A new series of short-form posts: the Elephant Memory Systems entries

An Elephant Memory Systems 5¼″ floppy disk from my archives

Last week I was looking through my archive of 5¼″ floppies and stumbled on a bunch of disks made by this brand, Elephant Memory Systems. These were the first blank floppies I purchased back in the 1980s to use with my Commodore 64. When I last checked their contents in 2018, they were all still accessible. (That tagline, “Never forgets”, may be on to something).

This gave me an idea… for this blog.

Some blogs (like mine) only feature long-form articles. Others have link posts (frequent) interspersed with articles (less frequent). Others mix everything up: articles, links, and all social media status (micro blog). The latter is the kind I like less; they’re too chaotic, at times hard to navigate given the sheer amount of status updates, a mess to follow via RSS.

Some of my articles have been expansions of notes and observations I first shared on Mastodon. But, looking back, I remember some interesting impromptu threads that lasted a few posts, got insightful replies, and then nothing came out of it.

So my idea is this: from now on, any worthwhile thread I write on Mastodon that doesn’t get expanded into a full article on this blog will nonetheless be preserved here as a short-form Elephant Memory Systems entry — EMS for short. (Note the obvious connection Mastodon → Elephant). Where relevant, I will also include the most interesting replies I received in the original Mastodon thread. If they come from private accounts and I think they’re worth sharing, I will ask permission to do so.

In my opinion, this would add a bit of variety to the blog, and slightly increase the frequency I update it, without the mess of having my blog turned into a micro-blog with all my status updates mirrored here.

Those who closely follow me on Mastodon wouldn’t find nothing really new in these updates, but it could be useful to me, for future reference, and to readers of this blog that don’t follow me on social media.

This post is itself the result of a thread I posted on Mastodon a week ago.

Commentary

F.P. (via email): Not only do I find the name appropriate, I also like the connection to the old floppy format. If your regular articles as a whole constitute the ‘hard drive’ of your blog, these shorter additions can be like its collection of floppies…

While the context should make this obvious enough, I’ll nonetheless state that the reference to the name “Elephant Memory Systems” simply originates from happenstance and nostalgia. It’s merely a label I decided to use to indicate a type of short-form post whose idea started as a Mastodon thread.

This was EMS entry №000. See the EMS tag for more short-form posts of this kind.