First things first- on my way home from the grocery store today, a fracking truck kicked up a rock (more than likely part of the road they have torn up because the trucks are constantly driving over the lip and ripping the concrete and asphalt up) and cracked my windshield. There went a quick $300 bucks. It’s all part of the miracle of the free market. On top of a Subaru that got totaled when they drove my friend off the road and into the field AND DIDN’T STOP, I get destroyed road, traffic hazards such as trucks driving roads to narrow at speeds too high, debris all over the roads when their offroad vehicles come onto the roads during their pipeline constructions, numerous delays by flagmen, and excruciatingly slow drives as oversized loads transfer equipment, I now have to buy a new windshield. And this isn’t even going into the longterm damage to the water table which we all FUCKING KNOW is inevitable and will be met with a massive hoocoodanode, although we might not find out about it since the state GOP and the Trump are dismantling all the regulators. Or the eyesore of large fracking pads all over the god damned place.
And what does WV get in return? A couple permanent jobs, lots of people from Texas and Oklahoma driving around in monster trucks to and from work, and not much else. We aren’t taxing them much of anything, the profits are all exported with the resources, any time you mention taxing them more some idiot states the same bullshit we heard for years when we talked about coal taxes: “We can’t tax them too much, they’ll just go somewhere else.”
NO, THEY FUCKING WON’T. DO YOU KNOW HOW I KNOW THIS? BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE THE FUCKING NATURAL GAS IS.
So I guess I will just bend over and pay safelite a couple hundred bucks when they come tomorrow, lie back, and think of tax-cut jeebus. Sick of this shit and the way the right has fucked this country.
Moving along before I stroke out for real.
I spent some time today importing more music into the digital archive, and I imported a bunch of old Paste magazine cd samplers from the early 2000’s through 2009. As we have discussed at length, I have many, many issues and require correct metadata and artwork for everything I import, and I first thought that this was going to be a disaster. It turned out it wasn’t.
As many of you know, if for no other reason that I rant about it all the time, itunes uses the gracenote public automatic content recognition to fill out artwork and metadata for imported music, so that means it is not a complete archive of all music. It’s what people have and have imported, warts and all. I was sure there would be no artwork in the database for these cd samplers, and I was right! They were, however, correctly recognized, so I just had to find the artwork. This turned out to be easier than i though, as Paste magazine has all of them archived on their website in .pdf format. I just had to download them, convert them to .jpg, and crop them. Easy enough.
It turned out to be a pretty fascinating and weird modern archaelogical project. It was interesting seeing who was “unknown” at the time, who would make it, who would not, etc., but even more interesting was the artwork. Viewing thee sampler artwork through the years turned out to be like watching the extinction event for a magazine.
The artwork for the earlier years was just beautiful. High quality photographs, beautiful layouts- people put a lot of time, thought, pride, and energy into them. Again, I know I am an oddball because I really do appreciate album and video game artwork, but see for yourself. Here is the very first piece from Q3 of 2002:
Here is one from 2005:
Another from 2005:
Here is February of 2007:
I’m not a photographer (as you all frequently remind me), but these are good covers for a sampler cd. And they were all like that from 2002-2007. And then came the real estate unpleasantness of 2007. Here’s some background from wikipedia:
In October 2007, the magazine tried the “Radiohead” experiment, offering new and current subscribers the ability to pay what they wanted for a one-year subscription to Paste. The subscriber base increased by 28,000, but Paste president Tim Regan-Porter noted the model was not sustainable; he hoped the new subscribers would renew the following year at the current rates, and the increase in web traffic would attract additional subscribers and advertisers.
Amidst an economic downturn, Paste began to suffer from lagging ad revenue, as did other magazine publishers in 2008 and 2009. On May 14, 2009, Paste editors announced a plan to save the magazine, by pleading to its readers, musicians and celebrities for contributions. Cost-cutting by the magazine did not stem the losses. The main crux cited for the financial troubles is the lack of advertiser spending.
I don’t know if the two are directly related- Paste was having problems anyway. But anecdotally I suppose you can actually visualize the impact of the crash and the decline of Paste Magazine through the artwork. Here is February 2008 (note, this is prior to the actual market crash):
Notice the corporate logo’s? Here is August 2008:
And here is January 2009:
It never recovered from there, and the print version of Paste magazine ceased to be in 2010. It’s depressing to think about, like watching an extinction event in slow motion.
It’s also interesting to think about how things are being archived in the digital era. With Moore’s Law and the Law of Mass Digital Storage, we are used to ever faster processing and ever increasing storage space, but where is it all going and who is keeping track of it? What is happening to it? We all seem to think that with all this new storage space, once something is out on the internet it will be there forever. That may very well be true regarding celebrity nudes and your dumbest tweet, but for a lot of other things it just isn’t the case. Read this from 2013:
A new study has found that as much as 80 percent of the raw scientific data collected by researchers in the early 1990s is gone forever, mostly because no one knows where to find it.
According to a study by Timothy H. Vines, et al. titled “The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age,” published last week in Current Biology, most raw data from scientific papers published twenty years ago is unobtainable – either because authors have since changed their contact information and can’t be reached or because the data was stored using outdated technology, like floppy disks.
I sure as hell don’t know where my data from the late 90’s is. I know I have a box with old mainframe SAS printouts in the basement from grad school, but I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with it now. And as a gamer, this is crazy:
The people who make enhanced editions of old role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment want to do the same thing for Icewind Dale II. There’s just one problem: nobody knows where to find the code.
Beamdog, a Canadian publisher best known for releasing snazzy new versions of old Infinity Engine RPGs like the ones mentioned above, is looking to re-release Icewind Dale II with enhanced graphics and other improvements. But Beamdog’s CEO, Trent Oster, says his team can’t find the source code for Icewind Dale II. Without that code, he says, they can’t make any sort of enhanced edition of the game.
“We’ve searched all the archives we have access to, including all the data handed over to Wizards of the Coast from Atari and there is no source code for Icewind Dale II,” Oster told me in an e-mail. “We’ve reached out to our friends at Obsidian, as many of them were the development staff behind Icewind Dale II, and they do not have any source code. We’re stalled on the project without source and the project won’t move forward until we can find it. We’ve naturally moved on to other things until there is a change in the situation.”
Wow. This kind of stuff should be important. We should be archiving things. Our collective digital knowledge isn’t going to always “just be there.” It’s going to need people who care to take care of it, and a willingness to finance those endeavors like we would with museums or libraries. Well, like we used to, I guess.
Although, I guess, maybe it is irrelevant, because we are living through another slow motion mass extinction event:
A massive iceberg the size of Delaware has broken free from Antarctica and is floating in the sea.
“Put any adjective you like on it: a corker, a whopper — it’s a really large iceberg,” says Anna Hogg, a researcher with the United Kingdom’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.
“There have been some this big before,” says Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U.K. who leads a project to track changes in the ice shelf. But he adds, the roughly trillion-metric-ton iceberg is unusual. “This is certainly in the Top 10, maybe possibly in the Top 5.”
And then there is this:
From the common barn swallow to the exotic giraffe, thousands of animal species are in precipitous decline, a sign that an irreversible era of mass extinction is underway, new research finds.
The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calls the current decline in animal populations a “global epidemic” and part of the “ongoing sixth mass extinction” caused in large measure by human destruction of animal habitats. The previous five extinctions were caused by natural phenomena.
Gerardo Ceballos, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, acknowledged that the study is written in unusually alarming tones for an academic research paper. “It wouldn’t be ethical right now not to speak in this strong language to call attention to the severity of the problem,” he said.
I grew up in rural areas. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of barn swallows. This should scare the hell out of you. I guess maybe worrying about digital archives is a waste of concern right now. Nothing really matters any more, does it.
I warned you this would be rambling.
Flanders' other neighbor
You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.
HeleninEire
tl;dr
HyperSphericalCow
And what does WV get in return? A couple permanent jobs,
I’m guessing that those are not White Working Class Jobs; they probably need advanced mech-engineering degrees.
Phylllis
@HeleninEire: Snerkle.
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
LOL, Helen!
John, that sucks about your windshield. At first, I actually thought you were using “fracking” as an adjectival euphemism, but on second reading I realised I should take it literally.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ve been feeling a lot lately like I hate my own fucking country. I don’t know. Maybe in some ways it would be nice to live in some shithole like Russia, where you know that, whatever the problems are, I had nothing to do with them, because I have no say in what my own country does, and some dickwad just fucks everybody over. At least I might feel somewhat blameless, and maybe even resigned to it all.
Here, well, shit, we should fucking well know better, you know? We’ve been at this self government shit now for more than 200 years. 400 where I live, in Virginia (with the obligatory caveats that not everybody was entitled to have a say for most of our history). You’d think we’d have some of this shit down by now. Only, we go and choose a deranged, sociopathic emotional cripple to run things. And people all over the God damned country go and choose people like Rick Scott and Scott Walker and Sam Brownback and fucks like that over and over and over and over, and then, when everything falls down and their lives get shat all over, they blame Black people or Muslims or Meckisans or somebody for all the problems that the white guys they’ve so slavishly voted for all this time have painstakingly made for them.
I hate this shit. I know that, on the whole, we’ve made a lot of headway in 230 years, and all this progress comes slowly, and all that. I know that. But then I hear about the backsliding in so many states, and I just get despondent. Maybe I should have a glass of wine, have sex with my lovely wife and then go to sleep.
LAO
@HeleninEire: you drove john to twitter! https://twitter.com/johngcole/status/885290569509023745
ETA: ?
dr. bloor
So, my differential for this post is down to Acute Methamphetamine Intoxication v. Fallen Hard On His Ass In Love. Can’t recall the ICD-10 codes for either, though.
HeleninEire
@LAO: AWESOME. I am John Cole adjacent famous!
TenguPhule
Shit is fucked and we’re all going to fry.
Eric U.
fracking is what is killing coal mining. We are getting less air pollution in trade for more groundwater pollution. Great. Pretty funny that it’s virtually unregulated in coal states
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
It’s a good thing you remember Paste for its capacity as a music mag, and not shit like publishing Shane Ryan and Walker fucking Bragman.
JanieM
I think we are where we are, both climate-change-wise and US-wise (see@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)‘s rant above, which speaks pretty well for me too), in part because we don’t understand that this extinction is also being caused by a natural phenomenon. Humans are not outside nature, and I’m pretty sure we understand massively less about ourselves and our motives (individually and collectively) than we think we do. That ignorance may turn out to be fatal. But it’s less different from the “ignorance” of a hurricane than we think it is.
Frankensteinbeck
To tell the liberals that let blacks have a place in politics “Fuck you.”
Major Major Major Major
Wow, i get to use my master’s TWICE today!
Nobody knows, and the people who do don’t have the time, money, and numbers to do it right. The Internet Archive and the Library of Congress are your best friends here. Do we need somebody on this? Yes! But we don’t have many widely adopted standards and practices for this in the same way we do for say “a book”.
On the standards level actually the W3C and WHATWG are doing a bang-up job.
guachi
Your complaint about not taxing resource extraction is one thing I share. You basically have the mining companies by the balls. It’s not like they can just go to anywhere to get this stuff, you know.
If I were King of a State, I’d tax the resource extractors at a high rate. I’d put the money in a fund. I’d either allow tapping that fund only in times of national recession (so we had a neutral way of determining when a real hardship was upon the state) or invest the money somewhere and withdraw a certain percentage each year (say, 5%) for funding the government or as a refund for each resident of the state on the assumption that the resources are equally owned by all the residents of the state.
But if the money were non-existent because of no taxes then the resources don’t really benefit the citizens of the state. And if there are taxes and they are completely used then the state is at the mercy of market forces.
Patricia Kayden
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Just keep hope that this too will end — the sooner, the better. Trump is doing the very best he can to bring Trump’s presidency to an abrupt end. I’m optimistic that with shoes dropping every day, this regime will collapse on itself. We’re only six months in and the scandals keep coming. I can’t imagine this lasting for a full four years.
trollhattan
Now that they’re cheap I think we should all have dashcams, like in Russia. We don’t have fracking gear (thank God) but gravel trucks, heavy equipment haulers, etc are always ejecting meteorites at the rest of us. Why should we pay a nickel, the time lost is bad enough.
Great pic of Lucinda, was lucky to have seen her this spring. She’s all that.
karen marie
I’m a bit surprised that John Cole doesn’t have windshield replacement coverage in his auto policy. I hardly drive at all but figure the minute I drop that part of my coverage, a rock will hit my windshield and break it, or the windshield will just spontaneously break on its own due to age. My car is 16 years old and has its original windshield.
Yarrow
@LAO: @HeleninEire: That is awesome! Congrats. Next thing you know you’ll find a jar of mustard you didn’t know you had.
Baud
Pat Robertson is still alive.
RinaX
@karen marie:
It seems to happen to me every couple of years. One year it actually happened three times. It’s always the same thing, some truck kicking up a rock and cracking my windshield. So I’m never dropping mine.
Yarrow
@Baud: But sure looks like he’s very close to meeting his maker. Or going through the gates of Hell. It’s not for me to decide.
Roger Moore
I’m proud to say I’ve successfully maintained a data archive going back to the early 90s. That data has been migrated repeatedly to keep it on new media. First it was old-style magneto-optical disks. When our hardware for those was getting old, I spent a week or two migrating it all onto CD. The CDs were eventually copied to DVDs, which were later copied onto USB hard drives. The data has now been migrated to a second generation of USB hard drives and now lives both there and on some big data warehouses. Amazingly, the companies that made the instruments it was acquired on have mostly remained in business, and some of them even maintain backward compatibility in their software so we can actually read our old data files.
The problem, of course, is that most stuff doesn’t have somebody bloody-minded enough to go back and keep doing that indefinitely. Our really old data gets maintained mostly because it’s easier now to just copy everything than it is to figure out what’s worth keeping. There’s also the problem of maintaining metadata so you can actually find something when you need to. That’s the area where I’m most worried; I’m not at all confident I would know which files were what.
JPL
@Baud: SAD.
Gravenstone
@SiubhanDuinne: To be fair, it’s both in this instance.
raven
@Roger Moore: I just bought an 8tb drive for $160. I’m going to back everything to it!!
Gin & Tonic
I figure that actuarially speaking, I have 25 years left at most. So iceberg, schmiseberg. I’m not going to buy property in Florida anyway.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: He must have been in heaven interviewing his President today. It’s a wonder he didn’t bow down at Trump’s feet.
Procopius
@Major Major Major Major: This. I remember reading (on the internet) about this problem ten or fifteen years ago. Almost none of the primary source material for the development of computers exists because it was stored in machines that no are no longer in use, like with 12 bit bytes. Nobody knows what the format of the file was or where to get a connector to access the device. Paper is less long-lived than parchment. You know every statute the federal government issues is recorded on parchment? Just found that out a few days ago. Parchment is less long-lived than clay tablets. We are finally becoming able to learn about Sumeria because we still have millions of their tablets (hi, Hobby Lobby). A thousand years from now, historians are going to say, “We know very little about The Crazy Years, because they didn’t leave any written records.” Also, too, you ever notice how our culture seems to be kind of following Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History timeline? A little slower, maybe, but somewhere out there is a Nehemiah Scudder (Logic of Empire, If This Goes On …) working to turn us into a theocracy, and the neoconservatives have been working for years to cause the bombs to fall.
Major Major Major Major
@Procopius: I recall reading once about some storage company producing a kind of micro-etched shatter resistant glass that was pretty high volume and very durable and designed to last thousands of years. The journalist noted drily that they didn’t comment when asked if the devices to read them would be around in thousands of years.
debbie
Around here, they’ve put signs on the rear panels of dump trucks that say, “Not responsible for broken windshields.” Bastards.
Jacel
I’ve been curious why it is that vastly more magazines with audio CD that I see on the racks at Barnes & Noble are British publications with few of US origin That seems to be the case for magazines focused on most genres of music other than jazz. Is there some different legal or rights difference in the two countries, or is it just that the British know how to do these things better?
p.a.
A day late and a dollar short, but here’s Christgau’s review of Trout Mask Replica:
Jacel
@debbie: Does that sign on the truck have any more legal standing than a sign that said “Not Responsible For Crushed Children”?
debbie
@Jacel:
I hope never to find out.
Mnemosyne
@Procopius:
I’m slightly confused about this statement, because paper is pretty long-lived. In fact, it’s hard to say for sure how long paper lasts under ideal conditions, but we have examples that go back pretty darn far. If the paper is acid-free and you keep it at 50 percent humidity, you’re pretty good.
You know what does deteriorate much more rapidly than anyone ever predicted? Plastics. Museums are frantically trying to figure out how to preserve plastics because their pop art collections from the 1950s forward are deteriorating badly.
Mike J
@Jacel: If you think it means something you won’t try to collect. Even if they aren’t responsible though, if you can be annoying longer than they can ignore you, you might be able to get them to pay out for something small like $300. Use the words “unsecured load” and “highway patrol”.
NotMax
@Eric U.
“But at least there is symmetry.”
– Zathras
SiubhanDuinne
Gilbert & Sullivan/Anna Russell fans:
Donald Trump IS Clotbelly Bunion!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yif-5xBbxd4&sns=em (start at 6:25 for the Rich Tycoon song)
TenguPhule
@Patricia Kayden:
The problem is that damage being caused by these fuckwits to the country is likewise snowballing.
Once the rot sets into government and all its rules and regulations, its a bastard to get rid of it.
Nicole
http://www.theroot.com/the-black-persons-guide-to-game-of-thrones-1796847562
This was a hilariously awesome read. I’m going to have a completely different experience watching Season 7.
DanR2
Honestly, I like the later covers better. No matter the quality, ad photography tends to age kind of like this:
TenguPhule
@Baud:
Proof that there is no just god(dess).
Ruckus
@Eric U.:
Give um a break will ya, they aren’t used to having regulations on stuff that needs it. They’re new to this you don’t have to destroy everything to extract crap from the ground stuff. As John says someone thinks the PTB will just pick up their coal or natural gas and move to another state, taking all the jobs with them. I’ve known a number of people from WV and not one of them struck me as stupid as a fence post. Maybe all their fence posts have been elected to office.
Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.
That decline in graphics / content quality in favor of bland sponsor fluffing mirrors almost exactly the decline of Wired magazine. Which used to be so so fucking great.
Major Major Major Major
@Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.: good call.
Mary G
I don’t know if this recap in NY Mag has been discussed, because reading it made me stay in bed for two days straight. All the ways that climate change means WASF.
Really long, but I am glad I read it. Puts Twitler in perspective.
SiubhanDuinne
O/T, but this is absolutely the best fucking news I have seen in a long time:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/governor-general-canada-julie-payette-1.4201614
Awesome, awesome Canada. I’m so proud I worked for this great country for 25 years, and just wish I could be part of the excitement now. So. Cool. So. Groovy.
marv
i blame evolution
Bard the Grim
John, many car insurance policies cover windshield replacement as part of basic coverage with a small deductible (like $50). It’s definitely worth a call to your agent to check. (Unless you already know from previous experience that you’re screwed. But hey, how often do cars get hit by rocks flung by overweight trucks from poorly maintained roads where you live, right?)
As for 80% of 90’s raw data going poof, well, maybe in some fields. But at least for “time domain” observational data (e.g., any kind of NASA data), central archives have been a big deal for decades, with lots of partial or complete independent backups by researchers. And using the NASA example again, there are now requirements for derived data products (i.e., results from analysis of raw data) to be archived (in some kind of reasonably “prermanent” repository) by authors when they publish papers using NASA data. The problem is recognized and there are continuing efforts to address it.
Most importantly (!), old computer games can be run on emulators such as DOSbox and there are companies such as http://www.allvideoclassicgames.com that take your old disk or CD and write a wrapper to enable play on current operating systems. My brother cried with joy when I gave him a working version of Civilization 1.
HinTN
@JanieM: We’re just an invasive. The immune system is working. We cam figure it out or not.
NotMax
@marv
Mm-hm.
James Powell
Damn, but I do love a good Cole rant every now and then. I was worried that homeownership & relationship bliss were making him soft.
It is true that the industries of extraction destroy the environment, but we Americans are more concerned with keeping energy prices low and to hell with future generations. This argument has been laid out for everyone to see for the last 50 years or so. Everyone understands what’s at stake and the majority of everyone (despite what they say in polls or conversations) don’t give a shit. Sad.
gbbalto
@SiubhanDuinne: As a proud citizen (dual as I am, I am proud of both) she looks like a wonderful pick!
Another Scott
@Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.: I found the early Wired almost impossible to read when I saw it out on display – their “edgy” color choices were ridiculous.
Cheers,
Scott.
ThresherK
@Another Scott: I gave up on the whole “creative disruption” schtick of Wired when they ran an article saying “Let’s cancel the Postal Service. Banks in poorer communities can take over the functions for a small fee.”
Just waaaaay tooooo detached from the world where people live.
Omnes Omnibus
@ThresherK:
They’ve got it exactly backwards.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
The early plastics were horrible at not degrading. The current stuff is much better, but will degrade over time. But then everything else degrades. And I know this by the fact that I have a mirror and a doctor. Of course this not degrading is a problem with plastic trash being discarded instead of being recycled.
schrodingers_cat
Finally, an outfit elegant enough for the kittehs, I present, cats in kimonos
SiubhanDuinne
@gbbalto:
I love Julie Payette! Came justthisclose to bringing her to Atlanta for an official visit four or so years ago. Can’t remember now why it never materialized, but I was very hopeful we could make it all happen. I think she’s a great choice for GG.
NotMax
@Ruckus
The Rockies may crumble
Gibraltar my tumble
They’re only made of clay
But Bakelite is forever.
;)
Oxford Comma
Check with your auto insurance company, windshields are often automatic full coverage / no deductible per state law. (WV / YMMV)
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
A day or two ago, someone linked to a picture of a dog in a Star Wars costume, and then either AL or BC in response linked to a video of a pirate cat. And I made the mistake of clicking on both, and since then, non-fucking-stop, I’ve been getting online ads for pet costumes.
So, no offense, but I will not be linking to cats in kimonos. I’m sure they’re cute, but, you know.
gbbalto
@schrodingers_cat: Looks great!
US: How cute!!!! (and I do agree)
CATS: WTF now???
Omnes Omnibus
@gbbalto: This is why cats throw up in people’s shoes.
gbbalto
@SiubhanDuinne: The last number of GG choices have been excellent. I love it as recognition for great people as well as recognition that PMs are politicians, not the soul of the nation.
ETA: Should be true for all elected leaders. Maybe I am just a monarchist…
gbbalto
@Omnes Omnibus: Revenge is best served cold, like at 4 am when you pull on your slipper…
James Powell
@ThresherK:
The motto of the Libertarian Party.
ET
I got my MLS in 1997 and librarians have been talking about the loss of data and information since before I started in 1995. No good solutions seem to have arisen bit that may be because so many thought talking about that was Chicken Little talk. It requires the concerted effort of many, many people, BIG bucks, cooperation, recognition of the problem, and really smart people all at the same time. That hasn’t really happened. Until it does that won’t change.
chris
@SiubhanDuinne: A good pick, I think, she’s certainly accomplished a lot in her life. I hope she and Sophie raise a little hell now and then.
Brachiator
@Procopius: UK laws are printed on vellum. From BBC Magazine…
The Queen’s Speech is printed on special high quality paper designed to last 500 years.
Death Panel Truck
@p.a.: I have an original Straight Records pressing, but I haven’t heard it in years. It’s pretty much a mess, but the final track, “Veterans Day Poppy,” is a great song.
Sab
@Omnes Omnibus: I did not know that cats throw up in people’s shoes until last week when my father’s cat threw up in my slippers, and I only found out when I put one on. Even in my sixties I learn new things all the time.
SiubhanDuinne
@gbbalto:
I know where that comes from, but I’m about to go to bed and don’t feel like getting into a Monarchy Thing with my dear Schrodinger’s Cat :-)
(Waves to the neither-here-nor-there kitteh.)
SiubhanDuinne
@chris:
Yup. And invite Michelle up for a Girls’ Weekend every now and then.
Architeuthis
Record producer Steve Albini put it best when discussing why he still records to analog tape: “Digital is not an archival format.” He has a valid point; the upper shelf life for analog recording media, well-stored, has not been found. Similarly, as someone who has often had to pull things off backups dating back to the ’90s, finding functional equipment and having a usable file at the end is a crapshoot. As much as I love my Nook for portability’s sake, it’s not my preferred format for storage or research by any stretch; I’ll take plain old hardware books for that when possible. I’ve lost too much over the years to hard drive failures and general obsolescence to trust any digital format for the preservation of knowledge.
Also: if it’s not backed up in at least three places, it doesn’t exist.
chris
@SiubhanDuinne: Damn, that would piss off all the wingnuts in both countries. Can you make it happen? I’d pay cash to see that.
xenophile
Is that Victoria Williams in the first issue pic?!? :-)
bago
MAGIC HAT!!!
http://www.somethingawful.com/hosted/jeffk/scottintarview/index-02.htm
david
Cole, you don’t have comp as part of your insurance package for the car?
Any decent auto glass dealer will know how to bill the repair so they can *wink**wink* ‘waive the deductible’.
Origuy
@Brachiator:
One copy went on tour in the US a few years ago. I felt like a pilgrim at a shrine when I went to see it.
Thanks to my sister’s genealogy work, it appears we are descended from King John and possibly other signatories. Just found that out a few months ago.
Steeplejack
@Origuy:
How come no one ever finds out they’re descended from an unbroken line of turd-wranglers who all died before age 30? Asking for a friend.
Jerome
I teach digital archiving at a library school in Illinois. You just recapitulated the thought process I go through every day, right down to the “with the whole collapse of civilization imminent, not sure investing this much time in preserving 80’s computer games and music is the best use of resources.”
MCA1
All I know is that, while the music coverage is still fine, Paste as a general matter has become cringe-inducing for me. By 3 or 4 years ago the whole thing seemed to have been taken over by the click-baiting, short attention span “list” disease (like incessant “Top 25 network TV series episodes of the 2010’s” sort of crap). And now to compound that, it’s been taken over by our progressive betters and reads like nominally a music and culture magazine mostly populated by Salon refugees. It’s obnoxious.
Paul Niederländer
Bishop Solomon Burke!
HeartlandLiberal
As a retired computer / programmer / networking / director of IT guy, I sent John’s musings on the digtal age to a half dozen of my former colleagues I stay in touch with, even six years out from retirement. I closed the quotes from John’s reporting and commentary on loss in the digital age with the following:
FWIW, one of my servers is a data repository, and there are files on there going back more than 30 years, there is probably stuff there when I migrated from my first Novell LAN server to the first gen Windows servers. Source code and now for years, digital images. I recently reviewed the backups, and discovered a change I made some months ago had dorked the backup jobs that copy all data to two different drives, so in theory there are always three copies on three physical drives. Somehow I had messed up the admin password in the scheduled tasks, or changed the doman admin password, maybe, and forgotten the jobs. Fixed now. But rather chilling to think I had not had backups for months.
How easy it is to lose literally EVERYTHING in the digital age.
OK. With those inspiring things to think about, you guys get back to work. I have a few more episodes of the German Krimi Der Kommissar und das Meer to watch on YouTube today.
J R in WV
@Gin & Tonic:
I’ve actually considered doing a big houseboat and keeping it for use when I want to be warmer than WV gets in the winter. Could also go up rivers, along the Intracoastal Waterway too, and a rising ocean lifts all boats!!
So who cares about rising sea level, beside people who own giant investments right by the ocean, like Mar-a-Lago…
J R in WV
@debbie:
But that sign doesn’t make them not responsible. It just discourages people from calling them and insisting that they make their damage good. Same for parking garages – they are responsible for protecting your vehicle while in their parking facility, and that BS on the ticket is just that – BS!
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
You know, as a former employee, and being well vetted and all that, perhaps you could get refugee status and admission to Canada with relative ease? Since WASFuqed here, and they aren’t as badly harmed yet?
Stephen
The people looking to re-release IceWind Dale II should check out http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start – They’ve already done it and it’s all open source.