Safety Dance

This article has absolutely nothing to do with the song. I just wanted to call an article "Safety Dance" because it's fun.

I'm not even really going to talk about safety. I could have called it "Backup Dance" but where's the fun in that? Nowhere, that's where. And anyone who thinks differently is selling something. And that something is a cheap Czech knockoff CD featuring a song called "Backup Dance." Don't fall prey to these people.

Wow, tangent city in the first paragraphs. No matter. We're back on target and heading down the track. Destination: the problem of losing information.

I have heard from various sources that Blogger lacks finesse in the area of not eating archives. I have yet to see evidence of this, but by writing about it I will no doubt call down the evil gods of data loss upon my blog and will experience the horror first-hand. And horrible it will be. For you see, I don't have any backups.

I'm sure there's probably some way to use Blogger to make backups. And the low-tech method of simply typing out these things in a file on my own computer, then copying and pasting them, is also a possibility. I wish I could say that the reason I don't do either of these things is something other than laziness.

Actually, I can say that. I don't do either of these things principally because of laziness, but also because of the transient medium that is the Internet. There is something cathartic about knowing that nothing is permanent, and that things come and things go and if the evil gods of data loss will it, I shall be archive-less. Or archive-impaired, as is the correct term. I am not writing for the ages. I am writing for its therapeutic benefits to my brain. Albeit that these therapeutic benefits are slow in coming.

For that matter, I don't know why I restrict myself to views. I could just as easily have named this blog, "Nobody Wants To Read My Writing." That's not a bad idea, actually, since it's the truth. I should have used that. But I have views, and I ought to express them. Nobody wants to read poetry by me, or short fictional pieces by me, or vague rants by me, or indeed any of my writing. And of the broad category of, "My Writing," the narrow sub-category, "My Views," is the most difficult to write.

It takes a fair amount of effort to have views on new things every day, and even when I don't, I can't just glob out several paragraphs of random garbage. They have to be views. So I stuck with views because they're harder to write and require more thought. I think.

I am sorely tempted to create a backup of the archive now, because I'm egotistical enough to believe that something I write might actually live on through the ages. But, as I said above, I'm mostly lazy. So the gods of data loss still have their pigeon.

I promise, I will not write random crap for the next article (damn that word, damn it to hell), which will be entitled, "Foghat!"