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| {{Needs revision|reason = This thing is full of all the anal-retentiveness that academia eggheads and Baystation players are famous for.}}
| | when I lock eyes and look into the soul of a silk moth what do I see? a bundle of multicellular life? the kaleidoscope reflection of the retina? nothing? the DVD screensaver logo bouncing around? the genuine peak of evolution of the Bombyx Mori? |
| "Time crumbles things; everything grows old and is forgotten under the power of time"
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| – '''Aristotle'''
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| A crash course in Space Station 13's history.
| | i had silk moths once, you know? |
| Sources are listed below any relevant sections.
| | i have no idea what kind of genetic mutations I’ve been unknowingly instilling and engineering inside of my silk moths |
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| == Paleolithic Times - 1995 ==
| | remember that guy who said that all my silk moths were a bunch of genetic dead ends? that was only the first month I had the moths, I don’t think he’ll be saying the same thing if he ever finds out about this |
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| In order to properly understand the true cultural significance of Space Station 13 beyond the simple "funny space game", it must be understood the BYOND that surrounds it, which is where we will start.
| | the first winter I had them I left the window open on a cold night and all the moths froze to death |
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| BYOND began in 1994, when Dan Bradley approached Tom Hehre with the idea of creating an online multiplayer dungeon crawler game (think of it like Diablo) from scratch. The next year, in 1995, the two now graduated college students formed a company known as "Dantom International" (Dan + Tom = Dantom) to develop this game. However, as the scope of the game became more and more complex, they realized they would never be able to achieve their original goal and decided to repurpose their project into a game making suite, essentially to allow others to finish the game for them. This game builder was given the name "DUNG", an acronym for "Dantom's Universal Network Game", which can be interpreted as either a clever shortening of "dungeon", a poop joke, both, or neither.
| | dead silk moths are really fat, especially considering how many of them I had, I filled half the trash bag with moth corpses before I was done |
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/19981206132241/http://www.dantom.com/
| | you think the moths are done with me? I thought so too but I was wrong, man I was wrong, this first winter was not the end, it was not even the beginning of the end, it was only the end of the beginning |
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| Much like today's BYOND, it used a special programming language called "DM", presumably as in "Dungeon Master". Originally, DM was a system for creating spells in the MUD Dan and Tom were initially developing. However, it grew so incredibly complex that it started becoming the game's very own proprietary programming language, prompting Dan and Tom to switch to developing a game engine.
| | when I threw the moth corpses out, the eggs must have been in hibernation, I think the eggs used the moth corpses themselves as insulation, a couple months later in the spring some of the silk worms made their way into my shed with the mulberry saplings and sure enough they grew up to become silk moths |
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| Also like modern BYOND, DUNG was intended as a quick and easy way for programmers to quickly and easily create online graphical games without having to deal with networking or graphical interface creation code. Quoted below:
| | a surprise, to be sure, I almost thought I was rid of them, this genetic line of silk moths had grown themselves so fat that their organs literally didn’t fit inside their body, they looked like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s heart during his standard medical checkup at the Coolidge Naval Hospital on April 1945 |
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| <blockquote>
| | needless to say, the moth’s continued presence in my life seemed to be a stroke of luck on their part, although I had to say that I did not exactly want them any more by that point |
| DUNG is not revolutionary in providing this technology; networked graphical games have existed for quite some time now. Until now, however, creating such a game required a large amount of programming knowledge, especially in the frustrating field of networks and graphical interfaces. How many creative game ideas were abandoned because the otherwise capable programmer became overwhelmed with the [intricacies] of the interface? Many, to be sure. The advantage of DUNG is that these elements are automatically handled for you. You can design simple DUNG worlds, such as graphical chat servers, in a matter of minutes. And if you are interested in making more complex worlds, you can use the powerful DUNG language, DM to complete the task much more readily than with a traditional language. [https://web.archive.org/web/19981205093403/http://dantom.com/dung/over.html]
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| </blockquote>
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| Once again much like today's BYOND, usernames were called "keys", fitting into the vague dungeon-crawler metaphor. Interestingly, users were granted a key for only a limited amount of time. If someone wanted to keep their key permanently, they had to participate in the testing for DUNG, create and make games, and submit them to a particular Dantom-related email. If the Dantom team liked their creations, the team would grant the user the privilege of permanently keeping their key, and possibly other perks, including advertising and even hosting their games.
| | when the moths were struck by fungal infection, most likely due to the much more open and unsanitary environment of the shed they set themselves up in, I did nothing for them, if they wanted to survive this year, the moths would have to figure it out themselves |
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| In 2000, DUNG was renamed into the more marketable BYOND. However, the original start page for DUNG has been preserved on [http://www.bikegods.org/8.19.00/dung.html an obscure page located on a cycling website]. One of the cyclists, aka BIKE GODS, featured on the site was one of the members of the Dantom team (I'll let you find out who).
| | the moths that died to the fungus seemed to leak and excrete a vile black substance from their guts that they did not normally leak or excrete, although I was not really very troubled by this as my objective at the time was to rid myself of the silk moth presence, and just like last time, I sure thought I did |
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| == The BYOND Revolution - 2000 ==
| | so early yesterday, in the middle of the day, this chilly day in the middle of the wet and maritime and chilly Oregon winter, and I went into the shed to get a shovel, the same shed that the silk moths made their home, and I went into the shed and saw a brown silk moth flapping its tiny wings against its obese little moth body, I was shooken by its presence, beyond discountenance, genuinely knocked for six by its continued existence in the castle that I hold lordship in |
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| Despite the name of this section, for the most part, BYOND was basically the same thing with a different coat of paint after being rebranded from DUNG, aside from the renamed tools and the endless cavalcade of BYOND/beyond puns that still goes on today. BYOND still billed itself as a powerful yet easy to use engine that was going to empower creators (which were often referred to as "wizards", old habits die hard) and revolutionize the Internet (I suppose it did, in its own way). DM was still called DM, though this time it meant "Dream Maker", and like today, it had single inheritance and the area-turf-object-mob system that mappers today know and love. Dream Seeker was a thing as well, although it was used both for hosting games and joining them, rather than having hosting handled by a different program (Dream Daemon) like today.
| | you wanna know what I did? I got a fan and put it in the shed, and I got a jug of bleach and a jug of ammonia, and I mixed the two jugs together and shut the door to the shed |
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20000815223551/http://www.byond.com/
| | so if tetrazeta or tiramisu or Mark or any of the other people read these pages of mine, now you know what happened to the silk moths, because I gassed them, ok? I gassed the moths, like I should have done the first time I wanted them gone |
| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010406114618fw_/http://www.byond.com/start/byondhub.html
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010217111050/http://byond.com/code/ref/index.html
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| BYOND also still sold itself as a step up from the older multiplayer dungeons, offering many improvements that were revolutionary at the time but are today quite commonplace, across games in general and in SS13 in particular, such as embedding icons in text and using hyperlinks (modern GUIs). This time though it also its emphasized its compatibility with older MUDs, noting its ability to interface through telnet for telnet-based MUDs (something which it can still do today).
| | I mean, brown silk moths, really, silk moths aren’t brown, they haven’t had any kind of color pigmentation for thousands of years |
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| Many of the first BYOND games were card basically online versions of simple tabletop games, e.g. card games, word games, and board games, often with copyright-friendly names of varying cleverness, e.g. [http://www.byond.com/games/AirMapster/Una Una] vs Uno. There was an occasional role-playing, usually inspired by some kind of popular anime, which in 2000s was ''Dragon Ball Z''. Several have been lost to time and copyright hunters, but some still miraculously remain viewable on BYOND. Among them are [http://www.byond.com/games/Gughunter/DrummondCribbage Drummond Cribbage], [http://www.byond.com/games/Gazoot/XOFiveinarow XO], [http://www.byond.com/games/Gazoot/QuickStep QuickStep], and [http://www.byond.com/games/Zilal/Lexiconomy Lexiconomy], which are also some of the oldest games still on BYOND's Hub. There are also still a few titles from [http://www.byond.com/members/Dan Dan] himself, including [http://www.byond.com/games/Dan/GoldenStool Golden Stool] and [http://www.byond.com/games/Dan/NightMud NightMud], which hearken back to the ''Night Soil: the quest for the golden stool'' RPG from DUNG.
| | even if this was some kind of genuine biological breakthrough that I literally shut the door to, I’m not interested in it, the moths are gone from my life, and this story is over now |
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| ''It is unknown if Tom (the other DUNG creator) never created any titles of his own or if he did and they were merely lost to time.''
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010405080145fw_/http://www.byond.com/hub/hub.cgi?qd=gameIndex
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/19981206111656/http://www.dantom.com/dung/demos.html
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| Just as it is today, and ever shall be, BYOND was free, but unlike today, rather than premium memberships with perks, BYOND used a variety of methods for funding. There was pedestrian fare, such as selling physical books about BYOND and DM and getting money from ads, and BYOND also proposed potentially offering game CDs and even commercially releasing games. Most curiously, BYOND also experimented with a currency called "BYONDimes", which a good analogue would be Steam Wallet funds.
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| ''It is unknown if there were actually any BYOND CDs or games released commercially.''
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010618125503/http://www.byond.com/products/
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| People could buy BYONDimes via credit card or check at a rate of 1 BYONDime per 10¢ USD. They could then use the BYONDimes to purchase game content, with extra levels being BYOND's go-to example when explaining the system, and the money would go towards their creators. On the code end, buying content through BYONDimes was done through a simple inbuilt <code> PayDimes()</code> procedure. BYONDimes could also pay for various hosting plans from BYOND, which had names like "The Launch Pad" and "The Moon", on a X BYONDimes per day basis.
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010412174601fw_/http://www.byond.com/products/host/details.html
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010406112706fw_/http://www.byond.com/products/BYONDimes.html
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| In addition to selling content, people could also receive BYONDimes through BYOND's developer referral program. If someone introduced another person to BYOND through a personalized link, and if that person bought a hosting plan or the DM physical guide book (which in BYOND's eyes meant BYOND was gaining a developer), that someone who shared the link would get a 10% cut of the proceeds as BYONDimes, with dividends being handled out on a monthly basis.
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010410013132fw_/http://www.byond.com/products/referrals.html
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| BYOND made its money through transaction fees incurred when people redeemed their BYONDimes for cash. If someone wanted to exchange their collected BYONDimes, BYOND would take 50 BYONDimes and 10% of the amount as a transaction fee and mail the remaining amount as a check. BYOND essentially acted as a retailer for wholesale content creators, handling the legal and security matters of credit cards for them, though BYOND did offer to assist high-volume sellers in becoming full-fledged credit card merchants. In some ways, it's similar to BYOND acting as a game development kit and networking platform for game developers.
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| * https://web.archive.org/web/20010410015127fw_/http://www.byond.com/products/shopintro.html
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| == Genesis - 2003 ==
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| Space Station 13 is a free-to-play open source game played on BYOND. BYOND has been home to a whole great varied sort of games over its decades of history, but Space Station 13 has weathered the tests of time and stood above every one of them by all regards.
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| While all sorts of games such as ''Cow RP'' or the countless ''Naruto'' and ''Dragon Ball Z'' spinoff games have long since died out today in the 2020s, Space Station 13 has actually grown and evolved since its inception, recently with all sorts of influential public figures on the internet bringing attention to it and BYOND as a whole. But how did we get here, of all places?
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| It all began on the cold Wisconsin day of February 16th, 2003...
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| The original version of Space Station 13 was created by one man and him alone, Exadv1 (pronounced Exa-div One). Chances are if you found your way to this article, you've heard the story about how the game started out as a gas simulator. Unlike many of the things that people say about the early history of Space Station 13, this one is actually true, the game really was originally designed to be an atmospherics simulator for a college project, to contribute to his engineering degrees.
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| While Exadv1 himself cites a lot of things as as "huge influences" on the game, the two works that directly caused him to make it in the first place involved increasingly advanced computer simulation technologies being developed at the time. One was [https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/papers/cellular_automata_for_physical_modelling.html an article in ''Game Programming Gems 3''] that outlined a basic framework for using cellular automata to simulate air physics, and the other being another BYOND game called [https://secure.byond.com/developer/Gughunter/SpaceTug2001 ''Space Tug''], an ''Alien'' homage game notable for its exaggerated hull breach physics. Together, both of these works is what directly inspired Exadv1 to implement his own vision of simulation.
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| While the man was building his atmospheric simulator, Exadv also took the time to build up the station and many of the departments around it. Many of the game's central mechanics we have to deal with today were added simply to make the air simulation more interesting, but mostly to give himself a break from the very mathematics-dense atmospherics coding. Plasma, every security officer's worst nightmare and every griefer's favorite substance, was added because Exadv wanted a flammable gas that was easily visible in the air and thus more pleasing to work with. Even the setting serves second fiddle to the atmospherics. One thing that few know about the game is that initially, the game was terrestrial and set on the surface of an Earth-like planet, but was moved to outer space as his excuse to include vacuum physics.
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| After a few months of this, including a week for the foundations of our modern atmospherics code, SS13 was released in BYOND on February 16, 2003. The [https://wiki.ss13.co/Old_Storyline original lore], in all its confusing flowchart glory, was posted some months later.
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| In our best attempt to sum up the whole flowchart shortly, the United Nations (at the behest of the United States) launches the Space Station program, eventually creating the Space Station known as 13. The United States, who is basically running the whole show up until this point, calls up the expertise of one of the largest Big Tech companies in the world, Nanotrasen. The whole point of the Space Stations is to promote space commerce and rapidly promote research and scientific investigation into space travel, as well as secretly building up a defense network for the United States. Naturally, most of the research done on the station revolves around plasma, a newly discovered element that is notable for having no neutrons in its core, unique in that there is only one other element that has no neutrons, that being hydrogen, but only a specific isotope of hydrogen known as a protium. This is where the Syndicate comes in, a global criminal organization bent on destroying the sinful hegemony of the United States. Thanks to the Space Station program, their leadership no longer resides on Earth, as they are being hunted by the United Nations of human civilization. They seek to take over or destroy the various Space Stations in order to neutralize the defense network that the United States has built up for itself, harness the power of the plasma, and topple the United States.
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| == The Archaic Age - 2003/2006 ==
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| Finally, with everything ready, he hosted the game on the BYOND platform.
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| Like many other things on the internet, it was not a very popular game when it started out. A few non-Exadv independent servers were available, but player numbers in total rarely reached the double digits. The peak player count for the year of 2003 was '''10 players''', if you can believe it. The hardcore community itself consisted of around two dozen people, with 5 of them, including Exadv1 himself, holding admin powers. Unlike today, most of them knew each other from other, far more popular BYOND games and would have had each other on their friends list prior to Space Station 13.
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| Much like modern times, most people spent their rounds battering each other with construction tools and creating increasingly creative ways of breaking the station. In this early primordial form of Space Station 13, there was no power wiring or electricity generation, everything constructed was just naturally powered by the floor of the station, meaning that while there were roles like the Medical Doctor, Station Engineer, and Toxins Researcher, these were mostly just roleplay titles as actual content was quite sparse. There was also no game modes yet, so many found themselves with nothing better to do besides beating the shit out of each other. (Un)like today, hardly anybody minded. Most people saw it as friendly roughhousing or a sort of "forgive & forgot" arrangement.
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| The sprite work was also quite archaic and basic compared to what we are used to today, as were nearly every single one of the mechanics (just check out a screenshot from this era).
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| [[File:Oldstation.png|thumb|300px|The old look of Space Station 13]]
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| Of course, that's not to say there wasn't any negativity at all, hardly such. There was the natural tension between players who preferred roleplay and those who preferred action, and when hosting files were distributed later on during this era, there were plenty of admins and server owners known to abuse their powers. That said, any drama that came from this early era was of a hilariously smaller scope and is really peanuts compared to what goes on in modern Space Station 13 on a daily basis.
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| And that was pretty much all they ever did.
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| Initially, there were no game modes at all; the "round" only ended whenever someone decided to take down the server or the escape shuttle timer would run down. However, some weeks and months after the release, Exadv1 did add the five original game modes in order to keep the people entertained. You might recognize some of them.
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| *'''Traitor''': One crew member was actually a Traitor tasked with assassinating someone, usually the Captain. The crew could discover the name and identity of the Traitor by using research, of all things. Later on, traitors gained uplinks and access to a handful of weapons and tools.
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| *'''Meteor''': Poorly-drawn brown meteors that look more like meatballs would occasionally be thrown at the station over the course of the round, colliding into some random part of the station, tearing up any walls, windows, machinery, and people (though not any of the floors) in the way. Had (has) a rather poor reputation as being unfun.
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| *'''Extended''': No antagonists or hazards would spawn, so the station crew were free to build things and fight each other without any space rocks or Syndicate Traitors to interrupt their horseplay. So-called because the shuttle timer went longer than usual, i.e. the round length was "extended" for a while longer than it would normally be.
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| *'''Monkey''': One player was a monkey with a disease that turned other people into monkeys. Reception is still rather mixed on this one, even today.
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| *'''Nuke''': A small group of non-crew Traitors attempt to destroy the station from the outside with an atomic bomb. Unlike in modern times, the nuke required inserting the green disk, activating lots of weird random toggles until you got some combination right, and then inputting the special code.
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| While the Space Station 13 of today is regarded for its openness, the Archaic Age is regarded as the period of time where it was once hardly such a thing, in fact it was quite the opposite, the game and its mechanics were kept in extreme secrecy and fiercely guarded, to the point that there are recorded cases of people being banned for talking out of character about game mechanics and leaking other secrets of the code. The code itself was also closely guarded, so much so that only Exadv had it, meaning he was the only developer and the only person really working on it in this era of time. He would send the server files to his friends and other game admins as a compiled package (the .dmb and resource files only) for hosting purposes. It was also possible to acquire a version with defines, icon files, and the map files, allowing the code holder to edit the map, but having to send the updated map file to someone with the original source (Exadv) so they could compile it.
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| == The Departure of Exadv1 - 2006/2008 ==
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| After about three years, the popularity (yes, 10 players on a server was and still is considered a popular game) of Space Station 13 began to stagnate. Exadv, the holder of the original source files, began to get more and more busy with his life and began to lose interest in maintaining his creation as he gradually drifted away from the game to focus on other things. Over the next couple years, the community managed to remain active but stagnant. Exadv decided it was time to share the source code, and the friend group he gave it off to continued to develop his code and maintain the SS13 forums and website in his stead. Two people of the group who were not privy to the secretive and closed state of the code were a programmer going by AZA who attempted to remake SS13 four times with little progress on each of them, and a non-group member named Hobnob who was hard at work reverse-engineering SS13, carefully decompiling the bare-bones host files, eventually managing to create [https://secure.byond.com/forum/?post=34372 the first mapping tool] the game had ever seen outside of the default Dream Maker client. The program was called Mapsub and it was released on the BYOND forums, and can still be found today.
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| With the departure of Exadv from the game, the remaining tiny community began to lose interest, and player numbers dropped by over three-quarters of their original values, back into the single digits, which wasn't really terrible for a BYOND game at the time, but it certainly wasn't a good sign.
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| What came next would change everything, and would be the subject of speculation and theorizing for almost an entire decade...
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| == The Platinum Age - 2008/2010 ==
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| In March of 2008, the source code for Space Station 13 was unexpectedly made available to the public. The exact details have been hazy for a very long time, and there were many rumors spreading like a recently-oxygenated plasma fire on how and why the source got released as it did.
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| Immediately after the release, many suspected that a disgruntled programmer leaked the code, supposedly against Exadv's will. One of the most prevalent claimed that the code was actually stolen, with many versions saying one of Exadv's own friends had stolen a flash drive with the source code on it during a house visit, in some versions accidentally, some intentionally. Other speculate that Exadv merely gave a bare-bones version of the host files to somebody (typically AZA, one of the programmers), who, after some disagreements, (the particular disagreements vary) gave to another user, Hobnob, who then [https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/2vrcap/a_look_into_the_early_history_of_ss13/cokva7a/?st=jr06vn0y&sh=3817fca9 decompiled the code] and gave it back to AZA, who then released it.
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| The exact details would remain unknown for years. Whatever did happen, the result remains the same.
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| Eventually, Hobnob and a few other users created the first open-source version of SS13. Thanks to the open source, Space Station 13 gradually improved in quality and gained popularity within other communities. Around the same time of OpenSS13's inception, the Goons from the Something Awful forums began to take interest in the game and a Goon-hosted server appeared. The Goons would find themselves taken very heavily to the game, dedicating themselves to it to this day, and working amongst themselves to create their own private codebase, all the while, the other communities worked on the OpenSS13 code.
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| [[File:OpenSS13_Oldstation.png|thumb|300px|right|Map of the OpenSS13 Originalstation]]
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| The release of the full and complete source code meant the future of Space Station 13 as a community, and this public open source code would go on to be called [https://github.com/Glloyd/Pre-Open-SS13-Host-Files-and-Source OpenSS13]. '''These are the oldest available versions of Space Station 13.'''
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| * https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/4ytenp/ss13_files_from_2004_2005/
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| * https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/53akyg/old_ss13_version_download_late_2003/
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| With the new influx of brainpower from the Goons alongside OpenSS13, many of the features common to every SS13 server today, such as the power network and the lighting system, arose shortly after the release. You can take a look at some of them here in the video below from 2015 of a couple of Goons figuring it out:
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| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Or12-xwA1s&ab_channel=Gannets
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| The Platinum Age is generally defined by Space Station 13's first increase in player count, with the Goons, Penny Arcade, and OpenSS13 programmers settling and growing rapidly. Player numbers reached unbelievable peaks of '''18 players'''! However, each codebase still sat with its own slightly edited version of the original map made by Exadv. OpenSS13 used the OpenSS13 Originalstation map, while Goons used the Goon Oldstation map, the latter of which is better known as the Derelict.
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| In 2009, as Space Station 13 servers were getting up to '''25 players''' at peak time, Goon coders and mappers were by far the ones making the biggest advances. Eventually, in 2009, Goonstation successfully produced a second map for the game, Donut Station, a major accomplishment at the time. Because Goonstation was closed source, nobody else could use the map, so they were stuck with the OpenSS13 version. The popularity of SS13 steadily increased through 2009, eventually leading to the creation of new maps in 2010, Ovary Station, which were a huge step forward for the game at the time, as it along with Donut Station brought a whole host of other additions and changes as part of the map, including much improved sprite work, the addition of functioning power wiring and electrical systems, the Pathology (Virology) system, the roles of the Chief Engineer, the Research Director, the Quartermaster, Miners (and mining), the Head Miner (since merged into Quartermaster), the Cook, Mechanics, the Singularity Engine, and the infamous Clown.
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| The release was accomplished by forcibly rewriting of much of the old Space Station 13 code, much of which was still corrupted with technical debt by Hobnob's failed reverse engineering attempts. In April 2010, as player numbers on servers were hitting '''40 players''', Goonstation had their improved and rewritten code released publicly as [http://puu.sh/1Fehv revision r4407] after a very large amount of community pressure, kickstarting a great explosion of codebases, although it would be the last time they ever released their Goon code for a very long time to follow.
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| <blockquote>
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| Wow, that's insane. It's a '''fucking''' miracle that even compiles at all.
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| Tom, owner of BYOND, regarding the Goon's r4407 revision of SS13 (and his first recorded swear on the forums)
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| </blockquote>
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| == The Golden Age - 2010/2013 ==
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| This Goon code proved to be a massive leap forward in terms of technology and design, with much of the ancient spritework and damaged code from prior reverse-engineering attempts greatly optimized and with a much simpler syntax. The Golden Age is characterized by community outreach, as news of this new, incredible, and most importantly '''free''' game began to spread to places such as Bay12Games, Newgrounds, 4chan, more foreign communities moved to get in on the hype.
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| Taking the released r4407 Goon code, 4chan's Traditional Games board, /tg/, and Bay12Games would go and branch off into their own player bases, both of which with their own set of coders, spriters and code, based on r4407 of Goon code. The three player bases slowly gained player numbers. Goon with two servers, /tg/ and Bay12 with one server each, with the three communities each having their own policies and expectations for players, covering the full spectrum of gameplay. You would go to Bay12 for the high class Star Trek-tier roleplay, /tg/ for braindead chaos, and Goon for the traditional in-between experience of the two, with other communities coming in throughout the rest of the Golden Age, with NoX and Yog in late 2010, Facepunch in 2011, Lifeweb in 2012, /vg/ in 2013, and a whole bunch of others in between then, all releasing and working on their own versions of the code at this time.
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| Throughout the Golden Age, there would also be many sorts of petty servers coming and going, rising and falling, all the while without much drama in between, although the servers listed before are the ones that stuck through time and age. Developers and players mostly stuck to their own little groups and shared what progress they could with each other.
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| In 2013, many servers began to hit some major road bumps and growing pains...
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| == The Silver Age - 2013/2016 ==
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when I lock eyes and look into the soul of a silk moth what do I see? a bundle of multicellular life? the kaleidoscope reflection of the retina? nothing? the DVD screensaver logo bouncing around? the genuine peak of evolution of the Bombyx Mori?
i had silk moths once, you know?
i have no idea what kind of genetic mutations I’ve been unknowingly instilling and engineering inside of my silk moths
remember that guy who said that all my silk moths were a bunch of genetic dead ends? that was only the first month I had the moths, I don’t think he’ll be saying the same thing if he ever finds out about this
the first winter I had them I left the window open on a cold night and all the moths froze to death
dead silk moths are really fat, especially considering how many of them I had, I filled half the trash bag with moth corpses before I was done
you think the moths are done with me? I thought so too but I was wrong, man I was wrong, this first winter was not the end, it was not even the beginning of the end, it was only the end of the beginning
when I threw the moth corpses out, the eggs must have been in hibernation, I think the eggs used the moth corpses themselves as insulation, a couple months later in the spring some of the silk worms made their way into my shed with the mulberry saplings and sure enough they grew up to become silk moths
a surprise, to be sure, I almost thought I was rid of them, this genetic line of silk moths had grown themselves so fat that their organs literally didn’t fit inside their body, they looked like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s heart during his standard medical checkup at the Coolidge Naval Hospital on April 1945
needless to say, the moth’s continued presence in my life seemed to be a stroke of luck on their part, although I had to say that I did not exactly want them any more by that point
when the moths were struck by fungal infection, most likely due to the much more open and unsanitary environment of the shed they set themselves up in, I did nothing for them, if they wanted to survive this year, the moths would have to figure it out themselves
the moths that died to the fungus seemed to leak and excrete a vile black substance from their guts that they did not normally leak or excrete, although I was not really very troubled by this as my objective at the time was to rid myself of the silk moth presence, and just like last time, I sure thought I did
so early yesterday, in the middle of the day, this chilly day in the middle of the wet and maritime and chilly Oregon winter, and I went into the shed to get a shovel, the same shed that the silk moths made their home, and I went into the shed and saw a brown silk moth flapping its tiny wings against its obese little moth body, I was shooken by its presence, beyond discountenance, genuinely knocked for six by its continued existence in the castle that I hold lordship in
you wanna know what I did? I got a fan and put it in the shed, and I got a jug of bleach and a jug of ammonia, and I mixed the two jugs together and shut the door to the shed
so if tetrazeta or tiramisu or Mark or any of the other people read these pages of mine, now you know what happened to the silk moths, because I gassed them, ok? I gassed the moths, like I should have done the first time I wanted them gone
I mean, brown silk moths, really, silk moths aren’t brown, they haven’t had any kind of color pigmentation for thousands of years
even if this was some kind of genuine biological breakthrough that I literally shut the door to, I’m not interested in it, the moths are gone from my life, and this story is over now
