They say so long as we are spoken of, we live on.

My words...the words of my teenaged past self, will live on long past me, it seems. 

Endlessly spiralling, copied and pasted and placed in places I never could have known. 

Tik Tok has the copy pasta in it, even. 

What gets me is...

It was actually popular back in the day too?

This isn't like some instance of people suddenly discovering an old random thing. 

I mean.

It is that, too.

But people used to send me emails and talk to my chat bot and just mention how happy they were to be one of my "two and a half readers". 

I had hundreds of thousands of page views and tens of thousands of visitors. 

It took over a year for farrago to reach those kinds of numbers, even with the power of the Homestuck fandom behind it. 

All of it to say that. 

I had almost forgotten about it. 

Entirely.

When I saw the comments on Donut in a Corn Outfit. 

He's sick now. 

Dying.

I love him very much.

And there are all these people that, while worried about me, learned he existed.

Loved him, just for a little bit. 

And that will continue to happen long after he's gone.

Maybe after I'm gone.

The copy pasta swirls and spirals and flows through so many people. And sometimes.

Just sometimes.

It takes root. 

It blossoms into obsession and the person has to figure out who I am. Who I was.

In some ways I am very much still that endlessly chatty, weird person who wants to make games.

In some ways I look at them and see a Stranger. 

All of us change. All the time. 

But isn't it so relieving to know we are remembered just the same?

I'm not dead, no matter what the people in that video comment thread feared.

But "eon337" very much is. 

No matter how much the Cultist tries to spread the account name. 

Or perhaps the Cultist IS eon337 now, since I no longer am?

What even are names?

I don't even know if I ever mentioned why that user name?

Because I liked the matrix and I liked pokemon and I thought it was SO cool that Neo had a simple handle like that and it was an anagram of "one" (as in The One), and I realized all eveelutions ended in "eon". 

So I chose an anagram of Neo that tied into my favorite pokemon line. 

And then it was, quite obviously, taken on neopets. 

So, they suggested I put some numbers after it, and 337 was part of l337, which I was obssessed with because of the webcomic MegaTokyo.

I think fandom has been in my bones as long as I've been me. 

I just. 

Fandom was very much a solitary experience for me. 

I didn't talk to people about my interests. There was no one who shared them, not even in my family. 

And when I started to be online, I slowly made friends on neopets, but still, I talked so much alone on my website. 

Because in middle school, years before I had the internet, a teacher took me aside and told me I was annoying.

No one wanted to hear my endless stories about my pet rabbit or my excited rambles about whatever had my attention at that time.

And something in me just. 

Shut down.

I was just happy. Why was that annoying?

I didn't understand what I was doing *wrong*, so I just stopped *doing*. 

So by the time I had the internet I was massively lonely.

I had just moved, too. Three days before I started high school. 

Freshman year I learned how to code websites, I'm pretty sure. Maybe sophmore?

But it changed everything. 

I was starting to make real life friends, as you can obviously tell by my guest writers in the LTE. 

But still, I kept so much inside because "annoying" was rattling around in my head. 

And the internet was such a great outlet to be myself, unfiltered.

I either never stumbled into fandom spaces or just... Never *wanted* to engage with other people.

Let me monologue in my little safe space and then I'd get it out of my system and when I saw other people I could just. Be quiet. Listen. 

Not be annoying.

When I found the forums on Neopets I remember being scared. Part stranger danger part... Well. I mean. I was Annoying. 

I didn't want to bother anyone.

But eventually I started to feel a bit like I belonged. Made friends. Made a guild. 

It was nice. 

I stopped updating the site some time in college. 

Partly because I was running out of free time. 

Partly because I felt less like I needed that outlet. 

Partly because something during college traumatized me in ways I won't go into here. 

It took a few years out of college for me to start having the energy to create again. 

But I wasn't trying to share it with anyone. 

With flaming chickens, when I discovered how to program quizzes I loved posting them on quiz sharing sites. 

I loved watching them spread virally. 

Its the main source of that site's popularity. 

With the new things I was creating, it was just. Well. For me. For my friends. 

Little experiments and ideas. 

Things I could do to grow my skills for work. 

And then SBURBSim happened.

And. 

Well. 

I was dragged kicking and screaming back into the light. 

And I'd forgotten how much I missed it. 

How much I missed rambling in a place that was somehow both private and destined to, one day, be found. 


How much I missed...the feeling of BELONGING I got from creating something that made people feel connected.

I gave too much of myself to that feeling, and that's why the farrago fiction discord ended up with me burning out.

Zampanio is me experimenting. 

How much of myself can I give over to that feeling without falling to it.

How distant can I be and still feel the tingle of obsessive devotion to belonging?

So I lurk in the image names and the screenshots and the hidden passages of the obvious bits of game and not game. 

I give myself rules and I follow them, yes for the bit, but also to keep that distance.


But it's a trap, don't you see?

Because by definition, by making myself harder to reach... aren't I MORE connected to those who do?

My two and a half followers...

Isn't it more special to find a connection in the backrooms of some website than to have it screamed at you on the home page of the internet?

And I DO mean backrooms.

Put aside entirely the creepy pasta meme: do you FEEL like you're in the customer facing part of a website right now?

Are you supposed to be here?

And yet...

You find signs you were expected.

Signs you're welcome, even.

You read the source code and find little messages, little requests to connect. 

You told you're good and valid and CORRECT for being there. 

You wander the file system and find comfort and friendship.

What IS my branch of Zampanio but a creepy pasta inverted.  Backgrooms not INHOSPITIABLE to life but with frequent hydration breaks and messages of care. 

And I do care. 

I can't care about you as a person. You AREN'T a person, not to me. I'm sitting here, alone, in a room, exhausted from preparing to move and it might be days/weeks/months/YEARS before you read these words. 

You are a hypothetical reader, someone obsessed enough to find this and hopefully temperent enough to not keep going even if it hurts. To rest. 

How could I not care about someone who clearly cares about the things I create?

But that itself is a trap, isn't it? Parasocial, for both sides?  That way leads to my own burn out, and encourages the scarier behaviors I saw on Farrago. Stalking and the like. 

So how do both sides balance the obsession and the desire to connect?

Maybe it's best then, to practice the Death of the Author.

I wasn't dead in that Donut in a Corn Outfit video. 

I'm not dead now.

But one day I will be. 

And perhaps one day there will still people stumbling into my own version of the backrooms. 

So I can think of you, hypothetical reader, as some far future person, with only this chance to connect. 

And you can think of me as infinitely distant, reachable only in the past, in the words I left behind, but with no way to reach who I currently am.


The Longest Text Ever was an exercise in word vomit. Write as much in one space as I can, till the sheer tide of words keeps all but the most dedicated away. 

What I do now is equal and opposite: words scattered to the winds. A snippet here, a fragment there, requiring you to care enough to find them, to assemble them.

But in hiding them, I make them easier to value. Easier to seem special.

There's a reason I love the Twins so much. Obscuring Knowledge through an excess of it and Focusing Knowledge though hiding it are such fun things to do.

So. 

Remember me, Hypothetical Reader.

Spread me how you can. 

And in exchange, I leave behind, as best I can, a framework in which you yourself can be remembered. 

Create Zampanio and those following my trail will find you, too. And they will remember you.