CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Who the Hell Uses Chat Rooms Nowadays?

Sunday, August 19, 2007

this entry brought to you by scott weiland, "lady, your roof is dragging me down"


Whenever I hear about child predators-- actually, I'm going to back that up a bit and go broader. Whenever I hear about any Internet predator at all, I don't hear about the victim meeting the predator on Myspace. You'd think this is what would happen with frightening frequency, considering how Myspace is the most popular thing on the Internet since, uh, the Internet. I mean sure, I've heard about a couple of people that have had bad things happen to them on Myspace, but I think I could count the amount of Myspace crimes I've heard of on one hand. Victims of Internet crimes meet their predators in chat rooms almost exclusively. And this completely befuddles me, because I don't know where any chat rooms are anymore, and I don't know anyone personally that spends any time on any of them.

Back in 1994 or 1995, before the Internet was a series of webpages, there was no such thing as "browsing". You'd go to your Internet program, and lots of places didn't even have web addresses as we currently know them, you couldn't type chatroom.fun.com, it would look something like 105.55.63.27, and there was no sort of graphical interface, just a login screen, then a welcome paragraph and a line of text that said something like Main Forum, then lots and lots of names of people who were in the chatroom with you. This was 12 years ago, when essentially the only thing you could do on the Internet was go on usenet, post on message boards or BBSes, go in chatrooms, or play on MUDs. And even back then when those were the only choices you had on the Internet, when the Internet didn't even have graphics and sometimes didn't even have the technology to feature multiple colors of text at the same time, I thought chatrooms were a complete waste of time. You're in a room filled with strangers, and no two people seem to be talking about the same things. Even more confusing, sometimes you'd see different groups of people having different conversations in the same room. HAL69, Wolverine74 and Sweetiepie02 might be talking about music, JRJr, MacFan, Deceptacon, and JustHavinFun might be talking about a TV show that's on right then, URDUM, EatMyAss, and YorAFag are just typing random obscenities, and DaddyBigDick and Wetpussy have been quiet for the past three minutes since they've been private messaging one another and end up jumping to a private room to have Netsex. It was the absolute most horrendously unattractive waste of time imaginable. And this was back when you could still turn on a news program without hearing about some psycho stalking and murdering people on-line.

Keep in mind, even when the only porn on the Internet was for people on college T1 lines who could FTP pictures from 1970's porn rags and, for the rest of us, nude women made entirely out of ASCII characters (that would still take forever to load), this was still seen as an utterly idiotic way to waste your time. Nowadays though, when everyone has blazingly fast cable modems and you can stream essentially anything you can think of, download essentially anything you can think of, and play with web applications that were unimaginable 15 years ago, why in the world would anybody ever go into a chatroom? They were moronic 15 years ago, and they're absolutely unfathomable nowadays, especially since I've heard that spammers sit in there and continuously send messages advertising their dick enhancing cream and low-grade pornography. As I said before, I don't know anyone that uses them, and most people I know haven't ever even seen one. You'd think they wouldn't even exist.

Except nowadays, every time you turn on the news, something horrible happened to someone, maybe their child was taken out of state and murdered, maybe their mom met someone from there and was raped, maybe they met someone who was from Nigeria who managed to convince them to give up their credit card number and proceeded to steal all of their livelihood-- and they always met up on a chat room. First of all, I don't know where these people are finding out about chatrooms. I imagine I could find them if I actively tried, but then again, I could also find out how to make a nuclear bomb if I actively tried. But I never just browse through the Internet innocently and suddenly end up in one, which is the only way I can imagine anyone finds there way there. And for another thing, I don't see why anyone wouldn't immediately leave a chat room once they've discovered one, because 1) every time you turn on the news you learn that chatrooms are lurking with nothing but predators, perverts, and Nigerians, and 2) the second you get in there, it is instantly the most brain-fizzlingly moronic experience anyone could ever have. I'm not saying I think any victim of anything that came from meeting someone in a chatroom deserves it, I'm saying I don't even know how this is fucking possible.
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with love from CRS @ 8:51 AM 

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