Error 404: Freedom Not Found

A poll today on Internet Censorship currently stands at 96% opposed, 3% in favour and 1% indifferent. At last count there were almost 27 thousand votes on the SMH/The Age poll that accompanied the article ‘Government Goes To War With Google Over Net Censorship’. It covers Conroys recent attack on the giant cyber-corp Google, after Google objected publicly to an Australian internet filter.

The Obama administration has also echoed concerns with the state of freedom of speech and free-flowing information which would be halted with the introduction of the filter. In particular, the filter goes against US foreign policy which seeks to preserve an open internet to spread economic growth and global security.

With such heavyweights in opposing positions one would think that Stephen Conroy, who was never elected but obtained his position after another MP stepped down, would reconsider his draconian plans. Not so. Conroy has shrugged it off and once again did not publish the blacklist he has proposed, of which the last version included materials on abortion, euthanasia and other politically volatile topics, of which discussions are controversial but in no way illegal.

One has to wonder exactly how much blatant opposition does there need to be before the public’s wishes are taken into consideration in regards to the state of democracy in Australia.

A Thousand Curses Upon You CONROY / RUDD / LABOR!!

What the fuck is going on around here? I leave the game for a minute and suddenly democracy turns to shit, just when I was starting to believe in the system. How does the government have a free reign to do this shit? Labor seems to be playing up harder than Johnny Howard in his Iraq days! And on the topic, what happened to withdrawing the troops?

What happened to my education? I thought we were gonna give students a break and suddenly I’m hit with a $1k bill for “fees” that I’ve never had to pay in my whole university career. What do they need that for after all this fucking time? I was cut when they were simply proposing a mere (only in comparison to the grand) three hundred bucks! And giving the private schools more funding than the public ones.. Which fuckhead spun the logic on that one?

Internet filter going ahead despite wave after wave of disapproval from the ISP’s, experts and the majority of citizens. Except now they’re going to wait till after the election to implant it, knowing full well that the backlash would definitely affect their vote count. You’re damn right it will! I’ve never once thought that voting Liberal could possibly be better than voting Labor, but I hate this fucking assembly. I want it dismantled! Maybe it wouldn’t be such a problem if the issue wasn’t shrouded in mystery and outright lies from Conroy, “The filter is 100% accurate,” “Its going to block pages not sites,” and other such nonsense ripped apart in this article from Crikey.

In SA bloggers aren’t even allowed to POST POLITICAL COMMENTARY ONLINE ANONYMOUSLY!! You can’t tell me that shit ain’t fucked up, and you know its us next. We’re right next door. If you want to keep talking with all your dissent and “political critiques” you can say hello to the blacklist fellow bloggers!

Is it enough yet? No? That’s cool, I got more.

What about the ban on small boob porn? Or female ejaculation porn? You all know I hate the porn industry and everything it stands for, but when you start banning you can begin with the misogynistic shit that encourages violence against women who moan in pleasure when the guys spit in her face and slap her. Maybe I should be happy they’re banning the porn? No, no I can’t be! Who is the man who gets to decide which of the boobs are big enough? Is a visible female orgasm so offensive that we have to ban it from sight? Where is the logic? Isn’t this crazy talk to anyone yet?!

Now Conroy (the man I hate so very dearly, dearly, dearly!) is giving $240mil of tax payers money to tv networks for doing no more than meeting the content requirements they were already meeting? Take from the poor, give to the rich, its genius! Why didn’t we think of it before? Oh wait.. They wasted $30mil with Telstra when they scrapped their broadband revamp, replacing the $4.7bil plan with a $43mil one. Think of what that kind of money can do and it went to nothing.

Thats fucking it! I’m gonna do something. Join something. March or rile up a mob or something. Storm city hall. Australia is a fucked up place to live. It’s definitely not the worst, you know, it’s no Sudan or Zimbabwe, but its full on fucked up right now and more people should be screaming about it. I’m enraged by this bullshit.. Contact me if you need more soldiers for the revolution, I’m down for life!

Fuck you CONROY! Block me! I dare you!!

Ren Rou Sou Suo

Lately I’ve been a little obsessed with the Ren Rou Sou Suo, or in English, the ‘human flesh search engine’, netizens from all over China who uncover the identities of Internet villains.

In Communist China, citizens often find themselves frustrated and enraged at the lack of social justice they encounter on a daily basis. When they are provoked, the highly digital-literate population take to the internet and put the power back into their own hands.

This video is showing a young Chinese girl in a restaurant, who stops to give a man directions and escapes as he attempts to pull her into the bathroom with him. She retrieves her parents, who confront the man, an official government minister, before the police come and let him go citing a ‘lack of evidence’ despite the girls testimony, witnesses and the official himself shouting “I did it, so what? How much money do you want, give me a price. I will pay it!” to the girls father.

The news was posted on the internet, and the Ren Rou Suo Sou quickly discovered the official and identified him as Lin Jiaxiang, a party secretary of Shenzhen Maritime Administration. Lin Jiaxiang was dismissed from his government position in the Ministry of Transport on November 4^th 2008. However once again, the Chinese police deemed there to be ‘not enough evidence’ to issue an assault charge, and this footage mysteriously vanished from the internet at the time.

Another case of Ren Rou Sou Suo saw a woman publicly named and shamed for stomping on the head of a kitten with her high heel, killing it. The woman was quickly identified as Wang Jue from her location and the online purchase of the shoes, and her details were posted online for thousands of netizens to use. She was mercilessly harassed, lost her job, and was forced to post a video apology online where she acknowledged her actions and asked for forgiveness.

You see a lot of this lately, notably with the recent case of the puppy killers. Its interesting how the internet has given power to the masses, a new and effective route for vigilantism..

Guest Post From TDW

So I sit here having downloaded yet another album through the Pirate Bay using my Bit Torrent program, and am wondering whether or not it truly is naughty of me not to pay anything for this music. After reading an article over at the Economist about the starters of the Pirate Bay webite getting in a lot of legal trouble at home in Sweden, obviously there was a bit of heated discussion in the comments section about whether or not downloading is naughty or if record company executives are merely trying to hold on to a dying and outdated business model. I care obviously because I hope to one day get in the business. This comment stuck out to me:

“The author is completely missing the point. The Pirate Bay case is not “a victory for media companies against internet piracy”, it is their (temporary) victory against change and innovation. It is giving them the right to keep operating with their outdated 20th-century model, and keep feeding their customers an inappropriate product (low-quality, rigid, locked and overpriced). What the public wants is a product that would be versatile, readily-available, high quality and affordable.

This industry is calling itself “creative”, yet it hasn’t been able to figure out a way to adapt to current technology or its cusomers’ needs. Through its systematic resistance to change and progress, it has left a gap in the market, which, in turn, has allowed so-called pirates to flourish.

Few will deny artists the right to make a decent living off of their work. That they have the right to make fortunes is more debatable. However, now that the need for material supports is disappearing, that recording equipment is becoming affordable, and that music and film can almost market themselves, the middle man (“the industry”), on the other hand, has become an unnecessary, expensive step in the creative process.

Hopefully, the market will do its work, and weed out those dying relics of the past century. Someone will figure out a legal way to bring artists closer to their audiences, and still make a healthy profit. Adapt or die. 2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of “Origin of Species”. How appropriate!”

What do you think? To be honest, I think that downloading illegally has allowed me to discover FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR more artists than ever before. Great for me, but what about the bands? The odds of me going to see these bands live, or buying their merchandise has increased avenged sevenfold now that my awareness of music is at its highest. So if you were a musician, what would you prefer: sell CDs at a rigid $30 a pop where you are in direct competition with zillions of other artists, many of whom are incredibly fake and manufactured by industry heads to sell CDs over yours, or distribute your music freely, generate a massive word-wide fanbase that is restricted only by who has internet access and has an interest in checking you out, and selling almost nightly concert tickets from $50-$150 where thousands of people attend, selling t-shirts at $50 a pop and actually interacting and PERFORMING live like all good musicians should? I’m really starting to feel this new direction, even though it feels somewhat wrong.

This is an excellent example found in a different article:

“Take, for example, two hypothetical films: one made by struggling idealistic art students and the other by a big name director backed by a major studio with a multimillion dollar budget and nationwide advertising campaign. If each film was pirated and watched by a million people we could reasonably expect that the film students would be ecstatic (without an advertising budget their film would have been doomed to the art house circuit) while the big name director would be furious. Why? Because the film students are doing it for art while the director is doing it for the money. This is, in simple terms, what I believe the political potential of piracy to be — piracy allows us to quickly ascertain the authenticity of a cultural product.”

Luli Is So Sad

My laptop is broken. Its all my fault really, I got sick of it being so slow so I flipped it over and pulled out the battery in a huff, as a kind of super fast reset without having to wait for windows to shut down. Every time I’ve tried to turn it on since, it just says ‘fan fail’ and turns off again. So I’ve temporarily (I hope its temporarily anyway!) lost all my music, articles, assignments, anime and all the freakin pictures I’ve been saving for years that only get to shine through these posts. I can’t afford to fix it till I start work, which is two weeks I think, so that means my beloved blogging beauties, I can only sporadically update and comment for a couple of weeks. And that will be when I’m either at my dads place stealing their internet (like right now), when I’ve stolen my brothers desktop off him for a few mins or when I risk sacrificing my eyesight to the dimly lit broken screen of my sisters lappy. I’ve been doing that this week, but seriously my eyes are bugging out, I’m gonna be blind soon if I keep it up.

So apparently, I have to learn to live how the rest of the world does, with offline hobbies or something? Who the hell would want to live in reality? I’ve been walking around the house, opening books, reading a few pages then closing them, turning on the tv then turning it off again, cleaning (WTF?!) and organising my room and sitting in the backyard for long periods of time looking up to the sky and crying over my lappy. I’m not even joking, I really did cry, you don’t know what that thing means to me. I’m lost in the real world. I’ve decided to learn how to read runes, but thats gonna take me like 2 days, so if anyone has any idea what I can do to occupy my time with please comment, suggestions very welcome.

I’ve been thinking I might handmake christmas cards for my mum to send off, I did it last year but it was a joint effort with India. Its a lot of work but what else do I have to do, right? My mum is scared of the mess, but its India who took over the bench not me. Plus for a non religious mofo, I really like christmas, I get into the spirit, everyones all happy and theres decorations and good will and sappy movies and candy canes and christmas lights.. Goddamnit I’m delirious aren’t I? See what happens when I have no net! How am I supposed to know what the celebrities are doing or catch up with The Hills? How will I know when Israel cuts off the water in Gaza again, or kills a family by bulldozing their house? How am I gonna keep up with all of you kids and your goings on and happenings? I don’t have two weeks of internet time spare, I have to keep on top of things. I can’t stand that I’m missing everything.

Anyway, my sis Min thinks it was a sign, like I was getting too addicted. Man, I hate it when she’s right. Okay well, I better be off, take my sad kitten face back to the ‘real world’. Why meeee, whyyyyy? *Out*

No Clean Feed – Protests

Well my friends I’ve finally come across the details of some upcoming protests against the internet filter! Thank god because I was worried that the mainstream public didn’t really care about it, and thats never a good sign for change. Educate, agitate, organise – thats the way to get things done!

So if you disagree that you should be forced to have mandatory filtering of your internet, on both legal and illegal materials defined by no clear reasoning or organisation, of questionable accuracy, that slows your internet on average by 30% and is presumed to block 1 in 100 sites accidently (that could be your own blog!) then the way to speak up about it is to visit No Clean Feed or to attend one of these protests:

Melbourne – 13th Dec, 1pm-5pm, State Library

Sydney – 13th Dec, 11am-4pm, Town Hall

Brisbane – 13th Dec, 11am-3pm, Brisbane Square

Hobart – 13th Dec, 11am-1.30pm, Parliament Lawns

Adelaide – 13th Dec, 12pm-4pm, Parliament

Darwin and Perth have not been organised yet. Its a Saturday so you don’t have to worry about getting time off work, and if you live in Melbourne like me and rock up and its looking kinda feeble, you can always chant a couple of lines then skip across the road to Melbourne Central for some shopping love. And you will be right near one of the last remaining Starbucks shops in Vic so you can get a frappe! I’ve been craving one for months.

Anyway this is all about anti-censorship and free speech. I hope that just because I’ve discussed things like porn, strip clubs, drugs and disliking Kevin Rudd my page won’t be blocked (plus you might not have noticed this, but I sometimes say the f word!), but seeing as they are blocking content unsuitable for children the chances for staying open for business are slim. Stephen Conroy has actually been blasted in Parliament for being misleading with his campaign, in particular for saying that there were similar filters in the US, the UK and Canada, which is a complete fabrication, so thats a bit of good news. Someone is checking facts at least.

Its about time they got to see exactly what they’re up against. The internet is serious business.

Don’t Censor My Intarwebs!

The push for filtering on the internet worries me. It has been criticised as worse than Iran’s own system and has been based around this whole scare tactic notion of child pornography (or CP). I don’t want a filter, but that doesn’t mean I can be accused of wanting or supporting CP, I just don’t think a content ban is the way to stop it. Especially when it is a censor that we can’t opt out of, as initially claimed.

The first tier of blocks is on CP and on ‘all other illegal’ sites and you can’t opt out of it. The second is on material ‘not deemed suitable for children’. The blocks are also not accurate and once a site is gone you probably can’t get it back. Also they slow your internet connection by up to 86%. I already hate my goddamn internet connection speeds, and I have the fastest you can get. I was waiting for the government to make good on its better broadband promise, if I had of known I was voting for censorship of my only source of media they can’t get their hands on (or so I thought) I wouldn’t have voted for them. And now I can’t remember if I voted for Greens or Labor, I know I voted Greens in the Senate. Fuck.

The internet, unlike movies and the news in Australia, is the only thing we have that is completely free, and fair in that we can all set up our own space to make our voices heard. Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean I don’t want to read about it. Plus the Australian government isn’t exactly the most fair and neutral judge, what about the anti-Asia thing where Howard wanted to restrict immigration. Or the anti-terror thing where Muslims were targeted and all you had to look was ‘suspicious’ (read: have a beard or hijab) to get arrested. I’m an internet user but for writing this post I’d be accused a CP defender.

I’d love to be able to blame porn for all of this. It seems like with porn, it can’t just stay at one level. It has to get worse and weirder till finally you hit beastiality, midgets and the illegal shit like CP. But when people get the most of their content from peer to peer programs which can’t be blocked, the idea of a content ban becomes useless. I’m pretty sure the best programmers in Australia will be figuring out the way around it within minutes of it being administered and I’m confident that I could find a way to illegally get it off, but why should I have to?

I don’t campaign for terrorism, but I want to read about it. I want to read from sources that disagree with my government, because the only way to keep a government fair and democratic is to constantly question it. I already have a heavily biased media that I ignore, don’t take away the only thing I use for fair and balanced news. Even if the sites I visit aren’t balanced, they at least offer a different viewpoint I can think about. I want to make up my own mind on what content I will filter. I want my freedom to read whatever the fuck I want to read! Are they going to start banning novels now too? A lot of books write about murder, drug use, CP, terrorism blah, blah, and are still essential reads by brilliant authors.

What stops them from blocking things that aren’t exactly illegal but disagree with their own viewpoint and encourage ‘dissent’? Its only a matter of time before they start blocking socialist or radical political sites, unions and activists. We’re the ones with our heads on the chopping blocks here, the ones who will speak out against the hypocrisy and the corruption. If you ran a country and could figure out a way to silence those who opposed you, wouldn’t you do it? Iran did, China did.. Australia too? The internet is the only thing we have to get out our views, Allah knows we won’t see it on Today Tonight. It provides a quick and easy way to get our opinions heard to a mass audience (even if the hits aren’t there we still have the possibility of hits, amirite?).

Fucking hell, another reason to hate Rudd! If I did vote for him.. I have a feeling I voted Greens because Labor & Liberal had the same policies.. but if I did, I never will again! Can we organise a protest? All us little nerdy internet users marching down the street with our star wars & pokemon paraphernalia, puffing on our inhalers and adjusting our coke bottle lenses to the attack of actual sunlight would be a sight to see. I’m down, if anyone’s organising. This shit just got real.

Trolling The Dystopia

I trolled a Facebook group the other day, or should I say, I defended the liberal ideology of the group in the face of a conservative troll who first fired up at a black girl, calling her a nigger and so forth. I’m proud to say I embarrassed and ripped him to shreds, and forced him into retreat. The only way to beat a troll is to troll harder.

I don’t know what it is about me lately, I must be overly irritated or just feeling like a smeeki (Arabic for an ‘annoyer’) but I’ve been doing a bit of trolling. I usually try not to feed the trolls on boards with replies and I have this rule in my head where if someone writes something in their blog that I don’t agree with, I don’t leave them a scathing comment about how wrong they are, I just breathe and let it go. I absolutely despise bitchy comments and snide remarks, so in the name of politeness I do not bite.

Plus ignorance is a hard thing to overcome, it definitely won’t be helped by me barging in, scoffing at their ideas, cursing their lack of rational thought and compassion. I think its all centred around Obama actually, and its only his name thats started the whole thing. Maybe its because its just been Ramadan, so I’m feeling a bit of connection and solidarity behind Muslims, after finishing their most peaceful and pious month. Whenever Islam is on the agenda, I jump. I’m like a puppet. Come push my buttons.

I can’t even look at my tag surfer without seeing an anti-Islamic post, and its taking all of my strength not to link you to the disgusting blog of a woman whose avatar is a picture of her tits in a t-shirt that says ‘Infidel’ in English with the Arabic underneath, holding a gun. She’s only written four posts and I was so outraged after only glancing at them, that I had to write this post to prevent myself from commenting. I’ve already fucked up once tonight, spitting a bit of venom at someone who wrote a post pondering on the article in which Palin was said to be hated by women because she was ‘pretty’ and ‘confident’.

I’m offended and frustrated by the bias of the world lately, and I guess leading up to the Presidential election I shouldn’t be surprised, but its like every conservative or right wing just went into hyper drive on their bullshit spreading. And it really kills my life that they put so many lies and misrepresented stories out there. There are people who will not vote for Obama because his name makes them associate him with Islam. There are people who support Palin simply because they think she will fool the women into voting for her, just because she is a woman.

Theres really a lot wrong with the world right now, and I’m not seeing much of the good guys winning. When you think of dystopia, how far away is it from what we have now? The world is dying from pollution. Truth and justice do not prevail. The bad guys go to war against the poor and weak, and we let them, and they win. Rational thought is suppressed and silenced. There is no sense of compassion for humanity. Truckloads of money are given to the rich to keep them rich. Women celebrate the fact that they have regressed back to the status of 1950’s trophy wives, and I think this quote from a chick today at uni says it all perfectly: “I’m like so0o0o against feminism.”

Yes, my sweet, you are.

Web vs Print

Its a bad time to be a journalist. Not that they would ever admit they were losing the fight. The Green Guide from The Age on Thursday had an interesting article about ‘citizen journalism’ but stuck mostly to the uploading videos of events as they happen side of things while pondering the morality of documenting a crisis instead of taking part in it or helping. An issue journalists have faced for years, of course. And as you might expect from a print journalist, all forms of ‘citizen journalism’ were undermined as not being proper, because they were not ‘trained’ to write about things with an unbiased eye, as they themselves had been.

I found the article to be lacking depth and highly questionable, especially in motive. Journalists find their way into the field without degrees all the time, there is no set of qualities one must fulfill to become a successful writer, all you have to do is write well. Anyone can research, anyone can be at the scene of the crime to make an account of it, anyone can conduct interviews. Hence, freelance writers are often people with no ‘qualifications’ other than shit loads of experience, especially when it comes to fields like travel writing.

Also, the unbiased eye? Since when has that been a factor for journalism? The entire article reeked of print media bias, and I’ve gotta tell you, if I can read your article and pick which side you are on then your ‘training’ has amounted to shit. This applies to a lot of the mainstream media we come across, the media companies profit remarkably (sometimes in ways more indirect than through profit) by subtly influencing our opinions on certain topics, and of course in advertising. In the case of Today Tonight and A Current Affair it is not so subtle, and perhaps thats better, because at least we can see through it.

The fact of the matter is that circulation of newspapers is in decline. The state of magazines is volatile, because the content can be found online and due to a monthly or weekly printing, it is almost always out of date by the time it reaches the consumer. In the same Green Guide, I found an article about Britney Spears small guest star role in ‘How I Met Your Mother’, a popular sitcom, which I had known about months ago, from accessing websites such as PerezHilton.com and TheBosh.com. Magazine articles are often stale, so they must push away from current issues to stories that are less influenced by a need for fresh information, like ‘Ten ways to spice up your sex life’ and so forth. Also, print media is suffering because it makes most of its revenue through classified ads which have all moved to the web, creating websites like JobSeek and the Trading Post Online.

Myself and the youths of today can be described as ‘digital natives’, we’ve grown up with the net. It is often our first information source, not the second or third as it is with older generations. Fewer young people are buying print and older readers are moving to the web. We are seeing fragmentation of media audiences, falling into smaller niches that interest them, like Middle Eastern politics or gaming news.

Blogs are increasingly popular and accessible. They are now fulfilling a journalistic function with the most recent post getting prominence and equipped with the eye witness aspect, they are strong first account sources and often provide very sophisticated analysis on a broad range of topics. A better article to read on ‘citizen journalism’ from The Age is this slightly older (2005) article, a profile of sorts on Al Gibes, the online editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He argues that newspapers are no longer the ‘gatekeepers’ of information and must change to avoid being superseded.

Journalists basically have double the workload now. Before they had to write an article to be handed in at the end of the day, to be published for the following mornings print, now they have to cover both the online and print editions. So they will be working on that article for tomorrow, while finding sources and conducting interviews, and on top of all that they must update their website with the new information every couple of hours or so. This isn’t happening in suburban media or magazines yet, but its definitely affecting the larger print media.

So really, I’m not surprised to come across journalists who are grumpy with our beloved blogs. If I was them, I’d probably do some underhanded biased article writing myself. But then again, I’m from the internet – we’re all about integrity here!

I Love My Intarwebs

You know, I’m gonna be real with you all. I love the internet. I’m IN LOVE with the internet, I have been ever since I was first introduced to it in primary school. I can’t go a day without it. Its an obsessive love, constantly checking up on it for updates, new stories, new posts, new comics, new gossip, new games. Its a controlling love too, I mean I can’t handle someone on my laptop for one minute, I get jealous. Even if I wasn’t on there, I might have been doing something else, as soon as they ask me for my log in password I silently crack the shits.

But it provides me with so much.. There are new people just waiting to be chatted to, or commented on, 24-7 interaction waiting to be had. When I first had the internet at home when I was about 13, thats what I was obsessed with. Teen chat, forums, mIRC, msn. Even before I had the net I loved this program my dad had where you would type something and the computer would chat back to you, like a bot. When my curfew was lifted at about 16 or 17, I soon got over it. I swapped chat for parties.

The laughs to be had are endless, if you know where to look. When I was bored at my old work I spent hours (that ran into days & weeks) trawling through the QDB and Bash archives finding the best of the best quotes and compiling them into a list which I sent to my (for the most part unimpressed) friends. Let me share with you some of my beloved ones, if you want the entire list email me:

<remial> gah…
<remial> I was visiting my college roommate earlier today…
<remial> his ex-GF and his daughter were there…
<remial> they were in the other room watching cartoons or something…
<remial> and my friend asked me how my life was going, and I told him that things wre OK but it felt like there was some sort of consperacy to keep me from getting laid…
<remial> his ex GF immediatly calls someone on her Cel phone and says “He knows”

<+darthpony> geez dude
<+darthpony> with my last gf
<+darthpony> I made the most terrible fruedian slip
<+darthpony> we were sitting at breakfast the one day, and I wanted to ask her “pass the sugar please” <+darthpony> instead I said “you’re ruining my life, you fucking bitch”

<DaZE> at my school.. the cop from DARE passed around 3 joints to show everyone… and he said “if i dont get all three of these back this schools getting locked down and everyones getting searched till i find it..” and like 30 minutes later when everyone got to see ’em and they got passed back the cop had 4

[orion] my knife just beeped like a cellphone when i touched it
[orion] time to lay off the booze
[orion] it was three electronical tones
[orion] it went
[orion] bo BO BOOP
[cmplx] don’t answer it.

<@Afterglow> what’s the point of irc anyway
<@Afterglow> everyone idles
< destruct> the “point” is that if you take the third word spoken on the second tuesday of every month of the the third person down in each channel you visit on irc, they will form a description of the path to the lost city of atlantis

<slackor> maybe, send me your pic first. last person i met off the net turned out to be 12 FBI agents

<redbud> so i was sitting there listening to some ska with your girlfriend
<redbud> then all of a sudden she started making sexual advances towards me
<Micah> wait a second
<Micah> nobody listens to ska

NgOs_WiLL: how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
NgOs_WiLL: One to change it and fifteen to form a support group!
E30SupeR: it’s a trick question – feminists can’t change anything.

<tetsuo> why do our bathroom signs at work have braille on them?
<tetsuo> for that matter, why do any?
<tetsuo> what kind of cruel fuck wouldn’t lead a blind person to a bathroom?
<tetsuo> “I’m kinda busy so here’s what you’re going to do. Walk down this hallway for about 40 feet. You’ll come to an intersection, take a left down that hallway and walk another 20. On your right you’ll encounter two doors. Now, I can’t tell you which is which, you’ll just have to find that out on your own.”

I think of myself as an internet expert, although I only am in comparison to my offline friends. I love quizzes as well. I’ve done thousands of them, my favourites were the ones on Quizilla, that were user created and came with an anime picture with the result. Thats when I began my huge anime picture collection, some of which I’ve included on this blog. I also started lurking on the imageboards, wastelands of the internet that they are, but every once and a while I’d find something amusing.

I never checked out blogs until about a year ago. I didn’t see the point of reading someone’s online diary, I likened it to Myspace and other ego-centric web pages. But I came across a very watered down kind of paid blog on The Age website, and I suddenly got it. It was like amateur journalism or reality tv. And after that I couldn’t get enough. Because if you own a blog, you’re a child of the internet too. You relate to me. I used to think it was wack I spent so much time online, but I found out I’m one of many. Its like having a special culture.

So, to conclude, I love you internet. Never leave me.