#why don't images show from my website anymore? What did I break?

[nixmcretro]

New Year, New Something That Rhymes with Year

Technically I’m still the same, but my hammock is weirdly outdoors. For the first time in years I have an outdoor area. I’m no longer trapped in a box. I hate apartments. At the same time, urban sprawl isn’t good from an environmental standpoint either. Maybe the answer lies in population reduction? I’m doing my part!

We’ve got cicadas out here in the wastelands. The floury baker cicadas are still about, the one above was intercepted from a noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala) but had catastrophic wing damage at the joint. He was laid to rest that same afternoon. Just because something can suffer, doesn’t mean it should. Rest easy little one.

We’ve also held our first barbecue without incident. My diet remains mostly vegan, thanks to reduced pressure on rent. The only big exception is salmon which will probably be replaced eventually again.

The garden though, and being able to have plants outdoors in the sunlight. What a game changer. I’ve made an active decision to let dandelions take over the buffalo grass. They mow down quite well.

Looks better than any buffalo grass I’ve ever seen. Function over form I say. When they are at full growth, they provide pollen for the bees (native and European), harbour lots of little bug jumpers, which in turn feed the lizards that roam the grass. A little sad when a common blackbird (Turdus merula) snaps up a few, but as long as I can keep the bugs plentiful the lizards should thrive.

Not everything has been rosy though. My first plant casualty, lavender. I had high hopes for it, but since I don’t really know what I am doing it kind of died. Farewell lavender.

My native beehives have been doing well, attracting a few different species of native masked bee (Genus Hylaneus) as well as native wasps (possibly Genus Pison). Both are ridiculously tiny and harmless to us.

Then you’ve got the other bugs, like the pictured assassin bug nymph, Pristhesancus plagipennis. It’s ready to drink the brains of the next honeybee that lands nearby.

And now I’m back on the Apple Watch train with my shiny new Apple Watch SE 2. This time around I’ve picked out the smaller of the two and went with the 40mm. And I have to say, I do not miss the bulk of the 44mm. The Apple Watch is a great motivator to stay on track with new year health goals.

Wait that’s not the image I was looking for… that’s more dandelions!

Whoops, that’s another floury baker cicada. I think the several that were in this tree were eaten by the local bat population as they’ve been silent for a while now.

And that’s Stumpie. Tail growth is coming along well. If I find him running about while I’m mowing the lawn I’ll move him into a lizard hotel plastic tub until I’m done.

Don’t look at me like that Stumpie. We don’t want any repeats of how you got the name Stumpie after all!

Then we’ve got this little guy still rocking about, a bar-sided skink (Concinnia tenuis). After being trapped by a redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti). Luckily for the lizard I noticed…

And here’s the data I wanted to show. Weight loss is beginning again. You might notice a drop almost immediately after becoming unemployed, then a spike to >100 kg when I ran out of money thanks to Sydney’s rental market being unaffordable for a single person – let alone an unemployed single person.

Sure, I could have killed myself easily enough but chose to do the paradigm shift thing. Is it enough of a shift? That’s still an unknown at this point. At least for now, there are real life distractions everywhere which seems to leave very little time for uploading videos. Not such a bad thing I guess. That’s not to say I haven’t been recording new footage.

Better go and check the garden is still there and get my 30 minutes of exercise in. Target weight is set at 75 kg this time around. Roughly 20 kg of weight loss to go, and while transitioning. Should be one heck of a ride. 🤷‍♀️

[queensparklekitten]

I found your web weave about last online 7 years ago and scp 1762 (And I Love It), and I noticed it said you can’t reblog unless you were from the SGE site. What is that exactly?

*looks up from my drink, in the corner of the bar*

So. You wanna know about the SGE site, huh? Well.

Once upon a time, there was an online community.

Fandom forum, though the Open Chat one (equivalent of a #general channel in a discord server) was by far the most used. You got a book you read when you were 12 that changed your life? SGE's the acronym for what was that book for me. You might've seen the movie adaptation on Netflix a couple years back. I really waited seven years for that... I'm getting off topic. Back to the website.

The userbase was in the 8-17 age range, 90% girls, many of us the kind of people who devoured books like it was nothing in our then-ongoing preteen years. The few moderators never even looked at us unless we reported a glitch, spammer, or bigot for them to deal with, so we had no adult supervision.

Open Chat was used for, among other things, the most chaotic unhinged roleplay you can imagine. We got really into it. Wild parties that lasted days, food fights that quickly escalated into the hunger games, everything to do with those living shadows, Bob the alien, the Potato Kingdom, many of us had pets or imaginary friends doing this alongside us, I'm barely scratching the surface here, if I were to try to explain it all we'd be here for weeks. Quoting the Bee Movie script or singing certain songs had a tendency to cause all hell to break loose paranormally, one time it opened a portal to the underworld. It was the most fun ever. There was a reason we'd greet newcomers with "try not to die".

Aside from the chaos, there was contests where we'd reply with images of dresses or cute animals or what else have you, lots of clubs based around various things, people would sing (post song lyrics, sometimes roleplaying whole flashy performances) and post fun questions for everyone to answer and stories and neat videos we found and really good poetry and so, so much more that we didn't archive because we just assumed it would always be there.

It's where I met a lot of my closest friends- hell, it was the only place where I regularly got invited to participate in anything. I don't think there's anyone on that site who didn't forge friendships there. It's also how I got into quite a lot of songs and books and shows, and how I learned HTML formatting. That site was my home. It was the best part of my life for years.

You know how online friends are, though. Sometimes they disappear without a trace, a warning, or an explanation. Or their parents forbid them from going on the site because they think online chat rooms are dangerous.

I joined at 12. By the time I was nearing age 15, most of my friends had disappeared without a trace, never to return. I was one of the very few users to join in 2016 who was still active. The site wasn't abandoned, there were new people everywhere, but...

I don't pretend to understand the why of it, but the magic just. Started fading, I suppose. The community was falling apart. The roleplay got more stale and repetitive and often died down before it went anywhere. It all slowly declined and decayed and became a shell of itself. A hollow mimicry of what we once had. It wasn't really fun anymore, and I found myself wondering what was left to stay for. Just got worse in this regards, up until the website's final days, even after the rest of the userbase started becoming aware of it.

Eventually one day, the Open Chat started glitching hard. It had done that before, many times, and always been fixed. That time, though, it went down for repairs and never came back up. They said they'd bring it back, and they never did. Here's the thing, though- our posts all disappeared. When other forums on that website got closed around then, we could still see the posts by going through our post histories, we just couldn't reply to them. Open Chat and every last record of what we did there just vanished entirely, like it never existed.

It never even got crawled by the Wayback Machine.

...Now that I mention it, tomorrow's actually the anniversary of when Open Chat went down... how the FUCK was that five years ago it does NOT feel like it's been anywhere near that long.

Anyways.

During this time, the very few (like, there was maybe 2 at most) moderators had begun responding to drama by banning offsite links, followed by, several months after we lost our Open Chat, banning off-topic (non-SGE-related) discussions entirely, which sparked riots and a petition and they knew what it meant to the userbase, even to newer people who'd only known the comparatively lifeless version, we told the admins as hard as we could, and they did nothing. Well, other users told them anyways. I knew the site was beyond saving and thus didn't do anything but listen to music and make "let me guess, your home?" memes.

We also lost the ability to make posts in our profiles that weren't in any forums but could be seen if you went through the user's post history.

The official end was the "revamp" of the website, that was just a shutdown. They deleted everything that was left of it and all the records of what we were, and made a completely new website that the old one's url now redirects to. Though at least this time they had the courtesy to announce it a month and a half in advance so we could load as much as we could of what remained into archive.org during those weeks. There's no forum feature on the new site, and user data wasn't transferred. I never made an account on the new site. Why would I?

You can probably guess by reading those lyrics and asofterworld screencaps that I, and at least some other users I'm still in contact with, never really got over the death of that community.

That last image in my webweave is a screenshot of the page that now comes up whenever you type in the url for a forum or an old site member's profile and hit enter.