Over the years, my IRC channel has seen a constant stream of people come and go. Some people would stay for a few minutes and disappear forever, and some people practically lived there for years. Even the regular users, the hardcore users who you would expect to be there forever would disappear from time to time. Sometimes they would come back a month or a year later, and sometimes they were gone for good.
#teenflirt grew very quickly to start with, mostly because DALnet was still fairly young and didn’t really enforce policies against spamming at the time. We would join #teen, #teens, and a dozen other teenager-oriented channels and spam some stupid crap trying to get people to join our channel. I’d say a good eight out of every ten people that joined did so just to tell us to piss off before leaving. Some however, stayed.
Asraia – As I’ve already mentioned, Asraia was one of the original founding members of the channel. We spent a fair bit of time playing around in the channel, while also talking privately and becoming good friends. She taught me about ska, we talked about dragons, and became penpals. She mailed me several tapes of bands she thought I would like, as well as a few pictures. This may very well be the root cause of my love for redheads. For personal reasons, her stay on IRC was only for a year or two, but we kept in touch for a very long time before life just got too busy.
Nova – Nova was the other member of #teenflirt when it was founded. I think he was probably one of the more level-headed people to come in. If you give a dozen teenagers anonymity and a way to communicate, there will be drama. Nova was one of the few people who I can’t remember ever getting caught up in some nonsense fight the channel hosted.
Ficka – Ficka was one of the first people to join the channel after it was founded. He also holds the distinction of being the first person from IRC that I spoke on the telephone with. The subject of that conversation however, I have completely forgotten. He was a very steady member of the channel for several years, and I actually heard he’s made recent appearances in the channel (although I was not present at the time).
Sonicbabe – Originally using the nickname Seattlebabe but switching shortly afterward, Sonicbabe joined #teenflirt to flirt (imagine that). She was my first internet girlfriend for a very short time until the arrival of the notorious Sonicdude, which is a story for another time. Sonicbabe made occasional but short-lived appearances over the years until around 2004 when we were actually roommates for a bit.
Jim007 – Of all of the members of the channel, I think Jim007 spent the most time in it, aside from myself. He j0ined very shortly after the channel was founded, and stayed until the late ’00s. He was a programmer-type and we worked on a couple little script projects here and there together. My understanding is that some people from the channel still talk to him from time to time, although I don’t think I’ve spoken with him since IRC.
Dria – There are a lot of stories about Dria that will be coming up. She was one of the very first people from IRC that I met in person, and was (and still is) an absolute sweetheart. Trying to write about some of our misadventures in this little paragraph wouldn’t do them justice, so I won’t go into any detail here. I don’t talk to Dria as much as I should, or would like to, but she was certainly part of the inspiration behind this series of blog posts.
lilmoore – One of the surprising things about #teenflirt is that it wasn’t the sausage-fest you would expect a bunch of teenagers on the internet to be. Lilmoore (nickname capitalized here for grammar’s sake) was another of the super flirty girls who joined the channel early on. She worked with animals a lot if I remember correctly, and was also one of (if not the first) person in the channel to get married. After disappearing for a couple of years, she came back but didn’t really fit in too well with the new climate of the channel so her return was pretty short-lived.
Ultimate – Ultimate (aka TrineX years later) was the channel’s resident pervert. This isn’t to say we weren’t all perverted at the time (again, think a bunch of teenagers with little supervision), but he had a directness to him that certainly put him over the top. He only spent a couple of years in the channel here and there (there was a falling out involving another channel named #jealousy, but I don’t remember the details of it unfortunately), but he was the one who came up with the idea of a real-life gathering called /-fter Zer0. He was long gone by then, but in 2001, /-fter Zer0 became a reality.
There was one other regular member who joined the channel at this time. She would become one of my absolute closest friends, still to this day. There is no way I could begin her story in a single paragraph, so I’m going to save it for my next entry in this blog.
In the next chapter of my story, I’ll write about how I met Charmz.