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Movie lovers will remember scenes like these from WarGames:







The Adventure Starts Here!
I'm only a few months older than he is. He played a high schooler when he was 24 years old and he totally made it work. My modem back then didn't have to use the actual phone receiver, but it did use the phone line, of course.



Foriisphere Ethnography #666

Back in the raging, formative days of the foriisphere - the naughty noughties - we were suddenly exposed to sorts from outside our social sphere of understanding and we'd clash with these alien freaks and have torrid, torrid times.

"This tosser is different to me therefore I will peel shreds off the bastad online until he comports to my way of thinking".

Yeah, that worked out well. The lonely people, reduced to seeking human contact online, got to feel even lonelier. Great job making people feel connected there, intranet.

These days in the atrophied, shrivelled, twattered post-apocalyptic ruins of message board BBS culture, and at the risk of sounding like a flaming hippie, I can see how we just have to realise that those tossers who are different to us don't have to be excoriated or lambasted. There are so few of us left plugging idiotically away at BBS that we can ill-afford to make some poor fellow forii "holdout" feel like garbage and have the sad git wander off to twitter etc.

Just find a way to get along with that "different" seeming individual. Or, at least, accept he is not you and don't make it your devout mission to convert him to The Temple Of You.

In this way I reckon the BBS online experience is currently ahead of twitter on the online sociability/acceptance timeline and, weirdly, moving ever-closer to the real world experience of NOT walking up to some blowhard dingus in the pub and telling him all his opinions on everything ever are "arsemulch".

Which makes me wonder; where is twitter at now on the online sociability/acceptance timeline? Foriisphere 2009?