/dear-future-readers

time capsule for the arctic code vault

MIT LicenseMIT

Dear future readers

On February 2, 2020, a carbon copy of every public repository on GitHub will be captured and preserved in a decommissioned coal mine in the Svalbard archipelago, closer to the North Pole than the Arctic Circle. While most repositories on GitHub are set up for code versioning, this one is meant as a message to those who eventually recover it from the permafrost.

Notes

  • At the time of writing, my location is 52.481844, 13.452864 in the southeast of Berlin, Germany.
  • I was born in 1991 in a small town in the west of Germany and grew up speaking German, though these days I happen to be bilingual via and communicating mostly in English through work and social circles. I was also taught Spanish, French and Latin in school, but most of that has regressed.
  • My biggest aspirations in life are to express myself thoroughly and with no compromise through creation, to sustain healthy and meaningful habits that lead to happiness and self-fulfillment, to treat myself and others kindly, to foster creativity, fun and fulfillment in others, to wait and smell the flowers, to play.
  • Since I was a teenager, I have been struggling with mental health issues, hypothyroidism and a generally high-maintenance immune system, which I am all writing up to poor DNA.
  • My professional work revolves around visual design - I help create video games in a small team, functioning as a graphic designer, illustrator. I do many things, but at the bottom of my heart I am a person who enjoys it the most to create things that are of use to people, that make them laugh, and bring them together.
  • I enjoy good food, coffee (a brewed drink prepared from roasted coffee beans, the seeds of berries from certain Coffea species), drawing little doodles, reading, listening to podcasts (a sort-of on-demand radio series, though severely more informal), playing games, physical exercise, companionship, comedy, lists and collections of things, manuals, charts, diagrams, the ocean, travel, tattoos (a form of body modification in which ink is inserted permanently into deeper layers of the skin), typography, writing in lowercase (though I'm making an exception for the sake of future legibility), art and music.
  • Is it cold where you are? Climate here is temperate and marine. Cold winters follow warm summers, things are relatively mild. In recent years, the human population has become increasingly aware of climate change (i.e. the average temperature on earth rising), with masses of activists demanding change from industrial and political leaders, though plenty of those are still denying its existence.
  • Just to confirm it on the record: as far as the public is concerned, we have not made contact with extraterrestrial / cosmic / demonic species, and capitalism still is the name of the game.
  • Despite considerable relative progress in social rights, humanism and global interconnectedness, there is a staggering amount of hate, violence and harmful ideology present in all aspects of life. We're working on it, but I am increasingly sympathetic towards the general attitude of can't wait to die.
  • I'm assuming that even if you're reading this hundreds or thousands of years after I wrote it, memes are still going to be a thing. For you, in the future, is it still funny if a person slips on a banana peel? Do bananas still exist?

Yours, -dom

How to use

Feel free to use this repository as a starting point / inspiration for your own dormant time capsule.

References