Adam Scott, I’d Like To Have A Word With You!
There are days when I’d give anything for a brief stroll through time, just long enough to grab my former self by the shoulders and ask, “How could you do this to me?!” Perhaps even shake him dramatically for good measure. But alas, time travel remains inconveniently theoretical, and we are forever bound to suffer the consequences of our own artistic chaos.
I’ve been writing on this blog for what feels like several geological eras, since around 2005 or 2006, back when “blogging” was the digital equivalent of carving your thoughts into the primordial internet stone. It was a strange, lawless time: I posted memes before memes had names, links to odd corners of the web, photos that had no business being uploaded at 480p, and the occasional earnest post for flavor. It was messy, delightful, and entirely emblematic of the early 2000s, a glorious digital attic that I now regret not labeling properly.
Earlier this week, WordPress (my ever-patient jailer) gently informed me that my media library was nearing its storage limit. Apparently, two decades of memes, photos, and questionable creative decisions take up space. Many of those early posts have long been archived into oblivion, maybe still haunting The Wayback Machine like digital ghosts, but their files have lingered, bloating my library like unwashed laundry.
And so, yesterday, I began the task of cleaning it all up. It’s tedious, soul-numbing work, and I can feel my younger self laughing somewhere in the background, blissfully unaware that “future me” would one day be untangling his digital mess.
The first thing I discovered? There isn’t a single free, user-friendly plugin that will clean, organize, and optimize your media library. Oh, there are plenty that claim to, but they all seem to require a subscription, a blood pact, or a minor in computer science. The second thing? Past Adam was a disaster when it came to labeling. No titles. No descriptions. No alt text. No SEO. Just a parade of unmarked JPEGs floating in the void like lost souls.
So here I am, naming, tagging, resizing, and redeeming thousands of wayward images, one by one. It’s a slow, purgatorial process, and I have no one to blame but my own youthful enthusiasm and complete disregard for metadata.
If anyone out there happens to stumble upon a TARDIS, a flux capacitor, or a suspiciously glowing amulet that whispers secrets of temporal travel, do let me know. I have a few sternly worded, possibly expletive-laced things I’d like to say to 2006 Adam.
