# Permalink or It Didn't Happen

Originally published: 2015-02-28
Canonical URL: /2015/Feb/permalink-or-it-didnt-happen/

As far as I can tell, I don't have any kind of synesthesia. You can't be too sure (which means, you can easily be _entirely_ too sure), what with our na(t)ive theories of psychology being so inadequate that _everything_ we believe about other minds is but a filament of noise and conjecture, but your probability distribution about the mapping of sensory inputs to perceptions for _me_ is probably not so different as mine of the same for _you_ (dear reader of whom I know nothing)—roses seem red, violets would seem blue if we spoke a language that didn't already have a word for _violet_—which means that when I tell you that there's a musty, stale odor around a blog that hasn't been updated in a month and change, it's only a trite metaphor and not a perceptual reality of any sort. Still, even if you can't smell it (if your senses are like mine; if your fox, like mine, still hasn't bothered to implement the [HTML5 `<aroma>` element](http://www.sitepoint.com/html5-new-sensory-elements/)), it's an ominous thing, to see a blog hovering near the boundary between life and death, a corpus perhaps on the way to being a corpse. The internet is littered with the latter, monuments to people who reliably had _something to say_, month after month ... until they missed a month, and then it wasn't long before they missed another.

[![my_block_of_squares]({static}/images/my_block_of_squares.png)]({static}/images/my_block_of_squares.png)

Now I can assure you that that will _never_ happen to _this_ place while _I'm_ still breathing—this blog lives exactly as long as I do—only that's not a precise way of speaking; what I can do is _offer you my assurance_, which is a different thing from you actually feeling assured, which is a different thing still from that which was assured against actually never coming to pass. But I think these differences—between feeling and reality, between saying and reality—I think these enormous differences are much greater than the tiny, barely-perceptible gap between seeing so many gloriously intricate things to say, and making the time and words to express them on your blog when you are so busy with your trade in the manufacture of useful machinery (and the green tiles which are its highly-coveted industrial byproduct). But if all I can _observe_ is that the gap is barely perceptible, then by the enormity of the earlier differences, I am not licensed to _infer_ that the gap is tiny, not when the only reason I am telling you this is that I would die of shame if my monthly archives sidebar skipped a month for the first time since May of 'aught-twelve, not during this second year of my life in which I am _supposed_ to write a compiler and a bad novelette even though it is for all intents and tens of intensive purposes practically _March_.