and there rarely is anymore. but it's like a habit. a few times a day I'll just reflexively open a new tab and type "f", which inevitably autocompletes to
https://forum.blockland.us/, then I'll look around for a few seconds, get bored, and close the tab
I don't think it's even really a negative thing. it's just how things have turned out. people move on. but it's got me thinking lately about my time here, and all the people I knew, and all the things that have happened in my life since I started playing this game, and how much of that is probably because of people I met here. the difference between what this forum is to me now, and what it was to me in the past
since the beginning of the year I've made 120 posts (excluding this one). but I used to post here all the time, I was like a freak about it. my old account has an average of 40.8 posts per active day. in a single average week, I'd make twice as many posts as I have in all of 2023 so far. and there were outliers where I made over 120 in a single day. probably way more than that on occasion. isn't that crazy in comparison? between the two accounts, I've spent nearly a year and a half in total on the forum. bizarrely, despite the far greater number of posts on the old account, I actually have three more days online on
this account than the former. maybe that's because of... well, all of this. I open it, becoming "active", and leave without doing much else
it was properly lively back then though. lots of other people had similar, or even higher, posts per day. now, I can skip checking for days and practically the only thing new is a post in the geese thread. we actually got lucky this week, with a cool-sounding gamemode in General Discussion. I don't really have anything to contribute there though. the last several times I've opened the game were to get screenshots as references for one purpose or another. the last time I actually played was four years ago, and I can't imagine that was for more than a few minutes
ok anyway back to the actual premise of this post. back in those days I was a pretty lonely little kid, didn't really have any friends at school, so blockland and the forum was it for me. I don't think I had much direction either, I didn't know what I wanted to do or be as an adult. but through friends here I ended up finding an interest in programming, and with some of their encouragement, pursued it. one thing led to another, and now I've got an in-person social life I'm happy with, a successful and fulfilling career as a software developer, and still have time for hobbies, and my online friends, who remain important to me and always will. I've skipped a lot of steps in that description but that's fine this isn't really about all of that. it's just about the broader stuff
and then there's everyone I met here. a few I still talk to regularly, daily even. more I kind of keep in touch with but don't really speak to that often. and the majority, who I haven't spoken to in years, and would probably not be able to get in contact with if I tried. but I still think of all these people often. I remember a skype group with ipquarx, hellhound, facepalm, frontrox, shadowsfear, and several others. I remember talking to gravity cat on MSN almost every day, and trying to start a very short-lived clan with jamestheleet. hanging out with the KC group all the time even though, in retrospect, I think they probably found me annoying. a night on skype when frontrox introduced me to Muse's Knights of Cydonia while we talked, a song I still listen to all the time, and can't help but think of him every time I hear it. kanew, who I can't even think of any specific memories with, I just know I cared about him and that's enough. there are countless more memories like this that all have a really big place in my mind. I don't have to go digging for any of them, they're just sitting right under the surface, waiting for an opportunity to come up again. it's almost routine
and there are more bittersweet memories, particularly of people who seem lost to time. a lot of people had this experience with vegetarian zombie, who dropped off the face of the earth, as far as I know. my steam friends list shows them as "last online 11 years ago". we weren't close, but it's still sad. for me there was skelolego, who I really only knew for a short period of time, but I just can't shake him. star9578 is probably the only other person who cares about him as much, if they even still do. who knows. I haven't talked to them in almost as long as skelo. he just disappeared, and there's just this vague sense of unease related to him and all the other members with a similarly unknown fate. don't even know if they're still, euphemistically, around. closure would be nice, to at least know what happened, whether they're gone, they drive for uber, or graduated college and got a nice job, or work in retail. just to know
it's funny how few bad memories I have. at any given time I'm sure I thought some people here would be, like, lifelong arch nemeses, or that some negative experience would hang around in the back of my head forever. but, at the risk of sounding sappy, the love is all that's really stuck
I wonder a lot about whether all of the people I remember so fondly also remember me. if they think about me as often as I do them. do I occupy a space in skelolego's heart, like he does in mine? does gravity cat remember talking on MSN when our time zones lined up? I tend to assume they don't. I have an awful little maladaptive habit of thinking of myself as a background character in other people's lives. it's not very realistic, but I can't help it. maybe I need therapy lol. I find myself assuming that they must not think of me, since they stopped talking to me. but that's not really fair, because I stopped talking to them too
and on the other side of the same coin, how many people do remember me, think of me occasionally, who
I've forgotten? sometimes I take a nostalgic trip through old posts, usually with some purpose that I soon forget about in favor of reading pages upon pages of forum threads from the old days. that's how I ended up here tonight, in case that's not already obvious. tonight I saw a thread asking everyone who they'd like to meet in person someday, and I found posts from myself and shinji/strovbe mentioning each other. but now, tonight, I can't recall a single memory involving them. their name feels familiar, but that's all I can muster up. yet, at the time, they must have been somehow important to me, and I to them. do they, maybe, think of me? would they be sad to read this post and find that I don't remember them? if they do, am I responsible for that? should I have done more to remember them? rhetorical questions
I'm not too sure where else to go with this. really I just wanted to get these thoughts out. it might have been better suited for a journal or something, but I don't have a routine of doing that, and this seems like a strange way to start, so I think this outlet suits it well enough. I don't expect much of anyone to read it, much less reply. this is a lot of text and it got pretty personal and sentimental up there. but if anyone else feels like talking about this sort of stuff, I'd be glad to read about your own feelings or experiences. or whatever you wanna talk about really. this post didn't have a lot of direction to begin with. it's late at night, and I got maybe 4 hours of some low-quality sleep last night on a plane, so don't judge me
thanks though!! for reading it, if you did. and for everything else, either way. it's pretty different these days, but nothing will change the fact that this forum is and was important to me. I guess only badspot knows how much time we have left on here. I'd like to see it stick around a while, even just for those nostalgia trips, if nothing else. if it was totally up to me, I think I'd have him wait until after masterlegodude catches up to my old account. it feels like that'd make a nice final entry into his chronology thread
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