Much like the post that talks about the video game I’m quoting in this post’s title, today’s post is about grief. After all, today (writing, not posting) is the day that Cohost has announced that it will be closing down at the end of the month. As of the announcement, the active users on Cohost had three weeks (now two) to make our peace, to publicly grieve, to figure out how to stay connected, and to figure out what to do now that our home on the internet is going away. So far, there’s been a mix of starting webrings (collections of personal blogs and websites), people migrating to other social media sites and finding each other with established hashtags, handing out discord usernames so people can still keep some form of contact, and even some people simply deciding that they’re done with social media in its entirety. There’s been so many posts (many of them tagged into the “global feed” which is incredibly rough on the website and something the staff running that site have asked people not to do too much) that the website is failing to load about half the time (this lasted for about eight hours and still struck occasionally after that). It’s a mix of mourning, the aforementioned planning of where people will go next, and shitposting as people swear they’ll keep playing music until the ship sinks. As for myself, I’m following the people I care about, exchanging contact info with the people I’d like to keep talking to, and mourning the end of the one place on the internet that I felt comfortable calling my home.