Some thoughts on memory, the Internet and turning 30
It's been an astonishingly long time since I wrote a personal blog entry. I think in between moving to London, getting my degree and then getting a job, my whole habit of journaling and blogging has fallen off a cliff entirely. This is perhaps best expressed by the fact the "most recent" entry on this site is a blog post I wrote three years ago, cataloging some of the things I did during my first year at The Times and Sunday Times.
This is the first post in my new, "v8" version of aendrew.com. It's also the first blog post I've written since turning thirty, since moving flat like four times, since changing jobs, since leaving one relationship and entering another. It feels like an unbelievable lot has happened to me since moving to London, most of which seems like an eternity ago. Perhaps restructuring my web properties has contributed to my suddenly feeling this way; perhaps also it has something to do with finally not having a book I need to be working on for the first time in roughly two years.
I call this "v8" of the website because my web presence has changed dramatically since I published my first website in 1997. For the sake of posterity, here are various personal websites I've built throughout my life. Please be forewarned that most of these are utterly terrible, and reading the content somewhat chronicles my journey from naïve small town child, to gratingly "woke" small town high-school student, to the largely-ambivalent and semi-creative semi-adult I am now.
- v1: Rinin's Land (1997)
- v2: hairysquid.net (2003)
- v3: hairysquid.net mk.II (2004)
- v4: begin.hairysquid.net (2008)
- v5: aendrew.com (2009)
- v6: aendrew.com mk.II (2011)
- v7: aendrew.com mk.III (2013)
All of the above would be lost in the sands of time to bitrot were it not for the valiant efforts of Archive.org, who have the sisyphian task of trying to snapshot the Internet over time. Be that as it may, it's still pretty incredible that I'm able to recover so much of my personal history this way — though, given how much of our online lives are lived through walled garden social media sites, I wonder whether I'm particularly unique in this regard.
Anyway, we'll see if this site exists outside of Medium in a year or two.
-Æ