the end of the line

one hundred and two days ago the game glitch closed.

i am not done writing about what an astounding thing that game was, or how beautiful and immersive it was, but this morning, in a few hours, the forums will close as well and we will no longer have our homepages to log into. they will put us all into an archival form which is better than we'd have a right to expect, but we are all putting on our archival outfits the way one might choose a burial suit and we are having our last goodbyes to each other because although we have all migrated to other places, it is the last time we have to talk with each other in this land we loved.

Voluptua Sneezelips I always thought it started with banjos for me, but now I think it started with Proust: "If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time." And I did, to my enrichment and detriment. In Glitch, I dreamed all the time. First minutes: Overwhelmed. Grinning at the contented tree-sigh. Into this new world, harvesting, petting, nibbling. Visually inundated. In love. Melismata came; she radiated at me then left me to explore. In hindsight, it was Groddle Heights. I wandered the world. I met many. Familiar strangers on my local streets and in the quarters. Some became friends. I moved to Salatu. More familiar strangers at the grocery vendor. More friends. New skills, new areas, new achievements. New selves and homes. And always dreaming. I knew Ur better than my real-life neighbourhood. Thank you all for sharing it and yourselves with me. I cannot leave with banjos, and so I will leave instead with Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." And so it ends as it began, though with far less dreaming now. I am awake for the first time in years. But I will always remember.

kastlin I wanted to say something really profound here for the top of my profile page, so here goes. ... I didn't want to love this game, I just wanted to have fun. I didn't want to get caught up in a community, I was going to hover on the perimeter. But TS made a game I couldn't help but fall in love with. And the people here (especially you troublemakers, you know who you are) are so wonderful, so understanding, so accepting that I fell in love with you, too. The awakened Giants are playing with our Glitch toys, our cubimals, our play cubes, heck, they're even sampling my herb hybrids. And now, well, now we disperse, a few here, a few there (a few of us kind of everywhere). Now we put our inner glitchen on the outside, where EVERYONE can see it. Because now, we are the Giants. And we will spark that tiny speck of creativity in everyone around us. All my love, kastlin 

flask there was a place once; no, it was a REAL place, with streets and geography and cultures and i lived there for a time. i lived there as much as i have lived anywhere and it was my home. and you were there too, with your garden and house and we lived there. it was a beautiful land but there were no more dreams and we were exiled to other lands, none as beautiful as the one where we had lived. for a while we got postcards from there and treasured them but now there will be no more postcards and the exiles will meet in bars and bus stations and sing the old songs for old time's sake, but none of us can ever go home again. it was a beautiful land. we miss it, and we can no longer go home.