I'll be brief. I love maus as though I actually know him. I love kyle too. I've made lots of friends here, friends I confide in, friends who know more about me than my own parents do. People who would pull the gun out of my hand, try to staunch the bleeding.
You can wax poetic all you want: E2 is a website. It's a huge collection of lines of code. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code in my day. It's a tool. It's a textarea and chat box. It's a search engine and stack of links.
The only thing any of us have to remember is that E2 exists with or without us. It's been coded. It's been instanced on a web server. It's got an IP address and DNS information and server space and a team of developers to make sure it doesn't get all busted up. It is done.
What happens to E2 isn't up to one person. It's not up to the content editors, it's not up to President Bush, it's not up to the upvote-all-the-time-regardless users, my cell phone service provider, my job, your pizza delivery boy, or our hopes. E2 is finished. It's that pesky content that isn't done yet. Always evolving. Capricious. You want to direct some of that change... do it.
Or don't.
I love all you people so damn much, I can't really stand it sometimes. You're passionate, intelligent, belligerent, obnoxious, charming, handsome, repulsive, left and right. You make me want to be a better writer, more emotional, more in touch with people. Make me want to drink less and smile more. Change the world and fix my spelling. Hate less.
It's cliché to say it, but E2 is what you make of it. It's your bane or your release. Your merit or your text-based-RPG. You can write or not. E2 doesn't demand either from you. There's no romanticism attached to this. E2 is unfeeling, uncaring, unthinking, and remorseless. I am not E2. You are not E2. We are E2.
There are problems. None of them are E2's fault.