"Lemmy: Where men are men, and men are women, and women are men, and I think we've got a few women who were born women, and also there's a whole bunch of new genders as well, and no genders at all, and that's all cool with most of us."
It's a mouthful and might not read well on a t-shirt, but we can workshop it.
I knew my first long distance gf on ICQ. I remember also having that service in Miranda IM along Yahoo Chat, MSN, Google Chat (back when it was based on XMPP) and Jabber.
Messages from my current gf are announced with the classic ICQ "Uh-oh!".
No, it was bought by MRG after AOL fought its users and won, so they all left for Skype.
EDIT: Or maybe first by Rambler and then by MRG. Rambler was the Russian search engine I used in 2005, btw. Was an email provider too. I had an email account or two there, don't even remember which. Also narod dot ru (free web hosting, similar to geocities) hasn't yet been bought by Yandex then, and there were ucoz dot ru sites, and borda dot ru free web forums (something like phpbb). ICQ (and later Skype) would be used for real-time conversations in all of these communities. EDIT2: ... which you'd make forums for.
As someone who has most of her socialization on IRC now... Eww, mIRC is proprietary and for Windows. Maybe it's just me having learned about IRC only a couple years ago and thus not having a sentimental attachment, but why use it if you have open-source ones like Hexchat, Irssi or Weechat?
I got on ICQ in 97 or 98 to keep up with friends from a MUD and mine was 7 digits. I haven't logged into it in over a decade because when I went back to see if anyone from the old game was around none ever showed up online.
With ICQ I learned the social skills that I couldn't on the real world because I had been bullied to near death. I talked to random people all over the world, learned that I could talk to girls without having to feel like shit.
Used it so much, and with volume up, my upstairs neighbor thought I was watching the teletubbies all the time because of the UH OH!
Met my first girlfriend this way, she was in Mexico, I was in Europe. Moved to Mexico to marry her (bad idea, she was rather manipulativr and a huge cheater as it turned out, got divorced) and lived in Mexico for samn near 20 years.
To say that ICQ had a big positive influence in my life is an understatement, it changed my life beyond anything I've ever had before.
