The rules of Random Date Archaeology are simple: pick a date somewhere inside the surviving archive, don’t reroll because it looks boring, search only deeply enough to see what survives, and then let the artifacts interrogate my memory. This time the wheel landed on Wednesday, August 15, 2018, and Gmail produced an Airbnb receipt. Seven…

The rules of Random Date Archaeology are simple: pick a date somewhere inside the surviving archive, don’t reroll because it looks boring, search only deeply enough to see what survives, and then let the artifacts interrogate my memory. This time the date dropped us onto Saturday, March 14, 2015. At first, it looked like we…

In 2021, Christianity Today released a two-and-a-half-hour episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill called “The Tempest.” Somewhere in the middle of it, Mike Cosper tells the story of three nerds who recovered 140 pages of Mark Driscoll’s old internet posts: Dwayne Forehand found them buried in the internet archive, Adam Wygle assembled…

I work in a submarine. Technically it’s a drive-thru-only Starbucks in Tacoma, but it is very small and sometimes has eight or more people stuffed inside with two espresso bars, ovens, refrigerators, sinks, blenders, ice bins, drive-thru equipment, and several hundred beverages trying to happen at once. So, submarine. During Peak the whole thing runs…

There is apparently a correct way to blog. I know this because Gabe and Max taught me. According to their extremely comprehensive internet training program, blogs allow you to share your thoughts with up to ten people through something called the online blogopolis, where you can talk about the most important issues of the day…

I have accumulated an unreasonable amount of evidence of my own existence. Blog posts, LiveJournal entries, tweets, Instagram posts, Threads, photographs, emails, messages, concert records, things I wrote and forgot I wrote, things other people wrote to me that I forgot they wrote, and apparently enough miscellaneous digital sediment that ChatGPT and I can now…

On January 9th, 1999, I was 18 and living in Cannon Beach, going to Ecola Bible School, wearing thrift-store clothes that I thought were funny because somebody had graduated in them in 1985, and listening to a lot of ska. A lot of ska. Five Iron Frenzy, The O.C. Supertones, The Insyderz, Squad Five-O, The…

A text from Dwayne, a Claude-built BBS experiment, one reckless copy-paste into ChatGPT, and the accidental birth of The Hall of Remembering.

A house flooded, a mind broke, and a life was rebuilt—slowly, imperfectly, and with help.

One of the other things I’ve noticed while going through Adam At Last, the blog I started when I was 20, is that my younger self was very good at preserving things my current self had no idea he would want back someday. Twenty-year-old me wasn’t trying to create an archive. He was just telling…