reddit archaeology

05 May, 2025

it's been longer than i intended since my last post. the last little while has been really quite draining, with everything going on, and i haven't really had the energy to write.

this morning i woke up sick, so today has been a listless one. sick is a bad state for going to work and being useful. i've spent most of the day struggling through the most elaborate sudoku puzzle i have ever seen, with not much progress; i enjoy these kinds of puzzles, but i never really got the hang of them. stuck inside and not able to really help with anything... i feel useless, and i don't like it.

i was going to write more about that, but to be honest, i've been dwelling on my own uselessness a bit too much over the past few weeks. i'm ill, i have enough malaise right now without getting on all that, let's write about something nicer instead.

the other night i went out with my girlfriend! we had a lovely time, which she has given a better account of than i could, i think. we talked about a lot of different things, and... through various events, one of them led to me going and digging up some of the writing i did several years ago now.

i was a little bit apprehensive, after my other recent experiences reading my own writing from more than a few months ago, but everything i was looking through on saturday predated even my old blog by three or four years, and it felt... different. it didn't itch at me in the same way, even though i was expecting it to itch so much worse. sure, the writing style doesn't really feel like me any more, and i cringed a little at some of the choices made, but... i enjoyed reading it, all the same.

i'm realising more and more that i miss a lot of that part of my life; who i was at the time and more importantly who i was that person with. the pressures of real life made it difficult to stay so tightly enmeshed with a community that i miss being a part of, and with that loss of fine closeness went a lot of the confidence and fluidity i think i used to have in social interactions. was i always so held back and stilted? the me who wrote those things was so self assured in comparison, in the jokes that he made and the more comfortable tone he would put on in more serious writing.

i said i was going to write about something nicer, so i won't push too far on the oh, woe is me, how i have peaked as a 22 year old man on the verge of dropping out of uni. let's be clear, despite having a bunch of really close friends on discord, 2018 era emma was a fucking loser. but it was nice to go visit some of the marks he left on one small corner of the internet while he was around, and remember how happy he was with them sometimes; the puzzle he spent weeks working on and most of a day just explaining to people, the weird fiction he tried quite hard to make disturbing instead of just wildly horny¹, the time he spent a good three days trying to make believable judgements on what a group of fictional anime girls would give each other for christmas, the story that was so full of threads tied to the people around him that it only really worked perfectly if you read it within a couple of weeks of it being written.

i miss it. reading all that old stuff again has filled me with a new momentary desire to recapture a bit of it, if i can figure out how to. the figuring out is going to be the tricky part.

#general #writing