Writing in this weblog is always a curious thing for there's no audience beyond posterity. It is somewhere between a textual photo album and landscaping.

There are interests out there that subscribe to the use of the word blog, food blogs, for example, but this conveyor belt of dates format is not appropriate. What they really want is a series of pages irrespective of the date. But lack of education funnels them into using a popular CMS that was built for weblogs and *TADA*, there is a whole industry of "bloggers" who don't blog.

And how did weblog become a verb anyway?

Curiously, photo posting services like Instagram play the weblog role, which is a HORRIBLE vehicle to express ideas!

I miss the way things used to be. Oh the appreciation I would have behind the wheel of a DeLorean and down the hallways and stairways of my life!

Past memories, days of old:
Seesaws, slides, the monkey bars,
Dances, dating, and first cars;

I wish I could bring the world back to Fall '95, my senior year of high school. Yeah, I was dialed into the Internet with my 28.8 baud modem which my 2021 fiber was 34,722 times faster. But it wasn't 34,722 times better.

I miss a world where the Internet was just something geeky we did on the side, not unlike my running this Jekyll/Markdown site.

Work, and times of fun and play:
Tests, teachers, big papers due,
People, pests, and "How 'bout you?"

The Internet was hardly life! Today, it is our relationships, our news, what we're told what we should think, what we should do. If we do not follow the mainstream collective, then the response to us is rage, rage, rage. They The machine knows no other.

She was sittin' beside the ocean
Looking out at the waves
Watching how they keep on rollin'
But always seem the same

She called and said she'd been thinkin' about
All those quiet country nights
And whatever she thought was so wrong with me
Suddenly seemed all right

-Montgomery Gentry, She Couldn't Change Me (2001)

We drive through the tech noir; our cities are seemingly abandoned. People have become mindless NPCs. They even share the same dialogue.

I remember a time when we had our quiet spaces. We didn't run from ourselves. We had to face ourselves in the mirror to the silence of an electric hum.

Aside from my favorite author Anne Jacobsen's Nuclear War: a Scenario (2024) annihilation aside, I suppose for most of us on this planet, a world before a commercialized/monetized Internet will never be a reality again. Just think, the Mosaic Internet was given away for free to break out from CompuServe and dial-in bulletin boards. Today we pay-to-play with paywalls, ads, and our personal data. And just maybe we shoved our souls across the counter.

Have we lost ourselves?

True individualism is lost to stamped labels. For all the uniqueness people claim, it's all tedium.

As what was once sung at a hazy coffeehouse for me, "For all the things you're losing, you might as well resign yourself to try and make a change."