“I’m excited to explore the idea of truth and trust and online versus IRL personas, but also how funny it is when people meet?”

It’s the penultimate post for HELLO INTERNET BOY, and tomorrow I’ll be reflecting on the project as a whole. But today, I wanted to revisit my aims, my ‘statement of intention’ from the very first post, and probably from my application. This idea of truth and trust in the online versus IRL persona – did I come to any great leaps of discovery, any epiphanies?

Sort of.

I kind of DIDN’T get proven incorrect, and that’s interesting in itself. I wondered if by meeting people IRL that I’ve known for ages online, that something dramatic would shift. I suppose the doomsday scenario is that I would discover that the person I thought I “knew” was an illusion, a projection, and that the real person behind that persona was someone I actively disliked, or was so different they’d be unrecognisable. It’s the story that comes from shows like Catfish, or was what I feared as a teen in the airport, when we thought we were picking up an obese middle aged woman instead of a plucky farm teen.

Rather, meeting Michelle and Lyndsay was almost exactly as I expected – there’s definitely a deepening of the friendship (at least for me – maybe they hate me x100 more), but I was definitely meeting the people I knew online. I would argue that the increase of friendship came from shared experience, rather than any particular power or truth from real life. But also that capacity for that level of a shared experience can’t really be facilitated online. There is a kind of topping of experience in purely digital – people can be incredibly, incredibly close, but will always have a barrier of physical distance. People can be closer on the internet than in real life,  for sure. But perhaps it all leads towards a proving moment, the testing zone of meeting in real life?

Because I suppose when it comes to trust, I now 100% definitely trust that Michelle and Lyndsay are real people, and not malicious AI’s or old internet men after my fortune (joke’s on them). I never had that worry before – ever. But I also had no real stakes. Online I trusted them to be who they were, but really they never had to prove it to me. That moment I met Michelle in the airport, that was high stakes. That was where she could have ripped her flesh-mask off and revealed that she was sent back in time to stop this project from ever happening. That’s when she could have revealed she was the head of a porn ring called ‘Sallow white dudes .com’ and she was just after some sweet butt pics.

So I think truth is subjective between online and digital personas, and trust is forced. Which honestly is what I assumed already – but it’s good to have it confirmed.

This post is generously supported by the Thiel Grant for Online Writing, and is included in a 50 part series called ‘HELLO INTERNET BOY’ ranging from March 2015 – March 2016.

Ahead of them, all possibly reachable before the stampede overtook them, were some points of interest. To their right were more groups of trees, a large pile of rocks and boulders somewhere in their midst. To their slight left, there was a series of dips that traveled downward into what seemed a small ravine, where a stream might have once flowed.

Ahead, their path took them through some pockets of clearings, where they’d need to weave in and out of the trees and hope the beasts would be slowed by those same trees in the meantime.

Over in the game, Patrick is trying to get away from the stampede, and has been given some options on how to do it. Tbh, it all looks pretty unappealing as far as ways of not dying goes. I’ve headed towards the rocks – they seem more solid than the ravine. Who knows! Maybe I’ll die.

It’s gotten me thinking about different paths, and different options. As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve got a bunch of shit happening in my life right now. I’ve always been someone who believes in working hard for what you want. When it’s something big and amorphous, like ‘being an author’ it’s easy to stay focused on that. However, it’s the little tributary paths that you have to take while you’re getting to that one big road that can be most confusing. I’ve spent a bit of time recently trying to strong-arm fate, and wrestle destiny into submission, sort of forcing big decision to happen. It’s been really weird (and please note I don’t actually believe in destiny or anything) but all the stuff I’ve been trying to MAKE happen, like changes in career, new opportunities etc – none of them have been working out when I’ve been pushing for them to happen. It’s sort of felt like I know I need to be on a different path, so I’ve been trying to blow holes into the side of the road and make new ones. I think that there’s a place for this, certainly. But it hasn’t been working out. I’ve just been wasting a lot of energy.

Instead, the things I’ve wanted have become apparent with time – like the opportunity to focus more on my writing happened after a complete accident of circumstance. I was certainly looking for that opportunity, but instead of forcing it to happen, the opportunity to take that fork in the road presented itself. Whether or not it will end up being the CORRECT fork in the road remains to be seen. I could still be trampled by lizard-dogs. We could all be trampled by lizard-dogs.

Last night I did my level three grad show at ITS, the improv school in Sydney that I study at. It’s taken me a while to get here, as I keep taking breaks between semesters. The first break, between level 1 and 2, was my trip overseas to Newwwww Yawk.

It was such a good night – I’m really hungover right now, and not because I had a crazy party. I just have this weird thing where after I’m on stage, the switch in my brain that says ‘stop drinking’ just doesn’t flip, and I sat in the pub afterwards and drank four beers really quickly. Because I’m a light-weight.

Anyway – performing was great. All of my classmates were spectacular, and from the teams that I watched, it was clear that everyone was having fun. Nobody was being a jerk. At UCB in New York, there was one guy in my class who I desperately didn’t want to perform with. It wasn’t because he was un-funny, although he was. And it wasn’t because he was “bad” in the sense that there’s some kind of natural talent, which you do or don’t have. It was because he was selfish, and in improv that really sucks. He had designs on being a stand-up comedian, and a film writer, and he was a few decades older than everybody else, so he had that easy entitlement when it comes to cutting other people off, and interrupting. It meant that every time he took to the stage, you could see everyone tense up, waiting to see how he would twist the scene to be all about him.

In the monologue, he told a long story about swapping someone’s cremated remains with that of a cremated family dog in order to pacify a crazy ex-wife. It had to be a lie, or else he’s a bona-fide psychopath. It went for such an incredibly long time and was so clearly a horrible mixture between a fib and a stand-up routine that it seemed to stick out and make everyone uncomfortable. During the scenes that followed, he would bust in and override everyone’s suggestions, trying to act out the crazy fantasy he’d just talked about. It mightn’t sound like much, but it’s the difference between having fun, which makes the process more enjoyable for the audience, and having a shit time.

Anyway, I was thinking about that experience last night, while having the opposite experience. And then, we got on stage and I realised I was wearing literally exactly the same outfit, down to underpants and socks, that I wore on stage at UCB. Then, we asked for a word suggestion and we got ‘San Francisco’. I took a step forward and said ‘when I was in New York…’

This post is generously supported by the Thiel Grant for Online Writing, and is included in a 50 part series called ‘HELLO INTERNET BOY’ ranging from March 2015 – March 2016.

I’m on the coach down to Canberra for this year’s Noted writing festival, and we’re pulling into Canberra and I’m surprised by the rush of affection I have for the wide, tree lined streets and big blocky 1970s era buildings. I’ve been to Canberra a lot in the last few years, and it’s all been for good things. I’m starting to feel comfortable.

Canberra always makes me think of my old internet friend, Lani. She was someone I met from Aelyria, who came and stayed at my parent’s place when I was a teenager. Later, my mate Bob and I drove down to see her for her birthday. I want to say 18th birthday, but maybe it was her 21st. That party was my first real experience of the sheer and utter panic you get when you realise you’re stuck somewhere you truly don’t want to be. Lani’s friends were scary and standoffish, and had a weird fixation with making fun of my jeans. They were all wearing shorts. We also accidentally dropped our six-pack of craft beer directly into the esky, smashing a similar number of their VB’s. It was excruciating, and Lani became drunker and drunker, only able to spend fleeting amounts of incoherent time with us. It was then decided that we had to go to ‘the Civic’, which is the Canberran term for the part of the city which has night life. We plodded out there, and discovered that the party was only the entree of the horror. We were packed into a sweaty bar, and whenever a certain song came on, everyone had to drop their pants. We didn’t realise this – once again everyone was judging my pants. Canberra hates my pants.

By the end of the night, Lani had a huge fight with her boyfriend, and drove off in a friend’s car. We were supposed to stay at her boyfriend’s house, but didn’t particularly feel welcome there anymore. Luckily we had discovered another friend from Aelyria in Canberra, and stayed at her parent’s house for the night, which was full of dinosaur bones.

We stayed in touch with Lani for ages after that, seeing her a handful of times. One of the last times we went to a German beerhouse and drank litre steins and then we all vomited all over the train. It was lovely.

Anyway, I really like Canberra now.

This post is generously supported by the Thiel Grant for Online Writing, and is included in a 50 part series called ‘HELLO INTERNET BOY’ ranging from March 2015 – March 2016.

I’ve just discovered that my landlord is raising our rent, which is fairly typical of the Sydney rental market. It was already too expensive for us, and add in the fact that I’ve just lost my job, it means that we are packing up and moving again. I say again, because 12 months ago, right at the beginning of this project we were also moving house. 12 months before that, we were also moving. 12 months before that, we were moving. Once a year, we pack up all our shit, and we shuffle around to some other overpriced shithole in Sydney. It can’t be a surprise that this is driving me insane. Today I am selling and giving away about 70% of my books, because the idea of moving them all again is making me sad. I’m going to sell most of my furniture and live from boxes. I’m going to go to sleep with all my clothes on, in case I need to move house suddenly in the middle of the night.

The repetition of this was really bumming me out, and then suddenly I thought about how free I suddenly was – no house, no job. Apart from the whole ‘friends and family’ thing, no real reason to keep shuffling around the dystopic rental horror of Sydney. I realised that we could go anywhere. My partner still has a job, which is good, because someone has to feed our dogs, but other than that, the world is our oyster.

I did a bunch of research on moving to the US. Basically, it seems hard. It seems unlikely that anyone would sponsor me to work over there, and I don’t even want to work full-time anymore. And the costs to move would also be… extensive. And our dogs would have to stay in quarantine for like half a year, and even 15 minutes is basically out of the question for their anxious little hearts. But, I knew that there is a whole raft of places we could go where we would already have friends. God bless the internet. That was comforting.

But we are planning on getting the fuck out of Sydney. I’m so fucking tired of the shithole rent. We have lots of friends in Melbourne, and lots who I talk too practically every day on Twitter, but only see once a year. It would be nice to turn them into real life friends. Oh – and for the person on Twitter who said that ‘in no world is Melbourne rent cheaper than Sydney’, that’s just so untrue. Yes, there are still some overpriced trendy suburbs, but on the whole there are options for rent under half of what we are paying now, in suburbs actually quite close to the city and much much much more dog friendliness. To find those kinds of places in Sydney, you have to go at least half an hour to 45 minutes out of the CBD.

Anyway, here’s a cool thing I found on Tumblr:

This post is generously supported by the Thiel Grant for Online Writing, and is included in a 50 part series called ‘HELLO INTERNET BOY’ ranging from March 2015 – March 2016.

Re-joining Aelyria for this blog project hasn’t felt as nostalgic as I thought it would. A lot of that is because I’m keeping myself reined in fairly tightly, and not doing more than one thread, staying firmly anchored in the storyline of Patrick Lenton and his weird gnome + dog person journey. This is mostly because I really don’t have time for more, and as I’ve mentioned before, the danger of Aelyria is when you spiral out of control and suddenly have a seven short story equivalents to write every morning. The other is that I don’t understand some of the new game mechanics, and have no real desire to learn how time works.

But I think the real reason it’s not feeling like the grand old days is that I haven’t engaged socially. This shouldn’t be a surprise – this entire project is literally about engaging with the social aspect of the game, so without it, it’s vaguely hollow. Why haven’t I engaged socially? Once again – time, mostly. I also don’t know any current players, except for the people who I road tripped with. I also don’t know if they’re even playing anymore.

And I just don’t have the kind of life that’s conducive to sitting in a chat room or playing around on the OOC (out of character) forums. Back when I was younger, it was very much a community thing, about finding my people, especially outside of high school. I’ve written about this before. I’ve been writing an article about how important it was for me to find my community online, especially in regards to the protest against the Safe School’s initiative in Australia. My high school life went from barbaric to below tolerable, and homophobic assholes in Australia want to reject a program designed to specifically stop that from happening.

Although while I was writing this, I also thought about the downside of this kind of community. It was great for me when I needed it, and then when I didn’t, I pretty much fucked off without even a ‘LOL bye’. But for people more involved in the online community than me, there has to be a tension between wanting the social aspect and playing the game. Is your social life and friendships based on your actual engagement with the game? Are you allowed to come and hang in the chatroom if you’ve no longer the time/ inclination to write? Or does the social aspect simply mutate beyond the constraints of the game? Regardless of these questions, there’s also a lot of infighting and gossip, and I’ve seen what happens when a dominant clique makes the chat and forums become unwelcome for a person. All that safe harbour, all that feeling of belonging dissipates. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen in real life too – but perhaps there is something more vicious or subtle online. I don’t know. I feel like the rose tinted article about the joy of online communities has been written a few times – maybe I should write one about hate and bullying on fantasy game boards?