The transcendent nature of hearing a strange old robotically buzzy 20 year old song as the bus crested the hill on Punt Rd and, a little later, I stepped off and walked to the office; it fit the cold morning air so well.
When did I first hear this song? I’d bought the CD in Singapore and listened to it on this train trip to Kuala Lumpur in early 2004, in very different weather to this wintry morning:
I learnt so much on that trip, and saw so many things:
As we get older, it’s harder and harder to fight the pull of nostalgia. What would I have done differently? Plenty of things, but also nothing.
We visited Ueno Station one cold, grey morning, entirely because of a memory of an old song, as you do – or, well, as I do.
My wife found it odd. I couldn't really explain how songs seep into your bones over time, but it related to how I needed to experience a more random nature of Tokyo beyond other people's top-N lists.
We could've seen anything at all here, and it would've helped a few more connections form somewhere in my brain. That's what I'm looking for – the joy of less-conscious discoveries. After all, it's up to you what the image means.
I woke up to a sea of memories from musicians and other folks about Tom Verlaine and Television; my own are more second-hand.
An influential friend gave me a mixtape in the last year of high school containing a single from a local band we all liked (and whose guitarist would, in a strange mixing of worlds much later on, become my manager for a year or so). The b-side of that single was a cover of Little Johnny Jewel which lodged itself squarely in my mind, even after I bought the impossibly good Marquee Moon later on.
Somewhere among the waves, I enjoyed reading Lucy Sante mention how every gig sounded different – it almost makes me miss going along to more live music in the hope of those transcendental moments (who am I kidding? I feel too old for all that standing up).
Having some time on my hands is a gift – I've been using it to just get out and spend time on my feet, each day. I might struggle to suggest that I'm making the most of my time, but that's the point – I don't have to! The main battle has been to disconnect myself from the constant need to feel productive, and to just let it happen. This includes photographic opportunities.
A mixture of idle time marooned at home and my day job having taken me away from hands-on tech a long time ago has resulted in me prodding at the old shared server I’ve shepherded for a little over 20 years, now. A bunch of people once used it – fewer still do. You might think of it as being a bit like a tilde community. While it used to be more convenient to have it running from someone’s machine room (I'm not even sure exactly where, now) that’s no longer true, and I’ve worked out that I can support the few services it still needs to provide from my house, on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB SSD attached to it. In some ways it’ll serve more as an archive of old things more than anything else, really. In the process of sorting out a migration plan (something I’d had to do many times before, as we moved from machine to machine) I wondered if I wasn’t alone in looking back on those earlier days, wondering how we got to a year like 2020.
I’ve reached out to my old peers – most of us relentless journallers & bloggers back in the early ’00s – to ask not just “are you still using anything on this server?” but also “how are you going?” I’ve been pretty awful at actively keeping up with folk, instead relying on the passive nature of seeing updates floating past in the mix of news from the doom-scrolling apps that vacuum our time. Many of us moved away from Melbourne. One or two I never met in person, even. Some folk I’m almost too frightened to reach out to, but I’ll find a way. I’ll see how we go for responses, and hopefully one or two of them might write something we can publish for the archive, as it were.
What did I get out of running that host for all those years? Mostly I just wanted to feel useful, and I felt useful helping folk out, helping them say something no matter how small, and helping them connect with others in those earlier, potential-rich days of the Internet. In return, I received plenty of system admin practice that fed my day job (and vice-versa). I’m curious to hear from the others now – what did they get from it?
It's hard to avoid the gravitational pull of music from our formative years – in my case, around the end of high school. One such song has its 30th birthday today, on July 16th – #Swervedriver's Son of Mustang Ford.
Do I suddenly have more to say? Not in particular, but in the process of cleaning up lots of old things and old memories, I realised that I missed feeling part of a world of words. Like everyone, I fell into the world of short status updates and private messaging (the latter not so different to the 90s, except that this time we don't have a single app pulling all the chat protocols together). My ability to self-host never went away, but convenience trumped continuing to maintain my own software stack as my day job moved away from hands-on tech, and also as my life changed in various unexpected ways.
For various reasons, now feels like a time that I'm able to consider revisiting this world. I wonder how many old friends are still out there?
