Recently I befriended two new acquaintances on Hardwarezone's forums. It's been a long time since I chatted with someone via private messaging, yet the experience brought me back to the year 2000 when I first started to meet new friends over the internet. I still remember I became a fan of Stefanie Sun Yanzi in the year 2000, and back then I joined Warner Music Taiwan's online forum, a fast moving platform similar to Hardwarezone's EDMW forums. Because most of the people on the Warner Music forum were Taiwanese, I started to keep a lookout for names which I could associate with, and I got to know an acquaintance named 小A or "Xiao-A" on the forum. Xiao-A was from Singapore like me, and while I was serving National Service in the years 2000-02, Xiao-A was waiting to start school in a local university. We didn't really hit it off, because there was some awkwardness making pen-pals over the internet, but still, we did become slightly more than hi-bye friends over the Warner Music forum.
In the year 2001, on the same Warner Music forum, I got to befriend several more Taiwanese friends as I started to become proficient typing and reading in Traditional Chinese. I never met any of these acquaintances in real life just as in the case of Xiao-A, but the activism and passion we engaged in over the forum was really fascinating. There were many names from Taiwan and Hong Kong such as "WWW", "Leoman", "PingZai", "Justine", "Junp" and "qqdi". Stefanie Sun Yanzi's music brought us together, and we shared encouraging words amidst delight as we followed our pop idol as she became famous in Taiwan.
I also met several Singaporeans over on Warner Music Taiwan's forum. Their handles include, "nitrozix", "zaru", "chewythai", "applepies88", "sunny island", "keon" and "bingo", and we would meet up in real life for casual activities which range from attending Sun Yanzi's concerts to going for teahouse sessions at Kreya Ayer. I was still young back then, probably around 20 years old or so, and we were all once young.
As time passed, the internet has become a really complex place. These days there are so many scams and spams over the internet, sometimes I am really reluctant to befriend another person whom I encountered on the internet. But, give and take la, while I am hesitant to make friends, I don't mind being a passive cyber Non-Playable Character (NPC) whose purpose is just to stay at a fixed location and pointing the directions or setting up playable quests for young people who are getting to know the cyber sphere. To be honest, I have been using the internet since the year 1994, back then we were still using 33.6kbps dialup modems and the internet was damn slow. These days you can even play complicated games over the internet, back then these were at best a fantasy.
So, I'm still online this evening. I continue to monitor my inbox because I am earning my own upkeep working for my family business, while I don't mind befriending a few interesting youths over the internet with the hope that my presence can give them some meaning in life.