Have you ever met someone online and it turned into a real friendship? Yes. Well, yeah, I think so. So — I guess real friendship makes it sound like you hang out in real life a lot, and I can’t say that’s true for the one that I was thinking. I do a lot of work with like — one of my hobbies is digging through basketball archives, and I have a YouTube channel devoted to that, that has a small cult following.
I hit my 100,000th subscriber earlier this year and that was like, something to me that meant a lot because I, I don’t, I did it my way is what it felt like, I never got into the game where I’m spamming my channel everywhere or where I’m — you know, I don’t really advertise myself. I don’t want to, so if someone’s gonna subscribe to my channel, it’s gonna be ‘cause they just stumble upon it and decide that they like it. And so that felt good to reach that milestone.
But anyway, in the midst of that, I’ve been able to make some connections with people who were similarly interested in, like, archival work, or just have a broad interest in, in basketball, especially like the older eras of basketball. And I’ve actually made a, a pretty good — we haven’t met each other in real life yet — but I have made a pretty good friend from Australia, who has his own like classic basketball podcast and I actually — it’s, it’s a friendship that I value. We don’t speak every single day or anything, but it’s certainly to a point where we have spoken in person — over the Internet, that is. And he even had me on as a guest on his podcast and it’s been really fun to sort of like, flesh out a little bit of a community online through a common hobby.
Isn’t that kind of like a case of the internet doing good internet stuff? Like, bringing people together who otherwise wouldn’t be brought together? Of course, if, if my friendships were only with people online like that, I would need more. So I still have of course, like — I have a real life if you want to differentiate between the two. But it’s been neat to get to know these folks within this community. So yeah, I have been able to build some semblance of friendships here and there through, through those means.