You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

  “Heather, you’re a Libra, so your struggle will mostly be with vanity and validating yourself outside your looks.”

  “Stop saying you’ll never be able to do three pirouettes, Jackie! You’re an air sign; it’s totally gonna happen!”

  “Will you pass history class? Oooh, you’re a Pisces with the moon in . . . ugh. Give it up, Tina.”

  Turns out the girls loved having their own private psychic in the changing room. I convinced my mom to drop me off at class a half hour early for “stretching” and started consulting with all the dancers on parental problems, summer school plans, you name it. A lot of them brought in birthdays of boys they liked in order to see how their charts aligned. I’m pretty sure my advice led to a few de-virginizations. It was an awesome change from no one wanting to talk to the weird homeschooled girl! I’d finally found a way to relate to other kids. It was fulfilling. And made me popular. And eventually I got shut down.

  Miss Mary, my dance teacher, stopped me one day when I arrived. “Felicia, what are you carrying?”

  “Um, just a few books.” There were fifteen stacked up to my chin. I’d just discovered Chinese astrology and I Ching and couldn’t wait to tell Jennifer about the guy she crushed on, Simon. Sadly, his stubborn Tiger traits would always keep them apart.

  “Megan’s mom doesn’t like her learning about astrology. I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking about it with the girls.”

  “But it’s the science of the stars!”

  “She thinks it’s Satanic. You gave her daughter a pentagram.”

  “It’s a natal chart, duh. You can’t let ignorance trump science here, Miss Mary!”

  Nothing I said could persuade her. She was a Taurus. Once her mind was made up, it was over.

  I was forced to hang up my crystal ball, and eventually the girls stopped talking to me again. (And they probably made terrible life choices they could have avoided if they hadn’t been deprived of my insight, thanks to Megan’s mom.) I was upset but soon bounced back and was able to move on to another, more accessible place for friendship and identity exploration: the online world.

  [ Vidya Gamez! ]

  I don’t need a psychologist to tell me that my love of role-playing games is linked to my childhood quest for self. Link number two: I like killing virtual monsters.

  We were always big on technology in my family. My dad studied to be an engineer before becoming a doctor, and he’s the kind of dude who always had a PalmPilot in a large holster attached to his belt. (Now he has his Android phone in a large holster attached to his belt, but that’s his life choice, and I will not mock it. To his face.)

  When I was about seven or eight, my grandfather gave us his secondhand “laptop,” which was as big as a dining room table.

  I think it was meant to help my parents with their college courses, but generally my mom set the standard for us kids by playing video games on it. They were text-only, because the monitor didn’t support graphics, so it was more like reading an interactive novel than anything. The gaming equivalent of liking weird foreign films with subtitles.

  My favorite one to watch her play was called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It came with a scratch-and-sniff sheet tied to various parts of the game, and I sniffed the pizza area until it disappeared, even though it smelled more like dog food than pepperoni. (If I did drugs, I would totally be a sniffer. Gasoline and Magic Markers, I gotta fight against getting my nose all up in there.) After watching my mom type “attack Tiffany with pipe” and having the game tell her back, “Tiffany yells, ‘ow!’,” I knew I was hooked on video games for life.

  As my brother and I grew up, we played any PC computer game we could trick our parents into buying us. It was the primary hobby we used to fill our many, MANY free hours between geisha lessons.

  “We need this program called Math Blaster to help us learn better, Mom. Oh, and those four other games under it, too. Don’t look too close!”

  In an amazing stroke of Cancerian fate, right after the ballet class Satan-worshiping situation, I stumbled upon a video game series called Ultima. Besides pretty much being one of the seminal Role-Playing Game series of ALL TIME (don’t argue with me about this, you’re wrong), this is a video game that literally changed my life.

  What set this series apart from other indecipherably pixilated games of the early ’90s was the way you created your character. At the beginning of the game, a fortune-teller asks you several multiple-choice questions like:

  “A girl is to be killed for stealing bread from a dying woman. What do you do?”

  A) Let them kill her; she deserved it.

  B) Demand that she be freed; her crime is understandable.

  C) Offer to take the punishment instead. She’s hot.

  (Okay, that wasn’t one of the real questions.)

  Depending on the way you answered, your avatar (the character you played; don’t worry: I’ll hold your hand through the nerd lingo) started the game differently. Your decisions influenced who you were in the world; your morals shaped what Virtues (like Honesty and Courage) you were aligned with. Let me simplify: As a kid, this video game SAW INTO MY SOUL. It defined me, then projected me into a world where I could be a virtual hero version of myself. I could walk around alone, without my mom warning me there were molesters waiting to kidnap me on every corner. I could go shopping and steal things and kill monsters! Oh, and I could name my avatar AFTER MYSELF! Screw astrology, I was in love!!!!!

  I played the games in the Ultima series for HOURS and HOURS a day, month after month. I decided it checked the box for many subjects in my homeschooled curriculum, like computer science, literature, and PE (for the eye-hand coordination). The only thing my mom ever said about it was, “I’m glad you’re concentrating on something, kids!”

  I became completely immersed in the world, channeling my avatar’s ruling Virtue of “Compassion” everywhere in the 16-bit realm. And deep down, all I wanted IN THE WORLD was to talk to other people about it. Discuss how bitchin’ the graphics were. How awesome the lore was. And Holy crap, this game allows you to BAKE VIRTUAL BREAD! I NEEDED to share this joy with other humans! But the girls at ballet had no clue what a computer was (Megan’s stupid mom probably thought that technology was the work of Satan), and my brother was . . . my brother. I mean, brothers are practically subhuman, right? No, I needed real live people who loved this Ultima game who were not living in my house with me! Where could I find them?!

  Hmmmm . . .

  [ Technology-ships ]

  BONG-BOOP-BOOP-BEEP-BEEP-BOOP-BOOP-BEEP

  PLAP PLEEP PLWAAAAAAANG SCREEEEWAAAAAA

  KLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESHWAAAANG GLAW CEGLAW

  SSCHHEHEHHEHEHHHHHHHHHHWHHHHHHHHH

 

  Just approximating that sound in type makes me recall joy, like other kids getting excited over the creepy tinkle of an ice cream truck. In my childhood world, the sound of a modem dialing up to connect with another computer was the sound of freedom.

  I’m probably a member of the oldest generation that grew up with the idea that you can connect with other people using a computer. My grandfather worked for the military, where he headed the nuclear physics laboratory at the US Missile Command for twenty years, so he was probably sending groovy selfies back and forth with colleagues in the ’70s. When the commercial internet started to emerge in the ’80s, he encouraged my parents to get on the computers-talking-to-other-people train earlier than 99 percent of the rest of the population. And we thought we were soooo cool.

  There was only one commercial online company at the time, CompuServe, and it was not sophisticated, guys. It was the cave painting equivalent to Tumblr. I mean, you had to pay $10 an hour to use it. That’s right, in ye olden internet days, kids, people had internet cafés in their own living rooms! But, for the times, CompuServe had it all. It offered news, messaging, and bulletin boards covering every subject you’d want to chat about in a glorious “only text” interface. Oh, and tons of racy
ASCII porn.

  For that, and many reasons, it was a long time before my brother and I were allowed to log online by ourselves. We could only pop on and off to get quick hints about video game puzzles we were too lazy/stupid to figure out on our own. (Conservative usage of CompuServe was more affordable than using the 1-888 hint line, which we previously used to run up $400 phone bills. We got very good at hiding the mail from my father.) But eventually, when I was about fourteen, my family graduated online technologies to a newer online service called Prodigy. Which was revolutionary amazing because it charged $12.95 for unlimited use. In addition, it had REAL GRAPHICS. Like, eight whole colors.

  In 1994, this interface looked like virtual reality.

  Prodigy had online GAMES and interactive bulletin boards, and did I mention it was a flat rate, so my brother and I could use it as long as we wanted and not get in trouble? This was like Prometheus rolling into town, “Here, humans, check out this fire thing.” It changed everything!

  As soon as I got access, I immediately went to the message boards to search the video game discussions and found a group called the Ultima Dragons. Browsing through the posts, I couldn’t believe it. I had finally found a place where people totally knew what I was talking about when I wrote, “OMG ULTIMA IS THE BEST GAME OF ALL TIME SORRY FOR THE CAPS!” My dreams about finding a place to create true, meaningful friendships around my fake video game world had come true.

  And my mom didn’t have to drive me anywhere!

  I joined the club and named myself Codex Dragon because everyone had a Name + Dragon theme going on, and a Codex was an object in the video game that represented the “book of infinite wisdom.” Are some of you feeling like it’s getting too geeky in here? You probably should have read the book blurb better, because I’m just getting STARTED.

  As a member of the Ultima Dragons, we didn’t just post about the games, although a majority of the stuff was, “How do you defeat the stupid gargoyles at the Shrine of Humility because I keep dying!” We talked about movies we loved and books we read. The people who shared my love of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time fantasy book series immediately became my closest friends. They were the first people I’d ever met who’d read them, too. (Although I was the only one who had all the hardbacks in first edition and did a yearly reread. Impressed? Well, THEY were.)

  It might sound dorky, but the Ultima Dragons gave me my first environment where I could express my enthusiasms freely to my peers. Hell, for once I HAD peers. And I mined it for all it was worth. Socially, artistically. In all ways. Even . . . with poetry.

  Yes, I wrote poems dedicated to a video game—shut up with the judgment (although it’s warranted). The following is a really special example. It’s an ode to one of the fictional characters in Ultima video game. A jester. His name was Chuckles.

  Hand me the Pulitzer. Dozens more where that came from!

  There was also a separate message board called the “Drunken Stupor” where we’d post what I now understand to be “fanfic” set in a tavern (called the Drunken Stupor) about our Ultima Dragons characters. Meaning, ourselves. Example:

  Codex Dragon enters the tavern with a tough look on her face. Busting open the door with her high-heeled boot, then she strides over to the bar and then slams down her silver sword of Grandia. She looks at Tempest Dragon with torrid eyes, “You! I don’t know whether to kill or kiss you.” Tempest looks up. Like he wants her to do both.

  Looking back, there’s an uncomfortable dose of S&M in the stories I wrote at fourteen. I attacked other Dragon members with swords and whips a lot, and Codex always wore sexy leather outfits with stiletto heels. The guys LOVED how creative I was! Their feedback on the stories made me discover that flirting was fun. So I proceeded to do it with a lot of people.

  Um, pretty much everyone.

  You gotta understand I had NO OTHER GUYS in my life! Sure, there were some boys in my dance classes and community theatre productions I acted in, but the other chorus members of Brigadoon didn’t generally put their Ps in Vs. The guys online were into girls, and I had access to them. Do the teen math: I wanted all of them.

  We started sending pictures to each other (physically in the mail, yes), which either fueled or quashed the fire of awkward teen romance. I got a ton of positive feedback on my submission:

  This picture was originally taken for a JCPenney modeling competition. I was not a winner in the eyes of the department store, but the Dragons all thought I was a treasure.

  Yes, those are velvet high-tops.

  I got pictures back in exchange, and it was weird to put a face to an online personae. They never matched up the way I imagined. The asshole goth punk of the group turned out to be a Midwestern blond guy in a football outfit, straight out of Friday Night Lights. The friendliest of the group turned out to be a little person, which was a shock, but then cool, and no one brought it up again. Several of the other guys had really long stringy hacker hair, or were old, so I stopped flirting with them (kinda), and two standouts got my thumbs-up endorsement for continued romantic flirty times.

  On the one hand, Wolf Dragon’s picture was a Sears portrait special, with the bokeh-blurred edges, and a splattering of pubescent facial hair, erratically spread, like a limp hair-gun had shot follicles at his face. But I liked his personality online, and he had kind eyes that overcame the velvet waterfall behind him. I was into him for his brain, mostly. And his cat named Poe.

  Camouflage Dragon, on the other hand, was, by Dragon standards, the hottie. He did have a significant unibrow, but he had eyes the color of a tiger’s eye gem, ochre and deep, and he was into math, which I liked because my grandpa would approve. I gave myself permission to get a crush on him, too.

  I wasn’t ready to commit to one boy or the other fully, I wanted to keep both in the romantic-type running, so we became an online trio, sending messages back and forth to one another in private email boxes. We also sent handwritten letters snail-mail style filled with song lyrics. Mostly Bangles and Aerosmith.

  “Camouflage, I like the idea we could all go to the same college. That would be so cool, but I don’t wanna hope too hard. Like Steven Tyler says,

  You’re callin’ my name, but I gotta make clear

  I can’t say, baby, where I’ll be in a year.”

  We would three-way call every other night. The guys each lived in different parts of New Jersey, and I remember thinking, Wow, their accents are so exotic. We mostly talked about the Ultima games, but we got into other things, too. Like . . . other video games. Our conversations were always fraught with veiled sexual innuendo. “What kind of armor do you hope your character wears in Ultima VIII, Codex? What kind of corsets?”

  My mom was cool with all of this, by the way. She had recently gotten more defensive about our socialization; maybe the state started checking in on us? Who knows? But she was extra aggressive in supporting my relationships with all my online Dragon friends, especially the romantic ones. After all, SHE first had sex at sixteen and other details I tried to black out after she shared them.

  The summer of my fifteenth birthday, my family had to move to Louisville. And because we were going in the general compass direction of New Jersey-ish-ness, Mom decided that it would be okay to take a trip and see as many of my Ultima Dragon friends as I wanted. Yes! MEET-UP TIME!

  I was so excited; I’d never been above the Mason-Dixon Line (yes, Southern people still had that as a THING) and I was going to meet face to face with my only friends in the world and perhaps a potential husband. My mom and brother would be along for the ride to cramp my style . . . but whatever. For my romantic teenaged heart, this was do-or-die time. I was gonna figure out which one of these guys I liked better if it KILLED ME!

  New Jersey is much farther north than you’d think if you’re driving from Alabama in a two-door Acura hatchback with broken air conditioning. We arrived at Camouflage’s house after a few days (for a real name, let’s call him Tyler. Which was hard to remember in person anyway, to NOT call
him Camouflage). And when we got there it was obvious he hadn’t explained everything about the meet-up to his mom. Or . . . anything.

  We were shoved in the basement with the four other Dragons who showed up while Tyler got chewed out by his parents upstairs.

  *muffled yelling* “Weirdos!”

  “Mom!” *muffled yelling* “NOT weirdos!”

  That went on for a while. Meanwhile, we made the best of it downstairs and awkwardly tried to pin faces to Dragon usernames.

  There was Aeire, our club leader, with waist-length blond hair and a slacker vibe, who never took his sunglasses off, and his girlfriend, Mist Dragon, who looked like she should be into reading romance novels, not killing gargoyles. I don’t think I ever got either of their real names, but they were nice and came from Ohio, which was also an exotic state to me. “You eat spaghetti with your chili? How interesting!”

  There were a few older dudes who I can’t remember much of at all because my mom was kind of a cock block to us interacting. And thankfully, Wolf (fake real name Henry) had shown up from exotic EAST New Jersey for my inspection.

  He approached me, wearing that Sears portrait smile. “Hey!”

  “Hey! Wow, weird to meet you in person!”

  Insert awkward attempt at hug. Abandon.

  Insert awkward pause.

  And another.

  I sat down next to him on a slightly broken futon, and within twenty seconds I could feel the possibility of romance disappearing. Instant turn-off. A never-gonna-happen-let’s-be-friends-forever switch flipped in my head. And it wasn’t because of his looks (although his picture didn’t translate BETTER in person), but there was just no chemistry there. He was someone I got along with and wanted to talk hours to on the phone. But have my virgin intercourse with? Nope.