Christine’s reflections got me looking at my own archive. There’s only a week of functioning Hi.co left, so if you haven’t grabbed your archives, do it now. (Under account > Export.)

I’m going to miss this place. It’s been a strange place, indeed. And looking back at my archives I realize I haven’t written nearly as much as I thought I would have. Part of the problem is I’m slow — I’m a very slow writer. And part of it is stage fright, certainly. Over the years I sketched loads, but in the end, only extended a few dozen posts. I’ve never been a daily blogger, and not even Hi.co could change that about my writing habits.

Those moments I did extend are mostly unlike anything I’ve written anywhere else. I’m going to miss that — the weird permission that came with Hi.co and the community here. That the community was small made the stage feel more intimate, and from that, a bit more forgiving. So while I didn’t write hundreds of thousands of words, I wrote more than I would have otherwise. And for that I’m grateful.

Just a week left. I always wanted to build a writing platform, truth be told. I started building one in 1998 using Perl. It took a long time for something like Hi.co to emerge, and perhaps it emerged far too late. Maybe there was a business or sale had Hi.co been launched ten years earlier. But that’s OK. Being Blogger was not the destiny of this site. This place was the manifestation of an old, weird dream, and Hi.co, too, took on the texture of a weird dream. Floaty and outside the norms of Silicon Valley, existing for its own tiny sake, beholden to no real outside expectations, growing as it grew, finally, until it closes in a few days.

My final hi.co moment in New York. Back to Tokyo tomorrow. Will finish this on a mountain somewhere in the middle of Japan.