A couple of decades ago, I was very active on a US adult bulletin board. It encouraged conversation, and I posted a lot of material there. Unfortunately, the board was sold to a competitor, who eventually took it down. Its archives vanished. I, unfortunately, had failed to keep copies of my posts and their corresponding conversations.
This is not significant in the scheme of things, but it’s important to me. Those conversations were effectively my diary. I like to revisit my old output, see what I said, how my opinions have changed, who changed them, how & why, and what else I might have forgotten. In effect, my posts are part of my personal history.
I have been able to recover quite a lot of my material from other sites where I was once very active, such as the UK’s CIX, and occasionally boards.ie, who have kept their old bulletin boards alive and kicking. I am grateful to them. A while ago, I backfilled this blog with entries from there. I cannot do the same with boncom.
I find myself, at the moment, posting quite a lot of (mostly forgettable) stuff on quora. I used to post a lot on faceboot before I got fed up with crass, abusive ethos. Now, I’ve no reason to think that any of these sites will vanish, but I thought that about other sites that eventually did.
I don’t want to suffer the same loss again. That’s why, as I post things elsewhere, I tend to copy the posts here. I will sometimes backfill this blog with old posts from elsewhere.
Not all my blog originates elsewhere, and most that I post elsewhere doesn’t appear here. This is not the place for photographs of last week’s lunch, as traditional as that might be. It is the place, though, for other kinds of posts, such as, for example, mentioning that, entirely by coincidence of course, I’ve beaten my personal best for distance drop–kicking of yorkshire terriers, my only sporting activity.