I wrote most of this up a week or two ago, and lost all of it when the page accidentally refreshed, and was too frustrated to write it all out again. I've made a few of my points obliquely in the Grid itself, or the Gridpoem text, but I'll try to sum it up here in straightforwardishly full sentences, again.

First, I'm beyond thrilled that Gridcosm has been the most active that it's been in years. Perhaps ever, at least in pieces/levels per day, if not in variety of articipants. In the last month or so, since my most recent return from hiatus, there's been only contributions from 12 unique SITOIDs, though a few of them only added to a level or two, and I'm not convinced that all the new players are in fact distinct individuals, given the lack of any real identifying information on their profile pages.

That's another conversation though. As I said, I'm thrilled that the Grid has been active. While the specifics of a level can be at times frustrating, Gridcosm is only really fun when it's active. And, there's been some great stuff happening. I am, if it's not painfully obvious from my contributions themselves, an unabashed blendist, and there's been some nice blendy happening. Also some (and this is my own personal judgement, based on my own personal preferences) lazy quilting, but that goes with the territory.

What I really don't like though, is the horrible misuse of the level tagging functionality. Uploading some crap squares to a handful of levels quickly gets lost to time. That's the way the Cosm works. But tags are metadata that is not linear in that way. By filling up the tags with unrelated nots, useless spam, and links to YouTube videos (none of which I will EVER visit, by the way, I'll just assume their all RIckrolls and be done with it) destroys the usefulness of the whole tagging system. Gridcosm is big and unwieldy and if I want to find an old level that I remember a specific feature or two of, the tags are invaluable. If they're filled with crap, not so much.

To a smaller degree that goes for this discussion forum.

Add your pointless crap in the gridpoem text. (Although I prefer when that reads in an exquisite corpse esque textual blendiness as well.)

And get off my lawn.

No but really, come over this weekend. We'll grill up some veggie burgers and maybe try and dig the croquet set out from the back of the closet.