(NOT A STORY)Chars31 Info
If you go to Charmander31's Chat Room today, it is baron. It's dead. And rightly so.
Quite frankly, I'm astounded that even though none of the buttons on this god awful geocities page are clickable, the owner has most likely abandoned it and left it to the geocities host site to maintain it since the latest as of 2015(from what I could tell) and the actual chat itself is jut one of many "discord" type chat rooms available through some IRC called "Kiwi" that is hosted by a broad "DarkMyst" net server. But somehow, it remains when the vast majority of things from that era are gone, completely.
And I respect the hell out of it because of it.
I'll admit, back in 2012/2013 I had hopes that there would be a "Reunion" someday for Chars31, or some other platform available for the old patron's to return and recount their glory days, but now, in 2020, realism has set in, but nostalgia lives on. Some of these users might not even be alive anymore. And if they are, they have their own lives and lived out their own stories over 20 freaking years! They might have gone on to become math teachers, or police officers, or politicians, or maybe they never grew with the times, and still frequent similar chats today, wherever the majority of Chars31 patrons migrated to. These are the questions that I chase. My job allows me a lot of time to float around the internet and one of the things I explored was the "Wayback Machine" Website, which literally shows you excerpts from any site from 1995 onward and what it looked like and how it functioned. This was integral in my fascination with this social experiment.
Quite frankly, I'm astounded that even though none of the buttons on this god awful geocities page are clickable, the owner has most likely abandoned it and left it to the geocities host site to maintain it since the latest as of 2015(from what I could tell) and the actual chat itself is jut one of many "discord" type chat rooms available through some IRC called "Kiwi" that is hosted by a broad "DarkMyst" net server. But somehow, it remains when the vast majority of things from that era are gone, completely.
And I respect the hell out of it because of it.
I'll admit, back in 2012/2013 I had hopes that there would be a "Reunion" someday for Chars31, or some other platform available for the old patron's to return and recount their glory days, but now, in 2020, realism has set in, but nostalgia lives on. Some of these users might not even be alive anymore. And if they are, they have their own lives and lived out their own stories over 20 freaking years! They might have gone on to become math teachers, or police officers, or politicians, or maybe they never grew with the times, and still frequent similar chats today, wherever the majority of Chars31 patrons migrated to. These are the questions that I chase. My job allows me a lot of time to float around the internet and one of the things I explored was the "Wayback Machine" Website, which literally shows you excerpts from any site from 1995 onward and what it looked like and how it functioned. This was integral in my fascination with this social experiment.