#birdgo

i just found this out, because i checked. i remember and i check once or twice a year and this time, the search returned nothing but a 'buy this domain!' so i guess Sam finally gave up maintaining it, the nostalgia having run its last course. Maybe she died and her executor had no idea and it lapsed as an unpaid account. Or any other random thing really, including Sam finally relocated to the island of her dreams and married that guy from Thunderbirds and there's no wifi signal.

it was only active for maybe a year, year and a half back in its heyday and i poured so much of my creative effort into that place. into being friends with Sam and piggybacking on her support and encouragement and platonic long distance internet friend stroking. she liked the things i wrote! we had fun talking about all the things we were going to write! she bought the plot of digital land we staked our claim on and i built the shack we lived in that we decorated together - we had a website and a forum and even a little drawing application because i liked to draw and why the hell not, it was Our Place And We Could Do What We Wanted.

and we collected other people who liked the same kind of heretical smut that we did and i put up a sign that said Here Be Dragons so nobody could claim they hadn't had a warning and we made friends with them, with the people who stumbled over the threshold looking for proof that dragons existed and we all just kind of tumbled all over each other like puppies, in ways that just don't exist now with the loss of those small, enclosed spaces for fandom.

birdgo.com was a zombie for many times its active lifespan. but even after it all imploded, she still kept it shambling along and i could visit and stroke its sight-blind head and whisper that i still loved it, even with all that it wasn't anymore.

and now its finally laid to rest.

goodbye, sweetheart. i loved you so, i really did. i have your bones still somewhere, locked in terribly earnest code on a media that i can no longer access. i have so many good memories of you, at the end of it.