that’s the word of the day. punify. i feel like my life has been punified. i feel like nothing much, but i secretly listen in on myself, i spy on myself. i listen to my complaints with a sinful, songful dismay.
i don’t know how to explain it, so maybe i will not try.
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i shot a full roll of color film today. i think it went well enough, but who can say before shippinng it off for processing and receiving the goods… i give up on any local developing shops, regrettably, partly on cost but also on convenience. the only places that develop Professional grade film are in Manhattan. i haven’t chosen a mail order film processing place yet. i may stay lazy and let this film sit in its cases for years.
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nothing more to report from this vacant day. some Etude-related correspondence got me interested in that project again, not that i fully lost interest, but it had waned a bit of late.
a piece in the NY Times today about the Internet Archive caught my interest. The person in charge of the digitization of millions of pages of old books and magazines has taken it upon himself to build a bunker and fill it with books. Real books, not the digitized versions.
It reminded me of a great many things, not least of which how Google Books, for all its apparent industriousness and “foresight” (in the form of scanning first and asking pesky copyright questions later) did a flat-out lousy job with a great number of their scanning projects. in a number of cases it is, admittedly and in their defense, a matter of “garbage in garbage out,” with aged and barely readable microfiche providing low quality material to begin with. but even in the best cases the OCR conversion is a joke. they dumped gigabyte after gigabyte of incomprehensible garbage text onto the Internet. on that count the Internet Archive is no better, but i give them a break on that count because they do such a great job on so many other things. they are also a non profit.
i think about this stuff because i have the scanning interest myself. i think that these projects are best left to the little guy and/or the philahthropist, or perhaps a latter-day version of the Librarian. but not the commercial companies.
i might ship off a pile of pages to a scanning company, just for the hell of it. about 1000 pages of a hardbound copy of a full year of The Etude. the volume would have to be destroyed, but no shortage of surviving copies still exists. some digitization types decry the practice of scan-and-destroy, but in some cases it can’t be avoided. i scan-and-destroy as little as possible, but without dismembering this particular volume the scanning would be, simply, impossible. i’ve never paid for scanning but it might be productive and money well spent in this case.
i got the laminator up and running. it smells bad but it does what i expected of it. it wraps pictures in hardened plastic so i can place the pictures out of doors in a way that will protect them from the elements for at least a little while. i told a friend about this project last night and she liked it, saying i was “underappreciated”. i say that i am underknown.
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