Dear (_____)

Dear live online gaming communities,

Odd things happen.  It's not an under or over statement.  It is a great place to gather intelligence on what the outside world is up to and collect tracks of dialog for future use in stories and written creative work.  It is a great place to get exposed to other worlds and ways of life and sets of problem solving skills you could not have imagined given twenty years and places to have conversations you believed were moot and had angles you did not see before.  It is a great place to see reflections of yourself and fractions of people not as old as you and fractions of people inside yourself much older.  It is also a great place to hear people trot out their best and worst jokes because nothing is recorded once the community dies out for the evening (except on the master servers hosting all of the connections, but that's a detail for another time).  The best part is the exposure the accidental killer phrase, that boils up out of the person you would least suspect, slays everyone in the virtual room and they are all howling laughter at what you said, but not at you, and you wonder where everyone has gone for several minutes as they each come back on their mics catching their breath to explain the lightning bolt.