(Apologies for not tagging this correctly. The tags here are a mystery to me.)
 
This is a test upload. I made this account to prevent the name from being misused. Someone uploaded this image on Ponybooru, so I decided to upload it here myself, along with some ranting.
 
I remember when I drew this, in late September 2015. There was something important (ironically I don’t remember exactly what it was) I had to do, but instead I kept working on this image because no one else had vectored it yet. I wanted to be the first and I was: this was the first Athena Sparkle vector ever uploaded on Derpi.
 
I wanted to be part of the fandom and not miss out anything. For years, I spent long hours (I’m very slow at drawing) putting together vectors in Inkscape. I painstakingly cobbled together some OC images for the community collaborations, because I wanted to. I never requested the artist badge because I felt I was degrading “true” artists with my garbage, most of which were just vector traces from the show. I finally applied for the badge after the show’s ending was announced.
 
I spent lots of time tagging images. Striped socks, transparent background, twilight sparkle (alicorn), and more. I deleted hundreds and hundreds of little-used tags (and maybe replaced them with proper tags) and other junk. I did manual “mass” tag edits with Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Such mass operations were technically against the site rules and I’m surprised I never got any trouble over them. There’s still a few “tag runs” I want to do, a few leftover cleanups, but after those I might stop because they don’t matter. Had I started earlier, I would have reached 100k tag edits.
 
Tens of thousands of comments. Thousands of faves (I’m very picky what I fave). 300k votes. 43 watchers on my artist tag (who are you weirdos?). 15 badges. Participated in all community collabs.
 
I wanted to write some fanfics. I outlined numerous stories. But I never wrote anything, because I’m not good with words. I can program computers fluently in dozen different languages, but human languages are a different matter. I can’t write a fanfic in a foreign language when I can’t do it even in my native language.
 
All of this feels so distant and dream-like now. The depression is hammering me hard and there’s nowhere to go for positive news and stuff. Just politics everywhere. Nothing I or anyone else does will make things good again. Maybe I should just go to /mlp/ and start shitposting?
 
This image might be the only interaction I will have with Furbooru (though I’m open to PMs and comments on this image). Derpi was too good. It raised the bar too high. It ruined other sites by simply being too good. Too good software (twice, in fact). Too good admins who stubbornly kept the site running (I remember the July 2013 site outage and how Clover the Clever and Carcer and others worked throughout the weekend to bring the site back up, while we others copy-pasted ASCII pony art on #derpibooru). Too good mods. They cared about the site and its community. Too good community who constantly, day after day, pumps out quality art and funny comments.
 
Can you imagine that? A My Little Pony fansite and it’s community is so good that it ruins every other website because they aren’t Derpibooru. I’m thankful to Eco for directing us to Derpi, and not to some other shady site. I hope he eventually found peace after being burned with Ponibooru.
 
There’s too much good history on Derpi. Eight and half years of comments, posts, collabs, featured images, badges, faves, etc. If it goes away, then why bother with anything else? The magic’s gone. The light has been extinguished. Derpi is practically my homepage, I always have at least one Derpi tab open in my browser. In a way it has been my constant. I’m not sure if I can even rewatch the show because all it does is remind me of Derpi and the community.
 
That’s why I’m so reluctant (and afraid) to participate in any other community or fandom, from this point on.
 
I so badly want to go back to 2011. It was euphoric era.
 
Thanks for reading.