"Those were the days, my friend We thought they'd never end We'd sing and dance forever and a day We'd live the life we choose We'd fight and never lose For we were young and sure to have our way" - Gene Raskin

Mary Hopkin sang "Those Were the Days." But the earliest recording of the song was in Russian, sang by the Georgian singer Tamara Tsereteli in 1925. Gene Raskin wrote new English lyrics to the song. Paul McCartney produced the Hopkin version. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Were_the_Days_(song)

"Those Were the Days" was one of my favorite songs back in the day -1968. I might remember it as a school bus song. The bus's radio was always tuned to the pop/rock station. I still hear it in my head from time to time.

I might, but I still keep in touch with a lot of those people on discord now. If you know what the Moogle Cavern was, you know it eventually became Sonic Eats Rings, and there is a Sonic Eats Rings discord where most of the usual suspects have collected. It’s not super active, but it’s far from dead. More active than the actual SER forum was in the last six or seven years.

So what’s there to miss? I still have my friends. We still hang out together. Maybe not quite as closely as we used to, since we’ve all kind of drifted more in our separate ways over the years, but we’re still in the community together. And for the few people that aren’t in the SER discord for one reason or another... I keep in contact with some of them, too, through other means.

(There are a few stragglers that haven’t circled back around to the discord or whatever, but I assume they will probably show up at some point. Everyone eventually checks up on what their old friends are doing.)

If there were grounds to miss the Moogle Cavern still, it would be for the website’s content, which... yeah, I could kind of see that. The hoaxes and such. But also updates on that front slowed down well before the forums were shuttered, so I was already fully in the expectation that The Moogle Cavern was just a forum where my friends were.

And now it’s Sonic Eats Rings, which has become a discord where my friends currently are. 

I do suppose I miss “the old times” in general, though. But who doesn’t? That encompasses more than just missing The Moogle Cavern. I miss being thinner, and having more hair, and still living in Colorado. But those are romanticized things, too. The good times then were better than the bad times now, but it’s important to remember the “good” of right now is also better than the good of back then, too.

I may “miss” the times where I had fewer responsibilities and more happiness, but that’s just rose tinted glasses speaking. I just had a very, very long post about the depression and anxiety I suffered from back then. Were the olden days really better than now, or is my memory just selecting the happiest feelings?

I mean, it’s true that I was thinner, but that’s because my anxiety was stopping me from eating. I was trapped in a loop of feeling sick, and then not eating because I felt sick, not knowing that the reason I felt sick was because I wasn’t eating. I was probably dangerously malnourished because of my anxiety. And now, I’ve been told that the reason I’m overweight is because my body overcompensated when I finally realized that eating food wasn’t going to kill me. So yes, I was thinner back then, but was I really healthier? Probably not physically, or even mentally.

Which is to say nothing for all of the Moogle Cavern community who has gone through other types of transition since those days. Would any of us really, truly want to go back to who we actually used to be?

The Moogle Cavern was a great, formative place for me and many others to grow up. I cherish the people that posted there, and the times we spent together. Though my memory is often poor, there are some things about that place I will never, ever forget, and for that, I am deeply thankful.