I've been consuming a ton of media about the world wars lately. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of historical fiction, records, memoires, and documentaries. But so far, very few things have come close to painting a cohesive picture.

Most of it focuses on hot spots like Verdun, Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk, Normandy, the haulocaust, the atomic bomb, enigma, u-boats, the luftwaffe, Stalingrad... And I can see why. Even on a microcosm level, the conditions of the stories are unimaginable.

The issue I'm having is that I feel like our cultural memory of these events his been eroded over time. We have these impressions of what we think it was like, but not an overarching understanding of the complex series of events throughout the 20th century. We have an overabundance of records, photographs, film, and documentation in general, but maybe it's the overabundance that makes the digestion such an insurmountable undertaking.

What are your experiences with studying this time period? How do you feel about the quality of your understanding? And finally, do you have any recommendations for myself and others?

Online/digital bookmarking and excerpting is something that really interests me because I think most if not all existing options for it fall very short of the functionality I wish existed, and that I think could exist.

One of the first online bookmarking services I used was Delicious, and for a few years it was irreplaceable for me. However it languished after it was bought by Yahoo and then resold, and since then I’ve observed its slow and steady decline from afar.

The purpose of this post is twofold:

1. I want to know the current state of online bookmarking for you. I’m curious to know if it’s as much of an unmet need in anyone else’s life as it seems to be in mine.
   • Were you once a bookmarker and gave up due to the seeming futility of it?
   • Have you never been interested in bookmarking and/or don’t see the point of it?
   • Are you an active bookmarker, and if so what tools or workflows do you use, and what kinds of content do you bookmark?
2. I thought I would share some of the research I did into Delicious’ various design iterations over the years via the Internet Archive. It’s a cool birds-eye survey of how the service’s ethos, goals and design changed over time. Beyond the value it provides as a case study, I think there are greater lessons and insights that can be gained from observing the rise and fall of what was once such a beloved online service.
   • del.icio.us | 16 September 2005
   • del.icio.us | 20 December 2005
   • del.icio.us | 11 October 2006
   • Delicious.com | 11 May 2011
   • Delicious.com | 27 November 2011
   • Delicious.com | 12 May 2012
   • Delicious.com | 30 August 2012
   • Delicious.com | 14 October 2013
   • The period between 2013 and 2016 seems to be one endless loading screen from the archive’s perspective
   • Delicious.com | 15 March 2016
   • At some point in 2016, they went back to their original domain name – del.icio.us | 14 May 2016

As a sidenote, I also found this explanation of Delicious' approach to tagging to be very interesting: del.icio.us/help/tags | 21 February 2006

I hadn't realized that Delicious was actually the first to introduce the concept of user-controlled tags for bookmarks:

When Delicious was first launched, it was the first use of the term "tag" in the modern sense, and it was the first explicit opportunity where website users were given the ability to add their own tags to their bookmarks so that they could more easily search for them at a later time. This major breakthrough was not much noticed as most thought the application at the time "cool" but obvious. – Source

Edit: I hope it's alright to edit a post this many hours after having submitted it. There were a few important updates that I really wanted to include here.

“My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.”

― James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/504662-my-sweet-little-whorish-nora-i-did-as-you-told