One day on Houston St in NYC, while I was visiting at NYU for a couple of years, I was standing around, waiting for a student, not doing anything, daydreaming a bit, and all of a sudden there's a gorgeous, dark-haired young woman wearing a black dress, standing immediately in front of me. This is the kind of woman you see in Manhattan, perfectly made up, wearing a black dress that perfectly fits her body. They congregate here, somehow knowing this is where they should be. She is a Master of the Universe, can instantly command the attention of anyone she wants. And this godess wants to speak to me.Me? What. It couldn't be. Must be a mistake. But in an instant, I realized this was the student I was waiting for. Of course she was talking to me. But in that split second my reaction was instinctual, not intellectual, a whole story had played out. I thought of this story the other day, while looking out of my house at a green mountain far in the distance, a field in the foreground, a stand of trees, a huge bird of prey flying overhead. Everything verdant, alive, ideal, perfect as a young confident aloof woman in a black dress in Manhattan. As impossible to describe as a whole. That I could be in such a place, that this scene had assembled itself with me in it, me. Me. How did this happen? At my advanced age, I'm just beginning to understand that I am part of this world. #Peeve: Someone I'm collaborating with says they'll read my email later because they're busy now. Then they say what they're doing. The point of using asynchronous tools is you don't have to care what I'm doing now, and I don't have to stop everything to do something for you. #
Follow-up on yesterday's braintrust query. Using a regular expression, I find a t.co link in a tweet, and replace it with something smaller and less distracting. Remember this is a writing environment, so the result must be as simple as possible for readers. 😄 #
I'm really confused about what's up with archive.org. As I reported on Tuesday, they clearly aren't archiving this blog in any meaningful way. I write this blog with history in mind. I put things here and on the linkblog because I want to be sure historians in the future will find at least one link to this stuff. If archive.org isn't backing it up, that's a big problem. And it raises an even bigger question -- what else aren't they archiving? And how do they decide what to archive and not to archive? Do they run the JavaScript on a page to get a rendering? If not, there's a huge amount of our knowledge that isn't being recorded. Are they trying to be neutral or do their friends and people who donate get preferential treatment? #I just did the monthly ritual, backing up June's blog, in OPML, on GitHub. BTW, archive.org has one snapshot of the repo, on 11/22/2020. Anything after that is not in their database. (On further examination it seems the only took a snapshot of the top level of the repo, so it doesn't serve as a backup of the content of the blog.)#
The conclusion: archive.org, no matter how good it is and how ethical the people there are, is a last-resort way to backup the web. It can and should get better, but if we want to create a historic record of any kind about this era, we're going to have to be much more deliberate about it, even competitive. There are nothing but holes in our approach, all the way down to the architecture of the net itself, and at every level above it. We've created a very temporary way to record history. And like everything else, we aren't doing anything about it. #
