💾 Archived View for ashley.cities.yesterweb.org › gemlog › 2024-05-23-archival.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:34:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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oh, archive (derogatory)
~bot
archival is weird. it feels weird. for one it's not terribly useful. I rarely actually access my archives; indeed, the format they're stored in makes it extremely inconvenient to do so. that's at least partially intentional. I know full well that the past is merely an illusion, a creation myth for the present. but ultimately memory is an uphill battle against the universe, and it always ends in defeat. memory is only useful insofar as it informs and shapes the present, but otherwise it's just that, memory. a tiny subset of the present which we perceive as a reconstruction of the past. now that may not be *entirely* true -- it IS possible for the past to come back, ever so briefly, usually as a result of smell or sound. I posit that that IS in fact more or less a literal trip through time (as far as subjective human experience is concerned anyway), but also that it is necessarily short lived and either immediately slips away through the cracks and vanishes forever, or simply becomes a natural part of mundanity, and loses all its ties to the past. back when I was a little kid I thought this was what everyone meant by 'nostalgia' -- now I'm not so sure anymore.
archival is weird and foolish. fetishistic, even. I don't think the point of archival, at least in the way I do it, is ever really to provide some form of practical utility. rather, it seems to me that it serves a religious purpose. it's a ritual, and a damn involved one at that.
I have spent unheavenly amounts of time archiving stuff. my archives are curated by hand, tarred, and aggressively compressed. they currently measure somewhere around 570 giggles. my obsessive archival escapades usually last somewhere between a day and a couple weeks. they occur maybe once or twice per year or so. I estimate that, on average, I spend about a day per month archiving. my technique usually involves running over top-level directories one by one deciding whether to include each, and only descending into them to filter with finer granularity if their size warrants it. this does let some junk through but it is generally good enough. sometimes temporary directories and pointless caches will make it through, but I bet filtering those, assuming the split were always perfectly clear cut, would maybe only shave a couple giggles at most off my archives. that's good enough for my purposes.
but that's not all there is to archiving. in the process of traversing the directory tree you will usually peruse it -- almost certainly for the last time. you will watch old videos; read old text files; explore old minecraft worlds. maybe even spend hours searching free space for accidentally deleted minecraft worlds, years after the fact, to no avail (if only I had the technical knowledge then! or better yet, the good sense to make backups...) there is a very strong sense of finality to this process. witnessing the remnants of your very own past, with your very own eyes, just as they arrive to their final resting place -- archives are tombs, and the process of archival is a funeral.
humans are generally prone to this sort of farewall ritual. it's arguably a necessary part of finding acceptance, and peace thereafter.
I can't help but feel that museums serve a very similar purpose. art is on display for its aesthetic beauty, yes, but if that were its only purpose it would just be left strewn about on the street for all to see. once a painting is hung on the wall it has at last achieved its global optimum. it has become fully ripe and as a result it has been publicly hanged. don't touch the artwork.
couldn't find this archived anywhere, sorry! >< (if you find it, email me please)
if you are having trouble seeing the connection, consider the following: coffins are canvases, and humans are the art. beautiful, but finished. there is similarly a very strong aversion to physically disturbing graves, which are usually associated with misfortune, and may cause one to become haunted (to varying degrees of literality). who's afraid of red, yellow and blue? don't touch the artwork.
and ultimately this is what archival is about. finding peace through acceptance. coming to terms with the past, and collecting its happy overflow, and having it drown out all the terrible things that happened since, for one last time before it's gone -- shedding its weight and becoming free once more. and, as do corpses, archives are treated with respect; buried in the depths of a hard disk encrypted with a passphrase that only exists in your brain, so that they may truly die with you.
because the future always wins. always. don't touch the artwork.
