-!- Now talking on #IRC
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I probably shouldn't HAVE to start off with an explanation of what IRC is, but considering I myself was none the wiser until a few years back, and it probably isn't taught in schools of Internet Intercourse anymore, maybe i should preface with this:
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol released in 1988, allowing for instant text messaging through Channels, hosted on individuals decentralized networks. It was created by Jarkko Oikarinen, a finn, in Finlands every reaching quest to be able to take credit for every Computer related invention. (Amousingly, the creator still keeps up a adorably simplistic Personal Website.
As it is a protocol and not a application, IRC networks can be accessed from a myriad of different applications, so called IRC clients, on pretty much any operating system released in the past 40 years. ![]()
-!- What to do when your Doctor prescribed getting on IRC? ![]() Alone on a Friday Night? Come join us on Koshka.love's very own Owncast server ![]() Great, now you know of the existence of IRC, and the network I currently spend the most time in. We live in the information age, so you obviously have a computer, and so, you'll join us, right? Ready?_ |
That's it, that's all you should need to know to set off on using IRC, Most people would be satisfied by now...
But maybe you aren't like most people, maybe you thirst for more...
Maybe you want to go beyond what regular IRC has to offer...
Maybe you want your own IRC, with cats, and guns...
well then, scroll Down, my child <(*-*)>
Microsoft Comic Chat, later shortened to the more boring Microsoft Chat, is an experimental and creative IRC client released in 1996. Sitting on top of regular IRC, it adds a graphical interface, allowing you to sport avatars, and places your messages alongside your avatar inside a comic strip. A testament to a more experimental era of computing, it allows for a truly unique way to use IRC, never seen before or after Comic Chat's release, and not something you could dream of seeing in modern chatting applications. Speaking from personal experience, ...
At the heart of Comic Chat lies the avatars Outside of just a few included avatars,
I have personally taken to sporting
The tools for creating your own avatars can still easily be found, just note you will need to run them in a virtual machine of either Windows 98, or Windows XP.
Despite later coming pre-installed on Windows 98, Comic Chat never received much mainstream notoriety, but was popular enough for some brave stalwarts to adamantly stick with Comic Chat through decades after it's release. It has also, as of recently, experienced a renewed surge of popularity within a friendgroup on KoshkaIRC, spurred on largely by the efforts of Shadowm00n, and later on Koshka and Cidoku. As special information encoded in messages shows up to anyone not on Comic Chat, KoshkaIRC hosts a channel dedicated to the Client, #comicchat. To concentrate the activity in the channel, a day long Comic Chat event, which we have dubbed Comic Chat Caturday, has been declared, and encourages chatting all day long in #comicchat during Saturdays
The undisputed one stop shop for downloading anything related to comic chat, including the client itself, new avatars, and software for creating your own avatars, is Mermaid Elizabeth's Comic Chat Resource page I have personally had the pleasure of chatting with Elizabeth (on Comic Chat, of course) and have to respect her for her preservation efforts regarding everything related to this obscure client. She has even gone so far as to archive defunct websites that used to host avatars on her site.
If Comic Chat sounds interesting to you, please consider installing it and trying it out. For anyone on linux, Shadowm00n has written a simple guide on getting comic chat and it's dependencies working via the compatibility layer Wine. It should only take around 5 minutes to follow and requires mostly copying commands. When you're client is set up, join us in #comicchat on IRC.koshka.love, thought note that you may be unlikely to see any acitivy outside of around 10-23 UTC, which you can blame on timezones.