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why can’t web archives be easier to use!

a web crawled archive should just as easy to use as a normal web page!

the saved html, txt and mht files I’ve amassed over the past 17 years are easier to access and read than these warc files.

what’s the point of an archive that lacks usability for the common user!

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photography assignment

An assignment that I often give students is this—

Close your eyes, turn your eyeballs around, photograph what you see.

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"Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it.

Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description.

It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?"

- Duane Michals {is an American photographer known for his innovative use of photo-sequences and for often incorporating text to examine emotion and philosophy.}

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"A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind."

- Albert Einstein {was a German-born theoretical physicist known for the general theory of relativity. He is considered as one of the pillars of modern physics.}

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"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."

- Susan Sontag {was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist. Her stories and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary publications all over the world.}

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"When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognised as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself." - Edward Steichen {was a American photographer, painter, and a curator. He was the fi rst curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1953.}

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"Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second." - Marc Riboud {was a celebrated French photojournalist who captured moments of grace even in the most frightening situations around the world.}

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“Essentially what photography is... is life lit up.” - Sam Abell {is a teacher, artist, and a photographer. He has worked for National Geographic as a contract and staff photographer for 33 years.}

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So You Want To Make A Digital Archive?

January 3, 2016

No comments

Managing physical and digital files, metadata-gathering, and enabling complex internal or public searches of cultural production, ephemera, archives and/or born-digital assets are issues faced by many organizations: large, small, funded, volunteer…

At Openflows, we build digital catalogs and archives regularly and want to share some of the specific strategies we use at the outset of a digital project, which determine how we proceed. (If you’re curious about software you can use, check out this post by Openflows’ worker-owner Damien).

FOCUS AND STRATEGY QUESTIONS

When considering what kind of software or scope needs your project has, digital archiving projects bring up a lot of questions. Here are the three we start with:

WHY am I collecting this?

Is it to document an individual, movement, history? Is it to archive for future research

Is it to learn new information your collection could produce? How many items are first editions and prints?

Are existing taxonomies like Getty, the Library or Congress, or linked open data important to connecting this?

WHAT am I collecting and how is it organized?

Is it digital or analog? Do I have digital representations of my collection, or is all the information in text form?

Do I have taxonomies, accession records, or metadata I need to consider? Importing data from one system to another may be worth it, and adds a layer of complexity to any system.

Is my collection large? Rule of thumb: if your set of items is bigger than 100, a database can help you organize and manage it, share or display it, and discover aspects of it.

Is there a specific politic I need to think about?

Will items be moving in and out of your collection and require tracking?

WHO I am collecting it for and who is using this resource?

Will this collection be public or in-house only? Does this collection need any privacy considerations? Do you want it on the web?

Is it for researchers? Academic research requires citability, and sometimes rights management and access.

Who will be producing and/or managing this digital collection? Are they paid or volunteers? Are there many or few? A project with more financial backing can have a larger scope than those without.

BONUS QUESTION: WHY MAKE A DATABASE AT ALL?

Nowadays there are multiple software options for creating digital systems to assist in cataloging and organizing  — even better, in creating a collection management system you can generate new information from and allow new access to your existing collection, archive, or research data set.

Why manage my collection in a digital database?

Imagine your sock drawer. A database is the difference between putting your socks unmatched in a drawer, versus matching them, rolling them up together, and putting the light socks, gym socks, and winter socks in different areas. Sure they’re all in the same drawer in the first situation, but in the database they’re organized. This is how you realize that you have a lot of wool socks, how you keep track if you loan out your favorite pair, and how you can easily replace all your socks at once if your sock drawer crashes. Ok, the metaphor isn’t perfect.

http://www.openflows.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/OF_Catalog_onesheet2015.pdf

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”The problem is, somewhere along the line, these companies started to absorb end-user culture and aspects of humanity that we associate with creativity and personal history. That's when I get worried.

For instance, we're going to host all of your media for free. Your photos, your podcasts, your writing. Then you notice they have no contingency for shutdown. They have no contingency for export. They have no contingency for being able to get your hands on it if the company happens to go into receivership. It's not built into their DNA because it's not profitable. There's no reason to have that living will.” -Jason Scott

The Web Ahead Episode 97 Archiving The Internet with Jason Scott

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Why You Must Archive Website Content

                   May 30, 2013 in

Collection

Digital historians everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief. The first web page in the history of the Internet has been found. You can see it here in all its hypertext glory or see a small screencapture below. Just look at all those font sizes!

The story of the first web page is that Tim Berners-Lee created a computer language to help researchers in his lab share information. In 1990, he put together the first page in HTML, and later showed it publicly at a conference called Hypertext 91 in San Antonio. Until recently, web historians (there is apparently such a thing) had failed to archive the first web page. Despite recent efforts to archive website content, like the Internet Archive, the page had not been seen in decades.

The Disappearing Internet – A Common Fate

It’s not unusual for web pages to disappear forever. According to Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive in San Francisco,”The Web was not designed to be preserved. The average life of a Web page is about 100 days.”

One hundred days is not very long. That means anything you put online is irrevocably changed, edited, or even entirely destroyed in a very short time. Social media is even more ephemeral- your Facebook timeline or Twitter feed has probably completely changed in the time it takes you to read this sentence.

Now imagine you, your company, or a client is involved in a lawsuit. Say, an infringement, intellectual property, or misappropriation case of some sort. Or you are suing someone else for infringement of some kind. You are probably going to have to produce web content to defend yourself. Or, if you are the plaintiff, you will need to capture the other party’s web content for litigation to prove your case.

However, the existing models for discovery do not provide all of the tools necessary to successfully archive website content and preserve continually changing and disappearing social media information. The things that make social media popular–the instant and shared nature of the communications–create new challenges for organizations concerned with preservation.

The only reasonable and defensible strategy for preserving, reviewing, and producing social media information is to capture it quickly and in such a way that you can identify changes, edits, or deleted content.

With Websites, S.O.P. is S.O.L.

The standard operating procedure for many litigators is still to preserve a copy of a web page as a PDF or other image file. We’ve talked about authenticating social media before. Unfortunately, one common problem is that many lawyers still present digital evidence in court printed out on paper. For example, in Griffin v. State, the court overturned a murder conviction at least in part over a failure to authenticate evidence obtained from a MySpace profile, which had been presented as a printout.

Accurately preserving social media is achieved through the application programming interfaces (APIs) for each social media type. Legacy approaches to discovery such as capturing screen shots or creating PDF images from browser-generated content is insufficient for accurately capturing data from social media platforms. Any attempt to collect content from social media sources must make use of APIs to pull actual data and content from the social media source, and not just collect an image or screen capture.

Capturing web and social media content means archiving a complete and forensically accurate copy of the data, or authenticating the data later becomes impossible. Nextpoint has been archiving social media for litigation since 2010. Talk to us about how to make social media discovery work in any matter.

For more information about Nextpoint’s social media and website archiving software for eDiscovery, contact us, or download our two free eBooks on Social Media Discovery:

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http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2017/01/22/information-is-everything/

Information is Everything 

For me, I exist to create information, or to improve upon it.

“Information is not only power; it’s simply everything” – Kanye West

I see “information” broadly — as articles, videos, blog posts, my genes (my future children), the words I share with others, the love I give, and the value I give to others.

In the past, those who had information had power. The textbook companies were rich, because they monopolized educational information. The publishing companies were rich, because they monopolized nonfiction information. The media companies were rich, because they owned all the entertainment information.

But today, information is everywhere. Information is free. Information is abundant.

Most people nowadays don’t value information. We treat it as something cheap and replaceable.

Avoid the noise

I think the problem of modern society is that there is too much sterile information out there. We are overwhelmed by unnecessary and inane tweets, blog posts, news reports, Instagram posts, Facebook status updates, and YouTube clips.

We are drowning in a sea of information. Information that doesn’t empower others. Information that isn’t useful to others. Information that entertains us, rather than informs us.

Signal over noise

Limit your information intake to only “signal”, not “noise.” Only intake information that empowers you, makes you more inspired, and more encouraged. Don’t consume information that makes you sterile, depressed, or frustrated.

For me, I don’t look at social media, the news, or current events. The media focuses on the sensational, the morbid, the negative, and the outlandish. 99.9% of the “news” or “information” out there is driven to catch your eyeballs, your attention, or for you to click on advertisements.

Rather, stick to wholesome information. That might be just reading books, looking at photo books, only having conversations with people who uplift you, and by also creating information that you think will help or empower others.

Share your information

Use your information for a good. Share your information. Be generous. Share your secrets, and help uplift others.

Know that your information isn’t just power; it is everything.

Humanity and society cannot grow and evolve without having the right information. And it is those who try to keep their information from us, who prevent others from being uplifted and becoming the best versions of themselves.

I know it is scary to share. We are afraid that if we share our secrets, we will somehow be put in a disadvantage. But know in life, there are no “winners” or “losers.” Life isn’t a zero-sum game. The more we help others, the more we help each other. The more we give, the more wealth and value we create for everyone. Humanity prospers; and you as an individual will prosper as well.

Always be generous with your information, but also be careful of the information you consume.

Information is everything.

Always, Eric

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But, in fact, we are all collective beings, let us place ourselves as we may. For how little have we, and are we, that we can strictly call our own property? We must all receive and learn both from those who were before us, and from those who are with us. Even the greatest genius would not go far if he tried to owe everything to his own internal self. But many very good men do not comprehend that; and they grope in darkness for half a life, with their dreams of originality. I have known artists who boasted of having followed no master, and of having to thank their own genius for everything. Fools! as if that were possible at all; and as if the world would not force itself upon them at every step, and make something of them in spite of their own stupidity. Yes, I maintain that if such an artist were only to survey the walls of this room, and cast only a passing glance at the sketches of some great masters, with which they are hung, he would necessarily, if he had any genius at all, quit this place another and a higher man. And, indeed, what is there good in us, if it is not the power and the inclination to appropriate to ourselves the resources of the outward world, and to make them subservient to our higher ends. I may speak of myself, and may modestly say what I feel. It is true that, in my long life, I have done and achieved many things of which I might certainly boast. But to speak the honest truth, what had I that was properly my own, besides the ability and the inclination to see and to hear, to distinguish and to choose, and to enliven with some mind what I had seen and heard, and to reproduce with some degree of skill. I by no means owe my works to my own wisdom alone, but to a thousand things and persons around me, who provided me with material. There were fools and sages, minds enlightened and narrow, childhood, youth, and mature age—all told me what they felt, what they thought, how they lived and worked, and what experiences they had gained; and I had nothing further to do than to put out my hand and reap what others had sown for me.

Goethe, quoted in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe (via austinkleon)

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                   Losing the Internet You Grew Up With                        

A generation raised online risks forgetting its cultural touchstones, thanks to the whims of the web.

In sixth or seventh grade, my best friend and I were obsessed with a fanfiction called “The Fellowship of the Banana Peel.” It was pretty much what it sounds like—a reimagining of The Lord of the Rings in which the One Ring is replaced by a banana peel. We printed it out and brought it to school in one of those pocketed paper folders, reading it to each other at lunch and between classes. An ongoing bit was that bananas made Elrond sick—“The smell permeates everything,” I remember him saying sadly, repeatedly, throughout the time the Fellowship was at Rivendell.

It was so stupid. It made us so happy. I can’t find it anywhere.

* * *

The Internet is a great facilitator of nostalgia. It remembers the things you’ve forgotten, and with just a little prompting can usually hand you the thing your mind was fumbling for—where do I know that actress from, or what’s that song that goes like “a chicka-cherry cola?” Instagram observes Throwback Thursday; Spotify suggests songs that were popular when you were in high school; there’s a pair of websites whose entire reason for existence is to play a 24-hour stream of old Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network shows from the 90s and 2000s.

But when you grow up with the Internet, inevitably some of the things you’re nostalgic for come from the Internet itself. The popular app Timehop recognizes this, showing the user photos and social media posts from the same date in past years. It’s not so much my tweets from five years ago that I want to revisit, though. It’s watching Teen Girl Squad cartoons on Homestarrunner.com huddled around a screen in the high school computer lab; playing Text Twist and Bubble Spinner in the suite of my college dorm, the cultural touchstones that were as much a part of being young, for me, as listening to Dashboard Confessional and watching The O.C. (And now you know exactly how old I am.)

Those things are still just a Google away. But other relics of Internet past have slipped beyond reach, like the tale of a young hobbit and the smelly banana peel he is fated to carry into Mordor. “The Internet is forever,” they say, often in warning about incriminating photos, but that’s not always true. Websites come and go as the fortunes of companies rise and fall.

Take Quizilla, for example. It was the original bastion of “What Kind of X Are You?” online quizzes (a title now held by BuzzFeed and its imitators, PlayBuzz and the like). And while people did visit the site to find out which Disney princess they were, Quizilla also became an unlikely home for fiction, fan and otherwise. The platform was not really conducive to storytelling—stories were often serialized in that people would post new quizzes for each chapter, which were usually one question long, with the “answer” just a bubble that said “click here.” Then you’d click “Go,” and end up on a results page that might be more story, or might be nothing, to the best of my recollection.

I have to rely on my recollection because Quizilla doesn’t exist anymore. It was acquired by Viacom in 2006, and lived on TeenNick.com for a while, until the site was retired in October 2014, and old Quizilla profiles and quizzes were deleted.

Some of the story quizzes were very popular—in particular, I remember one called “I’m a Girl In An All Boys Boarding School,” or as it was stylized on the site, “I'm a Girl...in an ALL BOYS BOARDING SCHOOL?!?!” It was exactly the kind of Mary Sue-ish adventure you’d imagine; the titular girl the only available object of affection for a school stocked with heterosexual boys. But it was more silly than hot-and-heavy, like if the Amanda Bynes vehicle She’s The Man had been written (without the loosely Shakespearean plot) by a teen, and in 2005, I eagerly read every installment. I don’t have numbers on how many people joined me, but it’s still possible to find forum discussions referencing the story and its author, user youandmeboth.

I was able to find the story using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but while you can read the first portion of each chapter, the quiz mechanism itself is broken, so the part of the story written in the results is forever lost. It seems like a lot of Quizilla’s still-active writers have migrated to the story-sharing website Wattpad. I tried to contact a couple of them to ask how they felt about their community being deleted, but never heard back.

Even if websites don’t disappear, they evolve. (Usually—to my great delight, Homestarrunner.com has been preserved in amber since 2000.) As a young Francophile, in early high school I frequented the chat room on a website called Polyglot, where people from different countries helped each other learn languages. It has since been rebranded “Polyglot Club” and my old account is irretrievable.

That might be for the best—whatever I would find would be embarrassing at best, horrifying at worst. This was the rationale behind deleting my old Xangas. That, and not wanting anyone I know to ever see what I thought was cool to post on the Internet when I was 14.

* * *

I think the same logic might explain the disappearance of "The Fellowship of The Banana Peel." This is my (totally speculative) theory. It was on Fanfiction.net, as I recall, a website that still exists. No amount of searching has turned it up, though I did learn that apparently, if enough time goes by, bananas will figure into Lord of the Rings fanfiction more than once. Whoever wrote the story probably just grew up, got embarrassed, and took it down.

In a way, that’s not the Internet’s fault. But in another way, it is—the paranoia of being searchable can be strong. If someone can find the obscure anime version of Thumbelina she watched as a kid on YouTube, she can probably find your old fanfiction, too.

It’s understandable. I am mostly glad I deleted my old blogs, but I do miss them a little. There was an un-self-consciousness to them that hasn’t existed in my writing since, a freedom of expression that can maybe only bloom in the brief window of adolescence. It might have started with "The Fellowship of the Banana Peel"—it wasn’t long after reading it that my friend and I started writing our own fanfiction. We weren’t worried about who would read it, or how bad it was. It just made us happy.

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Quizilla

Quizilla was an online community featuring user-generated content from teen authors. Much of its content was quiz fic and reader inserts.

 logo from website: "Penny the Pencil Monster"

"Quizilla was first released into the wild on August 4th, 2002." [2]  

When fans began to post   their fanfic at Quizilla in the form of chapters, the site added a section for fiction.

In September 2014, Quizilla announced it was shutting down on October 1.

A similar site is Quotev.

What Was Quizilla?

From its website in 2005:

Quizilla is a place to imagine, create and share great content. It started out, as the name suggests, as a place to make, take and share the results of quizzes. In its over 3 year life, it has grown beyond just quizzes. It now is a leading home on the Web for stories, poems and other user generated content. Whether you want to create, take and share quizzes, a personal journal, write poems, stories, create and share games and more. Quizilla has it all. It represents and embodies the heartbeat of today's teen spirit. [3]

The Beginning: An Announcement

Its creator announced his site on August 4, 2002:

What a concept.

A September 2, 2002 post:

Few things are more gratifying than watching HTTP_REFERER logs run past with tail(1). It's quit a cool thought to be sitting here and having people use something I made. And they keep using it, so they must actually *like* it. Wow.

From the FAQ page in 2005:

Where did you get the idea for Quizilla? The ides for Quizilla came to me when I was looking at ideas for expressing complex data structures in XML. I was mulling around the idea of a standardized format for quizzes and other things and I decided to make some CGI code to automate the idea for me. Then I decided to build more complex display layers around that core, and then I added user accounts, messages and everything else you see now. [6]

Some Stats

2003: A year after its launch, Quizilla had over 330,000 users with above 9 Million pageloads a day and more than 50 Million images used on the site.  [7]

September 2005: It has 40 servers.  [8]

2005: "On an average weekday Quizilla serves nearly 3.0 million pages, most of these involving CGI code and database access. This figure does not include images, which can often surpass 10 million daily... If you go to the homepage of Quizilla.com, you will see some basic stats in the center blue bar at the top of the page. On most days over 1,000,000 quizzes are taken, 5,000 new quizzes are created and up to 2,000 people join the site as new members."  [9]

2007:  Some forum stats from an unknown month in 2007: threads: 47,098, posts: 4,888,270, members: 184,705,active Members: 1,381, most users ever online was 673 on November 11, 2006

Follow the Money

Regarding costs and advertising:

All Internet advertising is evil, and you're just doing this to make money off the work of others! Some people think that, and maybe they would even be right to think that from a cursory perspective. People think that because they got 10 MB of free web space with their dial-up accounts that every Web site in the world should be free because theirs is. However, the unpleasant truth is that a site of any large size costs money to run, money to maintain, and money to expand.

Also see this 2007 post and comments: A look at some fandom based money numbers; archive link, partly bouncy, June 25, 2007

Bought Out and Changed

On October 16, 2006, Viacom's MTV Networks (Teen Nick) announced it had bought Quizilla for an undisclosed sum of money. [11]

After selling to TeenNick the site went from a free writing site to a PG rated site. Due to the sudden changes, a lot of the users' work was deleted, which caused a large number of people to abandon the site.

In 2014, Nielsen wrote about this:

I found out about this about a month ago via Twitter and I’ve been meaning to write something about it but could never find the right words. I hadn’t been involved with the day-to-day operation since middle/late 2009; when the economy tanked, Viacom laid off or reassigned all staff Quizilla developers. They didn’t lay me off since I was a contract employee with no guaranteed hours, but they basically said they weren’t going to give me any more work to do. As the site went to hell I tried to keep up with the dwindling number of people I still knew inside Viacom/MTV Networks. At first they had one sysadmin and a couple of "community managers” still maintaining the site. Then they dropped the sysadmin and went to one community manager with some interns. The last time I reached my fingers in, Q2 2014, I was told all that was left was someone’s AA answering the support email part-time. I didn’t expect them to axe it, actually. It was still bringing in enough page-views to turn a profit (I assume), especially since they basically had no staff. But there may have other been factors at play we don't know about, like potential liability. I haven’t heard from anyone as to why it was killed specifically. I’m sad it’s gone, but it in a big way it had died years ago but just hadn’t stopped moving. I've tried to restart/reimagine the site at least 5 times since 2009, but my own faults have smothered all my attempts all in the cradle.

Regarding the Citrus Content

A fan in 2014 asked a Reddit forum:

I wonder if teenage girls new to fan fiction know that term, or if it's specific to people who discovered fan fiction on sites like Quizilla and fanfiction.net that technically forbid pornographic scenes so teens came up with terms like lemons to get around the filters but let others know what was going down in their fanfic. [14]

xunker/Nielsen replied:

No bones about it, Quizilla had a problem with that kind of content. I dutifully removed it when it was reported or automatically flagged, but if nobody reported it or they used words I didn't know about, well.. let's just say that I, 24 years old at the time, was regularly being outsmarted by 14-year-olds. I think I learned what it meant when someone sent me a message asking me to "please get rid of all these lemon stories!" Thankfully, when I naively asked them what they didn't like about that particular citrus fruit they explained it all to me. Thus, an arms race started: when I started automatically flagging quizzes if the title contained "lemon", they switched to "L3m0n". Then to "nomel", "lemonade", "limon", "lémón" and a dozen others I can't remember anymore.

Why Was This Format Popular for Fanworks?

In 2014, a fan at

Reddit

asked:

To this day I still don't understand why people would write fanfiction on a site whose specific purpose is quizzes when there are fanfiction-specific sites around! Why would you want your fanfiction cluttered up with question numbers and checkboxes and submit buttons? When it wasn't even a choose your own adventure story? [16]

xunker, the site's creator, replied:

However, that being said, they're one of the biggest reasons Quizilla stayed around for as long as it did. Quizzes were fun, and people would spend hours taking them but not many people wanted to spend the time to make a really good quiz. But stories... people would gladly spend weeks writing stories and building their little worlds. Part of me thinks that the users didn't really understand the quiz mechanism and so they thought it was a choose-your-own-adventure-type thing but it really wasn't. Or maybe they did, but just in a different way that I don't realize. A big reason, in the beginning, was the laissez-faire attitude toward customization. Early on, the users figured out how to put CSS and JS in to quizzes and the system fully accepted it, unlike many other user-generated-content sites at the time.

Penny the Pencil Monster!

Comments by Nielsen:

From the site's FAQ, around 2003 and again, in 2005: "That logo, the No. 2 with green arms and legs, is "Penny" the Quizilla pencil monster. When the site first launched I needed a logo to identify the site quickly, but I have no artistic skill when it comes to drawing. Instead, I loaded up a graphics program and clicked out a peculiar little image dot by dot in super zoom mode. It's not very good, but I've grown attached to it."  [18]

From Nielsen's online journal, January 2, 2008:  "Big things are happening at the old Quizilla site, most of which are really due and I'm excited for, though with this new message posted there are more than a few complaints. My favourites? Look for all the people complaining about the loss of the Pencil Monster.. the logo I did in 20 minutes with the Gimp oh so long ago."  -- The Pencil is mightier.. - xunker, Archived version </ref>

Comments by fans:

"Whoever created Penny the pencil monster was a genius." [19]

"I pretty much blame the way I grew up on this little monster..." [20]

a fan commemorates "Penny the Pencil Monster" -- "If you remember the old days on quizilla then this is a familiar mascot that they should not have gotten rid of which is by far one of the best mascots ever." [21]

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10 Deathbed Regrets You Can Avoid by Making Changes Now By George Mortimer

10 Deathbed Regrets You Can Avoid by Making Changes Now

10 Deathbed Regrets You Can Avoid by Making Changes Now

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” ~Leonardo Da

Vinci

It’s terrifying, isn’t it?

There you are—days, hours, maybe minutes remain in your life. You lie there helpless, searching

for the strength to say your last goodbyes.

You look back on your life. All the things you wish you’d done differently.

As you continue to reminisce an overwhelming emotion comes rushing in, an emotion many are

familiar with.

Regret.

You set the standards high for yourself. But now that it’s all said and done, more was always

said than done.

There’s no greater fear than leaving this world with our most important goals unfinished. Yet,

with never ending hopes and dreams are we destined to live an incomplete life of mediocrity?

Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way. A New Perspective & Why You Should Burn Your Bucket List

It’s human nature to desire more. No matter how much we accomplish, we’re wired to create new

objectives to pursue.

For most of my upbringing, I was obsessed with bucket lists. Mine had over 100 things I wanted

to do. Anytime I managed to cross one off the list, I’d add ten more.

The process was never ending and doomed for failure.

During this time my grandfather passed away. It happened so fast I never got to say goodbye. It

was my first experience of how quickly life comes and goes.

I started thinking about when my time would come. Would it matter what my bucket list looked

like on my deathbed?

So I threw it out. Instead of thinking of what I wanted to do with my life, I started focusing

on things I didn’t want to say about myself when it was time for me to go.

That I was greedy, angry, or rude. That I didn’t care about others, or even myself.

Death is scary. We can’t change that. But we have a chance to live fully right now—and we can do

that by ensuring we don’t have to say these things at the end. 1. I didn’t take care of my body.

Your time will come much faster if you don’t take care of yourself.

Smoking, excessive drinking, compulsive eating, sitting for too long—all these add up over time.

Continuing bad habits encourages rapid aging and brings you closer to your final days.

You can buy another car, a new house, and find another job, but you only get one body.

If you want an abundance of breathtaking moments, you need a body that’s ready for the long

haul. 2. I let anger get the best of me.

Anger is a natural emotion. We all experience it, and at times it’s perfectly justifiable. But

we do ourselves a disservice if we let anger control us and sabotage our relationships.

One of the best ways to address anger is to empathize with others and to understand why they did

what they did.

Being proactive and reflecting on the times you’re angry helps you to get to the root of what’s

bothering you, allowing you to move on and go back to being happy. 3. I spent my entire life in my comfort zone.

There’s no bigger waste of your time than doing the same thing over and over waiting for

something exciting to happen.

Nothing exciting will happen if you don’t get out there and make something happen.

Escaping the confinement of comfort is a struggle for anyone at first.

But when you’re looking at your life as a whole, you’ll be proud if you don’t have to say the

most unease you felt was choosing what to watch on Netflix to waste the night away. 4. I spent too much time around toxic people.

There comes a time when you must face the reality that not everyone you spend your time with is

actually benefitting your well-being.

People change, family members bring you down, and certain people just aren’t fun to be around.

If you want to make the most of your time, it’s essential you minimize your time with people who

drain you emotionally, disrespect you, or otherwise treat your poorly.

If you think it’s rude to dismiss someone, look at it this way: When you stop spending time with

people who aren’t positive additions to your life, you open yourself up to relationships with

people who will uplift and support you. 5. I didn’t stay in touch with family and friends.

The other end of the spectrum is the people we love.

Humans are biologically social creatures. We’re meant to be around others, especially the ones

we care about most. There’s no sense in fighting the nature of humans because you’re too busy at

the office.

If this doesn’t seem pressing to you now, know that it may one day feel that way, when they’re

gone and you realize you didn’t show them how much you loved them. 6. I didn’t give as much as I took.

It’s easy to forget that nothing tangible comes with us after we die.

Once we’re gone, that’s it. Whatever you have gets left behind. So why do we spend valuable

years of our lives taking rather than giving?

Money is always the first to come to mind. I’m not suggesting we give it all away, but I’ve

never met someone who was proud to say that all they did with their life was pad their bank

account.

Life is about giving and sharing experiences. The more you give, the happier you’ll be. 7. I thought I knew everything.

People often assume that after graduating from high school or college, they know everything.

But the truth is when you stop learning, you stop growing.

Since the beginning of our existence humans have been explorers, venturing to the corners of the

world and into space to discover more about life.

Constant learning allows us to discover new things about ourselves and the world, and our

experiences teach us things that could never be taught in a classroom.

Looking at the bigger picture, we don’t know anything. And that’s exactly what makes life so

exciting. 8. I never made any mistakes.

It seems counterintuitive to wish for failure, but our mistakes are what allow us to grow.

The point isn’t to make as many mistakes as possible, but to learn from our mistakes.

Every great revelation, invention, or revolution started with hundreds of mistakes before it,

until one miracle made it all worth it.

It’s not so much mistakes that matter, but having the courage to make them. 9. I hated my job.

Accepting the nine to five and secure paycheck. Two weeks vacation for fifty weeks of slavery.

Accumulating debt on house loans, car payments, and credit cards. Add on the responsibility of

supporting your family, and it may seem you’ll be trapped forever.

If you don’t enjoy your job now, that’s okay; many feel the same. But if by the time you lay on

your deathbed you still hate it and never left, that’s a problem.

You won’t want to look back and say you took the easy route and played it safe, accepting that

you were never supposed to do anything meaningful with your life.

Leaving a job is scary, especially when raising a family. It doesn’t mean you should quit today,

but implementing an exit plan toward a career you actually do enjoy will relieve yourself from

years of misery. 10. I spent my entire life trying to be someone else.

It’s become the norm to follow the crowd, adapt to the trends, and accept what everyone else is

doing and join in.

By doing this you never encounter the person you really are because you’ve been camouflaged by

the identity of society.

Taking time to understand yourself is life changing. It allows you to gather a clear picture of

what you want to accomplish during your short time on Earth.

You learn the things you love about yourself and things you might want to change. And most

important, you understand what makes you unique and how your uniqueness can help you leave the

world a better place than you found it.

One Last Thing

In the end, you’ll likely reflect on the things you didn’t do. As I said before, it’s human

nature.

But avoiding certain things, such as not taking care of myself and living in my comfort zone,

has brought more happiness to my life than a bucket list ever could.

It doesn’t matter if you swim with sharks, travel to every country, and take the first ride of

space tourism; what matters is how you live your life, how well you take care of yourself, and

how well you take care of others.

This is your life, and you only get one. There’s no right or wrong way to live it.

What matters is that you do.

[thedrakontomes]

Little mermaid by melaniedelon

I’m researching mermaids atm for future stories i hope to write. here’s a link to my Pinterest board of mermaid pix and history links

https://www.pinterest.com/LunaEnyaDrakon/mermaid/