Intelligent life?

There comes a time in everyone's life when they want to try to recapture that feeling they had when they were young. Okay, so maybe it comes a LOT, but most of the time we are sane enough to resist the temptation to try. I can only presume that insanity of wanting to know for a moment how it would be to revisit the joys of yesteryear is what caused me to peruse the AOL Instant Messenger chat rooms and try logging into the gaming chat. I don't know what I was expecting... intelligent life maybe? When I was younger - so many centuries ago - I played Dungeons and Dragons. (This was just before the start of the mass hysteria that the game was the tool of the devil and would possess you if you played.) I wanted to see if I could find a game online to sit in on for a little while, perhaps to even join in on some freestyle gaming, and what I got was educational to say the least.

I have been on AIM for probably three years, having found that it is the best one for trading large quantities of text with my writing buddies, and I have never been the recipient of the random instant message from sex sites. Yes I have an unlisted AIM screen name, but still, it surprised me the number if IMs I recieved in the brief time I was in the game chat.

I was pleasantly surprised, and think a few of the people there were as well, when I found that not all the 20something names in the list of who was there were bots. I think I said something along the lines of 'does anyone here know what D&D or AD&D stands for or should I go elsewhere?'. Someone actually knew, two people in fact, a third had guessed wrong and if there were others they never commented. A brief and very uninformative conversation ensued ranging from what they thought of the game ('like and playing tomorrow' to 'ain't that for nerds?'), discussions on if the old books or new books were better, a discussion on making your character vs random generators..... and so on... but no one knew anything about anywhere to locate a game or what there was online. :::sigh::: I feel old and outdated.

I suppose the worst part of the experience was the stupid bot ads. Every few seconds the room would be invaded by a bot, a stream of sex ads were posted, then the bot logged out. More often than not the bot logging in was accompanied by my getting an IM from a bot offering XXX websites or such. I'm glad that I filter my incoming IMs so I did not have to read the advertisements, just refuse to accept the IM when I saw IM names like "sexycum0414" or "teengirl4u" (I just made up those names but you get the idea). There were also bots that lurked in the room and sent their ads when someone logged in, most of those were for people seeking information or cheat codes etc.

What really riled me was the appearance of a poster in the chat that asked for 14-15 year old girls to trade pictures. That is just sick. I am afraid that my current opinion after spending 20 minutes in the gaming chat is that the public chats for AOL are nothing but bot infested advertising forums for sex sites and perverts. I'm going to go in search of intelligent life on Google or something, but I am uncertain how much luck I will have. Hopefully midlife crisis only last a few hours and I will forget this insanity of wanting to find a gaming chat room before the sex ads overwhelm me.