Everything2.com reaches a quarter of a century on this historic day! Like the humble horseshoe crab this beautiful site has persisted for eons of (internet) time. To the outsider it appears as the common ancestor of a wiki and Reddit; walking a middle way between the discussion thread of the moment and the sterile articles of facts. To we souls sailing the node gel it remains the best place to dump our thoughts and feelings. For me personally, the purity of hypertext has always been one of the great strengths of this site. Some pictures may be worth a thousand words but there are trillions of sentences which carry the full beauty of a painting. Most of them have yet to be written.
It's arguably the case that writing is the greatest of human inventions because it's what let's us pile knowledge on top of knowledge. It's definitely the case that the world wide web exists at all because people wanted to share their writings. The internet has broaden exponentially since then but words remain. Noders claim this site is its users but most of them have left. We are impoverished for the loss but most of their writings remain. I think that this reflects an important truth about people. We are our words. Most people are remembered for their words rather than their deeds.
"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
-Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 8:36
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
-Gouverneur Morris, preamble to the USA constitution
"The buck stops here."
-Harry S. Truman
Talk may be cheap but a good write up is priceless. This site has given me the opportunity and drive to read and be read and I am so grateful for that. Some people lament about the inadequacy of language to fully capture the full richness of reality and while I can sympathize with the sentiment I ultimately see it as a skill issue. Your greatest power as a person and our greatest power as a species is the ability to put ideas in others heads. Everything2 is among the best places to develop and use that skill. I hope to keep at it alongside my fellow noders for another twenty five years
IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING