i contacted sujoy about buying the site, telling some of my friends it kind of feels like a mid-life crisis motorcycle purchase. sujoy offered a very fair exchange of allowing me the site identity, code, data, etc., in exchange for maintaining this site in appreciation of the community. we were both on the same page in that regard.

this site played a large role in my intellectual development. i was challenged, through arguments with smart and dumb people around the world, to prove myself argumentatively. i threw my personal identity and home addresses out like candy, brazenly daring the internet to find and kill me (please). i absorbed lessons about the nature of power and how human beings handle it that i would later read about by authors such as jouvenal, aristotle, skinner, etc. i watched charged personalities accelerated into the wall of community disdain, to explode into particles whose energies altered the direction of interactions for days, weeks, and months.

i've also been strongly negatively impacted by this site. i've been banned for exposing hidden corruption, i've been chastised for calling out well-loved users who used their power to secretly alter other users' content with no accountability, i've been hated for being a blatant asshole with no consideration for people i made no effort to understand or empathize with, and i've been criticized by others just as strongly for the audacity i've shown in making attempts at creative expression.

there's so much more than that, but i'll avoid getting too distracted from the general point i want to make.

i have some short-term quality of life and general improvement goals for esreality.com as a site, and some long-term goals for Excess Reality LLC as a company.

the short-term goals:
1. fix and improve the twitch stream sidebox - i'd like to first assess the state (what's working, what isn't), research and estimate the work required to update the codebase, then decide whether to update the existing code or perhaps roll out something new as a base for number 2.
2. allow users to manage their own lists of twitch streamers, rather than relying on an admin to manage a universal list for all users. this is a very low priority, as twitch provides mechanisms for notification of stream activity, but it is useful for users who don't have twitch accounts or maybe find having a less ostentatious source for updates is easier to handle.
3. update the user interface to be a bit more mobile friendly. nothing crazy, just enough to make browsing on a phone less tedious.
4. update the navigation & some of the content link boxes. articles haven't been posted in years, and are a somewhat antiquated format. esreality isn't currently a content creator, it's a bit of a community aggregator, and so i'd like to lean into that strength a bit by giving the community content better visibility, and de-emphasizing some of the stagnant feature content.
5. privacy updates - gdpr and ccpa, as much as i disagree with the rigorous structure of them, have become pretty big deals. they're a threat to people who just want to run web sites like esreality.com easily. however, giving a shit about user privacy and user preference toward how data they create is treated is morally correct. my goal here is to give users tools to mask their identities & content, to request data related to their accounts, to delete their accounts, and to never have to worry about their data or any behaviors being tracked, monitored, or distributed for any reason other than furthering the security of the site. this is a big task, and requires thorough review of esreality.com legal language, and european & californian statutes and codes.

these are general quality of life changes that can improve the site experience a lot, without changing things too radically.

the long-term goals:

excess reality llc owns the digital properties & assets of the site. my ultimate goal is to build a new platform that takes the core identity of esreality.com (gaming, life, community participation, discussion, passion, etc.) and frames it in modern technologies with some modern web app conventions, as well as a few ideas i believe are innovative and solve a lot of problems with how people holding disparate and antagonistic ideas can live and function in the same universe without constantly driving each other crazy.

i think there could be some opportunity for monetization, but it's not a focus for me. if anything, that could look like dumb ads sold to companies through classic human conversational business, rather than targeted ads employed via algorithm. i have pretty strong opinions on the impact that ads and things have on user experiences, and on the general moral basis for their presentation. like i said, it's not a goal or focus, just a potential. another avenue for monetization could be game server hosting, but that's a huge undertaking and definitely not one i'm interested in pursuing in my current state.

assuming this project becomes a reality, and is publicly released, i will archive esreality.com in a read-only state & preserve it for as long as i am financially, mentally, physically, and spiritually capable, as a tribute to what sujoy built.

all i have left to say is that i hope i do it well.