All that freedom was good for my head though, so I'll give you that one.
There used to be a joke about the Internet:
Where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.
It seems that this is no longer true, and with the massive influx of kids, that itself has increased risk.
It wouldn't make much sense to be a child predator on the Internet in 1998. There just weren't that many kids.
And these days, there are still plenty of parents that let their kids run wild.
I don’t think anything has changed.
I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.
BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.
Some people played until total exhaustion, so around 3AM you started to see people fall asleep while playing. That's the moment the hopefull looker in the next seat would gently grab they keyboard and mouse and 'borrow' the sleeper's PC and finally join the game.
Good times. Don't ask about the smell of the room after a 2 day fragfest.
We built these things so the important voices would no longer be isolated from us by distance.
But now to maintain those connections you either have to put in almost the same amount of work as going to your neighbors house and talking to them OR you have to go into a massively networked social media site and scream into the void and hope you get a response through all of the ads and noise of everyone else screaming at the same time.
It's crazy.
We need a filter to lower the noise floor again.
Parents were sane back then, it's today that they've gone crazy. They watch too much news and keep their kids caged up, and end up doing far more harm than what they're trying to prevent.