I found an odd quirk at arhive.org yesterday. A search for “sorabji” turned up a number of expected results, meaning the name “sorabji” was somewhere in the title or description. But one item caught my attention, looking strangely familiar but also unknown, if that makes sense. In Your House Lived a Girl I Used to Know, by Scott Shay, is a sweet little piece using material from the Prelinger collections of home videos. But what does it have to do with Sorabji? Why does this film turn up when I search Archive.org for videos about Sorabji?
It seems to be because I favorited the film. My account name at Archive is sorabji.com, and it seems that using that account to favorite an item at Archive is enough to associate that item with Sorabji. That glitch, if it is not somehow unique to this circumstance, must cause a lot of pollution in the site’s search results.
In addition to the above mentioned film I also feel exposed for having favorited a couple of items from the Wolfman Museum of Art and a 1947 film from Hawaii. If I were so inclined I could destroy Archive’s useful ability to search for anything related to Sorabji by favoriting some of the ample quantity of smut and garbage content on the site.
I sadly had to abandon giving content to Archive. Upload speeds bacame glacial and all the folks at Archive could say was that upload speeds will vary. I am reasonably certain my upload bandwidth was 503 throttled but there is nothing that can be done about it. I had embarked on a limited collection of 24-hour webcam captures but it got to a point where uploading a 24-hour video would take far more than 24 hours, and the upload would likely fail anyway. It’s too bad. Archive is a fascinating resource but I will not be contributing to it anymore.
