Sands of Time

I recently went on one of my favorite recipe sites to get the ingredients for something I make pretty often. I open the link I have saved in Google Keep - just like always. I scroll past the author's life story and cooking tips - just like always. I copy the ingredients to my shopping list - not just like always. Huh? The ingredient list is wrong. My heart skips a beat as my stomach drops out. Dijon mustard? Worcestershire sauce? What the fuck is this shit? My panic rises. I check the url. Is this a different page? Am I having a stroke or something? The ingredients are different. Or were they always this way? WAS I MAKING IT WRONG THIS WHOLE TIME OH MY GOD

And then I saw it. updated 5-20-21. I didn't know whether to feel relief or anger. They changed the fucking recipe. I feel like I was gaslit by fucking Beth from budget bytes.

The Mushroom Stroganoff Incident is just another symptom of a problem I've been running into for a while now. We talk about information on the internet as if it'll be around forever. Parents and teachers echo "be careful what you post online!", but they don't talk about the other side of the coin. I grew up with the understanding that whatever goes up on the internet won't come down. Yeah, some things are like that. Embarrassing videos? Sure. Those can't go away fast enough. What if you're looking for something actually useful, though? Find it, bookmark it, go back in a few months... might as well have never existed. Dead links are dead forever. All information is just one cull away from being lost, permanently.

It's all ephemeral. Everything returns to entropy. Tablets erode, paintings fade, books decay, and bits un-flip. Unto dust shalt thou return.

I think this is the main advantage of having a time machine. Imagine all the cool-ass shit we've lost to history that we could finally have back. What happened to the Roanoke Colony? What happened to D. B. Cooper? Who built stonehenge? And, most importantly, what happened to my fucking mushroom stroganoff recipe?

Until I get a time machine, I'll do what any reasonable person would after they've been burned: trust no one. I can't rely on any resource that I don't control.

Indeed, that's one of the reasons I made this site. I can at least store my thoughts here. I can rely on myself, right? As long as I own the domain... and have a hosting provider... and Github stays up... alright, I admit, the outlook isn't too good. We'll see how it goes. Only time will tell.

There's always a relevant xkcd.