The Life Electronic
“I had no idea what to expect going into this, but I was not disappointed.”- My review of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Jan 2012.
Back in 2012, I posted a movie review on a fledgling platform at the time, Stamped, where users could post reviews of things and recommend them to their friends.
Stamped was quickly bought up by Yahoo and shuttered shortly after.
Thanks to a popular but short-lived trend at the time, Stamped included the ability to cross-post to other platforms when you published a review. This review ended up on Twitter.
In 2021, I became tired of the clutter on my Twitter profile and decided to delete a majority of my tweets. Unsurprisingly, this included my Stamped review.
Last year I stumbled upon the Tweetback project, a way to publish my tweets to my own site. Luckily, I'd been paranoid and downloaded my Twitter archive every few years since 2012. I set up my own Tweetback instance and got all of my tweets... back.
Finally, I decided to backfill my Letterboxd account using reviews I'd written across the web and ticket stubs I'd saved over the years. This particular review completed its journey from Stamped to Twitter to a ZIP file in iCloud to my website to Letterboxd and now lives alongside my growing collection of movie reviews. Here it is.
Unfortunately, when the Stamped review was cross-posted, its content was cut off. Had I said more about it at the time? We may never know.
Preserving the internet is hard.
Art by Michael Knepprath, 2012.