I've known Ms.Koda for over 25 years. Not surprising, we were both members of a club for citizen archivist. What is a citizen archivist you ask? It's a person, not affiliated with a library or scholarly institution who maintains or is interested in maintaining a personal archive. Think "special interest". One member had a collection of over 500 Japanese matchboxes from 1938-1962. Another member curates a collection of American motel postcards. Cyan and I fell into the "interested" category when we met.
I dabbled in archiving. I started collecting tea canisters, tea ads, tea boxes and while I loved the designs, it became difficult to move the collection. I let it go two moves ago. Cyan on the other hand was more interested in the skills necessary to build an archive. From taxonomy to room temperature, she mastered the whole toolkit without identify what she would actually want to archive.
What she hadn't told me was about Timeline-D. For years, she was putting her skills to use literally in a parallel universe. She created the Timeline-D archives, an extensive collection of ephemera. The archive focuses on pop cultural differences between our timelines. We have sumo wrestlers, a traditional Japanese activity. Sumo is an Italian tradition in Timeline-D.
It was only in the last 5 years that she has started to disclose her project. I wanted to believe her but she was unsuccessful in bringing paper through the timeline rip until recently. She couldn't save images to the cloud. She couldn't carry a memory card. Our timelines did not follow the same path to computing and digital storage. Timeline-D designed computers entirely based on synthetic DNA. They developed implants over 100 years ago. What changed? Cyan got the implant which allowed her to carry the data through the rip. But getting the data through was only one step.
I've asked Cyan to explain the science in a future post but for now, you know how Dead Media Club got involved in such an exciting project.