To have any experience with the internet is to know that there has been no greater lie told (mostly by accident) than “the internet is forever” (or it’s popular variant, “if you put that on the internet, it is there forever”). That was always what I was told when I was young. It’s what many of my friends were told. “Be careful with what you put on the internet! There’s no such thing as completely taking it down!” Nowadays, we know better. For things to exist on the internet, they have to be stored somewhere and digital storage is not as eternal as we were led to believe. Servers go down, backups get deleted, “AI” agents delete entire environments and then back that nothing up over the backups, and sometimes Amazon just deletes your account and all it’s digital licenses for no reason with no chance of recovery. Digital ownership is ephemeral and while nothing truly lasts forever, the half-life of things on the internet might be much shorter than everyone was led to believe. And sure, just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. There’s so much data tucked away in advertising companies, various archival efforts, and forgotten, dusty hard drives in some abandonded warehouse or server rack, so it’s difficult to tell when something is truly gone forever (like a video game I played via SNES emulator that I cannot find any mention or record of anywhere that I keep thinking is Secrets Of Mana but learn it isn’t when I go play SoM). I’m sure this game from my late childhood/early double-digit-years exists somewhere and I’m sure the version I remember is some modified ROM or a translated version of a game and that it is sitting tucked away on someone’s computer somewhere, forever out of my reach other than the few hazy memories of it I hold onto.
Continue readingCatholicism
Lasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory
One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
Continue readingI Could Write A Book About Why I Love Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Spoiler Warning: Here is your one and only warning that most of this post will talk about Fire Emblem: Three Houses and a whole lot of spoilers for the game. Anything below this paragraph might include spoilers for the various paths, choices, and secret of the game. While it has been out for three years already and that’s probably plenty of time for everyone who is going to play it to have played it, adding a spoiler warning doesn’t cost me anything and I want everyone who might become interested in the game to experience it. So stop reading if you don’t want spoilers because I’m running out of junk to put here so you don’t accidentally see a spoiler in one of the paragraphs below.
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