i donāt think i expected cohost to outlast bradley. iāll be honest about that one.
jae and i used to say that bradley would live forever. he was an exceedingly healthy cat, and we kept him very active. sure he was a little bulky but he would run and jump it off. even just 5 or 6 months before he got sick we brought him to the vet and they said he was in top form, blood test results were great, eyesight and hearing were great, everything youād want from a 10 year old cat and then some.
and then he started thinning out and slowing down, and it hit all at once. he went from the healthy silly guy who would run into my bedroom first thing every morning for snuggles to the guy who didnāt want to hang out anywhere except the flattest, most solid possible surfaces because movement hurt pretty much overnight. and we kept him as happy and healthy as we could while looking for options, we even got him back to laying in laps for a while, but then one morning in august he didnāt want to eat anymore and that was it. he told us he was done.
cohost wasnāt like that. the end wasnāt sudden. the numbers were sinking for a while, and itās not as if hope got lost, yāknow? multiple hail mary funding rounds, an attempt at building well-loved user facing features to bring in MAU after eggbux stopped making sense. jaeās talked about this someāthemes were almost ready, the new post editor was in active user testing, they were waking up really stoked to tell me what they were working on next. but the funding story was still what it was, and ultimately now weāre here, on the last day.
but bradley and cohost were similar in that they were incredibly well loved. and bradley (@soupconsultant) was one of the siteās first users. heās baked into the site! there are pictures of him hidden all over the place, from the homepage to the codebase.
he was my cat. i adopted him in 2013 when he was 9 weeks old, in garden grove, california. thatās why heās called bradley!! we listened to sublime on the way home, and heās named after their lead singer, bradley nowell (Z''L).
we took this trip to garden grove /
it smelt like lou dog inside the van, oh yeah
(fun fact, the syllables work out well enough that you can place ābradleyā instead of ālou dogā and i need you to know i do that every time i listen to that song)
jae moved in with me in february, 2016. they knew bradley from online, a lot of people did!! he was a very popular cat, at least in some circles. they first met bradley in november 2015, and it was there that they passed The Bradley Test, which is to say that if he hung out on top of you in any capacity the first time you met him, that means you were a good person worth keeping around. not everyone passed that test, though admittedly a lot of people did because he liked people a lot. and jae was excited to live with him! i was always his favorite, because he was a certified Mommy Liker Supreme, but whenever i was out of town, jae became his favorite instead, and heād hang out on their lap and cry at their door and come see them in the morning, all the things heād do to me when i was around. even when i was in town, if we were both gaming, he had a preference for jaeās lap. maybe itās just because jaeās skinnier, and so he had more room in that position, but he also had a preference for jaeās desk chair. either way, eventually, and by eventually i mean within like a year of us moving in together, bradley was our cat. he was our guy!!
and so when jae built this thing, they wanted to put their guy everywhere, and it always meant so much to me that this dude i adopted from a garage in garden grove became the first mascot for something that i thought was really special. that my wife had grown so attached to my cat that he became their cat, too, and that they wanted to put his face in their lifeās work.
bradleyās face isnāt going away in read only. itāll still be hidden in a lot of places, and itāll still exist in the #bradley tag. it isnāt going away when the site goes down, eitherābetween jae and i, i think there are well over 2,000 photos of that dude throughout his life, and thatās amazing.
(a cursory search of my phone and our shared library gives me 1720 photos of bradley, which is pretty close)
and like bradley, cohost isnāt actually going away, either. sure, this website is going away. definitively. but its impact on your life isnāt. the friendships you built here arenāt either.
iām not trying to imply that cohost is as significant as my dead catāthis is probably obvious, but i love him way more than i do a website, and he meant more to me than pretty much anyone whoās going to read this post, because as much as i think yāall are great yāall never laid on my chest purring and meowing stinky fish breath into my face. BUT,
bradley changed my life, and he also got to be a part of this, which changed a lot of your lives, too. when bradley passed last year, i didnāt suddenly let go of the impact he had on me. donāt let that change go away because the site is. if youāre less addicted to the internet because of Numbers? hold onto that. if you post differently because of how this site was better for longform writing? keep doing that. if you post more risquĆ© art, if you think less about algorithms, if you express yourself more authentically, if you prioritize commenting on peopleās work to let them know it mattered to you, if you spend more time talking to your friends and less time tweeting at them? keep that when you go.
bradley was an eleven year old, 13 pound (at his best) tuxedo cat with half a mustache and a tiny goatee and the loudest meow youād ever heard. bradley is, currently, about 1,720 photos, a small wooden box in my house, a small glass jar containing a clump of fur, and eleven years of the best memories i have. he is my improved photography skill, he is part of why i care so deeply for the needy and the disabled, he is dozens of songs that i can never sing the same (try listening to the bluey theme without saying BRADLEY! instead), he is my joy and my laughter. heās the reason iām still alive and i mean that very sincerely.
cohost was a website. it is, in fact, like a website in here. itās also a group of people that truly believe in a better, more open, more friendly internet. itās people who believe in healthier online relationships, itās over 1,000 eggbug plushies hanging out in peoplesā homes, itās 3D printable models of the mascot, itās the friendships you formed online or even IRL, itās the dozens of wakes happening around the world right now, itās thousands of pieces of art, not just about the website but all the art that was made because this place existed to share it, itās the way you are going to use the internet differently going forward because of the time you spent here.
iām going to post a lot of pictures of him today. i might even post more text later, but for all intents and purposes, this is the last big thing i have to say. and iāll close out with this.
youāre gonna remember both of them. theyāre going to stay with you forever. everything will be okay. see you around.
(youāll also find this on https://ellen.zone, and i have a links page there with all my other things too)
