The Batpham

Nostalgia has it's pros and cons. The pros are that it can bring back great and fun memories that you have temporarily forgotten about, but through certain stimuli, you've re-enabled the memory in your head. The cons are that sometimes it happens a bit too soon and there's a level of it being bittersweet.

Now, if you notice by the title of the post, you might be able to piece together that I'm referencing what I call the best friend group I have ever had in my 20 years of life. Okay sure, you can't exactly make friends in your first few years unless your parents say "oh yeah, you always hung out with so and so" but in reality that is just because you tagged along with your parents since you were too young to be left at home. The point being, I've had some friend groups, some better than others (because I have had groups of who I thought were friends but led into a series of years of bullying that made my life rough in a sense). I've had groups that I've learned a lot, fell down a bit in growth, but ultimately had a good time with. And that leads to my most recent friend group, the Batpham.

A bit of establishing details (in case you're only just joining us now), the Batpham was started because I was the Liberty Batman (whether or not I still am the Batman is another story for another time). I had found people who had followed the account to take up a role as the Red Hood, and then later a Nightwing. Since these are all characters of the "Batfamily", it would only make sense to have a group chat for this, as well as make friends with these people I was inviting to become admins of the Batman account, just for fun's sake. Later, I would find someone who would become the Spoiler, and the Orphan, to then have an Azrael, and finally a Batgirl. Or maybe the other way around on the last two. The point being I had taken people who I had known, or people who had followed the Batman account and invited them to take a part in all of the fun of being a superhero on Liberty's campus because there had been other "heroes" such as the Crimson Ninja, the Emerald Samurai, and the LU Spider-man.

If you're wondering why Batpham is spelled with a "ph" rather than an "f", well there's an inside joke about that, so for now just accept it for what it is.

At one point, say around mid to late October, one of the members decides to get Minecraft. Naturally with myself and 3 others having played before, and since I've had a friend who found a site where you can host a server (sorta) for free, I created a Minecraft server for us to all play on, naturally named The Batpham.

We've had hundreds of hours of fun and goofing around. From originally starting as a pure survival world, to eventually opening up to creative and use of console commands, there has been a ton of nonsense that was all fun and all great times. I theoretically even crashed the school's wifi temporarily because I forced a lot of load on the game (the server was over the internet). Side note to that, I forced in a lot of blocks because a friend had accidentally burned down his home, and then the server crashed from too many blocks loading in and then the internet went out shortly after. Coincidence at the very least, I'd say.

Without digressing too much, I was just browsing on the internet last night before bed, and I happened to just go back to the host website and for whatever reason, I had decided to download the world just to keep it for myself. I guess because I don't want to lose it entirely in case the host site goes down, but other than that I don't know why I wanted it. Just even thinking about the time I have had on that Minecraft world makes me feel nostalgia. And all of those fun times was in reality only a few short months ago. The last time we all were on it was in December of 2019, so only 5 months ago, and it feels like a lifetime ago.

I don't know why I decided to download the world and then upload it to my Google Drive. Maybe I'll re-open it for fun just a couple more times. But by myself there wouldn't be as much fun since I don't have the social aspect on it as the world once had. Maybe it was unwise to download the world and I should just let it stay only on that host site and if that site ever went down, then that's the end of it. I've lost Minecraft worlds before, from just playing on school laptops and then turning in the laptop at the end of the year. Or even just changing and upgrading computers from my first laptop, to my first desktop, to my laptop for school, and now my Vengeance 5182 desktop.

Maybe I just wish that I could at least restore the friendships I had burned just so that even if we don't make many more memories now or any time soon, that if we ever meet again when we're older and just spending time together, that we can at least have something to relate on and reminisce over. "Hey, remember that time I did _____ on the Minecraft server? Yeah, those were great times". That and I just want the memories I have of the Minecraft sessions to be good one. They were good then, and they should be remembered as good now. They shouldn't be darkened or poisoned with "well, they aren't your friends anymore" or whatever negative sentiment I might come up with.

I don't know if this is healthy. I don't know if this is growing. Maybe I should let go and move on since I've not received any contact from either party in about a week now. Then again, I ghosted them for 1-3 months myself, so I can't blame them for not wanting to respond to me or anything. But I just hope that if any of them check the blog since they can tell it still is getting new posts when I sent "Restitution", that maybe if they saw this, we can at least share good times together. Maybe nothing more, maybe nothing less. But we have memories together, and I hope they are nostalgic for them too.