"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?
B2 sized promotional poster for the widescreen VHS and S-VHS (Super VHS) release of "Silent Möbius the Motion Picture", Victor Entertainment, April 1992
I think too that now would be an exceptional time to start delving into and making fan works if you haven't yet, and to just keep creating and engaging with one another. So many people have forged incredible, long-lasting connections with one another through this game, and it doesn't have to end here.
Maybe it won't be the same as playing, but I promise that letting that go and acknowledging what you have and can still make will be precious in the long run. Y'know, the whole "maybe the real Destiny was the friends we made along the way" type of schmaltz. The stuff I've seen people write and draw, too- it's incredible, and I genuinely wish so many of these folks had a hand on the narrative team.
Just remember that these are real people, and to be kind and patient with one another.
dailybridgerton
areudirty
snowghoul
kianamaiart
origamiaround
