The world is collapsing.
Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 10:09 amSo, the world is a strange place. I have proof.
As you may or may not know, I've been working at an ice cream shop right outside the college I go to. There's a manager there everyone thinks is really odd. I don't normally work with him, but he switched shifts with another manager (my sister, incidentally) and I wound up on the same shift as him last night.
The shift went fairly normally until just after close, about the time when one of our coworkers came back in from taking out the trash, and mentioned that a load of concrete had been dumped outside. "It's not wet anymore, though, or I'd write in it," he said. I was doing the dishes at the time.
"Damn," said the manager, walking by us. "I wish it was still wet, I'd go out and write 'Nev was here' in it."
I was confused for a moment; this guy's name doesn't have a Nev in it. "Why 'Nev'?" I asked.
"Well," he said, "there's a lot of people with my name on the Internet, but very few Nevarehs."
"Nevareh?" I asked, beginning to feel the world shrinking. "N-E-V-A-R-E-H?"
"Yeah," he said.
"Well, there was a Nevareh on a forum I go to, so either I know another one or it was you."
He confirmed it. AIM screenname: TheGreatNevareh.
I've been working for a month at an ice cream shop in a college town with Ting and didn't even know it.
Now, the way I look at it is this: First of all, I had no conscious idea where Nevareh was located, geographically, beyond the vague notion that he lived in the US and no conscious memory of a timezone dispute as I've had with Kelne or Zero. He could have said "Oh, I live in France," and all I would have done would have been to compliment him on his English.
There are 62 names in the RPGWW section of my buddy list, with about 55 of those being unique people (as opposed to alternate screennames). Some of them were people who were only on the forum for a brief period and I literally don't know enough about them to be able to identify them in the course of a conversation, and doing so would leave little or no impact on me ("Oh, you browsed a forum I'm on once and made a post. Weird."). That leaves, by my count, 49 people whom no one can dispute are former or current RPGWWers - identifiable by the community at large as being such.
Geographically, we have a tendency to cluster, because a fairly large cross-section of the community was introduced to the forum by another RPGWWer whom they knew in real life - Joe, Gus, Trom, Ashley, etc., and I'm sure there are others. Another fairly large section of the community has clustered by choice - Dia and Mike getting married, the couple of people who moved in together, etc. So let's, for the purpose of this argument, discount...six people, let's say, to account for this fact (because you have the same chance of living near one RPGWWer as you do a cluster of three).
That's, like, 43 people, dispersed through the English-speaking world (Glu isn't on my buddy list, and I don't think we have anyone besides him anymore for whom language is anything but a first language). Stumbling on one of them in Maryland is a one in several million chance.
Or was, until the world started collapsing.
As you may or may not know, I've been working at an ice cream shop right outside the college I go to. There's a manager there everyone thinks is really odd. I don't normally work with him, but he switched shifts with another manager (my sister, incidentally) and I wound up on the same shift as him last night.
The shift went fairly normally until just after close, about the time when one of our coworkers came back in from taking out the trash, and mentioned that a load of concrete had been dumped outside. "It's not wet anymore, though, or I'd write in it," he said. I was doing the dishes at the time.
"Damn," said the manager, walking by us. "I wish it was still wet, I'd go out and write 'Nev was here' in it."
I was confused for a moment; this guy's name doesn't have a Nev in it. "Why 'Nev'?" I asked.
"Well," he said, "there's a lot of people with my name on the Internet, but very few Nevarehs."
"Nevareh?" I asked, beginning to feel the world shrinking. "N-E-V-A-R-E-H?"
"Yeah," he said.
"Well, there was a Nevareh on a forum I go to, so either I know another one or it was you."
He confirmed it. AIM screenname: TheGreatNevareh.
I've been working for a month at an ice cream shop in a college town with Ting and didn't even know it.
Now, the way I look at it is this: First of all, I had no conscious idea where Nevareh was located, geographically, beyond the vague notion that he lived in the US and no conscious memory of a timezone dispute as I've had with Kelne or Zero. He could have said "Oh, I live in France," and all I would have done would have been to compliment him on his English.
There are 62 names in the RPGWW section of my buddy list, with about 55 of those being unique people (as opposed to alternate screennames). Some of them were people who were only on the forum for a brief period and I literally don't know enough about them to be able to identify them in the course of a conversation, and doing so would leave little or no impact on me ("Oh, you browsed a forum I'm on once and made a post. Weird."). That leaves, by my count, 49 people whom no one can dispute are former or current RPGWWers - identifiable by the community at large as being such.
Geographically, we have a tendency to cluster, because a fairly large cross-section of the community was introduced to the forum by another RPGWWer whom they knew in real life - Joe, Gus, Trom, Ashley, etc., and I'm sure there are others. Another fairly large section of the community has clustered by choice - Dia and Mike getting married, the couple of people who moved in together, etc. So let's, for the purpose of this argument, discount...six people, let's say, to account for this fact (because you have the same chance of living near one RPGWWer as you do a cluster of three).
That's, like, 43 people, dispersed through the English-speaking world (Glu isn't on my buddy list, and I don't think we have anyone besides him anymore for whom language is anything but a first language). Stumbling on one of them in Maryland is a one in several million chance.
Or was, until the world started collapsing.