A few years back, okay, over a decade ago, I was playing this Play By Browser Game (PBBG). In retrospect, it was not a very good game at all. You made an army, blew up the army, joined a clan, blew up clan armies, but it was all text based and done with some shitty browser algorithm. If you were a gamer kid in the early dotcom days, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you didn’t miss anything.
Early on, I joined this moderately successful clan. We’d all stay up late, chatting in the clan chat room, planning to blow up whatever rival clan we were at war with, and over many, many hours of this I became internet friends with a clan member, BrokenDreamer. BrokenDreamer was witty and we’d troll each other a bit, but it was all in good fun. We were both 20-something college students, but I didn’t know much more about the user’s personal life. One night we were exchanging pictures in the clan chat. This was a little more difficult back in late-2000s, but doable. I saw BrokenDreamer’s photo and realized the user was a woman. It felt very Eurotrip, like, “*Mika’s a GIRL?!?*” She was also really hot! Pale skin, dark hair, fit, freckled – checked every box of what I like to look at. Turns out she thought I wasn’t too bad either. Come to think of it, those descriptions match me pretty well, too. We exchanged MSN addresses and started chatting on there.