neurological dryer lint

mirc.exe. a piece of chat software that makes you reminisce?

i've spent a decent amount of time in IRC in the past two weeks - one, because mikey pointed me to a server where a bunch of ex-onenet guys hang out. two, because i get more ILB information from the IRC room than from any website. and it's more fun to interact w/people than read a site.

i bet dad remembers back in 1995 (almost ten years ago... holy crap) when i discovered IRC for the first time. interactively talking with large groups of other people was absolutely revolutionary - at the time the best personal interaction i knew of was BBS forums and USENET newsgroups. for a kid hungering for friends, IRC was phenominal. at the time it was just three or four large networks - EFNet, DALNet, UnderNet and a few others. i spent hours a day, our phone line tied up, in #nin on EFNet. in a room with other people that grew to respect me simply because i was there. another human being with a shred of intellect, okay, we'll accept you. they treated me like an equal, laughed at my jokes, sighed at my frustrations... and in turn my inhibitions vanished, and i was truly myself with them because i didn't have the baggage that was there in every face-to-face interaction - school, work, etc.

when i awoke, so to speak, in '96, my interaction there declined. not out of any issue with the people there - they were fantastic, but actual people began to replace the lines of text i was used to, and it felt good, and i went that way. but i was involved in that community - we had shout-outs to each other on our websites, spent pretty much all day in that room sharing life w/each other - and i'm grateful to them for hooking up their batteries to mine and giving my social confidence a jumpstart. blackrose, damsel, aswicked, dh, youth, soulvac, cut, cringe, blur, ramen... doubtful any of 'em remember a weird little kid named skale, but for a while they really warmed me up.

heh. google found a bunch of these guys still hanging out on EFnet. maybe i'll stop in some day. as jw, instead.

gotta go clean the old house tonight. party.