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United States22154 Posts
Of Fate and Friendship
"Don't trust strangers on the internet" a mantra we've all heard a hundred times. A mantra many of us have ingrained into our behavior, and a sensible mantra to follow. One should never trust a stranger on the internet, and even the the slightest sliver of information is a vulnerability. Its not paranoia, its simple caution. And with all this I agree.
Its also funny, that in six years actively on the internet, I've made friends who are just as strongly my friends as people I've known for much longer. People who, without even hesitating, I'd offer my couch and home to, people I've never met, thousands of miles away, across oceans and mountains and deserts. People who's images I've never seen, and who could easily be fabrications of my mind. Yet these are people I trust, people who know intimate secrets about my life, and people who have entrusted me with powerful personal stories. People who were once strangers, the type of people you don't trust, because trust is a weapon that can be used against you.
Yet somehow, we've transcended that, we've broken the chains of "caution" and in the process grown. As I sat there this morning, in the midst of one of the most annoying aliments known to man, insomnia, and talked with a stranger that is more than 4000 miles away, a stranger who lives six hours ahead of me, and with who correspondence is only possible thanks to the wonder of the internet. As we sat there, each in our own separate cloud of woe, sharing our miseries, I realized, this person isn't a stranger, but a friend. A person who I've told stories that maybe three other people in the world know, stories that I can share, out of trust, and because of the vast gaping distance between our worlds.
In talking with this no-longer stranger, this alien who lives in the future, I learned, I learned that our misery is kin, and that regardless of distance and time, we have similar experiences and attitudes. I learned that this not-stranger, this friend, *is* a friend.
This led me to reflect. In my time on TL, I've made of friends, some closer some further, some older and some younger, and I've lost friends, people who have simply vanished, people who've disappeared off the face of the earth with no trail. I've also realized why I've met these people, the force that brought us together, the common denominator. Its the same common denominator that brings you and I together reader, it is the force of TeamLiquid, and the passion and work we've put behind it. Its the fact that we've worked, shoulder by shoulder for months, perhaps not even noticing each other's presence, for the same goal. Perhaps in different ways, by different means, yet ultimately, it is the force of our passion and our love, for both games and this site, that has led me to meet many friends I would otherwise never have met, people who hide in the far reaches of Australia, or only an hours flight away, but who's path I would have never crossed if it weren't for the binding strength of teamliquid, and the willingness to work towards making tl and by extension all the games that tl covers better.
So, today, I want to thank Teamliquid, for the friends I've met, and the ones I have yet to meet. I'd also like to raise a cup to the one's we've left along the way, may they be happy and prosperous, even if we don't know where they are.
 
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United States22154 Posts
I am dubious of the coherence of this blog, because insomnia, but enjoy!
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Extremely true sentiments. While it's always best to be wary of those you "meet" on the internet, those of us who are more internet savvy than others can really make some great friends on here, be it through the games themselves, communities around games, or communities around other things you may find an interest in.
Insomnia often gives the best blogs, I think 
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Italy12246 Posts
Awesome blog, i can really relate 
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Is that a picture from Mount&Blade loading screens? Haven't played the game in a while  And I totally know what you are talking about, it feels very strange when you think about it.
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On April 09 2013 00:08 Qbek wrote:Is that a picture from Mount&Blade loading screens? Haven't played the game in a while And I totally know what you are talking about, it feels very strange when you think about it.
Yep, it's from M&B Warband.
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The best thing about a friend from a completely different world is that it's easy to trust them. I have many friends here in the town I recently moved to, and none of them have ANY connection to my life back home. So no matter what I tell em, it can't come back to bite me in the ass... A very liberating feeling somehow... I guess TL is similar for me in that way..
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And then there is the bad karma you will share with others because you met them online. The karma tha rips away the lies you keep in effort to maintain your hollywood movie version of reality. The karma that makes you look at the the cold, chill, lifeless side of socializing on the internet. The abandoned Broodwar channels where Koreans in PC bangs once met up, the channel your clan used to talk girls instead of games in, that old replay on Lost Temple you think about from time to time,where you dropped tanks on the cliffs successfully for the first time. The barren, inactive myspace page where you once met random friends and acted like a way cooler version of yourself, the "friend" who knew the boisterous but also censored version of yourself. The one who was always around on some instant messanger when you felt most alone, the one who you could always get to type you "lol" in response to your witty self, the one who's well angled pictures made her look like your trophy girl now become ghosts, with their vague haunting nostalgia.
The karma that you pay for when you realize you are only sitting in front of a machine and your friend's avatar only represents her, just as mindlessly as you in front of a similar machine.You see that much was censored. You realize you were probably wrong to picture her as her display picture or as the image of the girl you met in, tights, make up and a leather jacket, that you would have been more correct to picture her in her pajamas farting, eating chips and screaming at her mom. Or that maybe this is what you ought to have portrayed of yourself to her, instead of ignoring it and channeling it into making yourself an even better avatar.
This is the make up we wear on the web that makes you pay. The price is paid when you one day realize that the side of you that you thought was pouring through to another, was filtered through yours and her illusions and was forced to traverse the uncommon grounds of reality that you share with her.. You see for once the illusion your real friendships were buried by. The one that cannot but be destroyed when you you realize the faults the internet covered up are what makes real life friendships so rewarding ie. the challenge of being a presentable version of your true self and accepting the real life flaws of other humans.
This is the karma that you receive when you realize your internet friendships started from social networking habits that were caused by greed in yourself. It is the desolation when you realize your efforts to improve yourself in social situations is what you regret, and you would have rather just made the best of what you actually had.
I guess this is all friendship an all life though. Some sides of it are real and some are fake. the fake parts disappear so fast and leave you wanting them but you k now better than to latch on to what will surely be pulled from you eventually.
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On April 09 2013 00:08 Qbek wrote:Is that a picture from Mount&Blade loading screens? Haven't played the game in a while And I totally know what you are talking about, it feels very strange when you think about it.
I assume you trust me a lot =)
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Magic Woods9326 Posts
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Yo, when are you going to host Catastrophe mafia with me?
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I owe you a deck of cards.
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Lalalaland34491 Posts
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I was thinking of this over the couple of weeks. That some of the friends i've made on Tl are as close as my closest friends IRL and its a weird thing referring to them by their screen name that I identify them by
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United States37500 Posts
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Bisutopia19239 Posts
Here's to being one of your newer friends!
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I'd like to use a sentence and for the first time ever genuinly mean it:
Cool Story, bro!
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i made a friend on starcraft once, and we hung out online and customs and things for a while
but then i got scared and muted him and unfriended him and pretended he never existed
i wonder what he thought
i am a terrible terrible person
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Lalalaland34491 Posts
On April 09 2013 07:50 snively wrote:
i made a friend on starcraft once, and we hung out online and customs and things for a while
but then i got scared and muted him and unfriended him and pretended he never existed
i wonder what he thought
i am a terrible terrible person
He called the American consulate to make sure you were alive.
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On April 09 2013 07:50 snively wrote:
i made a friend on starcraft once, and we hung out online and customs and things for a while
but then i got scared and muted him and unfriended him and pretended he never existed
i wonder what he thought
i am a terrible terrible person
Isn't that one of the signs that you're a sociopath?
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United Kingdom14464 Posts
I do like the internet friends I've met on TL ^_^
Its funny talking to them on skype though, some of them are so completely different on there than on TL that i think they have 3 personalities, TL personality, Skype personality, and (possibly) an IRL personality. Its probably not healthy.
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On April 09 2013 08:18 MCDayC wrote:
I do like the internet friends I've met on TL ^_^
Its funny talking to them on skype though, some of them are so completely different on there than on TL that i think they have 3 personalities, TL personality, Skype personality, and (possibly) an IRL personality. Its probably not healthy.
It's actually pretty normal. People present different sides of themselves to different groups of people. Think about how you act around your parents. Do you act that way in front of your friends? How about in front of your professors? Your boss? Your students?
Some people craft their personas very meaningfully -- I can think of a few off the top of my head even on this site -- but for others, it's a reaction and depends roughly on the medium of communication.
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So one of the partners at a strat consulting firm I worked for escaped out of an inner-city black childhood by doing this
age 14: get on Usenet through the public library computer
age 15: make friends with a whole bunch of people doing random computer/IT stuff
???: learn how to code/do advanced math/combinatorics + make friends with a grad student who later became a professor at MIT
age 18: go to MIT off a combination of math skills, decent SATs, connections with said grad student and affirmative action (one of the few times where I would say AA provided a social net good)
age 22: graduate from MIT and start working for said consulting firm
age 35: become a partner making 5 million a year when almost half his relatives, by his own admission, are still in the projects.
making friends on the internet is definitely one of the best ways to improve the quality of your social network, and the younger you start, the better.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://www.bubblews.com/assets/images/news/608786423_1359995439.jpg)
