Etcetera #49: Floppies, Curators, Puppets
Etcetera #49: Floppies, Curators, Puppets
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We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business
Tom Persky sells, transfers and recycles floppy disks. He's the only one left in the game. His company currently has in its possession around half a million 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch and 8-inch disks, along with other rarer formats.
His typical customers vary: from individuals looking to retrieve important files from old disks through to enterprise businesses that invested in the format many (many!) years ago and are still locked in to some degree.
This is a nice interview, with some lovely thoughts around the edges that recall a very different time:
To me, the floppy disk is a highly refined, technical, stable, not very hackable, way to get relatively small amounts of data where you want it. I grew up in the days of the Sneakernet and at the time, the floppy disk was how we moved information around. It’s a really remarkable thing. There’s a beauty and elegance to them. I can see how complicated they are, and what an elegant solution they were for their time. I’m not a watch collector, but I have friends who are. The beauty of a finely made watch is something to behold. Even though it might be less reliable than a $19 clock, it is a work of art. Just consider the human effort that went into its making. The same can be said about the floppy disk.
See also: Many years ago I floated an idea for a project based around media obsolescence: the corporate wars, inventions and technologies that resulted in formats, filetypes and media types falling out of use. Unfortunately I was far from the only person with this idea, and several books were eventually written about it. Here's an old Ars Technica piece on popular media obsolescence which covered similar ground to something I was working up at the time.
Before YouTube’s Algorithm, There Were ‘Coolhunters’
These days you have to rely on a faceless recommendation engine to gradually direct you from Blippi videos through to alt-right propaganda. Back in my day YouTube employed someone to do that in a wholly manual fashion. This is a nice early history of YouTube, taking in issues of curation, moderation and automation around the era of its acquisition by Google.
See also: In a recent issue we looked at what it's like to be a YouTuber and the effort required to keep the algo-lords happy.
See also: OK, fine, but what keeps audiences happy once you've acquired one? Here's how influencers become brainwashed by their audiences. Before reading this, I had no idea who Nikocado was; his tale makes me feel immeasurably sad.
‘People might cry’: welcome to the hilariously creepy world of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared — www.theguardian.com
An unfortunate consequence of our head of state dying was that the first televised episode of DHMIS was postponed. I'd always assumed that the various broadcasters and media-tech giants had courted the team in an attempt to take the show away from YouTube; this article confirms all that, and entertainingly describes some of the mis-steps along the way. Now let's all agree to never be creative again.
Jew Or Nazi? Ted Kessler’s Encounters With Mark E. Smith — thequietus.com
It is to my detriment that I will happily read pretty much any piece like this about MES. Luckily, this is a good one.
For a few minutes, he reviewed the contemporary music scene, paying particular attention to grunge. Nirvana had tried to get on the Fall’s bus, he explained, but he’d kicked them off. ‘I have a rule about not mixing with people from Seattle.’ He hated that city. ‘It’s like Moss Side on a bad night.’
He blamed the English for Nirvana’s success. ‘The British record industry closes down on 10 December and comes back at the end of January. If there’s something wrong with the spirit of rock, it’s that.’
He eyed his own group, chomping on sandwiches and cracking open cans around the local news broadcast. ‘Can I go now?’ he asked us. ‘Or should I get the band to beat you up?’
Tom Cruise's Late Style — lareviewofbooks.org
A fascinating examination of Tom Cruise's latter work:
Other critics have noticed the hollowness at the heart of the Cruise persona and have recognized that it’s been with him for his entire career, but it’s really only with his late style that the void at the heart of Cruise has leached into the films themselves. There is a suspect and disquieting politics behind this shift — though of course the current Cruise would never comment openly on politics. From at least Jack Reacher onwards, if not before, Cruise’s action films have had a reactionary bent: the world is chaotic, institutions are corrupt and failing, and only one man is capable of redeeming humanity from this looming catastrophe. The opaque, right-wing political resonances vary film by film, but — as is always the case — behind the guise of entertainment lurks something far from innocuous.
Etc.
An Oral History of 'Homer's Barbershop Quartet'.
All about Doric, the Scots dialect reportedly spoken by the Queen.
No, carpe diem does not mean 'seize the day'.
"The collective noun for a group of historians is an 'argumentation,' and for good reason." On revisionist history.
Alex G is back and is doing the interview circuit: NYT, Pitchfork, Loud and Quiet. I've managed to listen to his forthcoming album and I love it. Maybe his best since Beach Music.
I've linked to this series a few times; this one is particularly good. On Crazy Town's stupid 2001 hit 'Butterfly'.
An eye-opening piece on pronouns: “I go to work. I’m wearing a miniskirt. Everyone asks me for my pronouns. To me, what that means is ‘I see that you’re a man. And I see that you’re dressed in a woman’s costume. And I would like to know whether or not you want me to participate in the fantasy you’re having.’ ”
The dreaded Tweets
In rotation
🎮 I've started playing Dead Cells again. It's a combination of roguelike and metroidvania that's somehow still getting meaningful, free updates several years after its release. I'm not really sure why I'm so bad at it, given my experience and relative expertise in similar games, but I am awful—I hear stories of people getting to the 'end' in their first few runs, but I'm up to run 66 and haven't come close. It's available on pretty much every platform, including mobile. Highly recommended.
Outro
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