I spent the last two days using AI to build out a tool which allowed me to go through and clean up all ~400 or so posts that used to be on this site. In the end, 369 old posts that were about single songs have returned from the grave, for better and for worse, though admittedly I left out some of the worst (or at least most questionable) posts.

Reading three years of your writing can definitely help put your life into perspective, a perspective you may have forgotten about. Most of my writing on this site was either complaining about women or lusting after them. Nothing really in between those two points, though there were a couple outliers where I complained about all the people I used to know back then.

And don't get me wrong, in this case, all those people were worth complaining about. It's 15 years later and I don't know any of those people any more, not a single one. A couple years after I hit the period of unemployment that led me to shut down this site, I cut all ties with my previous life and focused on building a new one, and it worked out fantastically. If you read this site back in 2010, you should know that I'm still depressive and angry, but my depression and anger tends to be externally focused, away from my life, and more toward the the people and systems that keep us oppressed. In some of my old writing, you'd swear I was supporting these systems of oppression, especially in some of the posts that I did not carry over from the archive.

On that note, I tend to be an archival purist, but, man, it felt like if I brought some of my old posts forward it would seem like I was condoning what I said in them, and I don't, so I left them behind. Internet Archive has them, so I'll never be able to run for public office without changing my political opinions about 180 degrees to match my prior rhetoric. I get that part of the allure of my site was the way I shared my life, no-holds-barred, but good lord, "who would want to be such an asshole"?

It was also interesting to go through the archive and see which bands are still around and which vanished into the ether. My batting record here isn't particularly great, as a few bands I said will undoubtedly be big ultimately went nowhere. But it was a pleasure to see Ha Ha Tonka release a new album just two years ago, which features this song about how quickly time flies. The members of the band have gotten married, started families, and watched themselves get old, which I've also done (except my children are dogs) in the same time. Other bands, like blog favorite Viva Voce, saw their marriages disintegrate along with their bands and music careers entirely. I luckily emerged from my 20's relatively unscathed, which I can say now that I've got a full decade in between me and my 20's; the scars have all healed or been replaced by new, different scars.

It's a trip. Who would have thought we'd be here, so many years into the future?