Sucks

It rises above the landscape like a virtual city.

Its forums spiral up, from the sea of electrons, towering into the sky like skyscrapers from the coastal islands.

Its threads are teeming, pulsing with life, in every corner, every post, like the crowded thoroughfares of the modern metropolis.

It greets you each morning as you open your window, just as the city greets you as you open your window. It welcomes you with the logo, and the title, and the faces of the demons, cursed and sacrificed on the altar.

The clarinet takes up the song. Rhapsody in Blue.

It is the New York of the Internet.

The pictures adapt to fit each season, yet the simple, practical straight lines never curve, the fonts remain default, the javascript goes unused. Unforgiving to art, to aesthetics, it sits defiantly amongst the rebellious ezboards, a metal slide in a playground of plastic.

But still it changes, and the poster who returns after six months will not recognize the forum he grew up in. The old is paved over, washed away; this is the way of things, the lifeblood of the virtual city.

In the suburbs, posters awaken in their splinterboards and commute to the mother land, the central hub of commerce and culture. They meet here, mingle here, admin and newbie, spoiler and spammer, drawn here, drawn here day after day after day.

It is bursting with life. I lurk in a forum and watch the people. All sorts of people. The bumper finds another thread to which he can attach his name. The troll discovers a new wound to open. An ocean of humanity, all anonymous, all adrift in cyberspace but tethered to the same raft.

Day after day they come.

Citizens of the virtual city.