Three or four years later, I joined myOtaku.com:
I was now a 2nd year university student with an ADSL hi-speed internet connection, MSN Messenger (I finally caved), and a (soon to be) best friend who was now studying on the other side of the country. By this point in life, I'd like to think that I had a fair understanding of basic internet safety and common sense (something that truly seems to be lacking in far too many people in our world today). I also now happened to be hooked on anime, so naturally signing up for some kinda anime website (which I later found out involved a blog) was something to do. So yeah, I joined myOtaku.
Back then I was using Lord of the Rings miniature figurines as my avatar, but pretty much all the info you all know now is there: there was my age, the city in which I lived, and my actual given name (and as a quick sidenote, I fully respect all peoples who enter nonsense for those particular bits of personal info if they're not comfortable with sharing such personal info'). Anyway, I was starting to make friends on myO now - some have moved on, some are still here. Anyway, of all of them, one girl in particular made a connection with me...
She's not with the site anymore, but at the time she was a girl going through a lot of personal strife and soul-searching, and I was luckily able to give her a shoulder to lean on. As time went on I protected her from one really undesirable type on myO who (empty or not) threatened to kill her for posting on her page things she liked that he didn't. We shared e-mails. We told each other our personal troubles with relationships and things.
We also had about six years' difference in age.
I would have been 19 at this time, and she was 13. I guess right then and there there should be at least a few flags going up and I can't blame anyone about that. The main thing I can really say for a situation like this is that although we may have shared life stories, e-mails and first names, we never exchanged phone numbers, home addresses, or issued invitations to meet each other in person - and no, practical distance was besides the point. The only other point would be that I knew that I certainly had no intentions of taking advantage of this young girl, and that she never did of me.
And if she did or if she really did turn out to be a 40 year old molester, well... Vancouver's a big city and she/he didn't know what I looked like. In either case, I'm absolutely ecstatic that that was never the case.
This particular girl aside, I was making friends with plenty of other wonderful people here at the site. I had a few girls in Virginia, Florida, Kansas... an artist friend in Alabama, a wrestling fan in Texas... and yeah, we bit the bullet, exchanged IM information, and for the most part we're all still talking. As I recall, I did actually end up posting a picture of myself around Christmas time for everyone on myO...
...alright, it was actually just a picture of my chin and the thirty-some days' worth of facial hair I had grown by that point (didn't shave during the exam period - seemed like something to do at the time). So even then I wasn't quite ready to break that specific internet "don't". Well, publicly, anyway - privately in MSN chats I did send the full non-cropped picture to my more close myO friends - several in turn sent back a picture or two.
So about breaking the "no pictures" rule... my best response is that we had known each other for about a year or so by this point. We were chatting with each other a lot, and... I guess, the story never changed. Florida-girl was still in Florida, Virginia-girl's dog still had the same name... I'd like to think that a man looking to kidnap somebody would need to go to some pretty extreme lengths to keep up such a facade for so long - especially when there's always a far easier (and far stupider) someone else that he could be stalking instead.
It's not foolproof by any means and I'm also fairly sure that there are some psychos willing to go through such lengths. It's a risk you need to really consider and measure; you can absolutely shrink the risk, but it'll never really go away, y'know? For us, we measured this for a whole year before we started passing around pictures - and luckily for us these years later, the pictures have remained consistent.
One girl in particular became a very close friend to me and we confided in each other a great deal - she even became the very first internet friend to whom I ever mailed a package. She loved it, her husband loved it...
...oh yeah, she was a newlywed by this point. And boy howdy, did we ever celebrate that day in her honour...
I guess I'm in a curious position in that I was already of drinking age before I started chatting with internet friends online. Even if my mom had concerns, I was already an adult capable of making smart, well-informed decisions.
Well... sometimes even well-informed decisions with the best intentions can go awry...
