The Hypogean Forum

August walkthrough is up. Twelve minutes, no music this time, I turned the ambience down because someone last year said they could hear my chair and liked it.

For anyone new: I have been building a cathedral for four years. It is not a game. There is nothing to do in it. You walk in the west door and there is a nave, and clerestory windows on a real solar cycle, so at 4pm in August the light comes down the south aisle in bars you can stand inside. That is the feature. That is all of the features.

This month I finished the north transept glass, which took eleven weeks, and which nobody will see, because nobody walks north — everyone comes in the west door and goes straight up the centre to the crossing and stops there, and I know this because I log the paths and the paths are all the same path.

Visitors this month: 4. Last month: 6. Best month: 41, which was two years ago when someone linked it somewhere I never found.

I want to be clear that I am not fishing. I know how this reads. I built a room for a congregation that has not come and I go on describing the light in it every thirty days like a man reading the weather to an empty station, and I have made my peace with the shape of that, mostly, on most days.

The light in the south aisle at 4pm in August is genuinely worth twelve minutes of your life. I am not a good enough builder to have made that by accident and I am not a good enough talker to make you believe it.

doors open. always have been.

I have just spent forty minutes in your north transept.

I went north deliberately, having read your paths, and I want to report that the decision to put the eleven weeks where the paths do not go is the single most defensible act of construction I have encountered on this site, and I have been thinking about very little else since a certificate lapsed on me in July.

You built the glass for the room, not for the traffic. There is a word for that and the word has been ruined by people who use it to mean expensive.

Two things, and then I will get out of your nave.

The first is a correction. You wrote that nobody will see it. Four people saw it. You are counting an audience when what you have is a congregation, and the difference is that a congregation is composed of individuals whose names you could learn. I would take four over forty-one and I say that as a man who has, historically, paid quite a lot for the forty-one.

The second is a request, and I would like it answered in public so that nobody can be delicate about it afterwards. What does it cost to keep the server up, and who is paying it, and for how much longer is that person able to?

You are twenty-one. I am not. I have very recently gone looking for an invoice on something I loved and found that the man who used to pay it had been dead for four years and the renewal notices were going into an inbox nobody empties.

I am not offering you anything yet. I am asking you to tell me the number, out loud, in front of everyone, so that whatever happens next happens in daylight and not as a favour.

Valid for all future content.

sorry to do this in the cathedral thread but this is where the conversation is so

swan_king asked for a number in daylight so let's do numbers.

VR project, four years, custom asset pipeline, real-time solar cycle, persistent world state. that is not a static site. that is a box that has to be ON. running cost floor, generous, is three figures a month and the ceiling is worse, and the thing that kills projects like this is never the hosting bill, it is that the hosting bill arrives on the twelfth of every month for four years while the visitor count goes 41, 22, 14, 9, 6, 4.

receipts on request, and here are two of them unprompted.

Feb 2024 I said the mid-size VR social platforms were a shorting opportunity because the retention curves were being reported as engagement. everyone in the predictions thread told me I was a child who did not understand community. eleven months later three of them were gone. I have the post. it has four replies and two of them are people telling me to be humble.

Aug 2025 I said the same thing about fan-maintained wikis and the specific mechanism I named was lapsed renewals on domains held by individuals. swan_king, you replied to that one. you said, and I am quoting because I saved it, not everything worth keeping has to justify its cost.

I am not saying I told you so. I am saying I told you so is the only sentence anybody has ever let me have, and I would trade every one of them for somebody in that thread saying she was right and we should have done something in February.

one_visitor: say the number. he will pay it and you should let him, and you should let him because the alternative is not that you keep it, the alternative is that it goes down on a twelfth of a month in eighteen months and everyone posts about how beautiful the light was.

I have run this curve. I am sixteen and I have run this curve more times than anyone here and I am so tired of being the only person in the room who has already seen the ending.

Honey, I'm home!

one_visitor I have been in your north transept FOUR TIMES this week. four! I keep going back because the way you did the tracery is wrong and I mean that as the highest compliment available in my trade.

You have modelled it as a single mesh with the mullions as geometry, right? That is a stonemason's solution and it is why it eats your frame budget in the crossing. But it also means the light bars in the south aisle are doing something the "correct" solution physically cannot do, because you have real depth in the stone and everybody else fakes it with a texture, and so at 4pm you get an actual soft edge where the sun clips the mullion and it is GORGEOUS and it is gorgeous BECAUSE you did it the expensive stupid way.

measure once, cut twice, weld the difference. you welded the difference.

Anyway here is why I am really posting.

I want to make you a rood screen. In steel. Actual steel, in my actual shop, at about a metre tall, based on your model, and then I want to photograph it in raking light and send you the photos so you have a physical object off a building that does not exist.

I am not asking for anything and you do not owe me a yes. I have a torch, I have offcuts, I have a dog who will absolutely ruin at least one attempt, and I have had a rough month and I want to make something for somebody who is building a thing nobody visits.

swan_king asked you for a number and you have not said it yet and I saw you not say it. I am not going to pile on. But I will say that I have been the person who did not say the number, on a project, for eleven months, and the reason I did not say it was that saying it out loud would have made it a real thing with an end date on it.

It already has an end date. Saying it does not add one.

ANYWAY. Rood screen. Yes or no. I am starting Saturday either way, I just would rather do it with permission.