i started my own online social network once, and cultivated it like a garden, styled in a manner i hoped would make it unique and appealing, attempting everyday to push it to take on a life of its own. i made it invite-only and male-only and left it in a listserv format that didn’t require people to visit a website to make it more a conversation. i really worked very hard for three years.
and i am not sure how or where i failed, but though it still exists, it is limp and lifeless. i learned a lot about how write posts that elicit responses and for a time the members felt as though they were a part of something special, something they created. or perhaps is was just a mirage, my own cheerleader-like personality whipping some friends of mine into a short-lived sort of party that like all parties must end. they’re still my friends so i don’t really care about the network, and maybe that’s what’s at the core its demise, perhaps we all felt that way.
so i was reading that facebook’s numbers took a hard hit in january and february and it got me to thinking that social networking may have begun to run its course, perhaps sliding in to decline. but, the interwebs themselves are naught but a social network of astronomical scale and are just the latest means to interact with one another, simply tribes, nations, what-have-you.
wrapping a bar around people and corralling them in ironically concrete places such as second life failed to work because the virtual world exists but in the mind and 3D-animated avatars are in the end, unnecessary. the various mmporgs are just convenient gamer circles and myspace has become what geocities once aspired to and linkedin is strictly business.
today, the cyberlandscape seems at once barren and cluttered and the chaotic choir of empowered voices raised in indiscernible static have become the human background cosmic radiation and computers have become tuners, looking for broadcasts as well place phone calls. our heads truly are in the cloud.networks such as a few private ones to which i belong offer a freedom not known in public spaces, and silliness too — i check them more than i do my e-mail.
but while these are virtual, they share one thing in common, that their roots border on familial and predate the cyber universe in which their collective dopplelganger reside — i already know most people within them.
the virtual world on which i gaze in wonder is but the telephone and my son will think me a relic and will never know the newness nor the awe i hold and sadly, i will most likely never grasp his realm.
i am but a fool think i am seeing anything new.
my birthday is on or about the autumnal equinox
annually
and as my years progress,
the obvious metaphor looms like a harvest moon
over my fat, balding head
and i’ve just discovered a year or more ahead of time
that my 40th will arrive on a monday
damn.
i swear to god the water in the bowl gurgled just after the first of the three amigos i dropped off at the pool landed its swan dive, then i realized it was because the women’s restroom had just flushed, however that did nothing instill confidence…
after the third amigo landed its triple somersault, i [edited for content] and then flushed the bad boys, only they didn’t go down, the water welled to halfway up to bowl’s brim…
i washed my hands. then bravely, gently flushed again, no avail, panic as the waters rose in a flash flood of wretched refuse, nearly brimming over…
i ran and hid in my cubitainer where i now am contacting you — i am on the run…
the poo patrol is surely sampling the dna and comparing against scatalogical samples looking for local pizzarias like some twisted csi episode…
CSI SEWER PATROL!!!
so we all know that the people opposed to the idea that human activity is to blame for climate change are only opposed to the idea because they don’t want to be inconvenienced by the changes in human behavior that would be necessary to avert calamity should that idea be definitively proven.
as proof of this, simply listen long enough to any person opposed to carbon reduction, and eventually they will say that they don’t want to have quit driving an suv.
well, a case for this can surely be made in that massive upheavals in the fuel supply will unfairly negatively on the poor, who can scarcely afford cars as it is, and will be mostly affected by job losses, etc.
and the fact that the kyoto protocol exempts china who will soon far surpass america as the number one polluter is a fact that should dampen the party quickly
but to deny the mountain of evidence that global warming exists and is most likely caused by human activity is counter-productive.
to wit, if it turns out that global warming is not caused by carbon-based fuels, and we have successfully converted over to other, cleaner sources of energy, then we will have a cleaner earth, darn. alternately, if global warming is indeed caused by the use of carbon-based fuels, and we have done nothing, we will have face the consequences in the full knowledge that we did nothing to prevent it, and that feeling of shame will probably include the guilt for all sort of ills.
so can we please just quit kidding ourselves and start working toward a cleaner safer world, one in which our entire economy is enslaved to the finite supply of underground petroleum?
just a thought.
we always knew the lady who lives down the block from us was kind of insane. she waits with her two kids at our corner for the bus every morning. she seems to be a really nice lady, if a bit weird.
she turns up missing for two weeks as she left the house to go on a crack smoking binge and put her self in a hospital with a heart attack.
it freaks me straight the fuck out out to know how close to home these drugs really come.
i thank god every day that when i was a kid, no one had money for cocaine. all we could afford was a little weed — which is a bad drug in and of itself, but surely no worse than alcohol. today there are all kinds of drugs with names i’ve never even heard of that are cheap and super addictive and as a new father it scares me to no end.
oh my god
i still am feeling the effects of the booze i drank all day saturday, and to top it off, i was LATE for work this morning. oh, and not only was i late, i apparently left a line of code that sends an e-mail when an error occurs, on the one error i was looking for is expected and is okay to ignore — so when a 10,000 line data file was fed through the process with bad data, 20 people got 10,000 e-mails.
yaaaaay! i’ve only been on the job a week and i feel like i’m in the doghouse. grumble, mutter, spurt
so apparently human stem cells, when injected into monkeys with Parkinson’s disease actually help (pardon the pun) stem the dreaded disease’s symptoms, but do not permanently cure the disease.
“A single injection of neural stem cells has markedly improved the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in monkeys…they could stand, walk, feed themselves, and had regained independent living…[but] after around four months, the animals again began to deteriorate” (new scientist)
now all we have to do is come up with a good supply of stem cells, and good god, the implications of the free market’s effect in this space really spook me, embryos are the best supply, but are we really going to condone spawning offspring just for spare parts? ‘noids me out just thinking about it.
however. scientific american recently reported that harvard researchers were able to convert ordinary skin cells into stem cells, i just hope that they can create a ready supply of stem cells before we have to enter the murky waters of embryo destruction.
President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight. (link)
great, just fucking great — guess i better stop complaining about the government, i’m sure dissidence will quickly be quashed once w really gets the noose, i mean reins, in his hands.
truly a sad day for our republic
i keep walking around muttering to myself sentence fragments like ‘ok, we gotta take a look at this’ or ‘this has got to stop’ or ‘where am i and what am i doing?’ that don’t really express any real thought that i am having, or have any real meaning. almost like tourrette’s or something.
anyway, it’s kind of making me feel like i’m crazy. i know i’m not, but when i go off the adhd meds i take, i often wonder how in the hell i ever made it as far as i am in life, but i get a clear picture of why it’s taken me so long.
damnable thing, this adhd.