Scientifics

IRC: Too much of a good thing?
Rosanna Gullveig

There are many ways to stay actively involved in HOL-life: classes, clubs, and common room games are just a few examples. For many of us, the most addictive aspects of HOL are the chat rooms on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). There you can go from a shy and innocent HOLer, to a crazy, random, chained to your computer mutant. Some people are online so often that it really makes you wonder if they ever sleep at all (you know who you crazy sleep deprived people are! *g*).

Spending some time on IRC is a great way to meet new people and to talk to them about anything and everything. It’s also a procrastinator’s best friend and worst enemy all rolled up into one. You can easily spend an entire afternoon, evening, and part of the night discussing the relative merits of your favourite type of candy (and various other odd and random topics), playing in multiple games of pick-up quidditch, or fan-girling over the latest anime or Jdrama.

Some people have described IRC as the best thing since the beginning of time, chocolate milk, the discovery of double chocolate cookies, sliced bread with peanut butter, and Robin Hood combined! These are obviously the people who spend countless hours logged into multiple IRC channels at once. Other more reticent HOLers have issued thinly veiled warnings about IRC sucking your soul away and taking over your life until you revert to being a puddle of primordial ooze.

So the question remains, can you get too much of a good thing? Is there such a thing as spending too much time on IRC?

Here are the top ten signs that 'you spend too much time on IRC.'
10. You compulsively correct people on their spelling.
9. You think that netspeak is a sign from the devil.
8. You refer to yourself as an anime/manga/jdrama character. Ex: Aido, Haruhi, Kaname, Kanga, Echizen
7. You can love, hate, huggle, thwack, pounce and kick your friends in the span of an hour and you do it all again the next day!
6. Instead of logging out, you stay online for days at a time, and simply add various endings to your nick such as: out, working, DND, sleeping, uni, school ... AND you have logs to prove it!
5. You know never to say “cute” in #gryffindor, that saying “calculus” will make you want to integrate and that sumbot really does love you.
4. You try to *hugsquishtackleglomp* your real life friends when you see them in the street.
3. You consider many HOLers to be close friends who know all the goings on of your life, yet you’ve never met them in person.
2. You recognize your friends by their IP address.
1. You suffer from withdrawal symptoms when you can’t come online for more than a day. Come on, a day is a long time! I’m sure some have withdrawal symptoms after a few hours.