Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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decay & ruin
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dead malls
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got that wrong
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Like my brownhouse:
   Marie at the Secret Spot
Saturday, September 8 2007
Yesterday was hot and today was even hotter. In past summers we made use of the Secret Spot on the Esopus in such conditions, though we haven't gone much at all this summer. But today Gretchen arranged for us to meet Penny there. It's a convenient destination for her, only about a mile from her boxy modernist house.
As we were setting out, we impulsively decided to bring Marie the elderly cat (also known as "the Baby"). As we headed down the road, though, we wondered if we were being foolish. What if someone else was already there with a dog?
But nobody was there except us and then Penny. Marie wasn't all that happy about being in an alien environment, but eventually she quit complaining and stretched out in the shade near the beach and waited for us to quit splashing around. Actually, though, mostly what we humans did was sit on the gravely river bottom of the Esopus shallows and talk. The dogs, meanwhile, were having a great adventure trying to scare something out of a jungle of roots overhanging the north bank. At one point Sally vanished for several minutes into what was essentially a cave hidden behind those roots. Penny was appalled, saying that we couldn't pay her enough money to go in there. Then she started offering us money if we'd go riverbank spelunking, something we might have had to had Sally spent much more time concealed in that spider-flecked darkness.


Developments in web-based social networks have allowed people who have been out of touch for years to reconnect, whether they are high school classmates, former employees, or members of earlier, more primitive web-based social networks. One such earlier, more primitive web-based social network was the one that connected the people who maintained web-based personal journals back in the years before the word "blog" existed, back before there were the easy web-based web publication tools that now spew so much content out of Port 80.
Back in those days there were primitive social networking tools, which mostly took the form of webrings. Webrings allowed for a consistent pre-determined linear surfing pattern through a collection of like-minded sites. Back in, say, 1997, that was pretty much the only kind of organized site-to-site networking available, although even then it seemed primitive and, dare I say, pointless. Nevertheless, these webrings managed to build communities (even if the people in those communities didn't necessarily surf the web in the manner that the ring-based system suggested). There were webrings about all sorts of things, and individual sites joined numerous rings simultaneously, sometimes dedicating most of their homepages to the rings' logos and navigational links (here's a classic example).
Back in the days of the early web, many freshly-minted HTML experts seemed to be struggling to come up with things to put on their sites. Web-based journals created a useful framework for the addition of constant new material, but, since many of these web masters were singularly obsessed with the web and their inflated sense of their place in it, much of the writing in these journals hasn't stood the test of time. They obsessed about their status in communities whose existence was far more ephemeral than anyone could have predicted at the time. Many paragraphs and whole journals were given over to prattle about the giving and receiving of web "awards" (here's a classic example); evidently a gift culture based on nothing more than overtly-stated mutual affirmation is a phase that a society can pass through as its people transition from excited pioneers to bored channel flippers.
But it turns out that there are still plenty of sites on the web dedicated to nothing more than the getting and giving of awards in the most headache-inducing ways permitted by HTML. I did a Google search for "most awards" web and came up with this page that looks like it has been frozen in amber since 1996. Following one of those banner links will drop you at the Felix Bongers Web page, which should be avoided by anyone nursing a hangover. Felix Bonger claims (using the marquee effect) to have won 2,850 awards. When I click on the heavenly gates to enter it, the text (in 20 point font) says this:

Vote this site for Top 50 Award Winning Web Sites List!

"Welcome in to this page with 2851 Awards.
Mouse klick here.
Being No 2.
in the Web with the most Awards

My web page name is:
Felix Bongers Web Page."
I am the owner and the creator from these pages.
Self made Powerpoints by Felix Bongers
28 Wedding photo's from our Daughter. In 3 pages
My page has . Poems. Jokes. Quotations. Stories.
Angels.Unicorns. Fairies. Family Tree. Family-Photo's.
Australian page & Australian terror in Denpasar Bali. Indonesia.
American pages September 11 2001. Translation. Backgrounds.
Christmas pages. Valentines page. Saints & Sinners. Free gifts.
My pages have been made with lots of love and heart.
My karate training at home on my kickbag
Say I love you in all Language in the wold.
All Universal Currency Converter .
Pray Holy Mary in 17 languages.
URL's Pages .And much more.
I thank everybody for visiting.
Felix Bongers Web Page

Get your own countdown at BlingyBlob.com

Those lines read as though they're links, but none of them are hypertext. To get to the content you must use the navbar on the left. I poked around to see what I could see but eventually I had to do something to dull the pain of what felt like a throbbing nailgun wound between my eyes.
The point I'm making is that, though I'd forgotten about it, there is still a culture on the web of affirmation for people who make such sites. Amazingly even TheSiteFights.com, a centralized affirmation engine for the migraine-inducing web, still exists.
But it all seems so sad now, knowing what we now do about the futility of all this exuberance and transparently-selfish reciprocity. There are so many loud links back and forth between pages, but amid all this visual shouting there isn't any actual content. And even when there is the expression of what superficially seems like a genuine sentiment, the means of stating it inevitably amounts to a paste-in graphic with a long-dead hyperlink, and nothing is ever added by way of commentary. We're left to wonder, really, who was Missy? Why is there a candle burning for her? Who was Rebecca? Why are there praying hands for her? It's enough to drive a guy like me to walk into a crowded school cafeteria, bar the doors, and start farting on students.
Meanwhile members of the old web journal community have reconvened in a group on Facebook.com. They post messages about the good old days: the flame wars, the deceptions, the intrigue, the hanky-panky, and the polyamory. Many of them no longer have much of a presence on the web and are now just passive consumers of its utility. But they sure have stories to tell from back in the day, back when nobody knew where this Frankenstein monster was going to go and what havoc it was going to wreak.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070908

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