Escape Characters

Who is me?

I just finished out an anime series called "Serial Experiments: Lain." It's about a 14 year old girl who, over the course of thirteen episodes, comes to question her identity, humanity, and the very reality of her experiences both in her normal life and in the Internet (the "Wired"). It has minimal dialogue, bizarre art direction, and a non-linear storyline. However, if you're looking for a show that asks the right questions about the future of human networks, you need look no further.

My timing in completing of the series is pretty strange. I've been watching it off and on for a few weeks now, but only this evening did I discover that (somehow) I'd accidentally left a rogue instant messaging client program open on one of my personal computers. It's, well, needlessly complicated how I have this all set up (I have a program that can take other programs, capture their input/output, and let me come back to interact with them whenever I want). The reason my client program was "rogue" was because I'd simply forgotten that I had it running. Because I could run my client and screen-capture program multiple times without noticing, I was actually appearing online for a number of weeks without noticing (despite reports from people saying, "Oh hey, I saw you online last night...").

Stranger, I guess, was how the chat client program (the program that lets me communicate with friends, coworkers, etc.) behaved when there were multiple versions of it running, and without me interacting with it. By default, when a new conversation started, the new messages would go to every place that I was logged in. However, after I had responded, the messages would be routed only to the client from which I responded.

This meant that after a few weeks, I had dozens of one way conversations people were having with me, and then stopping at random whenever I had responded from another location.

It was pretty bizarre. Conversations I'd never seen before (collected only when I was online nowhere else), or people wondering why I was awake at such odd hours. Thankfully (after watching "Lain"), none of the conversations had any responses from me.

I did notice when I was poking around that I'd turned on a feature of my chat program that keeps track of all of my "statuses." A "status" is just a message that appears next to your account on other people's screens, such that you can indicate if you're available for a conversation, listening to music, really whatever you choose to put in there. I usually put fun and strange and obscure movie/TV/song lyrics/quotes for mine, or whatever I happen to have stuck in my head.

Here are the ones I've been using over the past year or so. See if you can guess where they all come from.