comic chat amusingly, this is what got me interested in the internet. Comic chat is a gimmick really… it runs against standard iRC, but it interprets communication to make the characters display emotion - or you can easily define your characters emotion and you can create your own character.
Now most people probably don’t find chatting on the internet fun… what is addictive about it (for me) is connecting to people in distant places and discovering they are basically the same… awake/drunk/over-caffeinated/bored/horny .. or some combination of emotions/feelings that are easily relatable. But I don’t think I would be interested in iRC if it hadn’t been for MS Comic Chat. And I was pretty disappointed when it was unavailable - though I think my more internet savvy younger brother was happy that I wasn’t muscling in on his PC time anymore.
After Comic Chat (for me) came ICQ, this had the advantage of being able to search for people. People from Israel, Egypt, France, UK, US, Mexico, China, Brazil, Columbia… Anywhere in the world where there were people that could speak english. It amazed me that life seemed to be basically normal in places where the news seemed so bleak.
I don’t know if this would have been interesting (for me) if it wasn’t for Comic Chat. By this time I was using mIRC, text based communication was OK… it didn’t have to remind me of an Asterix comic anymore. But I still wish it did. The comic chat application was somewhat annoying for non-comic chatters… which I guess is why we stopped using it (but we still wanted to). Now there are some private iRCs that allow it to run.
The big difference in internet communication (for me) between 2007 and 1997, is that NOW almost everyone I talk to online is someone that I know through ‘real world’ connections. However, THEN almost everyone was someone I had actually met online… of course THEN many of my friends could not use a computer… NOW many of my friends work in IT related fields and everyone has an email address.
There is a rather uninteresting comic strip that uses the characters.
That is all.
One Comment
There is a public server for Comic Chat… http://www.chat.org.uk/chatrooms/