In the blink of an eye—or in the panicked flop-sweat of an incompetent rich man—decades of brilliant, stupid, funny, tragic, important, meaningless, original, and copy-pasted digital-media work was wiped off the Internet this week.

According to Gawker, G/O Media leadership (almost certainly CEO Jim Spanfeller) ordered the images be removed from nearly all articles on G/O Media sites (including The Onion, Deadspin, Kotaku, Jalopnik, etc.) that pre-dated the company’s purchase by private-equity firm Great Hill Partners. Everything from original art and illustrations done or commissioned by in-house staff to the raison d'etre of the legendary Deadspin post, “Butthole Eaten at Lions Tailgate,” gone.

The loss is practically incalculable, especially for writers and readers of a certain age. The current stable of G/O Media sites contains months, years, decades of full-time work from many of the best and brightest writers and editors of the Aughties and Aughtteens. Much of that work has now been degraded or destroyed.

The forces of truth and justice stood victorious.

A furious siege by authors and their followers had reduced the enemy citadel to rubble within hours of the battle-horn sounding. Naught was left of their internet presence but a screencapped surrender flag:

…and there was much rejoicing.

When now-former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden’s old racist, sexist, misogynist emails were leaked to the media, I had the same two reactions almost anyone connected to football did:

1) “This is horrible,”

and

Every sportswriter will tell you that covering a sport for a living, especially in an access-driven role, changes your relationship to that sport. You lose your “fan card” pretty quick when the players stop being heroes on TV and start being Guys At Work.

It becomes impossible to watch the sport without your analyst brain kicking in: spotting formations and matchups, scouting positive and negative traits. Even if you’re covering the team you grew up loving, your emotional reaction to its every success and failure is dipped in layers of your emotional reaction to what it means for the players involved, what it means to the fans (who are your audience), what it means for the reaction-story idea you’ve been nursing, the season-long narrative you’ve been spinning, the Bold Prediction you made on Friday.

It becomes impossible to casually talk sports with people, because they ask for your professional opinion – and then cut you off and tell you their opinion, and expect you to certify it as Correct even if they’re talking out their absolute ass.

I love roller coasters, but I hate free-fall rides – and whenever anybody asks me why, I have a pat answer:

And yet, I participate in the digital-media economy. Curious! I am very intelligent.

Carlos Watson is very intelligent, too; just ask him (or any of the glowing media profiles that have been written about the OZY.com founder over the years). Way back in 2015, OZY became one of Silicon Valley’s digital-media darlings; Watson made headlines in more traditional outlets because he named his site and company after what appeared to be a total misreading of the poem “Ozymandias.”

I’ve never read A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of books better known as the source material for the TV show “Game of Thrones,” but these two simple lines (which thankfully made it into the show) have stuck with me.

I tried to hook this topic with a bunch of different idioms (‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating,’ ‘a man is only as faithful as his options,’ ‘everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth’) that all kind-of engaged with my recent thoughts. But this idea, that courage can only exist in the context of fear, comes closest to what I was really thinking about: That you can only claim to live by principles when those principles have been tested.

When I was in middle school, my best friend’s dad was thrown an “Over the Hill” party. Their basement was slathered in black crepe paper and filled with gravestone balloons. His friends, colleagues, employees, and everybody’s kids all ate off black plates and drank from black cups and jauntily celebrated the impending doom of this now-40-year-old man.

It was a joke…except, it kind of wasn’t. The median retirement age at the time of the party was 62. The honored man’s life expectancy at birth was 73. His story isn’t mine to tell, but he didn’t live to see either retirement or age 73.

At the time, I’d long since noticed adults’ preoccupation with age and aging; it was the subject of countless movies and magazine articles and comic strips. It felt like every ad break during grownup TV shows featured a pitch for wrinkle cream or Grecian Formula or both. And when younger Millenials and Zoomers checked out the pop culture Boomers produced in the 80s, they not only saw it, they saw why:

I’ll always remember pulling up my then-favorite Internet hangout and seeing the top post, “THE GLASS DESERT,” full of comments about how we should nuke ‘em 'til they glow.

I’ll always remember the guy who drove his pickup truck into the Islamic Center of East Lansing the day after.

I’ll always remember the U.S. Senate voting 98-1 for a plainly unconstitutional law that to this day allows our police, military and intelligence agencies to spy on us basically as much as they want.

“We thought we were part of a revolution,” rock icon Grace Slick once said when asked about a potential reunion tour with the original members of Jefferson Airplane. “Going up on stage now with gray hair and singing all those songs for a bunch of bankers who paid a hundred dollars a ticket would just be sad.”

…at least, that’s what I remember her saying. I can’t find the documentary she said that in, but there are plenty of similar quotes from her throughout the three decades since the final reunion of the original lineup. Sober, stable, and decades separated from the radical countercultures her band made anthems for, Slick realized she’d done all she could from behind a mic—and maybe, given the uncut cringe that was Starship, should have done a little bit less.

Immediately after that 1989 reunion tour, she retired from singing and picked up a paintbrush.

When I was 15, a magazine I was subscribed to said the hottest new video game in the world, Final Fantasy VII, was literally unplayable.

Sure, the review said, it was a technical tour-de-force that raised the bar for what video games could be. But readers of this particular magazine could never play it.

Why? Because it created a new religion.

Today I made seven meals before breakfast. Today my wife and I bought lattes 45 minutes before either of us usually check our email. Today we took our three teenagers back to physical school for the first time in 524 days.

Today I set up our new-to-us pop-up camper, in a fashion not designed not to catch the eye of the neighbors who bought a new-to-them boat a few weeks ago and have conspicuously been shining it up ever since. Today I picked my son up from JV soccer practice at 5:00, made dinner, and drove him back out at 6:30 to help his coaches trim the soccer field because I’d convinced him of the power of showing up—and they took note when we were one of just a few families who’d bothered.

Today we got an alert that our eldest had missed a class and nobody knew where she was and we couldn’t get a text through to her and we had no idea what was happening. Today I laid a hand on my wife’s shoulder in a vain attempt to comfort her as she shook, crying under the strain of everything that was going on. Today my wife finished a presentation for her job’s annual board retreat, for which she’ll already have left by the time you read this.

The Facebook rumors said a statewide group called “Moms for Liberty” was going to blow up this week’s school-board meeting—hundreds of angry, roving anti-maskers swarming our little town’s high-school auditorium and decrying our district’s newly reinstated indoor mask mandate.

I arrived just minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting, and when I registered for public comment there were only a dozen or so names on the list above me. I walked in and saw only a few dozen people, total. No signs, no chants, no angry horde. But everyone who had shown up, showed up ready for a fight.

Mask discussion was not on the agenda; the superintendent and board had already made the decision. But from the first words of the first public-comment speaker, it became apparent we were all going to have to be angry about it anyway.

I’ve only been hated on-sight by a bunch of strangers once. Only one time in my blessed, privileged life have I ever been made to feel utterly unwelcome the instant I set foot in a space because the people there saw I was the wrong kind of person.

And I loved it.

It was the summer of 2011—June 22nd, to be precise. Or maybe it was the 23rd by that point in the evening, who can say? As far as evenings go, it wasn’t very precise.

A few weeks ago I stepped out my front door to run a couple errands, checked my phone, and saw an email that froze me solid.

“After reading it and taking some time to consider it carefully, I’ve decided the article is not the right fit for [our] audience,” it read. Still stuck on my front porch, I frantically scanned the rest. An editor I was working with for the very first time, at an outlet I’d been excited to break into, was telling me the story I’d just filed had missed the mark so badly there was no point in giving me a second shot. They were simply offering me a kill fee and moving on.

In over a decade of freelancing, I’d only been offered two kill fees ever. Once, the entire website got shut down just after I’d filed. The other, the editor changed their mind on the angle so many times that the story had become moot by the time I finished my third rewrite.

In the past year I’ve launched a twice-weekly national podcast, been diagnosed with ADHD, written a bunch of cool features for premium outlets, and done a host of interviews on radio/audio/video shows.

But it seems like no more than 72 of my 10,000-plus Twitter followers ever found out about any of those things. For a professional creative who’s spent over a decade building his Twitter account as his main self-promotional tool, this is a problem.

About four years ago, I thought making a newsletter might be the only way writers could build an audience without being beholden to the whims of vulture capitalists. I thought it…but I didn’t do it.