this has to be admitted, and it isn't a good thing. i used to pride myself on deleting data. i scrapped it — everything — year over year. so many of my projects are gone, from years of letting the whole stack of context that was my computer get trashed because i hadn't thought of it as a story before
i didn't care. to me, needing your files was a weakness. the point was that you could do whatever you wanted on any machine, at any time, so i ran stock and vanilla for almost everything. veering away from the accepted default felt bad, because it would complicate using the same system somewhere else. why keep some massive year-over-year project when the system it depends on was going to get another version anyway
the turn
things changed. i couldn't have put this blog together if they hadn't. the deletion as pride, the files-as-weakness, the machines as disposable — none of it holds anymore. now i look at any computer like a massive book, full of words that just get resorted into some meaningful order for the user, an order the user themselves writes. and there's real value in that story, even if the files get left behind
记 is to record. the before times were about erasing. this log is the after — a place where the words get kept, and resorted, and finally mean something