This is my Vietnam.

Treasure your badly-scanned papers from 1980, and be thankful you didn't have to do historical research by sorting through bad scans from the 1980s of printouts of microfilm archives (yes, instead of scanning the microfilm) of photos of the original documents that were photographed in 1961 at a 45° angle by a lazy archivist who used the cheapest film he could get his hands on. And the scans have blotches that make some pages literally unreadable because the microfilms were allowed to sit exposed to moisture for 25 years before being digitized. No I'm not bitter and my collegiate education wasn't a waste, not one bit of either.
- That good old History PhD PTSD.
  
  Yeah the real PTSD is realizing that you spent 6 years getting a History PhD.
- I occasionally dabble in genealogical research. OP's meme is baby stuff, and I don't even know the field. I feel you, anonymous internet stranger. You would enjoy handwritten census records entered by a barely literate person with shaky 19th century cursive, microfilmed in the 60s, scanned in the 90s, and "transcribed" by a Mormon granny who's never left Utah County in her entire life.
- This was a wild ride of a post. Once I hit the historical research part I thought I knew where you were headed, only for it to get worse in that way that anything to do with history seems to do.
  
  If you want even worse, I know somebody who needed a manuscript that wasn't digitized, so he had to actually fly to the UK and go to the small university that had the manuscript. As if that isn't enough of a pain in the ass on its own, the actual research consisted of carefully leafing through a moldy 700 year old book written in medieval Latin, analyzing the handwriting to decipher certain nonsense words that it turned out were actually just spelling mistakes, and shining special lights at weird angles to read faded ink. And then in the end, he found out the part wanted to cite (about a clergyman burning a granary to punish a village for their sinfulness) was was actually just a passage about tax levies that was deliberately mistranslated by one of those charlatan gentleman archaeologists from the 19th Century who wanted to discredit the Catholic Church.
- Damn I guess I won't complain about blurry copies of old schematics after all. That's a nightmare.

EXPERIMENTAL
M.p.s are not corrected, Tottoli apparatus; IR spectra [ν/cm^-1], Beckmann IR-20A spectrometer; UV spectra, _Carl Zeiss RPQ 20A/C or Pye Unicam SP 8-100 instruments (λmaxnm](ε)); Mass spectra (MS(EI)) at 70 eV, CEC 21-490 Bell-Howard spectrometer (m/e [amu](% base peak)); MS in chemical ionization mode (CH4, 1 Torr), GC-MS system HP 5980 A, Hewlett-Packard; ¹H NMR spectra, Bruker WP 80 CW spectrometer: δ[ppm](multiplicity, apparent coupling constant J[Hz], number of protons, attribution [Eu(dpm), relative induced shift]), s, singlet; br, broad; d, doublet; t, triplet; qa, quartet; m, multiplet; δTMS = 0.0 ppm; ¹³C NMR spectra Bruker WP spectrometer (15.08 MHz, spectrum width: 3750 Hz, 4096 points, FT mode): δ[ppm](multiplicity, apparent ¹L coupling constants [± 2 Hz]
Edit: corrections per ornery_chemist
- Two corrections: Braker -> Bruker (one of the only NMR vendors still around today), δrms -> δTMS (TMS = tetramethylsilane, a common reference for proton chemical shifts)
  Edit: I suspect that 1L coupling constants is actually 1J coupling constants despite the proximity of the superscript to the stem; 1J referring to the coupling frequency of a 13C nucleus with a proton 1 bond away. I am wincing at the lack of 13C{1H} decoupling lol I bet the spectra are even less legible in their original form than this text is in the current form.
  
  Thanks! Fixed.
- I came for this and was not disapointed.

This is what sensory processing issues feel like, at a glance it's gibberish but if you give me a couple seconds i can figure out what was said

- Sounds like a good way to generate plausibly sounding but subtly incorrect bullshit.

A lot of those academic “printed on demand” books are like this, too. Very annoying. Yea they’re out of print and old library physical copies cost over $100, but the “new” ones always look like this but faded instead of over saturated.

pain

Apparently computers are way better at deciphering this kind of text than we are because of all the training we gave them on those captchas that were just words from poorly scanned documents (they didn't know the answers to both the prompts they gave us, only one, so if we correctly typed the word that they already knew they could assume we typed the second one correctly too). All that time I was just trying to get into my Foopets account, I had no idea.