We will be using old-school IRC. –Relish the historical experience!

1. To start with you need an IRC client; if you are using the Firefox or Mozilla browser, I recommend downloading ChatZilla.  If not, google “IRC clients and _______ (your browser) to find one.  Or try searching IRC in Wikipedia–they have a list of them all that compares features and has links.
2. Next, open you chat client and navigate to the chat: it can be found at irc://freenode/rhetorix/
3. The first time you’ll need to register a username.
4. You may need to join #rhetorix in a separate step, depending on your chat client.
5. Try signing in a day or two early in case you run into any trouble; you’ll have time to sort it out.
6. Here is a link to basic IRC commands; they are pretty simple.