Rant: Old Bookmarks
I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about knowledge management. Specifically, archival and retrieval from an archive. This has been evolving slowly over the course of a few months - I don't like to feel like I'm spending too much time admiring the process instead of getting work done. I wanted to try and get some thoughts in place.
I like history and old stuff in general. Personal history is an entire other category. It's inherently interesting because it's about you! I feel like "normal" people don't quite understand how cool it can be to go back in time and observe the small little details of your own life.
Probably in a decade or two this discussion will be nonsensical anyways, as everything will be recorded and remixed all the time.
Bookmarks
I have about 2,000 bookmarks. My oldest bookmarks date back to 2012, when I was in high school. I was 16 years old at the time. Likely I had bookmarks before then, but I didn't have a personal computer. The bookmarks didn't survive transfer from my family's shared Windows XP machine to my laptop.
I found a file named bookmarks_8_26_12.html in some of my backup folders.
Nearly all of the bookmarks inside of it are currently loaded into my browser.
That means those bookmarks have been continually syncing, across several browser changes, several OS changes, and about five different computers, for almost twelve years!
That is absolutely mind-blowing to me.
There are lot of artifacts from back then.
For example, the file contains a bookmark called "New Tab" which points to chrome://newtab.
So I was likely using Google Chrome at the time and accidentally bookmarked the default new tab page.
Which, if memory serves correct, was true - I did use Chromium on Linux for quite a while.
At the time Chromium was new (maybe not to others, but to me) and using it felt fresh and exciting.
Ah, the good old days...
A quick overview of the bookmarks reveals the following.
Statistics
I have 92 total bookmarks from 2012. (Sort of - keep reading.) Different backup files have different amounts; I don't know why. Maybe I was adding/deleting things over time, or maybe I was using multiple browsers.
Drawing
Quite a lot of the bookmarks are drawing resources - libraries of free PSD brushes, stock images, etc. I do remember trying to learn to draw at the time but I don't think I even really used these resources.
Memes
Even more of the bookmarks are joke website, memes, gags, etc.
I even bookmarked a specific meme (for example, something like http://imgur.com/funny-meme.jpg), which looking back seems extremely quaint.
I guess I didn't really understand that I could just save files and that if I didn't, they might disappear - the link 404s in 2023.
People often complain now that the Internet is entirely dominated by Facebook, Google, Twitter/X, etc. I think there's probably some truth to that. Looking back at my 2012 bookmarks, I was surprised at how many different sites I had bookmarked just for silly pictures.
I was also surprised that I had various communities on Reddit and 4chan bookmarked. In my mind (in 2023) bookmarks are for something interesting that you want to save for later and don't want to forget. I could be reading too much into it, but I had just started browsing social sites like Reddit in 2012. The obvious implication is that these sites were so novel and exciting to me that I wanted to make sure I could get back to them. Looking back, it seems impossible to imagine that at some point I just didn't know that Reddit, etc. existed!
Language Practice
I have quite a lot of websites saved in German. I was learning and practicing German at the time so this isn't very surprising nor interesting. But...
More interesting is that also I have a significant number of bookmarks in other European languages that I don't remember practicing at all, including Russian, French, Finnish, Serbian, and Polish. Generally, I was always interested in languages and specifically writing systems, but I don't remember ever learning those.
I then noticed that of these bookmarks are WWII related - either the history of the war specifically, or just military-themed art and music from the 30's and 40's. So maybe I went through a history phase that had nothing to do with the language at all. I honestly don't remember.
Another possible explanation might be that I bookmarked them while watching the anime Girls und Panzer, which had an amazing soundtrack with lots of military-inspired music that I really liked. However, GuP came out in 2015... Wait a minute.
Sure enough, one of them is a YouTube video featuring the GuP soundtrack. Checking the metadata, it was supposedly added in 2012!
So, for at least some of the bookmarks in my current browser, there was some sort of metadata corruption. Cross-referencing with different backup files, it seems to be slight (we're talking like 85 vs 92 bookmarks). I can't ever be certain, so I'm not really worried about it.
So, to amend my previous statement - the sync was good but not perfect. I'd say a 100% success rate of roughly 85 original bookmarks surviving over a decade is solid.
XDCC Packlists
This is interesting, if somewhat incriminating... before I learned what torrenting was I downloaded anime from IRC bots using what was called a packlist. You would join an IRC channel and direct message a bot for the packlist and it would use XDCC to send you a list of files it had indexed by number. You would then message them the number of the file you wanted and it would initiate a new transfer request.
At this point I was smart enough to know how to torrent, and smart enough to know that torrenting might get me caught by... someone, probably my parents. I had enough shame to feel that getting caught would be incredibly embarrasing, but not quite enough of a conscience (or a budget) to pay for anything. XDCC was very common in the anime fansub community and I could get mostly anything I wanted quickly and at no cost whatsoever. I was, however, not smart enough to realize I was quite literally broadcasting my IP address to random people on IRC, some of who knew my first real name, and then building a tunnel so they could write data to my computer. There was nothing resembling safety, integrity, or accountability, not even antivirus! Ah, to be young.
I have a bunch of different links to old tutorials and sites advertising packlist bots. These links bring back vivid memories.
I remember sitting in a library somewhere trying to download the newest episode of some anime off of a terrible connection and wondering if the school's firewall would trip on IRC and I would get pulled down to the principle's office for "hacking" or some such nonsense.
I also remember turning the lights off on a cold, rainy night and sitting back with a hot cup of tea and a blanket, calmly waiting for my episode to download. I watched the bar tick very peacefully, not a care in the world, not even particulary concerned if the episode downloaded fast or slow. I believe if was an episode of From the New World, which would fit the timeframe and the mood I was in.
Use your bookmarks!
I guess if there's a point to this blog post, it's that I think you should use bookmarks! I know people (work, friends, etc.) that actively dislike the feature and think it is an outdated or useless concept. Bookmarks are an important part of cultivating your digital garden. I think most people would enjoy looking back at old bookmarks, but don't want to put in the work maintaining them.