If I may ask, why did you not take MissManners up on her perpetual dinner invitations directed toward you? Were you afraid you'd wind up BEING dinner?
Treating this question seriously for the moment, there's several reasons I've never tried to go to any kind of TrekBBS "meetup."
1. I always thought it would be extremely awkward to meet anyone here in real life. It's why I never tried to meet DEA despite him even working in a grocery store where I've shopped. I mean, what would we even talk about? Plotting the overthrow of TrekBBS at Starbucks? Just endless conversations of "hey, did you see what Daystrom wrote" followed by awkward silence?
2. I'm just not driving more than 30 mins to meet anyone I met online. I'm pretty sure MM lived in like the midwest, I think. I also think she might have been like 15 to 20 years older than me. And I knew really nothing about her personally. I knew more about Sardy's life than I did hers. At one point, I might have actually met Sardy for lunch or something if he had been local, only because it probably would have been interesting talking about his alien newsletter or whatever he had going on and the movies he was trying to make.
3. At that point in my life I really wasn't interested in going out and meeting new people in real life. My life had several major changes and I was suffering from depression even though I didn't realize it at the time. I had quit my job to go back to college and I had just finished that during TK's prime. That's also when the tech industry decided to fall down and die, which made getting a job extremely difficult, which sent me into further depression. I had spent my entire teenage and young adult years constantly moving, constantly being out in the world, and by the time TK took off I found myself sitting at home for these huge stretches of time, which only made my depression worse. I didn't want to go out to some place where I was going to start having to answer questions about my real life. I was using TK to escape my real life, not add to it.
There are a few people that I might have been talked into meeting, maybe, if there was no inconvenience factor involved. I might have been talked into meeting Sardy, just to talk about different projects. I don't know, I might have gone to meet RobL if he had been local, only because I think he might have been a 400 pound shut-in in need of a friend. If I had the chance to meet Christian I might have taken that just out of sheer curiosity. And honestly, if Lisa had said, "you can stay at my place and I'll show you around London" then that would be a hard offer to refuse.