So, without getting too weird to too In My Feelings, tumblr has been scaring me more and more over these last few months. I don't even pretend to give myself enough importance to think I'd be banned--or, well, I wouldn't, except I was one of those people turned into a Blurry Avatar Person, which was weird? I felt a tiny version of the ice-chill panic I felt when Strikethrough was happening and people's blogs, and communities, were being completely obliterated in an eyeblink.

I don't know what's going to happen. All i know is, I feel tired of all this. I'm tired of coming into a fandom, seeing whole worlds and universes rise and grow and evolve, and some die, and others change into new things altogether--only to be completely destroyed by some corporate decision made on high, by people who don't even know, or care, that we exist.

Is this what it is? I think of this sometimes. I feel like I'm at the end of time, like i am in a bright room in a dark house at the edge of a precipice, and that precipice is time, and eternity, and I'm looking through a glass door out into that starless void.

I wonder where it all went. I feel so old! Like some kind of weak but undying eldritch being! I came from GeoCities to FF.net, to LiveJournal and DeviantArt and Y!Gallery and, finally, Tumblr. I came here around that time, too. I feel, weirdly, like a traveler constantly driven to different lands. If you can say websites are 'places' that one can go in one's mind, then that is how I feel.

I don't know anymore. For a long time, when the proverbial building finished falling down around me, i have shrugged, dusted myself off, picked whatever i could out of the rubble, and moved on. i've seen so many fandoms flash and die that i don't even know how to account for them anymore. i've read so many stories that do not seem to exist anymore. i've seen hundreds of galleries' worth of art that has been wiped from the face of existence; or, if it does exist, it does so now only as files lost on other people's hard drives. whole universes that existed only online. how can one explain this loss, to someone who has not felt it? all these things we make--fans, fanfic authors, fanartists, fic rec-list makers, modders, fanvid makers, everyone!--they are largely intangible. but does that mean they have no more value than a puff of air? everything now can be, or has been, reduced to a series of numbers, or code, on a machine. what does it mean when all the things we have created can be completely removed from existence with a few keystrokes, without our knowledge or even our permission?

Then i think of the ancient Greek forums, and Sappho and the other poets and their followers and fans, and all the conversations they must have definitely had--the discourse that must have been going on back then!--that neither i, nor any modern person, will ever know, and it makes me want to die with the unnamed feeling.

I think of the young noblewomen in post-Heian-era Japan, obsessively reading the Tale of Genji and the other books, arguing about their favorite characters, and who shipped who with who. i imagine a young woman seven hundred years ago staring at the moon and hoping she had enough time, the next day, to finish the latest chapter of the Tale of Genji fanfic she was writing. i think of how no one will ever read that fanfic. i want to cry.

all this fills me with this weird combination of bittersweet nostalgia and dread. is this what it is?
we--fans--we will be here, until the last people are sitting around campfires telling stories. i know this.
is that what it is?