Or the woes of building a foundation on unsteady ground
So a few days ago, as I was attempting to change the compilation settings for a project I was planning, my SSD crashed and failed. This was not my main drive, but it was my secondary drive. I made a boot disk with puppy linux, and tried to see if it could be read from there. No dice. I brought the drive to microcenter, payed 55 dollars for the recovery diagnostic, and they were unable to recover anything. I do have a few more options, but none of them are convenient. I'm in the "hail mary" phase of this honestly, and it does not feel great.
The drive contained:It's weird. When it happened, I didn't miss everything as much as I thought I would. For context, I've got some sort of malaise surrounding my relationship to technology sparked by the onset of general AI stuff. There's a lot of things I can't do for various reasons that I won't get into, but making software was the one thing I knew I could get good at, and could consistently contribute to society with. I've done a lot of research, and I am (was?) excited to contribute my skills to the field by making cool new things. The cognitive energy spent in solving the minute of problems while programming was FUN for me. I'm not the best developer, but I looked forward to solving those problems gradually and elegantly. It gave me energy! It inspired me! The AI stuff makes me feel like you're skipping the whole point of the job. Everyone knows about all the environmental harm that these datacenter companies do to our communities, and everyone is aware that these tech bosses are facists. Plus, your mind came with your earth subscription. Why PAY SOMEONE ELSE TO THINK? I don't ever want to be in a situation where I've offloaded my production to an AI company, and that AI company enshittifies and raises its prices tenfold. Mind you, this is what Epi-Pen company did to me back in 2012. Sixty dollar epi pen up to seven hundred dollars. That's not sustainable, and potentially not survivable in the case of an emergency. I understand that there are a lot of shitty things in our lives now that we are used to, but we don't have to let it get worse. I don't need another addiction or another crux, and I don't need another wedge for tech companies to drill into my life. I'm sure this is obvious, but the bad news blitz barrage the facists have been fueling with accelerating intensity, especially that of the last decade has been quite exhausting. And seeing my fields - software, gaming, and art be at the forefront of most of these attacks have given me a number of existential crises I'm still processing.
All this to say that for the last few months, I've felt strange about even working on things on my computer. Outside of my team commitments, this all really does feel for nothing sometimes. Like barely even for myself. My hard drive dying was another nail in that coffin. Immediately after it happened, I felt nothing. And that was scary. I've spent the last 18 years of my life staring at this damn screen and making stuff, why don't I feel anything? Am I not connected to it? Am I producing art or am I producing kipple? After I got the notice from Microcenter, it started to dawn on me that stuff might actually be pretty lost, and my thought process started to change. Why do I write these articles? Who's going to read my stupid comics? Listen to the music? I like to romanticize that someone might find something I worked on at some point in the future, perhaps decades in the future, and find solace on something I made. That's how I have experienced art. Going online as a young person often felt like exploring the caverns of a dead civilization. Once anticipated forum threads that fizzled out without fanfare. The lovingly crafted projects of people who died over a decade ago. Internet archived versions of websites that once had way more content on them (looking at you Nihon Falcom). Tools I use every day that haven't been updated since 1999. Usenet posts from the 1980s written with a decorum that feels foreign to my digital-native eyes. For a medium so cheap to produce and manage, it almost feels like a grave mistake when data vanishes. It is cheap to make but not necessarily trivial. Lots of places had love poured into them, ya know? Those places meant something to me!
But it's strange though. Nostalgia for these things isn't really something I feel, since I wasn't there for most of the show. I think that escapism has also been my enemy in this, and that's actually been kinda toxic for me. I'm not sure I have the words for this, but I feel like in losing myself in so much stuff from years ago I'm finding that I'm unable to enjoy things I would have otherwise liked had I given it the chance. I like to think that I'm immune to FOMO, but I think that's not true at all. There's a certain FOMO I feel while looking at everything basically. I should be taking my time with my experiences, I might miss something.
I suppose the lesson here is that there's nothing in this world that will last forever. I think I want to get better about being in real life, and appreciating the art and artists while they're still making stuff. But more than all of these I want stability. You get the feeling that everything is falling apart nowadays. Sooner or later everything and everyone you know will be dead and forgotten. I know that, but I think I'm extra sensitive to it now that the loss is everywhere and never ending.
I've had spinning disk hard drives last me 30 years, but a dead SSD after just two? YEARS worth of work just gone in an instant like that. It's not sorrow but more like a shock and anxiety. Like a hole punctured in my life that I'm still feeling the shape of.
You're right. I could, and should start backing things up. Some stuff was only saved because it was on github. I have an extra drive, and I could probably automate the process somewhat. Maybe setting up a little local FTP server is in the cards... But honestly, right now I'm just tired. I have deadlines coming up, and for one of them I have to face the music and tell them that I lost everything I did for this project.
I wrote this as a way to cope. I'm fine. I'll manage. June 28, 2026