Digital Dark Age

I’m a millennial. I grew up with a photographer mom who took beautiful photos of me throughout my childhood, I'm from the last generation to have photo albums. Eventually we stopped printing pictures, and I remember the day she sold her analog camera. My teenage years were documented on digital cameras and flip phones. I always had pretty decent cameras. From around the age of 15 to 25, I saved all my photos on an external hard drive. One day, the thing broke. And I didn’t have any backups.
I had many more photos scattered across blogs, MySpace and forgotten websites, but those disappeared too. What’s left are fragments. Every now and then I come across a random low-quality image, or someone sends me a photo they found. I suffer of very bad memory so it feels like there’s this huge gap in my life, an entire decade that survives in bits and pieces. This week I was hunting for music on my old collections, and found a CD that I had burned with photos from one particular summer. I was 16 and it was my first time going camping with friends on a music festival. That summer must have been special because I decided to burn all those photos onto a disc. It’s the only CD I ever made with photos. Opening it was very emotional. Not just because of the memories, but because this small plastic disc preserved something that my hard drive, websites and social media didn’t. And I didn't learn my lesson. I actually have another external drive where I’ve been saving all my photos since 2018. I'm just trusting it and still don’t have proper backups. I don’t believe in the cloud. It’s strange to think that the technology we were told was replacing physical media turned out to be so fragile.
So... what historians a hundred years from now will find? Every generation leaves traces. Letters, diaries, newspapers, photographs, books. Ours has produced more images and text than any generation before it, yet so much of it lives on data centers, locked inside proprietary formats, abandoned social networks, broken hard drives, forgotten passwords.
And this is not just about photos. I'm talking about writings and work too. At the same time, we're witnessing something deeply ironic. As our own digital memories disappear, physical books are being bought in bulk, scanned by AI companies and discarded. The book, mind you, at some point in my life was considered obsolete, has become valuable again - not as an object to preserve or read, but as raw material for machines.
Tomorrow I'm grabbing a stack of virgin CDs :)

CyberErotica 90s Archive

Future Sex came out during the rise of the internet in the 1990s, it explored how technology, sexuality, and digital culture started defining the future of human intimacy. Articles on cybersex, virtual reality, online relationships, and futuristic fantasies, the magazine captured the excitement and sometimes the naivety of a world on the edge of the digital revolution. Today, it's a fascinating time capsyle of the 2000s optimism, with bold graphic design and predictions that range from surprisingly accurate to delightfully outdated. You can flip through all editions on archive.org, my favorite might be issue n2.

For those interested in vintage erotica and cyberculture, Future Sex is so inspiring, it offers a perspective on how people imagined desire in the digital age, making it an essential piece of the 1990s print culture.

Happy Pride!!!

This week on my radio show 100PUDOR @ East Side Radio, you can listen to 2 hours of grrl & gay punk:

I'm into this btw

Thank You for Not Breeding (1993) is a campaign by artist, musician, and programmer Chris Korda and the Church of Euthanasia. Through posters, stickers and public interventions, the project used dark humor and provocative slogans to question overpopulation, consumerism, and humanity's impact on the planet, becoming an icon of underground counterculture.
Performance art + environmental activism + media prank? Depending on who's watching, Thank You for Not Breeding can be offensive or funny, keeping conversations that are still relevant today.

Link added

I've added a link to the LGBTI+ movement archive, compiled by activist Sérgio Vitorino. This incredible collection spans over 40 years and includes press clippings, photographs, publications, zines, posters, and other materials that document the history of LGBTI+ activism in Portugal since the 1970s. Made available by the Hemeroteca Digital de Lisboa, so you can look into the struggles, milestones and communities that shaped the movement. Check it out for research, education, or personal interest.
Pic included here is from the magazine "Fenda".

Update!!!

Listening to: Lydia Lunch - Queen of Siam (album) Today I was checking out dead sites on the old internet archive and found mine from 2003 when I was just 11 years old. It was so fun to go back to the past! I spent the rest of the day just experimenting again with this little space, working on my HTML and navigating cool sites!! So the website is finally finished, I created a few pages including the •Scanner• page with a selection of untouched files from my own Scans folder. Many more ideas to come! :-)

Avoiding my phone

100% seduced by this article: Tiny phone, big change. How ditching my iPhone helped me re-awaken.

OBSESSED WITH YOU

Listening to: The Cure - Why Can't I Be You (song)

You turn my head when you turn around
You turn the whole world upside down
I'm smitten I'm bitten I'm hooked I'm cooked
I'm stuck like glue!
You make me
Make me hungry for you

Restart

A scorching Monday at the start of Summer 2025 threw me straight back to my teenager bedroom, when summer meant unlimited computer time. Through my early teens, I spent so many days indoors building blogs and making fan graphics. I lived on LiveJournal, Photoblog, Myspace... The internet is a completely different place now. I missed having a space that felt like it was truly just mine. So I decided to restart my little corner of the web!