I am looking at a book of poetry. When it was published the author said that certain of the poems were about me, my websites, and some of the people who used to inhabit them.
Dated from 1972 to 2015 I can only guess which pieces from 1994 onward might have made reference to sorabji.com or its predecessors.
He made his comments about the book on a sorabji.com message board posting in early 2016. Baffling to me is the fact that this posting is among the very few that no longer exist on any of my file systems. I have no idea how or why that happened, but I seem to recall a few messages being nuked on account of a web server bug that I was unaware of for several days in March, 2016.
I made regular backups of the message boards, and for reasons only the hoarder might know I have retained most of them. But in another baffling turn I find that the last backup I made and that I still have is from exactly 2 days before this person posted his comments. It might be funny to me if it wasn’t annoying as all that all this digital hoarding I do fails to capture something like this. This is exactly the sort of thing digital hoarding is supposed to prevent from happening. You save every goddam thing, regardless of the storage costs or colossality of the quantity, so you can go back in time and find one particular sentence.
The boards do not exist at the Wayback Machine because I told all bots to ignore the content. I did this because the software running those boards comprised a bunch of 1995-era Perl scripts which, however much I liked their functionality, almost certainly represented a huge security vulnerability. That was why I switched to a new BBS software in 2016. But so few people came to it (this poet was among the absentees) that I killed it.
I am starting up the RAID to see if I managed to save a backup of the boards from a time when that message might have still been there, but I’m not optimistic. (UPDATE: Nothing there) The only recourse I have now, if I really am that curious, is to just contact the guy. I never communicated with him at all, and doing so on account of this seems like it could be a little awkward? I don’t know, maybe he’d get a kick out of hearing from me.
I would also have to figure out how to contact him. He was very off the grid, as I recall, posting to the boards from library computers and other public terminals.
I could also contact one of the women I seem to remember him saying he wrote about. She and I met in person once, but had no real friendship beyond occasional e-mails. I became friends with a number of people from those boards but I can’t think of any of them who I think it would be appropriate to contact about this.
The comments he posted are mostly gone from my memory but fortunately the link to his book for sale on Amazon was not. I added it to my Amazon shopping cart after he posted the link to it, and it sat there ever since, for about 2 years. I guess it might appear a little unsupportive to be so focused on looking for the ME content, but I did show support by actually buying the thing, even if it took me two years to get around to it.
I would think the span of time in which this place might have been referenced starts not from 1994, when my first site hosted at the original (now long-gone) paranoia.com came around. He might have started around 1995 or 1996, when I set up a message board on the old “Place of General Happiness” site, but it was probably later than that, when the more robust boards now archived at bbs.sorabji.com were alive. I don’t think it was myself in particular or my web content he wrote about but the interactions and personalities seen on the message boards.
There were three message boards at sorabji.com. The first one started (I think) in 1994 and ended in 1997. It was located on the file system under the original web site, “The Place of General Happiness”. Since I told all bots to drop “The Place of General Happiness” altogether it is not to be found in archive.org’s Wayback Machine, even though it used to be there. I should have copies of the files from that old board somewhere but lots of luck finding them in my oceans of hoarded digital detritus. The second one ran from 1997 to 2016 (wow, 19 years, that’s longer than I thought). The third board lasted maybe 7 or 8 months. Everybody loves Facebook now so I killed it off for lack of interest.
The poet, who is not known personally to me, was not the most prolific contributor to those boards or the ones that followed. But he was there, and happy for it, posting lengthy observations on the nature of things and on the personalities in the virtual room. I think he met in person with at least a few other contributors. I never got a good read on the person but he seemed sane and very Zen. Well, that’s all I have to say about this.
…
In other hoarding news it turns out to have not been such a waste of time as I thought it would be to go through the contents of the 10 or so hard drives I pulled out of storage last year. I am getting ready to haul them to the e-waste center in Gowanus, where their contents will be destroyed in an eco-friendly way. Saving the planet from a bag full of hard drives gives me a fine feeling and all but I’m actually more interested in simply having them destroyed. The same is true of my CD and DVD backup disks, which I do not want pickers or grinners getting at.
The profit I derived from plugging in these old drives is that I actually found stuff I had not adequately hoarded, or rather backed up. It’s nothing of great consequence but I found some Usenet sheet music downloads I forgot about, including hundreds of complete scores to Broadway musicals and fake book settings for thousands of shot tunes and standards. There is not enough time in the world to play through even a fraction of that stuff but, as per my philosophy of digital hoarding, it is good to know I might have access to a particular song or ditty should the need arise.
I also found a curious collection of transcriptions of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, a song which I forgot had been transcribed so many times.
Here is what the RAID looks like:
RAID
