A Lost Fish Always Looks Big

I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon salvaging what I could of this blog's previous iteration from archive.org.  All told I've lost eleven posts, all from 2021... everything between January 5th and September 30th.

I'm not too broken up about it, as I really couldn't tell you what many of those posts were about.  Knowing me, they were probably music videos, promises of things to come "for real this time", making fun of people I perceive to be of substandard intelligence, updates about my family, and so on.  Might have even complained about my job at some point.  No big loss.

Well, I shouldn't say that... there were two posts I regret losing - the first was a memorial post I wrote to mourn the passing of Jim Jaworski, an acquaintance whom I knew from the old New Winnipeg forum, also from my brief time in the TRUWinnipeg urbanist/subway advocacy group (I left when they got really nasty).  The second post was a play-by-play of a Car Wars gaming session I'd recapped in a TV sports commentary format... similar to the more recent one on my gaming blog.  I still have the rough draft in my Joplin journal, but I've lost all the embellishments I added after the fact.  I could rewrite it, but meh... the moment has passed.

Of the resurrected posts, I'm happy to have recovered the final two posts in my Never Let Your Magazine Run Dry series.  I'm only just getting back into my magazines again, and the topic couldn't be more timely, as I'll explain in a later post.

Until then...

Now a Waste of Time AND Money!

While rooting around in the darkest, dampest part of our basement this morning, I came across a moldy, forgotten old box sitting in a puddle of cat pee in the corner.

Believing its contents forever ruin'd, I opened the box to see if anything was salvageable.

Inside, I found my old blog and vanity domain.

Wow, that brought back memories!

I pulled them both out of the box and set them on a paper towel to dry.  The last few years of the blog were stuck together and ruined (and kinda smelled), but I was able to salvage the rest after a little wipe-down and disinfecting.

They cleaned up easily and looked as good as they ever did.  After admiring my handiwork for a few minutes, I asked myself, "CJ, what are you gonna do now?  Put it on a shelf as a curio with your Sega Saturn and martini glasses?  Put it in another box and forget about it again?  Or are you going to do something with it?"

As usual, I had a point.  

After five whole seconds of deliberation, I made the decision to do something with the old blog.  Several (dollars * 1.35) and twenty minutes of fiddling later, I am once again in control of my blog, my domain, and my creativity.

Welcome back to Conceit and Sociopathy. 

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I'm going to (partially) thank/blame John Dobbin for this.  

I loved his recent blog post on magazines, which reminded me of my own writings about magazines (a subject near and dear to my heart)... which reminded me about blogging, which reminded me that I have a metric shitload of writing and creative projects I've been putting off for a decade or more.

I was inspired enough to renew my old domain (now that the squatter let it lapse), start a new blog, and upload the last backup I'd done of the original blog, sometime in 2019.  Thankfully archive.org has everything up until October 2021, which will give me all but the last few posts I'd done.  These last few were thematic posts about music with embedded links to music videos on YouTube, so no great loss there.

I have a bit of work to do, but I expect to have the remaining content up in the next day or two.

It's good to be back.