• Remembered about our old home The Sinner and went there to see if it was still doing all right
• Was confronted with the phrase "fulsome funbags" within the first 27 seconds
• Left happy

It's a sure sign of rapid aging that I've begun to feel nostalgic about university - even though I still feel like I've barely left the place, chronologically. This was brought on partly by looking through my old videos folder and finding one taken at the May Dip, a tradition where everyone stays up all night on the last day of April and then charges into the freezing North Sea when the sun rises (I admit I miss that part considerably less).

A brief look round at the unofficial university message board where we all met revealed that familiar thread, which was started near the beginning of my second year and is now on its 263rd page, but it's quite sad to see that one page of the forum is now sufficient to hold the last two years' worth of content. I don't think that it went at an absolutely blistering pace even in the age I remember, but it was enough to keep me distracted - we had the core circle of regular posters and gradually added to them as more (similarly disturbed) students arrived and found the board...

When I think about it, we really were a weird and wonderful cast of characters that no fiction could have imagined... the Quake-master Linux fan, the perpetually drunk narcissistic Conservative (who lived together in the same house like some sort of terrible sitcom), the unlikely outcast from the 18th century thrust into the world of the Internet, the master(s) of the bizarre, the good-spirited joker, the bastard overlord, the Scottish nationalist, the politicians, the musicians, the insanely Christian, the insanely anti-Christian, various sages fools and sinners, and the American student that had been watching us from afar to preview the madness that she was entering.

As for what I was... I've very little idea how other people saw me - if there's anything that university taught me it's that everyone is slightly messed up in their own individual way. (And also computer science.) Thrust into this strange new environment, I seemed to take on the role of some sort of archivist, documenting the madness around me and distilling it into a list of bite-sized samples in the form of the infamous IRC logs...

Angelfire links? I thought they'd been abolished

I rather miss that time of life, living right next to most of the people I talked to - now we're scattered around the earth. Not that we ever appreciated our proximity at the time, mind you, as you can tell from the length of the chatroom log.