A victim of covid more than once, yes, but luckily not in a fatal sense, lol.
Sorry to everyone on the takedown of my main rotorcraft site, it seems Google nuked all of my sites hosted with them after some revamping of their free sites service. No emails or anything explaining why, just completely gone. If there was an option to download a backup, I sure never looked into it. Just goes to show the "everythig on the internet stays on the internet forever" adage isn't always true. My philosophy has always been to save everything of interest that you can just in case. Yay for data hoarding. Thankfully my private digital archive survived, since my physical one (before I made my sites) was destroyed in the Lake County Valley Fire in California (I lived in Middletown at the time). I started these sites when I was 13-14, so I was still at the mercy of my authoritarian mother who wouldn't allow me to spend money on my own domains, forcing me to make due with free site hosting services instead (which came with their own nightmare of limitations).
Paul has given me a great opportunity to host my 50GB private archive which I hope will be useful to anyone with access to it. It will include an unpolished draft of my Yakovlev helicopter book, as well as aircraft projects I've personally collaborated on with old friends like Rehan Janjua in Pakistan and Tsheten Dorji in Bhutan. Plus some projects that were shared exclusively by some former friends on SRF like Dave Hickman and Don Hillberg (the latter of whom I cut ties with after he was a total 'phobe to me on a brony (My Little Pony fan) site we both frequented after my coming out as trans, which was one of a few things that shattered my interest in returning to the hobby). I think there is additional stuff in my archive that hasn't even seen the light of day on either of my sites, so that will be a treat.
As much as I've distanced myself from this hobby, I'm still proud of what I tried to do with these sites and none of what I scavenged over the years deserves to be lost to history just because of my mental health issues or big tech bureaucracy that's out of my control. I still sometimes log in here to research something for my projects - I'm pursuing a lifelong dream of writing and filmmaking, with one of my current projects being an all-practical-effects sci-fi short that I hope to gain financing for to make into a feature-length film (yes, I'll be sure to share it here when it's finally released).
If anyone wants to get a hold of me where I'm available more often than here, I'm on the
book of faces 
.