φ Archivist by trade and employ φ Etruscan enthusiast φ An excessively organized and helpful individual with a working comprehension of information systems φ Weird but sincere Further Information Testimonials Icon source
"man, museum work pays peanuts, has an incredibly low supply of full-time jobs for current demand, sometimes involves getting yelled at by the public, causes Imposter Syndrome, and is often undervalued by people who assume it's easy"
Some of the moments when I have felt the coolest in my life are when I was doing internships in a museum. Because they kept the dang room where I was working below 70F and my fingernail beds turned blue.
having a 4,000 year old mummy in my office for half a year because we couldn't find storage space for a coffin sized box anywhere else is still the coolest thing that has ever happened to me
"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 forget where I read it, but somewhere in the archival literature I ran across a quote that noted that as our ability to create and store information has grown over time (from stone and clay tablets to paper to audio/video to born digital), our ability to preserve and steward that information over time has decreased greatly because we simply cannot predict how the format will behave over time. *
Whenever I explain this to non-archivists, the dawning realization and fear in their eyes is tangible.
*this is a broad generalization focused primarily on western european culture, the archival tradition i am trained in
Current twitter drama is Europeans confidently declaring that they don't need to drive or use overpriced public transport to get to the MetLife stadium for the World Cup; they will simply walk down the highway to get there. Girl it's New Jersey. They're gonna splatter you for fun.
I think a lot of Europeans think that the stadium is in the middle of a city and surrounded by infrastructure, which is why they keep insisting that they can just walk from point A to point B. It's not! It's in the fucking Meadowlands!!!! You have multi lane highways and a literal toxic swamp and that's it!
"Well if there are a LOT of football fans they'll stop for us!"
There's a video online of a trucker who accidentally hits a flock of sheep in the middle of the highway at full speed and splatters them. Has to turn the windshield wipers on to wipe away the blood. This is what every Jersey driver yearns to do once they get on the turnpike.
girl help they're now demanding NJ build a bridge over the highway (???? from where???) or shut down the fucking I-95 (one of the busiest highways in the country that everyone commutes on) for their little soccer game.
I live close enough to the Meadowlands to regularly curse the hubris of the American Dream mall and this is the funniest shit I have read in YEARS. A lot of the European twitter people seem to think we are DEFENDING the Meadowlands and the general layout of the area like we think it was good urban planning. Girl no! It is a shithole, we know it is a shithole! (Although the actual swamp is kinda pretty from the window of a train heading to Secaucus Junction.) We are not trying to express pride, we are trying to save your life!!!!
I MEAN. I know people talk a lot of shit about American arrogance and they're not wrong to do so, but look at this, my fucking god.
Right like, no no. We KNOW it is horrible. We KNOW it should not exist like that. MetLife stadium shouldn't have been built in a swamp like that. Everything about its existence is bullshit. This is probably the WORST stadium to try and get to, considering that it is illegal to try and walk there.
FIFA has also intentionally MADE it worse. Because they're closing the parking lot. They're also preventing ride shares from what I can tell??
Meanwhile the governor of New Jersey is saying this is going to cost NJ $48 million to deal with the ridership, and wanted money to offset that, which FIFA doesn't ever do. So they decided to massively inflate train fares to offset the cost.
Again, while trying to prevent rideshare services from occurring.
Oh, ALSO people in New Jersey and New York City are all being told to "work from home" on days of the world cup matches because the public transit congestion is expected to be that bad, coincides with rush hour, and because for some of it, they're full closing off public transit to anyone who doesn't have FIFA tickets.
And then there are people complaining about our "shitty national stadium" and I don't even know how to begin to explain that MetLife isn't even the biggest capacity stadium in the US. It's not even in the top ten. (It is #15).
I genuinely do hope everyone is just being a bit of a troll when they say they're going to walk on the 95 or some shit because people will 1000% die. I don't even know what a comparable metaphor for this is.
I need a polite and effective way to say "hey your heart is truly in the right place and your anger is often righteous but I think sometimes you’re getting recreationally mad about things that are frankly not worth the amount of energy you’re spending on them, and every time you do this you're driving yourself slightly more insane with nothing to show for it," and then I need a way to broadcast that message through a loudspeaker to roughly 30,000 people at once, and THEN I need a time machine to send that message to my past self lol. and maybe a second time machine in case past me tries to be clever and sabotage the version of me who comes through the first time machine
I used to be very obnoxious in my twenties about food and showing things off that I cooked, but sometimes I like to indulge because fuck it. Dry aged duck breast in the fridge then rendered and seared to perfection out on the grill today, plus potatoes crisped in the duck fat and a blackberry salad.
love the idea of a onesided rival ship. character who is trying to have a homoerotic mindgames relationship vs a nemesis who thinks theyre trying to kill eachother for real. one keeps a framed portrait of the other next to their bed and thinks theyre getting a good grade in kismesis behavior and the other is completely oblivious to all of it.
so i guess my life right now is just camping out in my work email waiting for a response from the Italian State Archives in Bologna because my job is normal and i care about my work blorbo a normal amount
great news, i got a fairly quick response confirming the locations of the documents that were in private family hands back in 1940 and it's everything listed, there's only one last chunk to track down and now that I have a form email for writing to Italian archives in Italian, I can copy/paste everything and feel mildly less mortified about my language skills
so not only did i order the scans yesterday after a very nice Italian librarian diagrammed out the confusing payment page, but i spent two hours looking at the art created by Blorbo and then Guy That Took Credit for Blobo's Art side by side and a) got bowled over by the Blorbo's art b) even MADDER that the other guy tried to take credit for the art c) found an upsetting version of a pufferfish with a human smile that will haunt me for my days d) had a really nice time with my coworkers
I got the scans of the first letter written about Blorbo's death to his friends and family in Bologna at the end of December, and a very lovely coworker translated the French for me. It is wild reading Blorbo's boss just casually stating the cause of death and burial location (the latter I am more suspicious about, the former is probably as close to any idea of how Blorbo died as any) before just completely shitting on him as an artist and complaining. And being so goddamn bold as to write all of this down to someone else even though the man is actively lying the entire time and has been lying for months about Blorbo's death and who is responsible for all of the art.
Every single damn time I think I'm over any of this, something new comes up and I just get mad on Blorbo's behalf again. But at least I can include all of this in the finding aid (because cause of death and supposed burial location haven't been published in English material, only Italian) and actually conclude the draft that I've been working on.
