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Personal Encyclopedias

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Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#161

Post by bonoboTP »

wdrw wrote: post #152
runj__ wrote: post #139

My grandfather left five moving cartons of diaries written by typewriter, every single day of his adult life documented, an achievement, to be sure. When he passed away he left them to my mother to be scanned, transcribed and moved online, something that weighed her down for the last 15 years of her life. When he died there was no way of transcribing them automatically (there still isn't really). The boxes stood in m…

I understand there may be an emotional desire to get rid of something unpleasant, but some descendants e.g. 5 generations down the line may feel very differently about this. Given how easy scanning is these days (there are literally companies that will do it for you if you send them a box), and given how good the technology for sifting through mountains of text is becoming, and given that it's literally irreplaceable…

No, the dead can't exert such influence from the grave. You're dead. It's the next generation's turn. If you were the kind of person whose diary the kids or grandkids want to see thrown in the trash, then that's how it is. You had your time on the face of the earth, you don't get to haunt the descendants. You got erased, that's it. Or your story gets retold in filtered ways in the fog of the past.

Im perfectly content knowing just vague information about individual ancestors 3-4 levels up, and basically nothing on level 5, except the odd church record of births, marriages and deaths giving a rough indication of where some of them lived.

The people 5 generations back deserve much less thought space than the community you cultivate around yourself today (including living family).

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#162

Post by T-A »

Eventually people will begin to put their memories of their lives on their sites. At first they will be like a grand photo-album, but then things will get more complicated. People will begin to journal their memories (cleaned up and detuned or exaggerated). This will be called their Book Of Life and when you fall in love or become very close with someone you will share your “Book of Life”.

Jann Burner, "The book of life", December 26, 2008

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352#s...

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#163

Post by T-RN-R »

bonoboTP wrote: post #161
wdrw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand there may be an emotional desire to get rid of something unpleasant, but some descendants e.g. 5 generations down the line may feel very differently about this. Given how easy scanning is these days (there are literally companies that will do it for you if you send them a box), and given how good the technology for sifting through mountains of text is becoming, and given that it's literally irreplaceable…

No, the dead can't exert such influence from the grave. You're dead. It's the next generation's turn. If you were the kind of person whose diary the kids or grandkids want to see thrown in the trash, then that's how it is. You had your time on the face of the earth, you don't get to haunt the descendants. You got erased, that's it. Or your story gets retold in filtered ways in the fog of the past. Im perfectly conten…

This is frankly a selfish take. Society is a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone’s deepest thoughts is a treasure for future generations. By deciding to destroy, you choose to destroy the past that the future generations might value.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#164

Post by h4ch1 »

marknutter wrote: post #100
h4ch1 wrote: post #24

I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year. She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we visited and loved) and decorates it. Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, disc…

This is an incredibly cool idea. I'm gonna talk to my wife about doing this with my girls. Thanks for sharing!

Great to hear :) I hope it brings y'all much joy through the years!

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#165

Post by Nzen »

fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #67
72deluxe wrote: post #57

I am starting to do this with actual physical books. I have thousands of photos going back over my life, and I am putting them together in Scribus to then go and print a physical book for each year or event or holiday along with some relevant text. Ideally square books that can go on a coffee table. At least when I am dead there will be some part of my existence in physical form, unlike all the digital things we spen…

Won't the SD card data decay in a relatively short time? Maybe convert some part of that video into a flipbook for another piece of physical media?

You could add an appendix with printed, scannable, binary data. You could create a page with a bunch of QR codes. Martin Monperrus vouched [0] for Twibright Optar [1].

[0] https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper

[1] https://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#166

Post by h4ch1 »

eks391 wrote: post #110
klondike_klive wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is beautiful. and inspirational. although I know that I don't have anywhere near enough energy to carry through on this kind of thing!

It only takes a little bit of energy once a day (or per week if you haven't realized yet how eventful your life actually is). The highest energy first day making it is a fun date with your spouse, or parent child time if you are separated.

@parent don't get too worried about not writing in it religiously and having a schedule. That removes all the joy about doing it in the first place.

For example our 2026 notebook has only one page filled in yet where I wrote a recipe for a chocolate cake I made on the fly and was worried I'd forget the measurements.

There are some days when I am bored and I pick it up and backfill it as well.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#167

Post by asdefghyk »

runj__ wrote: post #157
wdrw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand there may be an emotional desire to get rid of something unpleasant, but some descendants e.g. 5 generations down the line may feel very differently about this. Given how easy scanning is these days (there are literally companies that will do it for you if you send them a box), and given how good the technology for sifting through mountains of text is becoming, and given that it's literally irreplaceable…

I totally understand your way of thinking but there's just so much _stuff_, we already kept most of his paintings which takes up a lot of my limited storage space (I do appreciate them though, but it's possible to have conflicted feelings). It would cost around $3000 to have the diaries scanned today, this number was way higher a few years ago (which my mother didn't have). I know Americans have a lot more storage sp…

Pages could have been cut ( if written in a bound book) with a small guillotine type machine.

A few years ago , There are auto sheet scanners that scan both sides of pages relatively quickly , like 1 or 2 seconds a sheet, and can do at least 50 pages at once.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#168

Post by bonoboTP »

T-RN-R wrote: post #163
bonoboTP wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the dead can't exert such influence from the grave. You're dead. It's the next generation's turn. If you were the kind of person whose diary the kids or grandkids want to see thrown in the trash, then that's how it is. You had your time on the face of the earth, you don't get to haunt the descendants. You got erased, that's it. Or your story gets retold in filtered ways in the fog of the past. Im perfectly conten…

This is frankly a selfish take. Society is a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone’s deepest thoughts is a treasure for future generations. By deciding to destroy, you choose to destroy the past that the future generations might value.

No, its the natural cycle. What passes away fades away. Anything that is kept up needs to be kept up actively by the generations. That which is valued needs to be preserved, such as wisdom, knowledge, art, science etc. All your drama and idle musings, maybe not. Unless you're deemed worthy by the next ones. I understand that this is a scary thought but our impact is only kept if we act such that the next generations want to preserve it. 5 generations down even your genetic impact is people who share 3% genes with you and 97% other people. Imagine a classroom with 32 people. For each of your descendants 5 generations down (which can be zero or many, the count varying greatly based on choices made by not-you), you're one person out of that classroomful of ancestors.

Sure it's kinda cool to see some fragments here and there. But would I want it to be the standard that we keep all the emails, chat messages, phone camera roll, GPS logs etc of people... Hell no. I'm not advocating for absolutely forgetting everything. But we have to filter.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#169

Post by bonoboTP »

inanutshellus wrote: post #153

I did the same thing and came away with a different opinion. The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no one in the family would've tried to resurrect it. They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it. I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image direc…

You may like DokuWiki. It's a wiki you can browse and edit in a browser but stores its data as human-readable files, not in a database.
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