Memories, Like The Corners Of My Mind
Apr. 27th, 2008 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mundensI've been hermit-like since Friday morning. Probably will today as well. Quite enjoying being almost completely lazy, but there's a bit of a nag in my head that I should be using this time to get stuff done, so I may have to do something today. I didn't get up until half ten though so the days almost gone. :)
Watched the first disk of Escaflowne last night, having finished s-CRY-ed a couple of days ago. s-CRY-ed has an ending that is remarkably true to the characters. Escaflowne has cat-girls, steam-punk mechas, magical girls, and so far a Gundam Seed plot-line. so I'm enjoying it. Finally finished watching Dr Who season three, and was glad that other's had noticed the homage to Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet in the person of Captain Jack and the in the design of the USS Valiant. Now I can try and catch up on season 4. 22" monitors and PC sound systems a couple of feet from you are in some ways better than large LCDs on the other side of the room.
Other than I've been doing washing, cleaned the fridge, and listed stuff on TradeMe, managing to avoid spending $200 on more 40K stuff just because it was damn cheap, and I could have made a profit on it. I've been doing lots of thinking about "stuff" over the past month or two, and as I begin to get rid of things, the rubbish, duplications, and least wanted first, I feel more like beginning to reduce the hoard. I've started to realize that the physical objects are not just being kept because I hoard and collect, though some of it is that. With some things it's because they are physical indexing system for memories. I realized this while listing some Legion of Superheroes comics. I realized I couldn't remember the story told in them itself, but I could remember the cover art, and I could remember that what was in those covers was good. I think I long ago subconsciously realized that I would not be able to retrieve everything I wanted to remember without some form of external memory and indexing system, just as I consciously realized long ago that I could never retrieve everything I have ever learnt, so stopped bothering trying to retain facts and skills, learning instead how to recover that information from external sources quickly. Until I have a thought-linked AI major-domo to do my remembering for me, these clunky retrieval mechanisms will have to do.
What I would love is a multiply-backed up digital archive containing all the pages in all the books in my house, in searchable text format, as well as in actual printed layout, and with image context search, accessible from wherever I am, readable on a virtual book. That would allow me to toss the majority of my stuff, just excluding the special editions, the signed copies, the things I really love or have special significance enough that I'd want to keep the physical object. For instance, if I could be guaranteed of being able to retrieve them in as good quality, at will, I would have no need to retain any of my DVD's. It's only because I don't trust my technology, the network, or the financial stability of the company providing the service that I need this physical copy.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I haven't (touch wood) lost a hard drive with useful data on it before it was retired. I have oodles of local disk, and more costs less each day, new 500Gb drives are going for under NZD $130 in TradeMe these days. I think Amazon's cloud storage will be reliable enough as the remote back-up and accessible from anywhere component too, as log as I have those local copies to shift providers if Amazon goes buts or has catastrophic failure. But, the time it would take to transfer those DVD's to my local drive, the cost of storing them in the cloud, and the network bandwidth required to retrieve, is prohibitively expensive. And that's just the DVD's
Though admittedly the video component does represent probably the greatest bulk of data for storage and bandwidth purposes, in terms of digitization they are actually the simplest. The next simplest, and second largest storage and bandwidth is audio. OK from CD's, but what about all the vinyl I have that probably has never had CD versions? I can link the turntable to the line input, but it takes time. It seems the smaller the amount of data storage required, the smaller the bandwidth, the harder it is digitize adequately. I spent some time scanning a few articles out of a twenty-eight year-old Military Modelling magazine yesterday. The amount of time required to do that in the way I would want it done, is just ridiculous. Then there would be the organizing.
I'd be happy to subscribe to services providing this sort of thing, but a lot of this data is pre-computer, and were it has been done, like with the Dragon Magazine CDs, they are often not very well prepared and scanned and indexed. Then there's the stuff that wasn't commercial that may be gone for good when the physical copies finally degrade, like the issues of Dispatches / NZ Wargamer from the seventies I have, or APA stuf like Tangent, Pink and even Noumenon or Stripz.
Physical objects are similar. All those little miniatures I have because I once thought they were cool and I could do something with them, storing them in case the day comes when my fancy is to implement that idea I had thirty years ago, stored because I could not be guaranteed of finding the item again, or afraid that iot would cost ridiculous amounts. A valid fear, BTW, as the increases in the cost of figures on Trade Me over the last three years alone are astounding, it's why when I sell them I don't ever lose money. But with a good metal-capable RepRap and the relevant 3D model, one would not need to store the physical object, just print it out when one needed it, if one ever needed it.
Finally there are the ephemera of life, like times with lovers, great LARP's, and just plain good times, tastes, and feelings. Without a 24/7 full sensory "lifecam" tied in with emotional recording, that's gonna be a big ask for digitizing, and so those are things I try to ensure my internal retrieval and storage mechanisms do handle well, but one notices that it is hard sometime to remember such things.
So yeah, I hoard stuff because I can't digitize it economically enough in time or money. I hoard stuff because I don't want it to be forgotten, because I want to share my memories with others. I think, if I won the lottery, I would spend equal amounts of time between creating new stuff, and digitizing and clouding old stuff so that it won't be lost.Then I'll start worrying about true off-site backups. because we want this stuff to survive, even if the planet is hit by a crust-cracker. Then I'll try to look at a means of allowing the data to survive the collapse of the galaxy, and then the heat death. Heh! One imagines that it is this sort of crazy desire (something I usually repress) that leads to recreation...
Let there be light!
Watched the first disk of Escaflowne last night, having finished s-CRY-ed a couple of days ago. s-CRY-ed has an ending that is remarkably true to the characters. Escaflowne has cat-girls, steam-punk mechas, magical girls, and so far a Gundam Seed plot-line. so I'm enjoying it. Finally finished watching Dr Who season three, and was glad that other's had noticed the homage to Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet in the person of Captain Jack and the in the design of the USS Valiant. Now I can try and catch up on season 4. 22" monitors and PC sound systems a couple of feet from you are in some ways better than large LCDs on the other side of the room.
Other than I've been doing washing, cleaned the fridge, and listed stuff on TradeMe, managing to avoid spending $200 on more 40K stuff just because it was damn cheap, and I could have made a profit on it. I've been doing lots of thinking about "stuff" over the past month or two, and as I begin to get rid of things, the rubbish, duplications, and least wanted first, I feel more like beginning to reduce the hoard. I've started to realize that the physical objects are not just being kept because I hoard and collect, though some of it is that. With some things it's because they are physical indexing system for memories. I realized this while listing some Legion of Superheroes comics. I realized I couldn't remember the story told in them itself, but I could remember the cover art, and I could remember that what was in those covers was good. I think I long ago subconsciously realized that I would not be able to retrieve everything I wanted to remember without some form of external memory and indexing system, just as I consciously realized long ago that I could never retrieve everything I have ever learnt, so stopped bothering trying to retain facts and skills, learning instead how to recover that information from external sources quickly. Until I have a thought-linked AI major-domo to do my remembering for me, these clunky retrieval mechanisms will have to do.
What I would love is a multiply-backed up digital archive containing all the pages in all the books in my house, in searchable text format, as well as in actual printed layout, and with image context search, accessible from wherever I am, readable on a virtual book. That would allow me to toss the majority of my stuff, just excluding the special editions, the signed copies, the things I really love or have special significance enough that I'd want to keep the physical object. For instance, if I could be guaranteed of being able to retrieve them in as good quality, at will, I would have no need to retain any of my DVD's. It's only because I don't trust my technology, the network, or the financial stability of the company providing the service that I need this physical copy.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I haven't (touch wood) lost a hard drive with useful data on it before it was retired. I have oodles of local disk, and more costs less each day, new 500Gb drives are going for under NZD $130 in TradeMe these days. I think Amazon's cloud storage will be reliable enough as the remote back-up and accessible from anywhere component too, as log as I have those local copies to shift providers if Amazon goes buts or has catastrophic failure. But, the time it would take to transfer those DVD's to my local drive, the cost of storing them in the cloud, and the network bandwidth required to retrieve, is prohibitively expensive. And that's just the DVD's
Though admittedly the video component does represent probably the greatest bulk of data for storage and bandwidth purposes, in terms of digitization they are actually the simplest. The next simplest, and second largest storage and bandwidth is audio. OK from CD's, but what about all the vinyl I have that probably has never had CD versions? I can link the turntable to the line input, but it takes time. It seems the smaller the amount of data storage required, the smaller the bandwidth, the harder it is digitize adequately. I spent some time scanning a few articles out of a twenty-eight year-old Military Modelling magazine yesterday. The amount of time required to do that in the way I would want it done, is just ridiculous. Then there would be the organizing.
I'd be happy to subscribe to services providing this sort of thing, but a lot of this data is pre-computer, and were it has been done, like with the Dragon Magazine CDs, they are often not very well prepared and scanned and indexed. Then there's the stuff that wasn't commercial that may be gone for good when the physical copies finally degrade, like the issues of Dispatches / NZ Wargamer from the seventies I have, or APA stuf like Tangent, Pink and even Noumenon or Stripz.
Physical objects are similar. All those little miniatures I have because I once thought they were cool and I could do something with them, storing them in case the day comes when my fancy is to implement that idea I had thirty years ago, stored because I could not be guaranteed of finding the item again, or afraid that iot would cost ridiculous amounts. A valid fear, BTW, as the increases in the cost of figures on Trade Me over the last three years alone are astounding, it's why when I sell them I don't ever lose money. But with a good metal-capable RepRap and the relevant 3D model, one would not need to store the physical object, just print it out when one needed it, if one ever needed it.
Finally there are the ephemera of life, like times with lovers, great LARP's, and just plain good times, tastes, and feelings. Without a 24/7 full sensory "lifecam" tied in with emotional recording, that's gonna be a big ask for digitizing, and so those are things I try to ensure my internal retrieval and storage mechanisms do handle well, but one notices that it is hard sometime to remember such things.
So yeah, I hoard stuff because I can't digitize it economically enough in time or money. I hoard stuff because I don't want it to be forgotten, because I want to share my memories with others. I think, if I won the lottery, I would spend equal amounts of time between creating new stuff, and digitizing and clouding old stuff so that it won't be lost.Then I'll start worrying about true off-site backups. because we want this stuff to survive, even if the planet is hit by a crust-cracker. Then I'll try to look at a means of allowing the data to survive the collapse of the galaxy, and then the heat death. Heh! One imagines that it is this sort of crazy desire (something I usually repress) that leads to recreation...
Let there be light!
If all things must fall, why build a miracle at all?See, there's a danger in being hermit-like.
If all things must pass, even a miracle won't last
(Alan Parsons Project - What Goes Up,Pyramids)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-27 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-29 11:45 pm (UTC)There are some wonderful pieces in it, and some of the plotting and character design is inspired. The power of "Mad Script" for instance is one I am going to have to use somewhere somewhen. Although most of the odd villains get better, or at least make more sense, and some you even get to feel sorry for, overall, I think it doesn't quite pull it off.
I'd recommend watching it, if only for some of the lovely ideas, and a handful of really beautiful bits, but possibly not buying it.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-27 07:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-29 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 01:30 am (UTC)