Are we pen pals?

[Axaday]

My daughter asked me the other day what a pen pal was. We DID have a thing in my second grade class where we were assigned a second grader in a school somewhere far away and we wrote letters back and for a bit. I don't know if that gets done again.

But then I started wondering if you and I are pen pals. I've been at the Allspark for every bit of 20 years now. More. People have come and gone, but many stayed a long time and a few have been here the whole time. When I actually step back a second it seems odd. I see a bit of news and the people that I want to go talk about it with are people I have never met.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

Makes sense to me. Name aside, there's no particular reason pen pals have to use pen and paper. Kids tend to use pencils anyway. If that counts, I think what we do should count.

 

[Caldwin]

I never really thought about it like that, but yeah, I guess in a very real way, we're all pen pals.

 

[MEDdMI]

Though with pen pals, you're writing to one specific person. A forum like this is like displaying your letter on a theater screen and seeing who displays theirs back.
PMs or text messages would be closer to pen pals, though I'd argue there's a difference b/t penning a letter that takes awhile to send/get a response on vs immediate digital delivery.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

The internet I had when I joined Allspark was not what I'd call instant.

 

[Zamuel]

PMs really do give a pen pal vibe. Even in 2024, responses tend not to be instant. Granted, the feel probably shifts between people who do their web browsing on a phone versus on a PC.

 

[Stepwise]

On a bit of a tangent - I actually had a pen pal when I was on ATT 25+ years ago. We emailed back and forth fairly consistently for a year or two.

 

[Dake]

It's a fun way of looking at it. I can say I've definitely been better about responding here than to any of the myriad pen pals I had and abandoned around the world while in elementary and middle school.

 

[Dvandom]

My online reviews actually started as letters exchanged with a friend of mine from college. He graduated a year before I did, so for my senior year we'd exchange letters because my school internet couldn't really do email outside the local bitnet, nor did I have access to Usenet. The next year, I got proper internet and started posting my comics observations to Usenet in addition to emailing them to my friend. (Another year after that, alt.toys.transformers was created, and I started reviewing TFs.)

---Dave

 

[Destron D-69]

yeah of course we all are... it's like a pen-pal community. where like you post something and maybe 4 to 10 of us would reply to it. the boards themselves have slowed down a lot lately so in a way it's almost back to being a little tight knit community like it was way back in the webring days.

sure you can go over to the discord and have instant responses that... maybe somebody took a minute to think about before typing. But that sort of thing I wouldn't call pen-pal like in any sort of way.