rainbow glitter and photo preservation

[asakiyume]

I thought I'd do a messages-in-bottles writing prompt tomorrow, which meant I needed to collect a bunch of bottles, so after work I just walked the main drag near where I live, and sure enough, turned up PLENTY of little nips bottles.

I cleaned them and covered them with glitter. Fingers crossed that the writing exercise goes okay.



I didn't post that image directly into Dreamwidth. I posted it to Flickr instead and then copied it from there into here. I pay for both my Flickr account and my Dreamwidth account, but Flickr is solely for archiving photos, and it has much more storage available, and this is an issue because in three months I'll cease to have a paid LJ account--I'll still crosspost there (for a while anyway), but there's no point in paying for both it AND Dreamwidth--which means I'll lose access to any photos that are stored there. That turns out to be quite a few photos, so right now I'm engaged in the cumbersome process of taking any images that were stored there and storing them here, instead. Otherwise, come May, bunches of entries will suddenly have little question marks where once they had pictures.

It's a weird process. I'm working backward from the present. As I do, I'm unlocking all my back entries, which somehow, when I poured LJ into Dreamwidth, came over as friends locked. It's kind of melancholy making. I'm only back in 2016, and I've had a journal since 2006.

I wonder what I'm doing, a little. Why does this even matter? ¯\(ツ)/¯

Comments

[amaebi]

Because I like your pictures? :D

[asakiyume]

That's a good reason ^_^

[queenoftheskies]

You have always posted the best pictures.

I love the bottles. Let us know how the writing prompt goes?

[asakiyume]

I will!

[minoanmiss]

I love that you do this. Maybe I should with my next batch of nips bottles (I like nips bottles for. trying new flavors and for portion control.)

[asakiyume]

Some of the flavors look super intriguing!

[kore]

Your pictures are beautiful, and it's also about preserving your own history -- that matters.

[asakiyume]

It's strange history to preserve, though, because it's just--often--of-the-moment stuff. I'm going ahead and doing it, so in some part of me it's worth it and what I want to do and yet, I always felt (and still feel) that it was just going to be this online thing, that I was never (for instance) going to download and save it, etc.

I guess it's kind of valuable to me to read through it all, carefully, this one time. And some of the stuff, maybe I'm the only person preserving it, who knows? It's amazing how many links are dead when I glimpse back at 2006.

[gale_storm]

Yeah, what they said above this comment of yours. For whatever reason you do it, it’s your own. And the stuff you share is fascinating and beautiful.

[asakiyume]

Thank you <3

[sonia]

You have a lot of cool colors of glitter! The bottles look like very appealing treasure. I'm guessing your writing participants will be delighted.

I have also done cumbersome tasks to preserve history and continuity and important images. Best wishes for the task, and for sitting with the melancholy.

[asakiyume]

I apparently bought a little variety pack of glitter at some point! It was great to use it.

Thank you for the good wishes. It's strange to travel in my own history, but--I guess--not a bad thing. And who keeps a journal and doesn't expect to do this, or something like this, at some point?

[ivy]

I wonder what I'm doing, a little.

You are bringing wonder and joy to the world. You are providing hope and magic at a time when the news is full of terrible things and a lot of people are tuning out because they can't even deal. You are fighting the good fight in a way that I think is beautiful. Thanks for that.

[asakiyume]

Thank you for the supportive words! I think I meant more, why am I bothering going back and saving the stuff. If all the links died, maybe that would be the more natural thing. But I guess I do want it to happen not quite yet. I don't know if that's really fighting the good fight or not--I feel like maybe **posting** is a part of fighting the good fight, but I don't know if preserving is. But the preserving gives me, and who knows, maybe others, the option of looking back and remembering, so...

[amaebi]

If half-heads from war memorials remain to puzzle future generations, let your photos also be peering from the sands.

[asakiyume]

I love this idea. "What's your Ozymandius [sp??] going to be?" I'm picturing all sorts of interesting things half buried in sand, now.

[amaebi]

:)

[shewhomust]

I wonder what I'm doing, a little. Why does this even matter?

You are preserving order in the face of chaos. What more can we do?

[asakiyume]

I tell myself that we never know what things the future will find useful/valuable/helpful etc. If I were to run into a library and pull out one book to save from a disaster, I'd be paralyzed trying to choose. This is like just running in and grabbing the first thing there. Well, not **entirely** like that, but somewhere between those two extremes, I feel.

[cmcmck]

I'm working on a complete transfer from Photobucket who've turned into a bunch of crooks, to Google, which, as I run a Google based system, give me free photohosting, so I hear you- it is a strange experience.

[asakiyume]

Yes, I'm sure you know exactly what it's like, then.

[sartorias]

Those bottles will be fun to play with!

[asakiyume]

I certainly had fun covering them with glitter!

[osprey_archer]

I love your photos, too. And they're such an integral part of so many of your entries, and a way of saving ephemeral moments, sort of a spiritual cousin to say a haiku.

It is odd doing fiddly journal upkeep stuff, though, I feel you there. Sometimes I find myself fiddling with my tags - recently I've been thinking it would be good to have book posts tagged by author, for instance, but there are SO MANY book posts that it seems overwhelming - and I do have that same feeling of "Why does this matter?" But at the same time - there are times when it would be convenient to have things tagged better.

[asakiyume]

YES: that kind of maintenance too. Sometimes I think of a new tag and get daunted at the thought of back-applying it. (In fact, I only do it if I know the number of entries is manageable.)

[missroserose]

What a delightful way to turn litter into something useful! Although my cocktail-loving side points out that you lose out on the opportunity to drink the liquor yourself...but then, most of the bottles you find by the side of the road aren't from liquor worth drinking, haha.

I recently was talking with my grandmother, and she mentioned that she wishes she had a secretary, or perhaps an amanuensis. She's currently engaged in sorting through her belongings, including literal decades of accumulation of stuff—fabric, old sewing/quilting projects, newsletters and clippings from her religious work, genealogy research, books and letters and awards and all the other detritus that accumulates over a lifetime. She's been having a hard time sorting through and working out what's worth keeping and what's worth saving, but a lot of it is worth saving - she was one of the pioneering members of the Bahá'i Faith in Alaska, and her quilting is phenomenally gorgeous. So even though I suspect a lot of it strikes her as in-the-moment stuff, that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile - and as to the question of why you're organizing things now, I suspect it'll pay dividends later, when you least expect it. :)

[asakiyume]

I am definitely going to buy a bunch once Lent is over just to try some of the crazy flavors.

That's so neat about your grandmother, both the quilting and the Bahá'i elements!

And you're probably right: we do things with one intention but what grows from that, or what happens because of that, can be totally surprising and different. ... what an abstracted way of putting it, but I'm counting on you to get what I mean.