Sentimental

Data is weird, especially in the digital age. I'm a computer science student, yet I think that quite a lot of people would be able to tell you that computers see data as a series of 1s and 0s. On signals and off signals. A presence or a lack of electricity. Yet such a simple concept can lead to incredible complexity. It's the reasons I know what I looked and sounded like 10 years ago. It's the reason you can even read what I'm typing right now.

Photographs, video recordings or other physical objects can bring about memories of time gone by, whether it's ancient history, modern history or the history of your own life. And, generally when it's something to do with your past, that object will hold sentimental value to you. However, in an increasingly digital world, what's to stop data from holding sentimental value?

That's something I've found myself thinking about over the last day or so. I've talked before about how I work on a gameshow in Minecraft. At the moment, the team is in the process of rennovating the main build of the project. We've copied the entire build to a separate part of the map and, such is the extent of the work, we've needed to remove the original version. This is a build that, even though I only really became a part of the team last April, I've seen on the community's server since August of 2015. It's data. A massive number stored on a server somewhere in Europe. But I've spent so much time working on and with the build for the best part of a year now, so even knowing that there exists a copy that is fully intact and is practically indistinguishable from the original, the entire ordeal seems... wrong, somehow. The rennovated form of the build is going to be much grander and give us so many more opportunities to do fun things in our live shows, so I know that this is a good thing to do.

I know in my head that it doesn't matter, that it's just another number in a world of numbers, yet my heart just doesn't want to hear any of it.

And, until next time,
o/