rupaul taught me how to parallel park

ungodly abomination with an anime pfp, driver’s license and terrible hand eye coordination // LoTR // LoZ // Ghibli // multi-fandom // shitposts

[gvalesdraws]

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.”

[totallyawesomesocks]

feel like I’ve been living in the part of the lord of the rings where frodo can’t remember what strawberries taste like for like five years now

[sosaysdean]

I hate applying for jobs. “desired salary for this role” one billion dollars next question

[100493503004422]

I don't want a Career I want to Fuck Around

[dreamfarer]

And not find out. I cannot stress enough how much I do not want to find out.

[ca314159bara]

quitting my job to pursue my childhood dream of drinking a glass of water

[pottetto]

Zelda passing the time 🌱📖

[consulships]

youre in her dms im on wikipedia looking at bronze age tombs

[eclrr]

More Link horse girl

[mithrilking]

lord of the rings prequel but it’s just gollum screaming and chasing after the ring like scrat from ice age

[splatterpunkrock]

oh fuck this is a really good hill i gotta die on this

[gerbertsdad]

rich people seeing mount everest

[maedictus]

Aragorn

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

You know, it's kinda funny how much of high fantasy centers around kings and nobility and courtly intrigue considering that the archetypal high fantasy, Lord of the Rings, had the rather explicit moral of "saving the world is up to this backwater hick and his gardener because no politician, least of all inherited nobility, would have the ability to see past their own ambition and throw away a weapon". Oh sure, Aragorn is a great king and all, but there's a reason he's over there running a distraction ring while the hobbits do the real work. Sauron loses because he gets distracted by kings and armies and great battles (i.e. typical high fantasy stuff) letting Frodo and Sam sneak through his back door and blow it all to hell.

Just saying, maybe old Jirt knew what he was saying when he said that the small folk doing their best and holding to each other was more powerful than a dozen alliances and superweapons and we should respect him for it.

[sophiamcdougall]

You're a reasonably informed person on the internet. You've experienced things like no longer being able to get files off an old storage device, media you've downloaded suddenly going poof, sites and forums with troves full of people's thoughts and ideas vanishing forever. You've heard of cybercrime. You've read articles about lost media. You have at least a basic understanding that digital data is vulnerable, is what I'm saying. I'm guessing that you're also aware that history is, you know... important? And that it's an ongoing study, requiring ... data about how people live? And that it's not just about stanning celebrities that happen to be dead? Congratulations, you are significantly better-informed than the British government! So they're currently like "Oh hai can we destroy all these historical documents pls? To save money? Because we'll digitise them first so it's fine! That'll be easy, cheap and reliable -- right? These wills from the 1850s will totally be fine for another 170 years as a PNG or whatever, yeah? We didn't need to do an impact assesment about this because it's clearly win-win! We'd keep the physical wills of Famous People™ though because Famous People™ actually matter, unlike you plebs. We don't think there are any equalities implications about this, either! Also the only examples of Famous People™ we can think of are all white and rich, only one is a woman and she got famous because of the guy she married. Kisses!"

Yes, this is the same Government that's like "Oh no removing a statue of slave trader is erasing history :(" You have, however, until 23 February 2024 to politely inquire of them what the fuck they are smoking. And they will have to publish a summary of the responses they receive. And it will look kind of bad if the feedback is well-argued, informative and overwhelmingly negative and they go ahead and do it anyway. I currently edit documents including responses to consultations like (but significantly less insane) than this one. Responses do actually matter. I would particularly encourage British people/people based in the UK to do this, but as far as I can see it doesn't say you have to be either. If you are, say, a historian or an archivist, or someone who specialises in digital data do say so and draw on your expertise in your answers. This isn't a question of filling out a form. You have to manually compose an email answering the 12 questions in the consultation paper at the link above. I'll put my own answers under the fold. Note -- I never know if I'm being too rude in these sorts of things. You probably shouldn't be ruder than I have been.

Please do not copy and paste any of this: that would defeat the purpose. This isn't a petition, they need to see a range of individual responses. But it may give you a jumping-off point.

Question 1: Should the current law providing for the inspection of wills be preserved?

Yes. Our ability to understand our shared past is a fundamental aspect of our heritage. It is not possible for any authority to know in advance what future insights they are supporting or impeding by their treatment of material evidence. Safeguarding the historical record for future generations should be considered an extremely important duty.

Question 2: Are there any reforms you would suggest to the current law enabling wills to be inspected?

No.

Question 3: Are there any reasons why the High Court should store original paper will documents on a permanent basis, as opposed to just retaining a digitised copy of that material?

Yes. I am amazed that the recent cyber attack on the British Library, which has effectively paralysed it completely, not been sufficient to answer this question for you.  I also refer you to the fate of the Domesday Project. Digital storage is useful and can help more people access information; however, it is also inherently fragile. Malice, accident, or eventual inevitable obsolescence not merely might occur, but absolutely should be expected. It is ludicrously naive and reflects a truly unpardonable ignorance to assume that information preserved only in digital form is somehow inviolable and safe, or that a physical document once digitised, never need be digitised again..At absolute minimum, it should be understood as certain that at least some of any digital-only archive will eventually be permanently lost. It is not remotely implausible that all of it would be. Preserving the physical documents provides a crucial failsafe. It also allows any errors in reproduction -- also inevitable-- to be, eventually, seen and corrected. Note that maintaining, upgrading and replacing digital infrastructure is not free, easy or reliable. Over the long term, risks to the data concerned can only accumulate.

"Unlike the methods for preserving analog documents that have been honed over millennia, there is no deep precedence to look to regarding the management of digital records. As such, the processing, long-term storage, and distribution potential of archival digital data are highly unresolved issues. [..] the more digital data is migrated, translated, and re-compressed into new formats, the more room there is for information to be lost, be it at the microbit-level of preservation. Any failure to contend with the instability of digital storage mediums, hardware obsolescence, and software obsolescence thus meets a terminal end—the definitive loss of information. The common belief that digital data is safe so long as it is backed up according to the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies on 2 different formats with 1 copy saved off site) belies the fact that it is fundamentally unclear how long digital information can or will remain intact. What is certain is that its unique vulnerabilities do become more pertinent with age."  -- James Boyda, On Loss in the 21st Century: Digital Decay and the Archive, Introduction.

Question 4: Do you agree that after a certain time original paper documents (from 1858 onwards) may be destroyed (other than for famous individuals)? Are there any alternatives, involving the public or private sector, you can suggest to their being destroyed?

Absolutely not. And I would have hoped we were past the "great man" theory of history. Firstly, you do not know which figures will still be considered "famous" in the future and which currently obscure individuals may deserve and eventually receive greater attention. I note that of the three figures you mention here as notable enough to have their wills preserved, all are white, the majority are male (the one woman having achieved fame through marriage) and all were wealthy at the time of their death. Any such approach will certainly cull evidence of the lives of women, people of colour and the poor from the historical record, and send a clear message about whose lives you consider worth remembering.

Secondly, the famous and successsful are only a small part of our history. Understanding the realities that shaped our past and continue to mould our present requires evidence of the lives of so-called "ordinary people"!

Did you even speak to any historians before coming up with this idea?

Entrusting the documents to the private sector would be similarly disastrous. What happens when a private company goes bust or decides that preserving this material is no longer profitable? What reasonable person, confronted with our crumbling privatised water infrastructure, would willingly consign any part of our heritage to a similar fate?

Question 5: Do you agree that there is equivalence between paper and digital copies of wills so that the ECA 2000 can be used?

No. And it raises serious questions about the skill and knowledge base within HMCTS and the government that the very basic concepts of data loss and the digital dark age appear to be unknown to you. I also refer you to the Domesday Project.

Question 6: Are there any other matters directly related to the retention of digital or paper wills that are not covered by the proposed exercise of the powers in the ECA 2000 that you consider are necessary?

Destroying the physical documents will always be an unforgivable dereliction of legal and moral duty.

Question 7: If the Government pursues preserving permanently only a digital copy of a will document, should it seek to reform the primary legislation by introducing a Bill or do so under the ECA 2000?

Destroying the physical documents will always be an unforgivable dereliction of legal and moral duty.

Question 8: If the Government moves to digital only copies of original will documents, what do you think the retention period for the original paper wills should be? Please give reasons and state what you believe the minimum retention period should be and whether you consider the Government’s suggestion of 25 years to be reasonable.

There is no good version of this plan. The physical documents should be preserved.

Question 9: Do you agree with the principle that wills of famous people should be preserved in the original paper form for historic interest?

This question betrays deep ignorance of what "historic interest" actually is. The study of history is not simply glorified celebrity gossip. If anything, the physical wills of currently famous people could be considered more expendable as it is likely that their contents are so widely diffused as to be relatively "safe", whereas the wills of so-called "ordinary people" will, especially in aggregate, provide insights that have not yet been explored.

Question 10: Do you have any initial suggestions on the criteria which should be adopted for identifying famous/historic figures whose original paper will document should be preserved permanently?

Abandon this entire lamentable plan. As previously discussed, you do not and cannot know who will be considered "famous" in the future, and fame is a profoundly flawed criterion of historical significance.

Question 11: Do you agree that the Probate Registries should only permanently retain wills and codicils from the documents submitted in support of a probate application? Please explain, if setting out the case for retention of any other documents.

No, all the documents should be preserved indefinitely.

Question 12: Do you agree that we have correctly identified the range and extent of the equalities impacts under each of these proposals set out in this consultation? Please give reasons and supply evidence of further equalities impacts as appropriate.

No. You appear to have neglected equalities impacts entirely. As discussed, in your drive to prioritise "famous people", your plan will certainly prioritise the white, wealthy and mostly the male, as your "Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and Princess Diana" examples amply indicate. This plan will create a two-tier system where evidence of the lives of the privileged is carefully preserved while information regarding people of colour, women, the working class and other disadvantaged groups is disproportionately abandoned to digital decay and eventual loss. Current and future historians from, or specialising in the history of minority groups will be especially impoverished by this.  

[racefortheironthrone]

Gah, this is the worst possible way to go about digitizing historical records, for the worst possible reason.

[themathomhouse]

I'm a recent law graduate and hoping to begin my PhD, my undergraduate degree was in humanities and languages. My first office job? Working on a project digitising old student records.

I read the consultation document and haven't had chance to do full legal research yet, but upon perusing the legislation, I don't think the Minister actually has the power to order the destruction of the paper documents. They can create a digital archive, sure; but I don't think they are authorised to destroy the paper version. I am tracking down a copy of the 1857 Act to see what the consequences are (if any) but if they attempt to do this via statutory instrument I think a court might be able to strike it down. I have more research to do as I say but that's a consideration.

If I'm correct, that means they could only do this via Act of Parliament, which would mean a debate and scrutiny. In my response I suggested a cross-party committee look at the options and bring in experts to see if they can relinquish the older documents to, for example, the National Archives. The Ministry of Justice is looking at the legal requirement side and not considering that wills are extremely historically valuable; but I'm not even sure they've adequately considered their legal duty, which is...concerning.

I also mentioned that trying to digitise the student grade records from one university since the 1970s took several years, was never completed, and cost a bomb-load of money. You want to scan every single will in the UK that was created since 1858 and you're genuinely telling me you think that's cheaper? By the time you actually finish digitising 160ish years of documents, you'll have to start again checking the older file formats are even still readable. What format are you gonna use? How are you going to make sure it won't be unreadable in 20 years? Mate 20 years ago I was bringing my homework to print in school on a floppy disk, you tell me if we could use that shit now. What happens if you choose, say, pdf, and Adobe goes bust? Can you open an old-style pdf? How often will you need to transfer the files? How many times can you do that before the data is gone forever? What's the plan for backups and fail-safes?

The consultation document says it's more environmentally friendly to maintain a digital archive, which is extremely not true and I'm surprised they even said it. What's the carbon footprint of servers storing that amount of data? How much power does that use? How many more servers will you need to add per year to keep adding to the database? How much will it cost to maintain your oldest documents?

And in terms of the equalities impact, we have plenty of data from the Office for National Statistics indicating that digital-only copies of wills will negatively impact people in groups with a "protected characteristic" - in 2019, when surveyed, only 41% of women over 75 had used the internet at all in the last 3 months. 20% of people over 65 do not have internet access at home. The data doesn't include information on race, but it did show that 22% of disabled adults also had not used the internet in the last three months.

What will they do when people don't have an email address but need to see someone's will? What happens if they're blind? What about if they can't use a computer? Only providing a digital copy disproportionately affects women, the disabled, people from Northern Ireland, and the poor, and that's just with the data we have. Based on other data I must assume it will also disproportionately impact people of colour, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. Who has internet access and can afford a device to look at a digital copy? Maybe they can go to the library, but do they know how to use a computer? My cousin is deaf and blind, she should be able to access a braille format so that she can read it herself.

Everything OP said about historical information is true, we stand to lose so much information when inevitably this is a huge fuck up and someone deletes a decade of data or the computers break or they used an obsolete format. It will take forever, cost a fuckload, and be generally less efficient than keeping the paper.

I do think they could modify the 1857 Act so that older wills can be stored by eg the National Archives or the British Library, after a certain point a will loses most of its legal value and becomes an historical document.

Maybe I'm a Romantic, but I'd want to touch the document someone created saying what they wanted to do with their belongings. It doesn't just tell us the things they owned or the money they had, it tells us what was important to them. It tells us who they loved. Seeing a digital copy and knowing the original is long gone would just make me sad.

[evonnagale]

@qqueenofhades Signal boost?

[qqueenofhades]

Oh for the love of Pete.

It does not especially surprise me that the reactionary right-wing Tory British government, which is just as bad as the Republicans these days and in some ways worse, is desperately flogging this as a Good Move for the Environment!!! (lol) when they already trampled over their other existing climate commitments, decided that winning Uxbridge due to opposition to Ulez (the ultra low-emissions zone, which would have imposed a daily tax on car usage in an outer London borough) meant they should make a bonfire of all green energy initiatives, flown Rishi Sunak from London to Leeds in private jets, and otherwise done their absolute level best to wreck the planet (and the UK) as fast as possible. They do not care about the environment. The end.

It also doesn't escape me that this is happening at a time when the Tories are desperately trying to withhold physical information and historical records from the Covid inquiry, and other ongoing government investigations into the absolutely monumental scale of their recent fuck-ups, outright lying to the public, procurement and profiteering scandals, and other depredations and abuses of power. So actually, destroying the original copies of documents so they tightly control access to any inferior digital copies, and the possibility that that access might be rendered altogether obsolete by technological changes, is a feature, not a bug. This is after Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak both insisted that they owned the only phones in the UK where their months of WhatsApp messages particularly relating to the government's Covid response could not be retrieved, they totally just forget the passcode and accidentally dropped it in the bath, pinky swear. Why don't you believe us??!!

In sum: The Tory government does not like history, it does not like people being able to study history or scrutinize their actions, and this is coming against a long-running backdrop of, to say the least, an insane British penchant for institutional secrecy and destroying unflattering records. See the battles over the wills and private documents and financial transactions of the royal family (including the Guardian's recent disclosures about King Charles personally profiting from the estates of dead people in Lancaster and Cornwall) and going back to the 1960s, the British colonial government deliberately destroying the records of newly independent Kenya, in something literally called "Operation Legacy," intended to sanitize and whitewash the British Empire for posterity.

(Related: I also wrote this long ask around the time of the queen's death, discussing post-1952 "decolonization" in the former-British-Empire and how she contributed, or rather did not contribute, to it.)

Basically: this is outrageously stupid, the people promoting it as Environmentally Friendly are demonstrably and maliciously lying, they don't want people to be able to study either current or past British governments and hold them to account, and while digital humanities are a valid and important way to conduct historical research and making virtual versions available is a great way to broaden access, that should not ever rely on destroying the originals. The end.

[dwgif]

Sometimes I think there’s something missing, like I had something lovely, and it’s gone. I lie in bed thinking, what have I lost?

[jame7t]

I see you’re trapped in my gay and stupid maze again

[omgislena-blog]

[ibtisams-deactivated20240709]

The UK proposed Gaza ceasefire amendment failed to pass. 125 voted yes and 293 voted no.

[ibtisams-deactivated20240709]

On the plus side, as of right now 5 front benchers have now resigned from Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet

[oceanmonsters]

Here is the full list of MPs and how they voted and here is the site to find who your MP is if you don’t know already.

[mspbandj]

I want to make sure everyone knows that there were thousands of people gathered to demand the ceasefire amendment be passed. We were there for hours. Four days ago, over a million Britons from all over the United Kingdom gathered in London to march in support of Palestine, the largest protest since 2003.

The votes tonight do NOT reflect the British public. We have made our desire for a ceasefire and an end to Israel's oppressive regime VERY clear, and our UNelected politicians (we did NOT vote for these people, party leadership has changed hands without our consent) do NOT represent us. We are outraged, disgusted, and furious about this.

Please, do not see these votes as reflective of Britains people. These are the votes of a corrupt, unelected, unwanted ruling class.

[bee-afraid]

I am but a jester who lives to serve the greater goof