Slash Me Smiles




There are two kinds of net users. Duh! I hate these "there are two kinds of" lines. But it's still true. There are the real, active users, and the passive ones, and both groups are getting larger so fast I can't say which kind is the more common. I don't even know which kind you (dear reader) are.

The net is a lot of stuff, as you all know, but the most popular bunch of stuff in it, as we all (except for the ones who don't) know, is the WWW, also known as the World Wide Web, the World Wide Wait, the World Wide Weirdness, the World Wide What?, the World Wide Whatever, and Yahoo, inc. If you got confused already, you're of the second kind. The web is not the net, it's just a part of it. The reason it's so popular is that you don't need to know more than how to operate a mouse to use it, and it gives easy access to pictures of Pamela Anderson. The passive users (well, most of them) know that there's a way of actually talking to people from all over the world in the net, but they never really tried to figure out how it works.

This way is called IRC, in case you didn't know that, and I'm sorry if I'm boring the active users among you. There are alot of other ways, of course, all kinds of chat rooms and i-phone and PowWow and Freetel and good old fashioned e-mail,of course, but IRC (short for I'm Really Confused) is as The Real Thing as they get. It's one of the oldest and most efficient methods of communicating with people you have no reason to want to communicate with, and the mere fact that it wasn't replaced yet by something a bit more comfortable that doesn't spontaneously kick you off every half an hour means that it's going to stay that way for a while.

So. I'm not going to explain to those passive net-users exactly what is IRC and how it works. From my experience, it takes 37 minutes of explaining on average for an un-user to understand what the hell is it even about. there are other people to do it for me, and if you want to, you can ask them. But the very basic is this: You sit at home at your computer. Somebody else, elsewhere in the world, sits at his computer. You type. He types. You see what you typed, and what he typed, too, and so does he. And it's all taking place in a Thingy called a Channel, or a #, that can include as many people as you like. That's all. Yeah, really. I'm not kidding! That's all there is. No, there's no pornography in it. Sorry.

For you passives, there's going to be alot more you won't understand - like, bots, speaking disorders, This @ thing, kicking, lag, and weird punctuations like :-), So I'll put some explanations, but don't expect me to do this alot.

Finally, I'd just like to say: IRC sucks. It's really bad and you can die of it. It's yucky. Whatever you do, don't use it. Let us suffer alone.