The mIRC Days

The internet has been a medium for fantasy. Behind the monitor, with a keyboard and some really fancy Photoshop skills, we are who we say we are. I am Butterfly, news-reporter by day, rich tycoon by night, superhero by profession and I can pee alcohol.

I’ve never been much of a fan on the concept of knowing people online through random profile pages. For one, I don’t have that much time to be surfing profiles and if I did have the time, I’d be writing my book. Blaque, Reznor and LB on the other hand will preach you on the merits of this and would have archived stories to palaver you with.

They will swear by sites like Wholivesnearyou, MySpace or Friendster and the abundance of possibilities that these sites can offer for a trip to the bedroom. I on the other hand, remain skeptical to this realm of lies.

How do I know people lie about themselves? Well, MySpace has a search function that allows you to filter people based on physical classification. I clicked on ‘athletic’ and the search still came up with whales. I don’t know what culture you come from, but being built like a sumo wrestler is not athletic in mine.

Yet, long before social networking platforms like Friendster or Facebook came into play, teenagers battling puberty and internet sex predators alike, depended on chatrooms to make new friends, meet new activity partners, or hire new ‘alter boys’ for the Catholic churches.

And at the peak of them all, was mIRC, which translates to Internet relay chat. I don’t know the technical mechanics of it, but it had a simplistic interface which looked like some facelift of any DOS based program, except with more colours. I didn’t give a shit because it was so damn addictive to be sitting home all day talking to strangers. That was when I was 16 and still not old enough to pamper myself with alcohol, but if you are 28 and still doing that, I will laugh at you.

When I was 16 however, I was hardly a fitting reflection of myself today. I wasn’t as out-going, didn’t like the taste of alcohol and didn’t see the need to date women. Blaque on the other hand, was huge on the idea of meeting complete strangers of the opposite sex.

This involved a process of first filtering candidates based on nickname. It was a short funneling process of sifting the pretty ones from the lot and Blaque always believed the more materialistic or ‘ah lian-ish’ the nick was, the prettier the girl.

For instance, Gucci-girl would take precedence over Bata-girl.

I remembered sitting in Blaque’s living room while he was serenading to some girl with his guitar years ago, when leaving voice messages and knowing the lyrics to any Backstreet Boys’ song was still cool. And in the midst of this all, were blind dates, bell bottom jeans, Wywy Wonderspace, and a girl called, Cashel.

I was dragged by Blaque to meet up with this one girl whom had given the following description of herself; slim, long dyed hair, no pimples and big eyes. This was a decent reason to meet up by any standards. And we did, because by simple facial piecing, that didn’t sound any bad. At 16, a lot less picky and relatively un-influenced by important character traits like cleavages and nice asses, this was a great idea.

It was to be at Raffles City Burger King and we went down earlier than the proposed timing basing entirely on the merits of ambush. We were young and shallow, but smart enough to come up with a contingency bail plan and proper exit route.

When we finally did meet her, the plus point was that she didn’t lie on any part of her description, save for the fact that she didn’t warn us that she was a dead ringer for Patricia Mok, and mind you – this was not post fame Patricia, but how she looked like when she first burst on the scene as some two bit calefare playing staple roles of the perennial ugly duckling.

We did what any self-respecting man would do, we bailed.

She started calling Blaque and his conscience eventually kicked in despite me trying to drown it out with, “Do not fucking pick up the phone”. He started throw huge words like, ‘retribution’ and ‘promises’ to me, of which even at that age of innocence, sounded exceedingly vulgar.

So I devised a plan and we played it to an angle seemingly that we bailed because we had a friend who needed help. She offered to come along and at 16, I wasn’t so good at making excuses, so her persistence was met with no further resistance. I was disgusted with myself.

She ended up tagging along with us for the whole day and Blaque refused to let me leave, so I could only show my displeasure by the only way I knew how, by sulking. I don’t believe I’ve sulk more in my life, because I frowned so much, if you saw me then, you would have thought I had a botox malfunction.

The things I do for my friends.

mIRC was fun because you could immersed yourself with make-believes and faux personas, whether it was therapeutic for inferiority complex, baiting sexual preys or predators, playing a prank or communicating with fellow terrorist.

It was the realm you lord over, the cathartic escape or the sanctuary of solace. It was where friends were made, bonds were forged and virginities lost. In fact, I actually believe it is a communist tool because it was the denominator that wiped up all basis of physical attractiveness. If I was doing marketing for mIRC, my slogan would have been,

‘If you are fat and ugly, you still stand a chance”.

Popularity was solely by chance and leveraged modestly by the choice of nicknames. It was like Russian Roulette, a game of chance, hits and misses. Randomly starting from the nickname, then progressing to preconceiving images based on voice and what little superficial characteristics we knew about them.

mIRC gave everyone a level playing field. You could have been some pimply teen battling the wrath of puberty and the consequences of a $10 daily allowance, but over the medium of a chat room, you are the heir to some New Zealand cattle ranch with enough milk to feed half of Somalia. Oh and of course, you also happened to be built like a Greek God.

And I wonder why it’s popularity died off..