Online Friendships - I PWN JOO NOOB

Are internet friendships real? Do I need to know what you look like to figure out if you are my friend? Do I need to know your real name? Do I need to know where you live?

I started my online life in 1992 with Compuserve. At the time, I had moved to the arctic to persue my career, uprooting myself from all my friends, family and close associates. I was 1500 km from my nearest real friend or family member so I began to hang out online. In that time, online was a very different beast. The web was in it's infancy. I paid $24/hour for my internet connection at 2400 baud and another $20/hour or so for datapac services so I didn't go bankrupt. How do you handle that kind of cost? You only use text, never download pictures and you sure as hell don't browse the new WWW. My monthly cost was about $50.

In comparison my roommate spent $500/month on 1-900 calls. I was even able to download hundreds of kinky stories for that $50. Self actualized sex was not that bad.

But I made some cool friends. I joined the Science Fiction group on compuserve and then joined the IMPS. I can't really remember what the acronym IMP meant and probably I have it stored on some hard drive somewhere. But it doesn't matter. The IMPS were a group of aspiring SF writers joining online by text only communication to learn to write. We had a couple cool mentors. C.J. Cherryh dropped by once in a while and Mike Resnick was sort of the unofficial bash your head critic. Were those real friends? I sure thought so at the time and I remember a few of them. I've never met them in person. I have no idea what they look like. But I honestly did some writing. A real life friend even published one of the stories I wrote for that group.

One of my best memories was discussing food management on space ships. What kind of meat can survive acceleration? How do you feed people for 10 years? All of this was an asychronous talk with Ms. Cherryh.

Much later I became a die-hard Diablo II player. I remember many of my friends although we have lost touch. To anyone from The Amazon Basin in the late 90's early 2000's I remember you. Wappawappa, Baalos, and my other pals. Where are they now? Probably the same place as 90% of my high school friends. Things change and you move on. That does not mean those weren't real friends. Some of them I talked to for 5-6 hours a day. Try doing that with a real life friend.

I also tend to choose to live in small towns in rural locations. It can be a lonely existence given that the chances of meeting like minded folks are slim. The internet feeds my need to have intellectual conversations about something other than the weather, my kids and school, or our yards. And since I hate cities with a passion I can live where I like and still feed those needs.

Some of my family have caused me great pain by moaning and bitching about the time I spend online. But it's not a substitute for time with my children or wife. It's a substitute for innane conversations with morons who happen to be related to me or my wife. I can't help that most of my family doesn't like me nor understand me. I do my best to participate in greater family activities. However, don't be surprised if I don't much care about your latest scheme to buy up slum housing to make money. Or when you want to sell me some shit herbal crap because "It's good for you." It's not good for me. It's good for your pocket book. Fuck it.

I'll take my online friends any day. At least they are smart enough to understand what I'm talking about.