Tag: CB simulator

2306: Happy Birthday, Discord

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Back in the early days of “going online” — after the days of Bulletin Board Systems but before the widespread Internet we know today — our family used CompuServe to get at information online.

For a teenager like I was at the time, it was very exciting. For the first time, I was able to “meet” and communicate with people from all over the world, discuss common interests and even exchange files.

One of my favourite features of CompuServe was an area it rather grandiosely referred to as the “CB Simulator”, after the units used by ham radio operators to communicate with other enthusiasts over the radio waves. In reality, it was simply what we now know today as a chatroom, but it was a revelation to the young me, who had always had a bit of difficulty finding new people to talk to, particularly those who were into the same things.

In the CB Simulator, I could talk to people without fear of them, say, judging me for my appearance, or my mannerisms that clearly indicated I was uncomfortable with talking to strangers, or how I tended to go the colour of beetroot when talking to girls I liked. No; in the CB Simulator, I was able to communicate in the way I had always felt most comfortable: through the written word.

A few years later, when “the Internet” started to become more of a thing and self-contained, fenced-off communities like CompuServe and AOL were starting to become less of a thing, I looked into Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. There, I found a similar experience to that which I’d had in CompuServe’s CB Simulator: the ability to communicate and express myself through text to people from all over the world. And now, I could “emote” too, which in turn led to my first experiences with online roleplaying through a group that “simulated” Star Trek missions through text chat.

I was kind of sad when chatrooms fell out of favour with the rise of what we now know as social media, but for those of you, like me, who always used to enjoy the real-time nature of talking in chatrooms, may I introduce you to the wonderful service that is Discord, which is now celebrating its first birthday.

Originally designed as a free, lightweight alternative to Skype and Teamspeak, Discord has been actively developed over the last year to become one of the best — arguably the best — real-time chat application out there, particularly if you’re a gamer.

For the unfamiliar, it works in a slightly different way to instant messaging services such as Skype and its earlier counterparts AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Instead of focusing on private chats with individuals on your friends list, Discord is instead server-based, much like IRC was. Within that server — again like IRC — there are channels for whatever purposes the server admins desire. Anyone who is a member of that server — and servers can be public or private — can hop in to a channel and text chat. There’s voice chat facilities, too, which have very good, reliable, clear voice quality and connections, making it an ideal solution for “party chat” on PC, or even using alongside games that don’t normally offer voice communication: the Splatoon community, for example, use it quite a bit, since that game has no means of direct communication whatsoever.

Mostly the thing that excites me about Discord is how much it feels like those old IRC servers, only with a more modern coat of paint. Inline image posts, markdown formatting, animated GIFs and link previews are all a natural evolution of the purely text-based chat that IRC offered, and Discord’s cross-platform nature — it works via the Web, on PC or Mac desktop clients or even on mobile — makes it an ideal means for keeping in touch with groups of friends or specialised communities.

I’m very happy that Discord has been such a success since it originally launched, and hope it continues to be A Thing for many years to come yet. It’s been a great way for me to interact with friends from elsewhere on the Internet in new, more immediate ways than services like Twitter offer, and, depending on the server, it can be a nice quiet safe haven away from the noise of more public social media channels.

I’m a member of several different Discord servers, but the one on which I’m most active is probably the one I’m an admin of. If you’d like to stop by and say hi — the server is largely focused on video games, anime, lewds and general shitposting, but everyone there is just happy to have a good chinwag — then you can do so by following this link.

Happy birthday, Discord, and happy chatting to those of you who choose to come and join us!

#oneaday, Day 30: Julia

The Internet is a curious thing, as we all know. It’s given us LOLcats, cakefarts, puddingfarts (so I’m told… I haven’t dared look that one up yet), Twitter, Rickrolling, gayrolling, that kid throwing a WoW-related (fake) strop and jamming a controller up his arse, porn, dancing chicken man, leekspinning and all manner of other things besides.

The other thing it gives you is people.

As a kid at school, I often wondered what it would be like to meet people outside the local community where I lived. I grew up in a small village in the countryside that had a pretty close-knit community. You could probably name most of the local “characters” off the top of your head if you had a good think… largely because pretty much everyone got involved with everything. And, just to add to every country stereotype ever, there was even a semi-regular “village show” which was inevitably filled with middle-aged men and women making jokes that were smutty and/or at the local vicar’s expense. It’s pretty neat to see a close-knit community like that, actually, though I question how much it actually happens these days. It probably does, though I doubt to the same degree.

I remember when the Internet came to town, though. Or, more specifically, in the form of CompuServe, which wasn’t the “proper” Internet—that was a mysterious and difficult thing that no-one quite understood at the time. CompuServe was a window onto the rest of the world; people who were potentially far away that we all had access to for the first time.

CompuServe had one of the earliest chatrooms around—this was so long ago that the term “chat” hadn’t taken on the widespread meaning it had today. No, in keeping with the times (or possibly not), CompuServe elected to call their chatroom facility the “CB Simulator”. You know, because it was like CB radio in that you could talk to random strangers. Only it was completely different because you were just typing things.

I remember “meeting” a few people through this facility, with one in particular springing to mind. Her name was Julia, and she was from somewhere near Manchester. We got chatting and hit it off pretty quickly, and thus began a long campaign of emailing each other back and forth. I can’t remember any of the things we talked about—the usual teenage things, I imagine—but I remember that we were getting on well and it felt like we were pretty “close”.

So eventually, we had the opportunity to meet. She was going to Alton Towers with her friends, and as it happened, my friends and I were planning a similar trip. So we decided to make our trips coincide. I was pretty excited about the whole thing. She’d sent me a couple of (clean!) photos which seem to have managed to travel from computer to computer with me completely unintentionally, and she hadn’t promptly cut off all contact when I sent her a photo of myself looking slightly uncomfortable in a dinner jacket on prom night. Which was a good sign.

I’m not sure what happened. Perhaps it was shyness, perhaps it was the presence of all our other friends “cramping our style”, perhaps it was the fact that one of my friends was hitting on one of her friends (and doing quite well, from what I could tell), perhaps I wasn’t what she’d expected or hoped for (she totally was what I was hoping for, she was a hottie)… but we found it pretty difficult to talk to each other in “real life”. It was weird; we’d told each other lots of things, including plenty of “secrets”, but as soon as we were faced with one another it was suddenly like starting over… and it became a missed opportunity, sadly. We drifted off and lost contact after that. There was no “breakup” or words spoken in anger; things just… “stopped”.

I think about Julia every so often and wonder what she’s doing with her life. I hope she’s happy, wherever she is.