I’m not sure why exactly it went away, but my first IRC home has passed on. Like Swanno, I’ve found that law school and IRC are pretty much mutually exclusive, so it isn’t exactly a big direct loss out of my life, but I have generally very strong and very positive memories of that channel. It’s like finding out your old neighborhood bar, or maybe your college dorm, have suddenly ceased to exist- maybe you didn’t go there so much anymore, but if you spent a lot of time there, you have memories- even if in this case they were all contained within the xchat window.
Some particular memories that jump out were the discussion of my 3,600 mile-long penis (this when Krissa left for Africa- chatting with the friends in #dhg really helped me keep what little of my sanity there was that year) and getting told ‘hey, an airplane just crashed into the world trade center- get to a TV’ on the morning of 9/11, getting to the TV just in time to see #2, then frantically talking throughout that long, long day, until my laptop died. Lots of others, I’m sure… remembering the chuckle on Dan’s mom’s face at his wedding when she said that she understood I was Dan’s friend basically because of time spent together online. She was trying very hard to grok it :)
Anyway… just a reminder that online communities are very much like real ones- you can make very, very real friends there, and just like other communities, sometimes their time passes. On to whatever comes next, virtually or otherwise.