I Miss IRC

It’s one of those nights. No email to speak of, no one on IM, nothing new on Twitter, and everyone else in the house is doing their own thing. I’ve started trying to be more active on various forums, but it seems the same thing happens there as with email and IM: my words fly out into the aether of the ‘net and vanish, returning nothing.

A man can get a mite lonely cooped up in his own head. But it wasn’t always so.

Back in the day, there was IRC. More importantly, there was the #cantina_cloud. It was a chatroom about Star Wars gaming back in the days of Dark Forces and Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight. Well, except it had nothing to do with Star Wars, really. That’s what built it, but that’s not really what it was.

No, that chatroom was steeped in its own mythos, which flooded over into Jedi Legacy. A mythos of Drazen Isle. Of dramatic Never Ending Stories. Of little perverted orange monkeys.

And there was always something going on. And people talking. And people listening. People you knew. And people who knew you–or at least people who knew they could say something perverted and get a shocked reaction from you, or that you’d always kill a joke with logic if it was in your power, or whatever.

But, as they say, you can’t go back home to the Cantina again. Half of the -ites that frequented the room during its heyday probably aren’t even there anymore. And we’ve all gone in different directions. And IRC, or IM, or Twitter, or whatever, is nothing without a community. Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came.