psipsy

If bad luck existed as matter, it would be in a gaseous state. It would be able to slip through the tiniest opening and reach unexpected places in unwelcome ways. That said, I've never trusted lawn mowers and neither should you. For that matter, don't trust any power tool that involves spinning blades. (Nothing happened. I'm fine.) My mower has seen better days. The failure condition: Hard to start, low speed, wouldn't stay running. Clean out the carburetor? Nah, just replace it and a bunch of other parts for about $30. Fixed. It's good to have skills, tools, and the environment to do the repairs.

With M3-53 done, the wave of new music is still rolling in. So far across various methods and sources, I've bought 28 CDs plus a couple digital offerings. And climbing. That's a fraction of what I got at M3-52, but since I wasn't physically there this time, that's still a lot. When I was at M3 and I'd buy something that turned out to be a card for a digital download, I was like "why am I here, then". But when I'm at home, a digital download just means I don't have to pay for shipping and then wait for it.

Sometimes during light naps, I'll have a lucid dream. Sometimes they'll get me thinking long after. There was one where I was on the verge of finding something. Rare. Precious. Almost too ethereal to exist. Something that couldn't happen or be encountered through effort, it could only be by pure chance. What was it? I don't know. It used to be important. Is it still important? Oh, if it was, I would have remembered! Almost out of mercy, the dream wouldn't tell me, lest I throw myself down another rabbit hole.

And that could have been a lot of things, really. Obscure anime and manga with erratic releases. B-movies that rarely get aired and when they do it's at 3AM on short notice. Infrequent songs from singers with a "it's ready when I feel like it is" mentality. Acquaintances in parts unknown who logged into something like AIM or made any kind of post two times per year. Places that I wanted to visit but are hard for me to get to for various reasons. Websites with update intervals measured in eons. And so on. Sometimes I'd be able to go back and search with resources that only became available more recently, other times I'd have to accept it's effectively lost.

The obscure anime and movies from long ago eventually found their way to modern formats, or at least most of them did. Be it DVD, BD, or torrents, it's out there now and a lot easier to find than 30 years ago. Y'know, maybe I want to watch something extra cheesey and not have to worry about waiting for it to air or find out the rental store doesn't have it or hope someone has a tape of it. (I was gonna say 20 years ago but then DVD was very much established in 2004.)

Manga and comics have a slightly lower success rate. A series can be dropped by the publisher because it's not making money, or a licensing agreement collapses. And fandom isn't required to take up that slack. I've learned that putting subtitles on anime is a lot easier than putting translations in manga. At some point, someone will come up with a way to use machine translations for translating large amounts of manga. They'll feed a scanned page in, and the output will put English over the original Japanese and create a new file from that.

Places can close or disappear entirely. I'll go to look it up on Maps or something, and maybe it's still there, or maybe it was torn down and something else built in its place. Websites exist only for as long as someone is willing to host them. Once someone stops paying for the domain or hosting, it's gone.

The people are the hardest to find. Often all I have to go by is an online handle, maybe an empty shell of a blog, or an abandoned social media account. Faceless strangers emerging from the ether, only to vanish back into it. Of the hundreds of people I've completely lost contact with, I could count on one hand how many of them have made an effort to reconnect. The other 99% can't be bothered or don't want to be found. I learned to accept that I'm probably never going to hear from them again. Maybe that's for the best. I'm going to follow that cue and leave the past where it is and hope that life is treating them well. If someone does want to reconnect, hey cool, how's life been for you? Otherwise being a detective isn't my job. Point is, focus on the friends we have in the here and now before they too slip back into the ether.

Some of nostalgia is trying to re-live the past how it was remembered, and most of it is trying to re-live the past how we wanted it to be.