There was an old-school blog meme thing going around last week, a list of questions, people tagging other people to get them to fill it out, etc. My first thought was: How would I have any idea if someone tagged me in this. Then almost immediately Haughey voiced the same idea:
When I resurrected/rebooted this blog to its current incarnation (in 2019) the first thing I did was strip out any wordpress pixel tracking google analytics type stuff. My official privacy policy as it applies to this website is and has always been:
Other people’s opinions about what I do here are absolutely none of my business.
This is:
- 91% self-protection against online negativity;
- 6% awareness that if I had those tools I would check them incessantly;
- 3% self-protection redundancy systems because even if I did have those tools installed and did check them incessantly, it’s unlikely anything I ever wrote here would cause a stir/interest of any kind, which would compound any pre-existing depression. So better to have no way of knowing.
What even was my point. Oh the other thing about privacy, which is the stuff about posting personal stuff online that will get read and recorded and subsumed into the giant machine and weaponized against me.
There’s so much stuff happening in my life lately. I have sooo many stories and I love telling them in person so I can see the disbelief on people’s faces. There is stuff I would love to talk about here, stuff that it would be very helpful for me to process externally. But I also feel I have to be careful about who might read what and how that would make them feel and what they might do with that information.
I guess every complaint seems petty enough with the passage of time.
In the early 2000s I thought of my blog here as a kind of secret code. Phrases, memories, a diary of details that meant something very specific to me but would make little if any sense to the average reader. Like I felt I could complain about someone in a way that they could read the post and not even know it was about them.
And now, idek. Like I’m worried about protecting myself from people who don’t even read my blog. Or I’m worried about the things I write here eventually coming karmically back around to harm my family, their safety. These things happen all the time.
Anyways, another check mark in the pro column for posthumous memories, I guess.
Or: a lifetime ago Scott Erasing and I were email about scripting a sort of dead man’s switch for a blog – e.g. a chronjob that checks to see if the blog has been updated every so often, and if it hasn’t been updated after x time period, it auto-posts the “if you’re reading this I must be dead” post (or better yet just deletes the website completely).
Maybe something like that. If I haven’t posted here in x months, release all the draft posts of things I really wanted to tell you, things I would happily tell you offline right now. Seriously the one about the time [person] made me [activity] on [day] as a [activity]! This really happened and was even worse than it sounds.