The day before it was announced that cohost would be shutting down, I came to a preeeeetty wild revelation that I've been lookin’ forward to enchostinatin’.
... Let's start really far back.
When I was like 5-6 years old, my sister and two of her school friends would go to the mall during lunch breaks to play DDR at the arcade. One of those friends picked up the first DDR game for the PlayStation, and brought it over to our house to play. That led to us getting our own PlayStation to play DDR, and that's how the rest of my life started taking its shape — that's when I really started wishing I could produce music, for one thing; that I could design sounds like I heard in DDR music.
More relevantly, when I dropped out of public school at age 11 for health reasons, I had a lot of free time to spend on the computer. I gravitated toward forums related to the DDR simulator StepMania, where I met someone who's been my friend for going on 17 years now.
When I was 15, my sister told me that this new My Little Pony series that had started airing was actually surprisingly really good, and I'd been awake for over 30 hours at that time so I rolled with it and ended up in agreement. IIRC I neglected to keep up with it until I noticed that that friend of mine had favorited some funny fan videos on YouTube, at which point I rapidly started identifying more with being a herd nerd, a term which unfortunately didn't gain as much favor as “brony”.
But I was a teenage edgelord, so while love and tolerance were fine and all, once I ended up bed-bound and reliant on my phone for accessibility reasons with nothing but free time starting from age 17, I participated most enthusiastically in an edgy offshoot of an edgy brony community. I said something pretty terrible there as an offbeat joke relating to someone’s personal crisis, just to test the limits of my edginess, but somehow remained on friendly-enough terms with them that the very day I made my second Discord account because I forgot which email I was using before, I joined their server.
In that server is a little bot named Septapus.
I should note, I'm constantly struggling with having to make space to join new Discord servers. I seem to still have a grandfathered Nitro Classic subscription, which means I'm paying a lot more than I would for Basic for fewer features... except that Basic doesn't cover animated avatars, and, you see, I really desperately need my 2-frame avatar animation to play while I speak in VCs, which I rarely ever join.
So because I keep wanting to join so many servers, I've been fighting with the 100-server cap (that I, a moron, could pay less to double) for a long time. And with all the servers I've been in and out of, it's only within my not-super-close friend's server that I can recall seeing Septapus being put to use.
Just over eight entire years after joining that server, I wrote this chost directed at my own server, having felt an impulse to ask what I might do to make it a better place, since it's always felt like wasted potential. Little ended up being done or suggested, but someone said to add a last.fm bot, and I thought, so long as I'm adding bots... why not Septapus? I'd found its ability to quickly pull up emotes’ raw image files to be handy on many occasions, being stuck using my phone most of the time, and thus unable to just right-click them. So I added Septapus.
One other feature of Septapus, which I'd seen tried out a few times in my friend's server, is that it can open a “wormhole” in a channel; if someone, somewhere, uses a command to send a message out to a wormhole, it can randomly appear in a channel you've opened a wormhole in, which you can then reply to with a distinct command. I opened one in my general channel.
Two months later, I was having a bad night, and vented into the silence of my server.
not liking how existence feels at the moment
everything I've been wanting myself to continue to do until a tangible thing manifests as a result of doing it feels like work that I've immediately burnt out on
I wish more opportunities to converse would naturally arise here
A few hours later, someone I share a couple different servers with, who wasn't in my own at the time, decided to tell me in DMs, unprompted, that I was a cool, relatable, and loved person.
I wish I could say with greater honesty that I felt touched at the time, as I should have, but I think through the kevlar body bag of dissatisfaction with life, the prevailing feeling was more that the timing was funny.
I began to vent. Then had to take it to Google docs. Then went to sleep. Then spent most of the next day writing a vent that I had to split into 5 messages to be able to send.
The opening of my vent was about feeling underappreciated and out-of-place in pretty much any community, no matter how many I sought out and dipped my toes in. I went on to lament that I didn't have a space I felt I could comfortably express Adult™ feelings in, openly.
In the middle of writing it all out...
User 1:
free the pee
... a message finally came through the forgotten wormhole. The silly blip was sent by someone with an avatar that immediately piqued my interest, a manga character I'd guess leans a little bit alternative, which I've been vaguely aware of since childhood via my sister. So as I continued to write, on the side, I batted the ball back.
Me:
whr LIBERATE THAT WHICH YOU URINATE
The next three messages to come through were sent by three separate other users, who received similar responses in all caps.
User 3:
CAPS LOCK CRUISE CONTROL
Me:
whr TOGGLE IT OFF AND BACK ON BETWEEN LETTERS TO IMBUE YOUR CAPS WITH THE WEIGHT OF POINTED INTENT
User 4:
can you stop yelling please? ill be your friend
Me:
whr # I WILL BE YOUR LOUDEST FRIEND
User 1:
ᵗʰᵃⁿᵏˢ ᶦ ˡᶦᵏᵉ ʰᵃᵛᶦⁿᵍ ᶠʳᶦᵉⁿᵈˢ
I decided here that I liked User 1 in particular for their appropriate response. I've been keeping up my own bit involving superscript text on Discord. I was once told to stop using all caps in a server, so I started sending messages in superscript. Almost every message I've sent there in the several years since has been superscript. On occasion, I forget, or can't be bothered, so I apologize for speaking too loudly.
So once the entity on the other end reciprocated my play of text-formatting-based humor, the desperate connection-seeking entity on my end had to immediately make sure it would at least be properly remembered, and also thought “okay that's good enough, really” and wanted to provide an opportunity to allow yoinkage through the hole.
Me:
whr WHAT NAME IS DISPLAYED FOR ME ON YOUR END OF THE HOLE
User 1:
your core discord name [actually my server nickname] bb
Me:
whr MY PROPER NAME IS saltbearer AND I AM FEELING RATHER YOINKABLE TODAY
User 1:
oh great, ive been craving that mineral
Me:
whr REACH INTO MY POCKETS AND ALLOW MY SURPLUS TO SUSTAIN YOU
User 1:
AHA YOU FOOL YOINKS YOUR WHOLE ASS
Me:
whr AHA, I PUT MY WHOLE ASS INTO SOME SILLY SHIT A FEW WEEKS AGO. CAN YOU FEEL THE RESIDUE? IS THAT REALLY THE PRIZE YOU WOULD LIKE TO CLAIM? ARE YOU GOING TO TAKE LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY ENTIRE HEINIE, AND KEEP IT FED AND WATERED AND TUCKED IN UNDER THE GLOW-IN-THE-DARK STAR STICKERS ON ITS BEDROOM CEILING?
(The silly shit I’d already previously said elsewhere that I'd “put my whole ass into” a few weeks prior was the beginning of a certain prospective writing project, which I'd wanted myself to continue to work on until a complete thing manifested as a result of doing it, but which felt like work that I'd immediately burnt out on.)
(Glow-in-the-dark star stickers were fresh in my mind thanks to this poignant chost.)
User 1 had to go shortly after that, and left my entertainment in the hands of others.
User 3:
have you ever tried to fit your entire fist in your mouth
Me:
whr I'M WAITING FOR MORE OF MY TEETH TO ROT DOWN TO STUBS SO MY MOUTH CAN BE NICE AND GUMMY FOR THE BIG DAY
User 8:
admirable goals
It would become apparent that User 3 and User 8 have a bit of a rivalry, and User 8 has bowel problems.
User 8:
just took the fuckin tiniest shit and I'm pretty sure I created 3 new hemmorhoids doing it
Me:
whr I THINK HEMORRHOIDS ARE VEINS AND INFLAMMATION OF THEM IS COLLOQUIALLY REFERRED TO AS "HEMORRHOIDS" OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT
User 8:
if your doctor tells you that your blood is garbage and can't carry oxygen and you need iron, tell them, "Fuck off I'll just die instead" because holy shit iron is terrible on your sphincter
Me:
whr LESS ANEMIA, MORE ENEMA
As someone who's had medical issues for a lifetime, and has a tendency to want to overshare, I appreciate an environment where people can speak frankly about issues with their bodies.
User 3:
do not trust this man, he has a prosthetic ass
Me:
whr WITH HEMORRHOIDS? PROSTHETICS ARE SO ADVANCED THESE DAYS
User 3:
huge market
Me:
whr HUGE, PARK IT
User 8:
DON'T TRUST HIM HE WORKS FOR BOEING
Me:
whr WITH HEMORRHOIDS? AIRPLANES ARE SO ADVANCED THESE DAYS
User 8:
no he actually works with the entertainment systems. His job is to keep you complacent as you plummet to your death.
Me:
whr ADMIRABLE GOALS
User 8:
please do not encourage him he assists atrocities every day
I sensed good rapport on the other side of the wormhole.
More than a dozen users there ended up sending messages through it, but a few wouldn't until the next morning, after I'd already been reached out to and pulled into their server, which I somehow had space for in my list.
The server’s core members are refugees from an imageboard that went up in flames. Some have over 15 years of friendship to reminisce about. As I happened to have said in my vent, my own similarly-aged friend group is small, and we haven't managed to do much as a cohesive group in a long time.
This group has carried some of the spirit of an earlier Internet with them — an era I still feel close to, probably because the set dressing of my life hasn't gone through many changes in the years since. Less-sanitized conversations, classic IRC-flavored bot silliness, and healthy in-jokes. (Example: A rule of the server is to NOT tell the bot named after Todd Howard your real name. It frequently suggests you do so as you maintain activity.)
Many of them have, like me, grown out of unnecessarily being an edgelord, which I think is a particularly useful beat of life experience. Problem People™ can be easier to handle and empathize with when you've called their home yours, and been one yourself.
It's easy to conclude they’d have fine general People Skills from how long the local friendships have endured. It's impressive to me how many are still keeping up with each other's lives, and demonstrating that they care.
They have lived lives to keep up with — many past tense, sadly, but well-remembered. Existence, to them, has been eventful, with higher highs and lower lows than I have yet to know.
My life has had no sex, drugs, or rock and roll. I'm a fragile, bed-bound virgin, who's never had one alcoholic beverage, and is far more into glitch ambient than rock and roll.
They're all quite the opposite. Sorta. A bunch of them are into weird electronic music like I am, so not the last point. Plenty of the first two, though, plus a few of them have played at shows, which is kinda inherently rock and roll?
As a direct result of the first, a few of them are parents. ... I have been friends with very few people who have had children before, and so have not observed much talk of child rearing. Just one more aspect that feels oddly convenient, so soon after starting a writing project that includes a parent chatting online as a character.
Their lives away from keyboards might be a little more different from mine than that of the average nerd I've befriended via Discord. Nevertheless, I think I feel a little more in-place than usual around them.
They've made their server feel welcoming. I've been in other spaces with people significantly older than me, with long histories, where I was a new face, and distinctly an odd one out. With this group, it feels easy enough to step into the often-active chat flow, relax my filter, and say what comes to mind. I'm sure having become accustomed to the vibe helped me write the chost about Almix in the way that I did.
So welcoming, in fact, User 1 has even suggested stopping by to have a lunch with me — they took note of my Discord status shortly after I joined, which, since I posted the chost this linked one is a reply to, has been “SF Bay Area people, consider saying “hi”.” They have family living around here, who they'll certainly visit, so it would be a convenient opportunity to witness another friend in the flesh.
It's all been rather serendipitous.
In the early hours of September 8th, I had been thinking about how I wanted to engage more actively with Newgrounds, and I dunno what else, but I had been kept awake by abdominal pains and worse-than-usual acid reflux. Naturally. Mom had told me not to ruin my sleep on that night in particular, for some reason. It was 5 AM before I tried lying down to sleep.
A few minutes later, I sat up, because my brain decided to ensure that I would not get any sleep, and instead spend the next two hours shaking non-stop.
As the fog that precedes sleep rolled in and started unbonding memory's hold on them, I must have been possessed by a Howard-like spirit, because my thoughts turned toward people's real names.
I remembered a screenshot of a spam text that User 1 had shared, not too long before. It had included their first name.
When I initially saw it, I think the pieces of a puzzle of a picture of a person that I hadn't expected to be putting together may have only passed over the same neurons on the surface of my ever-distracted waking mind at slightly different times.
In a near-sleep state, their account avatar and server avatar (then a cat from Katamari) clicked right into their name.
I quickly started searching the message history of the server for other pieces.
Their hair color matched...
... and somehow, their last name came back to me. And came up in a search.
I DMed them:
WAITAMINUTEHOLYSHIT?
[SAID DETAILS]
The picture was clear, but I still needed to put more pieces in for the sake of believing it. I remembered specific animal pictures they said they should share with their mom, and confirmed their childhood pets. Their age. A specific diagnosis I once heard an offhand mention of.
HA
HAHAHA
I FEEL LIKE THIS REALIZATION STARTED TO DAWN AT SOME POINT AND THEN DIPPED
do I try to go to sleep in spite of the excitement from connecting the puzzle pieces or do I stay awake and giggle until you somehow figure out how I could have met you
They were awake and responsive at 5:35:
User 1:
ahahah, perhaps but you are a few years younger than me yeah?
They considered... maybe I'd seen them at a shop in a local mall they worked at for several years.
I reminded them I'd mentioned my exact age, and they’d seen my face.
Unfortunately, they've blocked out a lot of their younger years...
I showed where my home’s heater is in relation to the front door. Mentioned that they're probably directly responsible for my earliest exposure to Katamari. And...
Me:
I'm pretty sure on an old hard drive, if it isn't dead, there would be a clip of you saying "Hello... I like pie"
User 1:
huh....idk! i only recall one redhead i hung out with and that was [my sister's name]
Me:
[An emote of my own face, with a knowing expression.]
User 1:
eeeeehhhhh???
no way
Me:
@Septapus get in here and hugemoji [that emote, to make it huge]
User 1:
lol no way
Me:
it seems quite way
User 1:
oh my goddddd hi rofl
User 1 did not enjoy high school. They Got the Hell Out of the state and went to live with people they met online, severing most of their prior connections.
20 years later, they sent a message out to arrive somewhere at random, which landed in their childhood friend’s sibling’s server, through a semi-obscure Discord bot, which had just been added to the server two months prior, and which the server had received no messages through beforehand, and which the server owner had gone many years without adding after learning about it via a friend-who-could-have-easily-not-been-a-friend who had been met through a splintered community of an offshot fandom community that said sibling-of-a-childhood-friend stuck with because of a friend met through a community that served as the grounds for said SoaCF’s formative Internet experiences thanks to their other childhood friend.
I was busy writing a Vent of Great Length at the time. I didn't have to respond, and wouldn't have noticed the message then, had I not kept push notifications on for all messages in my server — and those have been known to become delayed for a while, for whatever reason, but this one wasn't.
Over on the Fun side of the wormhole, they like to send a lot of messages out, sometimes. If a reply from one wormhole comes in, and then a reply from a second wormhole comes in before the first one is replied to, the first wormhole message then can't be replied to.
The wormhole only displayed server nicknames. Had I not thought about it, and had a collision of wormholes interrupted the connection later, they wouldn't have known my real username.
The one connection lasted to the next morning, and I had made a good enough impression that I was offered an invite. Notably, someone sent their username through so I could add them as a friend — they may not have even realized they had mine already.
I could, so easily, have never known who it was, urging whoever might see their message to free the pee.
Yet, I could have encountered them sooner, potentially!
I checked my friend's server for old wormhole messages. Some from members of the same circle of friends had made it in there, four years prior. A connection could have been made then.
I probably thought it would have been funny to @ someone and tell them my real name the first time Howard asked for it, but I didn't. User 1 might have recognized it, especially in connection with my status.
Imagine later. Imagine if we never realized, until they came to visit their family, and stopped by this house, which we haven't moved out of in the past 20 years...
I haven't even been out of the house, for much of my life. The pool of people I've met offline is relatively very, very small, compared to almost anyone. These kinds of missed connections are extremely improbable for me.
This kind of connection was extremely improbable for me.
One with a friend of my sister's.
I've looked back on encounters with my sister's friends — including User 1, as I had known them — in a What Could Have Been sort of way. Always just to the extent that I could have known any of them.
I think I was only about 8 or 9 years old, the last time I was around User 1 in person. I don't remember directly interacting with them much. Interacting wasn't something I often tried to do with most of my sister's friends. They were twice my age, at that time. I wasn't ready to be into the things they were, in the ways that they were. That developmental gap felt like it mattered for a very long time, probably longer than it had to, so I barely tested the boundaries I felt Were There as a matter of fact. But they always seemed like nice, fun people — The Cool Kids, when they were together.
I liked looking through my sister's sketchbooks back then. She'd drawn a few little comics featuring the trio of herself, the DDR-owning friend, and User 1. One in particular was an imagining of how a kidnapper's attempt at driving off with the three of them in the back seat might play out. I think User 1 was the one who terrified the driver by sharing their interests.
I liked the group dynamic she made it out that they had. I was probably happy for, and envious of, her and them.
The interests I went on to develop, by the time I was the age they had been, had a lot of overlap — perhaps greatly because of their passive influence on me, upon the sorts of qualities I would come to value in media, and the people I would then be introduced to who orbited such media.
Had I not been so much younger, it's likely that we would've been good friends, then, and for who knows how long afterward.
As I've lain in bed for so long, still feeling like I've got a toe in that era, as if I could step right out into it were I to start walking again, my interests from then still feel important to me. It's exceedingly normal, on its own, to retain interests in the games and shows and songs one grew up with, but I haven't even directly observed the world changing around them, much.
Part of me still wants to know the people I never observed as growing up.
I hold some regret that I've rarely allowed any of them a decent glimpse of who I actually am.
Her friends saw the form of me then, and her later friends saw the form of me here in bed. They might've been told what sorts of music I was working on, and I may have piped up with a quip here and there while they were around, and I probably did a fine job of telegraphing Weirdo. In any case, I'd only ever show them a safely-boring mask, and a notched-down sense of humor... rarely a real interest, let alone a vulnerability.
My sister has moved to the opposite coast, and now only visits around holidays. Chances of seeing any of them through her have become far scarcer.
Had User 1 ever reconnected with my sister, and seen the form of me again through meeting up with her, that's all they'd have ever seen of me.
That's what they circumvented by sending that message out.
Before knowing who else they had been to me, I exposed certain thoughts and feelings within their space more frankly than I had with even my closest friends. I was happy — excited, even — to be getting to know them in particular, poking around and learning a little bit of the history they had with everyone still around and who went before them, and finding out the various little things we both like. The Friendable Person vibes were strong.
Upon connecting the dots, and letting the initial shock die down... I didn't know how to feel.
There's a clear romance 2. a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life. to the whole story. It could be fitting for a short film, or for the most insufferable kind of redditor to reply to with “/r/thathappened”.
But I didn't feel like I had the right to feel something to the effect of truly regaining a long-lost friend, as I had never properly known User 1. I was a child, and we, personally, were not friends.
I had wondered what it would have been like to have “them” as a “friend” — a flimsy idea of who they once were, who I would share a watered-down cartoon of myself with. I had never anticipated having them as a friend, who I would trust to know things I didn't feel ready to share with the world.
The idea of already being on track to call them a proper friend, by my standards, was really starting to put the emptiness of the fantasy of “them” being a “friend” into perspective.
It's COOL. It's WEIRD. It's DISTRACTING FROM WHAT'S IMPORTANT.
It's... ideally something that would not greatly affect the framing of one's personal attachment to another. The facts of such distant, different pasts are effectively about different people, not us as we are.
....... but heck, it is a hella cute friendship origin story, would suck to waste or ruin it somehow. the pressure to be very normal about it is palpable
On the morning of September 8th, I felt that I was going to need some time to properly process this.
Later in the afternoon of September 8th, I got three hours of sleep, having been awake 25 or so hours beforehand. I don't think I functioned very well afterward.
In the early hours of September 9th, it looks like I went back to sleep.
Upon waking up, I still felt exhausted, and somewhat numb to the revelation, and was back to thinking about Engaging With Newgrounds as an important thing to do with my life.
Shortly thereafter, I saw a friend post the announcement that cohost was to be shut down soon.
I have not had it in me to process this reconnection in the past three weeks. Or engage with Newgrounds at all, god damn it.
Writing about this now, I'm rather detached, and not feeling the reality of it as I should. I've been caught up in a frenzy of trying to stay connected with people I had only known through cohost, establishing presences on websites I've never touched before, and stressing myself out trying to get the almost-25,000-word Almix post written quickly enough that I could still write this one on top of it.
Regarding that post.
In it, I expressed that what this site’s culture became didn't make me feel like I was safe to be fully honest here.
Maybe it wasn't immediate, and it took the now-or-never scenario of the site shutting down... but when it came down to it, I did feel like I could be so honest on cohost, about myself. Honest with myself.
I was inspired to post the kind of thing I always felt I should, ripping my heart out of my paranoid body and baring it to anyone who would happen to come by.
In the wake of allowing others to see all that, I've been riding the high of a newfound shamelessness. I've noticed absences of shame I never felt myself carrying, but that I must have always carried with me, even in private, alone with nothing but my thoughts and impulses... alone with a self I thought I knew and loved too well for that.
Having long refused to acknowledge how my own sexuality, identity, and artistic goals would relate to my views of others’, I never acted like I truly believed in what I would say to others about the value of openly being oneself.
I wanted others to be themselves for me, but was clearly terrified of being half of myself for almost anyone else.
Merely expressing myself clearly in a public space has felt like it's making an immediate difference I didn't even hope for.
It's almost like repressing oneself is an active process that consumes mental resources and causes stress... and I've been fortunate enough that I never needed to impose that upon myself, but I was always too silly to take advantage.
I'm hopefully coming closer to honestly contending with who it is I want to present as. I've felt for a long time that my persona is at odds with my heart, and I need to find a new name and aesthetic that better suits me.
I'm pretty set, now, on creating a new generalized, all-mediums, adults-only art server on Discord, soon, with a specific ethos that I hope will let me feel like I have a safe place to nurture what I would call the best of myself. I'm not sure my ideals would align perfectly with those of everyone here, but reach out to me if you're also desperate for a space in which to Be An Adult and also Creative.
Hopefully, my body can successfully channel a type of person I think others should be privileged enough to have as a friend.
My sister still hasn't figured out who my new friend is, from the information I've drip-fed her, and left to linger in her subconscious for, perhaps, a couple months more, until the figure suddenly pops out of the Magic Eye.
I've been a little nervous about the obligatory, inevitable reconnection of the two old friends, that I have maybe already regretted delaying for even a moment. Also curious. I'm torn between hoping it would happen as a group chat, and not wanting to make the dynamic too weird funny with my presence.
She just messaged me a second ago. I could tell her right now, and maybe cap this plot arc off a little more nicely before the end of read-write cohost.
But where's the fun in that? :^)
Surely I'm not putting off the collision of this world I'm creating around myself with that of the people I've idiotically been unwilling to grow up around. I am clearly a sufficiently hairy fuzzy adult, and Pretty Decent at heart. No one around me will be terribly shocked or upset by information that points toward those things.
Well. In any case.
I'm glad I got both of these non-short chosts out in time. I feel like I've shared some Very Cool Things as a cohost sendoff. I'm not sure I’ll feel inclined to push myself to write the rest of my rant about star ratings on Newgrounds within the next couple of days... this would be a far nicer post to have as my last Serious™ one on the Best Website.
Thank you cohost, for everything you've been to the people who benefited from what it is you've been. I'll credit you as a genuine contributor to my personal growth, for encouraging me to write the things I have for you.
Not thanking you for the people who had really sucky experiences though, they do exist. Mine was significantly better than just okay though, I think. I did have reservations with the cultural shift after maybe that one Tumblr exodus in particular (I probably got settled in while the Twitter users were resetting the tone so I didn't get to feel so put off by it), and I barely ever got anything that would trigger a notification related to anything I was really proud of — the Almix post had one immediate Like from someone I shared the draft with and that's been it up until this point. I know other people have read and appreciated it, but god, gimme some NUMBERS HERE people, what is this some web 1.0 guestbook??? NO cuz if this were web 1.0 it would have a VIEW COUNTER that would INCREMENT upon PAGE REFRESH that I could EASILY PUMP UP. ....... But this place attracted some really good post makin’ people, is the real important thing. Oh and this CHARACTER LIMIT, of course, I'm going to complain about every social media site that caps posts at less than 200,000 until the end of time. Wish I could've gotten around to css criming on here. @staff you seem like pretty cool people and I want good things to come everyone's way so you in particular get to experience the kind of environment you hoped to create without having to worry about overseeing it. Play Levelhead, buy Tamalitoz, remember SOPHIE *scrawls in crayon* pRaiSe EggbUg
...
*scribbles it out*
TASTE
