Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

Personal web pages are in vogue, polluting web browsers with animated GIFs, embedded MIDIs, and the ever-popular “Under Construction” images. Free web services drive this trend, with Angelfire, Geocities, Tripod, and AOL’s Hometown being among the most popular. 10MB of storage is normal, while those with a Godlike 100MB are the envy of the community. You get an e-mail address with your site, but it only forwards to a different one; forget sending anything from it. Your web site comes at a ridiculously long and arbitrary URL, but you don’t care; you get a certain joy out of having a web site at all. The idea that some random guy on the side of the country (or perhaps the world!) might stop by and read your site absolutely thrills you.

And what exactly is it that people are visiting your site for? Is it a portfolio of all your bad poetry and artwork, carefully layed out with colorful imagery using that fancy new CSS stuff? A collection of codes, walkthroughs, FAQs, and screenshots for a video game? A fan-site dedicated to your favorite band, collecting every bit of digital minutia you can find? Or maybe it’s just a site about you, containing a few pictures, links, and your e-mail address. Regardless of what, your site is guaranteed to have two things: a hit counter, and a guestbook.

Lycos, Yahoo!, and Altavista are major web portals. Hotmail offers a popular free e-mail service. Screenshots, either from a video game, movie, or television program, are scarce, and so are highly prized. You’ve never seen video on the Internet, except for a low-resolution clip someone sent you of an old news report about a whale getting blown up. You peruse warez sites for programs made in Visual Basic which manipulate the Windows API to unique effect. AIM punters…text faders…mail bombers…an animated character that follows your cursor on the screen…it’s all so random, so pointless, so absurd, and yet so awesome.

You connect with AIM (or AOL) and see that most of your contacts are offline; being online but AFK is frowned upon. Away messages are employed sparingly.

You recently discovered Napster, and have been feverishly searching for music to download. You find everything you search for, even obscure background music for a Sega CD game. Each mp3 takes enough time and effort to complete that each file becomes a prized possession, an item to hold dear if only because of the trials you endured in obtaining it. Large collections makes you the envy of your peers, regardless of who the songs are actually by.

To pass the time, you download PC game demos, finding amongst them some real gems, like Dink Smallwood and Unreal Tournament. Before long, you are immersed in the addictive gameplay of Diablo, and decide one adventurous day to connect to Battle.net. The novelty of multiplayer gaming with someone in a different city quickly wears off when they repeatedly kill and then resurrect your character, repeating childish taunts to you the entire time.

You soon find comfort in the form of a browser-based game called Space Merchant, whose low-fi graphics are compensated for with a complex rule system, embedded social dynamic, and open-ended design. One bored day in class, you make a killing with the trade route you develop while on your school’s T1 line, only to find yourself podded when you attempt the same thing on your home’s dial-up connection. Those with the bigger bandwidth easily trod upon those without, creating two distinct classes of players.

At school, you get bored after completing your assignment in Keyboarding class and decide to spend your time playing flash games like Pico’s School on Newgrounds, laughing at humorous articles on Seanbaby’s site, or amusing yourself with the pictures on Cliff Yablonski Hates You. Nothing is filtered, and you are able to shock & amaze other students by showing them sites like dolphinsex.org. Maybe 3% of the other students are online on a regular to semi-regular basis. The few that are comprehend little of what is out there. You feel a certain sense of knowing, of belonging, simply by being a part of this giant, yet still obscure and esoteric beast called…The Internet.