Nostalgia and nowstalgia

It’s always fun looking back at things I’ve done in the past, especially if they’re neatly logged or visualised in some way. Robert Birming commented on the same feeling he gets when looking at his blog calendar, or pins on a map based on completed house inspections he’s done. Reading his post inspired me to finally write this one.

The front page of my website has the recent activity from some of these logs: blogs I’ve written, anime I’ve watched and beer I’ve checked in. Their main goal is to have a quick view of what’s been going on in the last few weeks, but behind each panel is a history of data I can view to see how far I’ve come. Robert calls this being nowstalgic.

It’s only lately that I’ve come to appreciate having a history at hand. I wouldn’t say I’m nostalgic, rather nowstalgic, but there’s a certain beauty in seeing the now in the context of the past.

Posts written

Writing blog posts here has been fun, researching various topics, dumping information down in a text editor, proofreading and editing for days, and publishing only to find it’s still riddled with spelling mistakes. What’s also sometimes just as fun is going through past posts and reading them in the context of other posts at the time. I also like scrolling through the archive and seeing how far I’ve come in the last few years.

Two years after I began blogging more frequently, I did a summary post, looking back at how my writing changed, my workflow adapted to the environment around me and how it all fit together. Much more than what I wrote, I enjoyed going back through the archive looking at everything. I might do another two-year summary next January too keep up the momentum and be nowstalgic.

Links shared

Much in the same vein of blogging, I began sharing links, it’s been a little over two years now, but there isn’t much nowstalgia associated with this. I assume because the links I share are usually topical, with minimal commentary. What I do find interesting is looking at the link archive and seeing how mixed my interests are.

I’m thinking there might be more nowstalgia if I had the dates mapped on a calendar in the archive and shown alongside other acitivity.

Beers drunk

Logging beers began when I started getting interested in local breweries around the Netherlands. I wanted a way to keep track of what I tried and what the breweries I was visiting offered, so I naturally leaned towards Untappd to provide and log this data. The service is a treasure trove of information on beer, beer styles, breweries, and reviews. I really can’t find much else like it. As a user, I logged every new beer I tried, or re-logged the same beer if I changed my mind on something.

It wasn’t until recently that I went through all my previous check-ins and realised there’s a lot of nostalgia (not nowstalgia) associated with the beer and particularly of the images I had taken of the beer. A lot of times when visiting new places, I’m with my wife, and I try out beers I haven’t drank before, so just flicking through the check-ins evokes a lot of memories of the day or place. This was an unintended consequence of logging my beers. It didn’t feel right placing all these memories on a website that didn’t allow me to easily export everything, since their API is locked down, and so I created my own beer log.

I can go through my own log and, much like Untappd, see all my check-ins. There is an obvious massive gap in knowledge of all the world’s beers and breweries, which I will still partially rely on Untappd for, at least my memories are stored with me.

Anime watched

Much like with beer, I started tracking my anime (and sometimes manga) to keep track of what I’ve seen versus what I intend to see. This has led me to have a large and very detailed log of everything I’ve seen over the last few years. I use Anilist for this, and even created an RSS feed for my activity too. However, unlike Untappd, Anilist has an API I can use to query all my data, including information about anime and manga. It’s for this reason I’ve chosen to continue using it, and will potentially consider mirroring my data on my website, but that’s a project for a future date.

Books read

Books! I read them, not as much as I used to, but I still do. For the longest time, I tracked them on Goodreads, it’s still fun to go back and see what I read a decade ago and all the activity I logged as I progressed through chapters. For some reason, I stopped, so there’s a gap of a few years in my activity, but if I do decide to start logging this again, I can mirror my lists through manual exports. There’s more nostalgia than nowstalgia with these logs, much like with the anime.

Rail videos recorded

It’s no secret I like trains, trams and all things rail-related, rollercoasters too sometimes. I try to record a train, tram or metro if I ever go to a new station, or see something interesting, and every time I do, I upload that video on YouTube. I’ve also manually decided to enter the details of the video on my website where it’s plotted on the map. There’s a lot of nowstalgia associated with this page. I like everything about that page, from the minimalistic map based on tiny-world-map which I can manualy edit to add cities that aren’t included, the wonky SVG icons I’ve created to show the number of videos filmed at a point, and the list of videos by country and city.

All the videos I’ve filmed come from trips I’ve been on with my wife, or for work, a railway-related milestone or event or an interesting rail-related technology I learnt about. There’s a lot to be nostalgic about, but looking back at all the locations and the list of videos I’ve recorded, edited and uploaded over time evokes some nowstalgia as well. There’s a lot I can improve in my video recordings and the page I list them out on, but it just feels right.

Future plans?

I’ve been toying with the idea of having a central activity feed, a place on my site where I join all these individual sources of data into one. That way, I can list out recent activity but also scroll through things I’ve done around a certain time. Imagine going back a year to a family vacation and seeing the blog I wrote about their transportation system, but also some links I shared about an interesting museum and the anime I watched on the train ride there. I think that would be cool. It’s possible, but I want to settle on some common connectors to make it all work with RSS feeds, APIs and some spaghetti Python scripts to tie it all together.

I think this would be most nostalgic and nowstalgic.