A Love Letter to Craftland

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Blue
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Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Accountname: BlueShadows22
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A Love Letter to Craftland

Post by Blue » Sat Jul 16, 2022 1:39 am

January 16th, 2013. Just another lazy Wednesday, and 11-year old me had nothing better to do than play video games on my PC for four hours straight after school, occasionally interrupted by the nagging of my mom telling me to go to a friend's house or do some chores instead of staring at the screen. It's the mundane and uneventful days that make me miss childhood the most. My friend Joshua calls me on Skype; a pretty standard occurrence at the time - He probably just wants to play video games. And, well, he does. He tells me about a Minecraft server he found that has the Aether mod installed on it. Sounds pretty sick to me, so I download the launcher and log on.

Needless to say, it was not just another ordinary Wednesday. As of now I have 2,011 hours clocked in playing on this server. That turns out to be 83.79 days, which turns out to be 1.67%, or ~1/60th, of my entire waking life. I don't know about you, but that is definitely not a non-significant amount of time. I'm 20 years old now, and in about 6 months it will have been a decade since I first logged into Craftland, i.e. half my lifespan ago. The place I chose to plop down my first house when I was 11 is quite literally burned into my mind - all these years later and I can still visualize bright as day the hundreds of blocks of terrain surrounding both my Aether and Overworld bases. Craftland, for the periods of my life that it was significant, was my second home. The players, the staff, the builds, the community - these have all been fundamental building blocks in creating the person I am today, and I know for a fact that the same can be said for the hundreds of other people who have been lucky enough to find this microscopic and seemingly insignificant pocket of the internet.

I could go on for hours about the times I had and the people I met on Craftland. I could describe to you in detail the most random deeplore about inconsequential things on the server which now permanently reside in my brain. I think the same can be said for pretty much everybody who has spent a few hundred hours on the server. It's beautiful, though, in my opinion... I have no clue what most of the players I interacted with years ago are doing now, and yet we all have shared experiences that have changed us and which we can look back upon fondly.

To the staff; past and current; who I've interacted with and who I haven't; thank you. I am in awe of and incredibly impressed with you. It is so hard to find communities like Craftland, containing such a diverse group of people and yet maintaining such a strong level of coherence. I really do mean diverse, too - It's crazy that I, a little 15-year old shithead teenager, could be playing on the same server as a 30+ year old mother with a full-time job and family, all the while perceiving the interaction as completely natural. Of course, these differences did come to surface at times, and Craftland certainly had its fair share of drama, but what community doesn't? I think it's amazing that the staff was able to foster such an open and welcoming community, purely out of love for that same community. I cannot thank each one of you enough for taking time out of your lives to do what is essentially volunteer work and help others enjoy life a bit more. Regardless of who you are or were outside of the server, I can say with utmost confidence that what you did here was good. Your contributions had a net positive gain on the people you interacted with, and for that I am infinitely grateful.

To everyone that I personally interacted with - thank you! Whether we liked each other or didn't, it doesn't matter. As someone who is happy with the person they are today, I can't deny that my interactions with you helped build me into that person. That being said, I don't think I disliked more than one or two people. My experiences on the server were almost entirely positive, otherwise I wouldn't have played on it for so long.

To the players who are new here - Welcome! As I'm writing this, the server is mostly dead, and it's looked to be that way every time I've checked in the past two years. What you're looking at is a relic of the past - a civilization that once was. In its heyday, this server could have upwards of 60 people on at once! Many good times were had here, and many memories were made. Of course, that isn't to say you can't make more. Hop on the server and just start running in any direction, or open the public warp directory and click something that sounds cool; you're guaranteed to see some amazing buildings. If you've got friends, invite them on to play! Treat it as a fun modded co-op experience - the server has a vast set of unique mods and worlds. If you see somebody else online, say hello and strike up a conversation. The worst that could happen is that they don't respond.

Sorry if the post was a bit incoherent. I simply started writing with no overarching concept of organization. Thanks again for the good times, and hello to everyone in the future that looks back at this forum occasionally (or is that just me?)

:morons:

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