This blog has been a number of things to a number of people. When I first started out, I was so desperate to get characters on the screen that I’d write anything I could so long as I wanted to get something down. Some of the early posts have very little context; most of them are notes to myself more than anything. A dream, a conjuration, a picture for which I didn’t have the background painted. They all mean something to me, though, and remain as reminders and inspiration. No thought can exist in isolation; they prefer paper chains.

The commit in question was largely a book-keeping correction. I had initially thought that I wanted to create some scenes for my stories and set them against a very precise timeline. This was to enhance the setting and make it feel real. The order of events seemed very important to me then. I thought about why. I thought about the way when you go to the movies and there’s no guarantee that the scenes you are presented are in chronological order. A character might be remembering-when and a scene plays for the viewer. Sometimes you get fake-flash-forwards, where a character (day)dreams, often but not necessarily while sleeping, of something they fear will come true. As in, Bobby has a big test tomorrow so he goes to sleep. He sleeps fitfully and has a dream in which he fails the test horribly. He wakes in a start with the dream’s finale imprinted on his memory stack – but he realizes quickly that it was a false-memory and he is not actually finished with the test.

In the vein of the unreliable (or at least disorganized) narrator trope, I had the idea that I would publish a bunch of vignettes that would come together as the story. But that was the problem. It was a setting, not a story. And even so, the vignettes had too much variation to feel united at all. Why are they presented together if they are all (seeming) random?

I realized with a heavy heart that the author cannot be excised from his work. Obscuring the actual dates of my work served little purpose but to confuse me. And it created a tight framework that would stiffle future progress. Certainly I was not intending to write purely in order going forward – but I needed a standard timekeeper.

Thus I would use the front-matter of the post as it was intended and each date would indicate the day the post was created as rendered by the calendar of the prime material plane(PMP). According to the commit detail, on this day, I moved any information about the post’s information-date to the post-body.

A relatively simple example is the poem dated to Nov 16, 2017 titled ‘the thrill’. This note references a short video clip in which a mouse-hunt is shown from the perspective of the cat. The three lines of verse are the thoughts of the cat at the conclusion of the hunt. The old scheme of reckoning time had this entry dated for the film creation (which happens to be one of the oldest from a watch-bot) in February 1976. Surely this was not the date of the log creation because NANNY-C was not even ALIVE then! No, in fact this date references the date the watch-bot created the file, which is indeed the third of February in 1976. There is some debate as to whether this is entirely accurate; dating methods on bots from this era rely on the initial date setting on the microchip, which was done just once when assembling the ‘bot. Some were set correctly, and some weren’t. At any rate, this is the date encoded on the video file. The sound has become lossy and was cut from the video at some point. It no longer remains in the file as documented in 2017 by NANNY-C.

Other points in this commit:

  • a disambiguation page for recipes might have been called ‘pantry’
  • I was unsure if snips was a permanent or transitory category
  • personnel was going to link to characters of various properties; this probably would have only helped me and served to confuse the reader
  • ‘entertainment’ was invented as a place to discuss properties of others

ref clean up fake dated posts