An old friend asked me a few days ago about all of the posts from this site that disappeared. He also jokingly said that, given the wordiness, I should have published them in a book. I disagree with that completely and utterly because the editing alone would be more work than I’d ever find time for. I wiped out the old WordPress version of this site because after a few years of pointlessly posting still alive, maybe junk I decided to just scrape the domain and start over. I’d guess that the majority of what was posted there would not age particularly well either since the majority of that stuff was cranky reaction to whatever was going on in the Linux community. You know, back when it felt like there was some community organized around FOSS and less like the only thing that people know about Linux is that it’s available in AMIs from AWS. I miss having invested people yelling at me when I’m completely wrong.
Apart from the raw logistics of why I deleted a gigantic MySQL instance full of bile and garbage, my areas of interest and capacity for interest in more than anything that can get me through the next 24-48 hours without the world falling in on itself have changed a bit since then. I still love Linux and would do 100% of my computing in it if time and energy allowed but the honest fact is that I don’t really live in the 90% Linux world that I did for most of 20s and 30s. I’ve got a ridiculous Dell Precision with an i9 processor and an ocean of RAM installed in it that mostly sits idle because I don’t have nearly as much time for playing with cool things as I used to. I also have an Arch work laptop of fairly mediocre specifications that I work on whenever I can avoid being VPN connected (this normally would be the part where I complain for six paragraphs and a thousand words about how shitty it is that the Linux version of Forticlient doesn’t support multi-factor authentication and therefore is worse than useless to me) but because I’m incessantly dropping in and out of VPN-only environments I end up doing the most work on another mediocre-ly spec’d Windows 10 laptop the majority of the time. It’s kind of sad to think of how many utterly crazy work environments I’ve toughed it through by using the weirdest tools in the worst possible and unintended way to stick with my Linux machine. I feel like I’ve run out of steam temporarily or something. The truly sad part about all of this is that Windows 10, especially when compared to the sleek and shiny shit sandwich that Apple is masquerading as a cutting edge OS these days, is pretty stable and usable. Maybe that is the erosion of attention span and patience that comes with age showing but I don’t feel much of anything about it since, in the quarantined world we live in and will probably continue to live in for far longer than the most pessimistic of public agency estimates, I feel like I have any time to advocate for anything better than the bare minimum functional requirements for anything. It makes it considerably harder to put effort into working around the actual damage much less creating overhead of your own. That’s my excuse anyway.
The old Team Murder content is gone and I didn’t even consider backing any of it up before dropping the database. I don’t feel like I lost anything consequential in the purge. It felt more like clearing out old junk from a forgotten corner of an attic and was oddly cathartic.
