And now post-published. Snow finished, mountains dusted. Clouds lifted. All the trees little matchsticks. A billion pins in rock.

Not quite a billion words, but a few million, from this wonderful community. Words that will be part of a process that uses "focused ion beam (FIB) technology to sharpen diamond probes, inscribe materials, and microprint onto nickel." Glenn Fleishmann wrote up a great piece for The Atlantic on our shuttering: Archiving a Website for Ten Thousand Years.

Hi closes but in the closing of Hi I hope we're establishing some watermarks for thinking about the ephemerality of the stuff we build online. Try as we might, without lots of input energy, the natural state of online things is to disintegrate. The wont of the web is to disappear. Are nickel plates the only (or even a sensible) answer? No, but they're one of the very few ways to guarantee Hi doesn't become an archetype of the Web of Alexandria.

We've got three more months together. I know I have a few Hi related writing & mapping projects I never quite got around to working on. Now I have to. Deadlines do that — they inspire. We die, things online die, it makes us a little less lazy.

Thanks, you all, for being part of this thing.