BLACKOUT

I don't have a sleep schedule - I have periods of blackouts in between work sprints. Today's Day of Digital Archives happened for me after one of these blackouts, where I was up around midnight and looking to get a bunch of stuff online, and prepare the rest of it for being online. Online is where a lot of my stuff goes because the first and main priority is to share what I acquire, not sit it somewhere waiting for grant funding or hugs to make it better.

Here's part of 200 hours of Game Developers Conference footage I'm digitizing for their GDC Vault site - they're having me put everything that makes sense up, for free, for the world to see. These are conference recordings dating from 1996 up through to 2008, and there's a lot more besides this. Historically fascinating, one of the leading industries in the world has some of the brightest minds at this conference, not to mention introductions of major platforms like the Dreamcast, XBOX, Playstation (2 and 3), and so on. Most of this has been accomplished using this old thing:

..and this is just for the BetacamXP format tapes - I have HDCAM, MiniDV, VHS, and Audio tapes as well. All are being digitized, all are going up. A lot of work!

I blew a bunch of material up to the Archive Team collection at archive.org; mostly captures of websites that decided to go down that had been around a long time, like the social gaming site Akoha.com or the art project Word Count Journal and even some pieces of the big boys, like Google's now defunct Google Friends Newsletter they decided to deep-six this year. I'm now doing some checks on the Archiveteam Friendster Snapshot, where we put millions of Friendster accounts up for later study by academics and historians. We didn't get all of it, not by a long shot, but we definitely got a good sample for people to use.

A few years back, I did a documentary on text adventures called GET LAMP, and over time have been uploading raw footage sets from that movie into this collection. Well, among the things I shot was a ton of footage inside Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and as we speak, 11 gigabytes of .m2t (hi-definition) footage is making its way up. That'll probably be all day, at least.

Just yesterday, my talk about Shareware came up! A massive, profanity-filled rant of fun, that talk is here.

Heck, if we want to mention talks, this is the way to go: Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack.

Until my next blackout!