Marc Hempel ‘Spaceman: Daydreaming Can Be Dangerous’. I originally posted only the first page of this brilliant comic. Now here is the full illustrated story. Scanned from short lived sci-fi magazine Questar, February 1980.
"We're gonna achieve immortality by turning ourselves into machines" buddy I want you to find yourself a 15 year old laptop and try to run a 10 year old piece of software on it please. Connect to the internet, if you can, and attempt to log into any of your online accounts
fun fact this is a big issue that museums/archives/preservation professionals run into
This is something I bring up a lot. Digital preservation is not a thing to rely on. Anything digital is inherently ephemeral, fleeting.
All current and former digital storage will eventually fail. Paper tapes and punch cards cards wear and rot. Magnetic tape and disks grow mold and shed their magnetic coating. Hard drives seize and crash, their controllers fail. Optical media scratches, rots, or simply fades. Solid state media loses its charge over time. Cloud services shut down with no warning.
Long-term digital storage is a never-ending process of copying to new media.
And then there's the problem of format.
It took less than 30 years for digital works by Andy Worhol — one of the most popular artists of the 20th century — to be lost to obsolete technology.
A dozen previously unknown works created by Andy Warhol have been recovered from 30-year-old Amiga disks.
We had the disks, we had the computers, we had modern emulators for the computers. But reading the images (PDF Archive) required very specific combinations of operating system and software versions, and in some cases required reverse-engineering image formats for which the correct combination of software could not be found.
This wasn't some obscure machine. Millions of Amiga computers were sold, and Amiga users are among the most dedicated to keeping the platform going long after its discontinuation.
And still the image format had to be reverse-engineered to recover Worhol's images.
How much of our culture from the past 30 years has been entirely digital?
To be fair, this isn't exactly a new problem, or even one unique to the digital era. But I do wonder what will remain for future generations looking back. How much of human history has been pieced together from shards of pottery and clay tablets? With our communications, our documents, our art all moving to digital media, what will be left of us to dig up? What will it tell of our story, of who we are, what we believed, what challenges we overcame?
I think it’s time to start work on my high fire clay tablet, a miniature Rosetta Stone, preserving the lyrics of Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life in English, Hebrew, and Akkadian. This will be my primary grave goods.
It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.
And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.
I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.
Imagine if we did the “public libraries are punk” thing for other subcultures. Imagine if people made shirts that said “Soup kitchens are grunge” or “Mixed Use Urbanism is Juggalo”.
Listen, we have to keep this thing circulating on the internet for at least another two decades, because I have to believe that one day that little girl will be grown enough to stumble upon it and She Will Explain
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and laughed. The more he repeated the warning the louder they applauded, until the fire engulfed everyone.
I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
- S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Enten – Eller, 1843)
Well... something about getting a "Dear John " letter or in this case phone call on 4th of July seems fitting. No surprise but no worries. Can't hurt/ still hurts. "Life can only be viewed backwards but lived forward.." "something something... power of the Darkside... something something " Etm. Etc.
CRT-TV Drums. The sound is produced by catching static electricity from a CRT with the hands and sending electrical signals through the body to a guitar amplifier📺
titsay
kianamaiart
prguitarman
stormborns
theartofmadeline
gamechangershow
