Answers to Christina's Five Questions for May 2026

 How did April end for you: with a bang? or with a whimper?

I checked my records, and it was indeed a whimper moreso than bang.  I see myself documented to have
been beleaguered with work of no interest to me beyond its robbing me from that which I truly value.

 What's a website that was legendary a long time ago but is now "a ghost town?"

I nominate 4chan, an anonymous imageboard once filled with life however strange, now with its boards
reduced to mere hundreds of users if that.  A problem in such small spaces is the recognition of the
other users due both to increased contact with them and less of a crowd covering them.  This has the
boards feel noticeably smaller, yet even over a decade ago certain conversations had but mere dozens
of participants.  It fails even as a filter for the better, even smaller imageboards nowadays, which
are now plagued by lunatics anyway, and I anticipate the day it finally falls without resuscitation.

 What extinct website(s) are you grateful the Internet Wayback Machine archived?

I'm happy to answer this question, as I've wondered how best to document this very thing here.  Mine
is.  For many years I've noticed requests of paths I've never provided, this one easily most common:
/2008/08/27/post-emptive-week-in-awesome/

I so rarely use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, or any of the other archives, but eventually
looked to notice someone had been using this domain name before me, and got a glimpse into his life:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100211100259/verisimilitudes.net/2008/08/27/post-emptive-week-in-awesome/

 Post-emptive week in awesome
 Wednesday 27 Aug 2008

 Owing to a particularly busy Friday night, the ensuing weekend-long hangover and a heavy truckload
 of work to do, I neglected my regular noting of ~random crap~ shiny things that caught my eye this
 past week...

 *Some futuristic User Interface Concepts [Smashing Magazine] including this display which reminds
  me in a way of some work by an undergrad colleague of mine at Philips Research Labs. David's brief
  was to explore the concept of a multi-touch gestural display device. He investigated Fingerworks
  and how we might put their tech behind a screen for a portable device. This was in 2004, remind
  you of something that came out in 2007? Yep, Apple bought them out not long afterwards. I miss
  being in R&D...
 *A subtle clock that tells you the time.
 *The perils of being a music nerd.

 Back to some work...

I'd taken the plural form of this word as my domain in part because it was available and in part due
to its uncommon nature, so it surprised me to see I hadn't been that first man to consider using it.

When I had my website excluded from this archive, since I can, I gave guidance on when I owned it to
the one working there who asked, which ensured that the man's archive is still available.  I've long
loathed how I may rent a domain name from the cartel, but never own one, although this new knowledge
almost had me reconsider my position.  It's queer to see some digital space of all places once used.

I still see requests for this path in my server's logs, despite never returning any useful response;
some ghostly process, somewhere for some reason, continues to seek it out unsuccessfully, and likely
immediately failed for many years until I instated my website over this domain.  I still wonder why.

 Do you ever have days when you are certain none of the eight-plus billion people on the planet have
 made as many errors that day as you have?

No, I've seen too much footage taken in lesser areas, like China and India, to believe such a thing.
Once one learns about the careless destruction of life in such places, from negligence alone, he can
dispel himself of such silly notions; every day he lives without accidentally killing is one better.

 Is there such a thing as spiritual affinity? Do kindred souls truly recognize each other from afar?

As I've written previously, I'm willing to believe in souls so long as it also be accepted that many
lack them; I use the soul as a metaphor for the mind, as distinguished from sheep.  In this framing,
sure; I notice creative people from across the Internet through their works, without ever needing to
speak with them; more normally, I notice the people lacking souls all around me, the soulless husks.
.