Eyes Wide Shut

So, I finally put a bullet in the head of Albany Eye. It was a long time coming.

Albany Eye was a blog I wrote about local news and the media from 2004 to 2006. Its tart and snarky posts attracted a fairly good-sized audience before it came crashing down; what began as a lark got out of hand and nearly cost me everything.

The blog has stayed up online since then, but it’s effectively gone now. While it still exists, the site is restricted to invited readers only. And there won’t be any. I didn’t have the heart to delete the whole thing.

This came about after I received an email from someone I wrote about in Albany Eye long ago. They’d gotten in some trouble with the law, and I penned a couple of cheeky posts linking to news stories where they were named. After years of my stuff popping up in Google searches, the person reached out this week and asked me to take down the posts. I did so immediately.

That’s when it struck me that maybe it would be better if none of the Albany Eye blog posts were still out there.

I wrote some shitty things in that blog. I can’t change that now, but erasing it from the web is a small step in the right direction. In retrospect, I never should have started Albany Eye, and believe me, it was never anything but trouble.

It’s not possible to apologize to everyone I poked fun at, so it will have to suffice for me to say that I feel deep remorse for the way my actions affected people. Much of it was harmless, but sometimes the posts I wrote hurt people’s feelings.

Yes, one or two of them richly deserved it, but they were the minority.

In related news, the Times Union finally relented and took down the blog I used to write on their site. I always hated that they claimed ownership over my writing, and after a decade-long battle, it’s finally gone.

So here I am, pushing 60, and slowly vanishing. We can’t erase memories, but it’s not such a bad thing to clean up some of the little messes we leave behind.

6 thoughts on “Eyes Wide Shut

  1. My hostage TU blog is also finally gone. Dunno if you made interim pokes and inquiries about getting it removed after initial promises to do so . . . I did, and was fully prepared for it to remain up for another decade as time dragged on, but it did eventually disappear, so that’s good, if late.

    As a fellow gentleman of a certain age, I appreciate the “vanishing” aspect of our online worlds. Though I have long embraced that concept as a part of what we do, e.g. . . .

    https://jericsmith.com/2011/03/16/vanishing/

    I guess there’s some sort of limit or asymptotic function at play . . . we can get ever closer to invisible, but we’re still on the positive side of the line, no matter how hard we push toward that zero point.

    I loved Albany Eye (and was even accused in public by one of the market’s right-wing nutjobs of being you!), but I totally get your letting it go, and totally get the sense of “I did some amazing writing there, but, boy, some of it was probably problematic.” That was what Upstate Wasted and Upstate Ether were for me around the same time. The funniest things I ever wrote, easily, were there . . . but I can never really share them or celebrate them now because of what ELSE was there, alas . . .

    1. Yes, I wrote a couple of emails over the years requesting removal — and never heard back from anyone.

      Interestingly, the Wayback Machine ant Archive.org readily consented to remove Albany Eye. All I had to do was show proof of ownership, so I expect it will vanish from there soon as well.

      1. Hmmmm . . . wonder if we can ask them to remove the archived copies of the TU blogs . . . (off to check to see if they are there) . . .

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