Just wondering if anyone might know of someone looking for a Pen Pal (or even an 'E-Mail' Pal)? Doesn't necessarily have to be someone here in The Trek BBS, but if someone knows of someone, I may well be Interested I have a preference for North Wales, if possible, or Britain failing that, but that's mostly because that's where my Family came from :-) Failing that, I'm pretty much open, and I figure one can say more in a Letter (or an E-Mail) than can be said in a PM or an On-Line Chat....especially considering the Time Difference (I'm in Melbourne, Australia) Just a Thought :-)
I didn't think they didn't do Pen Pals anymore, especially with all the social media and message boards we have nowadays.
You may have to make due with an American bloke! You'll find that I have no shortage of things to say ... on any given subject - especially STAR TREK: The Next Generation! PM me for MORE information!
Not a good idea to post your email address publicly, 2takes. Spider bots crawl the site regularly picking up stuff like that. You might want to remove the above and send the OP a PM.
In this age of instant email, Facebook, Twitter, and internet forums, BB's and chat rooms, I figure pen pals have gone the way of telegrams and rotary dial phones.
As it happens, I'm ultimately looking for a Snail Mail Pen Pal if I can find one, so yeah, that does include a writing instrument (hey, so I'm old-school) :-) Failing that, yeah, E-Mail will suffice :-)
Or possibly you're the only two who have posted here and expressed that particular interest. People still write letters.
^Exactly. I myself still write letters and I wouldn't be so short sighted to assume I was one of a few people who still sit down with a pen and write a letter because a handful of people in a random thread said they didn't.
I remember my pen pal days fondly. There was my French pen pal, assigned by my French teacher in high school, who wrote in perfect English on graph paper while I struggled to do more than introduce my family in French. That got old quick. Then there was a pen pal that I found online, at a website in the 90s that linked up teen pen pals. We wrote to each other a few times, included lots of stickers and temporary tattoos in our letters, but then stopped. It seems to reach a barrier where you've done all the basic introductions and there's not much else left to say, unless you plan on writing about what you ate that week. I suppose it would be more successful if you took a more intellectual approach, or wrote to each other less often. I was able to find some sites after a cursory Google search, such as Maarten’s Snail Mail Pen Pals Online, Sassociations, and Global Pen Friends.
Thanks for those Spot's Meow, will check those out :-) Yeah, I used to be a member of a physical Club back in the 90s and the guy in charge of that had a list of people from OS that would like to write to people in Australia....I chose a couple in England (Manchester) for mine who were members of Manchester Star Fleet That seemed to go well enough for awhile....started with letters, graduated to phone calls and then to E-Mails, and then to ICQ chats (while still including the phone calls on-and-off as well), and that lasted a few years before they stopped for some reason :-/
It would be worse with emails since the whole process is speeded up. Why do you want to email strangers? Why not just post on forums and see if you make friends? You could write whatever you would write in an intro email in any of the intro threads on this BBS, or just start a blathering thread in Miscellaneous.
I am asking you why you would want to email people cold who you don't know. I don't get it. In the pre net days it was cool to get letters from far away places with far away stamps and that might still be interesting but if you're talking about a pen pal style relationship that takes place over email with a stranger I don't get it. I'm just curious as to what the motivation is.
Yeah, I guess that would be like joining a Club, striking up a conversation, and then asking people for their Facebook Details (which happens more often than you'd think) :-/ And it's still cool to do so....to see the stamps of faraway places one may never get a chance to visit, and to actually correspond with a person in the form of 'writing', and getting to know someone that way, rather than just staring at words on a screen....well, for me at least, that's my motivation :-) I'll be wanting to use a Fountain Pen as well when I can, if I can find decent enough paper to do so (so it doesn't bleed)....otherwise, I'll probably just be using a Rolling Ball Pen :-)