The You dot Com for Me dot Com

by Tom Scocca

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

My personal blog on my personal website is mostly gone, and that doesn’t bother me too much. A friend, a veteran blogger, had put tomscocca.com together for me in 2008, from the domain through the design, so I could just type posts into it while I was writing a book and being underemployed. Eventually I got a job and I let the upkeep fall through the cracks. A domain squatter grabbed the name and tried to sell it back to me at extortionate rates, even after I told them there are only two Tom Scoccas in the world and my half of the global market wouldn’t go over $50 for it. A few years later the price dropped and another friend got me the domain back, but I never rebuilt the blog. Part of it is on the Wayback Machine, with lots of broken image links, and although I thought I had an archive of the rest, I can’t figure out where I would have put it. 

Other writers have different relationships to their work, but for me, for worse or for better, once I’ve thought through something and set it down, I usually forget about having written it. This doesn’t mean I feel distance or estrangement from my former writing self, not at all—when I dig back into the wreckage of the old blog, some posts click back into my memory, while others feel recognizable in thought and mood. I wouldn’t have recalled reviewing a bootleg DVD of Baadasssss! but I remembered once I reread it; apparently I once had it in me to identify a fire-fronted serin. Good for me.