The Ceramic Archivists
nualacreed.com
nualacreed.com
I just came from a funeral. We all leave digital footprints, some more than others and some more intentionally than others. But it is still so transient relative to the longevity of the human race.
We have things like clock of the long now or whatever, but we really don’t have much that will stand as physical documentation of individuals. And the Terracotta Army is a really interesting analog to something like everyone having their own homepage memorialized forever.
What will have a longer lifespan: the archive.org data set or the Terracotta Army?
It is good to have heroes, exemplars and role-models to offer inspiration.
Especially in difficult times it is good to be reminded of the huge differences individuals acting selflessly can make, both directly and to other individual lives and by inspiring others and even creating movements.
It is important we do not forget the past and those who have passed.
The future is not always so different from the past.
Given $X, maybe I'd be better off scraping an ephemeral site into archive.org than trying to pre-pay for hosting. Getting into search indexes is the hard part either way, right? At least with IA for perma-hosting there's both economies of scale and a human hand protecting against the failures that take down small sites (TLS certs expiring, accounts deleted, etc.)
an archive browser would be like traversing a 4D web, time and space. I’m down if other people think that’s cool