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Donate to the internet archive!! Now!!!
If you're looking for a sign to donate to the internet archive, this is it. Or if you're not looking, then this is still a sign for you to donate to the internet archive.
Ahem. Hello, it's been a few days since I got here on my site to update anything. It's not that I already lost my interest, life has been busy lately and I've been kind of trying my best to fend off my depressive episodes, bedrotting and doomscrolling. Also I have been really sleepy, like groggy all day despite having enough hours of sleep, but there are also days when I would not be able to sleep until 5am and it messes up my body clock immediately.
I'm here because I just want to take a moment to appreciate the internet archive and archiving in general. I already mentioned before that I'm a self-proclaimed archivist but not like in the grand scheme of things. When I google'd the term 'archivist' I felt bad that I use that term quite freely to describe myself because it's an actual important job with... y'know preserving history history. But then I thought of how else would I describe myself as someone who likes to record things about my life? Meh, I don't know anymore LOL but yeah I guess this is the part where I put a disclaimer that when I describe myself as one, it's more like I'm just a girl who makes her own personal archive LOL Aaanyway, you get the point.
One random afternoon, while I was rotting on my bed, I accidentally opened my DS emulator on my old phone and suddenly thought '...I want to archive all the NDS games I've played'. I realized any moment now, That company may take down all those ROM archives available on the internet and eventually making those games 'lost media'. My NDS was the first console that I played that wasn't secondhand, my parents bought it for me during my 3rd grade and of course, I wanted the pink one LOL But we were middle class back then and games were considered a luxury for us that we couldn't afford. Thankfully, my brother is well-versed in technology so he got the R4 card for me and I got to play so many games in my NDS during my childhood. Even if I wouldn't have all the time to replay everything that I played in my NDS, I still wanted a personal archive of the games that shaped my childhood and video game preference.
So I looked at wikipedia's list of NDS games and started listing all the games that I could remember on my commonplace book (yay, finally commonplacing is happening!). When I finished writing, I was surprised just how much I actually played. Ah, the good ol' times when I still have the attention span and drive to finish games one after the other. Then I moved on to the 3DS list of games because the it was also a part of my childhood too ;-; My 3DS backstory was pretty similar to my NDS one, except I got it secondhand and my brother bought it for me from Australia, and of course he also included the 3DS version of the R4 card mehehe I ended up with a longer list than I expected. I didn't know I played so much as well! See, this is why archiving is important to me: mostly because I'm a sentimental person LOL While we're here at the topic, let me just say my all-time favorite games from my list: Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days for NDS, and Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward for 3DS :D
Once I was finished with my list, I got on my laptop and started searching on where to look. I don't think I'll be able to make a step-by-step walkthrough on how I actually archived the games, but it's fairly easy to look it up. I got most of it from the internet archive, even the now-delisted emulator. I'm grateful for sites like them who puts a great importance on data presevation. If only I wasn't unemployed I would have made a donation but soon, hopefully, I'll be able to.
I realized soon after I finished downloading all the games that I most likely got this habit from my brother. He also archives every media he has in a very organized matter. He literally has a bunch of CDs of TV shows, music albums, programs and stuff neatly stored in a big CD album. Maybe one day I'll also reach that kind of archive.
I started thinking of everything in the internet as something that could be 'lost media' the next moment. Just like how Twitter artists whose art really moved me randomly deactivating their accounts (thanks to my friend, I learned how to make a personal archive of art I see on twitter, with credits of course!) or how one of my favorite youtuber somehow deleted her video about her bullet journal which was important to me because I always go back to that video for inspiration (me regretting not keeping a download of it, but also didn't occur to me until few days ago that I can just google it and it turns out the video was only unlisted LOL) That also goes to say that everything I archive that aren't made by me are just for my personal use.
I think I already said the word 'archive' a bajillion times in this post but yeah, since we're still on the topic, I still plan to make my personal website an archive of everything I love so I might start making a page of the video game list I made :) Until then, see you on the next entry
- niki