Hi Adam! Welcome to Steem! That's a great catch on the Blue Angels formation! Love it! We were supposed to have the Blue Angels perform here last year, but this is where the accident happened that took the life of one of the pilots just outside of Nashville.
I didn't realize IRC was still a thing! That's crazy! I used IRC hell, 20 years ago!
Most Steemians use steemit.chat and or Discord to chat with each other. I hope you are open to checking out one or both of those platforms. Click into my blog where you will find a list of Discord servers in my Engagement piece I published last night.
Enjoy your time on Steem! Looking forward to having you here!
The Blue Angels happened to be doing the airshow in Rochester, NY where I went to college over one summer. They were doing there fly bys over the campus since it was near the airport conveniently enough!
IRC is still definitely a thing and is used in a couple of the newer technologies out there but has a new GUI, layout, and different kind of user experience. Most of the large IRC networks like freenode, efnet, QuakeNet, Rizon, and a few others are still around and kicking.
I'll definitely checkout the steemit.chat (hoping it's IRC like) if not there is always Discord which I know has an IRC like aspect to the chat channels. I do use Discord as well for clan activities for the games I play.
Excellent! Sounds like you will be off to a good start.
If you want to find some of the Steem discord channels, head to my blog and check out the People are People post from Wednesday evening, I have a link in there to a pretty good list of Steem related Discord Servers.
See you in the chat rooms!