It can all go away so fast

Even though it's deeply, deeply embarrassing, I've been putting up old fan fiction on the blog for the past couple of months for one main reason - I need another back-up.

There's a hole in our culture from the early 00s through to about 10 years ago, because that's when everything shifted online and has been almost been immediately washed out by the tide of history.

I can find out things about 70s and 80s culture much easier, because there was so much printed material, and a lot of it is still out there. Old magazines and newspapers that you can track down, and read about forgotten feuds and films and comics you didn't even know existed. 

But try and find something about a 2004 comic book - good fucking luck. All the promotional interviews they did at the time were for websites that are dead urls, a lot of sites have been snapped up by bitcoin bullshit artist or pornographers looking for their new easy sell (god bless them), and to be honest, we probably didn't need that interview with Jeph Loeb forever.

It's a rolling issue - I loved writing things for the Neotext Review, but even before they stopped commissioning new stuff, I've been archiving the shit out of everything that went up there, (which are much better than the original drafts I still have saved here and there, because I had a great goddamn editor who made me work my brain.) 

It's nobody's fault - as has been often noted in the great philosophical work Judge Dredd: things have a way of... happening. And it's no wonder all the culture is slipping away, when it's hard enough to hold onto your own past.

I've lost so much of my own shit. At least three complete novels, four finished movie scripts, a few dozen shorter stories and a few hundred scraps, all gone just to some kind of inevitable attrition that comes with having to get a new computer ever seven years at most (I always stretch them out to they're near breaking, because I know something will get left behind.)

Some of them really hurt - I would love to read a novel I wrote when I was 22, because who the fuck wouldn't? And there was a movie script I wrote with the right honorable Reverend Colonel Joe Rice which both of us have lost, of the gunman with pearl handles from the gates of heaven, standing up to all the evils in the world.

But the computers they were written on were recycled long ago, the email accounts we exchanged drafts on shut down two decades ago and I don't know when it happened, but somewhere in there, they got lost in the transfer between hardware. Even the clouds never really last. (The clue to that is in the name, because clouds always fucking disperse.)

The only thing that last is the printed copies, like the ones that I wrote when I was 19 and so proud that I printed the out from the work computer in my first office, there's only one copy of the serial killer movie script called All These Fools Bleeding and it's in the box under my bed, and it can fuckin' well stay there.

And that's why I put up the Skin Jobs every Sunday, even though I'm showing my arse with shame, because it's another back-up. I have somehow held onto them since the mid-90s, but I can't guarantee they'll survive if something catastrophic happens to the computer hardware sitting on the kitchen table. It can all go away so fast.

(Needless to say, all our pictures of our kids are backed up on multiple computers in multiple sites, with plenty printed out in case a sun surge wipes all the digital world clean...)

But there is some small hope - a few seconds googling revealed that comic site The Ninth Art is still there, which warms my jaded heart a bit. It shut down in 2006, which is a goddamn eternity ago, but there's still a bit of recent history there. As long as somebody cares. (Addendumb: OMG, The Bomb is still out there...)

And I still hope that one of the discs I have shoved away in junk boxes will one day be read, and that a slice of my own past will pop up again. If it does, it's going straight on the blog before I lose it again.