Yes, my friends, a great deal of the Internet these days is devoted to social interaction. To many, this is a good thing, especially the geeks who would never have any contact with other human beings otherwise. On the Internet, Ernie the Insecure can become Mr. Partyanimal and be surrounded by other such socially insecure computer geeks masquerading as party animals. The great thing about it is that nobody knows the difference.
That aside, I will get to the point I am working toward. I have a friend (in real life, surprisingly) who has managed to net one of the biggest slacker jobs in existence. Basically, he is getting paid to sit around at a not-so-busy cashier's desk at the local health clinic. To make matters worse, he basically has eight hours a day with littel to do... other than sit on the Internet all day
He started spending all of this time on the Internet on a certain chat server, and before long, he became something of a legend. Having little real work to justify being paid for his job (and yet somehow, he actually got paid for it,) he began spending ridiculous amounts of time on this one chat server. The ladies flocked to him.
We didn't know just how far gone he was until he came in one day showing us photos of his "cyber-girlfriend" from Georgia (who was actually pretty good-looking, to her credit.) Later, when I was trying to help him set up his PPP connection at home (which was not too sucessful, considering that his modem was flipping out on us,) he was called by this cyber-girlfriend. The interesting thing about this was that he is the type of guy who skipped hos own prom.
The question is, what does one do for a date when their boy/girlfriend is thousands of miles away? One, unfortunately, has to find a way through the comfusion of the Web to find sites suitable for a date on the Net. For starters, there's the ever-popular "dinner and an .AVI" date. The problem with this is that there is little food of real substance on the Net. You'd be better off with a virtual dinner instead. If your tastes run towards pizza, you can try the Internet Pizza server. Here, the diversity of toppings for pizza is unrivaled (if, by any chance, your date really does like having nails, kittens and roadsigns on their pizza.) The pizza server can be accessed here. No matter how much of this stuff you eat, you'll never gain an ounce from this.
After dinner, you may enjoy taking in a .FLC (or an .AVI, MPEG or QuickTime, dependent on your platform.) Whatever you do, AVOID THIS SITE while in the company of a boy/girlfriend (unless you are planning on finding a new one.) This site is not to be viewed in polite comapny. Entitled MeatMation, this site comes from a sick-minded person who seems to think that meat is some sort of plaything. Never before have I been this close to losing my lunch all over a perfectly good keyboard (and doing so would mean that I would have to suffer through writing the rest of this column on the '486, which may have taken a week or more just to load. As I have said many times before, the Internet is becoming part of the same vast cultural wasteland that TV has become, and this site proves it. Now where did I put that 12-ounce steak?
In case you and your date get bored with looking at all of these pictures of food in various states of being, you might enjoy the Celebrity Slugfest. Here, you get a chance to beat up your favorite stars, from Mister Rogers to O.J. Simpson. If you and your date start fighting, it's not my fault, however. Before too long, you will also have the opportunity of beating up on President Clinton and Howard Stern. All the guys you wish you could just beat up in one place. Now only if they had Bob Saget... (Note: This site requires Shockwave.)
Finally, if you fall madly in love, you can even get married over the Internet these days. You're on your own for this one, however. I have no social life at this point, so if you want to find out what the experience of getting married on the Web is like, don't bother looking here.
As for me, I hang out in PointWorld, a VRML chat server hosted by Point communications, requiring BlackSun's CyberGate client. To get a copy of CyberGate, check out BlackSun's Web site. When you are there, I am usually on as Warrior. Just be careful if I happen to be dematerializing anyone or doing other destructive acts... I don't tend to have a very stable personality on there... Come to think of it, I don't have a vety stable personality in real life either... maybe that's why I have never been able to get a date.