Have local copies of stuff

Jake Thoughts — 09 Oct 2021 00:25:58 -0400

The title may suggest saving your favorite websites or saving images or saving videos to your hard drive. This is just a subset of what I meant, albeit a useful endeavor. My real intentions go further than that: Print that website out! Print that image out! Burn that video to a DVD disk! Print/burn EVERYTHING!

The saver sits at a desk and next to him are about 30 hard drives and a screenshot of Window's Internet Explorer downloading something. There are various text around the saver and the images. The prominent text says 'The 30 year old Saver.' The other text says: 'used to save important websites. now saves everything', 'could help people by uploading memory-holed content, too busy saving to do that' and more.

Meme sort of related but doesn't go far enough. Hard drives and other forms of electronic memory can FAIL. [Someone pointed out that if you do go down the 'saving the entire internet' route you need to sort/tag everything you've saved because finding them afterward will be very difficult. If you are going to save everything, save everything more than once and on different devices so when one fails you still have backups (plural).]

But J-j-jake! I don't have enough ink for that! I don't have a DVD writer because modern gaming computer cases do not create space for them!

Pathetic. I suppose I can settle with you just saving everything on to a flash drive. I actually happen to possess a rather sizeable flash drive that I update infrequently - so I am at least understanding on that front. Also `ink` 🤭. I will let you in on a secret regarding printers: a single cartridge (toner) for a lazer printer will typically last longer than an inkjet cartridge by sometimes thousands of pages with a cheaper cost per page. The hardest part by far will be getting the printer to work but that is a different story for another day.

Civilization - Institutions, Knowledge and the Future - Samo Burja (37 minutes, a good video.)

After watching the Civilization video, I was left with some kind of impression specifically about the past and how lessons of the past often BARELY made it to the present.

"For 2000 known ancient Greek writers, we have 13% of it. ... And a smaller fragment of complete works."
"0% of this culture is present with us today [because 2/3 of the Chinese population died which includes the entirety of this culture]."

This fear encourages the schizo within. What if the internet breaks? What if electricity gets turned off forever? You can't read your blog if it's intangible! Obviously that would never happen unless aliens invaded Earth. And I'm not saying that aliens will invade Earth and target these specific weak points... but they could. The chance is non-zero. How much data exactly is intangible and therefore at risk? I suspect a rather high degree and if something bad happens that semi-intangible data will remain forever intangible. Now, I also think in the event of a real alien invasion (real or imagined), they would probably bring back the 'internet' but only selectively and with lots of restrictions meaning your creative blog posts probably will not make the cut. Additionally, 'privacy' will most likely be heavily discouraged, so Tor, and other methods of getting 'anonymous connections' will not be allowed to function the way they have previously. My uninformed schizo-take on technology but whatever: maybe they will make it so that packets will require some kind of identification just to be transmitted[1]. I should stop giving them ideas.

A different perspective if my favorite boogy-man, the aliens (a place in for some powerful entity), doesn't sit well with you... Internet archives ... *can* be modified! One example that I know of is nearly every archive for original mewch, one of my favorite chans before it got [REDACTED]'d, does not exist even though, according to others, it used to. You cannot find internet archives on them even though they did exist at one point (I've made some personal copies of some threads but not enough, something I regret). Unless they are somehow made immutable through something like the blockchain, files can be removed or worse, altered. Of course, physical paper can also be modified and destroyed but the effort to do this would require it to be deliberate or a very bad case of carelessness. Paper documents will last much longer than electric documents would because they are already physical and not an abstraction somehow created from 1's and 0's that also somehow appears in a logical manner on a screen. Paper documents can also be converted back into electronic documents and printed again.

Regardless of the hypothetical risks, having a printed copy of something makes the intangible tangible (sure, you could argue semantics about 'what *is* written language? How does the brain interpret letters in such a way that we can understand abstract ideas from random chicken scratch?' but I think the planet's lingua franca will be somewhat resistant to being eradicated, take a look at Latin or ancient Greek for example). You DO have a piece of history. With luck it will find its way to the right person in the future. Maybe it will end up being a 'redpill' or maybe every one will greatly enjoy the story 1000 years later or maybe future readers will think 'wtf were they doing back then?!' or maybe the religion will gain a new follower or whatever. To me it doesn't really matter what the content is as long as it can reach the next generation(s) somehow.

I am doing my part! I've printed my entire blog! :^) Future historians will thank me for it.

I've also printed out some holy books, fiction, philosophy, and other things that I enjoy. You get bonus points for reading what you've printed more than once since you are making that paper pay for itself. Information is valuable and nearly priceless - worth more than the paper itself. Next step might be organizing it somehow and I cannot offer advice on that though I want to. Another benefit of printing is that you can annotate the paper without feeling guilty. It's not a $70 book!

Jake, I am totally unable to acquire a printing device and even if I do, what I print will be used against me regardless of the content printed.

Hmm... I hope your future will change for the better so that you can spend hundreds of dollars on paper, a lazer printer, and some toners. When I say print I mean print, if you are printing a book that you could buy, maybe buy the book? Perhaps printing will be a waste of paper if are going to end up buying the book as I have for some titles. Don't buy eBooks though, unless either: you figure out a way to print them, or it can be transferred to your file system.

Also, I heard that looking to the past is like looking to the future. Be someone's past so they can see their future! Or something.

[1] That idea alone kind of spooked me. I have thought of some things that might help in dealing with it. It would be a good idea for people, myself included, to learn about 'underground' ways of connecting to the internet (more than just Tor and I2P and Yggdrasil). Maybe look into what is needed to create some kind of private intranet that could connect to other private intranets. I believe this will reduce the power that 'turning off the internet' will have. Off the top of my head, large mesh-nets seem like a decent-ish option, though I will plainly admit I don't really know how they work besides connected devices are server-clients. I agree that it will be a pain to get people to even experiment with mesh-nets as with everything technology related especially when their internet already 'just works'. If one can create or join a mesh-net community, it would be a good idea to use TLS since who knows what the other nodes are doing. Ah, but if the mesh-net gets super big then the FCC might get force themselves to get involved and... hmm...

This project, libremesh, intrigues me, especially the links under the heading 'Free Networks, Free Society.' I am curious about the kind of community they foster, if at all.

Hmm, Hyperboria's documentation (of course the cert is expired and half the links are dead) is very interesting and if I am understanding it correctly, similar to what I envision.

(This blog post was 'in progress' before Facebook went down for several hours while the media is pushing that they should have a seat at the UN. These incidents did encourage me to actually finish this... Lately I have been having difficulty saying 'yes, this is finished.' I have to almost impulsively publish blog posts (the Doppio cgi post was finished before the Gemini blog post, for instance) otherwise I will try to perfect them forever.)

Other thoughts

Jake on 2021-10-11,20:09:10 said:
double-sided printing can save you a lot of paper - make sure to do that.
curry on 2021-10-11,20:19:49 said:
It is a good idea to update your storage media according to current technology. If in 1998 you would archive data in Floppy disks, you began to archive it DVD in the 2000's and so forth. Microsoft (if i'm not mistaken) is trying to write data on glass, and some other crazy company is using DNA n shit. There are also tapes which can hold digital information, but these are usually used for enterprise applications and are slow to read. The best you can do at the moment is to store media in hard drives, Blu Ray and Paper. Maybe we'll see those new storage methods in a few years, maybe we'll need to store data in stone tablets.
Jake on 2021-10-11,21:01:35 said:
curry, thanks for the comment. I find it hard to disagree with anything you wrote it makes perfect sense to me.

Writing to glass sounds interesting and if the glass is maintained/cleaned often then that would be more permanent than say paper. But to read it you need specialized software/hardware... hmm.

I heard about DNA but I think consumers will be locked out of it for the most part.

Problem with stone tablets is that I cannot think of any easy way of mass writing to them besides maybe 3d printers. Of course, one could do it by hand but how long would that take?
jke on 2021-10-14,01:17:19 said:
(Of course, stone tablets would probably last MUCH MUCH longer than paper would)
Jake on 2021-10-15,12:07:17 said:
(Providing that nobody defaces them or breaks them)
Jake on 2021-11-01,06:46:02 said:
I spilled coffee on one of my printed papers. Future historians will wonder what, if any, significance it has.
coolio on 2021-11-07,01:22:58 said:
I am quite a fan of this post, this is quite small but there is a YouTuber that I am a big fan of named the Examined Life (of Gaming). He has privated about 4/5 of his videos and has been a gaming YouTuber since 2011, I think. I think that he is one of the most thoughtful game analysts on Youtube but for an unknown reason, he privates nearly all of his videos. Thankfully I had most of them backed up and as far as I know I am the only person aside from him who has access to most of those videos. His GTA 5 review wasn't backed up by me and isn't on archive.org which makes me sad as it seems to be lost forever now, and back when I saw it I remembered it as being the best analysis of GTA 5 on YouTube.

This is pretty minute, as it's just a small gaming channel, but I've been watching him for years and I really appreciate his content.

Back up what you love, peeps.
Jake on 2021-11-07,20:28:33 said:
coolio, thank you for your comment! It reminded me when I used to listen to exclusively nightcore music that, of course, tended to use copyrighted music.

I'm sure you are aware of the DMCA apocalypse which made me cry irl. that was my first lesson in hating copyright but it was also before I knew you could download anything that your computer is able to access. More DMCA shit followed. I am still very bitter about it. That nightcored music was better than the orginials and I badly wish I saved them.

>Back up what you love, peeps.
So true!
extramundane on 2022-05-12,16:36:35 said:
Hey Jake. Honestly can't remember how I found this blog, but I added it to my RSS feed and have just been lurking more or less. Anyways, this post in particularly really inspired me towards archival, especially now that I'm seeing channels go down left and right.

I've witnessesed it for years now. Specifically on YouTube, where you got a lot of people privating vids to avoid false copyright claims. I can think of many examples off the top of my head; Mumkey Jones' channel deletion (from which he has since recovered as of writing), first Filthy Frank vid taken down, EmpLemon privating all his YTP's he made back in the day (thankfully backed up on Odysee). Nintendo went a rampage a few months ago taking down nearly ALL their copyrighted music (iirc GiIvaSunner just closed his channel altogether, which makes perfect sense on his part, but all the video comments are now pretty much lost). Most recently, I used to frequent a music playlist channel by the handle "Fruddle". He used to make playlists with names like "Relaxing Video Game Music to Sleep To for 3 Hours". It was good stuff. And one day I booted up NewPipe on my phone (a youtube alternative frontend) and it said his channel got terminated. All those memories, songs, comments; gone in the blink of an eye. I don't have a single photo left. Maybe a playlist or two, but that's it. (Here's his old channel link (no wayback page unfortunately): https://www.youtube.com/Fruddle)

That one was personal, and so now I'm gonna go archive what I can. The way I see it now, the access we have to the internet now may go away in the near future, and if that access goes, it'll go quickly, and probably without warning. I'm going to save what I can on hard drives, and save what I love on physical media as well (eg. Papers and Disc-based media). If it's anything serious, then cotton-based chemical safe paper. Or maybe even film for videos. If that's possible at all. If not, then I'll just go for what I can.

In closing, all I can say is that backing up your stuff certainly isn't a schizo fear; not when we have more and more regulations coming down on our internet. I don't even mean net neutrality. Just the other day, US courts wanted to crack down on illegal streaming sites (Source: look it up). I know certain kind of websites have always been restricted to some extent, but if they can force that, then what else can they force?

Just food for thought. Thank you very much for the blog post Jake. Best of luck in your saving endeavors. Hopefully you've convinced a couple other people like me to save stuff before it's too late, and avoid a few "Fruddle" Situations.
Jake on 2022-05-16,10:57:04 said:
extramundane, hello!

I have convinced a few people to start their own archives! It makes me rather happy, and somewhat amused that people actually read what I have to say and actually do something about it.

Don't forget to print your blog! Im sure future historians will LOVE that kind of stuff! 😀

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