I often visit there using my ID of literarydiscussions. Once in a great while, I meet some really interesting intellectual person and have a good chat in PM. Most of the people there just fool around, chatting about sex and bathroom humor. I sent up this free IRC chat room for discussions on Brokeback Mountain, but no one really took an interest in visiting. But, if several of you here click on this link at the same time, you will fing yourselves in a very fast real time IRC chat room channel. So, if you can find a few people from here and set a date and time, you may all click on this link: and start chatting. I will be happy to join, or you can just chat with me, if you cannot find anyone else. If you really get interest in IRC chat, then you can download mIRC free shareware chat client, and do all sorts of interesting things. You may LOG the chats, and edit them, and post them, for example, if you have a monthly reading club discussion. That way many can share in the experience by reading the edited chat. I created a brokeback mountain game for that chat room. If you type help, you get a menu of commands. You can request random questions about the story and movie. The game is driven by an IRC event program, and only works when I am logged in with mIRC client, and have the program running. But a group of people could go to that same ircstorm site and create their own nabokov channel, and make their own random question game about Lolita, for example, and have regular meetings for discussion of some particular topic, and they could log the chat and edit and post it. So many things are possible, but it is hard to find people with long attention spans and interest and focus and dedication and forebearance to make something truly worthwhile happen. Hence, yahoo chat and IRC chat are for the most part wastelands filled with idlers, spammers, hackers, and perverts. Anyway, let me know if you really want to try some on-line chatting. I can't stand chatrooms. I hate yahoo chatrooms most of all. I don't like not having any idea who is posting and the conversations frequently have nothing to do with what I want to discuss, and often veer into topics I'd rather not discuss with anyone but my husband or doctor Either that, or somebody wants to vent their spleen about America's involvement in the Middle East or beg to marry me so they can get a green card Click to expand... I started to chat seriously, for hours each day, in Yahoo, in 1998, mostly in the Religion chat rooms. There were also essays there, which were written to answer questions that arose during chat. I learned a lot, and edited certain things for posting. You have to make it clear to everyone that whatever they say may be posted. But such a forewarning may encourage people to be more serious and less frivilous. Real time chat inspires questions and dialogue which one could not come up with alone, in solitude. They choose to return to the darkness of the cave, to free all the others in bondage, much like a bodhisattva who intentionally retains some faults, rejecting the liberation of Nirvana, to be born again and again into the world of suffering, vowing to help all sentient beings. Look at it this way: MobiusX wants some kind of help, encouragement, fellowship, call it what you like. If SFG75 and I were to join MobiusX for an hour or so per week, whether it be in MSN, or Yahoo, or AOL or ICQ or IRC I run all of them at once, much of the time ,.... All you need is two to tango, and three makes it better. So, what is the harm? Its chat is a tool, to be used or abused. Plato and Socrates seems to do well with dialogues. In MSN, or AOL, or ICQ, one can invite many people to the same chat, and what starts as an IM becomes a chat room. The difference between those chat clients and Yahoo, is that you have control of exactly who can join and participate. So, if you had three people at TBF, or 5, or 8, that you like, you could all meet in one of the chat clients. At various times in my life, when I was working with certain programming languages like Foxpro, Visual Basic, PHP, then I really depended on IRC chat channels, as well as news groups, to ask questions and get answers. So that is another use for such tools, for programmers to share knowledge. MobiusX was asking if there exist such things as reading chat rooms. One answer is that any group of two or more people can instantly create a reading chat room, if they please, using IRC, or ICQ, or AOL, or Yahoo, or MSN. Apparently there are many people who dislike them, or you would see them forming more frequently. One real issue is the time factor. Chatrooms, channels, and group PM are instananeous. IM at a message board, or posting to threads, has a bit of delay and is less spontaneous. I certainly respect your inalienable right to dislike chat rooms. One of my best friends on the Internet, Ladybug, the medical student in Iran, is someone I met in a yahoo chat room.
