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Giulio Ghirardi

Enameled gold memento mori ring, Europe, circa 1550-1575

from The Victoria & Albert Museum

Its always such a bummer when "period" dialogue is written to be as stiff as possible to demonstrate that it is Ye Olden Times. You missed your chance to open the Fun Contractions box! Shan't. Oughtn't. Mightn't. Mayn't. Needn't. Daren't. 'Twasn't. Aren't we having fun???

Taping my third eye closed like a webcam

has this been done?

right where you left me by taylor swift + automat by edward hopper

Kata Tjuta / Mount Olga, Australia by Melanie Dretvic

Your Film Fave Is Problematic: Goncharov (1973)

While the Goncharov meme has grown colossal on tumblr, it’s important to remember that the film is in fact quite reprehensible for numerous reasons regarding its production.

Here are some of the most critical for you to know:

So enjoy the jokes, but never forget the hard times that afflicted the movie.

Lovers’ Bridge on the Canal du Vasse, Annecy, Haute-Savoie, 1992. Photo by Jean Gaumy.

the best thing a man can do is have big brown eyes. the second best thing a man can do is be bisexual

Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.

This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.

Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.

So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.

That is not good.

In pseudo and acadamic circles this has routinely been called the ‘digital dark age’, I even wrote on the subject a few years ago but can’t find that article right now. [There is even a Wikipedia article on the concept] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age#:~:text=The%20digital%20dark%20age%20is,technologies%20evolve%20and%20data%20decay).

It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.

This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.

@xkcd-for-that

Bates Littlehales: Replogle Globe Company, Chicago, ca. 1957-1967

Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska as Ophelia, ca 1867 / source