Talk:Members of Hate/@comment-26323407-20150419213044

I'm going to say this as someone who's been around the Internet since Skype wasn't thought of and Google was just a daydream:

shit, son, did you build a dream machine to examine my nightmares from the days of IRC and MSN group chat?

There used to be this user who'd show up in the chatroom whenever I was on Mibbit. Their username was just _. and they'd never say anything--just show up and sit there for hours. If you private-chatted them they'd say "hi" and then never respond to any further messages. Once I went into the list of all the chats they were in and systematically started entering chats, asking people in there if they had any idea who this person was sitting in a private chat between me and a few friends. I got ignored in most rooms, told no such user was in the room in one, and banned from two. I can't say I ever imagined _. as a human/mannequin hybrid, but were there nights I dreamed about them as just being an empty, flashing computer with some unknown malicious purpose? Absolutely. Pastas like this one and Funnymouth take me back to some of those strange, dusty corners of the Internet I used to hang out in.

9/10. The final reveal lost a lot of the drama it was going for (I think IP addresses that didn't exist would actually have been a lot more frightening), but there are far more things in the Internet than are dreamt of in most folks' philosophies, and could I see bot programs or viruses gone wrong doing this? Totally.