blather_loves_you raze hey dallas. i know you don't pop in much anymore unless there's a technical issue that needs sorting out, but i wanted to wish you a happy_birthday, and this felt like the most meaningful place to do it. sometimes i wonder what you think of the way these blue and red spaces have evolved over the last quarter of a century. blather is and has been many things throughout its bifurcated life: an online encyclopedia, a gathering of poets, a chatroom, a collective diary, a place for crimson_admissions and half_asleep_thoughts, a bottomless maze of beauty and inanity, a_horizon_with_no_line, a_little_taste_of_time_long_gone, and a_place_for_us_to_dream. there have been volcanic arguments (political, personal, theological, and philosophical), breathtaking moments of empathy and understanding, and countless conversations (and disagreements) about the nature of blather itself. there have been flirtations and rejections. there have been experiments and large-scale deceptions — some clever, some cruel. we've had hackers, preachers, pranksters, and good samaritans. there have been teenage 'skites and retirees. high_school students and advertising executives. artists and anarchists. people from all walks of life have repeatedly redefined what blather is and what a blathe can be. some have even written long-running collaborative stories and full-length novels that don't exist anywhere else. blather has been a sanctuary for so many of us. a quiet but constant oasis on the outskirts of what's become a very noisy information superhighway. hundreds if not thousands of people have poured out all their love and hate, their poetry and their pain, and they've tattooed their souls on these walls. countless connections have been made. and there's at least one person walking around in the world who wouldn't exist without blather. two 'skites who fell in love on blue moved to be together and had a child fifteen years ago. they never would have met if they hadn't stumbled into what you started. blather has saved lives. it's given the lonely and broken a place to call home. it's a living document that's grown into an improbably resilient community. a few people have tried to destroy it over the years, in one way or another. but it still stands. we're a family forged in words. this is where we return to when we want to remember who we've been. it's where we come when we need to work out who we're going to be. i've been a 'skite for more than half as long as i've been alive. there are pieces of me that would have been lost forever if i hadn't been able to preserve them here. i can't imagine who i would be or what shape my life would have taken if a random internet search hadn't brought me to a labyrinthine blue website more than twenty_years_ago. i swam here when the channel that led from blue to red was revealed to me. along the way, i found a voice i didn't know i had. and when everything i thought i could count on fell apart, this red place helped me find myself again. i've met some of the most important people in my life here. the selflessness of building the framework of this massive house and then leaving us to furnish it as we see fit will never cease to astonish me. you might not be here writing with us now, but you've changed our lives. thank you for all you've given us and all you've allowed us to give. i hope you live forever. i hope blather does too. 220730 ... tender_square happiest of birthdays to you, dallas. thanks for creating this space and allowing it to flourish with a hands-off approach (and getting hands-on when we have tech issues). i've only been blathing for a little less than a year, but this site has completely transformed my life, and brought me into the lives of folks whose hearts and writing i cherish and am changed by every day. red has allowed me to find a voice i thought i had lost, it has been a sanctuary of support. thank you for keeping the site in operation all these years. it's a privilege to post here every day and to read the words that many have left behind on these walls. wishing you a year of blessings and joy. 220730 ... nr/no reason happy birthday, dallas! i found out about blather in around 2003, when i was in my early 20s and feeling insecure about who i was and life. blather was only place i could be as close to myself as i'd allow, and not worry about being misunderstood or judged. i developed relationships with people i met here that were essential to me at various times, and i honestly can't imagine what my life would have been like growing up without this and them. i'm sure i would have felt there was something important missing. i'm so glad it's still kicking, and that you're quick with the fixes when needed even if you don't blather anymore. you built something incredible that took on a mind of its own — or, a bunch of brilliant, open-minded, wonderfully weird minds. (also, when i took a web development course recently, i looked at some of the code of these pages and did not understand, but i am curious how it works!) hope you're well and having a great day. 220730 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I'll chime in with the birthday wishes! Plus a big thank-you for starting and maintaining blather. And also a thanks to J. and to raze for bringing me here to write! So my longtime friend (anne-girl on blue) first introduced me to blather in the computer room in her parents' basement. We were sixteen or seventeen, and she had something to show me. No, not a Newgrounds animation (remember the early 2000s?) but a site for writing that didn't need you to sign up, where a regular commitment wasn't necessarily expected, where you could be pseudonymous. This appealed to me: I was shy about putting my name on things and my parents didn't have Internet at home yet. I have a list of names I used somewhere in an old drawing pad. A few were literary: Anna Livia Plurabelle, Frodo9 (for his nine fingers?) and Eowyn, until I saw someone else had used the last one; I didn't want to take over their space. But I settled on epitome of incomprehensibility after a song/poem I'd written. First the word had underscores, then I decided it looked better without. (I also wrote this long digression on the phrase, but I'll put that in "blathernym.") Anyway, it was early in 2013 when raze suggested on blue that I check out red. I welcomed the chance to do longer-form and more personal stuff as well as dream-related goofiness and more. You could do all that on blue, potentially...but the smaller group felt cozier. I was also at an uncertain time in my life, having recently graduated from Brock in the far land of Ontario and moved back home to Quebec. When I went away for my Master's I was sure I would have an adventure. There were comparisons to The_Lord_of_the_Rings. A parade of ponies with ponytails (Thorold seemed to have frequent parades). A class on surrealism with "Do not fight the process with a knife." But some of the adventures were painful: learning I was more unprepared than I thought for such intensive work, having my violent habits return in a moment of anger, and discovering I had ordinary, unglamorous ADHD...which only partly explained the first two problems. Bad choices were an issue too. Aaaanyway, back in the shadow of the Mountain of the Real, I was soon to be fired from my first "real" job, which gave me extra time and a whole lot of extra uncertainty, so it was good to have a refuge in writing. At least, when I didn't launch projects I wouldn't finish (why chronicle all the parks in Montreal? wwhy try to parody every entry in an encyclopedia of key terms/people in the humanities and social sciences?) But I think, being in a generous mood, it was worth it for the practice. Writing needs a lot of practice because it's fucking difficult. Not to get started, necessarily. But it's like an instrument: not that hard to make noises, but hard to get the effect you want. And on a personal level, it's valuable to have people to share ideas and feelings with. I couldn't have written a lot of what I did without you. Literally. The cases of half_asleep_thoughts_dialogue and half_asleep_play are the more obvious ones, but you've also got the times where someone responds to a thought, builds on a concept, comments on others' work. You all are precious! And if you find the word "precious" cheesy, replace it with your own preferred non-cheesy term. 220730 ... dallas Thank you! The fact that blather hasn't just withered away since we first put it together 25 years or whatever ago is completely confounding and amazing. I got teary eyed reading your personal stories. Today blather is a little window into a bygone era of the web when it felt like anything was possible. 220801 ... kerry late to the party as usual, but better late than never, right? dallas, they all said it better than i could. thanks for providing a place where i could record my adolescence (often cringey, often prescient) and come to know all these wonderful people. i wish i could remember how i found blather in the first place. the internet was much smaller, then. in any case, happy belated birthday and cheers to you, dallas! hip hip hooray! 220801 what's it to you? who go blather from