Hey all.
I don't believe I'll be interacting or posting here much (although you never know). I just wanted to introduce myself. I maintain the site at "ashspace.org" which archives some older suicide resources from the net, going back to the 1990s. Yeah, I'm old now.
I guess I was never all sunshine and kittens. Something happened in the late '90s that hurt me a lot and I wound up on alt.suicide.holiday, the old "ash" newsgroup, and thence a couple of other related places like IRC chat channels. It was (and is) important to me that there was a space where people could actually discuss death, the potential of death, and the meaning of death, and the desire for death, without being automatically shouted down for being negative, or nihilistic (so what!), or attention-seeking, or whatever; and in fact to make meaningful connections with other people with the same ideas -- whether that might end in dying or in living.
In 2001 I was hospitalised and had some interesting times in the psych ward. And since then a lot has changed... I haven't really interacted with the ash community since about 2010, and I don't urgently want to die every day, but certainly something died inside me and it's just a long cycle of bullshit and I spend as much of my time sleeping as I can manage. -- However, it's 2023 and I'm not dead. Biologically.
The "ashspace" site hasn't really been touched in over a decade. It's pretty retro stuff, it doesn't look beautiful, but it's history, and there are some people's pages there whom I knew well and miss very deeply, to the point that my eyes wrinkle as I write this. This stuff is preserved I suppose partly because "look what our community used to be" but really because it represents people's thoughts. The same thoughts that maybe can't be expressed in other places. And about which I occasionally receive a lone e-mail saying "X's pages meant a lot to me", and wish I could say more than "me too".
One thing that has changed, in general, about the Web, is that people used to make "home pages" by default. You'd get online and make your pages. This doesn't really happen any more (sadly): that form of creativity has been basically usurped by social media, where you're not sure if you even own the stuff you write, or if it will be shown or hidden from others, etc. So the old promise of "preserving home pages of ashers" doesn't mean much any more. Still. If there's something personal to be kept, then there is space for it. (I'll be updating the site some time soon, between sleeping and blahing, and I will of course add a link to this forum -- I wanted to sign up partly to verify that this place represented what I always understood ash to be. And it seems to do so.)
Enough outta me. I didn't want to create an account and never post (that is infinitely suspicious), and I also wanted to drop the reminder that there's an archive out there, in the event that anyone still has Web pages, poems, ideas, or who knows what that are left behind. And I own none of it. I have just tried to collect it together. Re-archive my archive, I don't care.
Thanks for listening. And thanks to the people who are still running places like this, because Lethe knows we need them. (It's been a long time since IRC, but I think I can recognise at least two of the moderators from the user names.)
I don't believe I'll be interacting or posting here much (although you never know). I just wanted to introduce myself. I maintain the site at "ashspace.org" which archives some older suicide resources from the net, going back to the 1990s. Yeah, I'm old now.
I guess I was never all sunshine and kittens. Something happened in the late '90s that hurt me a lot and I wound up on alt.suicide.holiday, the old "ash" newsgroup, and thence a couple of other related places like IRC chat channels. It was (and is) important to me that there was a space where people could actually discuss death, the potential of death, and the meaning of death, and the desire for death, without being automatically shouted down for being negative, or nihilistic (so what!), or attention-seeking, or whatever; and in fact to make meaningful connections with other people with the same ideas -- whether that might end in dying or in living.
In 2001 I was hospitalised and had some interesting times in the psych ward. And since then a lot has changed... I haven't really interacted with the ash community since about 2010, and I don't urgently want to die every day, but certainly something died inside me and it's just a long cycle of bullshit and I spend as much of my time sleeping as I can manage. -- However, it's 2023 and I'm not dead. Biologically.
The "ashspace" site hasn't really been touched in over a decade. It's pretty retro stuff, it doesn't look beautiful, but it's history, and there are some people's pages there whom I knew well and miss very deeply, to the point that my eyes wrinkle as I write this. This stuff is preserved I suppose partly because "look what our community used to be" but really because it represents people's thoughts. The same thoughts that maybe can't be expressed in other places. And about which I occasionally receive a lone e-mail saying "X's pages meant a lot to me", and wish I could say more than "me too".
One thing that has changed, in general, about the Web, is that people used to make "home pages" by default. You'd get online and make your pages. This doesn't really happen any more (sadly): that form of creativity has been basically usurped by social media, where you're not sure if you even own the stuff you write, or if it will be shown or hidden from others, etc. So the old promise of "preserving home pages of ashers" doesn't mean much any more. Still. If there's something personal to be kept, then there is space for it. (I'll be updating the site some time soon, between sleeping and blahing, and I will of course add a link to this forum -- I wanted to sign up partly to verify that this place represented what I always understood ash to be. And it seems to do so.)
Enough outta me. I didn't want to create an account and never post (that is infinitely suspicious), and I also wanted to drop the reminder that there's an archive out there, in the event that anyone still has Web pages, poems, ideas, or who knows what that are left behind. And I own none of it. I have just tried to collect it together. Re-archive my archive, I don't care.
Thanks for listening. And thanks to the people who are still running places like this, because Lethe knows we need them. (It's been a long time since IRC, but I think I can recognise at least two of the moderators from the user names.)
