Diary-X foo

Wow. All the data for the diary-x site was lost through a combination of a failed drive and human failure to back up the stuff. My condolences to everyone who maintained their journals there. We did for several years, and fortunately I have backups of everything (although mine is so big *cough* it’s proven hard to import it into this one).

I certainly feel for the d-x creator/maintainer, Stephen, who must feel like utter shit. I think we’ve all fucked up in our lives and most of us are lucky that our fuckups weren’t that bad – or at least not that public. Of course then there are doctors and such whose fuckups result in death, so – a little perspective is good, here.

At the same time I feel really fortunate to have worked on PernMUSH with people who simply didn’t make mistakes like that; they would have noticed the backup file was Really Small In Size, or something. They respected (and still, I am sure, respect – hi Dy :)) the time and effort that other people were putting in to create things enough to share the responsibility with other people and – well – be careful.

I think that was a pivotal experience in my 20s that taught me that even if a thing is free in money, it’s never really free in time. And you should, ideally, respect other people’s time and effort even if they are not paying you in cash. It doesn’t mean you will always do what they want – particularly in running something Internetish – but you can give them warnings if things are going to disappear, etc. You can remind yourself, in that moment that you’re angry and frustrated, that destroying their shit is plain old wrong.

I think it says a lot about our society that the response of a lot of people has been: well, Stephen did it for free, so what do you expect?! And there’s a certain truth in that: I don’t think there would be much sense in suing or villifying Stephen. At the same time, I think he did have a moral/ethical responsibility to those who were pouring their creative efforts into the site. I imagine that, like most of us, his life changed, his priorities changed, and he was not able to take as much care with it. And having burned out and witnessed burnout on similar things, it’s entirely understandable that he made a mistake.

But it was a grave one and I feel really sorry for those people whose work was lost to it.

Like Hemmingway and his famous lost manuscripts, I hope that they just get writing again. And I hope I can find some of them ’cause I will miss ‘em. Many if not most of them have no idea I was reading their stuff and I don’t have their email addresses, so I hope we bump up on the small world of the Internet again.

If you had a diary-x and have a new journal you want people to read comment here with its url and your old d-x username, and I’ll stick a link up, in the hopes that people will all link to each other and eventually we all find each other again.