From the Sidelines

 Looking at the calendar, it has been well over a year since I last posted on the blog. This is due to a variety of reasons with a lack of interest being the primary reason...

When I first started From the Sidelines, it was intended mostly as a journal of sorts rather than trying to start a paper one yet again. Those prior attempts never lasted long due to there rarely being anything positive to report leaving constant bad health for entries. At some point, abandoning doing the same on the blog had to happen as nobody (me) wants to read a litany of woe.

Over the years, the death of Live Writer and Open Live Writer straight up killed the formatting I liked to use for posts containing images leading to a reduction of my interest in photography as an unwanted side effect. Simultaneously, the Internet became a short inflammatory text message or video oriented format as the race to the lowest common denominator of human behavior took over. The failure of search engines in recent years turned the new frontier days of the World Wide Web into a corporately homogeneous dull pastiche of assorted inanities with no place for anything remotely thoughtful or creative.

In short, it all ceased to be even remotely fun.

At one point, I thought the site would at least be preserved for posterity, after all everything is permanent on the Internet as it used to be said. Time and reality have proved otherwise with vast tracts of data, personal sites, and even large web sites vanished into the ether. While the Internet Archive project is a valiant attempt to preserve things, it is under threat of being sued out of existence. 

The fragility of digital data has become very apparent of late and the things we take for granted today will be gone without a trace, unlike tangible objects such as books, documents, paintings, and buildings. We, the denizens of the modern West, have built a house of cards at the end of our civilization that most people will be shocked by when it collapses.

So I find myself questioning why I bothered with creating From the Sidelines in the first place. 20/20 hindsight is at play, of course -- but I can't remember the feeling I had starting it up and adding to it in the early years. That was a time I still had hope for some kind of life in mortality and those kind of delusions are now long gone.

The blog is a relic of the past at this point, I think.