It's fashionable nowadays to bash the Internet for the poor quality of material it contains: porn sites (you don't need a URL for this one, just do a search on lightbulbs or something innocent, and a site will pop up), stupid pages that cherish some stupid looking wrestling player (I kid you not), and of course, pages with useful information such as 'how women can pee standing up' (I wish I was kidding).
The truth is that we have no-one to blame but ourselves for letting the 'net become a place that any idiot can join. Long gone are the days of Unix-only accounts, checking your mail with Pine, struggling to read the news without any Make Money Fast letters and looking up useful information with Gopher.
Nope, nowadays anyone can get an account, and if they don't have space for a webpage on their ISP, they can go through Xoom or Geocities. Geocities should be banned from every ISP in the world. When a Geocities link appears in a search engine never fails that at least half of them will be broken. The other stuff contains information so useless and pointless, you gotta wonder who is the person that spent the time doing it.
There is an advantage in all of this: the Internet should be used in Psych class so that the soon-to-be Shrinks can take a good look at what cases they are going to have to diagnose. A webpage represents the thoughts and logic of the human being that created it. Many of them would obviously quit school and start working jobs like garbage collectors, but those few that remain would be some serious ass-kicking Shrinks.
Now, most of this stuff is usually far far away from us. Unless we like to spend most of our time surfing the 'net, thinking that this is what "being on the net" all means, we'll hardly see this evil that lurks on the IP next to yours. Unfortunately, sometimes, be it ICQ or e-mail, you get a URL from someone you know.
Take it the other day. Got an ICQ message that just contained this URL:
http://members.xoom.com/dor_sho/kiss.htm
I forget who half the people are on my endless list of people, but since the person was on my ICQ, I assumed it had to be something good, perhaps CoNnish or related.
Being a Xoom page, I should've known this spelled trouble. But being the bloke that I am, I checked it anyway.
Now, how many of you have received a URL which brings you to a "ICQ snowball fight" page? Shit like this seems to have sprouted as fast as the popularity of ICQ. I've received the "ICQ snowball fight" URL countless times from people that I thought had some brains. Apparently, and forgive me here if I miss the hilarity behind such things as sending this silly drivel to others, this is humorous. I usually grind my teethin disbelief at the same frequency of the grinding noise of my hard disk loading Explorer.
So let's take a look at this page. On a positive note it wasn't the "ICQ snowball page", but it might as well just have been:
YOU'VE JUST BEEN KISSED BY A CYBER PUPPY!!
You load the page and you are greeted by what the author considers "art". It is some sort of animal that looks like an overgrown hunting dog. It's got fangs rather than teeth. It also has blue saliva and a giant human tongue. Saliva and tongue are animated. This twisted weird thing I can't comprehend is a puppy. I'd hate to see this fucker when it's fully grown.
Isn't he CUTE?!! :-)
Actually no. But I guess whoever drew that thing wasn't very talented, so we'll give them credit for at least trying.
Wait a sec! What's that on your face??
It's my expression of disgust using my facial muscles. First, I can't believe they sent me this URL. Second, that there are actually people who bother to do pages such as this just to show a few quantizillion ads. If you check the length of this page, you'll notice how 3/4 of it are banners.
YUCK!!!!!
Not quite what I said, but since you can't see my face, this will sum it up nicely.
How GROSS!!!!
Gross? The page? Oh yeah.
He slobbered all over you!!
Yes, the feeling you get from this page is as if someone just took a big long warm piss on you.
Cyber Puppy Slobber is one of the stickiest substances known toman (or woman *LOL*).
I could name others. There is one thing that really gets on my nerves, next to emoticons (and God knows I am guilty of using them), but if there is one thing I can't stand it's that *LOL*. This is there to point out it's funny. I wonder how many actually laughed when they got to this page. If the counter could do this, it would be neat to see it say:"number of people that got slobbered: 52,123"
"number of people that found this somewhere in the vicinity of remotely amusing: 4".
There is only ONE possible way to get rid of it!
Yes. To take the pages offline. Or kill the author. Since that can't be done, as stuff like this pops up like mushrooms in a humid corner of your room, the best one can do is to simply reforward this URL to the person that sent it to you one million times.
Do you want me to tell you how you do it?
Ok, I figured you would, so I'll be nice and help you. :-)
(After all, it's partly my fault you're covered in Cyber Puppy Slobber.)
I wonder if I could use this in my defence, in a court of law, after accidentally shooting the author several hundred times.
You can get rid of it by passing it on to everyone you know!
This is also another great way to give away your own popularity. Think about it before you forward this to your friends: what will they think of you?
Send this page to all the people you know by forwarding theURL in e-mail, ICQ, AIM, or any other means at your disposal.
Also known as chain-letters which unfortunately waste plenty of bandwidth on the net causing immense congestion. Isn't it re-assuring to know that you are getting an 8% packet loss because there is stuff like this travelling on the 'net?
I'm sure your friends will be THRILLED that you're so sweet andare sharing your Cyber Puppy Slobber with them! :-)
Thrilled? Oh yeah. Don't wonder afterwards why they don't reply to your e-mails and have set you on ICQ to "always invisible".
By the way, if you want to see my other pets, click on thepuppy to go to my homepage!
Oh yes! With a link that states:
How I Found A Husband on the Internet
The best part are the first few lines:
On the night of September 15, 1996, I was in the Star Trekchat room in WBS, looking for someone to talk to.
Need I say more?
*LOL*
Metadata: