I’m quite fortunate, I’ve never moved house, so I’ve never had all the stress, strain and emotional upheaval that goes with it.

But it feels a bit like the end of an era today. I feel like I’ve just finished packing and I’m taking my last longing look at the place I’ve called home for so long.

My premier runs out sometime today over at swydm, and I’m not bothering to renew it this time.

It’s strange, I’ve known it was coming for the better part of the last year. I renewed my premier a year ago against my better judgement, and it didn’t take long to realise the way things are going, there’s just no point.

Most of the time it’s like a wasteland over there, and many of the people who are still about (those that haven’t fallen foul of a convenient “technical glitch” that deleted them from the system) are skulking about on myspace.

Not to mention it doesn’t seem worth paying out all that money (I’m poor and sickly and unemployed remember!) for a profile comments box that is lucky if it’s used twice in the same month, and access to peoples galleries… That would be galleries that are either never updated, a volley of porn from around the internet, or galleries that are all locked to the public for some obscure reason. Oh and journal comments, which I don’t use now I have my own webspace and host my own journal…

Nope, just not worth it.

I’ve already cleared out my own gallery, now I just need to spend some time later in the week sorting through all my pictures so i can add a snazzy little flash gallery I picked up the other day to my blog here.

I’m not going to delete the account, as there’s still a few people that I only know on there that I don’t want to lose touch with should they ever reappear.

Trawling through my gallery last night it just hit me how much the old place has changed. My account is heading towards it’s 4th year, and the name I held before that was around 2-3 years old too.

That’s heading towards the 7 year mark, which is the vast majority of my online life too. I only got internet back in 1998, and swydm.com was the first social site I ever signed up to. I looked at most of them, but it was by far the best, a great community, buzzing forums and some incredibly wild and wacky regulars.

I don’t know anywhere else where everyone seemed to own a latex rubber catsuit a whip and know of several creative uses for a turkey baster.

Then there were the bizarre forum chats, the kinky profile comments, not to mention the regular journal pimping competitions that people used to run.

None of that has existed for the last few years, and I still miss it.

That place used to be my home for many hours a day, it used to help make the days sat at the keyboard trying to fill in the long hours until I could go back to bed go by so fast.

These days I’m lucky if I even remember to log in more than twice a week, just to check on peoples journals, and even then there’s not much activity most weeks.

But still I’m looking at my empty gallery pages with pangs of sadness.

I’m not deleting my account, but I still feel like I’ve moved out and I’ll not be going back.

It still feels like a part of me is left there, trapped somewhere on their servers.

And I still feel like I need major psychiatric help for feeling so sad about not paying premium on an internet site