My chat links page used to go here. However, it seems I’ve been out of circulation for some time now. In the beginning my links were to chat rooms within GeoCities, back when they had the old magmacom-style  HTML chat rooms. Back then I used to chat in Community Chat, now long since gone, and, I’m afraid, forgotten. Some of them went to Powwow. Some went in whole or in part to ICQ. ICQ seems made more for those who want to chat with one or two people in particular—not with a room full of known people. Some of the Community Chat regulars went to webnautics for a while, but webnautics seems to be changing, too. If you’re interested in chat rooms, God knows there’s no shortage of them. You can find them on many ISP websites, in Yahoo, in IRC and elsewhere. Geocities still has chat rooms which, despite the howls of those who preferred the old HTML-style rooms, are quite well, alive and kicking. I suspect most of those who chat there have no first-hand memories of the old-style chat rooms, in any event. Go there, if you like; you can still find a widely dispersed chat community there. And, of course, magmacom’s l’Hôtel is still alive and well, too.
    Of course, as you can see, there are a few links set out above. However, I will not use the more detailed “back-door-style” links with forms for entering with your screen name and some witty quip. For one thing, I no longer know the precise URLs to the individual chat rooms; and for another, I no longer care to keep up with it. Much like an old, gnarled man all of whose friends and kin have passed on long since, I no longer maintain much interest in the chat room goings-on, though I’ll readily admit that many of the chatters I talked with over the summer and spring were nice folks.
    There are other pages, thick as oatmeal, with cutesy links to every known chat room on the planet (and to a few in the hereafter, too, I’ll bet). I will not duplicate efforts here.
    There are other places, as well, to turn for advice on chat rooms and chatting, if you feel the need for some guidance in that respect. I can recommend Caught in the Web, by Ingrid Parker, a Kiwi writer. Her book was published back in the comparative dark ages of 1997, so some of it is necessarily out of date. She, like me, used to chat in Geocities’ Community Chat, though I do not recall her handle, “Shy Lady.” I assume that she was either using a different handle, or that we were chatting there for the most part at different times of the day.
    However, I’ll still recommend her book, in part for her cautions about giving your true identity away unintentionally, and in part for her warning about how easy it is—and it truly is easy—to lose a certain sense of balance and proportion about life when a hefty portion of it is lived online.
    It wasn’t long ago that psychologists and sociologists urged us to let out pent-up inner feelings and urges through fantasy. The CB phenomenon of the 1970’s was seen as one aspect of this. We read how demure housewives became “Lady Hotlips” on the airwaves, harmlessly letting out hangups and enjoying themselves in the meantime. From that time until this, everyone, from Dr. Whozzit to Barney, has urged us to pretend, to role-play, to use our imaginations.
    Perhaps, after all, Barney and the shrinks were wrong. Perhaps, after all, we have our inhibitions for a reason.
    Why is it that text on a computer screen has proven so seductive and corrosive to so many people’s offline lives? Perhaps because we not only project our own fantasies, intending that people on the other end believe them—we come, perhaps, to believe the fantasies projected at us. We do odd things like fall in love with people whose voices we have never heard, the glint of whose eyes we have never seen. We rationalize this at the time in terms of a meeting of the minds. We may suggest that this is even better than meeting people in a bar.
    And, come to think of it, perhaps it is.
    We forget, however, how far apart we are, sometimes. People in different hemispheres act as if they were just down the block. And, unfortunately, the consequences can be harsh and unforgiving—all the more so because it may be our families that feel the pain, not just us.
    I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to pontificate here. I just thought I ought to put down something by way of an explanation of why I was removing the chat room page, and I’ve overshot the mark.
    To those of you who will remain in chat (which I will not), I wish you happy hours with friends who care. To those who knew me online, thanks for the chats, and I wish you well—my friends from the southern hemisphere, the eastern, the northern, and the western.
    Kia Ora. Dó jè. Mercí. Gracias. Einen recht schönen Dank. Thank you.