this past week i fixed an old hard drive i had.
i amputated it with a utility knife and a set of pliers and tore its heart out to transplant into another body to heal its broken port.
opening the set of files, i was astounded at how many videos i had collected over the years since the start of high school. folders of videos and files that i had almost completely forgotten since 2015. going through the files felt like looking through a second brain, one with memories that would've been long lost without a refresh.
i've grown up loving videos.
i grew up watching nigahiga, wongfu, and kevjumba. they were, and still are, my heros.
i took my first video editing class in 2014 at a summer camp. in high school and college, i've constantly had my camera in hand, scrapbooking.
part of it comes from my inherent tendency to hoard but not having enough physical space to own many items from moving around. it instead manifested itself in digital clutter, terabytes of footage and random collections of my memory.
occasionally, i go through my giant pile of mp4s and sort them out and a digital scrapbook comes out of it. i share these scrapbooks with my friends, dig up all the embarrassing stories, all the cringe moments, all the times that have passed and take all of it for what it was. compare these to today, see how far i've grown.
watching my past films makes me appreciate a past version of me, one that decided to put the work out into the world no matter how imperfect it felt.
i've been so happy making videos this past month. it's so nice capturing a moment of the past, immortalizing it, and being able to relive and share a piece of history on demand.
i want to do it more. i want to tell more stories.
it's incredible what technology we have now. what new emotions can be expressed, captured, and felt that weren't possible with books and screens before. there's so many more stories we can share with these new mediums.
stories to help us better understand each other. stories to help maintain peace. stories that teleport us into another body, try living a life somewhere else.
from the beginning of time we've shared stories that have formed our idea of truth. every piece of information we know has a story, an origin of where it came from. everything in the world has a reason for being.
it's so beautiful that we've constructed this world again digitally. creating a portal between this world and the real one. it baffles me that we can bring what we learn from the digital world into the real one and what's in the real to the digital. i admire the pieces that are symbiotic. the digital to help extend our memory, give us super powers to re-experience the past, teleport to another place, show us other versions of the world to see more than what we can with just two eyes in a moment.
it’s absolutely fascinating studying how the online world diverted from the real one. studying computing history is like studying a parallel history of the world online.
in documenting the history, i’m inspired by this quote from pamela mccorduck from her book ‘machines who think’:
sadly, i won’t get to meet her and tell her that i’m continuing her work since she passed in 2021, but i’m glad to have found her brain-child to adopt and continue its growth.
our lives are not long enough to see the whole world unravel. i’m so excited for what’s in store in mine.