The Internet

I remember being aware of something called "the internet" a looooong time ago. Must have been in grade school. Honestly, I don't remember when I first heard about it. Back then it seemed that nobody knew what the fuck to do with it. Transmitting any kind of data back and forth across it took forever, and the only thing really posted on it was tech stuff written by college geeks about particle accelerators and lame 80s movies.

Then came the early 90s. My high school buddy, Chi-Chi, showed me his computer one day, and he told me it could do something REALLY cool: It could "download" pornography off of the "internets". Right there, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. That would be "look up pr0n on the internet until my hands became deformed claws and I could no longer function in society." The only problem way back then was that there was no world wide web (only BBS [Bulletin Board Systems], or Gopher or something... I don't know, I'm really not a g33k), and we had to guess what the pictures in the electronic storage bin were by their name only (and their names told us nothing). Plus it took over 2 hours to download a 40 - 100Kb file. You don't know how pissed off we were when we took off for a movie, came back and found out that the 150K file named "bambi121" we just spent 3 hours downloading was really just a screen capture of a Dizney movie. GODDAMMIT!

Then came the middle 90s. This is when shit started to get good. The world wide web was up and running, and people were getting their first taste of first generation web sites and plenty of digital poontang. I remember the first time I saw the web in action. It blew me the fuck away. I was just starting my freshman year at college, and I had to type my first paper up for English 101 (a 7:50AM class, which sucked loser frat-boy ballz, but that's neither here nor there), and so I found a nice and quiet computer in the Student Center, and began working on it. At about an hour in, I got a little tired of typing and needed a break, so I clicked on that weird looking "Netscape" button next to the Microsoft Word logo. It opened up a window that said "Magellan" and it asked me to type something in in order to search the web for more information. I typed in "japanimation," and lo and behold, links to other sites filled the screen. Sure, the computer only had a black and white monitor (can't wait to tell my annoying, spoiled and A.D.D. grandkids about that), but I was still in total amazement. Yeah, back then all the pages looked exactly the same, and they all had annoying and really stupid animated gifs everywhere. All the information given was on the looooooooooong front page, and the colors were always gaudy and made your eyes bleed (for some reason people always chose a fluorescent green background with red fonts). But, you could still find out about TONS of stuff that you never even knew existed.... Like different forms of pornography. Lots and lots of porno. Needless to say, that paper I was working on kind of got forgotten, and my grades suffered ever since.

Oh man, I remember when I found out that the computer lab in the art building on campus had Macs with COLOR monitors! There was a time when I actually took a bagged lunch and showed up at that lab when it opened every Saturday morning at 10AM, and surfed the web until the place closed at 6 that night. Now, I wasn't ballsy enough to actually look up naughty things or anything like that, but I surfed for as much information as I could about anime and all my favorite TV shows and movies (especially for info on stuff that hadn't even come out in the States at that time). I was so fucking addicted to the internet it wasn't funny. But I kept it all a secret. I told no one. It wasn't until 1995 that I actually first began turning my letters to my friends (known as the Rossman Chronicle Printed Edition) into a webpage of my own. I wish to GOD that I kept a copy of that very first page I made. It was so shitty. I didn't know how to add fonts, graphics, or even how to change the background color. I looked up a web site that gave me the most basic of the basics of information on how to make a webpage of my own, and I barely read it. I think I was impressed with myself that I actually figured out how to "bold" something. Anyway, ten years ago the Online Rossman Chronicle was born. The world has been rejoicing since.

Back to the internet though. Wow, that was a long tandem there. So, from BBS to Gopher to Netscape 1.0. The internet was evolving sloooooooooowly, but then internet commerce came into play, and Amazon.com changed how greedy bastards everywhere made their fortunes. By the mid to late 90s America was embracing the world wide web like cute puppies made of fluffy clouds and kittens. Buzzwords like "yahoo" and "surfing" took on whole new nerdy meanings, and AOL began to really take advantage of retarded Middle America like a construction contractor pulling up to a corner crammed with Mexicans (honestly, I've heard that a good 40 fucking percent of all AOL customers don't even own a computer. Jesus! Talk about selling yellow snow to an eskimo!). The internet boom had boomed. Companies whose names all ended in ".com" were being traded like crack on the stock market despite the fact that they only existed in cyberspace and had no real product to offer. Print and television ads whoring these companies made the country laugh (purposefully, 'cause they were funny), but also wonder just what it was the company being advertised even offered. The geeks who started said companies became overnight millionaires despite the fact that their "company" was made up of them, a card table in their parents' basement, and a single computer running Windows 95. Seriously, even back then I wondered just what the fuck was going on. But soon, the rest of the world caught on that they had been had... And the .com bubble-burst, kicking the shit out of all those grabby, fat fuck geeks like no schoolyard bully ever could. It was glorious!

By the end of the 90s, internet chat was stronger than ever, newsgroups were starting to lose their appeal to the much more flashy and people-friendly message boards popping up all over the place, and products like Napster and Bearshare were making it possible to swap music files, porn, books, porn, TV shows and porn between two people, half a world away, at pretty decent speeds (for the time, when most people were still on dial-up modems). I think I bought my last fansub in 1998, back when I first discovered digisubs in their adolescence, but I digress. The 2000s are a blur to me. I can't place when certain things made their debut since the techno-leaps were coming in mounds of bounds. I think Bittorent began about 2-3 years ago... Blogs only really took off in the past 2 years (my personal blog entries from 7 years ago are so fucking embarrassing, they're embarrassing. I just hope that the rest of the bloggers out there feel the shame that I did, back when I was so goddamn open and honest about what was going on in my daily life, real soon. Then Livejournals can DIE)... and the way people buy things will never be the same (thanks to eBay, Playboy.com, and 98% of the web which is made up of porn pay-sites). Damn, I remember when I told good old Hatton that he was an idiot for actually buying something online with his credit card back in 1995. I think it was a plane ticket. Currently, all of my banking and more than 1/2 of all my purchases are done online. Right now my only techno fear is about when Skynet, the Matrix, or the Cylons will start killing us or turning us into living batteries... Where was I?

Ah, so that's like the basic history of the internet in a nutshell. Throw in some really shitty web-comix, instant messaging, and spam and you're up to date. Now, to rate all this crap.

For what it was, BBS and gopher were good starts. They should have evolved into the world wide web a little sooner than they did, but that's only me wishing that I had access to unlimited amounts of free pornography when I was just entering puberty, instead of tearing the house apart looking for the newest Sears catalogue (all you guys out there older than 25 know what the hell I'm talking about). The WWW was and is almost shear perfection! It's just how Jesus would have made it. The thing that I'm happiest about the web (other than the enormous porn content) is that it's stayed 2 dimensional, and hasn't gone all weird and 3-D or anything yet. Yeah, I find Flash sites to be annoying, but luckily Flash has mainly stuck to stupid webimations that your co-workers email to you 27 times a day asking "Have you seen this hamster dance yet?! OMG, ROTF LMAO WTF!" It could be worse.

Instant messaging is AWESOME! Talking to the Chief, the MegaPlayboy and St. Louis Boy all day at work just makes the hours fly by! I may have gotten the Chief in trouble a few times, but I think he likes being chewed out by his boss.

People to people (p2p) file sharing programs are just God's way of saying "I love all of you, hurt by the cold." Unlimited music, movies, anime, porn... All shot straight to my harddrive in seconds to minutes... Free of charge. Awesome. The rest of the net is all good too, but whatever, I'm talking about p2p shit here! Why did it take so long to invent this?!?! Bittorent, and now eXeem are the greatest achievements that mankind could ever hope to aspire to! I mean, I just downloaded and watched the movie Howl's Moving Castle despite the fact that it JUST debuted in Japanese movie theaters a week or two ago! And it was already subtitled! If things improve beyond the point where we are now, I think I'll shit myself. Unfortunately, seeing where the internet is going from here is like trying to see Keter from Malchut on the System Sepherotica... You just can't. You can barely understand the next step, let alone have full comprehension or even see more than two steps ahead. But it's all good. I just know that we'll all die happy when the machines come a knockin'. Our own A.I. creations will probably kill us all in our sleep, so we'd better enjoy all the pr0n we can while we're still alive.

So, what do I think of the Internet? It is the greatest thing mankind has ever accomplished. Air conditioning? Fuck it. Flying to the moon? Honestly, who gives a shit? The nuclear bomb? Good for ending prolonged wars, but what has it done for us lately? The Internet gives us free porn! FREE PORN! And for that, I give it a 10 out of 10 Rossman Stars of Pornographic Wonder! Not even 1337 speak can hurt the net in any noticeable way. May the Internet live forever, and someday jack itself directly into our brains so that we may "touch" and "feel" our downloads.

As a side note, I once had a professor tell the class that one night, while he was web surfing, he remembered reading somewhere that 9 out of 10 people online at any given time are looking up porn. He then looked out his window, saw that at least 9 of his neighbors still had their lights on, and he realized that they all must be checking out some dirty sites... Until he looked down at his own computer and he realized, "Well, I guess 8 of them must be looking up porn."

I cannot help but chuckle when I see the primitive "internet" that the Rossman is forced to use. Whenever I come back in time to see him I always ask him how his flux-interdimensional-net-driver is working... When he tells me that he doesn't have one I then ask, "Well then, how do you express the personification of the hyper-image inducer into your cerebral cortex while navigating the interway without crashing your implanted digital mobilizers?!" Ha! That always cracks me up. Though, I think I'll stop asking him now because he keeps hitting me with larger and larger household items. Last week it was a sofa.

I give the ancient internet a futuristic laser gun salute. It is quaint and antiquated, but it was a very necessary first-step for mankind to be able to eventually progress into the immediate, sexual stimulation that the uber-net now offers people and robots of my time. I would show the Rossman the future of the net, but generations of cybernetically enhanced genetics are the only thing that keeps the population of my era from having their brains explode as soon as they plug themselves into it. Good thing I experimented with that monkey first!

Ooooooooh yeah! The internet is the greatest of the great, homies. It put the "poon" in the "tang". It made me wanna be the shway hacker extraodinaire that I is today. The first time I saw me some boobies online was like an epiphany or somesuch shiznit. I was all zonin' out like a fool, tryin' to find some 411 about laws against "child bitch-slapping as done by daddy" an' all that, when I came upon a web site that blew my mo' fo' mind! There was spankin, all right! Only it was aaaaaaaalright by me. I burned those images into my mind, and when I was bein' whipped an' beat down that night, I jus' kept rememberin' those pics, and soon I was able to even smile through it. Now, after years and years of poon tang research, I can pretty much smile through any catastrophe that comes my way.

Yeaaaaah, baby! The internet is where it is! Two thumbs way up it's horny little bum! When peeps ask me if I am a religious homie, I just say, "Yeah, whore. The internet is my goddamn god! See, my god looooooves porn. Loves it, bitch!"