#bearville

Like, I’m not sure how many people remember Build-a-Bear Workshop’s MMORPG, but the chat function was a very open free type style (kind of like club penguin) with the exception that the censors were INSANE.

Like at first, people were just kind of substituting words like in tiktok, except you could only use words that the computer recognized as words, so alternate spellings were out of the question. Let’s take “sex” for example. As the middle school kids we were, we just swapped it with a permitted dictionary word.

Sex becomes “sat”. “I heard my parents having sat.”

But THEN the computer or whoever was monitoring an online game directed at kids starting picking up that the word was being used in certain contexts, and shut it down. After this, you couldn’t use “have” before almost any verbs without getting your message blocked as potentially sensitive.

Enter the completely useless invented particle “ds”. I don’t know why this was in the dictionary, maybe because of Nintendo, but we quickly discovered that ds was allowed almost anywhere as a minimally sensitive word. It could be thrown in to break any pattern.

“I heard my parents having sat” becomes “I heard my parents having ds sat.” Ds was a word used as a punctuation mark whose sole function was to throw off an AI’s sentence recognition. And it’s function was spread only by word of mouth from child to child for who knows how long, and accepted into the Bearville vernacular. When I was new, I even asked a few friends what it meant. Their reply:

“Ds means nothing. It’s for computer.”

I really wish I remember more of my middle school exploits on Bearville before they shut it down, or had the time and sense to study and write down some of it, because the natural state of kids when left alone in Lord of the Flies style isn’t to kill each other—it’s to adapt as a group, and to randomly ask other people if they want to be their gamer girlfriend/boyfriend.

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Deadpool and wolverine x bearville!!!