A New Site, or The Right to be Forgotten
My old site went down in 2020 owing to a series of hazy blurs, technical landslide, and financial disaster. It pained me that eight years of work disappeared just like that. I had three layers of backups and they just failed, all of them, like a well-timed grand cosmic joke.
Fortunately, I still have the raw documents for all the posts, but the experience soured me from the entire thing for a while. Annual subscription is a pain in the butt when you suffer from bouts of executive dysfunction. Back then, paying for more than a year of domain name and hosting at a time was not feasible.
Eventually, I missed having a space to unload my thoughts and toy around again. I have been spending a lot of time in itch.io and it felt somewhat nice to have my blog posts there, but itch's support for texts not tied to any store entry is horrible. I can't have an index of posts, no one would be able to search anything, and its existence is buried under layers of obfuscation. I'd have to unearth each blog link and show that manually on my profile. That's not the way to go.
Ko-fi, then? But it doesn't feel right, it really feels like I'm writing to beg for money, which is against what I'm doing this for. Plus, it's the same problem. No index, no searchability, as it's built to be status updates of your work and achievements and things you sell.
Uh, static site generator, then? Like many people, I went from hand-coded HTML with all moving parts, trailing cursors, and explosion of colors to Wordpress' clean-corporate-professional layout to wishing for something messier again (but maybe not that messy). From having my website hosted to self-host with all the pain and joy to looking for something in the middle.
And then I discovered Bear.
And I spent days reading cool articles on Bear. Seems like a nice neighborhood to be. Maybe eventually I'll get to Neocities when life would let me disappear into the rabbit hole, but for now Bear is a blast.
When I discovered that the free version of Bear doesn't let me be added to the search and discover list, I thought I would be missing them. To my pleasant surprise, it actually got me to take my time building this, thinking about the kind of pages I want it to have, since I don't have to impress.
Similarly, when sorting my old writings to find something I would include in this new place, a feeling of comfort came to me. I wrote a lot of these when I was still very young, and I wrote some extremely laughably bad takes. I'm happy to know I'm a better person now, and I'm kind of happy they've been mostly out of the internet.
It's nice to be forgotten.
My mind goes back to all the people who'd been online forever, to everyone who'd been hurt by having their old internet shame resurfaced and judged against them (have you ever met anyone who's not embarrassed of their high school self?). It's scary that people these days tend to act as if people are monolithic, static set of values. I write some of these feelings into the Site Philosophy page.
It's nice to have a clean slate.
It's not so much a scorched earth approach, however. I have decided to keep the name Mirrored World, a reference to my favorite game Legend of Mana along with the tagline I chose all those years ago in 2008: "world recreated in words". In a pure, delightful coincidence, the 2022 Remaster of this game has this on the back of the box: "All you need to do is believe it, and your words become your world."
Truly, somewhere somehow someone is looking at the very same sky.