Work has been going great so far! One of the nice things has been still having that freedom to just put on background noise while I work. If it hasn’t become apparent so far though, most all of that noise is YouTube videos going over hyper-niche topics into autistic detail–Cathode Ray Dude and Technology Connections are perfect examples of such and I would absolutely recommend them. But what stood out most this recent go around was a video that randomly appeared in my feed.

A small podcast, Influence with Matt Silverman, had an interview with another YouTuber I frequently watch, Jason Kingsley or Modern History TV, going over his life as a game developer and, more particularly, a historian. Jason’s channel focuses over medieval life of the commoner, both demystifying and explaining how fairly normal it all really was. The interview is fantastic to say the least and I would encourage anyone to listen to it. Jason Kingsley is just a fascinating man to listen to.

The thesis and title of the podcast were what really stuck out to me though: The Weirdest Parts of Medieval Life Are Not In Textbooks or Fairy Tales. While people may have not been as illiterate as is often speculated, there still was a rarity of written work or free time for the average person to reflect on what they perceived as mundane life. Now, in our modern, always-connected lives, that’s no longer as much an issue and many people post or repost most anything. However, even with that access, I still struggle to get my mind out there. The very first post I made on this blog spelled it out perfectly:

I’ve had this site up for close to a year now with little to no idea of what I wanted to do with it. From the beginning, it was to be as the name stated, a place for more to divulge whatever was on my mind that was worth sharing. Lo and behold, I was left empty because I feel like I have nothing to directly contribute that hasn’t been said. Most any idea I have comes from others whom I’ve engaged with, be it enjoying their works and having others dissect what they say.

There’s clearly a value to recording and reflecting on information, but I feel with such an abundance of it, my voice is just another grain of sand in the sea. What’s the point filming a concert, particularly for a well established band? Likely they’re already being recorded with professional tech for a live album. I’d bet at least three-quarters of the audience are filming the show themselves. Why should I be wasting storage space for something I can already find?

What’s Worth Remembering?

Unlike the past, there is a greater abundance of information and record keeping, obviously–I mean, here I am just posting into the ether. However, while it’s essentially solved the problem of finding means of record, it’s shifted the burden to knowing what’s worth remembering.

Just for a second, think back 7 or 8 years ago, before COVID or the start of the new decade. Do you remember what song you had on repeat this month? How you felt when you first heard it? Why you felt that way about it? If you do, honestly good on you! I just doubt most people, myself included, can.

I suffered from epilepsy growing up. While a fair number kids wind up outgrowing it (thankfully), I didn’t. Instead, through testing we were able to detect where the seizures were occurring from, and I elected to have that part removed; hence, where I got the idea for the name of the website–more on that later.

That part, the hippocampus, is overwhelmingly responsible for the formation and retrieval of long-term memory. After its removal, I was still perfectly able to form memories, but it takes me roughly four times as long to fully memorize something. I had to shift how I learned and retained information to account for such, and I was able to get through school and college just fine.

I’m a nerd. Whether or not I had a neurological history didn’t matter so long as I could wrap my head around the crux of the subject. Yet as I just continue to get older, I realize more and more of those details continue to slip.

My childhood is gone. It, like many things before, is all but forgotten with my teenage and young adult years not long behind it. This isn’t new to anybody; forgetting things is just part of growing up. It’s just that, for me, it feels like how much is gone is much more severe.

Here, as an adult, I’ve made more of an effort to try and retain what information I can. For the past few years, I’ve been using Obsidian for note-taking in kind of a hope of storing that long-term memory–even calling my vault The Hippocampus. But that focus on note-taking is always more centered around what I consume rather than what I experience. The only records I keep of myself are just the highlights of life: getting a job, finishing school, getting a house, etc.

This squeaky clean image of our lives is only a fraction of what really happened. There’s wide swaths of information readily available on any of our devices–years and years of texts, images, or locations–that we just forget about. Most of us have had full, insightful discussions with others, but much of it is just gone without a trace.

I’ve always recognized the benefit of active journaling. While I’ve never been able to build the habit, one of the things I have been doing for a few years now has been following Steph Ango’s advice and answering 40 questions to ask yourself every year. When I do, I naturally peer back into my answers from the years prior and feel a host of emotions about where I last was in life. Not because they were outright sad or happy, but more so because it’s that image to compare myself to.

One of the questions asked was “Did you fall in love this year”. For several years now, being with my partner has been the greatest time of my life–living together, gaming together, and getting through everything life’s been throwing at us. But one of the years I added a comment to my response. While it was nothing close to love, it mentioned a friend of ours.

They and my partner were coworkers and spent almost every day together. On the weekends when I would come by, it was usually the three of us going everywhere together. One night, after drinking at the new years party, my lover was out cold, so me and the friend decided to go walk around the park in the complex.

Sitting up on top of the playground, they confessed their honest feelings for both me and my partner.

Nothing came of it. We both sort of laughed it off and felt closer from it. Not long after, they moved over to another city. Since then, they’ve been in a happy relationship, moved in with their partner, and the four of us meet up from time to time for events and occasions.

It’s one of those things I always forget about though. Something uneventful in the long run, but an insightful moment nonetheless. It’s not until I read back through the 40 questions, I remember what things were like at a point and, more importantly, who I was. That’s what I would have lost. Not the fact of the friendship, but that feeling of sitting on top of a playground after midnight, a little drunk, being told how close it was.

What’s Worth Expressing?

I created this website, Piece of Mind, as a means of delivering that message. When I had the surgery, I signed to have that brain matter donated for research. I felt taking things I recorded in my Obsidian vault and expressing them on the website would be a little poetic; hence, how I got their names.

Yet even with that intention, I still struggle deciding what deserves to be said and what ought to stay in my head. As mentioned, in the modern age with such a surplus of information, how do you say something you feel could be important without having it drowned out by others?

Recently, Matt Colville, another YouTuber I watch for tabletop RPGs, posted a video to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the channel. In it, he explained exactly how he determined what kind of content he wanted to make:

I thought YouTube was cool and I wanted to try it. As in, I wanted to try making videos and I thought, what could I make videos about that folks would watch that would be fun for me? And the only other criteria I thought about was I wanted to make videos that might be evergreen. So, that’s really the context for a lot of what follows. There are two kinds of YouTubers: the ones who do it as a hobby with no desire to go pro and those trying to make a living at it.

What do people want to know that I have fun expressing? How can I present it so that the idea is “evergreen”?

Evergreen, to me, doesn’t mean timeless in the way proverb is timeless. It means I could send it to someone a year from now and it would still do its work. It’s not tethered to just the news cycle or a trend or a mood.

I mentioned a few times like when I was watching my parent’s house that I’ve been playing older games for a while. It’s not nostalgia because I didn’t play most of these growing up; rather, it’s a quality of those games and the presentation of them that has me still interested all these years later. That’s the sort of the evergreen status that really defines greatness.

Fallout: New Vegas, one of my favorite games, was released back in 2010, over 15 years ago, and this game is still actively played, sitting at #250 in daily active users on SteamDB. The game is buggy mess and almost requires modding to play on modern system, but the quality of the writing and world building is what keeps so many, myself included, coming back.

Books, movies, songs: there are materials that continue to hold relevancy because there was a sincere quality to them. Hell, I bring up Matt Colville: his The Politics of War video is hands down one of my favorite of all time and sometimes I listen to when looking for good worldbuilding advice.

The video’s approaching 10 years old, but still go back to it. That’s the kind of longevity I’m chasing. That’s what I’ve wanted to provide. I’ve wanted my experiences to be just as insightful for someone else.

As much as it kind of pains me to admit it, there’s only a handful of pieces I’ve published on here that I really feel that way about. First Split Keyboard and Causes, Consciousness, and Chinese feel like the primary two where I really had something to say that felt like I was contributing. Maybe my D&D ones also. For each of them, I feel like there’s still more to say, but each makes a point and tries to provide something towards it.

The more I’ve been thinking about it, I feel like having this arbitrary goal of two articles every month is counterintuitive. I think that mentality is just an expectation and symptom of online content. Maybe it’s something to work towards, but it shouldn’t be where you begin unless you already have a clear idea of where you’re coming from. I’m thinking it’s more effective to asks questions about that knowledge. Just because it maybe worth keeping doesn’t mean it’s worth throwing into the sea.

I’ve started asking myself if what I’m working on was something only I could write. How do my opinions differ from the majority or what kind of insights do I have that I don’t feels has been adequately presented? When I was talking about setting up my creature stat blocks, I had a distinct path that got me there, and it concerned ASCII control characters which is just a niche in our current computer landscape.

I think that’s part of why I feel proud about those pieces. They connect things–ideas from different domains–while still coming from me. D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game; ASCII encoding is a computer standard; my nerdy interest in both is what ties them together.

That connection sprinkled with my perspective on an instance is what makes something unique. With that uniqueness, you have something might stand out in the sea of information–a sunken treasure. The only way to recognize it’s value, however, is to bring it back up.

What Will the Future Want from Us?

Colville’s idea of evergreen content got me thinking a little further. Content typically has a short lifespan. Often times the topics they discuss or the presentation of them decrease in value over the long term. What’s more fascinating, and what we would call more important to remember, are records that only become more valuable the older they get.

While helping his parents clean the attic of their home in Bethesda, Maryland, Peter Jones uncovered a box of old letters. The contents of the box were fragile; the paper, yellowed, but they were still readable. The letters were addressed to his great-great-grandfather, John Hunt, who emigrated from Ireland in 1855 just after the peak of the Irish Potato Famine had ravaged much of the country.

Within the correspondence, Peter saw the home that his forefather left, the difficulty of living on debt, and the profound guilt felt by John knowing that he couldn’t return to Ireland after having started a whole new life in America. Peter Jones was a professional songwriter and took that experience and wrote the ballad Kilkelly, Ireland.

The song is devastating, but what strikes me most isn’t the sadness–it’s the ordinariness of it. The letters weren’t written to be history. They were a father telling his son about the farm, the neighbors, and the small defeats of getting older. The famine was in the background and never center stage. That’s what makes it real.

John Hunt kept those letters because they were the only connection to the life he left behind. He wasn’t preserving history. He was preserving his father’s voice. It was releasing those letters and composing the song that let the history of it be felt. Not just a recount of the time period, but also an actual glimpse into a perfect example of an everyman afflicted by such an event.

From the inside, the Hunts’ lives didn’t feel remarkable either. They were the average people afflicted by natural turmoil of the world and forced to make tough decisions. That scope though is also what makes it so fascinating.

That’s still the hardest thing I’m trying to figure out. This whole site is something for record, expression, and memory, but I’ve hardly had the urge to use it as such. What’s worth preserving for someone I’ll never meet–

Never remember.

Well before going into the surgery, my neurologist warned me that while removing the hippocampus would likely prevent or reduce my seizures, my chances of developing Alzheimer’s and dementia were substantially more likely. I only have so many pieces of mind to give. Before long, it won’t just be questions of what to write.

Who am I?

Who is this for?

How will I be remembered?