#digital dark age

[whywoulditho]

i love you people who still use youtube mp3 converters to download music i love you people who still pirate movies i love you people who translate movies for free and share the encoded subtitle files online i love you people who still print their photos i love you people who still buy CDs and vinyls i love you people who keep DVD and blue-ray copies of their favorite shows i love you people who still collect VHS i love you people who keep their concert tickets i love you people who still use mp3 players i love you people who print and bind their favorite fanfiction (with permission from the author!!) i love you people who backup their data on hard disks i love you people who collect magazines and newspapers i love i love i love you people so much

[thoughtportal]

The silicon age is built on sand.

The things we love can disappear just like that.

Streaming changed everything. We pull from the cloud, not realising most of the content we buy is rented to us, not truly ours. Whether a Kindle book, or a film bought on iTunes; they can snatch it back in a heartbeat. Spotify's incompletion fucks with the canon, omitting beloved songs and albums based on licensing. Maybe a generation will grow up never having heard early Jay-Z, or Lana del Rey, deep cuts of Radiohead or the delights of Sapokanikan. Maybe their friends will never get into K-Pop. When George Lucas reworked Star Wars there was outrage; Disney makes stealth edits whenever it likes. People joke that future films and TV shows might just iterate - rush towards a deadline, patching ropey plot points and effects after the fact.

And cancelled artists don't have a chance. You had to burn a book, but a file's just gone. Maybe, like Amon Tobin, one errant sample gets your iconic track erased from the internet.

Because few people realise how delicate the cloud is. An outage freezes traffic, and one day might wipe out all those illicit remixes, all those emails, love notes. A million unprinted photos.

On a fragile internet, so much of our cultural wealth hangs in the balance.

All our beloved things. Tomorrow's dust.

[amethystsoda]

if tiktok actually sells to the US, it’s gonna get so regulated and censored 😒😒😒

I’m really not looking forward to scrambling if the app actually is getting taken down bc it’s where I’ve made all my cooking videos…

[reweber313]

Twitter's demise is much bigger than I think anyone is talking about. If the site stays online at all, which I doubt it will, what will likely happen is archival tweets will start silently disappearing. Not a big deal you say? What will historians do when they finally research the roots of the Arab spring? How about the #meToo posts? Election lies? Covid disinformation? You can archive your own tweets but from the perspective of history we don't know what we need to save till decades later. The death of Twitter will become a hole in history which is a ton more important for the future of society than some memes. A digital dark age is already happening.

[thisisworsethanitlookslike]

God I just saw a post talking about Twitter Archiving Efforts and how some Tweets are already not showing up

And the deep for of the Digital Dark Age just hit me fuck

[shellsnroses]

Comic for “The Ruin” a poem written by an unknown author in the 8th or 9th century

How wondrous, this wall stone,

Shattered by fate.

Castles are smashed,

The work of giants, crumbled.

Ruined are the roofs,

Tumbled the towers.

Broken the barred gates.

Frost in the plaster,

Ceilings a-gaping.

Torn away, fallen,

Eaten by age.

[catsauceeartofficial]

Continuation of my AVA!Human designs!

Ever since I saw @navy-leader's Victim design, I literally cannot imagine Victim any other way 🧎

Bonus:

I think its criminal I haven't seen any art of Blue with the Piglin kid. He'd babysit sometimes

[heartsyne]

[theterrornaut]

Random Skeksis doodles (also Feat. Random Maestro Skeksis)

[joelchaimholtzman]

This is a painting (top) I made a few years ago as a tribute to John William Waterhouse's work named ''The Magic Circle'' (bottom).

The mood, stortytelling and simplicity of the scene really caught my attention, and I wanted to take those elements and add more dynamicism to it when working on my interpretation.

I hope you like it!

Best,

JCH

[thoughtportal]

The companies that buy up sites like Bandcamp are interested in nothing except ensuring the executives’ pockets get lined appropriately. Growth is the only thing of interest. It’s the story of capitalism, but here, like with MySpace, it becomes a matter of cultural preservation {read}

In the meantime download your music libraries and the PDFs of articles you’ve written if you’re a writer. Make your own web stores to sell you art. Pay the people you believe in to write about music. Nobody will preserve the culture you care about for you. Nobody can make it better but us.

[teunip]

The Bellbird Firca

I was highly inspired by J.M. Lee's Song of the Dark Crystal, which I loved a lot. Kylan is the best boy :) I tried to make this nice and balanced, but not too symmetrical to keep the flow and shapes interesting.

[fiendishartist2]

my tma animation that i worked really hard on but wont post to youtube ^_^

[madcat-world]

Age of Pantheons: Dagon - Federica Costantini

[emilynart]

Ah. You’re all one.

[skatankata]

nice gelf ya got there