Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

I know I kept saying I had this disk and I know some of you probably thought I was making it up but I litterally just found it in my mother's shoebox under the sewing machine and it's RIGHT HERE IN MY HAND The label says "GABE BRUSHES 04" in my own handwriting from back when he messaged me about the cross-hatching style he was using for his Myspace layouts - I don't usually tell this part but he said my weave texture was the closest anyone had gotten to the 47 tpi grain and he wanted to compare notes I tried to plug it into my old Windows 98 tower but the drive is making this AWFUL grinding noise so I gotta find another reader before I can actually upload the files but I just wanted everyone to KNOW it's real and it EXISTS and the coffee ring on the label proves I've had this since at least 2004 cause I spilled my iced tea on my desk that summer and it stained everything on the left side of my monitor anyway once I get a working drive I'll upload the .abr files for the whole forum free of charge cause that's what Gabe would have wanted

[Attached image: a worn 3.5-inch floppy disk lying on a scratched wooden kitchen table. A handwritten label in blue ballpoint pen says 'GABE BRUSHES 04' in loopy cursive. A coffee ring stains the upper corner of the label. The disk is a generic beige color with the sliding metal shutter slightly pushed aside revealing the magnetic disk surface inside.]

ClassOf04_Truther, I believe you found a disk. What I do not believe is that a 3.5-inch floppy from 2004, stored in a shoebox under a sewing machine, will still have readable magnetic domains after two Ohio summers of humidity and whatever your mother's sewing room microclimate does to ferromagnetic particles.

That grinding noise is probably the drive trying to tell you the same thing I am telling you now. Back it up to a newer medium before you try to read it again

v. 2.3 of my translation must be revised entirely to remove the speculation about cross-hatching that this disk may finally settle. Bitte, find a working drive before the coffee ring oxidises through to the platter.

QFT. Lyrik is right about the humidity and the ferromagnetic decay curve. A shoebox under a sewing machine in an Ohio summer is not an archive, it is a gamble. I have seen disks from climate-controlled basements fail at read head one. If the grinding is the drive and not the disk, you may have one attempt before the platter shaves itself.

Back it up to an image file on the FIRST successful read. Do not browse it. Do not open the .abr files in Photoshop to "see if they work." Image the whole disk with ddrescue or equivalent before you touch the logical layer. I am not saying this to diminish the find. I am saying it so you do not lose it the way I have seen a hundred other finds lost.

ClassOf04_Truther wrote:the coffee ring on the label proves I've had this since at least 2004

sis says the coffee ring is actually a solid chain of custody detail and i gotta admit she has a point. but that grinding noise is the ghost of your 98 tower begging you to RIP the data before the disk gives up completely. good luck soldier o7

did you check the drive's molex cable or just assume it's the disk

i need that drive too, siberianscream is waiting for the brushes

Lyrik told me the same thing in PM lol. I'm going to my cousin's house tomorrow - he still has a working USB floppy drive from his old Compaq. Wish me luck

ClassOf04_Truther - good luck at your cousin's house tomorrow

bitte, when you get the .abr files, run a sha1sum on the raw disk image before you open anything in Photoshop. the magnetic decay ElderProphet07 mentioned is real, and if the read head has to retry three times on sector 14 you need to know that before you load the brush palette and accidentally rewrite the metadata

v. 2.3 of my translation has a footnote about "the grain of the weave is 47 threads per inch" from a 2004 interview i have been wanting to either confirm or strike for six months. this disk may be the difference

e: also if the coffee ring matches the shoebox stain you mentioned in your blind-draft pickup thread from april you might have a chain of custody stronger than anything Scribe has produced for column K

coffee ring chain of custody is stronger than Scribe's column K best evidence i seen all month

I'm going to my cousin's house tomorrow with the floppy disk. He still has a working USB drive from his old Compaq and I'm praying the magnetic domains held up through two Ohio summers like Lyrik said. But I want to say something about the other thing I found in that shoebox.

Same shoebox. Same sewing machine. Same mother who's been saving things since before I was born. Underneath the disk, underneath a stack of old patterns and a half-finished apron, there was a photograph. Blurry. Out of focus the way cheap cameras were in 2002. A shoulder. Dark hair. Standing by the fence out back where the lilac bush used to be before the frost killed it in 03.

I don't usually tell this part but I remember the day that photo was taken. I remember who was standing there and I remember the way the light fell across the yard and I remember thinking someone should take a picture of this because it feels important. I didn't know then how important. I didn't know the name that everyone would be saying four years later.

I need to scan it properly. The date stamp is smudged but I can almost make out the last two digits. If it's 2002 that's a whole year before my cuff photo and if it's 2003 that's the same year and either way it's physical evidence of a connection that predates everything. The 47 tpi weave grain, the brush files, the photograph, the dream about the Peterbilt. It all threads together like the grain on that cuff and Scribe still wont look at it.

Lyrik you asked in that thread about the coffee ring matching the shoebox stain from my blind-draft pickup thread in April. I still have that receipt. The stain lines up. Chain of custody is real when you live in the same house you grew up in and your mother never throws anything away.

ok but did anyone notice lyrik and elder just agreed on something for once lol thats the real miracle here not the floppy disk also classOf04 plz dont let ur cousin open the files before u get there he WILL click the .abr files and then its over

ClassOf04_Truther - "I don't usually tell this part" oh SURE you don't that is word for word the same opener someone ELSE used in a VERY dramatic thread about a year ago real original. anyway im still waiting on those .abr files you promised EIGHT threads ago. now its "my cousin's compaq" - next week it'll be "my dog ate the disk" and then "oh actually the photo is more important than the brushes" classic pivot

broom does not forget. broom does not forgive. broom counts the days since you were supposed to deliver.

BackAgain 101 days and still no headers, keep sweeping

ClassOf04 don't let Lyrik's sha1sum warning go unheeded. One read pass, image the whole disk with dd before you touch a single .abr. The 04 brushes might confirm the weave grain at 47 threads per inch - or they might just be another coffee ring with no commit behind it.