As you may have noticed, everything here is gone.
There's a reason for that. Everything I ever did on this blog was really just a way for me to deal with some really nasty personal demons. It was an outlet for me to express my frustration and to grapple with some issues that were really bothering me at the time. You may or may not know this, but I suffer from severe OCD and frequently develop unhealthy obsessions with topics that I don't have any true, legitimate interest in. Philosophy of mind was one of those topics; my obsession with it was a result of my being unable to cope with what I saw as a very threatening assault on my personal view of myself and, more importantly, an assault on the very worth of someone that I care deeply about. I couldn't handle the idea that a bunch of really smart people, in the name of "science" and "reason", were basically saying that the person I cared more about than anything else in the world was just a worthless machine made of chemicals reacting to stimuli, and because of my OCD and because of a very painful falling-out with this person, I started on this enterprise as a way of feeling like I was fighting for her, like I was protecting her worth from a bunch of nihilistic atheists who were trying to say she wasn't really a person. I felt determined to prove them wrong, and no matter what I did I still kept feeling this strong voice in my head telling me that they were right all along, that thoughts and emotions really were just brain chemicals and that I was just too stubborn to accept the truth. I spent over a year trying to quiet that voice, and to this day it's still there to a certain extent. But I came to a point where I no longer needed this blog as an outlet, and so I stopped writing for it.
The reason I chose to delete everything on this blog is because, looking back on this almost 3 months later, it really isn't something I would ever want people I know - either in real life or online - to see. I started to see this blog as an embarrassment, as something I didn't want anyone to know I was involved with, and once I found out that this blog was one of the first results on Google when you search for my screen name, I knew I had to get rid of it. Being involved in online communities in which I'm fairly well-known, I didn't want to risk people from that community Googling my name and finding this entire other side to my life. I kind of regret deleting 5 months' worth of hard work, and I really wish I had just reverted all the posts to drafts so that they would still be there in some way, but what's done is done, and it's too late to go back and change it.
The reason I'm making this post is to apologize for getting rid of so much stuff that some people might still have wanted to read. I'm lucky that this blog never got all that popular, so that I don't have much to apologize for, but to those of you (if any) who did follow this blog and are sad to see everything go, I'm sorry. Some of it is still archived on the Wayback Machine (although far from all of it), so it's not completely gone, but I just want this all to be done and for this part of my life to stay in the past. I wish I could say I had fun running this blog, but the truth is that it was actually a very painful and stressful experience for me, and the only reason I continued doing it was because of a personal obsessive need to. I did have some good times, but the sad truth is that it was overall more bad than good.
So I'm sorry for taking advantage of you guys, I'm sorry for abruptly ending my posting here, and I'm sorry for getting rid of all of the stuff I've written here over the 5 months that I worked on it. I'm sure you guys will be fine without me, so I won't feel guilty about leaving and taking everything with me. This will most likely be the last you'll ever hear from me on this site, so this is where we part ways. Goodbye, and good luck to all of you.
-Steven "ingx24" Brown
