A few weeks ago I was scheduled for a laptop update at work. That meant I had to spend some time making sure everything was set up correctly on the new machine before handing back the old one. I also used the opportunity to do a digital audit of my work data, making sure anything that was no longer needed was properly deleted, while anything still needed was appropriately stored and labelled. This digital cleanup took a couple of days of work time, but it also sparked an energy that carried over to my personal life. I found myself spending my evenings going over my own digital history and doing a bit of organizing.

Then, a conversation with Simon Cutajar led me to check out his website. Turns out he had a rather comprehensive and nice ludography page which my brain, being in "Cleanup and organize"-mode, instantly latched on to. Suddenly my digital cleanup got a stronger purpose behind it! I started taking a more structured approach to the whole thing.

Gathering the Sources

As a millennial I've lived through the shaping and re-shaping of the internet and our digital lives. As a software developer with an interest in tech and games, I've also found myself changing tools and approaches frequently through the years. Because of this, my digital footprint is stretched wide across several services, and there's no consistency between them. The first step became to gather all sources of potential data. The focus here was to list out everything I've used to store data over the years.

A stack of CDs and DVDs

This is the list I landed on:

Most of these sources were used as expected, but there were a few hiccups and things worth mentioning about some of them. Let's start with the most painful one.

My own web-host: A couple of years ago I migrated from One.com to Zume for hosting. During that time I also completely redesigned and repurposed my website. I know I had a folder on my old host where I kept builds of most of my projects from my university years. That folder never made the migration and is now, unfortunately, lost forever.

Bitbucket: Back when I started getting into version control for the first time, the big conversation was Git vs. Mercurial. Unfortunately I landed on the wrong side there, setting up most of my projects at the time in Bitbucket which has since been shut down. At the time they were shutting down I did download the repos, and I still have those downloads. I just haven't gotten to them yet.

Hard-drives of old computers: This was probably the biggest surprise. I always had the habit of (mostly due to paranoia, I suppose) removing the hard drives when I changed computers. I still have several of them, though not all. The ones I did find (and managed to get running) felt almost like snapshots of moments in my life. Digging through them felt strangely surreal, almost as if I was looking through a window to the past at a different version of me.

CDs and DVDs: This is not done. I know I have a drawer with old CDs and DVDs in my childhood home. They're mostly from my pre-university time, so who knows what they might contain? We're going up there this Christmas so I'll make sure to dig through it then.

The Collecting of Things

The next step was trying to recover as many pieces of my past projects as possible. Interestingly enough, this also led to a bit of website work as I ended up moving to a simpler and cleaner layout for my personal website, ABrevik.net. Previously I had attempted to mirror the style of my upcoming solo game, Soulfused, but the style didn't really feel appropriate for a modern website. The new style is much slimmer and just feels more like a website should.

A screenshot of my new website

While it's been a nostalgic trip down my professional past, it has also been a frustrating one. So much of the work I have done through the years is just gone. I almost wish I could slip into the past and make sure past me got his hands on a "Git for Dummies" book, but I suppose I need to make do with what I have. Most of these projects were "backed up" on various cloud storage services, but many of those backups were incomplete early versions of the projects. Most of the builds I found were also early versions, not the final ones. I guess I had a bad habit of not backing up anything finished.

That's not to say all is lost, though, since much was actually recovered in some form or another. Some projects live on in name only, while others have screenshots and descriptions. Others still have builds but no source code, while some have early versions and no final ones. Once I've processed everything I'll go over and summarize the states of all of them, and make sure they're appropriately tagged in my ludography.

That's right! I have a ludography page now! You can take a look if you'd like, though it's not complete yet. Through the magic of Ruffle, you can even play some of the old flash games straight there in your browser!

Screenshot from my flash game First Impression

The recovery and archival process is still ongoing and I do have several zip archives that still need to be processed. Taking this break to gather my thoughts around the process in a blog post seems like a natural step for me as it allows me to take a closer look at what I've done so far. I'm creating a list of next steps, which now includes things like organizing tags, rethinking the grouping strategy, adding a "presentation at the time"-section, and possibly even a reflections section to the posts where it's relevant.

Lastly, I did get the idea of checking out the Wayback Machine to see if my project pages still existed, as they were part of what was lost during my web host migration. I was able to recover many screenshots and descriptions of lost projects, and even an SWF of a game jam game which I don't have the source code to anymore! The Wayback Machine also gave me another unexpected discovery, which we'll get back to a bit later.

Digging for Memories

A huge amount of the data I've saved and backed up over the years was mostly worthless. I'm talking about OS files, copies of public works, and other things that are widely available online today, and therefore don't really need archiving. There were a few backed up steamapps folders (which is where Steam installs games) and even a more or less full Windows 7 installation all neatly zipped up! No wonder I've run out of storage space so often... I did take the time to dig through for any folders which could contain interesting data (such as Documents, Downloads and Photos) and any saved data from whichever programs had been installed.

List of phone backups

A large chunk of the unorganized data I have turned out to be photos from the pre-cloud era. Photos saved on devices and memory cards that never carried over when I changed or updated phones and computers through the years. Fortunately I usually had the sense to do a full dump of photos and personal files into an unorganized zip file whenever I got rid of a device, so I had a lot of "Blackberry.7z" and "OldPhone(2).zip"-style files across all sorts of locations. There were a lot of memories in those photos. Forgotten moments, questionable clothing choices, and people who were once key people in my life whom I haven't spoken with or even thought about in ages.

School work and adjacent files were the second largest category. For now, I've dumped this into semi-organized folders based on school and class, and I plan on going through it later to see if I can do anything with it. It doesn't really feel like ludography content, nor does it feel like it should share the same space as the more personal content such as photos. Most likely it'll end up in a School/year/class structure within my current storage setup, with a side folder for each school with non-class related things.

A birthday pie with wise words

I also rediscovered a lot of my old writing back from when I still had dreams of becoming a published author. I haven't read any of those texts yet, but I've gathered them and organized them by when they were written. Just looking at the titles was often enough to send me back in time to the brainstorming moments of those stories. I wonder how much of that made it onto the digital paper, and how much only ever existed in my head. At some point soon I want to read through these, but at the moment the thought of it feels overwhelming. I'm already experiencing a bit of an overload of "past me vs. current me" and I need a little time to process the rest first.

Fictional writing and storytelling do have an active role in my life still, and I'm glad to see that the seeds of it in the past are still growing within me today. I think the clearest example of this is my work with my upcoming solo game Soulfused, which is a text adventure currently sitting at about 30k words. It is also reflected in my passion for TTRPGs and the scenarios I write for Dread. Crafting and telling stories in one way or another has always been, and will always be, a central part of me.

The whole process has been a nostalgia trip filled with memories and forgotten moments.

The Return of Blog

Speaking of writing, did you know this isn't my first blog? I actually started a blog back in 2012 as part of my Nordic Game Jam experience, and there were two contributing factors to why I decided to start it up. The first is that I had been wanting to start one, but I was never confident enough in any topic to start. The second is that I was worried I would not be able to give a meaningful contribution to whatever team I might end up joining. (I also wrote about this in the History of Mussades post) The blog became my way of justifying participating, and participating became my way of starting the blog.

Screenshot of my old blog

That blog was one of the things that got lost in the website migration I mentioned earlier. All the posts were lost.

Or so I thought.

Enter the Wayback Machine again! I have no idea who or what triggered the occasional archival of my website through the years, but I was genuinely surprised to find that the majority of posts had been archived in some form or another! I immediately started digging through it to find and piece together as many of them as I could. The result? 38 posts ranging from just identified to completely recovered!

At some point the blog transformed into a "One photo per day" style blog, designed to help me get into the habit of taking more photos in my day-to-day. These posts consisted of a title, a photo and a description. This was an additional 40 posts on top of the previous 38.

A pie chart showing the recovered posts.

That's way more than I expected! I can't say with complete certainty if I've identified all posts or if some are completely lost, but I'm fairly confident that I have a complete list of regular blog post titles. I suspect I'm missing a handful of photo posts based on the timestamps, but it could also just be that I got sloppy and didn't upload every day.

As an added bonus, most of the photo posts with missing images had some amount of image metadata still available. With some digging, I'm fairly confident I can identify which photo from Google Photos belongs to which post! And to think I was considering migrating all my Google data elsewhere and deleting my account...

I have re-read all the posts and, well, remember that window to the past I talked about? It felt almost surreal. A bit like watching a movie you saw as a child. Of course you have the memories of it, but some pieces of it have fallen off over time and your brain might have created false pieces to fill in the blanks. These posts were written by the person I was, yet at the same time not by the person I remember.

The first photo in my photo blog! Me pretending to drink from a mug I just painted.

All posts have been re-uploaded on my ludography. (Yes, I know. A blog is not a game. But it was a blog about games, so I say it counts.)

A Time of Change

Life is always moving and changing, and so are we. I am doing this cleanup and writing this post during a period of my life in which a big change is taking place. 10 months ago I became a dad, which has been a change unlike any previous one. And this is a change that is constantly ongoing, as our newest family member grows and develops.

I do think that's a big part of why this digital cleanup felt so important and why I latched onto it the way I did. The process is not done, and I expect I'll be working on it on and off for a while. I might even make a follow-up post once I'm done, as I suspect I still have things to discover.

HDD transfer setup.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go see if I can rekindle some of those old friendships I mentioned.