Frequently Asked Questions About 2020

Are you married yet?

No. As of writing I am still engaged. We had plans earlier this year, but, you know.

What happened to your blog?

tl;dr A backup isn’t a backup unless you test it.

Up until this year I was using a DigitalOcean droplet to host my WordPress blog. For $6/month I got the low-performance server and weekly backups of the droplet data. At home, I had a little Gigabyte BXBT-2807 with a 1TB 2.5” drive for hosting more home-related data - shared media, backups, stuff like that.

I got kind of sick of maintaining two Ubuntu servers so I decided to consolidate everything onto the Gigabyte machine. Well… that machine has always ran hot, so to protect against data loss I started running a script like this to backup the data to Backblaze B2. Once I was sure I had moved everything over, I flipped the rysavys.me domain over to my home machine and deleted the data in DigitalOcean.

Things were good. Performance took a hit but nobody really visited my blog anyway. Until…

I restarted the little computer one morning for a kernel update, and it wouldn’t boot. Ear to the case, I heard a click. Several clicks. Many clicks. The drive was dead. Throwing it in my USB-SATA enclosure confirmed. No problem, since I had backups right?

Wrong. Turns out the only copy of the encryption key I made… was on the dead drive. Blog, gone. Media, mostly gone. I was able to recover much of the data from other sources1, but my blog data from 2017-2018 is gone.

I learned my lesson. My home media is now on a Synology NAS running periodic, comprehensive backups to Backblaze, and this blog is in a git repo hosted on GitHub. This is basically how my blog worked in 2016 and I didn’t like it very much, but here we are.

  1. One of those other sources was the cache of an RSS reader that was subscribed to my blog. That was actually the best source I had to recover the data. Kind of cool… if I wasn’t so bummed out about it.

What effect has quarantine had on your mental health?

Honestly… it’s okay. It’s not great, but if you had told me what was going to happen a year ago, I would have predicted a much worse outcome than what has actually transpired.

The biggest problem that I noticed early on is that the moodswings come in tighter loops now, and more frequently.

Did you witness looting during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer?

I did not witness looting, although there was a single night that I remember being worried about it. In retrospect, this was not based in reality but was in fact just a result of fearmongering by the coverage I had seen on social media. And still, even if there had been looting near me, my impression was that it was nonviolent. Well, unless you were a TV or window, I guess. There were a lot of businesses that boarded up all of their doors and windows and it gave the city an ominous feel.

In fact, my impression of the Black Lives Matter protests was, and I want to stress this, extremely positive. We joined one of the larger protests that came down our street for a while.

What happened after Joe Biden was elected president?

You may have heard reports that there was cheering in the streets after Joe Biden was announced the winner. Those reports are completely correct. That is actually how we found out; it was Saturday, and we had just returned to our quiet neighborhood after a shopping trip. All of a sudden, I heard clapping - I ran to the window to see what was up. People were leaning out their windows, people were yelling in the street, cars were honking. I looked at the news - AP called it for Joe Biden. I gave a few whoops myself. That afternoon we went downtown - the party continued on every block, every street. A man in a convertible blared “FUCK DONALD TRUMP!”

Look, this year was fucking crazy and it has made me more progressive than ever. I know Joe Biden is not going to be the bastion of liberal idealism that I want him to be. But it felt damn good to be proud of this country again. You know, I work with a lot of immigrants now and these last four years have been really stressful. Donald Trump is a cruel, cynical old man and I am very excited that already I am turning on WNYC and hearing stories not about the crazy shit he did today.

What were your quarantine cheats?

I like to think that Miranda and I did not break the rules or spirit of quarantine, much. At the beginning, in March or early April, there was a lot of conflicting information about masks and the shortage of equipment made it difficult to know what the right thing to do was. Miranda and I took a walk in Central Park at a time when half of the city were still not wearing masks, but an old lady took it on herself to publically shame us. It worked. I started wearing a mask.

We also took two road trips, since we had to cancel a lot of domestic travel this year. Both trips we rented a car from a place a few blocks from our apartment and wiped down the car with our own cleaning supplies. We stayed in New York State, except for a quick jaunt over the Vermont border - Vermont was not on a list of “quarantine required” states at the time and we similarly stayed distanced and clean.

Other than that… we stayed home, we did not do any indoor dining, and the only place we ate in for outdoor dining was a pizza place’s table on the sidewalk. I haven’t travelled anywhere else and it sucks, but we just don’t want to risk it.

What’s something you want to tell the world but haven’t had an opportunity to yet?

Well, you already know Miranda and are engaged and I probably talk about it enough anyway.

No, what I want to talk about is how much I love the Grateful-freakin’-Dead. I listened to their Skull and Roses live album early in the year and thought, “this is pretty great! Why haven’t I listened to this before?” and quickly fell into the rabbit hole of bootlegs, Dick’s Picks and best live mixes. It’s actually literally embarrassing how much Grateful Dead I have listened to this year. They have become my default. According to Last.fm they are actually my most listened-to artist (of about the last three years, when I started logging my activity there.)

What are some of your favorite pictures of the year?

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall you crazy animals…

Enjoy my 2020 mixtape!

2020: Make Sure the Door Hits You on the Way Out (Spotify)

  • “Monday” – Wilco (Being There)
  • “(Not Gonna Put On) the Monkey Suit” – Harry and the Potters (Live at the New York Public Library)
  • “(Rock Me On The Water)” – Linda Ronstadt (Linda Ronstadt)
  • “So Far Away” – Carole King (Tapestry)
  • “When You Were Mine” – Prince (Dirty Mind)
  • “St. Stephen - Live at Barton Hall” – Grateful Dead (Cornell 5/8/77 (Live))
  • “Cowgirl in the Sand” – Neil Young & Crazy Horse (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere)
  • “Valentine - Rough Mix” – The Replacements (Pleased To Meet Me (Deluxe Edition))
  • “Life Is Like - Live” – The Suburbs (Viva! Suburbs! [Live at First Avenue])
  • “Thundercrack - Studio Outtake - 1973” – Bruce Springsteen (Tracks)
  • “Hey Shadow - Demo” – The Replacements (Pleased To Meet Me (Deluxe Edition))
  • “Most of the Time - Alternate Version from ‘Oh Mercy’ sessions” – Bob Dylan (Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8)
  • “Jesus, Etc.” – Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot)

As always, here is the link to the full list that I compiled throughout the year.