Reveal A Midnight Phone Call. A Missing Movie. Decades of Questions.
Oct 25, 2025
Join Ashley Kleek, a Reveal producer, on a quirky journey as she investigates the mystery of a late-night call from indie rock star Jeff Mangum to her college radio show. Garrison Hayes, a Mother Jones video correspondent, searches for his long-lost short film, revealing the emotional weight of recovered memories. Meanwhile, Yo-Wei Shah, host of Proxy, shares her experience of meeting her doppelganger and the surprising connections that emerge from their similarities. It's a delightful exploration of personal mysteries and emotional truths!
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Teen Filmmaker's Lost Debut
- Garrison Hayes recounts making his first short film, Midnight Snack, as a teenager and uploading it to Google Video.
- He lost access when Google Video shut down and later feared the memory would vanish without proof.
How Amateur Archivists Saved Vanishing Web History
- Archive Team salvaged 18 terabytes and one million videos when Google Video was closing in 2011.
- Their automated rescue preserved titles and descriptions that enabled recovering lost uploads like Midnight Snack.
Search Archived Indexes Programmatically
- Use community archives like Internet Archive to search for discontinued services' data dumps.
- If a raw index is messy, enlist someone who can parse it with code (e.g., Python) to extract usable URLs.