At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book—one page at a time, by hand.

3 years ago by AnActOfCreation to c/mildlyinteresting

ech 149 points 3 years ago

WHY do people think everything needs to be cropped to hell just to fit on their phone. The screen rotates. Just twist it around ya lazy bastards.

Anyhow, here's a link to the full size video that isn't pointlessly cut down by 75%: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QThaHpkFVzw

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the_third 15 points 3 years ago

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AnActOfCreation 15 points 3 years ago

This video comes from the official Internet Archive TikTok page. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse lol!

https://www.tiktok.com/...

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ech 6 points 3 years ago

Explains its existence at least.

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0xD -1 points 3 years ago

The video contains all necessary information and you don't need to turn your phone. I don't see a problem here.

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Fades 3 points 3 years ago

You could say the same thing about a video recording of a pc monitor. Yeah all the necessary stuff is there but you also lose a lot may it be quality or just more pixels which give greater context to the video by showing more of the actual recording

With the full size recording you can see more of the machine which is part of the main subject so it’s not just meaningless data/context either

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ech 2 points 3 years ago

Ok. Good luck with that.

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PipedLinkBot 7 points 3 years ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=QThaHpkFVzw

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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Fades 5 points 3 years ago

I’m with you but it’s not about being lazy, just like shit audio being on most videos these days this is yet another symptom of tiktok bullshit.

Videos with shit sounds get more traction and tiktok wants every video to be scrollable without havin to turn your phone and shit so the result is trash like this getting pumped out which ruins the actual video content

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Ghostalmedia -1 points 3 years ago

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GBU_28 -28 points 3 years ago

Why care? In a second I'll leave this video and never think of it again. The key point is conveyed, and we are all done.

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ech 59 points 3 years ago

Because someone went out of their way to mutilate a video for no reason, so I'm gonna go out of my way to make it right. Just because you can't be bothered to care doesn't mean everyone else is just like you.

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GBU_28 -21 points 3 years ago

This isn't a "significant" video. By any standard. Digest the information and move on. Doing otherwise is fist fighting the waves on the beach.

Most importantly, the purpose and message of the video is conveyed.

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ech 24 points 3 years ago

Thankfully, you don't get to decide what other people consider "significant". I'll spend my time how I want, thanks.

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brbposting -22 points 3 years ago

Wouldn’t it be great to have it dynamic based on device?

Anyway, everyone’ll have to get off our lawn.

For the average world netizen…

…OP’s is the desirable format.

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v81 33 points 3 years ago

Here I am on my phone. I do not desire this format. And nothing you have posted suggests that anyone wants this format.

All it shows is device, not preference.

Anytime something is recorded wide screen my wish is that it remains in that format, regardless of platform I am on.

If I'm on my phone it takes less than half a second to rotate my screen and view as intended, on my desktop I can't do that.

Also in this case quite a bit of the original was lost, seeing the YouTube version is much better.

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Couldbealeotard 2 points 3 years ago

You don't understand the data. That data has nothing to do with what video format people prefer.

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Grumpydaddy 88 points 3 years ago

Looks like two pages at a time to me.

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xor 24 points 3 years ago

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Grumpydaddy 42 points 3 years ago

One Sheet, Two Pages A sheet of paper has two sides. Each side is considered one page. So a single sheet of unfolded paper is two pages.

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RecallMadness 4 points 3 years ago

One sheet, two leaves, four pages.

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A7thStone 18 points 3 years ago

Is that why each sheet of paper has the same page number on both sides in books? Oh wait they don't.

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xor 2 points 3 years ago

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metallic_substance 1 point 3 years ago

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vynlwombat 8 points 3 years ago

Gotem

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Vex_Detrause 2 points 3 years ago

c/theydidthemath /s

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guyrocket 59 points 3 years ago

Thank you, Internet Archive.

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Thorned_Rose 53 points 3 years ago

Please remember to make a donation to the Internet Archive for the invaluable work they do!

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Ohi 44 points 3 years ago

We so appreciate your efforts, but ya'll need more funding so you can start working smart and not hard. From the looks of things, I see no reason why page flips can't be automated there.

I just made a donation. Please use it to save this poor woman from the tedious task you've shown us today.

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IndefiniteBen 42 points 3 years ago

I think this is one of those things that seems like it should be easy to automate, but actually has lots of hidden complexity.

They probably don't use this to scan commonly available books, because for those you can just cut the spine off the book and scan the pages in a regular scanner.

This is likely used for books that need to be preserved and can't be damaged during the scanning process.

How do you make a machine that will always turn exactly one page and never tear a page, while adapting for different page sizes and thicknesses, and avoiding the static charge that can make pages stick together? All for less money than it costs to pay people to operate this machine.

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droans 10 points 3 years ago

Iirc they did experience with automation before and did get it to copy well...

But like you said, it would damage books pretty frequently. That's not what you'd want for old and fragile materials which are rather irreplaceable.

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0xD 2 points 3 years ago

Vacuum!

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activ8r 13 points 3 years ago

We should start doing charity style TV ads.

"You, too, can help us build page turners and save the lives of dozens of archivists. Just £2 a month will allow Margaret to finally rest."

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theRealBassist 2 points 3 years ago

Man I got some friends who are archivists, and they'd love that shit lol.

They love their field, but it's a lot of mind-numbing work

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pearsaltchocolatebar 9 points 3 years ago

I'd just use a bandsaw to cut off the spine and stick it in a document feeder.

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Gloomy 38 points 3 years ago

Leave that poor woman alone you psycho!

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antonim 13 points 3 years ago

If the book is not that easily available (old, rare), it's much better to keep it intact.

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Hereforpron2 1 point 3 years ago

This must be how you get "binders full of women"

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Wistful 30 points 3 years ago

Wow that seems painfully slow/tedious. Why isn't it automatized? I think I saw a robot do like 20 pages a second on a yt some years ago.

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aeronmelon 47 points 3 years ago

Do you remember the results of those speed scans? Crooked pages, parts of the document cut off, blurry scans, etc.

It was a lazy method that resulted in a lot of junk data.

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Wistful 21 points 3 years ago

I think this is what I saw. Not quite 20 pages/s hahah and also a different method.

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PipedLinkBot 4 points 3 years ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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Dave 15 points 3 years ago

Google have digitised a lot of books using some more advanced tech, though they started out with something a little like this.

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cashews_best_nut 4 points 3 years ago

What happened to that in the end? I heard they wanted to digitize the worlds books and then it just petered out at some point and heard nothing about it. Did they continue or was it spun to Internet Archive to do?

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Dave 3 points 3 years ago

My understanding is the project led into Google Books. Google fought many legal cases and ultimately won but their enthusiasm to scan more books seems to have waned. Google basically convinced judges that by only letting people see a few pages, it fell under fair use, but then that meant you didn't get a giant library because you couldn't read the whole book.

There's an article about it here: https://www.edsurge.com/...

Also see https://www.hathitrust.org/about/ which is mentioned in the article.

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prenatal_confusion 8 points 3 years ago

That would be interesting to see!

This is probably the method that gives you the best quality (deskewing, lighting) without cutting the back of the book and feeding it into a scanner. (AFAIK)

I saw a book scanner similar to this one that used a vacuum to turn pages but otherwise same principle.

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AlmightySnoo 24 points 3 years ago

There are DIY tutorials for that for those interested: https://www.diybookscanner.org/en/intro.html

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Pantoffel 5 points 3 years ago

This is awesome, thanks!

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brbposting 19 points 3 years ago

Do you really work there?

If so… We love you.

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Bravebellows 19 points 3 years ago

There should be a law that should any book go out of print, to be digitized and made available online. Publishers shouldn't dictate which books are allowed to be consumed once they allow it out of print when digital versions cost next to nothing to make available for a nominal price.

That goes for authors owning the copyright, as well.

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echindod 10 points 3 years ago

And limited to 25 years. This 100 years is bull shit.

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indomara 16 points 3 years ago

Today I learned that firefox doesn't like to play certain types of mp4 files. I also learned that you can copy a video link and paste it into VLC media player and it will play!

Watching these books being archived is amazing, I would love to do this!

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papalonian 10 points 3 years ago

I also learned that you can copy a video link and paste it into VLC media player and it will play!

You can also use this trick to download YouTube videos without the need of a 3rd party website!

Copy the URL of the YouTube video you wanna download
VLC / Media / Open network stream... And paste your URL
Once the video has opened, Tools / Media Information
Copy the URL in the "Location" field and paste it into your web browser, you should have the option to save the video

It's a couple of steps but once you memorize what you need to do it's a million times faster (and I'd wager equally times as private) than finding one of those websites to give you a link.

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imecth 4 points 3 years ago

or just use youtube-dl
edit: here's an electron gui wrapper: youtube-dl-gui

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kamiheku 7 points 3 years ago

Yes! Though yt-dlp has been the preferred fork for a good while now. yt-dlg is a nice GUI that supports downloading with the fork.

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indomara 1 point 3 years ago

Neat! I figured out accidentally that you don't have to do step 2, you can just open VLC and ctrl+v!

I am downloading a test video now, thanks that's very cool!

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papalonian 2 points 3 years ago

Nice, step 3 can also be accomplished with CTRL-I, at least on the windows version of VLC

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indomara 1 point 3 years ago

Amazing! I showed my husband last night, he was equally amazed. :)

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eerongal 6 points 3 years ago

MP4 is just a container, the specific audio/video streams can be one of several different codecs, and if you don't have the codec used it won't work. If you can identify the encoding you could probably just download a codec and be good to go.

Edit: for this video the video codec is

Codec: MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265) (hvc1)

and audio codec is

Codec: MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a)

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indomara 2 points 3 years ago

The more I read about this, the more confused I am! Near as I can tell, Mozilla refuses to support H.265 because it is "encumbered by patents". Is that right?

https://developer.mozilla.org/...

There are a few other places that mention the same... and I don't know of a reputable place to download codecs.

However people in this thread say they are viewing this video in Firefox just fine! o_O

Edit: I downloaded the HEVC codec from the Microsoft store and it has had no effect. (Feel no obligation to reply, at this point I am just lost!)

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eerongal 2 points 3 years ago

Yeah, firefox doesnt support H.265 it looks like from some googling. Not exactly sure how other people are getting it to work, but it does look like there's some extensions for firefox to toss the media streams to VLC instead, that could work for you.

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MonkderZweite 2 points 3 years ago

Today I learned that firefox doesn't like to play certain types of mp4 files.

Probably missing a few dll's or something, works fine for me.

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indomara 2 points 3 years ago

I tried googling and came up with nothing other than articles suggesting I delete my cookies and update firefox. If you know what dll's I should check please let me know! :)

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MonkderZweite 3 points 3 years ago

Depends on your OS and the alignment of Venus with the moon. For Linux, there's Archwiki, sacrifice a lamb few bytes for good measure.

It's usually something with media acceleration not set up yet. I believe i had to install the amdgpu-32bit driver first, before it worked? (oc only if you have amdgpu)

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_sideffect 15 points 3 years ago

Kids in university watching this: 😯

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MonkderZweite 13 points 3 years ago

Automatic page turners are unreliable?

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blazeknave 9 points 3 years ago

May I bring my son to visit? I know it's typically only for events. He will crack up at the statues and be underwhelmed by the two racks containing the entire Internet.

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emptyother 8 points 3 years ago

How do you reliably turn pages that fast without accidentally grabbing two pages and skipping? Im impressed!

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intensely_human 7 points 3 years ago

Meditation practice helps with this kind of thing.

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KnightontheSun 3 points 3 years ago

That and your king fu skills as you travel the west in the search for your family’s roots.

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intensely_human 2 points 3 years ago

It definitely improves your kung fu. But meditation really only activates super small refinements. You gotta build the kung fu before there’s anything for the meditation to sharpen.

Basically it increases the resolution of your sensory streams. I mean, that’s the lowest-level effect of all that time spent focusing on the streaming present.

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RizzRustbolt 2 points 3 years ago

Tacky-Finger.

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yamanii 8 points 3 years ago

I don't often donate since it's mostly in USD, but internet archive was one of the few that I did.

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Sensitivezombie 7 points 3 years ago

Ah, this takes me back to my college times when I scanned textbooks one page at a time at the library because I couldn't afford to buy one and renting a book was scarce

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Blackmist 7 points 3 years ago

Firefox: Video can't be played because the file is corrupt.

Chrome: Plays audio only.

Why are we hosting things on such shonky shit?

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AnActOfCreation 12 points 3 years ago

What OS are you on? The video plays fine for me in Firefox on both Windows and Android.

Also I think the codec is more likely to blame than the hosting provider.

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Blackmist 5 points 3 years ago

Windows 10.

When I download it I can play it in VLC, and according to MediaInfo HEVC encoding.

Is HEVC support not included by default? Chrome should support it, and Firefox shouldn't support it at all according to the compatibility charts.

Maybe there's some site bullshittery going on and the site is giving out different versions of the file to different people based on region or something. The file it gives me is 2,661,216 bytes. Is that what you get?

Edit: Works in Edge, although feel like I now have to go wash my hands after firing that up.

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AnActOfCreation 5 points 3 years ago

Ok I take it back. It plays in Firefox on Android, but not on Windows. Also on Android, it didn't play at first, I had to refresh. I don't know what's going on lol.

I kinda doubt catbox.moe is doing any kind of smart distribution. It's a pretty simple file hosting site.

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Blackmist 4 points 3 years ago

Found it. My Chrome has "Hardware-accelerated video decode" disabled. Apparently there's no software fall back there, so it just claims no knowledge of them.

Kind of sucks that Firefox can't play them, something to do with licensing.

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jenny_ball 1 point 3 years ago

hevc support is not default

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Fades 5 points 3 years ago

Shockingly, it plays for me (both a/v) on iOS (in the voyager app)

There is no audio outside of the sound of pages turning and the machine beeping in between so you aren’t missing much in this case

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Zink 2 points 3 years ago

🤘🏻 Voyager app!

I checked and it works fine for me too. In voyager, obviously.

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athaki 6 points 3 years ago

Reminds me of the hours I've spent scanning in articles from print journals for interlibrary loan.

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BeMoreCareful 6 points 3 years ago

Why not run the spine through a table saw and just use a regular document feeder?

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aeronmelon 40 points 3 years ago

I think they actually want to keep the book.

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SinningStromgald 26 points 3 years ago

Sometimes books are valuable so cutting them into bits so they can go on the Internets faster isn't feasible.

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nonailsleft -2 points 3 years ago

In 10 years you can just reprint the book by molecule so why bother

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ColdWater 2 points a month ago

This comment didn't age well

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BeMoreCareful 1 point a month ago

True that. In my defense, I was envisioning overpriced text books destined for landfills not priceless works.

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SayJess 2 points 3 years ago

That is really cool!

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lemmy 2 points 3 years ago

Can't you ask the book company for a pdf?

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ItsAFake -3 points 3 years ago

Could of cleaned the glass before filming.

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simonced 16 points 3 years ago

Could have checked your grammar before commenting...

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ItsAFake -2 points 3 years ago

Could've but didn't.

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Arthur_Leywin 1 point 3 years ago

Based

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mildlyinteresting

@lemmy.world

This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

go to feed...

mildlyinteresting

@lemmy.world

This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

go to feed...