It's no surprise to anyone out there that the geeks seem to be in a world of their own. They speak mostly in acronyms and use all sorts of obtuse-sounding technical terms. They brag about who can write a faster bubble sort than anyone else can (then spend hours trying to code the perfect inefficient sorting algorithm.) Thus it's understandable why the rest of the world seems to relegate such people to their own little world, and pay them all sorts of money to put the whole thing into terms that anyone can understand.
It is for this reason that recently, people who are considered to be at least somewhat more normal than the average computer geek have been finding ways to turn to the Internet for social interaction. I happen to be a member of one such community, known as Pointworld. Created originally with the intent of being some sort of VRML extension to Lycos' top 5% database by what was then known as Black Sun Interactive (but soon changed name to blaxxun interactive, for reasons still largely unknown,) Pointworld was created with the intent to attract people interested in different topics. What happened instead is that one of the weirdest bunches of people ever to reach the Internet assembled, with Point as the gathering place. I was able to fit right in.
For some reason, it seems that some people have a tendency to not act like themselves when engaging in cyberspace social activities. I have a tendency to see cyberspace as almost a cartoon world, Somewhere along the lines of classic Warner Brothers animation. I tend to use extreme measures in dealing with other people in Pointworld, such as 16-ton safes (well, actually recently I have decided to upgrade to 17-ton safes), plenty of anvils, flamethrowers, anvils, and plenty of explosives. It seems that avatars (the term for one's digital persona in the virtual world) can actually take massive amounts ofdamage in this fashion, and still come out without a scratch (well, maybe a scorched cocktail umbrella over the head or something like that.) It doesn't matter how many H-bombs one drops on the virtual world at once, someone else out there can come back and knock your av (the more commonly used abbreviation of avatar) down with a wet noodle. Certainly one can get away with a whole heck of a lot more in a virtual world than they can in the real world. Unless someone is in there playing Joe Supercop, you're not gonna' get carted off to jail for nuking the premises for the bazillionth time. This proves to be a great way to liven up those times when the conversation is at a lull... I find that randomly dropped strategic anvils are a great ice breaker (and the funny accordion noises are also a nice touch.) Thus, I have somehow acquired the reputation as the resident wacko in Pointworld (gee, I wonder why?)
Of course, anyone can hop into a chatroom on IRC somewhere and carry on some shallow, meaningless conversation to kill a couple of hours, and maybe you can even become a regular or an op in the channel. With Pointworld, however, the virtual community has been flourishing for what has this week reached the two-year mark, and this has included numerous "Pile-ins" (basically, just cram as many people as you can in one world, usually used to celebrate special occasions) and last July, several of the denizens of Point gathered in St. Louis to meet each other in real lide, as well as numerous other get-togethers between Point residents. Thus, Pointworld has built it's well-established group of regulars over the course of the two years, and although people come and go, there's still plenty of room for more. If you happen to be interested in joining this not-so-sane bunch of individuals, surf on over to blaxxun interactive's website, where you can get CCPRO, the software needed to access Pointworld (although if you can find it, Cybergate, an older program, is still preferred by some Pointers, although it tends to be less than stable at times.) To get an idea of the pulse of the community, you can also check out the Pointworld Message Board, where information about current events in Point and general chitchatting about nothing in particular take place. This is essentially an extension of the conversation that goes on in Pointworld itself, and remains a constant source of activity in the Point community.
Somehow, it appears that I managed to once again drift completely away from the topic and head off on some only slightly planned, yet ultimately irrelevant tangent (strangely enough, these kind of things tend to happen this late at night, which is when most of these columns get written.) That appears to be what I do to just about every column that I write here, for some strange reason that philosophers would endlessly debate if they were that desperately bored. Either that, ir I'm just using this as another excuse to fill up the 6-9K of space that I use to write one of these columns in... Otherwise, it doesn't take any scrolling, and the lusers who haven't quite figured out the concept of the "page down" key might thus be able to see that we're making fun of them, and call tech support to make us figure out how to make the computer stop insulting them (and spend two hours explaining the concept of a "back" button.) So if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm just writing this whole paragraph as a way to avoud havign to come up with a proper ending to the column, and also for the sole purposes of filling up space. There's nothing more to read, so go do something productive.