Snags

Hoo, boy!

One day into this project (meaning, yesterday), I already ran into some snags.

I was trying to decide whether to upload posts in order chronologically or some other way, when I noticed some weird stuff:

1. The backup files I have are named by their titles, with no mention of their dates in the filenames, and I backed a lot of them up on the same day, so the modified date doesn't help at all.
2. For some reason, I saved most of the posts as .webarchive files, which is horribly inconvenient for purposes of this project. I will have to convert that information into some other format before I can actually put them here. That will take some time.
3. Some of the backups lost all of their formatting in Myspace before I was able to grab them (something that happened toward the end), so I will have to get in there and put them back in their intended form, if I can even remember the intended form.

There are probably more snags I will discover soon.

So anyway, this is going to take some time to fix. My intention was to get in and repost a handful of entries each day until they were all up, starting yesterday, but that didn't happen and will be harder than I anticipated. Anyone anxious to read them (believe it or not, there are probably actually two people anxious to read them - I'm not narcissistic enough to think the general public gives a rat's ass about any of this) will have to be patient with me.

So, bear with me. All will be right in the end. I just have to figure this out.

Love, as always,

Josh

What's Going On Here? Welcome to Antmanifesto.

Once upon a time, there was a thing called Myspace. Everybody loved it. It was pretty great.

I had a Myspace page, just like everybody else. I used it for all the inane things everybody used it for. I can't even remember what all of those things were. This is all ancient history.

But, one thing I do remember is my Myspace blog.

It was a strange period of my life, and many factors contributed to the way I used that blog.

I wrote and wrote and wrote in that thing. I started out with opinions about the current events of the day (I'm talking like 2005 through 2009 or so). But I often backed up my opinions with anecdotes from my own life.

Somehow, I managed to build up a fanbase there. I made some friends from all over the world that way.

These friends would leave comments on my blog entries, encouraging me to continue, so I did. But, after some time, these friends mentioned to me that they were more interested in the anecdotes than the opinions. I was happy to oblige them.

I continued to write and write and write, but I shifted my focus mostly to just stories from my life. For reasons I may never understand, it was a hit. More people came from all over the world and read about my life. I do have lots of stories, for sure, but it was never clear to me why people were so interested in them. It didn't matter to me though. I'm pretty much totally wide open. I'll tell you anything. (That may not be a safe thing to do anymore, but it's how I am, so, you know...)

Anyway, I did this for quite a while, and then one day it all went away. Myspace went away and my blog went with it. Most of those new friends disappeared too. The ones who stuck around migrated over to Facebook with me, but most of my Myspace friends and fans just vanished into thin air, sadly.

But, I had the forethought to back all of my blog up before the site turned to mush.

For many years, I have intended to port that blog somewhere, but I'm the kind of guy who has fifty projects unfinished at any given time, and that idea got put so far on the backburner that I forgot all about it. Until now...

Today, I realized that I had set this page up long, long ago and never did anything with it. That's about to change.

One requirement for migrating the blog that I wasn't sure I could find anywhere was that the site give me the ability to change the dates on entries to match when I actually wrote the things. So very much has changed since I wrote this stuff, and it would be weird as hell to have the dates on the entries indicate that I had just written this stuff now.

Turns out, that's no problem here, and so now I feel ready to do this.

I will do my best to preserve the integrity of these posts. If I expressed opinions then that aren't my opinions now, I'll leave it as it was. I'm not going to censor my much younger self.

Also, Myspace's blog had some features that I'll have to recreate here in some way that works (for instance, each entry included the music I was listening to as I wrote, and I'm sure I can figure out a way to embed some youtube or spotify links here to mimic that).

So anyway, welcome to Antmanifesto. It's just a little self-indulgent garbage from a different age, but maybe people will still be into it as they were then. Maybe not. Whatever.

I hope someone will get something out of it. Maybe that someone is you?

Enjoy.

(This is going to take a while, so if you find yourself interested in this at all, check back from time to time to see what's been added. I assure you, there is PLENTY of material here. I wrote my ass off back in the day.)

Love, as always,

Josh