HikiCulture has been mentioned on quite a few sites; I've seen quite a few mentions ever since the forum received lots of traffic in late October.

Here are three mentions out of the many I've already seen:

http://twowheeledmadwoman.blogspot.com/2009/11/forum-for-reclusive-people.html
http://www.metafilter.com/86283/Irony-incarnate-a-forum-for-reclusives
http://mrod.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/oxymoron/

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The following guide will show you how to install and customize XChat. XChat is a good alternative to using the chat-box on the HikiCulture forum and is, in my opinion, the best Windows IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client. It is user-friendly, has a nice interface, has native SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support, among many other things.

Anyway, let's begin with the guide....

First off, download XChat from here: http://www.silverex.org/download/ (*Note* - Make sure to download XChat from the link I provided since that version is free, while XChat for Windows users usually costs money and expires after a month.)

When you're finished downloading XChat, install it (obviously). Now, open XChat. At the top of the screen, click on Settings. Under the context menu, select Preferences.

Now set everything up to be exactly as it appears in the screen-shots below:

Once you're finished setting everything up as it is in the above screen-shots, click on the top-left part of X-Chat where it says XChat. Under the context menu, select Network List.

The following box will come up:

Fill out of all the boxes with username(s) you wish to use whilst chatting on XChat. Once you're finished filling out all the boxes, click where it says Add. After clicking on Add, type IRCHighway then click on Edit.

The following box will come up:

Fill out the info so that it's exactly (minus the stars in the Nickserv box) as shown in the above screen-shot. When you're finished, close the box.

Now, to finish things off you can install a nice XChat theme from the following link: http://t0x.in/xchatthemes.html

Pick any theme you wish to use. I personally use the "Smog" theme, but there are lots of great themes on that page. The installation instructions for the themes is right on the page, so explaining how to install an XChat theme would be redundant.

Now whenever you wish to connect to the HikiCulture IRC channel, all you have to do is open up XChat, click on XChat in the top-left part of the screen, select Network List, highlight IRCHighway and click on connect. After clicking on Connect, you'll show up in the HikiCulture IRC channel.

Enjoy.

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Here's the latest batch of HikiCulture members I've given VIP status to:

Glasses
Porygon
FONEternal
LyricalIllusions
Hitori
Carruthers
Knots
shorelinetrance
gloomba
MobiusBrain
sibirskaya_koshka
geegor

Congrats.

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I've made the user Mikan a HikiCulture moderator as I feel she will do a great job of moderating.

Mikan is a relatively new forum-user, but I can already tell that she'll make a great staff-member.

Congrats Mikan.

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I will start off by saying that I am impressed by how active HikiCulture has become, and how much it has grown since creating it in late July of this year (2009). I initially wasn't sure if the forum would ever get more than twenty members (if that). Secondly, I want to say that the amount of new posts being contributed to the site (on most days) is quite impressive, to say the least.

There is one slight "problem" though - there are far too few threads being created.

Some of the HikiCulture boards have less than ten threads in them. Lots of guests who visit this site probably think that the place is somewhat inactive, or doesn't have much to offer when they see that the place has so few threads to discuss things in, thus preventing them from registering.

If every member could create a couple threads a week, or even a new thread a day (some people on the forums I'm on do this), HikiCulture would really have a lot more to offer and would not feel so banal.

Some members have been fine when it comes to creating new threads, but many have created hardly any, or simply no threads at all -- I am not sure if there's a reason for this, but it's a shame.

Don't be shy to create new threads; doing so will help make HikiCulture a better place with much more to offer.

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I am confused as to why there are so many different ways of spelling the term Asperger's (my preferred way of spelling the name of the ASD, hence why I used it).

I've been wanting to write a similar blog-post to this one for a while now, and was "reminded" to create this post a few minutes ago after seeing that WrongPlanet's Facebook Asperger's group goes by the name "Wrong Planet Asperger Group" which contrasts from the WrongPlanet forum slogan which uses the Asperger's spelling.

Asperger's is very often misspelled as assbergers, assburgers, ass burgers (and various other silly spellings), so the various "proper" spelling of the word don't really bother me - I'm simply stumped as to why there are so many ways of referring to this autism spectrum disorder.

Whether someone decides to spell it Asperger's, Aspergers or Asperger, doesn't matter much to me as long as people avoid using the dreaded assburgers spelling of the word (I've actually talked to people online who claim that they really thought the term was spelled that way.)

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I was going through new avatars to use on the HikiCulture forums on a near-daily basis without finding feeling full contentment with any of the ones I had used; today though, I found the perfect one:

I had thought about Final Fantasy whilst daydreaming today; I think it's because I long to play another game from the series. While thinking about Final Fantasy (which I am extremely fond of), I thought of Moogles (the name of the creature from Final Fantasy that is in my avatar.)

I decided to add my HikiCulture user-name "Chair" to the bottom-right corner of the avatar to make it somewhat more unique. The typeface I used for "Chair" is the same font and shade of blue (partially) that I had used for the HikiCulture logo.

My new avatar finally makes me feel contentment.

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Wikipedia Asperger's Page

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Here's a recluse/hikikomori survey I've created using PollDaddy:

Click here to take the survey.

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