I often find myself tinkering with already-published notes on this site. I initially thought of this as a confession, because at times I’ve felt that editing old posts (beyond fixing minor typos or bugs) is somehow cheating. But, no, revision is not cheating. There is no rule of any sort that I cannot change, improve, or remove old posts as I see fit. It turns out that this is my own website and I make the rules around here. I had forgotten I get to do whatever I want with my website, though that was kind of the point in not interacting with some corporation’s platform anymore.

Now, having jettisoned my guilt and cast aside my faith in conventional weblog practice, I am contemplating yet more aggressive revisionist practices. These measures shall serve to further consolidate my narrative and solidify my power and absolute domination over this web domain.

<mwahaahaha>
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.  
</mwahaahaha>
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¹

One of my failures on this site, and really any site or platform on which I have ever shared content, is that I don’t always get around to posting things right when they are relevant.² I still want to share my thoughts and have a record of them, but too often, posting such things later becomes incompatible with the idea of the chronological or current “feed” — the conventional organizational concept of a weblog or a social media account. And so, overwhelmed with ideas left unfinished and unshared, and feeling unable to move forward, I go quiet again.

Long story short, I might start adding new-but-back-dated updates and posts — not just republishing old content from my defunct websites and social media accounts, but also interleaving previously unpublished notes and photographs recorded in previous times but never shared.

My goal is to have a single life journal or archive of sorts that pulls from all my different sources. I do need to do more learning in “digital gardens” and related concepts, but in the meantime I feel a need to get moving and publishing. This is something I just really want for myself - I don’t entirely know if it should be public, actually? Yes, it needs to be public, because even if not tied to any other platforms or networks I do have some sort of amorphous internet audience in mind for these things I share here, for better or worse. I want to be able to share this site with people I know on occasion, asynchronously. I want to link to it. I want items on my site to become serendipitous search results. I might want to make it into a newsletter. I want it to be my interface with the world.

The Internet has changed a lot and is rumored to have been ruined by corporations, but my past experience tells me that good things can come from a little old personal website. My old blog in the late 2000s was once found as a serendipitous search result by a certain person. That person and I have since collaborated in creating two entirely new humans together, and we are coming up on our fourteenth marriage anniversary next month. I wasn’t really looking for love through my website, but I put some of myself out there into the world and it happened. I think it still exists, the promise and possibility of connecting with other people and spreading ideas through a genuine personal website, rather than playing a toxic algorithm. I hope so, for my kids and other young people.

To make my revisionism more transparent I’ve added “Last Updated” fields to the bottom of each post. I’m trying to decide if I should take the time to also build a “Recently Updated” page/feed that lists the sometimes-backdated notes and posts based on when they were last updated, rather than their original post date. (I admit, I tried one way to build such a page today and failed miserably.)

As always, if you have thoughts to share you can email me by clicking “Contact me” in the footer of every page.

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1. from “Ozymandias”, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and scene of Discord being turned to stone through the magic of the Elements of Harmony, from Season 2, Episode 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, entitled “The Return of Harmony, Part 2.” ↩︎

2. I don’t get out much, but even so, sometimes I am actually living through my life and don’t have time or desire to broadcast in real-time. And it turns out I have a job and a family, and this site is just a hobby. So there. ↩︎