Coming back here feels like digging through a time capsule, and I’ve discovered a few things about myself along the way.

Nostalgia brought me back, and yet, I arrived to find that most of the digital footprints I’d left were gone.

I’ve spent hours sifting through six different laptops and pcs, old hard drives, and deep dives into the Wayback Machine, hoping to resurrect what I could. After all that, I’ve managed to restore about 300 of the 400 or so posts, but it’s like piecing together a half-finished puzzle.

A lot of posts, even when I recover the words, are missing their images.

Some pieces can survive without their visuals, but others…not so much. Like the post about the impressive bruise I gave WrongMark during ninJA. Without the photo, it’s just a story of a bruise.

I might recreate some of the missing images with AI, just to give some context. I tried it with the Emergency Medical Facilities post, and it actually worked out better than I expected.

More upsetting is that Some of the Monkeys Like Us cartoons are gone. I remember and have recreated a few. But others, like the one titled The Elephant, where the only text in the post was “elephant.jpg” are lost to time.

I still adore those old Monkeys strips, but 20 years later what few graphic files I have left are very low quality. If I’m going to make more, I need new graphics – and the last few times I tried that I got a lot of negative feedback! It does need updating though, but I’ll talk about that in a different post

Re-reading all my old posts I’ve learned (re-learned?) a few things about myself

Firstly, that I used to say “mah!” instead of “meh!”. – I don’t even know what to do with that.

And some of the things I wrote? Yeah, let’s just say they might’ve been fine in the context of my close group of friends back then, but in 2024, they’d need some serious footnotes. I’ve resisted the urge to edit too much because this blog is a time capsule of who I was. But I did leave a few things out – trust me, you would too.

One thing that’s really struck me is how much joy I used to find in things. I gushed about ninJA, conventions, and my friends more than a few times. It made me realize I want to recapture that attitude. Somewhere along the line, I stopped pouring that much joy into things.

I was certainly a lot more active socially, I talk about being drunk a lot, and in one post talk about 4 weekends in a row in Blackpool for Beyond, Quest, EverQuest and a convention.

Once, I left for work on a Thursday and didn’t return home until Monday night after an impromptu weekend trip – Blackpool again, of course, with nothing but whatever clothes I happened to have in my car.

I don’t ninJA anymore, or play Quest, Beyond or EverQuest, and I haven’t been to a convention in years. I moved to Australia 16 years ago, so don’t see those same friends either

I’m married with 2 kids now. And 20 years older. So I’m much less socially active now. But I’ve been playing beach volleyball every Monday for the past 15 years, and that’s been a constant source of fun. Recently, we picked up indoor bouldering, and I’ve surprised myself by how much I love it. And D&D? That’s been a part of my life on and off since I moved here. Our current campaign, Deadlands, has hit the 23-session mark, which might be a record for us.

It was a pleasure to me to work to restore this old blog and rediscover who I used to be.

There were only a handful of my old friends who read and commented on the blog, and I can’t imagine any of them thinking to check for updates on a blog that’s been offline for fifteen years. Except maybe Pixie, because I’ve been spamming him with nostalgia throughout this restoration, so he at least knows it’s back up. But I suspect the only person I’ll be writing for is me. And that’s ok. I’m going to try to write regularly again and see if I can recapture the positive outlook and the joy in life past-mcphee clearly had.