The recent discourse about games journalism and its current sorry state on here made me want to go back and check out some critics whose work I liked or was aware of but didn't read enough of. This led to me checking out some old Waypoint articles, which led to me trying to find Lana Polansky/Mechapoetic's website, sufficientlyhuman.com

This is all that remains, if you can even get it to load. Mostly it's a cloudflare block page.

This is what it looked like before it was squatted on by the slot site.
From a cursory search, it looks like her twitter, like many accounts since the Muskening, was suspended at some point, so the only still existing work online is her work that's still hosted on Critical Distance, Waypoint work hosted on what's left of Vice, some podcasts she did over the last few years and what was archived of by archive.org, and lately even archive.org looks like it's not going to last the next decade..
I go through this with a different writer once every few months when I get the same itch to try to go back and read things I half-remember or find new-to-me work. This is a recurring pattern with many critics and sites.
The balkanization of everything online means that the oughtteen's games-crit renaissance isn't just dead but seems to slowly be being completely erased. You might be able to find archived essays and sites here and there, but for the most part the last 15 years of games culture is a black hole. If you weren't there, it might as well not have happened, and if you were there you're probably burned out and tired and just trying to get through the day at this point.
It's long been the adage that The Internet Is Forever but more than ever before it feels like the internet is more ephemeral than real life. The last 15 years of culture feels like it's almost been memory holed; the bulk of folks in both art production and crit spaces in a bunch of fields have been systematically forced out. All our cultural knowledge and discussion is fragmented and more full of holes than it is preserved.
I'm sure someone smarter than me will come along and point me to places this stuff might still exist or tell me I'm being pessimistic and doomer, but I can't help but feel this way. It feels like we're all having the same arguments and discussions we've had time and time again and we all vaguely remember what was said last time but nobody remembers it well enough to not have the same arguments.
We live in a state of cultural dementia.
