In the Three Body Trilogy (Remembrance of Earth’s Past), which I whole-heartedly recommend to every man, woman, and child– actually, hold on, I need to stop for a second. My Three Body recommendation should not be done in passing. Three Body broke my brain in the most incredible ways, and is, without hesitation, the best sci-fi since Dune (which deserves a quick aside: holy crap Dune is incredible).
I’ve forgotten why I started this.
In the last book of the series, Earth’s scientists struggle with the problem of keeping data intact for as long as possible. This turns out to be an incredibly difficult problem, especially given the volume of data they wish to keep intact (all the world’s great literature, art, history, etc). Similar to Voyager’s famous gold records, which are intended to last a billion years before they are unreadable, the scientists decided to use the same technique as early man: scratch stuff into something hard and then put it in the most inert environment you can find. They chose a cave system on Pluto for this task– I can’t say more– oh man what a great book series.
I don’t have access to a cave system to deface, nor does the writing I’ve done on this blog over the last decade merit sticking around for a billion years (see my first post), however, effective at the end of this post, I will be winterizing the old girl. Putting it in cold storage. Scratching it onto a cheap EC2 instance and sending it off into the void.
Phase II of my thoughts can be found on the soul-less medium of Medium, where I’ve been demoralized demonetized for not having the minimum of 100 followers. I’ve secretly been writing there for a year or so, in case you wondered.
You may also be thinking that perhaps there’s a good case for this writing to disappear altogether so that both future employers and current employees don’t find all the stupid stuff I’ve written in my less-enlightened youth (I’m very enlightened now). It makes a lot of sense, but I’m going to have to respectfully leave this dross on the Internet for future anthropologists to discover and award me posthumous honors.
You see, in the 122 posts on this blog, written over the last decade, there is clearly a struggle to figure out what I’m even trying to do. There are comics, witticisms, creative fiction stories, songs, entire programs, Jack-Handy-esque one-liners, book reviews, quotes, and very occasionally decent, insightful blog posts. This is me struggling to learn things: and it’s nothing if not chaotic. It’s also, rather comically, not strictly improving. That is, I posit that in another ten years my writing from today will look just as stupid as the oldest stuff on this blog. Am I to just delete everything every ten years? Maybe. Or, maybe that’s the fun part about learning: you just always look like a dumb-ass.