Against Entropy

The Slower Fear

There’s a particular kind of fear I don’t think we talk about enough.

Not fear of death in the dramatic sense. Not skeletons and graveyards and existential screaming into the void at 03:00. I mean the quieter version. The slower one. The fear of erosion. Of degradation. Of things slipping away so gradually you only notice once the shape is already gone.

A dead link.
A corrupted hard drive.
An account deleted without warning.
A photo you swear existed somewhere.
A voice you can no longer remember clearly.
A person still alive, but already changing in ways that feel frighteningly irreversible.

Entropy.

I think an uncomfortable amount of my life has been shaped by trying to resist it.

When Mortality Stops Being Abstract

For a long time, death existed mostly as metaphor in my writing.

Greek myths.
Folklore.
Lycanthropy.
Transformation.
Cycles.
Rebirth.
The symbolic language of endings and becoming.

It lived at a safe literary distance.

But eventually mortality stops behaving like symbolism and becomes logistical. Bodily. Immediate. You stop thinking about death as a philosophical inevitability and start thinking about hospital corridors, mobility aids, medication timings, exhaustion, deterioration, carers, paperwork, uncertainty, and the awful helplessness of watching people you love struggle against their own bodies.

That shift changes something fundamental in the brain.

You realise very quickly how much of adulthood is learning to witness fragility without collapsing under it.

Recently I wrote a poem addressed to Thanatos. Not because I worship death, and not because I want it to arrive sooner, but because mythology sometimes provides vocabulary where ordinary language fails.

I asked:

How do I cope?

And honestly, I still do not entirely know.

Anti-Entropy Machinery

Looking back, a lot of the things I build are essentially anti-entropy systems wearing different hats. Sync tools. Archives. Personal websites. Music history analysers. Identity infrastructure. Publishing systems. Backups of backups of backups because apparently my brain decided that digital continuity is a survival instinct now.

Sometimes people assume I’m just especially interested in infrastructure or decentralisation as abstract technical concepts. And, to be fair, I do genuinely enjoy protocols. I enjoy weird systems problems. I enjoy making software do things it arguably should have done from the start. But beneath all of that sits something much more emotional:

I am deeply uncomfortable with impermanence.

Not in a “humans should become immortal cyborgs” way. More in a “why does modern technology feel so disposable?” way.

We built an internet where entire identities can vanish because a company pivots.
Where years of writing disappear behind a 404.
Where platforms encourage constant posting but terrible preservation.
Where people are treated like engagement metrics until the servers shut down and suddenly whole communities become digital ruins.

I think that unsettles me because life already contains enough unavoidable loss without engineering additional forms of it.

Portable Histories

I think that’s partly why the AT Protocol grabbed me so aggressively. Underneath all the federation discourse and protocol arguments and decentralised identity nerdiness was a much more human idea:

what if your history belonged to you?

Not rented. Not trapped. Not platform-conditional. Yours.

A lot of my projects emerged from that frustration. Malachite especially was built almost entirely out of spite and impatience. I got tired of waiting for proper migration and continuity tooling to appear, so I ended up building it myself. Which is, admittedly, how an alarming number of my projects start.

There’s a running joke that I “do shite out of spite,” but honestly? There’s truth in it.

Spite can be surprisingly productive when directed properly.

Especially when the alternative is helplessness.

Poetry as Continuity

And poetry sits far closer to this than it probably looks from the outside.

I’ve written over 180 poems since February 2020. Maybe more. I’ve genuinely lost count at this point. Some are unfinished fragments written half-asleep at stupid o’clock in the morning. Some are overwrought disasters. Some I still genuinely love. But together they form something larger than individual poems ever could: continuity.

A long trail of emotional archaeology.

I can open documents from years ago and immediately recognise the rhythm of whatever version of myself wrote them. The obsessions. The metaphors. The emotional weather. Wolves appearing again and again like recurring ghosts. Transformation. Cycles. Moons. Yew trees. Repetition. Three-part structures. Identity splitting and reforming under pressure.

A poem is an unusually stubborn object.

It says:
I was here.
I noticed this.
I survived long enough to name it.

Myth as Emotional Vocabulary

At some point I stopped thinking of mythology as “inspiration” and realised it had become infrastructure for thought itself.

Greek myth. Celtic symbolism. Folklore. Lycanthropy. They stopped being topics I merely enjoyed and became ways of organising emotional experience. Vocabulary for things otherwise difficult to explain directly.

That probably sounds a bit absurd written aloud, but it’s true.

I catch myself using mythological language conversationally without even noticing now. Describing tasks as Sisyphean. Calling failed ambition Icarian. Talking about cycles and spirals and transformations as if they’re structural properties of reality rather than metaphors humans invented thousands of years ago to survive uncertainty.

Maybe that’s all myth ever was:
compressed emotional continuity.

Stories sturdy enough to survive generations because they encode recurring human experiences efficiently.

And perhaps that’s why I wrote to Thanatos instead of merely writing about fear directly. Myth lets emotion become external enough to examine without immediately drowning in it.

Wolves and Difference

I think that’s also why I’ve always been drawn to wolves and lycanthropy specifically. Not because I think I’m literally a werewolf, obviously, but because transformation is such an emotionally powerful metaphor for difference. Especially when you grow up feeling slightly out-of-step with everyone around you.

Wolfblood affected me so deeply for exactly that reason, I think. Underneath the CBBC surface was a story about hidden identity, instinct, social masking, bodily difference, secrecy, belonging, and transformation. It made “otherness” feel survivable. Maybe even beautiful.

That sticks with you.

Especially when you’re autistic and already feel like everyone else got handed a social rulebook you never received.

When Data Becomes Narrative

The strange thing is that all of this loops back into my technical work eventually. Even projects that begin as “haha data visualisation go brrr” slowly become autobiographical if you stare at them long enough. A scrobble analyser becomes a memory graph. Listening habits become emotional residue. Musical evolution becomes identity evolution.

The graph stops being statistical and starts becoming narrative.

And perhaps that’s the real reason I archive so aggressively. Not because I believe preservation defeats death. It doesn’t. Eventually hard drives fail, websites disappear, formats decay, memories distort, and entropy wins anyway.

But “eventually” still leaves room for resistance.

Small Acts of Refusal

A poem survives.
A blog post survives.
A weird little protocol survives.
A commit message survives.
A cached playlist survives.
A fragment remains discoverable long enough for someone — even future you — to encounter it again.

Maybe that’s enough.

Maybe meaning isn’t created by permanence, but by the attempt to preserve things despite impermanence.

Small acts of refusal against erasure.

Tiny declarations that say:

this mattered to me.

therefore I tried to keep it.