an uncertain eulogy

When I was a young teenager I would save a lot of anime images. After watching a series I enjoyed, I would open a folder with its name and scour the internet for images: official artwork, fan art, manga caps, edits. Sometimes even anime-related events, if they had good enough graphics. I saved every single International Saimoe League card and banner for the years I participated. (Realising again my enjoyment for graphic design is connected to events, to gatherings, and probably always has been. Maybe I should’ve just left graphics editing as a past-time leisure.) Through saving, I would slowly be inspired by these images to create my own anime graphic edits, which formally kickstarted my journey in graphic design.

Other than that, I didn’t even look back at the images much other than to sort. There’s Danbooru at home, basically. I think my main purpose of saving was to have enough images to participate in the act of sorting. I would open subfolders of character names, sort, leave them, then revisit them another time to resort. Maybe this time I’ll sort them based on category, then next time on characters again.

I had so much fun. It was like Tibetan monks drawing intricate mandalas in the sand, only to erase them once they’re done. An act with nothing to show for, a true act for myself. I never showed anyone these folders of anime images. It was one of the rare activities where I felt complete agency over. Saving images was a form of saving myself.

One day these anime image folders got too much to bear for my first ever laptop, always whirring, never shut down. I transferred them to a Western Digital external HDD. I wrote my name in sharpie and the edges would feather out onto metal. Placed it right on the the top shelf above my desk. I would continue this aimless pursuit of mine: save, sort, save, sort, save, sort, transfer when local storage gets filled up again. Until I went on holiday and after my return, decided to continue saving images locally. It always takes a while for a computer to read a HDD. The anime-watching rate also decreased, hence the slower rate of image-saving. That is to say, it remained untouched for a while. Well, I didn’t know that it would be the last time I could access this hard disk. When I decided it was time for another transfer, the HDD could not be identified. It was dead.

Troubleshooting went nowhere. As a teenager with no experience in storage systems, who also couldn’t afford any external storage resuscitation services, I decided the most natural decision was to accept its death. With it, the death of many anime images – my own anime image collection – locked in a silver-cased coffin. Because no one knew about this other than myself, only I could sit with the grief. In the grand scheme of things, it’s such a silly thing. If a HDD dies without anyone to perceive it, did it really die? Did it really exist? The only way to move forward was to live life as if it never happened. So, I did.

Now, I feel as if I’ve always been subconsciously hindered by that loss. I don’t think I could ever feel so obsessive and creative just because I don’t want to go through the risk of losing it all again. Despite knowing about cloud storage or NAS systems now, I don’t think I could do it again. Despite being able to afford repair services now, I’m still too weak. Is it okay to process this now, more than a decade later?