Coal's Notes

I also don't have a problem with ageplayers. However, if they act like whiny brats when I know they're fully adult enough to understand the annoyingness... um. I'll be annoyed. Yeah. There's a threat. Go Coal. You've got 'em on the run now. :P

AOLers - I know lots of folks who use AOL. Someday, I hope, they'll be comfortable enough with the internet and computer technology to venture beyond it's limited (and expensive) purview. SL might just be the right spot to put in the crowbar and wrench open their minds to the wide world. I just wish they would force their 1337-speaking kidlets to learn to touch-type, spell, capitalize, punctuate, etc.

People with numbers in their names... well. In some cases, it's very 1337 I'm sure. I tend to encompass such far-out ideas as capitalization, spelling and punctuation. I read Tomato Nation's Vine column. I know what Garner's is, even if I frequently ignore the rules entombed there. This apparently doesn't make me old school (or even OLD SKOOL zOMG LOL1!!!1!), it just makes me old ("Waaah!"). It's hard for me not to end sentences with periods. I try to avoid typos.

The funny thing is - in a medium like this, or like SL, or any text-based communication medium - you start to extrapolate from people's writing skills to the rest of their lives. I knew someone who read and wrote flawless english. I had to really focus to understand what the hell she was saying when I met her in person - her accent was so heavy and she didn't have the fluency that she did in text. And I've met people, from what we used to call the "hugs and snugs" crowd on the MU* I frequented, who would spend hours in banal text chatter and came across as they types who'd dot their Is with hearts and use flashing text on their webpages - but offline, they were witty and intelligent conversationalists.

In other situations, names with numbers just represent the massive population that is served - there might be thousands of John Smiths offline, but there can be only one (bad movie reference) in SL. So you wind up with John35981 Smith. Which, frankly, is just someone who doesn't get that this name is how you will be represented to the community for as long as you stay in SL. You do not need to be called by your real name in SL. In fact, I'd think you'd have to really luck out to see your RL last name go by at the right time. With the huge repository of words in the english language, plus unlimited recourse to other languages, plus the ability to just make up a word that sounds neat... well, John35981 seems pretty damn sad. We should pity this guy. I guarantee that once (if?) he "gets" SL, he'll be on live help or the forums begging for the ability to change his name.

Or he'll just make an alt. Named Mary3421 Smith. There's no helping some folks.