Ephemeral Daze

What is this?

One of my "hobbies" and tasks that drives me through life is the collection of ephemera wherever I go. I take back ads, flyers, business cards, and so on, from my mailbox, the grocery store, shopping malls, and anywhere else where I can get my hands on them. I then add them to a giant backlog of items to scan and upload to the Internet Archive as ephemera, before (usually) tossing them away.

While some might see this as (digital) hoarding, the reason that this drives me is that I have found that my purpose in life is to chronicle and archive life as it is now so that historians and researches deep into the future can look back at this as a primary source of things that are now. A big part of this relies on infrastructure that I hope will still exist at that time -- the Internet Archive being a big part of that hope -- but one can only plan and mitigate for so long, and the most important part of a big project like this is to actually do it, see what breaks, iterate to fix things, and do it again and build momentum over time. Time is a big factor with all this -- I have many more things scanned than I have uploaded and many more things unscanned than I have scanned, but the hope is that over time as I find better ways to do things and fix the things that annoy me, the more I can push those three numbers (ephemera collected, scanned, uploaded) to equilibrium.

One of the ways I've recently tried to streamline it is to make this list below automated instead of manual. There's already a link to my IA page at the top of this page anyway, but I nonetheless wanted a list on my website, it was just always a pain to have to update it manually everytime I uploaded something. No more! For now. At least until I hit some sort of limit.

You can access the rest of my site from here:

ට  Shelf 1: My Diary Entries -- for my life/travel blog posts.
ට  Shelf 2: Winter Night Library -- for all other posts/pages I've made. (You are here)
ට  Shelf 3: Ephemeral Daze -- for an automated, sortable list of my Internet Archive uploads. (You are here)
ට  Shelf 4: My Dream Diary -- for my personal dream diary entries. (severely backlogged)

Otherwise, here's the automated list! (The buttons allow for sorting, new to old and vice versa.)