We all build our own mythologies, and those mythologies are based on past experiences that shape not just what we want the future to be, but also what we want the past to be. I have written several posts this year about looking back to the past, even though I'm trying to move forward. I'm trying to find the carthasis in eliminating the past—not by removing it—but by consolidating it under a final banner. I mentioned previous online forays such as the Mad Ghoul, Key 23, Bots and Beer, and Apotheosis, and most are aware of my work on Codepunk: The project that resulted in several years of being awarded a Microsoft MVP award for community contributions. Originally, I did not intend to consolidate everything—and mostly this was because I have blog posts that reach back to 2002. The turn of the century doesn't seem like that long ago to me, but we are talking 22 years worth of archives. You can imagine how terrible those early years were—even if my 20 year old self thought they were phenomenal.

The other side of that "terrible" equation is that the Internet was still relatively young in 2002. There was no large scale social media and no smart phones. People might not have spent time on BBS and UseNet, but they were still scattered across message boards. Consider that Wikipedia started in 2001, so some of my earlier posts required actual book research or deep Internet searching. Knowledge wasn't at your fingertips.

It was a different world back in 2002 and the subsequent years.

Ancient history with the Mad Ghoul and Key 23 is one thing. Recent history with Bots and Beer and Codepunk's purely technical blog and podcast were also troublesome to me because despite the better writing, hckr.fyi was supposed to move in a direction with more cultural context and thought. Did code snippets and how-to's really belong? I had moved over some of the best pieces, but what about the rest?

I decided not to keep that separate. You should own up to your own history. There is no difference between who I am as a software engineer and who I am when contemplating philosophy or exploring culture. Whether I am the sum of these parts, or the "I" in me is none of that is a different discussion, but if I'm leaning towards a full consolidation, it made no sense to leave them out. Instead, I moved them over and went to work with the canonical attribute.

Much of this was prompted by my Richard Metzger post. I originally had zero intention of bringing much from the Mad Ghoul or Key 23 over. I didn't care for the immature prose. But in posting about Metzger's new Kickstarter, I thought it important to share some context on my history with Disinformation and some of their people; One such piece of history being my interview with Metzger all those decades past.

I had interviewed several people in the occult and counterculture world back then, and putting Metzger's interview up really prompted me to move the rest, and if I was going to move the rest and not be shy, why not move the Mad Ghoul and Key 23 items that made sense?

At about the same time I was contemplating this, I came across a folder on my computer with the original Bots and Beer newsletters in them. I enjoyed that particular project (and sure some of it was because of the craft beer reviews). If I was going to move over the ancient past, why not the recent, and if Bots and Beer was coming over… no reason to leave Codepunk out.

Officially… I'm done. All that has been saved and written has been published. I'm sure I'll come across some other items, but the heavy lifting is complete. This probably only represents 70-75% of what I've blogged about on the Internet, but like many things, some are just lost to the decay of memory.

I can't guarantee that the future won't see excursions into the past. After all, some philsophies and fringe scientific theories believe that the future can impact the past. Mitch Horowitz has been known to reference scientific studies that show you can increase your performance on exams if you continue to study after you've taken the exam: The future looking back upon itself.

The past warrants review, but not to ruminate or dwell. Use it as a tool for the future.