Internet Friends

[Keith Houchen]

Loki sounds exactly how I thought he would.

[Devon Malcolm]

Loki sounds exactly how I thought he would.

 

Yes! He said I was taller than he "hoped". I think he was hoping for a short-arse like him.

[Loki]

Ha! You actually said, I was taller than you'd hoped, you lanky bastard.

 

There's a few chaps off here that I've met IRL, and a few of you that I've known for, what, 12 years, across multiple forums. You don't absolutely HAVE to have met in the real world, but it does help a bit as, like Chest says, otherwise there's always this nagging doubt that they might be a complete fraud.

 

I think you CAN be friends with people on the internet, but not quickly. It's far too easy to decide you and someone else are kindred spirits, separated at birth, and then discover they vote BNP and beat their wife.

 

Way, waaay back in the early days of t-internet, before there was even Windows, there was IRC - text-based chatrooms you logged into via IP addresses. It was a shiny new frontier at the time, and after closing time a bunch of us at uni used to log on to talk shit with Americans. One of my female friends quickly amassed a lot of "IRC friends" and after only a month or two decided to invite them all down for her birthday.

 

The result was definitely the strangest weekend of my life. One of the guys who turned up was psychopathically quiet until about 2 in the morning when he became quite scarily violent and produced a knife. I ended up in bed with a girl who I'd got on with well, only for her to announce that she thought men had two orifices "down there", one for defecation and one for anal sex. Quite the mood killer. One guy walked through a plate glass window, and disappeared the next morning with most of my CD collection and all of my friend's wallet.

 

But the strangest bit by far was that she was picking these people up from the station. She had some bits of card with their screen names on, and would hold it up at the train arrived on which they were meant to be. She arrived back at uni with one guy, who'd answered to the name of, let's say, dobby ( I can't remember what it was now). He was pretty quiet, but by that point we'd all realised that this was par for the course.

 

Anyway, he hung around in college with us for about 2 hours, and then popped out to get some cash. At this point, my friend got a phonecall... from the REAL dobby who'd missed his train and had now arrived at the station. So fuck knows who the first one was, he never reappeared and we were stuck with dobby2 for the rest of the weekend.

 

In conclusion - just because someone else on the internet likes Life Of Brian as well, doesn't mean you should meet up with them in real life.

[John Matrix]

I think that's one of the most significant things i've found when i've meet people whom i've also conversed with online, is that their personality is often entirely different.

 

Someone mentioned earlier that it might be to do with the freedom we have to express ourselves on line, like if i crack a shit joke on here, i dont have to worry about you rolling your eyes at it, but i'm far less likely to crack the same joke in person to avoid the awkwardness.

 

Usually, it falls into the category Loki talks about above of eerie silence for most of the time which is strange, given you could presumably sit the opposite side of a wall, conversing by keyboard and have the magic back in an instant. There was a kid that used to play for a sports team i ran, who would email regularly to ask about various stuff, and because he was a member of the group we'd set up on FB, i'd often see stuff from his feed and you'd think he was the life and soul of the party and yet in three years i think i barely ever heard him speak a word. Still a great kid like, but "They sound fun" isnt necessarily a scientific formula.

 

Conversely, i have friends i've known since school who'll respond to three page texts with "OK", so it works both ways around.

[Sergio Mendacious]

I can't say that I think that online people couldn't become friends, or even mates, as I met my wife through a wrestling forum. That's totally the exception to the rule - there have been plenty of UKFF people that I've met, but that was through going to British wrestling shows, and often I would be told "that guy is so-and-so from the UKFF," but that was mainly when I wasn't very active on here. In terms of people from this forum that I've never met in real life, I don't really interact with many folks outside of here, and there's not really any prospect of meeting any of them, so I'd say acquaintances at best. A mixed bag of acquaintances - some that I'd think I could possibly have a laugh with, and a lot of twats.

[Richie Freebird]

For some reason I always read Richie's posts with a Southern accent in my head, which I know cannot be.

Assuming that