I just met bunner. And he was even funnier in person than his posts make him out to be. And sometime early next year we're going to hang at his place and make jambalaya.

LadyJ seems to be resigned to come to Cleveland for the film festival at Case and I'll probably get a chance to meet her, which would be neat.

I have a good friend who lives in LA that I met about six years ago online. I've had a couple of chances to hang out with her when she flew out east on business. She's way cool. I wish she lived closer so I could hang out with her more often.

And though I haven't met any of them yet, I'm planning on driving down to NC to visit my sister sometime next spring and I'm gonna drive through the DC area, in hopes that I can wrangle together boorite, wirthling, kaufman and evil_d for dinner or some kind of social gathering, because they're all cool. And we could spend all night watching kaufman make obscure puns to our waitress.

And some day when I have more cash and some free time I plan on heading down under, and you can be sure that if I get there I'm not going to leave without visiting DexX and his lovely wife.

All in all, those I've met online and then gotten together with in real life have been good folks that I wouldn't mind having around so I could hang out with more.

But on the plus side, if I move away from Cleveland, my relationship with all of you won't change a bit as long as I've got an internet connection.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

In your dreams!

And mine *sniffle*...

Seriously, just don't come during the middle to end of June. I'll be out in Obi country attending my wife's graduation ceremony.

We have a guest room ready. Maybe we can put our wives in there.

Oh crap. This is public, isn't it...

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

Ixnay on the omo-sex-hey.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

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We have a guest room ready. Maybe we can put our wives in there...

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LadyJ seems to be resigned to come to Cleveland for the film festival at Case and I'll probably get a chance to meet her, which would be neat.

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I gotta move....no one ever says "And I'm going to drive through Texas" EVER

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Women are fisher's of men because we all know.... The small ones you throw back. The medium ones you eat. The large ones you mount.

And there aint nobody up in the left hand corner of the map but me. (Seattle)

Thirty-six hours????

Is that non-stop?

Starting eight o'clock on Saturday morning, I will be watching 24 hours of continuous SF movies at the annual Westgarth Theatre SF marathon (they also have a 24 hour horror marathon in June). That is pretty much non-stop - ten minute breaks between movies, and one forty minute meal break. How about yours? What is the split between new and old films?

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

Here's the schedule for the one I attended two years ago:

http://films.cwru.edu/sfmarathon25/

I colored some of the mural. I can't remember which of the letters are mine, but I seem to remember working on that speckley M in Marathon.

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I am a delicate fucking flower. https://beacons.ai/jesskent

I'm down, yo.

I've had both worse and better luck with meeting people online than in physical space. I've met some real losers online, and most of them I don't ever talk to anymore. On the other hand, I met my girlfriend online and I'm currently living with her. I wouldn't have jumped into such an arrangement if I hadn't gotten to know her in person first; I certainly agree with 'Nate on that point. There are differences in the way people behave and communicate in the two media, and you may find that you can only get along with a given person in one. However, you can get a pretty good idea of what a person is like from either. Enough to make educated guesses about many things.

One of my closest friends is a girl I met in college. Even when we lived on the same campus, within easy walking distance of each other's rooms, we still conversed mostly via e-mail. We were both shy people and we both communicated better in writing than in speech. Today we continue to have a rich and very real friendship despite living farther apart.

It bothers me to hear people say "internet people/emotions/personas aren't real". I think it reveals an inadequate understanding either of how the internet works, or what "real" means. My computer is real. The phone lines are real. The electrons are real. I'm a real person typing real English words and you're a real person reading them. I defy you to find one thing about this communication that's not real. If you don't like me and don't want to talk to me, you'll certainly find that easy to accomplish since we've never met and I don't know where you live. But if you think it's okay to be rude to me because I'm just an "internet person", then you're an ass.

It's true that the anonymity of the internet allows people a greater freedom to pretend they're someone they're not. All that means to me is that I have to exercise more skepticism when dealing with people I don't know well.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

I met my wife online. Every once in a while we raise a glass to Vint Cerf, wherever he is.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

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But if you think it's okay to be rude to me because I'm just an "internet person", then you're an ass.

It's true that the anonymity of the internet allows people a greater freedom to pretend they're someone they're not. All that means to me is that I have to exercise more skepticism when dealing with people I don't know well.

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There's never any excuse to forget your manners. Even if they are a long way away.

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Then I will spend 36 hours watching sci-fi movies and shouting clever remarks at the screen with 200 geeks.

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I think that the online forum's utility as a "mask" is vastly overrated. I've tried to be both a different person and a non-person (giving away nothing of my identity) online, and each time, I've found myself gravitating inexorably back to my RL personality. Of course, "personality" itself derives from the word "mask," but the mask you present to the RL world is no trivial thing. It's rooted in your origins and constitution, and you've invested a great deal in it, and so it's not only difficult but disorienting to try and break out of it, even in a forum where you're invisible and anonymous.

Sure, we behave differently in online forums than in person, and we may affect different voices or aliases for different purposes, but that is a long way from the glib assertion that online persons aren't "real" or that they can easily adopt "masks." Sure, there are those who misrepresent themselves to varying degrees, but they smell fake to anyone with sense. (A hot and horny, barely-legal teen who is A/S/Ling you is either a pr0nographer or a dirty old man in a yellowed t-shirt. Conversely, I knew LadyJ was not the latter when she joked, "My eyes are up HERE"-- that's a joke only a woman would tell. And when I was trying to be no-particular-person, my correspondents guessed my gender, age, education, and secret motives with uncanny accuracy.)

This particular forum is unusual in my experience-- unique, in fact-- in the richness and depth of the personalities and their apparent "reality" to me. So I bristle at the offhand suggestion that for all we know, we could all just as well be shitting each other. It's kind of an insult. It's also not very well thought-out.

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What others say about boorite!

Which does raise the question:

Is it legal to shout "Movie, Movie!" in a crowded Tobor?

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

And back then, there was no Internet (unless you worked for a university, the Defense Dept, or were Al Gore). We had to use tin cans and string. Chat rooms consisted of yelling out our windows at neighbo(u)rs with other open windows. All our Pr0n was made out of ASCII text drawings.

And we liked it that way. Kids these days grumble mumble...

And it was really more like 17 or 18 years ago. And I ran a BBS on an Atari 400 with a 300-baud modem that plugged into the joystick port. Lara's dad had a vanity plate that said "SYSOP." I had two "dual density" 5.25" floppy drives that could each hold a whopping 170k. I called the BBS "Goat's Lair" and advertised it as "the lamest BBS in town." I am not making any of this up.

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What others say about boorite!

NO, wait-- it was "saddest bbs in town." And when you logged in, you got a big ASCII (or ATASCII if you were lucky) picture of a goat going "BAAAAAAAAA."

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What others say about boorite!

Before I could afford a real PC, I bought an old industrial computer (Tano Outpost 11) and a 300-baud acoustic modem at a blind auction. All I had were the operating system (something unique to Tano) and a system manual. It had a little 13 inch B&W screen (text only).

The O/S had a command to switch the console I/O to the serial port -- but nothing to set data bits, stop bits, or parity. So every time I'd dial a BBS, I would have to power down, pull the serial card out of the back (about the size of an ATX motherboard), set the dip switches for the settings I wanted, etc. etc.

All of which proves that I was nuts. And very happy when I bought my first XT-compatible (a Leading Edge!) and a 2400 baud modem.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

Thanks. :- )

January looks good for that.

I've met a few people from online, mostly from EW-Too talkers. We had a Spod Meet at Cedar Point a few years ago, and frankly, almost nobody talked to me. I mostly just held everybody's shit for them while they fucked off to ride the roller coasters, but that's cool because I don't ride coasters. Paying ten bucks to get strapped into something that I am not in control of and have my ballbag shoved into my stomach a craptrillion times isn't my idea of a rollicking afternoon.

Anyhoo, I have met a lot of people in England from a London based EW-Talker that I've had residency on for about 5 years. One of them, Paean, flew over to visit me up on the island in April when she needed a holiday. My boss at the Round House Bar, Teri, put us up with a hotel room smack on the main drag on the company's dime. She's the best boss in the known universe. Seriously. Paean now represents my and my partner's company's interests in the UK, and she's working the meet and greet end of a contract for us for July as we speak.

The point is this:

Treat people as you would like them to treat you. Online; it is even more important to project your best side to the people who respond to courtesy and civility than it is IRL because you only know these people as an intellectual construct. Sort of like a character in a book that your imagination fleshes out as the read gets interesting. They, like you, are the sum total of their words and thoughts and actions in virtual space. The sort of people who log on to a BBS, EW-Too talker or site forum with the intent to try and use other people's feelings and sensibilities for bumrag are generally pansy-assed little motherfuckers who only have manners IRL in order to avoid getting the living shit slapped out of them by people who aren't interested in their cheap behaviour. If that's the way you are IRL, and you only interact with people in virtual space in order to treat them badly and aggravate and insult them because they can't just turn around and kick your nuts up around your earlobes, you are a loser. Huge. And it's just a matter of inopportune circumstance until you trip over your hoo hoo in the real world and get stomped for it.

Bad manners never got anybody anywhere. If you think that wrestlers and loudmouths on the TV are hip and cool because they "get" to treat people badly, then you should probably just stay in the trailer park or shove a fucking gun in your mouth as soon as possible, because you have nothing to offer the world.

You're not supposed to aspire to courteous, considerate behaviour to fool people or butter them up or get your own way. You do it because you're SUPPOSED to. Because it's the way things work for the better in any viable social situation. Because it keeps the world from being a cesspool of twats and idiots.

When you learn that, and you aspire to it, and make it a habit, you will have attained something that cannot be taken from you. It is called dignity. And it makes the world a liveable place.

Thank you.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

I'll offend anyone - regular or newbie - who makes some really stupid ass fuck up, assuming that there is a point to doing it (such as for comedy purposes). For example, I will now offend myself for using the words "ass fuck" in this post.

Wow, TheElPaso, you're gay aren't you?

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My love for you is like diarrhea, I just can't hold it in. -Weird Al Yankovic

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You're not supposed to aspire to courteous, considerate behaviour to fool people or butter them up or get your own way. You do it because you're SUPPOSED to. Because it's the way things work for the better in any viable social situation. Because it keeps the world from being a cesspool of twats and idiots.

When you learn that, and you aspire to it, and make it a habit, you will have attained something that cannot be taken from you. It is called dignity. And it makes the world a liveable place.

Thank you.

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Cavalcade of fucktards!

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What others say about boorite!

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And it was really more like 17 or 18 years ago. And I ran a BBS on an Atari 400 with a 300-baud modem that plugged into the joystick port. Lara's dad had a vanity plate that said "SYSOP." I had two "dual density" 5.25" floppy drives that could each hold a whopping 170k. I called the BBS "Goat's Lair" and advertised it as "the lamest BBS in town." I am not making any of this up.

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When I encounter a person initially, and they've yet to make an impression, I am civil, courteous, and/or silent. At that point, the person is at 0 in my little subconscious rating system. If the person does something worthy of admiration, the rating goes up. If the person behaves like a fuckstick, the rating drops.

Then, when it comes time to communicate with the person for whatever reason, my tone is directly affected by the person's status in my little mental database of ratings.

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