Art of the day:

It’s been a week and I haven’t blogged, as the outside worlds, and worlds within the computer have absorbed me a bit. For art today, above is a screenshot from 2007 of Lorekeeper Lydros in World of Warcraft 1.13.2 from WoWhead. So maybe it’s not technically art to you. To me, it is. Art comes in many forms. The immersion with video games combines visual, audio, and story with it’s characters. I find my self constantly, sometimes in desperation, looking for old articles on random things and often default to wiki or the internet archive. And who are the keepers of the lore, the archivist, the librarians? Lydros provides end-game enchantments in the form of Librams for quest goers, and even unlocks higher ranked spells. He’s difficult to get to, requiring a key for entry and navigation through Dire Maul – a large dungeon with several wings and notorious for its hostile ogres and hyenas that stun and see through stealth. There are legends of brave solo hunter players guiding players through these dangerous paths, unlocking special world buffs and farming loot. The rogues and druids too, of course – bombing and unlocking doors, mining thorium and finding herbs in hidden tunnels.

Song of the day:

“Ink Long Dry” from The Great Gubal Library dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV. Another MMO tale of lore and legend, Matoya – the very same from the original Final Fantasy game; instructs the player to retrieve a tome within the depths of the largest repository of knowledge in Eorzea. Haunting, strange, and unusual – “Ink Long Dry” is a fitting name for a theme about delving into a dark descent looking through ancient texts. There are a few characters in anime and video games that represent libraries, characters always buried in books and surrounded by them. From Patchouli Knowledge (Locked Girl) to Re: Zero’s cynical Beatrice, the keepers of knowledge are some of the most interesting characters to me.

Thought of the day:

Like these characters, I hope that I can begin to be a keeper and archive the ancient internet. Whether it be a website, a blog, a guide, a video – I recognize my long journey through cyberspace. My memory is fading, these (web)pages are torn and parts are missing, and I want the future to know what it was, how it was, and have remain as it should be. The future is fakes, the digital world is crawling with AI twisting words, images, and now video. I’m only going to have fragments of memory in the future, and I don’t want them falsified by suggestions from something artificial. I want the organic, the original. If you value the same, create your database, your library, preserve your memory and save the internet (literally).