The thing about Meditations is that it's advice from a Roman Emperor, and, at first blush, more important than the advice of a 30 y.o. tech bro.
But only a few years later Altman has more influence and power than even Aurelius in his time.
We should all read Montaigne instead, the reflections of a man 1400 years later, isolated, considering his influence and how he lives/lived in the world.
the same Ted Chiang who wrote the short story that inspired the movie Arrival, which is in the very excellent short story collection Story of Your Life and Others...
As someone whose main career is in editorial and commercial photography, I ask this all the time.
Many of my clients advertise in glossy magazines and many of the stories I shoot go into limited-run luxury fashion magazines that sell in bookshops for >€30.
Though the industry has been changing for a long time, I knew things were different and that the cynicism had become unsustainable when very few people actually read / bought / subscribed to the magazines for which we worked. Few people believed in the product enough to support its ideal form.
Also, 600px-wide jpegs in an endless flow destroyed photography, but whatever.
I worked for years for a professional photographer with a vast commercial archive.
After every finished project we would copy the files to a thumb drive and print the top 10-20 images at around 14" long edge >300dpi and place everything in a simple archival box.
The logic being that even if the digital copy becomes unsustainable because of interface change or degrading, you could still scan or photograph the prints.
Most analog prints you see 'digitized' on Instagram are iPhone photographs of prints laid flat. It's all a bit ridiculous.
Paper will last, a 100 or so years is not that hard to achieve, honestly. A bank I worked for had documents dating 140 years and they were just in a box most of the time. They handled it carefully, kept proper moisture in the room, but that was mostly it.
What about the original photo film? Isn't that the ultimate backup in such situation? There will be an option of potentially scanning it with better equipment or skill in future. Like it's done nowadays firm classic analogue movies.
I've recently read a great story of a son of a local artist who found a box of photographic film left behind his relative 80 years ago and it was "relatively well preserved, just sitting there in a box".
This reminds me: please let me know if you found a tape backup solution that is feasible for a small homelab!
afaik even the best color papers (for wet prints) will last 20-50 years before starting to show color shift, that's in a darkbox with optimal humidity. b&w obviously is much better
Modern pigment prints seem to perform a bit better, 65-120 years according to some studies
Color film and photo paper is made with dyes that fade and shift over time. An inkjet print with pigments will last longer. Only monochrome silver metal film or paper will last indefinitely, and it's the gelatin layer that will last, some substrates including consumer-grade acetate film and most papers will degrade. The best archival format is silver on polyester film. Color can still be achieved by way of three exposures in RGB, similar to Technicolor.
I had a Nikon Coolscan 9000 that was the best scanner I ever had for 35mm and 120mm film. I worked professionally and would submit perfect scans to clients and retouchers that were far better than anything the labs were producing.
I bought a Pakon (Dogbowl variant) and modded an old Macbook Air to run it. It was great.
But, again and again, I found myself running up against entropy of time and software. It was always going to fail. I miss my Rolleiflex, I miss my Leica, I miss my Mamiya RZ and my Mamiya 7II. I miss film and writing shot notes in my notebook.
But the manufacturers and the labs are all going in one direction, digital, and the price of film and development is rising.
Since I've moved to Amsterdam from NYC I've looked at darkrooms/dokas but it's all too hobbyist and caught in an older era. Reluctantly, I've gone all digital and adapted my workflow to make it less painful: profiles, curves, mobile cloud syncing, batch treatments, decent historical archiving.
I've found a great digital printer and a great print shop, and now the only real issue if finding a good framer.
It less about the devices and more about giving the mind some simple physical task.
I have the same thing with any solitary sport. Rowing/Sculling in particular. No phones in the boat (since they're very tippy), and an hour of reasonably delicate physical activity.
The rowing movement requires a little concentration so it absorbs say 40% of the mental activity, what's leftover flows into light thinking and connection-making, without much angst.
The Parisians cannot stand my (now terrible) French and it's great fun to tease them with it.