purge
What.
I was traumatized to see a line through the name of a friend's journal when I linked to it in a comment on a friend's post the other day.
I inquired about this development, and was greeted with something in the vein of a shrug.
It's really weird to think about how much I take for granted the archiving of information about our online identities. I know that data mining and identity theft are constant kobolds in the super dungeon explore of our online experience. Plus, comment spam.
But I'm immensely thankful that Deniz' journal is still up and readable. It's not like she's still here - I can't read new entries, thoughts on Corey Konieczka's or Vlaada Chvatil's game design, invectives about Twilight or Game of Thrones, or emergent patterns of sapience in information flows between multi-core tablets. I'll never know what Deniz would have thought about Countermeasure, or whether she'd have auditioned or enjoyed this music without all the Exeter baggage. But the person she was until 2005, the things she thought and wrote (in enormous quantity) and her points of connection to my life are still there.
It's not just watching the footprints stop, in this case. It's seeing the whole trail washed away.
I have a predisposition toward nostalgia, I guess. I have trouble throwing things out, and I'm trying to cure that. But text? Text stored on servers? Particularly decentralized servers, where new space is cheaper than the paper it would take to write those words down? That's the past now. It keeps us honest. It reassures us that things did happen in the way they did. Yes, it prevents us from reinventing ourselves daily, something upon which I place a pretty high premium (and I feel fairly artificial when I don't). But memory is fickle and treacherous. Documentation, while often embarrassing and frustrating, is true. And this reinvention is really only valuable when it gets you somewhere truer.
The old Robin Hood show from the '80s had a quote that appears all over my 1991 high school yearbook. "Either we face the ghosts of the past or we become ghosts ourselves." I saw much of that show but not that episode. I assume they were swordfighting actual ghosts. I take it to mean, in an allegorical sense, that if we don't look at the stupid things we've done, we turn into repetitive clichés.
Reading this post, it probably looks like a bunch of stupid, introspective, self-obsessed posts I've already written. Fair point. But if I *want*, I can at least go back and reread those other posts and realize how stupid, introspective and self-obsessed they seem. Isn't that a kind of progress?
I was traumatized to see a line through the name of a friend's journal when I linked to it in a comment on a friend's post the other day.
I inquired about this development, and was greeted with something in the vein of a shrug.
It's really weird to think about how much I take for granted the archiving of information about our online identities. I know that data mining and identity theft are constant kobolds in the super dungeon explore of our online experience. Plus, comment spam.
But I'm immensely thankful that Deniz' journal is still up and readable. It's not like she's still here - I can't read new entries, thoughts on Corey Konieczka's or Vlaada Chvatil's game design, invectives about Twilight or Game of Thrones, or emergent patterns of sapience in information flows between multi-core tablets. I'll never know what Deniz would have thought about Countermeasure, or whether she'd have auditioned or enjoyed this music without all the Exeter baggage. But the person she was until 2005, the things she thought and wrote (in enormous quantity) and her points of connection to my life are still there.
It's not just watching the footprints stop, in this case. It's seeing the whole trail washed away.
I have a predisposition toward nostalgia, I guess. I have trouble throwing things out, and I'm trying to cure that. But text? Text stored on servers? Particularly decentralized servers, where new space is cheaper than the paper it would take to write those words down? That's the past now. It keeps us honest. It reassures us that things did happen in the way they did. Yes, it prevents us from reinventing ourselves daily, something upon which I place a pretty high premium (and I feel fairly artificial when I don't). But memory is fickle and treacherous. Documentation, while often embarrassing and frustrating, is true. And this reinvention is really only valuable when it gets you somewhere truer.
The old Robin Hood show from the '80s had a quote that appears all over my 1991 high school yearbook. "Either we face the ghosts of the past or we become ghosts ourselves." I saw much of that show but not that episode. I assume they were swordfighting actual ghosts. I take it to mean, in an allegorical sense, that if we don't look at the stupid things we've done, we turn into repetitive clichés.
Reading this post, it probably looks like a bunch of stupid, introspective, self-obsessed posts I've already written. Fair point. But if I *want*, I can at least go back and reread those other posts and realize how stupid, introspective and self-obsessed they seem. Isn't that a kind of progress?