I remember, back in the day, when the Other Users list never exceeded nineteen. Now the List is rarely, if ever, under nineteen. When I’m having a sleepless night and decided to cure myself with a little Everything, I’m used to logging on to find maybe eight other users, most from various crazy foreign time zones and other such nonsense. I would stagger about in the tiny, private community allocated to me at four in the morning, free from strangers, safe and secure towards the bottom of the Other Users List, looking up to the wiser fellows topping the stack of names on the side of my screen.

Such shelter is unknown to the users of this day and age. Now, when I log on, I am stunned by the eighty or ninety names filling the formerly tiny space of my little nodelet, most found beneath my own now bolded title. I no longer have an intimate grouping of wiser noders to gape at; in fact, I am now almost fully-grown in my noding experience and capable of having my name appear directly beneath such legends as WickerNipple and stand/alone/bitch. Sometimes, on rare occasions few and far between, I have logged on at some insane hour only to find my name at the top of the entire list. I cannot even begin to describe the loneliness associated with such status.

I long for those early days of childhood, when it was okay for little kaytay to ask silly questions and get sincere answers from her former parents, who now have become peers. I long for the ancient times when DMan was still an every day part of the Everything2 world, when us newbies looked upon him as the ultimate rebel - some with horror, others with awe. Now he is merely a fading legend.

I wish for the happy days of innocence, when e2 was new and fresh. Back in the days when I could type a random phrase into the search box and not get taken directly to an already-created node where my own thoughts are eloquently displayed by a complete stranger, written down before I even knew I possessed such ideas.

The e2 days of old have been replaced by an information revolution of universal proportions. The User List shall only continue to grow.

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