Sir, does tactile contact alter your perception of the Phoenix?
Years ago when I was still working at the Software Circus and Livejournal was still a brand new thing, I took up the task of printing out the hundreds of entries I'd written. I'd send the jobs en masse to the Xerox machine when I would get in at 6 A.M., back in the days when I had no car and would sometimes spend the night at my folks. Commuting with my dad, he was always out the door by 5:15 in the morning. Having that much time on my hands before the office officially opened at 8:00, I took it upon myself to always work on some personal task.
Even back then I understood the value of having a physical copy of my journal. I'd handwritten journal entries, poetry, letters to friends and such in the previous ten or fifteen years. There was however a benefit to typing a blog online. As ancient and tactile as writing with pen and paper is, my hand simply cannot keep up with the thoughts in my head the way it does when I am using a keyboard. I've tried, recently. At the beginning of last year I was writing in a notebook. It was fine, but it just wasn't the same as what I am able to accomplish typing my thoughts out. I decided in the end the entire point was the journal itself, and not the means by which my thoughts were manifested into it or what form it took.
So there I was ages ago printing out page after page of my original blog entries. I had stacks of copy paper that were 8 or 9 inches tall. I remember in between moves somewhere or another when these stacks of paper ended up in my storage boxes in my parents crawlspace. I discovered them years later and promptly discarded them. I liked the concept of a physical copy of my blog, but at the time the copy paper idea seemed highly disorganized and I had a sort of embarrassment for my blog. As if it was something childish. Add to that the fact it seemed over time the ink on the copy paper definitely had the potential to fade. A sort of reverse ghost writing, where the text eventually evaporates along with the memory of all that was written.
I've always had backups, and backups of my backups. Every computer has a copy of them on it. I have USB keys and burned CDs with backups. The only way I was able to restore this blog in its entirety to be able to take the complete backups I did last year was due to my foresight in backing up the original two-and-a-half years before dramatically deleting them in mid-2006. I spent a good part of last year going through, adding the originals back in. Editing tags for every entry. Even adding in some lost photos that I was able to find within the backups. I did some minor editing with grammar and spelling, though I tried not to mess to much with the original intent and integrity of the past entries.
I find when I write now I need to reread and edit every entry because either my fingers aren't moving fast enough for my brain or I have some form of dyslexia, where random words and slight errors in spelling seem to pop up everywhere. I don't remember having this much trouble in the old days, but then again my having to proofread and edit those old entries might say otherwise.
Since my new found appreciation for my past writing, I have mirrored this blog on two other sites. Though, based on the entry counts the mirrored sites have not copied over every entry which bugs me. It'd be such an arduous task going through and trying to determine which ones are missing. Plus, according to stuff I've read, pictures don't copy over between the two different blogs. I can't remember if I've verified this with my own eyes. Also, I am not sure how much it really matters. I think most of the entries with personal pictures I set to private. And those private entries are backed up to PDF.
It seems for many years other folks who were still utilizing Livejournal started to freak out when they moved the servers to Russia. I didn't even know the site was Russian-owned since 2007 I guess. But, ten or so years ago the servers themselves were physically moved to Russia, whose laws covering blogging sites threaten people's content. Mine included if I am reading the terms of service correctly. So there is a legitimate threat that this journal could be wiped out at any moment. As far as I know, no one is reading it. But, you never know when some busybody could happen upon one of my entries concerning my views on the "community" or past entries about my many flings. and it could be all over.
I suppose an obvious solution would be to just start writing on one of the backup sites as my main one, but I really do have a nostalgia for Livejournal. And I often find change difficult. There's a chance this site will be here forever. There's also a chance it could be wiped out in its entirety in a matter of months. I have to believe they make little profit running this site. At some point maintaining it has to become pointless. And I am not sure nostalgia works the same on the Internet, where people get tired of the latest social media tools and go backward to using a site like this.
The Sparrow was handwriting is journal last year, but discovered the other day how much faster and easier it is to get thoughts down when typing. He brought up the age old debate about how to do so going forward, suggesting that he just create Word docs on his laptop. It's a nice idea in theory, but you'd need to be running daily backups if you wanted to keep the content. That is one of the things I always liked about doing it online. Knowing (in the past) that the servers were themselves being backed up, in addition to any backups I may be taking. Also, the go-anywhere ease of it. These days I basically only write at my desk, but having had the option to post from any computer by going to a website was a definite benefit in the past. He also thought Google Drive could be an option.
There is also the reality that someday the next site I may move to will also be sold to some other country. Or it could just shutdown. There are always questions about censorship and whether a site would police content, flag certain words or otherwise infringe on a person's right to write their thoughts. The only way to truly avoid that is to write to a document on your computer (or in a notebook physically).
The question might be asked why having a backup is important at all. In the end I am only doing this for me. I no longer have any fantasies about being some great writer. I do think that this blog has been incredible, having done my rereading of it last year. But, chances are the content is only "incredible" to me, because I lived it and then was able to go back and relive it in such vivid details and recall the events... sometimes barely recalling them and being in shock that they happened to me.
Only doing it for me though does not make it less important as far as I am concerned. I think it is quite an achievement. I may have lost the plot for a while, but I see the value in all this for myself. In the end, no other reason need exist. Yea, maybe someday a niece or nephew might stumble on it and find it interesting. Who knows, maybe someday when I am gone the Sparrow will decide he wants to read it all just to remember me. I suppose I should apologize now for some of the things he's going to end up reading. But, it was all life... I am proud of having documented it to the extent I did.
So I have backups, I have sites it is crossposted to. But, I don't feel like that is enough. I feel like I want to have a physical copy of it all. For me, which is a good enough reason again as any. I was looking up sites today to do so, but it seems that these sites are geared toward folks looking to print out their Instagrams or minor blogs. One in particular had a limit of 300 pages. Which wouldn't cover a year of this journal. I just saw my numbers earlier, I am somewhere around 4900 entries I think. The cost of getting this blog printed out into a book would literally be in the several thousand dollar range. Perhaps a decision that would be easy to make when we are completely debt free and having money to spend, but not quite a reality right now.
I do want to pursue this though. It would be very cool to have a shelf in my office with professionally printed and bound books of my own writing. Again, for me, and that is good enough reason for it. Maybe if I broke the blog down into years I could have an edition printed every six months or so. I mean, when you get to the 2010s, my writing was far less frequent and I don't even have many (or any) entries between 2015 and 2022. I suppose editing could also help the cost, as there are several private entries that I wouldn't necessarily want in the finished product. I am not much for editing myself, but there are a few cases in which the entries I wrote are not worth remembering.
When I did the BlogBook backup of the journal on January 1st I think the glossary alone was 118 pages. BlogBook is a pay-to-use site, and I bought I believe 10 uses, of which I think I've gone through 7. I feel like maybe I should just do the PDF breakdown by year sooner rather than later. Even if it costs me another $30. I suppose then I should look at what exporting options there are on the backup sites I use. Just in case this site ever goes away.
This journal is my legacy in a way. Maybe that isn't as impressive as having kids or curing cancer or whatever other thing one would want to compare it to, to dismiss my accomplishment. But after years of shunning it all myself, I really learned the value of writing last year. This is my life. As ugly or embarrassing or hilarious as it may have all been, much of it is here. Even what happened in the "lost years" is still recorded in many cases afterward. My real feelings and experiences and impressions. Maybe I was wrong about something, or acted childish or stupid. It doesn't matter, because it was real at the time. Hopefully I grew from it or learned something. I think that is clear in retrospect.
I'd like to have it all in a nice printed and bound book on a shelf. Just in case the Internet ceases to exist. At least my words would carry on in some form. Unless the house burned down.
Even back then I understood the value of having a physical copy of my journal. I'd handwritten journal entries, poetry, letters to friends and such in the previous ten or fifteen years. There was however a benefit to typing a blog online. As ancient and tactile as writing with pen and paper is, my hand simply cannot keep up with the thoughts in my head the way it does when I am using a keyboard. I've tried, recently. At the beginning of last year I was writing in a notebook. It was fine, but it just wasn't the same as what I am able to accomplish typing my thoughts out. I decided in the end the entire point was the journal itself, and not the means by which my thoughts were manifested into it or what form it took.
So there I was ages ago printing out page after page of my original blog entries. I had stacks of copy paper that were 8 or 9 inches tall. I remember in between moves somewhere or another when these stacks of paper ended up in my storage boxes in my parents crawlspace. I discovered them years later and promptly discarded them. I liked the concept of a physical copy of my blog, but at the time the copy paper idea seemed highly disorganized and I had a sort of embarrassment for my blog. As if it was something childish. Add to that the fact it seemed over time the ink on the copy paper definitely had the potential to fade. A sort of reverse ghost writing, where the text eventually evaporates along with the memory of all that was written.
I've always had backups, and backups of my backups. Every computer has a copy of them on it. I have USB keys and burned CDs with backups. The only way I was able to restore this blog in its entirety to be able to take the complete backups I did last year was due to my foresight in backing up the original two-and-a-half years before dramatically deleting them in mid-2006. I spent a good part of last year going through, adding the originals back in. Editing tags for every entry. Even adding in some lost photos that I was able to find within the backups. I did some minor editing with grammar and spelling, though I tried not to mess to much with the original intent and integrity of the past entries.
I find when I write now I need to reread and edit every entry because either my fingers aren't moving fast enough for my brain or I have some form of dyslexia, where random words and slight errors in spelling seem to pop up everywhere. I don't remember having this much trouble in the old days, but then again my having to proofread and edit those old entries might say otherwise.
Since my new found appreciation for my past writing, I have mirrored this blog on two other sites. Though, based on the entry counts the mirrored sites have not copied over every entry which bugs me. It'd be such an arduous task going through and trying to determine which ones are missing. Plus, according to stuff I've read, pictures don't copy over between the two different blogs. I can't remember if I've verified this with my own eyes. Also, I am not sure how much it really matters. I think most of the entries with personal pictures I set to private. And those private entries are backed up to PDF.
It seems for many years other folks who were still utilizing Livejournal started to freak out when they moved the servers to Russia. I didn't even know the site was Russian-owned since 2007 I guess. But, ten or so years ago the servers themselves were physically moved to Russia, whose laws covering blogging sites threaten people's content. Mine included if I am reading the terms of service correctly. So there is a legitimate threat that this journal could be wiped out at any moment. As far as I know, no one is reading it. But, you never know when some busybody could happen upon one of my entries concerning my views on the "community" or past entries about my many flings. and it could be all over.
I suppose an obvious solution would be to just start writing on one of the backup sites as my main one, but I really do have a nostalgia for Livejournal. And I often find change difficult. There's a chance this site will be here forever. There's also a chance it could be wiped out in its entirety in a matter of months. I have to believe they make little profit running this site. At some point maintaining it has to become pointless. And I am not sure nostalgia works the same on the Internet, where people get tired of the latest social media tools and go backward to using a site like this.
The Sparrow was handwriting is journal last year, but discovered the other day how much faster and easier it is to get thoughts down when typing. He brought up the age old debate about how to do so going forward, suggesting that he just create Word docs on his laptop. It's a nice idea in theory, but you'd need to be running daily backups if you wanted to keep the content. That is one of the things I always liked about doing it online. Knowing (in the past) that the servers were themselves being backed up, in addition to any backups I may be taking. Also, the go-anywhere ease of it. These days I basically only write at my desk, but having had the option to post from any computer by going to a website was a definite benefit in the past. He also thought Google Drive could be an option.
There is also the reality that someday the next site I may move to will also be sold to some other country. Or it could just shutdown. There are always questions about censorship and whether a site would police content, flag certain words or otherwise infringe on a person's right to write their thoughts. The only way to truly avoid that is to write to a document on your computer (or in a notebook physically).
The question might be asked why having a backup is important at all. In the end I am only doing this for me. I no longer have any fantasies about being some great writer. I do think that this blog has been incredible, having done my rereading of it last year. But, chances are the content is only "incredible" to me, because I lived it and then was able to go back and relive it in such vivid details and recall the events... sometimes barely recalling them and being in shock that they happened to me.
Only doing it for me though does not make it less important as far as I am concerned. I think it is quite an achievement. I may have lost the plot for a while, but I see the value in all this for myself. In the end, no other reason need exist. Yea, maybe someday a niece or nephew might stumble on it and find it interesting. Who knows, maybe someday when I am gone the Sparrow will decide he wants to read it all just to remember me. I suppose I should apologize now for some of the things he's going to end up reading. But, it was all life... I am proud of having documented it to the extent I did.
So I have backups, I have sites it is crossposted to. But, I don't feel like that is enough. I feel like I want to have a physical copy of it all. For me, which is a good enough reason again as any. I was looking up sites today to do so, but it seems that these sites are geared toward folks looking to print out their Instagrams or minor blogs. One in particular had a limit of 300 pages. Which wouldn't cover a year of this journal. I just saw my numbers earlier, I am somewhere around 4900 entries I think. The cost of getting this blog printed out into a book would literally be in the several thousand dollar range. Perhaps a decision that would be easy to make when we are completely debt free and having money to spend, but not quite a reality right now.
I do want to pursue this though. It would be very cool to have a shelf in my office with professionally printed and bound books of my own writing. Again, for me, and that is good enough reason for it. Maybe if I broke the blog down into years I could have an edition printed every six months or so. I mean, when you get to the 2010s, my writing was far less frequent and I don't even have many (or any) entries between 2015 and 2022. I suppose editing could also help the cost, as there are several private entries that I wouldn't necessarily want in the finished product. I am not much for editing myself, but there are a few cases in which the entries I wrote are not worth remembering.
When I did the BlogBook backup of the journal on January 1st I think the glossary alone was 118 pages. BlogBook is a pay-to-use site, and I bought I believe 10 uses, of which I think I've gone through 7. I feel like maybe I should just do the PDF breakdown by year sooner rather than later. Even if it costs me another $30. I suppose then I should look at what exporting options there are on the backup sites I use. Just in case this site ever goes away.
This journal is my legacy in a way. Maybe that isn't as impressive as having kids or curing cancer or whatever other thing one would want to compare it to, to dismiss my accomplishment. But after years of shunning it all myself, I really learned the value of writing last year. This is my life. As ugly or embarrassing or hilarious as it may have all been, much of it is here. Even what happened in the "lost years" is still recorded in many cases afterward. My real feelings and experiences and impressions. Maybe I was wrong about something, or acted childish or stupid. It doesn't matter, because it was real at the time. Hopefully I grew from it or learned something. I think that is clear in retrospect.
I'd like to have it all in a nice printed and bound book on a shelf. Just in case the Internet ceases to exist. At least my words would carry on in some form. Unless the house burned down.