There is this thing, and it’s kind of weird, but hear me out. It’s called Omegle, and it’s a pretty fantastic idea and I’m not likely to get bored of it any time soon. Basically, you go instantly into a one-on-one chat with some complete random. Be warned; a lot of opening lines are ‘male looking for female with webcam’, although not in as finely crafted English.
But!
It is a fantastic place, thanks to the complete anonymity of the whole deal. I’ve met a couple of people I genuinely enjoyed talking to (you then have to decide if it’s worth exchanging email details…luckily, I have nothing remotely important linked to my hotmail, so I’m not too worried) and I’ve met a large number of nutters. I thought I would start screenshotting my favourite conversations thus far and sharing them with you every so often.
The first thing I should mention is the use of ‘asl’. For those of you cultured enough to avoid chat rooms, ‘asl’ seems to mean “hello and how are you? I would like to ask you what age you are, as well as your sex and location, if you’d be so kind as to oblige this information.”
It really gets to me when people start a chat with just ‘asl’. No question mark, nothing. The most interesting conversations I’ve had so far, I haven’t known the other person’s age, gender, or whereabouts until we’d actually started properly conversing and learning about eachother.
So, I now tell people this…
…aaaand more often than not, the response is a hasty disconnect.
Interesting.
I decided to ask people deep, involved questions about themselves, and they tended to get a bit defensive.
I’ve learnt never to ask people about sex, politics, or celery.
Sometimes, people surprised me with their randomness.
…but I guess my randomness is a little hard to beat.
So far the pattern is that I scare people away. But I enjoy every second of it.
Get brave, get involved, make people’s mundane lives a tad more surreal… I dare you.
Widely Regarded as a Bad Move 