it was recently brought to my attention (shoutout orphanim) that a lot of the links on the site are broken. huh, i thought, neoshitties being silly again perhaps? as i took a look under the hood to diagnose the issue. the problem was immediately obvious: the pages being linked to were completely gone! vanished! the entire "writings" folder where i indiscriminately parked half my pages was missing! there was something like 20 pages in there! some of them were even kind of good!

i thought back a little and realized what probably happened: on april 2nd when i was cleaning up all the rubbish kit dumped in my site's main directory, i must have accidentally deleted the "writings" folder as well. so really this is all kit's fault. but would it really be "suboptimalism" if this kind of thing didn't happen now and then?

"good thing you can just restore everything from the backups, right?" who the heck do you think i am? of course i do not have any backups! all my writings will have to be carefully transcribed from the ancient scrolls (word documents) and seasoned with the appropriate html tags again! i have to admit, this isn't the worst thing ever. frankly, i was already considering going back and editing a lot of the older writings now that i am several months wiser. the stuff i do post tends to be very lightly edited to begin with, because i'm very impatient and publish very soon after writing. the issue is that in order to edit well, you need some distance from the work, which is usually why writers get other people to edit their work. alternatively, you can just wait a while and come back to it.

so for the next little bit, expect to see some of the old stuff coming through again, and don't go accusing me of running out of ideas and showing reruns. i just have to hope that all of the best stuff is still in the word documents, because occasionally i'll add stuff during the transcription process. i guess a couple pages also made it to archive sites somehow. there might also be a few pages i wrote directly in the site editor which could be lost forever, although i tend to only do that for the blog posts.

then again there were some pages that are probably best forgotten, ones where i started strong and then petered out halfway through, eventually forgetting about it entirely and not even bothering to link it anywhere. if you think about it, in this age of reckless unchecked data creation and storage, one of the boldest actions you can take is deliberate deletion. the human mind forgets for a reason... now for this week's homework please read the borges short story "funes the memorious" (which i have found difficult to forget).