while sorting things out, some of the files were quite large, so i had to compress them to reduce their size. i opened one afterward. a photo, then a voice memo. just to check. the photo held its shape well enough. but the voice memo had shifted somewhere i couldn't quite tell. the voice was still there. still recognizably itself. and yet it didn’t land the same.

a compression ratio of around 60% usually kept the visible or audible quality intact. beyond that, artifacts began to appear. pixels softening, outlines collapsing. ghost traces where the data used to be.