I know I worry more when it’s late at night and I should be sleeping instead. But I think maybe a large part of my personality is driven by my struggles with media, archival, memory, and ephemerality.

Like there’s “fear of missing out” but beyond that there’s a fear that I’ll just forget things I’ve actually experienced in media and in my own life. I’ve always felt bad at committing events to memory.

Note that I’ve never had trouble getting good grades and never compared this to other people’s episodic memory; I think it’s just part of the human condition. However, it is one that doesn’t sit comfortably with me, especially when you start looking into research about how open to suggestion our own memory is.

You can’t change the past, but you can change history. The things we see looking at the past are informed by our present situation—both as individuals and as a culture. The person I was as a teenager might be totally different from the person I think I was as a teenager. My memory is not raw data; it is a reconstruction.

I think I like retro media partly because it’s a greater escape from the awful present but also because it lets me feel like I’m helping us collectively do a better job at remembering things. There are technical concerns too, like “hey, does this game become forgotten if there’s no way to circulate the disc images or repair the computer that runs it, etc”. So programming matters too. But anyway...