4 years
Speech for Gr-anniversary IV
Written and performed by Admin Atlas-C (thefrogbin)
Thank you everyone for showing up today. I appreciate you.
Let me start off by sending a huge thanks to the nine builders, who helped me make this Island possible. They are credited next to the warp.
Normally I’d just wing this. Express my gratitude for a couple of minutes, vaguely mention something about ups and downs, and move on with the day’s events.
But this year, it’s been four years, and I’m on ADHD meds. So, I’ve prepared a tiny little speech for you. I promise it’s small. So small.
Don’t worry, I WILL take a break in the middle of this.
While I’m talking, you can get “subtitles” at the website.
Today, I’ll be guiding you through 4 years of Grandma’s House, with lesser known lore and never before told stories
In this process, I can come clean about some past mistakes on the server, and how we have learned from them.
Buckle up, saddle in, and make sure you are hydrated.
Beta-testing for Grandma’s House started in December 2019.
I was a part of the seven people who made up the original “build team”. We were a Dungeons & Dragons friend-group who met on a prominent Queer Minecraft Server at the time.
On that server, we experienced a great community that was ruled by awful top-leadership. The server owner handled the server like a business, took things very personal, and had generally power-hungry tendencies. They still run the server today, so I will keep this short.
Some of us ended up getting banned, with no grounds in reality.
My ban was, however, valid. I was mad that my friends were banned for the obscurest reasons, so I impulsively griefed the base of a moderator.
We could not continue to play on the server.
We would later find out we weren’t the only ones who had experienced that server as a toxic environment. At least 3 Queer Minecraft servers have started from the incompetency of this owner – separate from each other.
I had a semi-popular town on the server, which I had spent several months on, branching into seven different biomes. One of these branches included the first ever Grandma’s House.
I didn’t want them to have it.
I got a friend to help blow up my base with TNT, and presumably no staff were online, according to tab-list. As we were blowing up my base, a peculiar death message showed in chat.
It turned out that one of the staff members who we suspected didn’t like us, was killed by TnT… They were spying on us, and didn’t think to fly away when we set off the explosives.
Later that year, we would revisit, only to see the explosions rolled back, and the before mentioned Grandma’s House comically removed with Admin-powers.
Where the original House used to be, there’s just a perfectly rectangular hole.
We gathered ourselves to process the loss of our second home – took us no more than a week or so. Then one day, a friend brought up… why don’t we make our own server? We can do better than this!
The first attempt at a spawn was… interesting. Back in 1.14, Minecraft terrain was way more flat than it is nowadays. We made some cute stuff, but it felt more like a draft. We had no idea that you could change biomes with world-edit, so we chose seed solely based on whether it had a flower forest…
We scrapped the world and found a different seed with a much more interesting flower forest. This became the iconic scenery of our first official spawn.
After 2 weeks of working on the server, the server opened to public.
Spawn was half-baked, but it was opened regardless.
What we learned from this mistake will come up later. We raced to finish the functional parts, and continued to work on spawn, even as people started playing on the server.
That’s Grandma’s birth date:
January 3rd 2020
The official opening of the server to public.
We had some firsts that year.
First major bug was pillager bug. A pill bug, if you will.
For some reason, back in 1.14, there could be 200, 300, even, at the same outpost. They would just keep spawning. The only solution was to install a plug-in that was made just to deal with pillager spawning.
First website, February 2020, using Enjin, which came with an old school Forum, where ban appeals were public – anyone could comment on them!
First event, the dragon fight, paired with the oldest special item that you can still get on the server: The Dragon Slayer Bow.
First version update, 1.15, which added bees.
First seasonal event, the Easter Egg Hunt.
First pride event, June of 2020.
Due to the pandemic, most Pride Parades around the world were cancelled. Thus, we held a Pride Walk in-game on a route through Axburg – a mega-build I made with creative.
First staff applications were in May 2020.
Two problems were present. First, the Admins & Owners would have the ultimate power to decide who got in. This meant, if you were on good terms with Admins & Owners, you had a higher chance of getting in. Second, the current staff were primarily from the same friend group. This created a very closed circle around staff, which affected the culture on the server negatively.
We have since worked on this, which I will touch on later.
Somewhere around this time we experienced The “Skyblock players from the Czech Republic” Incident.
For about two month, people would join and speak Czech—the official language of the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe. Some of them would ask variations of “where is the skyblock?” and then leave.
I was speedy with Google Translate to catch one, almost as if at gunpoint, to ask, in Czech, where did they find the server?
An admin did some digging based on their answer, and found out that our numerical IP had been listed on a Czech Minecraft Server Listing Site… as a skyblock server.
I tried to contact the owners of the site, but there was no sign of anyone maintaining the site since 2015. The flow of skyblock players from the Czech Republic would stop in July 2020, when we switched provider, and with that got a shiny new numerical IP-address.
First signs of world corruption, September 2020. An entire slate of blocks were missing in a small group of chunks. Hmmm, weird. It’s probably nothing.
First major update, December 2020, The Winter Festival Update.
During the Festival period, our beloved Senkayani and Nandaynetwork were added to what was then called Long Furby Security Team. Their p-warp Castle_Town was and still is, among one of the most prominent player-warps on the server. It’s one of the oldest, still standing, player towns on the server. They’re still with us today, side by side with me and the other Custodians, as Admin and Lead-Admin.
And so, we celebrated a year of Grandma’s.
On January 28th 2021, the world corruption showed its first gruesome face. The server was to go in maintenance and update from 1.16.3 to 1.16.4.
But it didn’t succeed. We kept calm, and decided to try and wait for 1.16.5.
The admins started planning. We knew a new world takes time to set up, and as soon as a world reset is announced, the players would grieve, activity plummet. We also wanted to avoid the mistake of rushing a spawn together in 2 weeks.
To give us time, we kept the cards close.
This made the first half of 2021 a complex time on the server. On the main server, we would have to pretend that things are fine, and continue to do events and such. It warmed my heart when, in February 2021, mre16 who was a very active player at the time, hosted the first big build contest that wasn’t hosted by staff.
The Emerald City project was a big survival build contest. I was in tears of honour, that someone would organize something like that on Grandma’s.
Another highlight was Aprils fools of 21.
We infested the discord server with rats. Rat-emojies were spread randomly around the discord channel names and descriptions, along with a cheese channel, urging people to send pictures of cheese to lure in the rats.
Behind the scenes, we walked a tight-rope with the world reset… When do we tell the other staff? When do we tell the build team? When do we bring in beta-testers?
This was made more complicated on April 11. 2021, where I had to handle a very delicate situation, which included a drastic power shift within staff.
I worked fast and tediously for 4 hours. Transferring rank store, voting sites, Tumblr blog, and more, to new systems where admins have equal access.
When it was over, I announced the changes in the discord. Quietly and efficiently, I had overhauled the structure of Grandma’s House.
Phew.
Let’s take a breather. Be back in 10 minutes, and when I get back, I’ll tell you about
August 13th 2021, we announced the death of the 1.16 survival world. We had finished beta-testing and setting most things up. People had 2 weeks to go in and take screenshots and prepare for the world tour at the last day. We ended the world tour with a surprise. I had hidden a bunch of TnT all over spawn, just below the surface. You can imagine where this led. Kaboom? Yes, Rico, kaboom.
We opened the new world, hailing in the Second Era of Grandma’s House.
Sometime during 2021, I was in a Facebook group for queer gamers. Posting information about Grandma’s House apparently caught some traction.
There were a good amount of comments on that post, and along with the server world being new and fresh, plus our new Tumblr blog getting popular, we started to gain real traction online.
To this day we’re the most popular Queer server on Tumblr. During that autumn, we got Top 1 Voted LGBT Server on Planet Minecraft. We had essentially taken the spot, that used to be dominated by servers like the one we came from.
And then came the Winter.
I will now come clean about a mistake I made.
Around the time of teasing the Winter Festival of 2021, I was active in another queer server at the time, who also started from the server that Grandma’s came from. I looked up to these people, and from time to time, I would be inspired by things they did, and would apply some of the principles to Grandma’s.
However, during this particular period, my impulsivity was starting to get really, really, bad. One day I was up at 5 am for some reason. I saw that this server that I looked up to, had announced an event in a code language, announced by a bot who was their mascot.
In a haze of my impulsivity, I fucked up. Instead of just taking inspiration, this time, I plagiarized the idea. I made a Grandma bot announce something in morse code. Later that day I realized I had fucked up. I stole an idea, straight up.
I was contacted by one of the owners, who was my friend at the time, and I apologized. I stopped sending messages encrypted in code, and from that day, if there was something I wanted to do on Grandma’s, that resembled that server, I asked. An example is the News role. I saw them implementing it, and I wanted to do the same thing on Grandma’s. This time, I waited a month or two to implement it. And I asked.
Even though I apologized, and did what I could to avoid plagiarizing in the future, this was a big red alarm bell on my own mental health. Why was I up at 5am? Why would I be so impulsive?
Behind the scenes, the power dynamic & culture from the nepotist era was becoming too visible. I have talked about this before in an announcement, so I’ll give you the broad strokes from that announcement.
We had been defining ourselves in opposition to the old queer server we came from, without reflecting on exactly what the root of the issues on that server was.
We had to go beyond “Have better server owners!” and ask “How was a malicious & incompetent server owner allowed to influence the culture on the server to that degree? Why is Grandma’s repeating mistakes from that server, and what can we do to combat that?”
I realised, we had been running a server, as if it was a corporation. Which makes sense on some servers out there, who are run for-profit – But we are non-profit, driven by volunteer work. Maybe we should restructure the server?
Around this time, I ended up being the only Owner. The old Trio of Owners was over, leaving me alone on the top of the ladder. Seeing the danger in that, I quickly stepped down to Lead-Admin, and was joined by Senkayani, to avoid one-person-rule.
The reparative-process took its first steps. It was time to work on the nepotism and the hierarchical structure on Grandma’s.
The first beacon of this process was to bring back the original rank theme, introducing Bakery Ranks 2.0
And then, on 3rd of July we had our, to this day, only raid.
As we were finishing an event on the server, we had our first malicious raid. The culprit was a right-wing streamer, using a fascist alternative to Twitch where he would do these “Lo-fi and raiding Woke Minecraft Servers”. The streams would have lo-fi music in the background as he jumped from Queer server to Queer server, getting his viewers to join all at the same time and say a bunch of slurs.
How cozy…
Luckily for Grandma’s we were 3 admins present, ready to lockdown the server Code Red, and start IP-banning – took us 30 mins to go through the bans, and some further time to clean up the survival chat on discord.
We now go into a period on the server where my mental health would affect the server in a more direct sense than it had done before.
Things were heating up, literally. There were bad heat-waves that summer. My undiagnosed and untreated ADHD was reaching a breaking point, and the temperature was making my executive function near zero.
I was dealing with a player who was gradually harassing the moderation team more and more, treating us like customer service workers… We are all unpaid volunteers.
I had taken on the gigantically oversized project that was the Cottage Core Spawn.
I was hosting Ultra Hardcore Grandma events. I was preparing for The Winter Festival, with help (thank you). I was attempting a video essay channel. I was attempting to be a regular streamer. I was handling a long list of problems that had arisen from my unstructured past on Grandma’s. I was slowly working on my master-plan of flattening the power-structure on Grandma’s.
And then, I had to leave a friend group I had been with for 3 years. My relationship to them had been declining for a very long time, draining me of more and more energy.
I broke down.
I got an activity notice related to my education. Basically, if I didn’t hurry up and take 4 exams in January, of 10-20 pages each, I would stop receiving financial help from the government until I had caught up on the missing points.
That was a wake-up call.
I dropped out of University, and took a break from Grandma’s to re-assess my relationship with it.
Down to half the Custodians we used to be and me starting on ADHD meds in February, I started picking up the pieces and building more structure on Grandma’s.
The building of the current spawn, the structuring, the website building, the wiki, the new custodians… the list of healing is long. And now we’re here, in 2024.
I have spent all of my 20’s so far, being an admin on Grandma’s. When I look at the community we have now, I see that we are far from perfect, but that’s not the point.
There will always be problems to solve, bugs to fix, annoying people to show kindness, party poopers, party starters…
But when I look around at the people who are online these days, and I see people who have been here for years, and still are here… It’s all worth it to me.
To every person, for whom Grandma’s has meant something.
Thank you for being a part of what I so cautiously dare call a community. You’re the reason why I’m still here.
Thank you for making it worth it.