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A Selection of Chosts
Date: October 16, 2024 Last updated: December 28, 2024
The following is a collection of cohost posts that I wanted to be able to be able to see again. I'm including both a screenshot of the original post as well as the pasted text so that it can be ctrl-f'd. I miss this damn website.
This list is not complete and also not really intended for other people to look at. This is just me trying not to forget.
@TomatoMarrow on May 6, 2024 1:28am EST
trans men are the world, truly. thank you for taking this thing we cast off and forging it into something worthy of honor.
share from @TomatoMarrow on May 6, 2024 10:40pm EST
after a youth spent confused and upset that i was supposed to be a person i wasn't, i spent a little time really struggling to conceive of masculinity as anything other than something people are afflicted with, and i owe it completely to the trans men and transmasculine dudes in my life for showing me that there's incredible value in the entire spectrum of masculine gender expression. i have never needed to mourn the man i could have been. with hands that arrived at gentleness through hard-won inner strength, transmasc found family and coworkers and lovers and friends have taken this thing i could not bear, scraped and sanded the patriarchy off it, and made a home in it. among them there are freaks and fathers and academics and madmen and engineers and artists and speedrunners and completely normal bog-standard dudes who resist categorization as anything other than "that guy I know", and they fucking love it, they love being masculine, and in loving masculinity they have shown me that i do not need to be the one to be a good man. in me they have seen someone who inhabits that which they escaped, and every single one of them has helped me be a better woman. i will do what i can to pay that forward every day until i die. god i love transmascs.
@widr on Jan 7th 2023 3:11am EST
zero bad bitches hitting my line this week..mercury must be in gatorade 🤣
(i)Know the facts
All Gatorade beverages have been within acceptable mercury levels since
the US Food and Drug Administration reclassed Gatorade as seafood in August 2015.
@corhocysen on June 18, 2024 5:36pm EST
they call it a 事務所 because it's the 所 that has 事務
@woob on June 10, 2024 4:16am EST
Berries for boy
@oriananonexistent on June 2, 2024
wierd pride conversations with ori, day 2: bugs
bugs rule and are queer
right now i just spent an hour relaxing outside listening to the endless buzzing of a million cicadas as they swarm cook county. most years the cicadas are heard and not seen (at least by me, maybe i'm bad at finding them) but this year there are so many! so many!! sometimes when i'm outside one will land on me and i have to gently coax it off somewhere better. what a good bunch of friends.
tell me about your cool queer bug friends (challenge: talk about why bugs are queer without reference to metamorphosis)
Share from @bigstuffedcat on June 2, 2024
queer bugs
The same word that means "the little things that crawl unseen" also means "errors to be fixed". The same word that means "a class of animal that, as the evolutionary joke goes, exists to fuck and die" also means "reasons a program defies our intent". The same word that means "beings that largely made hard shells out of themselves" also means "things to be understood on their way to being annihilated". Even when computers were women wrestling with 30 tons of vacuum tubes, before "rocks taught to think" came to share a word with "the product of human nature", bugs were at odds with them.
The same word that means "Colorfully clad migrant" means "One whose wings cause hurricanes". No metamorphosis was required for the monarch butterfly to wear its oppressor's name in drag.
Queerness is antanaclasis of the self. The same word is exploded into two definitions-- one to acknowledge how power sees us, one for anything else, literally anything else. The folk story is that the moth that flew into the ENIAC was the origin of "bug" meaning "error", but the word was in use in Edison's notes. The bug whose corpse is displayed in Grace Hopper's notes was part of a long line of "little guys you just can't get rid of" being the same English word as "something we need to iron out of the facial recognition software". These etymological "coincidences" are a window into how language-users thought about the small and erratic for thousands of years.
The same word that means "queer" means "happy".
@lethalbit on May 22, 2024
@bigstuffedcat on May 9, 2024
I wanna be a mathematician I can get acquainted with those furrier trans forms
@blackle on May 9, 2024
I heard that dec computers is coming out with a new PDP mainframe specifically designed to make transfemme operators look extremely hot while they use it
@trashbang on April 11, 2024
We exist in an era of paranoia. It is only inevitable—when you squeeze people beyond their limits, when you drive them to the depths of desperation, when you seek to exploit every crevice of their lives and pinch every penny from their pockets, there is no telling how any given person on the street may act. When the great smoke-belching furnace of your society is fueled by the bodies of the downtrodden, you know in your heart of hearts that you are incurring a kind of debt of violence, which could be repaid at any moment, to anyone. International media machines fuel the fire to their own ends, playing on people's deepest fears and anxieties, telling them to call the cops on their neighbours and to regard everyone they meet as an agent of some malicious conspiracy. The alienation of modern life makes everyone a stranger, to be regarded with distrust and fear.
To a certain kind of person, overly plugged-in and easily filled with propaganda, it must seem as if there's a killer around every corner. It must seem as if there's a killer in every room. And yes, as you noted, I was on the maintenance deck when the salvage crew was reported missing. I promise that I have nothing to do with them, or with the gestation sacs in the vents above the hydroponics lab. I can tell you everything I know. Just untie me from this chair, please.
@ardgonian on April 15, 2024
Now Where Could My Pipe Be?
@cathoderaydude on April 12, 2024
apparently there is a japanese adaptation of Solaris called Jaris and the theme is this lizard who is apparnetly so important that they put him in the grub?? he's like literally in the way??? he's making it harder to use the computer??????
@nomnomnami on March 29, 2024
if you're like me, you got a little taste of geocities as a kid before yahoo pulled the plug on it in 2009. if you're like me, you heard someone started a revival effort called neocities, and thought "aww, that’s nice" without looking into it any further. you maybe visited the neocites homepage once and figured it would take too much time/effort to learn html to make a decent website for yourself, and why would you do that when you already have social media? what is there to gain? it sounds hard, and you have better things to do with your time...
but do you really? does making a personal site need a cost-benefit analysis? what the past me (and maybe you too, sorry i'll stop speaking for you,) didn't realize was, NEOCITIES IS REALLY FUN???? i think there's just a small barrier to entry that stops people from reaching the fun part--and i don't mean learning to build a site!!! because i don't think that's universally fun!!!!!! but the amount of self-expression happening on neocities makes it SUCH A JOY to browse. i think here in 2024 it's harder to realize you can just wander the internet without a specific goal, and without an algorithm to throw it all at you. (i mean, you're here on cohost so i'm sure you get it!!)
the old web you may or may not have nostalgia for is still alive in a new form and you don't have to keep sitting here lamenting the current state of the internet (bad). you can just go on neocities and see a thousand little handmade websites of people sharing things they care about. it's amazing. i'm legitimately so sad that i skipped out this place for so long, because i wrongly thought there was nothing for me in there!!!
so i have written a beginner's guide to enjoying neocities. i'm still completely new to it (i only started building my site 2 weeks ago) so i don't even know that much, but i really really wanted to share how to have fun browsing sites at least because YOU CAN JUST DO THAT!! I THINK IT'S HARD TO REMEMBER YOU CAN JUST CLICK ON THINGS AND GO ANYWHERE!!!!! please let me tell you how because this has been my new favorite hobby and i want everyone to experience the fun!!!!!!!!!!!
this was my first mistake. the first time i made a neocities account was ~2 years ago. i thought it would be nice to make a website to put things on that was detached from social media, because i had JUST left twitter. there are social aspects to neocities though--you can follow other users and when they update their site it will show up on your feed. i planned to ignore all that stuff and just use it to make a website...
i knew what HTML looked like and had a baseline understanding of CSS from customizing my gaia online profile back in the day. so i made an account, and tried to make a site right away using their in-browser text editor. do not do this. it makes you save the file and refresh the page to see your changes--when you're new to coding websites and trying to do it from scratch, that's a lot of back and forth for little to no reward. it sucks.
after an hour or so of messing with my first site, i was like "wow this is way too tedious. i don't even know what i'm going to put on here, so i give up"... foolish... clown behavior. like trying to solo a dungeon at level 1 with no gear. this is not the way to have fun on neocities. you gotta see what's possible before you can imagine what to make for yourself. and to do that, you have to visit other people's sites!!
ok this is an ongoing step. keep this tab open. the default view is "most followed", and the top site is goblin-heart.net--the webmaster here is no longer updating her site but it has A TON OF RESOURCES in it. we'll come back to this.
what you really want to do is go to any site with an appealing thumbnail. the most followed sites are probably some of the most elaborate. you don't have to be intimidated or even try to aim that high... i just think it's so amazing to open up a page, see it filled with so much stuff and go "oh my god SOMEONE CODED ALL THIS???" it just fills me with inspiration. it's amazing.
ok, did you find a site that looks cool? read through their pages! stay as long as you like! usually there's an "about" page so you can get a little background info on the person who made the site, but there are also "shrines" (dedicated to anime or video games usually) where someone tells you about a thing they like. there's blogs, art galleries, and site resources full of links and things to put on your own neocities page... BUT DON'T MAKE YOUR SITE YET... bookmark the ones you like, and keep exploring.
be aware that some sites will look completely broken. this is the downside to letting everyone code their own websites... but it's also the main point of neocities discourse that i've seen. it's the only thing to really have discourse about, because it's something every webmaster either does or doesn't do. some people are mobile-hostile, some just don't know how to code their sites to be mobile-friendly, and some dedicate whole pages and blog posts on their sites advocating for accessibility.
my strategy for when i'm browsing neocities on my phone (and i do like to browse in bed sometimes) is to bookmark sites that are too broken to read on mobile and save them for later. i use firefox, so my bookmarks are synced between my phone and desktop. honestly part of the joy of neocities to me is that some things don't work at all--whether it's broken images, dead links, or impossible-to-read pages.
there's always somewhere new to visit, so just keep moving right along!
back in your browse tab (the one i told you to keep open!) there is a filter by tag search in the top right. type something in--the more general, the more results you'll get. tags are ONE WORD with no spaces. each site only gets 5 tags, so it's possible that no sites are tagged with your favorite thing (in my case, there are no sites tagged disgaea... i must do something about this).
at the bottom of the search, there's a list of popular tags. if you see a topic that interests you there, go check out what's in it! after a while of browsing random sites like this, you'll start to get a feel of the overall vibe of neocities and what to expect when you visit a new site... but i'm STILL finding fun new surprises every time i dive in. there's endless creativity in here!!! keep your heart open and you will have a nice time.
most neocities sites have a page filled with links to other sites they think are cool, or their site might be a member of a webring. webrings are awesome because members will put a button on their front page and there are left/right arrows to visit the next site in the webring. sometimes the links are dead, but usually you'll find a fun new site related to that webring's theme! it's fun!!
take the RPGmaker webring for example--it's a list of sites with rpgmaker-related content, both developers and fans! i was happy to find a couple devs i followed on itch.io on here!! a lot of people are way ahead of me and already made cool sites, so it's really fun to follow them... it's not all strangers there...!
are you feeling INSPIRED??? in your neocities journies did you run into a site and think "ohh i want to make a page like this!" well good news. that's what neocities is for! as mentioned above, many sites have links to the resources that they used to build their own sites. it's a community of people who like to share knowledge and make fun things! (wow i love doing those things, no wonder i love neocities!)
for my site, what i actually did was google something like "neocities template" so that i wouldn't have to start from scratch again. i ended up on a reddit thread linking to a beginner's guide to neocities by sadgrl--hey, that's the webmaster who runs goblin-heart.net! i used her layout builder as the template for my site because it's mobile-friendly. the code is easy to understand and has comments explaining what the different parts do, so you can customize it easily.
my biggest piece of advice is not to use the neocities editor. remember when i told you before that it wasn't fun and also sucked? yes, luckily you don't have to put up with it!! on the page where you can edit your site (the file-viewer-looking one) there is a link to "download entire site". click that. keep it somewhere on your computer where you can get to it easily. this is your local copy that you will edit your files from.
for my text editor, i use brackets but you can also use visual studio code. both are free and open source. the important thing about them is that THEY HAVE LIVE WEB PREVIEW!!!!! with brackets, this means it can open the page in a google chrome window and whatever you change in your files will update in the browser window instantly. so it's SUPER QUICK to catch mistakes or test bits of code! the best way to learn html/css is to just start making stuff with it. it's ok if your code is wonky because you're not a professional--you're just here to have fun!
once your site feels ready to share, all you have to do is drop those local files back into the edit-your-site page! if you're uploading folders, you should do it one-by-one (since i've heard it can mess up the upload to do a bunch at once). all the files will get auto-replaced as long as it's named the same. then your site will be live!!!! share it with your friends!!!!! drop a comment here if this post inspired you to make one!!!!!!! (idk i would be happy to see it lol)
my other quick tip is that if you open one of your html pages in firefox, you can hit ctrl+shift+m to preview the mobile version! so if you wanna make sure your site is readable on a phone, that's the quickest way to test it!! you don't have to cross your fingers and pray... omg it's so handy.......
i started reading new webcomics i found through neocities... there's so many cool artists making awesome stuff..... omg the amount of nostalgic gifs and banners and stamps i have seen............ i don't want to link it all here because i think it's more fun to find those places on your own, but i do have a links page on my site if you wanna see some of the places i've been.
like... i dunno, it really does take a lot of time to put an impressive site together on your own. and i'm the kind of person who enjoys coding things--i know that it's not for everyone. it's certainly not for someone looking to quickly establish something professional-looking (use carrd for that, it's much simpler). but i know i'm not alone in wanting to see more handcrafted personal sites, and i know sometimes all people need is an invitation, or to at least know that it's possible for them.
i wanna encourage all my friends to make sites because i selfishly want to see them... ohhh i just love neocities so much!! obviously you don't have to host your site there to capture the spirit of it, but because all these sites are connected it makes it really easy to explore them all. it's great. writing all this has made me want to go on my next neocities adventure hehe.
anyway yeah that's how u have fun on neocities! like i said at the top, it's my new favorite hobby. maybe it can be yours too! (and if it is, send me your frickin WEBSITES i wanna SEE THEM!!!!) thank you for reading!!!!!!! <3
@love on February 29, 2024
Do I look like I know what a void* is??? I just wa\040a666660000013a 000002a81f3f94e0 00000000fdfdfdfd 0000000000000000
what is even the point of a compiler. what's a type. fuck it, peggle write directly to memory
@sleepmode on April 14, 2024
Guilty Gear... 鶍?
One of the more infamous titles in the Guilty Gear series is the oft-maligned four-player endeavour, Guilty Gear Isuka. There's a lot to say about this game - a lot of which I will not be covering. Sure, I have opinions on the game design, the overall package, etcetera, but that's well-worn territory. Maybe some other time. Instead, I want to focus on the kanji that adorns various parts of the game's iconography: the eponymous 鶍 (isuka).
First off, this kanji is kind of a pain in the ass to find. Attempting to write it into Google Translate brought up nothing, and even attempting to search for it via radicals on Jisho gave no results. This is for a reason that is extremely unsurprising in retrospect - this kanji is basically never used, with the word in modern Japanese being written almost exclusively in katakana (イスカ). But having found it just by plugging "isuka" into Jisho on a whim, I found a meaning. It's the Japanese name for the red crossbill. A bird.
So this Guilty Gear spin-off was seemingly named after a bird. But the "isuka" search query also turned up another result: イスカの嘴 (isuka no hashi), which means "a crossbill's beak." That's literally what it means, but this is also apparently a turn of phrase which can mean "an unexpected turn of events," "something not coming together as hoped for," and other things of that nature. So there is also the possibility that the game was named not for the bird, but for the idiom it represents: is the game's story about things not going to plan? Is the game itself the result of some unexpected turn of events? Did the game's title get changed at the last minute when the dev team realised that the turn button was an awful idea but it was too late to fix it? Who knows!
@direlog on March 27, 2024
As A Large Language Model, I Can't End Your Suffering
My boss is always telling me 'destroy the ice worm', or 'the ice worm must be destroyed'. I have no idea what he's talking about.
I stare out the window. Fire falls from the sky. I'm not sure where it's coming from. In the streets, a thousand people walk about, all of them staring up into the sky. Some look a little too happy. Most look terrified.
I turn back to my monitor. Tickets fill up the screen.
At home I puncture the polyethylene film of a ready-meal with a serrated knife I bought from the corner shop. It has a plastic handle. It feels like it will break every time I use it. I slide the tray into the microwave and press a sequence of buttons that was passed down by my ancestors. A smell of hot metal fills the room.
The meal is hot on my lap as I watch the screen. I dig some utensil into it to retrieve pieces of flesh, vegetal segments, some kind of sauce. A plane flies over a city. The camera zooms into an office, where a man is sitting at a desk. He looks up and smiles. He stands up and walks towards the window. He opens it. He looks down and waves at the people on the street. A car jets off a ramp. Two men are punching each other in the face.
I stand in line at the grocery store. The clerk looks at me and I look at him. I feel like I should say something, but I don't know what to say. He's wearing a badge with his name, 'Brian'. I think I've seen him before. I wonder if I've ever talked to him. I wonder if he has a family. I wonder if he has a cat, or a dog. I wonder if he goes to church. Does the god he prays to exist? Does mine? I hope god is hungry for my flesh. I wonder if he's happy.
I walk out of the store with my groceries in a plastic bag, which makes me feel guilty, but I like feeling guilty. That, I can control. I write 'lol' at the end of each sentence that means anything to disarm it. I put the bag in the car and close the door. I turn the key. The car does not start. I look at the dashboard, but I don't know what I'm looking for. I look out the window. I look at the other cars. I look at the people walking on the sidewalk. I look at the sky. I look at the sun.
It's night. I'm driving and the road is straight. I look at the road. I look at the road signs. I look at the other cars. I look at the sky. The moon guides my way.
I look in the mirror. I see the road behind me. I see my face, my eyes. I look tired. I think about shaving. I think about getting a haircut. I think about getting a new shirt. I think about a new suit. I think about a new car. I think about a new job. I think about a new house. I think about a new family. I think about a new body, small and sleek and feminine and full of knives. I think about having my mind wiped, needles sliding into my skull, biting down on the bit and screaming out all that I am, little that it is. I think about a new country. I think about a new planet. I think about a new universe. I imagine fire consuming this one. I imagine fire consuming me.
My boss is standing at my desk. He wants me to look at something. I look at what he's showing me. I nod. He points at the screen. He says something I don't understand. He says something else. He says something else. He points at something. He repeats himself. I nod. I say yes. He puts his hand on my shoulder. He squeezes my shoulder. He smiles. He says something else. He turns around and walks away.
I look out the window. There is a street. There are cars. I see a thousand names I don't know. I look at the code. I don't know what to do.
@transArsonist on February 20, 2024
is it just me or is cohost groaning under the weight of every single trans woman posting at once
share from @enochianjones on Feb 20, 2024
wish i was groaning under the weight of evenrynethronjjr
@bruno on November 10, 2024
This is prompted by a bluesky post and not by any discourse going on here on Cohost, but I feel like there actually are some things that I have a strong preference not to CW. I'm happy to tag them so people can tag muffle them, but putting something behind a CW veil is, I think, a real social signal that it's something that doesn't belong out in public in full view and needs at least a little modesty curtain.
And like, some things clearly do – gore, or discussion of certain very sensitive topics.
But: I think most of us agree that the person in that classic tumblr post asking for someone to trigger tag "lesbian" was out of pocket for that; and if you take that view, I think the obvious reasoning here is that by taking something out of public view you are denormalizing it, and it's perhaps not great to systematically denormalize, eg, queerness.
But my example of thing that I wouldn't want to CW is actually spiders. I realize that arachnophobia is very common, and my intent here isn't "oh people with arachnophobia should just be made to look at spiders" – again, I'm happy to tag spiders so you can muffle them.
My intent here is that I don't really think it's great to reinforce the idea that spiders are inherently horrific monsters; it's that I think if I am (here on my personal social media account) going to post spider pictures, I should just do so out in the open. Because part of the rhetoric embedded in my posting of spider pictures is the idea that 1. spiders are beautiful animals, 2. they are misunderstood and unfairly hated creatures that people should be kinder towards.
This logic extends with more complexities to other things that sometimes get requests for content warnings, most notably food.
I don't know how to handle this on platforms like Bluesky that lack tag muffling though lol
share from @hellgnoll on November 10, 2024
There was actually almost exactly this debate brought to Mastodon by entomologists posting about their scientific research, much of which involved the public education of people who by-and-large live in a society where insects (and wider "bugs") are seen purely as disgusting pests - and they wished to discuss the beautiful creatures they were studying in light of the need to normalize this common part of our ecosystem
They were, of course, largely chased off Mastodon, or science instances were added to mute lists, because there were a lot of people who felt their particular phobic triggers should take cultural precidence and indeed that it should be normalized to hide insects (a category of life currently undergoing a mass-extinction event all aorund us) instead of showing them to the public.
I am a clinically recovered arcahnaphobe, so I don't exactly have an even-handed say in this mess. But my short version of it is: This is a bad idea, a bad practice, and indeed users tag muffling their personal triggers is what the cultural norm should be. CW'ing a common form of life that is necessary and integral to basically every thriving above-water ecosystem on the planet is not great! And spiders are part of that too!
@Seven-Cute-Fish on June 4, 2024
@vaudevilleghost on Nov 14, 2023
i do not dream of labor
Apparently at some point in pre-school we were given a standard "what do you want to be when you grow up?" prompt, and my response was something to the end of "I dunno, something to do with kitchens?" This was shared with me, I think, because it's the sort of odd thing children say, but to me, that response reads as someone who found the premise of the question annoying. As if to say, "Motherfucker, I'm four. I don't even know what a job is. Why are you asking me this?" And I was right to reject the premise of the question. No one should "want" a job.
Joey Comeau used to write something called "Overqualified," a series of cover letters that are, perhaps, a little too honest. They talk about ugly breakups and weird obsessions and impossible dreams. These are a commentary on how impossible it is to actually write a cover letter which conveys anything remotely resembling your true self, and though the archives are not available you can still get the book at the book dispensary of your choice and you absolutely should. They're all lovely. One of them helped clarify a perspective I'm not sure I realized I had before.
In it, he applies to work at a bank and tells them he has no interest in a career, that he's only doing this to make his mom happy, that the best day of his life was the day he realized that he could work a shitty part-time job and then just do whatever he wanted in the rest of his time. You don't have to be your job; you can just live your life, and draw a paycheck, and make ends meet. The number does not always have to go up.
I almost died about three months into working as a courier. Some days, when the world seems strange enough, when things don't feel quite right, I'm not convinced that I did survive. It doesn't make sense getting up and walking away from a collision like that, just one old fixed conversion Bridgestone going as fast as it could but not fast enough to escape the Lexus who decided that she did not want me to be occupying that space.
I remember the panic, getting up, feeling that my teeth were broken, wondering if I could find them on the road--I remembered reading that if you lost a tooth you should try to save it, and I didn't know yet that they were just broken. And then, of course, I moved my bike out of the road. It was beyond fucked, but . . . well, you never know. You never know.
Five people stopped because they thought they had just watched someone die, and I chatted and joked with them, because it takes time for the realization to sink in that you almost died so that someone you will never meet and who will never care about you can make money off of your labor.
"So, what do you do for a living?"
The same as anyone else: I exchange precious hours of my life in exchange for tokens that can, in turn, be exchanged for necessities like food and shelter. We have all decided that this system makes sense, for some reason.
When I tried to find a new job, after I almost died, one of the places that interviewed me asked the question "what are you running from?" and I was so staggered at the stupidity of this question I didn't even try to answer it at first. "What does that mean?"
"Well," she explained, "you're either running from something, or you're running toward something." From her tone it was clear that this was a trick question that I had already failed by not having an answer for, but she was willing to humor the possibility that I had a good answer.
"I almost died," I said. "I want a job where that is less likely to happen." That was the last interview I attempted; it was easier to just get back on the bike and keep riding.
I sometimes wonder if there was ever a world where I didn't reject the very notion of wanting to be something when I grew up, of dreaming of a prestigious career path. It always seems so nonsensical: why would I want this? Why would I want to spend even more of my time working, and to take that work home with me and let it subsume my very identity? Why would I want to live a life where I would proudly answer "so what do you do?" with my job and not with "I write, I fence, I dream, I ride bikes, I play games, I read"? What possible version of me exists where I am fine with that, where I let the system guide me where it will?
The question is unanswerable, of course, but in this world, in this version of me, they will never own my dreams. However much it costs me to give them my labor, day in and day out, there are worlds and voices within me that capitalism cannot strangle. And I am glad to live in this world, in this self, where that is something that I am able to fight for.
@artemis on August 9th, 2023
Affirmations for FCC-Part-15-Compliant Girls
I do not cause harmful interference. I accept any interference received. I accept interference that may cause undesired operation. My electromagnetic shielding is adequate. I have passed compliance testing. My system clock jitters to spread clock noise across the frequency spectrum. I am not immune to electromagnetic pulses. I am a compliant class B device. I do not generate any spurious emissions. I can be safely placed next to a radio or television. Any electromagnetic emissions I make will be drowned out by the noise floor of my environment. I meet all requirements of the Canadian interference-causing equipment regulations.
@thecommabandit on March 16, 2023
on preservation
years ago i was applying for phds in america and had to take the GRE, and the closest testing centre to me was in london. my brother lived there at the time, so i crashed at his place, took the test in the morning, then had a whole day to kill until we could meet for dinner. so i went to the british museum.
i had a really great day and saw a ton of really cool stuff, but the thing that has stuck in my mind over the years was this massive egyptian stele. it was like hundreds of others in the museum – a slab of stone as thick as my head, carved with beautiful hieroglyphs proclaiming the heroic deeds of some long-dead pharaoh. but this stele was displayed laid on the floor, most of the text obliterated by a gigantic hole bored through the middle of the stone.
the little card beside it explained that it had been recovered from a small village somewhere along the nile, where the locals had been using it as a millstone to grind their grain for centuries before british archaeologists moved it here. i stared at the stone and tried to wrap my head around how this could happen. how could someone look at something so full of history and meaning and use it to the point of destruction for something so mundane? how could they so carelessly destroy such beautiful things? how could they have had no thought for the long-term preservation of their culture?
⪼————⪫
when you start learning things about history and archaeology past the basics, you run into the problem that artefacts and sources dont survive equally. for example, we find lots of flint tools from the neolithic, but not much else. things like clothes slowly decay over millennia, and the organic components of compound tools – the wooden handle the axehead is attached to and the resin glue that binds them together – all decay too. we're left with only the stone, only fragments, trying to understand the whole.
then as you go deeper, you find there's another layer. societies only expend effort to preserve things they thought were important, and only some people get to decide whats important. this is why weve found so many temples and tombs but so few homes, why museums are filled with funerary steles proclaiming the deeds of kings but not the daily diaries of farmers, why youve seen so many hieroglyphs but so little demotic. the elites of a society are the ones concerned with preserving their legacy – extending their power into the future – but everyday people are too busy with the burden and joy of existing to worry about that.
but now, it's different. people today have the ability to document and record their daily lives easily and in so many ways – facebook posts of every night out in uni, instagram pictures of a walk in the park, tweets about your day in work. unlike those in the past, we wont be forgotten. future generations will see how our daily lives were, and theyll understand us. we will leave proof that we were here.
...
you ever tried looking at a website from twenty years ago?
sometimes the person who made it stored all the media on their own server, so all the content on the site itself works. sometimes they've embedded images or files from elsewhere and those servers have changed their URLs or died, and you get nothing but text and vacant images. sometimes they're too small, the entire page squished up in the top-left corner of your screen because the creator didnt anticipate anyone viewing it at resolutions higher than 800x600, or maybe they just didn't know much about HTML and placed everything using pixel counts from the top-left.
and those are only the ones that survived, because theyre simple. a handful of self-contained HTML files and jpegs stored on a cobwebbed corner of a server somewhere. once you start talking about things like social media networks, you add layers and layers of APIs, interfaces, servers, clouds, content delivery networks, and all kinds of infrastructure, each one with a chain of dependencies upon dependencies upon dependencies. and if a single dependency fails, the entire stack collapses.
we're inscribing the records of our daily lives on clay tablets that crumble into dust if they're allowed to dry out.
□————�
when you start learning things about history and archaeology past the basics, you run into the problem where artefacts and sources dont survive equally. we find lots of simple websites from the 1990s and 2000s, but not much else. codebases and dependencies slowly decay over years, and the complex components of simple websites – the CDN that stores the image and the web crawler that indexes the site – all decay too. we're left with only the isolated HTML, only fragments, trying to understand the whole.
then as you go deeper, you find there's another layer. societies only expend effort to preserve things they thought were important, and only some people get to decide whats important. this is why weve found so many pictures of beaches but so few of offices, why archives are full of articles about billionaires but not factory workers, why youve seen so many websites in english but so few in basque. the elites of a society are the ones concerned with preserving their legacy – extending their power into the future – but everyday people are too busy with the burden and joy of existing to worry about that.
///
and really all that stuff about recording your life is bullshit, isnt it? youre not leaving evidence and documents behind about your daily life to help future historians understand us. your instagram posts of tropical beaches are doing exactly the same thing as a king engraving his victories into stone. youre sending a message to the people who you think matter, sculpting an image of yourself for their consumption, because you want them to love you or fear you or envy you.
the real parts of life, the burden and joy of existing, dont get documented. you will never make an anthropologist a thousand years from now understand how it felt to be crushed beneath the heel of capitalism, and how you defiantly extracted every last drop of joy you could from a life designed to make you a miserable slave. when they dig up the bones of you and your lover, holding each other in death like you did in life, they will not know that you watched stupid tv shows together because you liked making fun of how bad they were.
///
today, we demolish old buildings because we need the space for new ones, then grind down the rubble to make concrete to build them with. sometime in the future, someone like me will go to a museum and see a model of the ugliest brutalist building you can imagine and have the same thought i did. how could someone look at something so full of history and meaning and use it to the point of destruction for something so mundane? how could they so carelessly destroy such beautiful things? how could they have had no thought for the long-term preservation of their culture?
we have a tendency to think weve learnt the lessons of history, that its different this time, but it isnt and never will be. stone inscriptions weather away, writing on parchment disintegrates, and harddrives melt. you and i will be forgotten in time, like every peasant, every slave, every tribesman, every hunter-gatherer before us.
...
but i cant stop thinking about that stele, laying on its back in the british museum.
those egyptian peasants left their mark, didnt they? if it hadnt been for the hole they had ground through that slab of stone, if i had seen nothing but yet another record of a dead pharaoh's proclamations, i wouldn't even have thought of them. they werent trying to preserve anything, they werent trying to leave a legacy. and yet here i am, writing about them.
years later i went to CERN for a conference and took a day off before my flight home to go be a tourist in geneva. in the old town, i ducked out of the rain into a cathedral and the signs written in english explained its history. it had been a place of worship of some kind for nearly two thousand years – the romans had built a temple here when they conquered the helvetii, then it was turned into a church centuries later when the locals converted to christianity. the wooden building had been rebuilt in stone sometime in the third century, and the modern building rested on its foundations. the basement was a museum, letting you walk around the excavated roman foundations beneath the church, and i paid for one of those electronic guide headphone things to walk me around the building, since all the signs were in french.
in one corner, in a place that didn't matter, i saw one of the stone blocks that made up the foundations was rough. the rest of them had been ground smooth thousands of years ago, but this one still bore chiselmarks. you could see each strike. when i touched the stone, i could almost see him. some mason who wasnt being paid enough to care. "this stone's going in the foundation anyway. no one will see it."
ive never felt such a strong connection to someone so far away.
///
karl marx once said
"the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living"
and like stone, that nightmare erodes and accretes. rock erodes into pebbles, pebbles into gravel, gravel into dust. dust accretes on the ocean floor and settles, layers upon layers, compressing gradually into rock.
but every so often, something survives – some ancient creature trapped in the sediment, or the footprint of someone long gone who was just passing through. while the rest is ground into dust, fragments survive. and the people who come after us will take the fragments that, by pure chance, happened to survive, and fill in the gaps with their own stories, the same way we weave stories between flint arrowheads, potsherds and inscriptions.
sometime in the future, someone like me will find something i left behind. maybe it will be something i threw away because it wasnt useful anymore. maybe itll be something i lost and missed greatly. maybe itll be something i expended great effort to make. maybe itll be something i halfarsed to get it over with. theyll pick it up, and maybe theyll be able to see me, the way that i saw that roman mason, the way that i saw those egyptian villagers.
"hello. i was here."
@sitcom on Sep 12 2024
Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.
it's ok for things to disappear. it's horrible & it's the worst & it's also ok. paper rots, servers get fried or degrade, memory distorts & the brains that store it shut off eventually too. we can't hold onto things forever & it's a tragedy & it's deeply deeply alright. make a fist. feel your fingers & fingernails against your palm. feel your knuckles folding against each other. rest your thumb in a couple different places. squeeze. open your hand & feel the air appearing instantly to touch it all again, cool against the moisture of your skin. it's going to be alright. i love you like any person loves any other person & it's ok
