The policy of the archive as long as I've been there is that if an unhoused person is non-disruptively sleeping on the steps of the archive, especially because it looks like a church and faintly has the words "church" on it, they are left in peace.

https://twitter.com/p8stie/status/1762998177798529124

There was a long-time outside sleeper named Thomas Hooker who was on the corner across from the Archive for years and the way it was discovered he died was an employee brought extra food over to him the next morning after a yearly archive celebration.

sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nevius…

Watching people debate about AI-Company-vs-User. Here's some other things you might not know (we do this all day, it's our job).

https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1662999547138945030

We've had plenty of researchers, and even individuals come to grab materials at scale. Ideally, that's fine, after all, we're the Access people. But in this case, we were seeing 10,000+ requests a second blasting across dozens of AWS IPs. So we ended up blocking them.

Not that anyone was clamoring for my statement on this, but I'm riding twitter down until it effectively dies. I don't think people should stick around just because I'm here - remember that my strolling through most sites causes people to realize terrible times are coming. But don't worry - I was here at the beginning and I'll stick around until the end. Maybe I'll even unblock @jack so I can watch the flames the way they were meant to - reflected in his dewy eyes

Today was an interesting lesson.

First, you need to know I spend a lot of time cleaning up collections at the Archive. Moving stuff around, getting it easier to find, read, and so on. I've gone into some pretty deep piles and (I think) emerged with some cleaned-up spots.

But. There was one collection that I had hoped to really clean up that has been around forever. It's called Old Time Radio and it's a complete mess. It's just a big top-level pile of over 8000 items. And some of those items are actually dozens or hundreds of radio shows in one item.

This was because originally it was considered important to know how the tweet was being generated, especially with a rich client ecosystem (which Twitter killed, then brought back). Since this place is doomed, yes, save those pennies musk

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592178009410531330

Now, I do find it rich that Emerald Mine is going "nobody seems to remember why this is in the case" like, less than a week after he fired 75% of the staff, but what do I know, I never took math past high school

I'll phrase this carefully.

Atari, the company, is a piece of garbage and has been for some time. It shares zero DNA with the company Atari as it grew in our hearts for the youth of the 1970s and 1980s.

But ATARI 50, created by Digital Eclipse, is a masterwork. It is a shining example of engaging with your historical subject and making it relevant for the present day, both providing optional ease of use upgrades and ways to take it raw, and it was in its day, and switch effortlessly. It's also layers and layers and layers of reference.

I'm going to do all the tweets from this thread in Midjourney v4 instead of DALL-E. Mute this thread if that's annoying, watch the fun if it isn't.

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1548004212549636097

Detailed blueprints on how to construct a beagle

I am fully capable of handling the dozens (soon likely hundreds) of Drive-By Opinion Tourism related to my Facebook tweets yesterday, but I do have a couple simple requests for the gentle beings lining up at my complaint window to spit in my face: First, in your rush to speak for the nameless good and solid folks of Facebook who have been hurt by this layoff, try to avoid portraying Menlo Park as the dying seaside town where the young men and women have to enter the Zuckerberg Cannery and Fish Paste factory or starve.

The Jury is out on whether I should have even been allowed near this technology. But you know - I asked for a cyberpunk neon hamster cage with appropriate neon lighting and it did not disappoint.

I have a very special message to the 11,000 Facebook people being laid off: You absolutely deserve it. Facebook was, and is, one of the most profoundly evil companies in the world, certainly one of the most specifically evil because it frames itself as a simple social app. Facebook's targeted tracking has absolutely gotten people killed around the world, and Facebook has shown, time and time again, that human beings are grist to them, coal to be shoved into the advertiser and tracking furnace.

All my friends quit working at facebook years ago.

If you give the slightest whit of a care about 1980s-2000s computer and software history, your mind is about to be very blown. Some people worked very hard on this, and anonymous credit to them. So, set aside your week, this is going to be change everything for you. Think I'm hyping up? I'm going to do even worse. I'm not going to do anything but give you the URL.

discmaster.textfiles.com

Happy Exploring.

Stumbled.into one of those weird 100,000+ follower accounts that focuses on weird motivational crap (in this case, "reclaiming masculinity"). Not linking, but mentioning my favorite game: "time before pitch" The time where if you wade between the different tweets and follows and threads, before it's clear there's a pitch for your cash and support. For a seminar, for a subscription.

Always there.

Signal boosting the hell-bound

https://twitter.com/zerojay/status/1575634405603037185

I mean, clumping together a half-ass "well, I still think I'm right" after claiming he didn't is VERY gamedev PM, but at least he deserves to... well, he doesn't deserve anything but now you all see how toxic gamedev is.

Go to Hell, @zerojay: A Thread by a guy on painkillers I joined the games industry in 1995. In 1997 I ran, not walked away from it like a greased hot dog shout of a pressure cannon. I haven't glanced wistfully at job listings or opportunities since. Now why is that.

Ah, now that's some old-school character generation This tape actually isn't likely to be on this documentary - it's actually a compilation of a bunch of different pieces of footage and videotape in this collection. But I did enjoy the bars and text from the beginning!

Hello, I am making a general call out to the public to make a version of DOSBOX-X compile in Emscripten. Here is the Github for the project:

github.com/joncampbell123… The result of this project would be emulation of Windows 95/98 in the Browser, which would bring an entire remaining set of computer history back into the public sphere and research. If you want to take this project on, or chat, you can DM me to get on my discord, or... do it?

So, I may be wrong, but this tape called "Mardell 2 Songs 5/25/85" may be a tape of 30 year old Mardell Stickley (1955-2013) playing two songs on her violin! Certainly looks like her. If anyone knows her family, please tell her I've got 10 minutes of her playing violin.

I have thoughts on this, but I just woke up.

https://twitter.com/dubroy/status/1569262025943175168

OK, I woke up. Problem is, this is a blog entry, but I don't want to restart my blog on this, so we're getting a small twitter thread and I'm sure I'll elaborate some other time.

The old TEXTFILES.COM machine had two drives and crazy interlinks between them to make the two 1 terabyte drives seem like one 2 terabyte drive.

The new machine has 34 terabytes in one drive, and I just finished flattening the whole thing so it's easier to understand. Just mentioning because you will never see that from the outside, and as a thank you to the people who donated to ensure I had a nice huge beefy machine to run the site from. I'm now doing other quiet cleanups to the machine that will make it all run smoothly.

Someone was stupid enough to give me access to DALL-E, so I'm going to make a thread of me versus DALL-E. "Detailed blueprints on how to construct a beagle"

Oh, I'm very excited. The TEXTFILES.COM machine is now in the process of synchronizing mirrors I've wanted to mirror for in some cases over a decade. They'll be done soon! Example: Mirroring all of FTP.SCENE.ORG, the epicenter of the Demoscene (and related scenes). Not every last byte of The Scene has been preserved or saved, but an awful lot has.

SCENE.ORG.TEXTFILES.COM