I'm joining MicroBlogVember (thanks for the heads-up @iro), partly because i noticed myself quipping more again on Twitter and thinking "cohost is for effortposts" instead of "for all posts". That's the trick of twitter, i.e. things have been nominally calm for a week or so in your personal bubble, so you stop thinking you're literally on a wannabe 4channer's website putting your good stuff out there.
anyway, the treat is i finally killed the mosquito that's been haunting my legs all week. i'd post a picture but it would count as guro, so
That's what we're calling Mastodon, baybee.
(I kid.)
Recent events in media industry have really taken the shine off the idea of streaming and subscription services being the kind of archival, library-in-your-home concept that was part of the early pitch, and I'm already regretting some years-old decisions to delete old torrents after finding them on Netflix following its launch here.
Not even the insistence on physical media, as helpful as that is, will help that much, at least not with games, anyway, with more and more titles essentially becoming a download code in a box.
Hence, piracy. The old freedom to have "backups" that mutated into a way to get stuff without paying to the last tool left for economically accessible preservation of stuff you care to engage with again.
None of these, of course, are a solution to the problem of media preservation absent a genuine archival effort from first- and third-parties that is ideally backed on a societal level by the state or community, but on the level of "what can i do as an individual consumer", that's probably the thing you can manage that doesn't put you too much out of your way (and as we know, the least effective form of preservation is the one that's too much of a hassle to do regularly).
As an aside, I am ironically relieved and thankful for microsoft's unpleasant habit of syncing absolutely every picture and screenshot i take to onedrive. i ignored it for a long time but it came in handy when i needed to search through old photos i had uploaded to Viber for documentary proof for some legal things. It's a messy solution but it works in a pinch.