Discord summer

I've been having some fun on Discord lately. It's a (relatively) new chat platform and, i have to say, I'm beyond surprised that it even exists. Why? Well, mostly cause it feels like I've been waiting literally 15 years now for chat rooms to come back again. 

Some people might stop and tell me "they never left". I vehemently disagree however. Mostly because, the way I remember my own Internet voyage, chat rooms were really huge when I first logged on (1999-2000) and then, around the year 2005ish, they just sorta collapsed completely, mostly, I always felt, because of the advent of social media like MySpace and Facebook.

The way I tell the Internet story these days, I always say that MySpace created a "localization frenzy". What's this mean? In my opinion, it means that , before MySpace, many of us logged online and often used the Internet solely to talk to strangers from faraway lands (or from two states away). We would play video games and chat there, or we'd just chat on the big networks like the Yahoo chat rooms, the AOL ones or, my personal favorites, the mIRC chatrooms. In fact, I always like to recall that, before Napster came around in 1999 (and even very much for a few yers afterwards) tens of thousands of people used to be logged into mIRC, as a way to trade music and videos. I have vivid crystal clear memories of accessing "secret" IRC chat channels, to download everything from DragonBall Z to Blink 182 videos. Yes kids! It was only the year 2000! YouTube was essentially still an entire 7 years away! Nearly a full decade still had to pass. Imagine?

But then, like I say, when things like Napster, MySpace, and other such tools started to pop up, and then the cell phones with the text messaging (which arrived around 2004 for me) chat channels basically just blew out of existence. Everyone became all sorts of obsessed with contacting locals who lived near them. Suddenly it was possible for me to sit in my room and text message girls from down the street, instead of lurk in dark IRC chat rooms talking to weirdos. So that was what happened and....then what?

Well then I fast forward to around a year 2015, when I start getting curious to see a chat room again, but what do I find when I go a'lookin in 2015? I find there isn't really any chat system available! In fact, I even wrote about it once, complaining, talking of how I asked my then 16 brother, if he had ever used a chat room. My brohan is a frequent Net freak ...and he said he never had. Alas, then just a mere five nights ago, I'm hanging out in his room, when i see him typing rapidly on a dark and strange platform. 'Whats that?" I asked. "Oh its Discord. Everyone is using it now. Has channels for everything.... chat channels..."

So immediately I downloaded my own Discord and gloriously logged on. At the moment, I'm in a vampire channel. I don't know how to link you, otherwise I would. Someone named "Finny" is running it. She's in Finland---i was talking to her a bit last night. Then I was also running around in some Ubuntu channels, a Lana Del Rey one, and a Spanish one.

And the best part of all is that Discord seems mightily similar to my old memories of IRC, but with crazy new additions. Like the fact that emojis are no longer just "=)" but actual photos (like the phone of course). Plus every channel has a separate little subchannel for links to YouTube videos, or pictures, or even short stories people scribble. It's crazy! It all looks really crazy consdiering i haven't used a chat platform in decades. 

So yeah. DIscord. Cool shit, boss.