Contravex : Now with expanded archives.

It should come as no profound revelation that Contravex.com is my third personal blog, but for the past two years, considerable stores of content from the first such venture – CarEnvy.cai – lay dormant on disks, rusting quietly on some closeted hard drive, deep in the bowels of an endarkened space not entirely unlike the well that Leonidas kicked that poor Persian emissary into. This oversight has now been corrected.

For while I could’ve sworn that I’d tried to upload the CarEnvy archives when I first moved from BitcoinPete.com to Contravex.com in the summer of 2014, like Charlie’s mom’s inexplicably failed abortion attempt, it didn’t take.ii I probably could’ve troubleshooted the issue in greater detail at the time, but as I was almost exclusively focused on establishing myself as a voice in TMSR~ – a pursuit that can probably be said to have failed at this point (though I still enjoy popping by and reading logs) – making a clean break from my humble and seemingly irrelevant roots was a rationalisable step given the monumental impact that first Bitcoin and then #bitcoin-assets had on my thinking at the time.iii But as it turns out, and in a stroke of self-delusion that won’t go unanalysed,iv my writings from before weren’t as different as I’d apparently imagined, and are therefore now rightly incorporated on this continuum.v

With that realisation baked in, with no immediate recourse to relevance in TMSR~,vi nor any particularly good reason why writing about the automotive industry should preclude owning fiefs, and at the recent suggestion by a friend that it’d be fun to read some of those old CarEnvy articles again – particularly the ones that got me banned from auto manufacturer press fleets – I thought I’d give this little “WordPress eXtended RSS” import business another crack. And would you believe it worked this time ? I couldn’t tell you what I did differently, but it’s probably not unfair to say that the shitstack we call “WordPress” is as hit-and-miss as blindfolded minesweeper… when right pissed and coming off a bad break-up.vii

So it is that at your present disposal, you’ve now what is essentially a full online repertoireviii and nearly 8-year history of Pete as writer.ix With another 200 [pictureless]x posts and a full 150k more words on these pages than were here yesterday,xi you’re hereby invited to exhume the fumes of yesteryear.

Cheers.

___ ___ ___

  1. No, I have nothing to do with the abomination of a placeholder currently stinking up that domain. It’s just GoDaddy being mega-faggy.
  2. Yes, this is an It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia reference. Who knows, maybe you’re an abortion survivor too!
  3. N.B. that the TMSR~ forum is now hosted on #trilema.
  4. For example, I’m now reassessing the practical viability of significant personal growth in sexually mature humans [ie. physical adults, even if they’re not socially or intellectually mature]. Not that I’m under any misapprehension that the “rehabilitation system” bezzle has ever been anything other than a GDP inflating, wage-depressing, state-driven scam, nor that social mobility was ever anything other than a charlatanic ruse, but I’d perhaps previously maintained idealistic notions as to the degrees of freedom available to each of us in our life’s quest, a theory that may now require further refinement, if not the chopping block outright.
  5. In fact, I could’ve written much of this yesterday :

    The Canadian auto show circuit is now withering away, signalling the renewed cyclical scapegoatism that the motor car periodically enjoys. It will be years before the internal combustion engine is de-villified (again) and we are reminded (again) that electricity is merely a means of energy transmission, not itself a means of propulsion. George Santayana is attributed with the following quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. This is perhaps a dilution of his original, but the meaning is retained. We usually take the quote in reference to international conflicts of armament, but this is too narrow. It was not by accident, by royal decree, nor divine intervention that the internal combustion engine gained popular acceptance in the latter part of the 19th century while the electric horseless carriage floundered. Nor will electric vehicles replace gasoline-engined ones in my lifetime. But I digress, because gasoline-fueled machines are alive and well. For now.

    This year, there were various Maranellan and Sant’Agatan showpieces littering the main hall of the 2010 EMS, but the European that was least expected and most edifying wasn’t from the Continent, but from the other side of the Channel: it was the Bentley Continental Supersports. The example in attendance was pearlescent white; not an unusual colour for a Conti, but that didn’t prevent me from experiencing a revelation; an emancipation from my stone-ingrained views of the two-door Phaeton. To my eye, the Continental GT had always violated the boundary into nouveau riche-dom that would have sent the Bentley Boys into subterranean revolutions. Whether it was the car itself or the new haircuts who flocked to it mattered not, I detested the car and looked forward to the day when I would swap the VW badges on my Phaeton for a pair of wings-flanked “B”s, thus reminding Continental drivers of their idiocy. Then I had that smug premonition wiped from mind with one gaze of the ethanol-inhaling car that is the most powerful Bentley ever.

    When in fact I wrote it six years ago. And even then it was clear to see my nigh-on obsession with long wheelbase luxury sedans, a problem I don’t seem to be shaking off anytime soon.

    Now if we hop into the wayback machine just four years back, we find this sort of memoir :

    I tiptoed across the creaky wooden floor booby-trapped with slippery Persian rugs and deftly made my way towards the kitchen. I found a banana and a poppy seed muffin before settling into the living room sofa to get my bearings and slowly wake up. The late summer sun filtered in through the stained glass windows as I meditated for a moment on the following passage from Alan Watts’ 1957 masterpiece, The Art of Zen:

    If we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide. We are free to decide because decision “happens”.

    Decidedly, I took the keys to the dark gray 2012 Dodge Challenger SRT8 392 waiting on the grass out front. I creaked down the wooden stairs and slipped on my Porsche Design Adidas lace-ups before gently closing the door behind me. Only the occasional V-Twin passing by the Round House broke the steady chime of birds and rustling leaves.

    Quite the journey, this blogging thing. Quite the journey indeed.

  6. Lest you suggest I play Eulora, start a PR biz for the scarcely-existent Bitcoin businesses extant, or something else entirely that I have neither the time, energy, financial incentive, skill set and most importantly the interest in pursuing, you’ll do well to recall that I’ve been scouring high and low for the right opportunity. Not that I’m the kind of pro-scavenger to give up entirely, but nor am I the type of fool who chases after his sunk costs when the deck’s stacked against him. 
  7. Just like Bitcoin txen, sometimes they work, sometimes not! Why ? Well, there are obviously theories, but even I’m not enough of an expert to reasonably opine on such matters. And if I’m not, you’d better believe that you’re not either.
  8. A broad swathe of posts, being exclusively text-based in their stored format, yet being overly dependent for coherence on videos or pictures or both, are now willfully lost to the sands of time, as are posts written for CarEnvy.ca by authors other than myself. Yea, that was a thing. Anyways, that’s why there’s the qualifier “essentially” before “my full repertoire”, because while my full breadth and range is retained and on full display, not every last shard of the mosaic glimmers on.
  9. Aspiring writers will well note just how incongruous my early slatherings across the page were –
  10. It’d be a daunting, perhaps even impossible undertaking to fish out all the correct, original pictures from those 200-odd posts and republish them all, but if you happen across an old CarEnvy post and you’re really interested in the visual half of the equation [yes, CarEnvy was easily half visually-oriented as a whole, if not moreso], drop me a note in the comment section of that post and I’ll see what I can find for you, though I make no guarantees.
  11. For a total present word count of 650k, or about as much as Atlas Shrugged, if notably less tedious.

7 thoughts on “Contravex : Now with expanded archives.

  1. Eh, failure’s not so easy to come by.

  2. […] ? Well, I probably enjoy failing more than the next guy – finding that there are few better ways to explore the boundaries of the universe than by […]

  3. Adlai says:

    Congratulations on eating yesterday’s leftovers. I look forwards to un-rotting links to the juicy bits, in your future writings.

  4. […] some TRB tickling and some of the same pooh-pooh’ing of pantsuits. But we laid all that out two years ago (has it been that […]

  5. […] merits, it was too morosely misanthropic beyond that (which is why, in case you were wondering, the band-aid was finally ripped off). […]

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