Ten Years Later
A eulogy on @quixol, my place in its community, and the future.
What follows is a rambling piece on Quixol, on the day of its 10th anniversary. There will also be a considerable amount of musings on my personal life, both now and in the past. Please forgive me if the writing is scattershot or meandering, I have not written anything like this in a long time.
I see the player you mean.
Many people reading this may be in the dark as to what this post is even about, so let me catch you up to speed.
A decade ago today, I started a new Minecraft server- and community- called Quixol, or QuixolMC. The premise was simple- a trans-inclusive space for people to play survival Minecraft together. In reality, it was me building my own digital safe haven- I've talked about this in the past.
You could also say that it was a minecraft server for my friend group, that other people were also allowed in on... It was a public space, yes, but the culture that Quixol's staff (my friends and I) cultivated had a very obvious effect upon the type of community Quixol actually was- even leading to some (rare) situations where people were actively pushed out if their vibes didn't match ours. The height of Quixol was around 2016-2019, after all- and as a space borne from tumblr in that era, particularly from a bunch of mentally ill trans kids, you can imagine the sort of environment that was. This is not meant disparagingly, only to set the scene as it were- obviously, I was one of those mentally ill trans kids! (Note: I'm using "kids" here loosely; most of us were adults at the time... Just, very young, 18-20ish.)
Most notably, there were a number of staff members on Quixol over the years whose presence proved to be caustic to the community, eventually leading to their removal. I've even made a post going into more detail about this in the past, though I've never said publicly who those moderators even were. At this point, it all happened so long ago that it would be meaningless to specify which mods we took action on for abusing moderator privileges. Any sort of disdain I may have held for former Quixol players for any reason is little more than a hesitation in my mind now. There's been years for everyone involved to grow, change, and truly mature. None of us are the same people we were then.
To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere.
Change is a gradual thing. As the years go by, we learn from our past, from our everyday. We grow. We make new friends. We find new hobbies. We find love. These things change us. It's these new experiences that truly shape us- that's something that can be easy to overlook. Time alone is not enough to change one's outlook. A girl who sits on her computer all day, doing the same thing day in and day out, does not grow into a different woman. It's the change in scenery, circumstances, and livelihood that causes this. That's something I didn't truly understand until now.
And it is, in some ways, a lesson I am still learning. My life has always been largely sedentary; marked by brief periods of volatility where great change happens all at once. Dramatic upheavals to the once mundane. But things settle, and I ease into old habits. Perhaps it's not such a bad life, but then it's not one that foments change readily.
If you actually go back and read the retrospectives on Quixol I linked earlier, you'll begin to notice a few things. For one thing, they largely skewed pessimistic. I wrote them at a time of my life that I wasn't very hopeful. I felt deeply alone, betrayed, and hurt. It took a long time for me to heal from the wound of losing my "home" in Quixol- of losing those precious friendships I had formed there.
Another thing you will notice is how frequently I express worries about what former Quixol players, former Quixol staff may think, or about the perception of the server as a whole. My old personal posts are bristling with this sort of anxious energy, constantly imagining a new guy that's mad at me.
This sort of obsessive behavior is... Something I still deal with, unfortunately- but it's something I am incredibly familiar with, too. A number of things have changed in my life over the past few years that have allowed me to deal with this particularly maddening facet of my mentally ill brainscape in a way I wasn't able to before. For one thing, therapy- but also a healthy-ish home environment, and a loving and supportive girlfriend. (Hi Rose <3)
It's obvious to me now that this sort of frenetic worrying must have put those around me on guard, even if it was unintentional. The people who cared about me would have found it difficult indeed to approach me with any concerns they have- how can you hope to communicate about a misgiving if it'll only cause a branching tree of anxiety in me nearly every time? Of course, even now, I'm doing the very thing I'm criticizing- how can I truly know what anyone thinks unless they tell me? This is what I say to myself whenever this thought process rears its ugly head again. It helps.
All this to say, I have actually grown since my last look back on Quixol. I may have said it at the time that I'd grown and changed, but I hadn't, not really. 2020 was one of the worst years of my life- my grandmother passed away, I was stuck in a stifling & nigh-abusive household, I had just got out of an abusive relationship, I lost most of my closest friends, oh I wonder if anything else bad happened in 2020... hmm... I wonder...
...Suffice to say, it took me a long time to heal from the wounds to my soul I took that year. Anything I may have said before like 2023 or so about getting better was kind of an exaggeration. Even now, I'm pretty fucked up- look at the world around us, who isn't? But I have grown. Maybe I still live that sedentary life of a shut-in, but I've absolutely learned from my past. I don't feel like a kid anymore. I feel like... an adult who is still trying to figure things out. But an adult nonetheless. Maybe I develop slower than others, but whatever. I am who I am. And no amount of fretting or trying to mold myself into a different shape to please the most amount of people possible is going to change that. So why not just be me?
Too strong for this dream. To tell them how to live is to prevent them living.
Quixol isn't the first Minecraft server I started- far from it. (If you remember Proteancraft, Marimocraft, or even "MultiMC", you qualify for senior benefits.) It just happens to be the one with the greatest legacy. And it's that legacy I want to enshrine here, without any of the nervous "but" statements of someone unwilling to stand for anything- even her past, imperfect, self.
What I did- what we did- with Quixol was nothing short of incredible. Over the course of five years, my friends and I crafted a safe haven like no other for our little corner of the internet. And it was well and truly ours. A digital space where we didn't have to worry ourselves about prying eyes, where we could just be our authentic selves. Anyone could be as autistic and gay and terminally online as they wanted there, it was wonderful. Was the environment of late-2010s tumblr a bit stifling at times? Sure, but that was more of a wider cultural thing that we just found ourselves mired within. There are countless people who have told me that Quixol allowed them a space to really discover themselves, to realize they are trans, to find community with others on the spectrum and even find love.
Even putting aside the topic of community, holy hell, we made some insanely creative things on Quixol. It would take hours for me to rattle off all of the "official" builds we've worked on, and I could spend days highlighting all of the amazing things people built on their own in survival. Some examples include the full-scale city of Orsus, the spawnpoint for the server, featuring countless secrets and even hidden lore written by yours truly. Then of course there's the market area, with an ingenious layout that allows for maximum floorspace while also providing an even view and relatively equidistant travel to every shop- also complete with secrets and hidden lore...! And, of course, possibly our greatest build, the breathtaking Chroma Park, a full-scale theme park with ACTUAL RIDES and minigames, built and designed by the entire Quixol community. And that's just the builds on our most recent world, Ghalea- there are years of builds on our old world Protos, as well as the original world from 1.8-1.9 that's now lost to the sands of time. There's plenty more I haven't mentioned, too, like the Tutorial in the sky that quickly gets you up to speed on how playing on the server actually works, serving you pretty views without distracting too much from its function. I could go on and on...
I would also be remiss not to mention what I'm personally proudest of on Quixol- our custom scripts that handle everything from setting your pronouns to literally handling the entire chat system for the server! I used a plugin called Skript to literally write thousands of lines of code without ever really learning Java. The result is actually a pretty unique experience, fine-tuned for the exact sort of survival minecraft that scratches my particular itch- and clearly, lots of other peoples', as well.
We also hosted countless events and parties on the server, including watch parties in our discord hosted by various staff, or listening to music together on websites like plug.dj. There was always something going on, keeping the community engaged- it was truly a special place, and it meant the world to me.
I hope that my passion and love for Quixol is coming through with my words now. It truly was my life, and I sacrificed a lot to make it what it was. Although I have a lot of regrets about my life, I don't regret dedicating so much to making Quixol something special. It was a special comfort to those who called it home, and I couldn't be prouder to have been admin.
Once upon a time, there was a player.
Of course, I'm not the only one who made Quixol what it is. There are dozens of people that contributed to the server in a major way over the years, and it would be difficult to go over everyone. Of course, some of these people ended up causing a lot of harm in their tenure on the server- or even just in peoples' personal lives- while others were merely holdovers from some of those older servers that I ran. There's a lot of prickly feelings that make me hesitant to name everyone that was ever involved, not least of which is the fact I haven't really told anyone I'm typing this post.
Still. There were many hands that took part in building Quixol, and I think it's a shame that we have had to erase that over time. Whenever we removed someone from Quixol's staff, the act often involved completely erasing their contributions to the server, up to and including replacing or destroying their builds entirely from prominent locations. I think it was out of a sense of shame, or awkwardness, or even anger. But it's something that leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, even if at times I feel it was warranted.
In the interest of righting what I see as a wrong of the past... Anyone that was a past contributor to Quixol in some way, is welcome to reply to this post. You can say whatever you like, kind or unkind- just know that a great many people may end up reading it. I also want you to know that your contributions mattered. The good and the bad.
If you're one of those people that hurt others during your time on Quixol- I won't say you're forgiven outright. But I will say this- it was a long time ago. There is no one I knew from back then that I wouldn't at least talk to now. We're adults, we can talk about things. Anniversaries are for reminiscing about the past, are they not? So, let's talk.
It would, of course, be presumptuous of me to suggest that I wouldn't have a lot to answer for myself, to friends I knew at the time. There's plenty I could- and should- apologize for. Maybe I'll even work up the courage to reach out to people to do so after I'm done writing this post? I wanted to do so before the day came, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Confronting people that way is really difficult. Some people want things to stay in the past, after all... How could I presume they'd want to hear from me at all? Well, there's only one way to know. We'll see.
Sometimes the player dreamed it was lost in a story.
Quixol's history goes back quite far- farther than you might expect. If you think you know the whole story, I promise you that you probably don't. As I alluded to previously, there were several servers that I ran, or helped run, that preceded the creation of Quixol. Each of these servers helped me- and my friends at the time- form a well-rounded idea of what we wanted out of a minecraft server, out of a community.
"MultiMC" is the oldest of these. I believe it was started in either 2012 or 2013, I don't entirely remember. The old posts about it are currently in limbo, because tumblr staff suspended my old account for some unknown reason. (I'll work on this later. Maybe I can dig up the posts eventually. I'll mention this in a reply if I do.) If I remember right, MultiMC was a whitelisted server with a small handful of plugins like mcmmo, factions, etc... It was heavily inspired by an even older server that I had a faction on with friends- Modesty. It ran for probably under a year and not many people would remember it now.
Marimocraft came after- on new years day, 2014. I started it as a coleader with someone who I only remember as Shibe now. It lasted for a while, but my tenure there was short-lived due to a disagreement I had with the rest of the staff there. It was basically a larger-scale version of MultiMC, a properly public server that had a pretty large capacity and some new plugins. Some people out there will remember this server fondly.
Proteancraft was started after I was banned from Marimocraft. In many ways, Proteancraft was the true precursor to Quixol. It featured most of the same plugins and had essentially the same sort of layout and structure as Quixol, to the point that a lot of Quixol's earliest staff were holdovers of the staff from here. Of course, there was a large falling out I had with a big chunk of the playerbase at the time that led to the decision to start anew. It ran from summer 2014 to summer 2015, roughly a year.
Which leads us to Quixol. November 16th, 2015 is the date that Quixol's "closed beta" began, though it had been in planning since September that year. As Quixol was still invite-only at this time, not many people remember that the server began in 2015. The server only really began to take shape during its "open beta" period, starting on December 18th, 2015. But, I think what most people will remember of Quixol's early days is June 18th, 2016- the day Quixol went public. The server really bloomed that day- it's also the same day we unveiled the iconic spawn city, Orsus. This is why most people associate Quixol with 2016, it's when things started truly popping off. But its origins began on this day, ten years ago.
You are the player. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love.
It's at this part of the blog post that I feel I need to mention someone that is crucial to the story of Quixol as a whole- someone that I can honestly say, Quixol would not exist without.
Let me begin by explaining- I'm unemployed. I get government benefits, but I've never really had an actual job, and when I first felt that burning desire to start my own Minecraft server, I had no money with which to host one. Luckily, though, one of the people in my Faction on the old Modesty server had the means to host one.
If it weren't for Ruslan, I never would have started on this journey all those years ago.
Many of you reading this may not even know their name, but Ruslan was the co-owner with me on MultiMC and Proteancraft, and technically Quixol in its early years as well. When I had no means of paying for the servers, they paid to keep them up. When we took donations to fund server upkeep, it was Ruslan who handled those donations and kept the server alive. For the first two years of the server's existence, Quixol depended on Ruslan. I depended on them.
They were never actually a very active player on Quixol- honestly, I think they may have been too busy to play much Minecraft, I'm not really sure. I played with them a lot more in those old days, on Modesty, and on the MultiMC server we started up together. They were only ever kind to me- friendly and funny.
I wish there were more I could tell you about Ruslan. I never got a chance to know them very well, and it's something I deeply regret. I learned from a friend of theirs that they passed away in 2019.
It's hard to really know what to say here. There are tears in my eyes as I type this... I'm so eternally grateful for the kindness Ruslan showed me, offering to help host servers for me even after they no longer played minecraft. They really didn't have to, but they could, and so they did because they knew it made a lot of people very happy. How incredibly kind. It's that kindness that I remember most of all. Thank you, Ruslan. I'm sorry I never expressed my gratitude enough in your life. I'm sorry I never became a better friend to you. I hope you know peace now.
...
You. You. You are alive.
It may sound cliché, but I like to think that Ruslan's kindness lives on with us. With everyone that called Quixol home. With everyone that has pleasant memories of goofing off together, listening to music with one another, building farms and cities and aquariums and pixels. Think of all the people you may have never met, or the songs you may have never discovered, or the games you never would have played if not for a recommendation.
Think of the laughs you shared, of the thrill of fighting the ender dragon, of the feeling of satisfaction looking out over your creation. True, you could have experienced this on any other server, or even singleplayer. But... There's something unique about Quixol. Something that I think all of us have taken with us. Kindness built that.
It's that kindness that I hope everyone reading this takes away from this post. It's that sort of kindness that lets people know there's something worth living for. It's a kindness I only wish I had thought to share with more people, sooner.
In a world marred by unfathomable cruelty, you are alive. You cannot change the world. But you can change one person's day. Do something kind for them, something that they will remember and smile about. Even something seemingly small and insignificant can change far more than you realize. So... be kind. you are alive. You are alive. You are alive.
and the universe said I love you
Quixol's legacy means more to me than I can convey with words. It touched countless people, improved so many lives. How could I possibly look back on it with disdain, or embarrassment? Together with my friends, I created something wonderful. Both for others, and myself. That work, that effort, had meaning. A deep, resounding meaning.
The earth formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Primates first evolved around 60 million years ago. Human beings, only 100,000 years ago. Our lives are but a drop in an ocean compared to that! Life is too short to give a damn about being embarrassing.
I love Quixol. I love the time I spent there. I love the friends I made, the jokes we shared, the music we jammed to, the builds we made together. I love myself. I love my girlfriend. I love the Earth. I love the universe.
and the universe said you are stronger than you know
I was so very, deeply mentally ill when Quixol was in its heyday. Suicidal ideation was something I experienced weekly, if not more. I felt I had no prospects in my life, being a high school dropout. That nobody would remember me if I died. Suffice to say, I'm still here, ten years later.
I'm still fucked up, I'm still mentally ill. But I want to live. I want to live for my girlfriend, my friends, my parents, my cat. I want to live so I can write to you, so I can make dumb little drawings, so I can listen to music, so I can play Deltarune. I want to live so I can learn about the stars and black holes and quarks and muons. I want to live so I can watch Godzilla movies. I want to live so I can eat a greasy burrito with verde salsa. I want to live so I get to see what comes next.
If nothing else, Quixol gave me that. The will to live. Thank you all.
and the universe said you are not alone
Did this post make you feel things? I felt a lot of things writing it. I've cried a lot. Today is important to me. Talk to me about it. Talk to each other about it. Post about it, if you want. It's worth remembering- at least, I think so. Maybe I'm the only one who feels this strongly... But, I know for a fact that others still hold a place for Quixol in their hearts. You aren't the only one.
I hope to post more about Quixol in the future. Retrospectives on all the little details and nuances. I'd like to answer questions about it, if anyone has any. After all, the 10-year anniversary only begins today. Perhaps we can give a proper sendoff to the server on the ten-year anniversary of it going public, who knows.
If we do ever host any get-together on the server again, I think it would have to be after Microsoft decides to be less evil. For those unaware- Microsoft is on the official BDS boycott list, with Minecraft mentioned as one of the games you should boycott. It's unclear what this means for people that already own Minecraft, but suffice to say that intentionally drumming up an event that could increase player counts is something that I feel is not in the spirit of the boycott. You are not alone in your anger.
...It's hard to believe I went this long without mentioning this, but the Quixol Minecraft server is actually still live, and able to be connected to as of this moment. It's been inactive for years, of course, and is on the now years-outdated version of 1.15.2... But, it's still around- I never had the guts to truly pull the plug. (Special mention here of the scare I had in 2021 when I found out that the datacenter Quixol is hosted on literally caught fire.)
If you do want to walk down memory lane, the server is right there- as is our discord server. You do not have to walk alone.
and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code
I realize that this post may not have the reception I hope. Perhaps people will be annoyed with me for babbling about such a personal part of their former lives again. After all, I seem to be the only one ever writing these long retrospectives... (That I know of, anyway.)
But, again, what else can I do? It's something I dedicated my life to. Everyone reading this has their own perception, their own thoughts, their own experiences tied to Quixol. Some people reading this never even knew it existed before clicking on this post. Maybe you had a different Minecraft server that meant the world to you, as Quixol did to me. I wouldn't mind hearing about that, too.
On this day of memories, I am speaking unto the universe, and unto myself. You are the universe, and I am too.
and the universe said I love you because you are love.
Thank you for reading this far. I poured my heart into this post. Do you feel it? It's beating in your hand right now. Yuck. It's full of love. How revoltingly sweet.
Starting today, I want to write, draw, code, or create something every week. I also want to watch or play or listen to or learn something new each week. I have been letting my life stagnate for far too long. My soul burns, as it ever has. But that raging inferno has been reduced to mere smolders in the past few years. Perhaps as a part of my healing, I grew complacent? Perhaps I thought I could get by without creating... No, no. I must create. We all must. It is imperative.
Not with prompts or "AI", but with pen and paper, tablet and stylus. It does not have to be good. Everyone always says this. But it's true. Agonizingly true. The pain from creating is a part of it. It doesn't have to be anything grand. Something as simple as a stick figure drawing will do. Something, anything. Every week. Do not let the fire of your soul burn out. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Creating is an act of love. Love for yourself, love for the universe. Love for love's sake. Keep on creating. i love you. be well.
free Palestine. trans rights forever. we are going to win.
-Vivian
P.S., thank you Julian Gough for making Minecraft's End Poem public domain.
