#these are all from the wayback machine :)

[predoom]

[polari]

A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe … those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born? It’s found truth in its maturity, which if a virtue in man ought to be no less so for the things men create.

— BLACK SAILS

Legend says the diver drowned retrieving the pearl.

The Pearl of Allah in Pearls: A Natural History (2001) / A woman models the Pearl of Lao Tzu in 1964.

Currently working on a diary full of lies. I want my loved ones to read it after I die and be like “wait what”

— @/SLUTFORTRAILMIX, Twitter

In the dry hills of Union City, in the San Francisco Bay area of California, I meet Cobb’s daughter Ruth Cobb Hill. [...] Her father, she says, was born in 1903 on Cuyo, an island in the western Philippines. His father was an American mining engineer, and Cobb grew up affluent, and with a penchant for adventure. As he travelled from island to island, he wrote romantic stories about the people he encountered. “The story­telling part of him was always, always there,” she tells me. “He wanted to be a writer.”

Cobb studied his pearl, sketched it from different angles, and finally saw the turbaned face [of the Prophet Mohammed]. He called it the Pearl of Allah in deference to the Palawan chief, who was Muslim, and then – with childlike indifference for the facts – he put words into the chief’s mouth, in the pages of Natural History.

In 1939, Cobb took the pearl to New York, exhibiting it at Ripley’s Believe It or Not on Broadway. Upon seeing the pearl, Cobb said, an elderly Chinese gentleman “of highest culture and significant wealth” named Mr Lee “burst into an hysteria of trembling and weeping”. This was not the Pearl of Allah, he insisted, this was the long-lost Pearl of Lao Tzu.

The San Francisco Chronicle article on Wilbur Cobb and his pearl dated April 6, 1967.

BLANCHE: I don't want realism. I want magic! [Mitch laughs] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it—Don't turn the light on!

— TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, A Streetcar Named Desire

When I began looking into the Pearl of Lao Tzu, I heard about Laura Lintner-Horn, a woman who knew more than anyone else about [Victor] Barbish’s 25-year ownership. I meet Lintner-Horn in Florida and she tells me how she lived with Barbish’s family, on and off, for 50 years – from when she was a little girl until she met her third husband. She has held the Pearl of Lao Tzu in her hands, and thought Barbish was here to fulfil its ancient message of peace. Indeed, she would have done anything for the man she believed to be her father. “Everybody ends up defending the pearl until they lose,” she says. “And they lose big.”

Barbish made Lintner-Horn sleep in the jewellery shop, to protect the merchandise. When he began telling her that jewellery was missing from the safe, and accusing her of negligence, Lintner-Horn thought she was losing her mind. She staked out the shop from a nearby restaurant, and saw Barbish entering the premises after hours.

But what was his pearl really worth? In a way, the pearl was worth only what someone would pay for it.

Well I've been betrayed before No more, no more I must insist I must insist Shatter what you will not carry Smash what you won’t bear Oh daddy, I broke in a million pieces That makes you a millionaire

— THAO & THE GET DOWN STAY DOWN, “Millionaire”

Lintner-Horn holds the pearl. / Laura Lintner-Horn and the Pearl of Lao Tzu in Victor Barbish’s Colorado Springs home in 2004.

[To] his dying breath, Victor Barbish had seen himself as the real victim, a “passionate romanticist” who had placed too much trust in imperfect souls. “I almost was a billionaire,” he lamented in his will, “but due to dishonest law firms, banks and brokers, I got swindled out of my wealth.” Still, he took solace from the fact that his legacy was secure. [...] Beneath a signature that does not appear to be his own, Barbish added an apt motto for his life: “This is who I am and wish to be.”

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

— ANAÏS NIN, Incest: From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932–1934)

“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.”

— HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick; or The Whale

For decades, the pearl case has dragged on in court, as litigants have tried to force a sale and get their money back. The original players are passing away (only Hoffman remains) and old animosities are re-enacted by latecomers, like a famous show revived by understudies.

Then I dreamed such a good dream: I dreamed this: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?

— CLARICE LISPECTOR, A Breath of Life (trans. Johnny Lorenz)

A pearl weighing 34kg found by another fisherman from Palawan, in 2016.

“You’ve never seen the pearl,” he says. “You’ve never seen the growth lines. You don’t know anything about the pearl. [...] A lot of this garbage you’re spewing out of your mouth, you would let it go, because you’d feel that intrinsic value just holding the pearl.”

When I ask why he keeps working the case, he says he has to know how the story ends.

I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence.

— VALZHYNA MORT for the Poetry Society Annual Lecture, “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”

Hoffman owns a one-third stake in the pearl and he has always seen himself as its rightful guardian, the only person who could successfully market it. Cobb, he once told a reporter, “saw me in a dream with the three sages, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu, who said I would be the next caretaker of the pearl”.

The Pearl for Peace Foundation’s mission statement ended with what can be read as a blessing or a curse: “Let the Legend and the Legacy live on from generation to generation …”

MICHAEL LAPOINTE, “The world's largest pearl”

[california-112]

I'm going for the S1 DVD-ROM game...

This is so 90s. I don't think I've smiled so much all week.

NOOO

Fellas there's something missing here... :(

I can't get the game to work at the moment, but I shall leave you with more screenshots.

I'm not going to give up. I can't give up. Not as long as the truth game is out there.

[macinroni]

more m&m's graphics and stuff, posting on my main this time instead because it's fun + a swf i downloaded + turned into a gif! f2u!

[youwillfindilluminating]

I get why critical role wanted to delete all the content that had brian w foster in it but at the same time the digital archivist in me is like... you can’t...just DO that...?

[geometryyaoi]

After committing a dangerous and disrespectful crime, Peppy is out on bail and ready to come to your house.

[mishmash-webster]

FINALLY BREACHED THE 400 PAGE MARK ON ARCHIVING THE W2H DEV BLOG LETS GOOOOOOOO

[peaceful7ea]

Its official, the playtfr.com link now redirects to the Splash Damage website, which has had all Reactivate content scrubbed. She's *dead* dead, folks.

[aromanticgarbage]

"pink omega", or that one time in 2015 when joji almost gave up on his non pink guy affiliated music.

[kateis-cakeis]

Where is Merlin: Secrets and Magic Ep0 Welcome to Camelot (50 mins) ???

Because the discs have everything but Ep0, and all the links on earth that I could find are broken, or are only some of the episode, or are long gone/deleted, and so on...

I just want to complete my own personal archive ;.;

Does anyone anywhere have it somewhere?

[ardate]

I just learned Skyblog, massive french blogging platform from Back In The Day, is closing down today at midnight.

It sure is the end of an era, a very important one for me as it was one of my first experiences online, for fandom and personal stuff...

A chapter is ending and it's definitely more bitter than sweet, though it comes to nobody’s surprise. Can't just keep all this up for old time's sake.

[concorp]

took a peek around qsmp.global. only interesting/hidden thing ive found so far:

otherwise just seems to be the image on the landing page

[narrie]

[sexiestpodcastcharacter]

well you see. that is what the read more function is for

Read mores are for cowards.

Joking aside, if someone is going to need to click through anyways I'd rather they be able to click through to a separate post. I know this sounds so silly to say on social media, but I don't like how ephemeral the internet is. I'm not planning on deleting/deactivating this blog, but one of the features I like about Tumblr is that even when someone leaves, their post lives on as long as someone has a copy on their own blog. And read more's fail to do that.

Yes, if I deactivated or changed my handle, it would also break the links to propaganda posts. My argument is based mostly in my own personal feelings and not actual logic, which is why I say:

Read mores are for cowards.

[starpaths-writing]

Looking at skgy on twt and there's this up-and-coming skgy author (i call them that bc i see a lot of ppl hype up their writing + they have a low number of skgy fics published to date but they seem to have plans to write more) who got a reply on one of their twts recommending xiajin's gold fever... AND THE AUTHOR SEEMED LIKE THEY HAD NEVER READ THAT FIC BEFORE. WE ARE LOSING THE ANCIENT TEXTS IN THIS SHIP FANDOM OR WHATEVER THAT PHRASE IS

Do people not go through a ship's tag on ao3? Do people only start following from the date they get into a ship and ignore all the history past page 1? Am i weird for spending weeks on months going through the entire skgy ao3 tag when i first got into the ship over a year ago? Do we really have that much skgy content now that ppl feel no need to go digging for more (and when i first got into the ship in late 2023, there was already quite a decent amount)?

I'm probably not giving enough grace bc everyone has that period where they're new to a ship so perhaps they haven't really started digging yet and xiajin hasn't posted in a while, but that really shocked me. But another part of it is that lately i feel like i've seen more and more skgy fans on twt bemoan not having content and i'm like if you (general) haven't read gold fever for instance... what else haven't you read? There's a lot of good stuff in the skgy ao3 tag if you dig (iirc, i think i really enjoyed works from the 2021-early 2023 period), and we can hype those works up in the meantime (although tbf the skgy ao3 tag is p active. I have been in ship fandoms before with FAR less constant activity). Or maybe it's just the minority being vocal and the majority of fans do pore over the tag and older content silently. But idk it just makes me sad to see ppl pretend like we have to keep building from the ground up when ppl in the past have already laid bricks...

(On that note, I feel obligated to give a skgy fic recommendation... i'd like to offer up you know you should —. Story-wise, it's a non-idol AU where nurse dk meets the absent son of one of his patients and hates him immediately, but despite never seeming to see eye to eye, time brings them closer. It was a fic i read early on when i was first getting into this ship and to this day i still consider it the best fic in the skgy tag. I haven't read it in a long while tbh, but from what i remember the story was good, it characterized the two and the messy skgy dynamic very well, the slow burn was enjoyable, and the author writes emotions well (balances humor and serious throughout, the characters' feelings or emotion/vibe of the scene are visceral). Lawd i just skimmed it again so i could better comment on it and it's too good. I remember back then i also appreciated how it included switch gyky/skgy (even if in-story the preference is skgy) bc at the time i was wading through the tag, a lot of fics would either just do skgy or gyky exclusively - which is fine! But skgy switch for sure imo, that is simply just their dynamic.

Anyway... complete topic change but Skgy just feels too hard for me to write these days, i feel like i no longer have a good grasp of their characters. Maybe i need to just FINISH things, actually turn my outlines into finished stories, and it'll come back to me but will it? Maybe i need a break from svt twt fr and try to remember what excited me abt this ship in the very beginning to fire me up again... i do really like some of my wips but i feel like i won't live up to what 2023/early 2024 me was cooking)

[nexo-nex]

thinking about #that band again it makes me soooo mad cause the one person that posted the album's cd pictures on discogs didnt even bother to scan them, they just took some pictures w their phone and didnt even crop the fckin background😞😞