Thank you all for being the awesome community that you are, even as things change and people come and go. I have real memories from this website - from being backed into a corner in an after-school club as a teenager and told that I should join this site or else (thanks, KB) to crashing in Valis's spare room for a few nights because I was too broke to pay for real accommodations, smoking on Yoyoyozo in a game of 8-ball to determine who got to sleep on the only bed in our hotel room, or quietly laughing with everyone as they reacted to me becoming a moderator (thank you zultar and jmo for being convinced I could be better than I was back then for some reason, and thank you abge and 2WL in particular for pretending like you agreed with them when I was around), this place has been nothing but good to me. Yet it's more than just good memories - ghug and jmo helped me kickstart a career that upended my life in a good way, and for some reason I get paid enough money to comfortably own a house in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. If I gave out the whole list it would go on awhile, but the long story short is that this place is pretty great. It has never had anything to do with Diplomacy; it's great because the people here collectively make it great. I have probably been one of the biggest beneficiaries of that of anyone here and it's made a real difference in my life.
The direction of the website going forward is aimed toward modernization, and that's for the best. Dark mode and player AI were just the tip of the iceberg. webDiplomacy is going to grow, and it's going to be exciting. I got to be part of those conversations and I genuinely hope it turns out to be as cool as I think it will be. I haven't had the time or energy to contribute to those projects in months and that was not about to change, and reworking the moderator team again to come up with a way to go forward from that angle is just not on my to-do list at the moment. There will be people who step up to push that forward, and they deserve the respect and trust that you all have for some reason decided to show me for the last several years. It's going to end well.
I'm stepping away from the site for a little while. I'm reachable on Discord, and if you're interested in my dumb tornado and aurora photography exploits in life I'll share my public social media with you. I'll be back at some point, and might even play a game of Diplomacy again, if I can still remember how to do that. I look forward to seeing you all then.
