Unpublished

Warning: the stunningly brilliant post that I had originally published in this space has now been unpublished.

I think it [the stunningly brilliant post] may have appeared and disappeared too fast even for Google and the Wayback Machine to catch it. Sorry. It was simply too stunningly brilliant to release on these internets. And I have personal reasons for changing my mind about publishing it in the first place, juicy gossipy reasons, all of which were spelled out in juicy gossipy detail in the now unpublished post itself, which was (did I mention?) stunningly brilliant, and now unpublished.

Alas, you’ll have to console yourself with the eternal blogging question: if a post is unpublished in the internets before anyone notices, did it ever really exist?

In the case of material by or about Violet Blue published and then later unpublished by Xeni Jardin on Boing Boing, I can recall that I did in fact read a few of those posts, back when I still read Boing Boing. [Nowadays, I get a 404 error when I even think about reading their "hugely unpopular" site -- mainly because Boing Boing never once linked to any of my stunningly brilliant posts here or at RealityPrime (which is thoroughly-thought-through (on occasion) and perhaps worth something to one or two people). And so I was mortally offended. Well, not really, but I'd be well within my rights if it were true. Actually, Cory did link to me once or twice for random things -- Keyhole and Crazy Taxi lawsuit, I think. But nowadays we don't chat much. Maybe I should unpublish him too... ]

So I did in fact read those Violet Blue posts before they were unpublished. I wonder… am I now morally obliged to unremember their contents? Should I return all of the products I bought after reading the ads on those pages? Better yet, can I get those moments of my life back, perhaps to apply to some other useless blog entry?

This is all very silly, it turns out. I’ve deleted lots of work of mine — sometimes I write it and then think “hey, people might not like this,” or “hey, if anyone sees this, I might not be able to get a job ever again,” or “hey, I might get shot by Dick Cheney,” and I reconsider. Sometimes, snappy RSS readers get to see them anyway. But mostly, I get away with it because no one really cares.

Look, if you want to pay my hosting fees, you can decide what stays and what goes.

In the case of Boing Boing, it’s pretty clear they would have been truer to their populist information-wants-to-have-desires roots by putting a disclaimer on each of the VB+BB posts saying something like: (channeling Xeni writing style) “hey, I don’t really like this man-chick anymore and I no longer endorse this message, but here it is as it was for historical purposes anyway, AND YOU WERE THERE.”

But even that would have engendered controversy among the controversially engendered. So let’s just say there’s no way to win, and if the goal is to not get any attention, then don’t.

Just don’t.