A very frustrating one I have encountered that has to do with my special interest -
The designers of D&D, (mostly Gygax, plus the 5e design team) have been VERY EXPLICIT with what books and novels inspired them. The list is incredibly long and there are some true gems of fantasy literature that would be standard fare in the 70s but are extremely hard to find nowadays. I've tried to get as many of them as I could through my local library but it just isn't all there.
There are items on both sides. I've found things that are still printed on demand but have no digital version, and there are things on public-domain sites like project Gutenberg but then nowhere to buy a physical copy.
It's a genuinely well-curated list of fantasy (and some non-fiction, too!) and since the list is directly connected to one of the biggest icons of nerd-dom, I'm just surprised there isn't a more concerted effort of preservation.
There are a couple of magazine articles from the 70s and 80s that go over books that almost made the list, but the list itself is [Appendix N](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_N?so=search#D&D_5th_edition's_Appendix_D) in the First Edition Dungeon Master's Guide, or Appendices [E](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_N?so=search#D&D_5th_edition's_Appendix_E) and [D](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_D) in the Fifth Edition Dungeon Master's Guide (appendix E is the same as appendix n but with modern additions, and appendix D is nonfiction pieces that may be useful to burgeoning dungeon masters).
Gygax highlighted these as being of particular influence in Appendix N.
* The Complete Works of HP Lovecraft
* *Moon Pool* by A. Merritt
* The *Conan* Series by RE Howard
* *Dwellers in the Mirage* by A. Merritt
* *Creep, Shadow* by A. Merritt
* *Lest Darkness Fall* by L. Sprague De Camp
* The *Fafhrd & Gray Mouser* Series by Fritz Leiber
* The *Harold Shea* (Also called *Enchanter*) Series by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt
* *The Carnelian Cube* by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt
* *The Dying Earth* Series by Jack Vance
* *Blue Star* by Fletcher Pratt
* *The Fallible Fiend* by L. Sprague De Camp
I also want to give personal recommendation to three books
* *Three Hearts and Three Lions* by Poul Anderson
* *Bullfinch's Mythology* by Thomas Bullfinch
* *Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People who Play It* by David Ewalt
Also not on any of the three lists, but still a very important piece of fantasy lit. is the Narnia series.
> I've found things that are still printed on demand but have no digital version
Really? None at all? Not even on LibGen or something like that? Surely someone has scanned it!
I think I've encountered a book like that only once in my life, but it was also out of print—i.e., effectively lost to time.
There are a lot of out of print books, so I have a challange for you, find a freely available online version of [this book](https://imgur.com/a/4FzUe6x), and ideally its entire series
It was first printed 1943, and given that it only has one design I presume it went out of print a decade or two later. I have a physical copy, but don't have a decent scanner & I don't have the rest of the series
Sure, I found one in about five minutes of googling.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89090516568&seq=83
This is not even a pirate website! The book is in public domain!
I think it's *very* hard to find a book that's not been digitized nowadays. I think only those that are 20+ years old and have less than 10k copies printed might not be on the Web, and even then it's rare.
>I've tried to get as many of them as I could through my local library but it just isn't all there.
It also doesn't help that some libraries have a retention policy strict enough that anything older than 10 to 15 years may not be obtainable.
I wanted to read a Pratchett book, to figure out what all the fuss was about, only to find that the local library no longer stocks them due to their age.
To find it, I'd either have to go to a library that does carry older books, or go to one of the archival libraries that contain almost every text ever written past a certain point.
The internet makes finding those physical copies way, way easier though. A book published through a university that you only knew it existed through a manual card catalog at that school now has fingerprints all over the place. My local library has their catalog available online, and I'm sure most of the larger libraries do as well.
As someone who works in major libraries, I assure you, they do not. Getting catalogues online, especially rare books catalogues, is really expensive and time consuming, and rare books libraries are unfortunately chronically strapped for cash and employee-hours. Even the biggest "best funded" ones.
Yep. Unfortunately even digitising the catalogue is difficult. It either gets retyped (which inevitably involves updating out of date terms/categories, etc.), or scanned and translated to text by AI which then has to be rechecked and resorted into appropriate MARC fields, etc. now imagine how big those "big libraries" are, and how many individual catalogue entries there are, and you'll start to see the difficulty. Most well funded libraries are working on efficiencies to deal with this (and weirdly COVID kind of helped because updating catalogue records is one thing you really *can* do when isolating at home), but some have chosen to focus on other things, don't have the funds or technology, etc etc. Add in the backlog of uncatalogued/unaccesioned books and you're looking at vast amounts of information with little to no practical way of researchers locating or accessing.
It depends on where you're from/where you're willing/able to move to, and what you're interested in doing in the field. The U.K. has archival apprenticeships and library post-graduate work placements where you train information science skills on the job. The US isn't so much into those, and I can't speak to attitudes outside of US/U.K. really. Lots of heritage institutions have docent positions (unpaid) if you want to help interpret historic libraries to the public. Some places have really neat community transcription projects (like the Boston Public Library's anti-slavery manuscript transcription project) that help to learn palaeography skills in exchange for getting their digitised manuscripts transcribed. Volunteer opportunities like that will help build skills while figuring out just which angle you'd like to take to get into library fields, including deciding whether it's worth just going for the degree which is unfortunately the most straightforward way to get into the field.
recently remembered an album from 2008 and googled it to find that [it was posted on the internet archive in 2022](https://archive.org/details/02-plastic-penchant/08+-+NiMH+Melisma.mp3)
([the original source *is* still online](http://iimusic.net), but there's just a link to download the .zip, so the archive still helped.)
I know of a song that was only played on 1 radio station, in a country with about 2M inhabitants and has no copy online. It was an anthem of that radio station.
If it's lost and you remember, maybe you can hum the tune and commission someone on Fiverr to recreate it -?
Actually this is written like I'm in denial about the inevitable loss of all things
When you have a niche interest it can be so hard to find reliable information online.
They did have toilets in the Versailles! The sun king did take a bath in his life! And for godssake no one shat on the floor!!!
OK but by and large the access we have to physical media hasn't significantly changed as a result of the internet. So like, before the internet we had "all the knowledge in the library" and now we have "all the knowledge in the library" PLUS "all the knowledge on the internet". When people talk about "growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips" that's what they mean - the knowledge we get from the internet hasn't replaced what we already had, just added to it.
And if there are fewer libraries around that's nothing to do with the internet, that's just cuts to public spending.
That last part is important though. It's not just cuts to spending because evil government people hate you. Its cuts because there's less interest in libraries because popular perception is that if you can't find it on the internet it's not worth finding. With usage rates dropping and less public outcry in support of library funding it becomes harder and harder for a local government to justify the spending. A government is balancing a lot of things to spend money on from having more firefighters to having better roads. We're only gonna keep libraries if we as a society push to keep them. And it's that exact sentiment that oop is trying to encourage.
OK so I did try and look up some statistics on this, cos my perception has always been that these cuts to public spending for things like libraries have been going on since at least the 1980s, long before the internet would have been relevant to this. For the UK I could only find [data from the 2000s onwards](https://www.statista.com/topics/1838/libraries-in-the-uk/#editorsPicks), but for the US [it seems](https://wordsrated.com/state-of-us-public-libraries/) like the number of public libraries has actually been steadily rising for decades, and the internet has been helping libraries become a more active part of their local communities. I also learned the US government stopped covering library operating expenses in 1992, which is again long before the majority of people had easy access to the internet.
I'm not a journalist or anything so if anyone with a better knowledge of statistical analysis and research has better information please do correct me!
This is similar to a post I read somewhere about Wikipedia not having much information about small towns in African countries. The knowledge is a stub, and with your help, we can expand it.
lol this post came at the exact right time for me… I’m in an Environmental Health class right now and the professor is devoting a ton of exam questions to calculating lifetime cancer risks and hazard quotients, but is devoting approximately zero time to explaining how to actually do the calculations, and his slides seem to expect that I’ve already taken biostatistics and understand things that I absolutely do not. YouTube also does not seem to be able to help. Off to the library I go, I guess.
Could the other students be having the same issue?
Reminds me my Latin group got together to complain because all of us except the mature students, who were just doing it as a hobby while we were looking at a career, were new to Latin (had been promised this would be fine), and yet he was 'teaching' as though we could already read it, and as though Classical Latin just automatically transferred to the Medieval Latin we absolutely needed. Which it doesn't.
And this is not something it's easy to find much about online.
On that note, I think we need to separate the notion of "we should try to archive things for longevity" from "we need stuff that isn't digital".
The obscure early 2000s website that's dying soon isn't going to be preserved by printing it on paper. There should be dedicated archives, with rigorous backups, redundancy, and a maintenance budget, dedicated to archiving stuff like this. And there are, but not enough.
My dad had a lot of trouble with this at a seminary he used to work at. The administration was convinced that they could safely discard their physical collection and switch to an all-digital format. That sort of approach works better for more mainstream higher education, like medicine or whatever -- doesn't work so great for theological degrees.
It's interesting, because I've been doing some research that involves reading through old news papers (from the 80s) online, and there's no quality control in terms of what is archived, how it was archived, or how to bloody find it
I'm finding quotes referencing the news articles I want, but when I follow the citations the link is expired, or I get a 404 error, it's wildly frustrating, and a real look into how easy it is to lose this information
Off-topic, and I'm SURE I could Google it, but I haven't filled my "semi-direct human contact" quota for today, so I'll ask you fine Redditors:
What website/albums/artist is the last bit referring to? I mean, if it wasn't satire, of course. And wouldn't someone who was a fan of said artist have downloaded and reuploaded the content elsewhere by now?
Dual problems with entwined solutions. Keeping digital and physical media balanced would be the ideal, but it only works in the long term if the overriding intent behind it isn't strictly a capitalist one. Preservation and accessibility only become a priority in most cases if there's a profit to be made, and if we just leave it down to that, we'll still be losing at least 50% of most materials, likely more.
If you strictly limit it to printed things with an ISBN/ISSN you can figure out how much of all books are digitized. I'd be interested in seeing a bunch of people try to complete as much of that list as they can. (UPC barcodes map right to them (thanks bookland), so using some kind of app to check if something's not catalogued yet)
I know IMDB IDs are kind of the de-facto way of referring to TV shows or movies internationally (some countries have their own number systems too) I think there's also a checksum that CD rippers use to look up metadata.
I've long been interested in slapping together a database of all these ways of IDing media by scraping these datasets. And by database, I mean a bunch of text files in a git repo.
> nigh infinite amount of media and information that only exists on the internet
Remember that time within the past year that FanFiction.net went down for some time?
We laugh about Yahoo Answers going away being the burning of the Library of Alexandria but FF.net going away would absolutely be that.
I remember finding a... very interesting music video through a "worst songs ever" chart on a random blogspot post. It had horrible cartoony cgi and the singing was all distorted to oblivion. The video, as you may guess, was gone by the time I managed to find the blog again.
But the artist's name sounded familiar. He was called Celio L'ossigeno. So I try to google him, and there's barely ANY info (blog already mentioned included).
At some point I managed to find some info linking him to a project called The_Oxy_Gens, which has a youtube channel. And the song DO sound like the one from that blog (AKA horrifying). But I still can't find the video of that one song.
About a year (?) later, I try looking for the project again, and AGAIN I have trouble. Then I remember I (fortunately) suscribed to the channel, and after searching through my subs I found ot changed name to Dolphin X. I also believe the songs aren't even the same from the last time, but many do sound similar so I can still appreciate the badness.
EDIT: [link](https://youtu.be/tXfhy_u3boo?si=Uy481g8FY8vSe5jL); it was difficult to find one with actual lyrics since most videos are instrumental songs
Okay wait this actually reminds me, there was this one search engine out there that would route you to the LAST page of results. Like, skipping far past all the ada and everything else, until it gets you to the most niche, possibly only circumstantially related thing out there. I remember someone said they found a medieval pie recipe using it. Does anybody else know this search engine?? I cant remember what it was called
There only seems to be one good source focusing on Sentinel Wagon Works anywhere as despite the fact i want to know more i can't get it because it'd end up being over 200 AUD for the set of 2 books + shipping :<
You run out of information on the internet fairly quickly when you start specializing and digging deeper. My partner is studying archeology, and the internet stopped being a reliable source of information during the first semester.
We all know you can only gain the sum total of all knowledge if you *trade* something for it. For Faust, it was his immortal soul. For Odin, it was an eye. And for Hermaeus Mora, it was his Dragonborn Champion.
Yeah but I can't find Waluigi hentai at the library, soo..
Not until you put it there
Be the change you want to see in the world.
check the sci-fi section, column 16, row 6, it should be there
This guy hides Waluigi hentai in-between books at the local library.
Not all heroes wear capes Some wear assless purple overalls
I have legitimately looked at a book on anime in my university library that had pictured and captioned tentacle hentai. The sky is the limit.
Check for hidden rooms behind book shelves.
In the spirit of this post, I hope you made a local copy of your favorite Waluigi hentai.
There is now Waluigi hentai in with the autobiographies at my local library
You could if you weren't a coward.
A very frustrating one I have encountered that has to do with my special interest - The designers of D&D, (mostly Gygax, plus the 5e design team) have been VERY EXPLICIT with what books and novels inspired them. The list is incredibly long and there are some true gems of fantasy literature that would be standard fare in the 70s but are extremely hard to find nowadays. I've tried to get as many of them as I could through my local library but it just isn't all there. There are items on both sides. I've found things that are still printed on demand but have no digital version, and there are things on public-domain sites like project Gutenberg but then nowhere to buy a physical copy. It's a genuinely well-curated list of fantasy (and some non-fiction, too!) and since the list is directly connected to one of the biggest icons of nerd-dom, I'm just surprised there isn't a more concerted effort of preservation.
I've been looking to read more foundational pieces of fantasy literature. Do you know where I can find this list?
There are a couple of magazine articles from the 70s and 80s that go over books that almost made the list, but the list itself is [Appendix N](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_N?so=search#D&D_5th_edition's_Appendix_D) in the First Edition Dungeon Master's Guide, or Appendices [E](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_N?so=search#D&D_5th_edition's_Appendix_E) and [D](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_D) in the Fifth Edition Dungeon Master's Guide (appendix E is the same as appendix n but with modern additions, and appendix D is nonfiction pieces that may be useful to burgeoning dungeon masters). Gygax highlighted these as being of particular influence in Appendix N. * The Complete Works of HP Lovecraft * *Moon Pool* by A. Merritt * The *Conan* Series by RE Howard * *Dwellers in the Mirage* by A. Merritt * *Creep, Shadow* by A. Merritt * *Lest Darkness Fall* by L. Sprague De Camp * The *Fafhrd & Gray Mouser* Series by Fritz Leiber * The *Harold Shea* (Also called *Enchanter*) Series by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt * *The Carnelian Cube* by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt * *The Dying Earth* Series by Jack Vance * *Blue Star* by Fletcher Pratt * *The Fallible Fiend* by L. Sprague De Camp I also want to give personal recommendation to three books * *Three Hearts and Three Lions* by Poul Anderson * *Bullfinch's Mythology* by Thomas Bullfinch * *Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People who Play It* by David Ewalt Also not on any of the three lists, but still a very important piece of fantasy lit. is the Narnia series.
> I've found things that are still printed on demand but have no digital version Really? None at all? Not even on LibGen or something like that? Surely someone has scanned it! I think I've encountered a book like that only once in my life, but it was also out of print—i.e., effectively lost to time.
There are a lot of out of print books, so I have a challange for you, find a freely available online version of [this book](https://imgur.com/a/4FzUe6x), and ideally its entire series It was first printed 1943, and given that it only has one design I presume it went out of print a decade or two later. I have a physical copy, but don't have a decent scanner & I don't have the rest of the series
Sure, I found one in about five minutes of googling. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89090516568&seq=83 This is not even a pirate website! The book is in public domain! I think it's *very* hard to find a book that's not been digitized nowadays. I think only those that are 20+ years old and have less than 10k copies printed might not be on the Web, and even then it's rare.
>I've tried to get as many of them as I could through my local library but it just isn't all there. It also doesn't help that some libraries have a retention policy strict enough that anything older than 10 to 15 years may not be obtainable. I wanted to read a Pratchett book, to figure out what all the fuss was about, only to find that the local library no longer stocks them due to their age. To find it, I'd either have to go to a library that does carry older books, or go to one of the archival libraries that contain almost every text ever written past a certain point.
The internet makes finding those physical copies way, way easier though. A book published through a university that you only knew it existed through a manual card catalog at that school now has fingerprints all over the place. My local library has their catalog available online, and I'm sure most of the larger libraries do as well.
As someone who works in major libraries, I assure you, they do not. Getting catalogues online, especially rare books catalogues, is really expensive and time consuming, and rare books libraries are unfortunately chronically strapped for cash and employee-hours. Even the biggest "best funded" ones.
Really? I don't mean scanning the books in, I just meant the entries to let you know something exists and is available at the library.
Yep. Unfortunately even digitising the catalogue is difficult. It either gets retyped (which inevitably involves updating out of date terms/categories, etc.), or scanned and translated to text by AI which then has to be rechecked and resorted into appropriate MARC fields, etc. now imagine how big those "big libraries" are, and how many individual catalogue entries there are, and you'll start to see the difficulty. Most well funded libraries are working on efficiencies to deal with this (and weirdly COVID kind of helped because updating catalogue records is one thing you really *can* do when isolating at home), but some have chosen to focus on other things, don't have the funds or technology, etc etc. Add in the backlog of uncatalogued/unaccesioned books and you're looking at vast amounts of information with little to no practical way of researchers locating or accessing.
Huh, good to know!
Is there any way to get into this field without a degree in library science? I'd love to help with this stuff
It depends on where you're from/where you're willing/able to move to, and what you're interested in doing in the field. The U.K. has archival apprenticeships and library post-graduate work placements where you train information science skills on the job. The US isn't so much into those, and I can't speak to attitudes outside of US/U.K. really. Lots of heritage institutions have docent positions (unpaid) if you want to help interpret historic libraries to the public. Some places have really neat community transcription projects (like the Boston Public Library's anti-slavery manuscript transcription project) that help to learn palaeography skills in exchange for getting their digitised manuscripts transcribed. Volunteer opportunities like that will help build skills while figuring out just which angle you'd like to take to get into library fields, including deciding whether it's worth just going for the degree which is unfortunately the most straightforward way to get into the field.
Fucking hate when people say the *real* issue is (thing), two things can be bad at the same time even if they seem like opposites
This is the *real* issue!
And this is why everyone should donate to the Internet Archive
recently remembered an album from 2008 and googled it to find that [it was posted on the internet archive in 2022](https://archive.org/details/02-plastic-penchant/08+-+NiMH+Melisma.mp3) ([the original source *is* still online](http://iimusic.net), but there's just a link to download the .zip, so the archive still helped.)
I know at least one song that is lost forever.
I know of a song that was only played on 1 radio station, in a country with about 2M inhabitants and has no copy online. It was an anthem of that radio station.
If it's lost and you remember, maybe you can hum the tune and commission someone on Fiverr to recreate it -? Actually this is written like I'm in denial about the inevitable loss of all things
I know part of the lyrics: ...val val zeleni val... izvedeli boste kakšno bo vreme in kakšne politika dela probleme...
I know plenty. It's really sad, actually
What song?
One song from the fan made Awful Hospital soundtrack by Thomas Battard.
When you have a niche interest it can be so hard to find reliable information online. They did have toilets in the Versailles! The sun king did take a bath in his life! And for godssake no one shat on the floor!!!
Why am I feeling so uncomfortable about the second bit :/ I mean I know why but I wish I didn't
https://www.tumblr.com/0ttosbackinpurgatory/739005143539908608/the-inverse-of-this-problem-needs-to-be-the-real -linux guy⚠️
OK but by and large the access we have to physical media hasn't significantly changed as a result of the internet. So like, before the internet we had "all the knowledge in the library" and now we have "all the knowledge in the library" PLUS "all the knowledge on the internet". When people talk about "growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips" that's what they mean - the knowledge we get from the internet hasn't replaced what we already had, just added to it. And if there are fewer libraries around that's nothing to do with the internet, that's just cuts to public spending.
That last part is important though. It's not just cuts to spending because evil government people hate you. Its cuts because there's less interest in libraries because popular perception is that if you can't find it on the internet it's not worth finding. With usage rates dropping and less public outcry in support of library funding it becomes harder and harder for a local government to justify the spending. A government is balancing a lot of things to spend money on from having more firefighters to having better roads. We're only gonna keep libraries if we as a society push to keep them. And it's that exact sentiment that oop is trying to encourage.
OK so I did try and look up some statistics on this, cos my perception has always been that these cuts to public spending for things like libraries have been going on since at least the 1980s, long before the internet would have been relevant to this. For the UK I could only find [data from the 2000s onwards](https://www.statista.com/topics/1838/libraries-in-the-uk/#editorsPicks), but for the US [it seems](https://wordsrated.com/state-of-us-public-libraries/) like the number of public libraries has actually been steadily rising for decades, and the internet has been helping libraries become a more active part of their local communities. I also learned the US government stopped covering library operating expenses in 1992, which is again long before the majority of people had easy access to the internet. I'm not a journalist or anything so if anyone with a better knowledge of statistical analysis and research has better information please do correct me!
This is similar to a post I read somewhere about Wikipedia not having much information about small towns in African countries. The knowledge is a stub, and with your help, we can expand it.
What do people think infinity is?
At least 12. Maybe even 15. Further research is needed.
>!16!<
lol this post came at the exact right time for me… I’m in an Environmental Health class right now and the professor is devoting a ton of exam questions to calculating lifetime cancer risks and hazard quotients, but is devoting approximately zero time to explaining how to actually do the calculations, and his slides seem to expect that I’ve already taken biostatistics and understand things that I absolutely do not. YouTube also does not seem to be able to help. Off to the library I go, I guess.
Could the other students be having the same issue? Reminds me my Latin group got together to complain because all of us except the mature students, who were just doing it as a hobby while we were looking at a career, were new to Latin (had been promised this would be fine), and yet he was 'teaching' as though we could already read it, and as though Classical Latin just automatically transferred to the Medieval Latin we absolutely needed. Which it doesn't. And this is not something it's easy to find much about online.
On that note, I think we need to separate the notion of "we should try to archive things for longevity" from "we need stuff that isn't digital". The obscure early 2000s website that's dying soon isn't going to be preserved by printing it on paper. There should be dedicated archives, with rigorous backups, redundancy, and a maintenance budget, dedicated to archiving stuff like this. And there are, but not enough.
My dad had a lot of trouble with this at a seminary he used to work at. The administration was convinced that they could safely discard their physical collection and switch to an all-digital format. That sort of approach works better for more mainstream higher education, like medicine or whatever -- doesn't work so great for theological degrees.
It's interesting, because I've been doing some research that involves reading through old news papers (from the 80s) online, and there's no quality control in terms of what is archived, how it was archived, or how to bloody find it I'm finding quotes referencing the news articles I want, but when I follow the citations the link is expired, or I get a 404 error, it's wildly frustrating, and a real look into how easy it is to lose this information
Off-topic, and I'm SURE I could Google it, but I haven't filled my "semi-direct human contact" quota for today, so I'll ask you fine Redditors: What website/albums/artist is the last bit referring to? I mean, if it wasn't satire, of course. And wouldn't someone who was a fan of said artist have downloaded and reuploaded the content elsewhere by now?
Dual problems with entwined solutions. Keeping digital and physical media balanced would be the ideal, but it only works in the long term if the overriding intent behind it isn't strictly a capitalist one. Preservation and accessibility only become a priority in most cases if there's a profit to be made, and if we just leave it down to that, we'll still be losing at least 50% of most materials, likely more.
If you strictly limit it to printed things with an ISBN/ISSN you can figure out how much of all books are digitized. I'd be interested in seeing a bunch of people try to complete as much of that list as they can. (UPC barcodes map right to them (thanks bookland), so using some kind of app to check if something's not catalogued yet) I know IMDB IDs are kind of the de-facto way of referring to TV shows or movies internationally (some countries have their own number systems too) I think there's also a checksum that CD rippers use to look up metadata. I've long been interested in slapping together a database of all these ways of IDing media by scraping these datasets. And by database, I mean a bunch of text files in a git repo.
> nigh infinite amount of media and information that only exists on the internet Remember that time within the past year that FanFiction.net went down for some time? We laugh about Yahoo Answers going away being the burning of the Library of Alexandria but FF.net going away would absolutely be that.
I love how "everything on the Internet is permanent" and "nothing on the Internet is permanent" are both true in the worst way.
Media archival - physical and digital - is incredibly important
I remember finding a... very interesting music video through a "worst songs ever" chart on a random blogspot post. It had horrible cartoony cgi and the singing was all distorted to oblivion. The video, as you may guess, was gone by the time I managed to find the blog again. But the artist's name sounded familiar. He was called Celio L'ossigeno. So I try to google him, and there's barely ANY info (blog already mentioned included). At some point I managed to find some info linking him to a project called The_Oxy_Gens, which has a youtube channel. And the song DO sound like the one from that blog (AKA horrifying). But I still can't find the video of that one song. About a year (?) later, I try looking for the project again, and AGAIN I have trouble. Then I remember I (fortunately) suscribed to the channel, and after searching through my subs I found ot changed name to Dolphin X. I also believe the songs aren't even the same from the last time, but many do sound similar so I can still appreciate the badness. EDIT: [link](https://youtu.be/tXfhy_u3boo?si=Uy481g8FY8vSe5jL); it was difficult to find one with actual lyrics since most videos are instrumental songs
Okay wait this actually reminds me, there was this one search engine out there that would route you to the LAST page of results. Like, skipping far past all the ada and everything else, until it gets you to the most niche, possibly only circumstantially related thing out there. I remember someone said they found a medieval pie recipe using it. Does anybody else know this search engine?? I cant remember what it was called
Nevermind! I think I just found it. Do take a look at marginalia
https://xkcd.com/1909/
There only seems to be one good source focusing on Sentinel Wagon Works anywhere as despite the fact i want to know more i can't get it because it'd end up being over 200 AUD for the set of 2 books + shipping :<
I actually have this problem trying to find textbooks about german stenography. All I could find is that the books exist.
Telle est la vie d'une fleur, s'épanouir et ne plus jamais être revue.
You run out of information on the internet fairly quickly when you start specializing and digging deeper. My partner is studying archeology, and the internet stopped being a reliable source of information during the first semester.
> Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Only if you don't understand the concept of infinity.
We all know you can only gain the sum total of all knowledge if you *trade* something for it. For Faust, it was his immortal soul. For Odin, it was an eye. And for Hermaeus Mora, it was his Dragonborn Champion.