This is wildly inappropriate.

Last night I couldn't sleep and after a while I remembered you, remembered all of you. Remembered burning it all for some stupid reason. So here's what I recall:

I wrote a thinly veiled open love letter to Swap. Massively embarrassing afterwards.

I read Anathem because my parents snail-mailed it to Shanghai. Almost immediately wrote a glowing review. It's really the best thing Neal Stephenson's ever written. I did a review of Haibane Renmei, which also happens to be the best thing Yoshitoshi ABe has ever done.

I played with a troll, ushd-something-or-other, name completely ungooglable.

I went to a few nodermeets. Columbus. Somewhere in New Jersey. Columbus again. Illinois, a couple of times. Indiana, where I ended up, probably for good. Lost a thing everyone can only lose once.

I dreamed about an internet encyclopedia of mathematics that wasn't hegemonic, disgusting, or useless. It didn't get off the ground. Nine years ago I didn't understand just how much work it was to make anything that isn't crap. John Baez has done markedly better with n-Category Cafe and the Azimuth Project.

What a stupid thing to have done. I'll never know what I was really like in undergrad. How awful and idiotic and self-absorbed. (Naturally still all three of these things.)

As time went on I kept feeling like I had less and less to say, until retroactively it felt like everything I wrote hadn't had any value at all.

Sorry. I was stupid.