IRC was strange for a couple reasons. One was that you never knew who or when people may show up, so it was a lot like fishing. You spent an awful lot of time just waiting around and you'd never know if it would pay off.
The other was there'd be these partial network outages called netsplits. You're in a channel with 10 people and suddenly 8 would disappear. Sometimes they'd come right back, sometimes they'd come back in 5 minutes. Sometimes they never did (never being the time you finally said fuck it and shut down for the night). Sometimes I swore netsplits were caused intentionally by unseen mods who wanted to cause blue-balls.
I enjoyed it. There's that weird intimacy and anonymity going on, like radio but removed even from that, where you're just reading and writing words on a screen and *everything* is in your imagination.
But doing that took work. One-handed typing is a chore. If you get a good partner, you learn to work with each other so one person does the work and the other is enjoying him or herself. If you get a bad partner, you can't coordinate your efforts, you work at cross purposes, and the worst--they quit as soon as they cum and tell hell with wheverever you are in the process.
Never did it on the phone (tried but I'm too shy) and No Way in Hell on vidcam.
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