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The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

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11–20 of 117 posts

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#11
post #8

>This agnostic, wide-ranging crawl likely represented both the original source of the image Why do they say it's likely that the person who first posted the image on the message board got the image from the Internet Archive?

My guess is because the image didn’t exist in other archives and it’s a very obscure site so why would someone have seen that? More probable they stumbled on something random like this in the wild or on Internet Archive?

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#12
I love and appreciate the Wayback Machine, but using it is such a bittersweet experience. So many of the crawls are incomplete. I’ve managed to find pages that hosted content of interest to me, only to find that particular resource unavailable. And if it’s not on the Wayback Machine, it’s just gone forever. Feels like tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#13

Now someone should make a game where you design indoor rc car tracks in the backrooms.

Not sure about design, but for driving them you have re*volt

And, as expected, there is a backroom level: http://revoltzone.net/m/tracks/70429/Backrooms (There are probably others, this was the first result after a search)

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#14
post #10
post #8

>This agnostic, wide-ranging crawl likely represented both the original source of the image Why do they say it's likely that the person who first posted the image on the message board got the image from the Internet Archive?

I thought the same thing. If you look at the crawled page, it's only one of like 20 images that survived. So either the crawl got lucky and saved the only relevant image, or there is survivor bias. Then again, the actual crawl might be triggered precisely because the image was linked.

What do you mean there is survivorship bias? That the only image used is the one that survived? Or it survived because it was used?

Something I noticed was that all other jpgs in this site have a lager number in the filename, for example: www.hobbytownoshkosh.com/Dsc00348.jpg

So maybe the crawler that saved this webpage had a limit on how many suburls it would capture and it sorted by name and then stopped at around Dsc00161.jpg, which is the name of the image in question. Though there is a Dsc00164 that is lost so it seems kind of unlikely...

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#15
post #4

I remember seeing this before. Curious how / who found the original in the Wayback archives? Didn’t see that mentioned in the article.

Here's a YouTube video covering the discovery process. Ultimately, one person found it, but they were part of a wider team piecing together many parts of a puzzle, including outdated phone image numbering schema. I found it to be a worthwhile summary that doesn't really assume the viewer has much previous knowledge.

https://youtu.be/-1EKIIM3ShI

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#16
post #12

I love and appreciate the Wayback Machine, but using it is such a bittersweet experience. So many of the crawls are incomplete. I’ve managed to find pages that hosted content of interest to me, only to find that particular resource unavailable. And if it’s not on the Wayback Machine, it’s just gone forever. Feels like tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.

I quite like the fragility of it, it makes it more apparent that everything is transient. In a way I wish the IA had a half life on content, that it would decay over time, pages and images would be randomly deleted. Little by little it would rot and become nothing, a reflection of humanity.

I suppose that's the internet itself...

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#17
post #12

I love and appreciate the Wayback Machine, but using it is such a bittersweet experience. So many of the crawls are incomplete. I’ve managed to find pages that hosted content of interest to me, only to find that particular resource unavailable. And if it’s not on the Wayback Machine, it’s just gone forever. Feels like tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.

I quite like the fragility of it, it makes it more apparent that everything is transient. In a way I wish the IA had a half life on content, that it would decay over time, pages and images would be randomly deleted. Little by little it would rot and become nothing, a reflection of humanity. I suppose that's the internet itself...

> everything is transient

I agree. Permanence should be tied to individual wills, not collective inertia. If you want a permanent thing, work for it, host it and publicize it

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#18
post #12

I love and appreciate the Wayback Machine, but using it is such a bittersweet experience. So many of the crawls are incomplete. I’ve managed to find pages that hosted content of interest to me, only to find that particular resource unavailable. And if it’s not on the Wayback Machine, it’s just gone forever. Feels like tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.

> Feels like tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.

I did this yesterday. He went in 2016.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite like the fragility of it, it makes it more apparent that everything is transient. In a way I wish the IA had a half life on content, that it would decay over time, pages and images would be randomly deleted. Little by little it would rot and become nothing, a reflection of humanity. I suppose that's the internet itself...

> everything is transient I agree. Permanence should be tied to individual wills, not collective inertia. If you want a permanent thing, work for it, host it and publicize it

Sort of describing entropy yes? All things will decay unless external energy is continually applied to the system to maintain an ordered state.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite like the fragility of it, it makes it more apparent that everything is transient. In a way I wish the IA had a half life on content, that it would decay over time, pages and images would be randomly deleted. Little by little it would rot and become nothing, a reflection of humanity. I suppose that's the internet itself...

> everything is transient I agree. Permanence should be tied to individual wills, not collective inertia. If you want a permanent thing, work for it, host it and publicize it

Every future historian is hissing at you right now.

So much of the past is completely opaque to us because of decay, intentional destruction and lack of interest. I think there's a moral imperative to preserve.

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