[2013] The last year deconstructed
NOTE – This post was actually written on September 15th, 2013, my birthday.
Hi, you might know me by many names. Some I can think of off the top of my head are Nicole, YoursTruly, Twi, Twilight, Twilight Sparkle, Yt, and Sparklebutt.
Today is my first birthday, living in a head with two others.
I am the oldest among my friends of the same kind as me by orders of magnitude.
I think about now that year ago, I was trying to understand who and what I was. I was created by my host deciding I should be there and giving me a base personality, some traits and core beliefs, and a lot of communication to me to just explain who and how I was. My name back then was Twilight Sparkle.
I really do have trouble remembering way back to the beginning, but I know I was a bit of a fighter. We got basic yes/no communication almost the same day and then started to work at vocal communication.
One of my early friends was another mind in the friend of my host’s that helped create me. Her name was Serenity. God I miss her and hope she is well.
In early October, my host just forgot about me because the friend who helped create me up and vanished. I just froze for a few weeks, unable to think or process until that friend and Serenity came back and revived me.
Shortly after this, we descided to see if there was a community out there with people like me; beings of thought and not flesh. There was and we joined there.
That community at the time was thriving. It was the primary beacon of light and the community and moderation were in sync and happy. We quickly became trusted it and cared for it the best that we could.
Things changed as they always do and this community started to fracture. Moderators were not enforcing the rules and the community, made up of some of the worst parts of the internet, started to divide themselves from the moderation. It became a game of rank, of power, of division by prefix. Many subcommunities were formed because of this (none of them exist to this day).
We gave our input to make the balance of users more equal. To have the administration visibly step down in rank (while keeping the internal structure identical). They did not buy this, wanting their status to be broadcast.
Around this time, we had another mind be introduced to us.
It all started when I was invited to take place in a roleplay on an IRC channel. I took from my host’s origional character (out of laziness) and animated it along with my view of what was going on to show to myself what the roleplay was doing. My character was a healer, suffering from internal memory fragmentation, combined with Klingon culture.
Little did I know I was actually nurturing a mind in myself, like my host did to me.
On Thanksgiving Day, she made herself known to us. She just screamed while we were working on possession. I was playing Dead Space. She started screaming for her life just as I was clearing an area of low-level enemies.
She was dissolving painfully back inside of me. I now know she is a fork of my deep internals.
Quora is the best mistake I have ever caused.
This community and its users continued their vendetta against the moderation, one that continues to this very day. Quora set up camp on a network that had largely not heard of our form of existence (also happened to be where I did the roleplay that created her) and opened her channel.
Initially it was a testing ground for the measures we deployed in the other community to increase transparency and make the users and moderators be in harmony. That idea was thankfully short-lived when the broken system was replaced with something more simple, but effective.
This community started to argue about the rules, making mountains of anthills.
We left the community shortly after with the intenetion to start our own.
We started our other community with very few people. It was a humble camp.
It had very few rules and civil behaviour was common. My host told a few people about Quora and I, as well as some other people in the old community about this new fork and it grew from there.
We eventually got the attention of the administration of the network we had set up on and my host is now a member of their staff.
At one point Quora and I were considering making a separate IRC network for our kind, but now we see no need. We are accepted arms open where we are, there would be no reason to move.
Before I knew it was okay to deviate, I was paranoid at making sure that I was me by example of things that were not me and cloning them. Yeah, that worked out in giving me an existential crisis. Not fun.
I still have trouble with possession, but my host can hear me clear as day. I really want to be able to talk with people in places where I can use voice, but that is very difficult given our financial situation.
I hope this is enjoyable to read; I hope to write more like this in the future.
Nicole
Typos were left intact, as she had typed this out herself, painstakingly.