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On Bookmarks and Eternity

Hello! My website is still very much under construction, so please excuse the broken CSS and lack of links. Also note that at some point (read: whenever I can be bothered) there will be a load of 88x31s at the bottom.
For my first blog post, I thought it might be fitting to get a bit meta and talk about what I'm actually using to do this, and why I'm doing it in the first place.

At the moment, I am typing this document up in the GUI version of emacs that came with Debian 13 when I installed it on this computer. Later, I'll edit it (and edit the other pages to link to it) with the built-in editor on CPanel, which I use to manage this website. This computer is the first laptop I ever owned. It is an Acer something-or-other from 2014, previously belonging to my dad, but he refuses to remember its existence. I got it at whatever point at primary school where I started doing Computer Things that couldn't be done on a kids' Amazon Fire tablet with a squidgy case, at which point I decorated it (badly) with snowflake stickers and stars. The snowflakes have, to be poetic and metaphorical, melted, but, to be similarly poetic and metaphorical, the stars remain.

I since moved on to a laptop whose brand I have forgotten, provided to Glasgow City Council to almost everyone at my school. I covered it in stickers indiscriminately. I did mischief on it, of the innocent kind and the malicious kind, as I left the primary school which felt like a personal hell to me, and went to a short-lived secondary school that I moved out of after one year. At the end of my second year of high school, I was discovering the hell of Windows, as it slowed to a deathly halt with a large majority of the storage taken up simply by a monolithic grey blob named 'System'. So I rebelled, and got my current laptop, a Chromebook.
This laptop has many features I like and many I don't. It bends all the way back, so I can use it as a monitor on a stand with an external keyboard and mouse. It also has a satin-textured metal case that makes me want to pull my eyes out. It is extremely intuitive and light and fast and lovely. It also has pretty much no local storage. You get the idea. It has its pros and cons.

However.

It became a little bit of a problem. It became a little bit of a problem because my school is just a little bit insane when it comes to technology, partially for the sensible reason that schools are apparently a big target for cyberattacks, but mostly for two other reasons. Firstly, my school's administration is on, in my humble opinion, Thomas Pynchon levels of paranoid. Secondly, anything tech or innovation has been taken over by a very slick tech bro in a suit with too many buzzwords and not enough self-control. I won't go into all of the incredible levels of security my school has put in to stop us accessing nefarious sites such as JSTOR, mostly because I can't even remember them all, but one of them is Microsoft Intune, which is meant for company owned devices, and which my school has made everybody install on their personal devices that they take home with them. There's also Securly, which is the standard way of blocking anything that might be slightly useful for doing research with.
So you get the idea.
Problem is, none of these, or any of the extra security they have on the school's WiFi network, are even remotely compatible with Chromebooks. They work fine on Windows, require a little bit of bodging and advice from the (long-suffering, lovely, and absolutely not to blame) IT department if you're using a Mac, and just do not work at all on Chromebooks.
This is roughly the conversation I had when I got back to school a full two days after they upgraded their security and essentially shut me out of the school network:

Lane (at something approaching light speed): I can't get on the WiFi because Mr. [redacted] said we can only use Windows or Macs and I know it's stupid to have a Chromebook but they only gave us two days' notice and I am not asking my parents for a new laptop when my new one works perfectly fine just because it's not compatible with the new software but I can't do any work because I don't have any WiFi and since the phone ban I can't hotspot off my mobile signal because they'll take my phone and I have an essay due and it's the first day and I'm already...

Pastoral care teacher: Okay, take a breath, get some cold water on your face, and go tell all of that to IT.

IT (for context, with Razer-branded gaming chair and RGB laptop): Right. Go tell all of that to Mr. [redacted] because frankly, all of this was his idea. Sorry.

Mr. [redacted] (looming creepily): Oh, yeah, I guess just use the guest WiFi.

Lane: I've been using the guest WiFi the whole time anyway because it was slightly less restricted, but you put the new security stuff on that network too and I can't get on anymore.

Mr. [redacted]:But can't you just log on?

Lane: No, I've got a Chromebook.

Mr. [redacted]: I know it's not supposed to work on Chromebooks, but I can't see why not.

Lane: It really doesn't.

[Ed: My theory for why is that the security system we were using depends on redirecting everything through itself, which looks extremely dodgy, because it is, and gets detected as such, and breaks.]

Mr. [redacted]: Well, try and share with someone else, and I'll try and sort it.

Two entire weeks later:

Mr. [redacted]: I've set you up with permanent access to the guest WiFi, you just need to log in once and your computer should remember it. Go ask the IT guys for the password.

Lane: Hey, Mr. [redacted] asked me to ask you for the password for my access to the guest WiFi. Thanks for sorting it!

IT: Sorry, the what?

Lane: I'm supposed to have permanent access to the guest WiFi, and apparently I only need to log in once, and my computer will remember it, and I just need to ask you for the password?

IT: Who told you that?

Lane: Mr. [redacted].

IT: Figures. He might've told you, but he certainly didn't tell us.

Lane: Sorry. I'll go pester him.

Lane (over Microsoft Teams, Kafka's favourite social network, with a distinct air of 'as per my last email...): IT says you didn't tell them to set up permanent guest access for me. Could you please do that? I have spent two weeks at school so far with no computer access.

Mr. [redacted] (also over Teams, thankfully out of arm's reach): Fine.

Dear reader, I will spare you the rest of it, but this is the trouble I went through with an off-the-shelf Chromebook from John Lewis and partners/friends/comrades/whatever they call them. Can you imagine the havoc if I were to switch it to Linux? The sea would boil. Blood would rain from the sky. I'd probably have to go to the headteacher's office. So, when I finally decided, after a few years of mild piracy, reading Cory Doctorow, and getting upset over all the cool things that didn't work on 'normal computers', to make the leap, guess what I used?

My very first computer, risen from the ashes.

The one I got from the council wouldn't even work past the log-in page anymore, just as it died, bloated to death like Norman the Conqueror, exploding messily. The slim silver Chromebook my mother tried to convert me to using, that I gave up on after having my innocence taken out the back and shot when I found out the hard way she could see my search history? Didn't even turn on. Good riddance. I didn't mention it for a reason.

So, covered in dust, stickers peeling, I attempted to resurrect the Acer.

As it was when I got it, the battery was shot, so I had to plug it in. My desk was already very nicely curated with laptop stand and heavily-modded mechanical keyboard (cheap-as-hell AKS068, Cherry MX Falcons with Sprit 67g springs, tape-modded, case and plate foam, keycaps full of Blu-Tack, thank you very much for asking) so I did it on my lap on the sofa. The keyboard worked, but the trackpad only sort-of worked, in that it moved the cursor but wouldn't register clicks or two-finger input, so I navigated everything with Tab. I tried to use Rufus to put Debian on a USB stick to boot from, but it needed the admin password to make changes to my computer. The admin was, at no surprise to me whatsoever but as a total shock to the aforementioned admin, my dad. He refused to believe me until I showed him that the admin, by some strange coincidence, had his name and email. Anyway, after about 20 minutes of trying every password he had ever used for anything ever, and finding out that my parents met through using the same password in uni, we gave up.

(I wouldn't be surprised if either of them still use it, so all I can tell you is it's a LOTW reference.)

So my mother made me swear blind that Rufus wasn't going to brick her very fancy desktop, and she got Debian on the USB stick for me.

Dear reader, I had to try to install Debian three times.

The first time, I managed to get just as far as setting up the root password, before my laptop turned off. This is when I discovered that the charging cable keeping my laptop alive is one of those that only does anything at a very specific angle, and that it can be moved by so much as lightly breathing. The second time, the same thing happened at exactly the same time, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, it might be an idea to set it on the coffee table instead of my lap. The third time, shock horror, it worked. A lot of getting to grips later, and also with a lot of autistically screeching in pure glee later (I'm allowed to make that joke, I even have the paperwork to prove it) I had the computer I'm typing this on right now.

On the bed of a holiday house on the Isle of Arran, murdering my back in cold blood.

So I'm well-versed in Firefox. I've already given it a theme, a very nice dark-mode one with animated pixel-art autumn leaves, to vaguely match the CDE-based theme I managed to get to work after a lot of bodging. I've also deleted it from my desktop to make way for all of the kind of stuff I could only have dreamed of on my usual computer, but it's still the default browser in the bottom row. (Current desktop stuff, top to bottom and left to right: Files, Home, Wastebasket, Civ4 that's been in the disc drive since 201x, Alacritty, Beneath a Steel Sky, Emacs, Freeciv, KildClient, Pidgin, QBittorrent, Quod Libet, Signal, Thunderbird, and Tor.)

So I know that, as one of its features as the refugee camp of browsers, the browser for the dispossessed and disenchanted, you can import data from other browsers such as passwords and bookmarks.

There is a reason the title of this blog mentions bookmarks, and not passwords.
Dear reader, I do not know how many bookmarks I have, but I know it is hundreds. I have had my Google account since I was nine years old. It has seen the best and worst of my life, and it has watched me grow up, but through all the years, one thing has not changed and I don't think it ever will: I really, really hoard bookmarks. So I don't want to import them all... but on the other hand, once I get around to it, I will.

I think that importing them all and doing a lot of pruning afterwards is truly better than just starting over.

Usually, if I have the chance to start anew, to erase the older and worse parts of my life, to burn bridges so I can't go back over them to whence I came, I will.

But I owe it to nine-year-old me to keep the goddamn bookmarks.
I owe it to her, in her infinite nowness, not even considering how long those bookmarks would last.

I owe it to her to keep TopMarks, and Sumdog, and Accelerated Reader, and Seesaw, bastions of online learning for those few years we all thought we were all going to die. Nobody acknowledges it, but the children remember, and many of them, like me, are pretty grown-up now. Except we're not, because time stopped for us, and we're all still kids in masks dressing up in baggy clothes.

I owe it to her to keep Google Arts and Culture, part of the curated internet environment she lived in then to stop her from seeing Bad Things Online, but that lost her so much art and joy. She saw Bad Things Online anyway, but it took her a long time to get to see art.

I owe it to her to keep Scratch, where, yes, she discovered a budding love for computers. But more importantly, it was her first social network. One of her favourite coders died of leukaemia, then was reborn, as a friend, then widely denounced after she was discovered to be a fake. She herself was banned for three days after a flame war with someone or another. I don't remember the argument, just the blind panic of Getting In Trouble. Biggest of all, she came out for the first time on Scratch, in the only place she could.

Thank you, nerds. You were so kind to her, and you still are.

I owe it to her to keep Duolingo, now ruined by AI and moneygrabbing, where she learned to love linguistics, swooning over the beauty of Navajo.

I bought a Navajo dictionary and advanced grammar from the 50s, from the Old Post Office bookshop in Blaenau Ffestiniog, itself a linguistic beauty. I plan to study linguistics for the rest of my life. Athabaskan languages are still my favourites.

I owe it to her to keep the endless Quotev quizzes. Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, prom dresses I was and am too much of a tomboy to feel at home in, queerness, smut, mental illness, death. It was and still is a Very Specific Kind of Place, and she was its target demographic.

I owe it to her, to some extent, to hoard.

My move to Linux, besides all the usual reasons, is an excuse to hoard. To hoard games, to hoard little terminal trinkets, to hoard gigabytes and gigabytes of torrents of music. These things cannot stay long. No matter whether you use tape, or optical, or store it in the cloud, or in the Arctic, all of these beautiful things cannot last, and even if they do, nobody in the future may be able to decrypt them.

This is why I write.

In Neal Stephenson's incredible piece In the Beginning... Was the Command Line, he says that writing is the only inherently digital medium. All other things, pictures, games, beautiful music, must be translated. Therein lies the rub. We know how to make text last. In my house are books that are hundreds of years old, in museums there are texts that are thousands of years old. Besides books, we have scrolls, clay tablets. None of these things were intended to last that long, so imagine how long text can last when you're trying to make it. Sandia National Laboratories did quite a good job of this, in getting the greatest scientists in the field of semiotics and beyond to devise methods to keep a message of nuclear danger alive for thousands of years.
We can do text.
Everything else will be destroyed.
So we translate, and so I translate, badly. The scientists of the future may never understand a FLAC file, even if we converted it to text and carved it into granite. But if we explain our notation and our instruments, they may be able to play it, and if we preserve older forms of our languages, they may know the ancient lyrics. And if we write about it, with human emotion, even without the original data they may understand the feeling. Even if the original file is long lost, they can know the lightly drunken ambience of the audience, the requests shouted from the back, the singing along on the Beatles covers and the reverent silence on the originals. They can know every piece of stage banter as the performer retunes, every laugh for every screwed-up intro or forgotten chord, every changed lyric or alternate riff, every shy smile, every cheer, every whistle. They can know that Pixies gig where Black Francis breaks the strings on two guitars within the space of minutes, and then stands awkwardly and strums his shirt while Kim Deal carries on with the bass and her usual grin, after a few attempts to get the lack of rhythm guitar across from one end and a lot of mouthing 'WHAT?' from the other over the music. They can know the Elliott Smith gig where the speakers are gradually vibrating Elliott's beer towards the edge of the table throughout the entire set, which eventually falls and shatters in the middle of Needle in the Hay, and he sings on for a moment before noticing with the most priceless 'What the fuck?!' possibly ever, all five stages of grief included. They can know, but better than that, they can feel.
This is why I write. Because I suck in so much of this, every file format, every medium, so many things that live inside my head, and I know that they will eventually be lost. Many of them already have, whether I have managed to save them and have the unenviably painful task of being the only person who has them, or whether I haven't and I have the even more unenviably painful task of being the only soul who even remembers them. I cannot carry them all alone, and I especially cannot carry the future-pain, like a ticking bomb, of knowing they cannot live forever. They force themselves into words and out of me and onto a page, and the words are not perfect, but I have to try, and that is what I do. That is the closest thing I have to my thing, the thing that I do, is try to ease the pain of the future, of eternity.
Hell, this is why, as well as writing, I plan to study linguistics for the rest of my life.
Words are all we have.
Words are all I have.
So excuse me for trying to streamline my hoarding of them.