And so it ends, not with a bang, but with
40.000
40k
40 thousand thoughts, or thoughtless clicks sometimes I'd admit, all in one place!
Last time I came back to hit the big 20k, was in 2011, three years after 2008 when I first came to this website. When I came here I was 17 and in the mood to troll people (as can be seen by my nickname coming from the trollest place of a troll website already). But after being around here I really fell in love with the place. I should be careful saying place - it's the people that made it (although the calming blue and the anime Artemis do tie the place together nicely!). In the years I've spent here, I've grown so much with the people that were here that in the end, I ended up being a better human being for having come here. And I'd like to believe I affected the place nicely - the

smiley is a remnant of the times I was here, and becoming a moderator and fixing a problem with spam bot attacks at one point come to mind.
But throughout those roleplays we did, the games we played, the movies we discussed, we grew together. We built on top of each other. We developed feelings, for the world, for each others' cultures, and for each other.
And after leaving this place I kept growing - I moved to a new country, I got a job, I changed careers completely, I got married recently, and I am planning children of my own in the future. But some new people were here, reading Artemis Fowl, finding friendships, learning about each other, and growing into their better selves.
And through it all, the clock kept ticking. Not the clock of time - but the clock of the Count. THE Count. The count to 40k!
A monument built through each one of us donating a second of our time to share in a monumental task. Memories, laughter, sadness, memes, and most importantly, palindromes and math gags from time to time - that's what the Count is made of. Like seeing a stone step in a church door, smooth from all the steps made on it, makes you wonder how many people went over it in order to chip away at something as sturdy as stone, so too does a thread with 2667 pages make you wonder - what had to happen for this to happen. What happened to the people who started it? Who are the people who are using it now?
But much like a church is the people in it bound together by an idea - so too are all the counters at this originally 20k project just people bound together by the love of Eoin Colfer's books. We started humbly, building to 1k, counting down to 0, and then starting the real deal, counting to 20k. 20k was arbitrarily chosen, as a number that is high, yet reachable. All our goals should be like this! 40k felt like the natural progression, the higher goal, double the amount!
Yet, for the next step, perhaps the crowning step, perhaps just another level in the foundation, a simple doubling will not do. Counting down back to 0 will not do. No, we need a symbol. A goal!
So here it is:
80318
Why this number?
Well, if you go to Eoin Colfer's Wikipedia page, you will find that he was quite a prolific writer not only of books but also of all sorts of art. In fact, if you add all of the years of the publishing of all of his works (excluding the ones that are not published yet, just announced), you will end up with a number that is really close to doubling of 40k - but just a bit more than that!
What a goal that is, to build a tower representing what brings us together, to contribute ourselves to a tribute to change and permanence at the same time, pillared around what brings us together. Why, that's a goal that I'd be willing to strive for
And so it begins, not with a bang, but with
40.000!
And remember:
