Toads-in-the-Hole

Early in October, our family of weblogs (or, from a different perspective, the colony of remorae attached to the underside of foldedspace.org) suffered some kind of data earthquake, the result of which is that all of our databases were corrupted. Now, I don’t entirely understand what this means, but it seems the upshot was that our weblog was there, but it couldn’t be accessed by anyone, whether to compose, comment, or even spam. Toads-in-the-Hole was locked away from the world; it was breathing and living, but it had become catatonic.

JD assured us that, while Toads felt no pain, the damage was irreparable beyond even the most heroic of measures. The time had come to move on, to build anew. I suppose that, superficially, this webspace seems much like the old. We have the same name, a lot of the same links, and our authorship hasn’t varied, but for us it is obviously a new place, gone are our personally molded butt-shaped divots on the virtual couch. But the best way to make a new home is to live in it, so here goes.

(Tangent: If you read the occasional science fiction novel like I do, you’ve probably run across the idea that pretty soon we’ll be able to transfer our consciousnesses into pure data, transcend our bodies, and become godlike computer people. No? Haven’t picked up on the whole post-human theme? Well, bear with me while I gripe. I know very little about computers in specific and information processing in general, but in light of our recent catastrophic dataquake, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be jetting out to Alpha Centauri as a stream of conscious particles of information any time soon. I mean, what kind of godlike existence goes like, “Behold, I am pure data! Immortal and capable of living a thousand life times in a second! I have risen above my mere meat shell and ERROR 400 BAD FILE REQUEST CONNECTION REFUSED BY HOST TERMINATING FUNCTION. Oh, crap.”)