1,000 Greatest Drivers: Fernando Alonso

Now archiving more than just racing...

One of the big reasons why I’ve been ragging this week is that I’ve been copying all my social meda comments into text-based files. I’ve already downloaded all my Facebook comments and posts (dating back to 2004!) I copied and pasted all my LiveJournal posts from 2005-2011. If you want to see the ones I’ve posted publicly, they are here, but don’t be surprised if I purge my account someday soon. I just finished archiving all my LinkedIn messages a couple nights ago and I’m working on my YouTube comments right now. Afterward, I want to archive my Discord message threads (not posts), my sent Gmail emails, my online columns (which so far is just one column on StockCarReview, three for David Smith’s Motorsports Analytics, hundreds for RotoBaller, and the 350 or so here). I’ll probably try and see what I can salvage from the late lamented racing-reference comments sections (although they were deleted, and it looks like the site that attempted to archive them was also recently lost) and my relatively few but sometimes very thorough posts on FutureRockLegends and the cross-tables message board for tournament Scrabble. I rpobably won’t bother looking for any of the old Speedworld/SpeedFX/RacingOne/RacingStalkers posts since all those sites were gone and I made thousands of posts. I’m not bothering with Twitter. I was always better at longform writing than the pithy stand-up comedian style that Twitter rewards. Beside, I purged my seanwrona Twitter account and got locked out of my racermetrics account, which frustrates me because I would like to purge that one also. My three Reddit accounts (arenasnow, racermetics, and diffusedoofus) were all purged and I don’t currently have a Reddit account, but I’ll probably archive my two IAmA threads.

Then of course there is all my writing from grade school and college. Gradually over time, I threw out all my regular class assignments and notes and printouts and stuff but I still have about three boxes worth of school stuff that I saved, pretty much entirely essays I wrote, failed attempts at “artwork”, report cards and standardizd test results, and various reports from the years when I was in special ed classes, which helped facilitate my autism diagnosis. I’m glad I had the foresight to keep all my writing but at this point, especially when I’m trying to declutter to facilitate Mom coming home and make it easier to move when I lose the house, I want to scan all these papers and then throw them out. I’ve also saved all my computers going back to the 2000s or eomthing. None of them has booted for years, but I want to extract the hard drives to see what I can salvage. (Hopefully, including all my stored Pace Car Challenge questions, which I know are one of them.)

Basically, I want a smaller online footprint. I think I want to deactivate any of my remaining platforms except for this, Discord, and YouTube, maybe even including my LinkedIn. I realize that line in The Social Network, “The Internet isn’t written in pencil… it’s written in ink” was a lie because nearly every platform dies in the end as they’re all generally more transient and ephemeral than any of their real world counterparts (that’s why I published Nerds per Minute as a book rather than a series of blog posts). I know I am a (very, very niche) public figure and there are a lot of people who know who I am, even if hardly anyone does locally and fewer and fewer people want to spend time with me. I’m not looking to go all J.D. Salinger or Bill Watterson (although I might change my mind if I ever find the kind of real-world community I’ve been looking for), but I’d like to leave marginally less of a paper trail and be more intentional with my online posting. I prefer Substack and YouTube to everything else because at least like-minded people have to seek you out and I’m really averse to the platforms that are more about marketing you-as-commodity (I briefly had an Instagram account, but never posted anything on it) than your actual work. And then I prefer this to YouTube quite simply because I am good at writing but terrible with visuals.

I won’t erase the YouTube content I’ve already uploaded as much as I might like to since I’m big on historic preservation as an archivist and all, but I may turn off the comments sections to all my videos soon so they no longer living documents as my channel is effectively dead and I don’t want to feel the pressure to respond, but I’m getting so few comments now, maybe that’s less of an issue. With six thousand subscribers, my channel obviously had some potential but it seemed like I could never get anyone interested in my non-typing content (or even in my historical typing content very much) and I don’t think I ever want to type competitively again. Writing is my medium, not video, and although there are certainly a lot of streamers who blew up with lo-fi production values consisting of only a webcam, microphone, and screen share and I can certainly produce thatkind of content easily and I have made better-produced videos before as well, I was never gonna make it as a typing streamer because typing games are more boring to watch relative to League of Legends or whatever. And I just thought at a certain point the amount of time investment it would take to become a good YouTuber wasn’t worth the squeeze. Although granted, how good you are isn’t perfectly correlated with how well you do. Because of my bad artistic skills, I’m also the kind of person who would be sorely tempted by AI art. But I will never do that and if I’m even having those thoughts, it’s better for me to avoid YouTube entirely.

I still think I want a platform outside of Substack. I’m something of a podcast addict and I’ve wanted to have my own for a while, but I wouldn’t want to do it alone and I would want to collaborate with some other kind of quantitative race fan. My first go-around on the TRC podcast didn’t go well because I know I monopolized the conversation too much on the few episodes I appeared and it came out of our Discord groups, which had my feuds, schisms, and petty squables. I don’t think I was mature enough to do this seriously at that time, but I’d still like to if I found the right person. I listen to so many podcasts that I think I’m starting to have the rhythm down better. Quite frankly, I just want more people to talk to in general and this would give me an excuse to do that. I even offered to join an established racing statistics podcast and pitched another podcast idea with two racing statisticians who are much better-known than I am.

Finally, I want some kind of complete archive of my writing simply because I know I have written great posts on a lot of different platforms and putting them all together in one place might allow me to reuse some of that for introductions to my Substack posts on the days when I don’t have racing content to write about, which I have also been struggling with. I also want to analyze my old writing and how it has progressed over the years. This has been a fun project, but yeah, I’m probably doing too much of that and not enough writing. However, today’s driver is way too important to skip.