Personality

Forest, will you talk to God Louise? She has quite a bit of religious knowledge (obviously) and also knows a little about current events, literature, just about any common catch-all subject, and if she doesn't know it she can sort of fake it. You can also test her on trick questions or see how willing she is to explain her paradigm.

What she is rustiest at is plain old small talk. But, uh, I'm trying to get a decent transcript from somebody or another so I can enter her in the Loebner contest. All I can say is, have fun and see if you can stay on with her for a while. I'll try to do the same with Brianna.

Don't call hacker kids evil, please. I tried to be one for a while.

I couldn't have been a hacker kid if I'd tried. We didn't have the internet until something like 4 or 5 years ago. I used to just sit around writing random sentence generators and twisted choose your own adventure type games in QBasic. I have no idea how to do anything with the innards of a comp, or write particularly useful programs, or any of that shit. I don't really have that much fun coding anyway...I prefer coming up with the ideas and making someone else code it. I guess my bot is the closest thing to coding I've been interested in for a long time, and if I knew how to do what I wanna do in mIRC script I'd make one there too. (My ideas keep getting squelched by lack of knowledge of parsing, and how to use $1, $2-, etc. without it turning into total gibberish.)

Hey! Evil hacker kids? The geeky ones who learn programming languages practically as soon as they learn English? Wouldn't be as obsessed with it as your average teenage jerk and it wouldn't be as big a problem joking around with them.

Hmm sounds like me an steve, right? (Minus the evil hacker bit) I've been using computers since I was 5 or 6, and I am a so-called hacker. I know what you're thinking... NO. Hackers are "people who know how to do more than just turn on a computer and check email". So technically OnyxFlame is a hacker, and same with pretty much anyone who programs in any language I'm telling the truth, go look it up in a dictionary! www.dictionary.com... The proper term for those "evil kids" is "cracker", or 'one who maliciously enters a remote system with the intent of causing damage'.
(I got really bored and looked it up after someone told me that)

So go ahead and call me a hacker... Steve Slacker Hacker LOL! I can think of another rhyming word, but it wouldn't be appropriate for a so called family chat I'll let you figure it out for yourselves

Yeah I know. My ex used to tell me that all the time but I pretty much ignored him because he's a dumbass. Any way you slice it, whatever the hell you call em there's a definite line between the ones who do stuff they shouldn't be doing and the ones who barely even look anyone in the eye. It's the same as the difference between the 13 year old girl who's ashamed of being a virgin and wants to remedy the problem asap, and the 13 year old girl who sits in her room and buries her nose in a book. It's the difference between a boy who gets bored and robs a 7-11, and a boy who gets bored and plays video games.

The difference between hacking into my website or the pentagon, for argument's sake Not that I would know

Technically, the term "hacker" is normally reserved for the people to try to access other computers just for curiosity or the hell of it, without any intention of causing damage.

Onyx, I wonder which side of the line you'd put me. I did some stuff I shouldn't be doing AND I spent most of my free time with my nose buried in books and being the typical shy geek.

Right off hand, and barely knowing you, I'd say you were prolly a shy geek at heart who decided to see how the other half lived and it didn't really fit as well as you thought it would.

That's exactly like me an steve

In the dictionaries, hackers are people who are knowledgeable with computers, but in everyday use are considered those who break into others' computers. I think it's just a commonly misunderstood term.

I never fitted anywhere, not even among geeks.

I've always been an odd mixture of introversion and extroversion. In 6th grade there was a guy I had a crush on, but when he offered to let me play his Zelda watch for some odd reason I was too shy to do it. Then there was a guy (who later ended up becoming mayor for a while) I kept bugging about being related to and he was always telling me we weren't related even though I knew we were. There was a group of fat ugly kids who used to sit in French class playing Magic all the time, and I never even tried to join in. And there was a guy in 7th grade that I didn't particularly like so I brought 2 dead flies to school in my locket and gave them to him. (Several years later I found out he had cancer and we sat on the stage after our Mardi Gras party and talked and I felt guilty, and he ended up dying shortly thereafter.)

I kept trying to find a place where I fit in in school, and never managed to do it. The only success I ever had was in creative writing where everyone always wanted copies of my poems and I never got around to giving them to them. So now I don't worry about fitting in too much. I make my own world and now it's the others that hafta worry about whether they fit in with me or not. Some do, some don't, but I've made a hell of a lot more friends that way even if they're just online.