The world is always breaking So the world is always breaking; it's in its nature to break. Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair melancholydecay
Angkorwatification Applied to a blog, angkorwatification is a sort of textual equivalent of rewilding. You have a base layer of traditional blog posts that is essentially complete in the sense of having created, over time, an idea space with a clear identity, and a more or less deliberately conceived architecture to it. And you have a secondary organic growth layer that is patiently but relentlessly rewilding the first, inorganic one. That second layer also emerges from the mind of the blogger of course, but does so via surrender to brain entropy rather than via writerly intentions disciplining the flow of words. Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm www.ribbonfarm.com writingentropydecay
The web in decay is the web by design An Essay by Chia Amisola chias.blog When will there be a guide to best practices for archiving the web? Will the giants responsible for the platformization of the web make the act of digital archival any easier for us? Is it foolish for platforms like Snapchat or Instagram Stories to brand themselves as “temporary” when temporariness is impossible on our internet? Should the web exist as something organic, malleable, and destructible –– or as an eternal timekeeper? Is link rot more of a technological issue or a human one? Do humans want to know themselves forever? The Internet Is Rotting decaywww
The Internet Is Rotting An Essay by Jonathan Zittrain www.theatlantic.com Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge— they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. The web in decay is the web by design wwwhypermediadecayknowledge
Weathering Steel A Material en.wikipedia.org Weathering steel, often referred to by the genericised trademark COR-TEN steel and sometimes written without the hyphen as corten steel, is a group of steel alloys which were developed to eliminate the need for painting, and form a stable rust-like appearance after several years' exposure to weather. The name COR-TEN refers to the two distinguishing properties of this type of steel: corrosion resistance and tensile strength. Dark satanic steelTilted Arc decay
Googie architecture Where uses are in actual fact homogeneous, we often find that deliberate distinctions and differences are contrived among the buildings. But these contrived differences give rise to esthetic difficulties too. Because inherent differences—those that come from genuinely differing uses—are lacking among the buildings and their settings, the contrivances represent the desire merely to appear different. Some of the more blatant manifestations of this phenomenon were well described, back in 1952, by Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum, under the term “googie architecture.” Googie architecture could then be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. These are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors. Mr. Haskell pointed out that the same impulses to look special (in spite of not being special) were at work also in more sophisticated construction: weird roofs, weird stairs, weird colors, weird signs, weird anything. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Ducks and decorated sheds quirks