Ed is the standard text editor.

i can't go to hell - i'm all out of vacation days. i watch space rocks and yell at computers for my day job. probably too old for any of this
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i think i might be burned out on internet social. it's hard to keep doing it. it's hard to even maintain the amount of attention i'm already giving it
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i am the cause of most of my own problems
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furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed
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birdsona: ?????
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π Ontario, Canada
congratulations ur birdie now
i dont make the rules
bonks my horns against your horns/antlers/ossicones with a little clatter
does a lil puffy snort while our skulls are pressed together
for everyone else:
and you should always offer us the cow brushy when you see us
you're pretty good perches, you're alright
the term itself is fascinating. there is nothing natural or organic about a hyperlink, i've never seen anyone call a working link alive, and yet a broken link is dead and links becoming broken over time is rot. the breaking of a link can, depending on the context, be frustrating, tragic, amusing; this it has in common with the more conventional kind of death. but we recognize that to live is to one day die, and there may be no justice in when or how but no justice can be asked of if. we will not last forever; why should our work? decay exists as an extant form of life, as they say. that iconic post itself doesn't exist anymore, it seems; we keep it alive through active preservation, and if it outlasts all its authors it will be because so many people found it compelling. a former drama youtuber recently removed several of his toxic edgelord videos, and of course they're not gone (and the links themselves may still work, i don't care enough to check) but it's good that he can do at least that much to clean up the cultural mess he helped make. maybe the fact that links can rot is a good thing, actually. may the worst of all our links rot before we do.
but of course, there's a spectrum, and just because the median tumblr post or youtube video deserves ephemerality doesn't mean there's nothing to be said for permanence. if we really could recover dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber, that could be very neat as long as we didn't do anything unwise afterwards. there's always nonprofits volunteering to be the metaphorical amber, but it takes a lot of money to remember everything for all of time, and they have an unfortunate tendency to also use that money to pick losing fights with big industries and get into Web 3.0, plus you only need them after the link has already rotted, so the simplest solution would be for links to just always keep working. the issue with that is that internet domains are like real estate in that you can only ever rent, and if you don't pay then someone else will so goodbye. i've had several domains lapse and immediately be squatted, especially later in grad school when $20 was a silly amount of money to waste to preserve the domain for a side project i'd long since given up on. links rot because domains expire, and one of the reasons domains expire is that someone else will pay for them if you won't, therefore, if you want to get rid of link rot, you absolutely have to get rid of capitalism.
computers really are a land of contrasts, huh.
I just kinda want to tack on that the notion that absolutely everything must be preserved forever is a very recent one - even the notion that we might have the capability to do this is extremely modern, likely post-2000 at least?
(I have not attempted to quantify this and am working purely off vibes, but I would argue that the rise of Facebook as early, large, centralized social media likely marks the start of a relevant era)
Prior to that, the idea that everything you've ever written and every thought would be preserved ad infinitum would have been preposterous.
Sometimes some things of value are lost and we should make efforts to preserve them (I personally largely think this is true of cultural media/artifacts like music, television, games, literature, since they are widely experienced and play a certain role in our experience of shared media culture)
But here's the thing: I think more things should rot unless they're actively maintained
I will be the first to admit that there is a lot of wiggle room on this, and the threshold for "is it worth it for a person to actively maintain this" is going to be all over the place within different domains and types of thing and I am not even going to try to enumerate them.
But even going beyond media, we're steeped in antiquated laws that mostly everyone has forgotten about, harmful systems that persist simply because "that's how it's always been done" - a frequent problem we keep running into is that bad people who want to pass a bad bill only have to win once, while everyone who opposes has to win against the same thing under a different name over and over and over, and I wonder if we wouldn't benefit for some sort of built-in rot in a much more broad sense, in much the same way that biological cells more or less universally have something kind of like it in apoptosis.
It's not a perfect metaphor, I know, but I'm just kind of thinking out loud, not writing a treatise on cultural apoptosis.