I have a paw in many online communities, but only one to call home: SpinDizzy MUCK. As it happens, today SpinDizzy celebrates 20 years of existence. Pretty damn impressive as such things go, and a good time to think about the past.

Some people have been there since the beginning. Not me. Found my way to the place in early 2010, as part of a campaign to sample as many different types of MUD as possible. My first impressions, captured at the time, sounded like this:

I saved the best for the end. Spindizzy has a huge map and an active population. It is furry- and roleplaying-friendly, while remaining an eminently social hangout. If you ever went to a costume party wearing cat ears, you'll fit right in. I can't even begin to describe all the things going on in there; it's pretty much a cartoon world, ellaborate (sic), beautiful and full of great people.

I've met individuals online who seem to think furry fans are somehow weird or crazy. This was not my experience at all. On the contrary, furry fans are good, fun, intelligent people. In any event, you are free to be a human on SpinDizzy, and nobody will expect you to roleplay if you don't want to.

Needless to say, that part of the plan backfired. Before summer, things went from "I'm not a furry but these people are cool", through "I seem to be turning into a furry", and all the way to "I was a furry all my life and didn't have a word for it". We're a special fandom like that.

A few things SpinDizzy did for me:

- help me out of a bad place, mentally speaking, during that same first spring;
- bring out the writer in me, a childhood dream that seemed buried for good: my first (and so far only) novel wouldn't exist but for my clumsy SD fanfic five years prior;
- enable a major revelation, that put a quarter century of my life in a different light, and gave me much joy since.

In the mean time, people came and went. There was drama. There were changes. And yes, people died. Wonderful people, too. We never really got over it. But we also had treasure hunts. Parades. Olympic games. World fairs. Enough cool things to astonish even veterans of the fandom. And we still somehow attract people entirely new to text-based virtual worlds.

It's not the medium, you see. It's how we use it.

Earlier, we were talking about the next twenty years in SpinDizzy MUCK. That's a scary thought. In two decades, I'll be older than any of our players are right now, to the best of my knowledge. What will the world even be like?

Whatever the answer, with any luck we'll still be able to type "/connect sd" and talk about it obliquely in character while tromping around our city in a bottle, poking our noses in half-forgotten corners and having a blast.