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May. 14th, 2025 10:43 pmi had a thought this evening in the car while driving to the grandparents about the subtleties of building things that are resilient ... the first instinct is building things as strong as in unbreakable or not durable, or not-fragile, right. flexible maybe.
but looking at the trees near the highway and how fiendishly resilient nature is - one of its powers is the ability to grow back easily. a forest actually needing a forest fire to grow back. a human body being incredibly good at healing wounds with scars (that's basically growing new tissues until it knows when to quit).
and that's something... rare to find in the online or creative circles? once a link breaks (as a smaller example) or a site goes down it breaks. so many indieweb discussions thoughtfully point that out.
one of my projects that feels more resilient than others is that giant zip art dump (of all art from 2011 to 2020 with a small bit of context). if i die or my site goes down, said art will still exist across.... 700+ computers. there is honestly a good chance that that one zipped file will outlast every other piece i do, save for maybe some physical books and doujinshi, by sheer breadth of machines, since the types of people that download zipped dumps have a non-zero interest in archiving things well. (okay that's wild to think about. the last time i'm thought about on this tiny pale blue dot of a planet, via that file.)
i would even argue that a book - while incredibly more durable than most digital files - is still only a single copy. a file copied across hundreds of machines feels like the type of "growing back" like i mentioned above where a single person could copy it at will, say, re-uploading to an artist's library in the future.
i think somebody somewhere said physical preservation is the art of keeping things in one place/stable, and digital preservation is the art of moving things (from computer to computer as old technology depreciates). what if we leaned into that.
moving as an act of growing back after destruction.
(but then how to keep context from flaking off imperfectly or being fragmented.... much to consider.)
but looking at the trees near the highway and how fiendishly resilient nature is - one of its powers is the ability to grow back easily. a forest actually needing a forest fire to grow back. a human body being incredibly good at healing wounds with scars (that's basically growing new tissues until it knows when to quit).
and that's something... rare to find in the online or creative circles? once a link breaks (as a smaller example) or a site goes down it breaks. so many indieweb discussions thoughtfully point that out.
one of my projects that feels more resilient than others is that giant zip art dump (of all art from 2011 to 2020 with a small bit of context). if i die or my site goes down, said art will still exist across.... 700+ computers. there is honestly a good chance that that one zipped file will outlast every other piece i do, save for maybe some physical books and doujinshi, by sheer breadth of machines, since the types of people that download zipped dumps have a non-zero interest in archiving things well. (okay that's wild to think about. the last time i'm thought about on this tiny pale blue dot of a planet, via that file.)
i would even argue that a book - while incredibly more durable than most digital files - is still only a single copy. a file copied across hundreds of machines feels like the type of "growing back" like i mentioned above where a single person could copy it at will, say, re-uploading to an artist's library in the future.
i think somebody somewhere said physical preservation is the art of keeping things in one place/stable, and digital preservation is the art of moving things (from computer to computer as old technology depreciates). what if we leaned into that.
moving as an act of growing back after destruction.
(but then how to keep context from flaking off imperfectly or being fragmented.... much to consider.)
