Coincidence or Voodoo? Deja Vu all over again.

Hey I was having a conversation with someone in SL - and it occurs to me thats there are many odd coinicdences that happen in Second Life and other Online venues.

For instance you and Your old love happen to try out Second Life within days of each other.

You meet you long lost High School friend.

And so forth.

I really wonder since these coincidences seem so strange in a game with only 40,000 suscribers but Millions and millions of internet users.

Really intrigues me how they seem to be not random occurances.

my SL girlfriend working for the company that caused me immense headaches at my old job?

my friend chris who still works there on me telling him where she works: "You realize you have to fight to the death now."

I had a fight to the death once. I won.
TIP: Don't bring a knife to a Chevy Suburban fight.
PWNT.

But really. I once met a person in SL that turned out to be my father's brother's aunt's sister's cousin's college roomate.

What did that make us?

NOTHING!!!!

Hence the Suburban.

My oddest coincidence happened when I was a beta on Uru. I used to hang out in the city looking for people to help, and I happened across someone who lived in the Netherlands, my first Dutch player. I helped him with some stuff for the game, and in the course of that talked about my brother who had just moved to the Netherlands. I asked him if he lived anywhere near Haarlem, and the player said yes, he did, he lived in Haarlem too. I asked if he was anywhere near my brother's address. He said it would take him a long time to get there...if he walked really really slowly. He was literally two minutes from the place my brother had moved to....
Cali

I met my gf on IRC, and it turned out she lived a block away from me and had been to the same high school
We're still together 6 years later

I met who would become my girflriend in Ragnarok Online, progressed thru that, to Gunbound, to FFXI, to Maple Story, to World of Warcraft, and now to SL. With all that online gaming now maybe we can finnally 'settle down' lol.

I also happened to meet an artist i admired in SL, we found out freaky stuff like we have the exact same birthday and she's one year younger than i am, i've met another guy who lives in the same state in a nearby county, met an online webcomic artist/author who also DJ's for a streaming radio station in SL...yah...freaky stuff...

Met someone quite casually at an SL party who does promo work for a theatrical group that I know one member of via an old work mate's old band.

I did run into an old fling from There here right at the start, he seems to have not only gone back to his old g/f, but back to There. Last time I went over, we chatted.

I have 1st life buddys that come in here so we can visit, kinda nicer than just a phone convo. and we spend more time together!

I met someone who lives on the other end of the block my mom called home for 24 years (I was there only about 4 all told).

It's a very small planet, RL and SL.

The Goddess loves confusing people, so these synchronicities happen a lot. I can't count the times when a, say, Slashdot story shows up, and the same comments are written simultaneously by two totally unrelated persons and show up one after the other on the page, for example.

Destiny are a wonderful thing.... what else can it be?

sheer dumb luck?

Statistically null ultradense electromagnetic fluctuations ?

Antacids might help with that.

I have not met anyone in SL whom I have known in RL. Then again, it is unlikely that my RL colleagues/connections would find SL, at all. There are other, um, synchronicities that I find fun/alarming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_Vu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny

))

On the material plane, the human brain is a fanatical pattern detector, and will create them where they don't exist.

On the spiritual plane, God knows !

I have a very interesting coincidence... or maybe not. My name in the game is Sidra, not my real name, but as i was looking over the map I found a sim named Sidra. The sim next to it is named Marmara. My father was born in an area called Marmara in Turkey.

Coincidence... or more?

Maybe just that the sim namer had Turkey in his mind when naming sims, and so did your parents when naming you ?

And remember most sims have eight neighbors, so only one eighth of the sim naming contributes to your coincidence.

And doubtless your father had other towns and villages near him, and near close relatives.

And lived where there was a street name? Possibly a house name? Any of which could have matched. Analyse it statistically to see how many other similar occurrences which did not occur could equally well have caused you to post like this, and you see its nothing surprising at all. Certainly not to us, who selected to read such posts by reading this thread, but maybe not even to you.

Indeed, absolutely astounding and near impossible co-incidences must, statistically, come to our attention now and again. Depends how widely we cast our network of observers. There's an awful lot of people in the world. Even disregarding the way every story improves each time a new teller passes it on.

The brain is amazing at spotting such things, but catastrophically poor at making a statistical evaluation of how surprised it should really be. All to do with evolution and survival.

You either run or you don't, and better safe than sorry.

When you're struck by lightning for the second time, it seems quite different to you from the way it feels to the statistician who analyses the data, and says "well that fits into the expected rate of ocurrence, almost bound to happen to someone this month".