In my previous articles I have tried to help you out, my readers, with such problems as "What to do when she blocks your IM" and "Rage issues when WoW lags." Today, however, we are going to talk about a rl issue, in response to some very desperate emails and IRC conversations I have had lately.
How to get not lonely.
There are many many different reasons that a person can find themselves in the
desperate place of loneliness. Since you are one of my readers, however, I am going to assume it is because you sit around on the internet all day. That is an understandable reason to be lonely. And it is possibly an easy one to remedy. Just follow these five easy steps:
1) Is there an exit to the room you are currently in? Exits often come in the form of doors or windows or just large holes in walls or floors -- but usually not ceilings, the reasons for this being very techinical, so we will not get into them. If there is an exit in your room, locate it. If not, you're boned.
2) Use the exit.
3) Repeat steps one and two until you find yourself in a location you could no longer call a "room." This is what some call "outside." Outside can prove to be a very
interesting place -- you might even consider explorng it more at a later time. If you can easily see things around you, this is what we call "day." That
large orange orb in the sky producing light is the sun -- don't look directly at this for long, it can cause blindness to your sensitive eyes. If you cannot see easily, or if you cannot
see at all, this is what we call "night" -- unless, of course, the reason you can't see is because you have already been blinded by the sun. It is important to recognize which one
of these two states the outside is in before we can proceed to the next step. If
it is day, please move on to (4a), if it is night, proceed to (4b).
4a) If it is day, what to do next is easy: Find the closest bipedal organism to
your location, these are most likely other human beings. You can recognize them because they
are shaped roughly similar to you. At the base they have two legs, above that a
big stumpy part called a "torso" off of which two arms, one on each side, and a
head protrude toward the top. Now that you have located another human, go up to this human and
say, "Hi."
4b) Night is a little more difficult than day. You cannot just walk up to random human beings at night. In many cultures, such as that of the native New Yorkers, this will be interpreted as an
attack on this person -- or at the very least, as among those indigenous to the Eastern Europe, creepy. So, the key to successfully
encountering another human being at night is to walk around until you find a
building with bright, colorful lights on the outside, but not really any lights
coming from inside the building. These bright lights will often be in curvy letters that form words such as "the Warehouse" or "Storks." This is what we call a "club." Clubs are
were non-internet people often meet each other. Think of it like a chat room with
a virtual interface where people use their avatars to approach other people's
avatars to initiate pming. Walk your rl body up to one of these bipeds and say
something really witty like, "Do you frequent this establishment at regular
intervals?"
5) Now that you have successfully initiated a conversation with another human
being, continue to say things that are either interesting, or in response to what
this other human being has said to you!
I do hope these steps can help those of you that emailed me so desperately, and those of you too afraid to acknowledge their own loneliness. Just know that you are not alone in your loneliness. I will be setting up a forum on my message board, called RUlonli2?, for people to discuss the success and failures they encounter with their socializing experiments. Remember, you can help each other far more than I can help any one of you. |
