im in ur internetz stealin ur time

The internet (ahem, beg pardon, the internets), as we know, is/are (a) very strange place/s. There’s google of course, which is strange. I was at a thing once, around ‘99, where there was a man we’ll call Andrew who hunkered about in a chalky circle, throwing plastic replica bones, while talking about the way forward and paradigms and core relationships and innovation. Occasionally he’d mention the word "Google". Milling about in the shadows (actually, it was a flouro-lit conference room so there were no shadows but you know what I mean), the casually dressed suits on this fun team-building exercise chewed on the ends of their cellular network branded goodie bag pens.
“What’s a google?” they worried amongst themselves. A man with a smear of sticky purple ink bleeding down into his branded golf shirt collar tried to leave the room traditionally, but the door had been bolted from the outside so he threw himself out of a window.

“So basically,” said Andrew, after he’d given everyone a go with the bones, and got them to sing shosholoza while standing on their heads and juggling raisins with their eyebrows, “At the end of the day what we’re saying here is that a paradigm shift in leveraging relationships within core markets focuses on innovation and strategic removal of impediments to the implementation of the blah rhubarb. And remember, Google. Thank you.”

Apart from one lady who ended up with a raisin lodged in her sinuses, it was the Google bit that stuck most firmly. Google is like that glue they use to stick promo CDs onto magazines, which sticks to everything else too and your skin in particular. You sit there at the coffee shop with the magazine wrapper and a little sugar packet siliconed to your fingertips, fluttering away like a crazy person. Even if you manage to lose the paper bits, you’ll retain the glue and it looks like snot. You flap at it feebly, you try rubbing it off onto the underneath of the table, it ends up on your chin. The people sitting at the next table will ask to be moved.

You can hardly do anything online without Google. It’s the people’s gateway to the universe. You can feel at home and put your feet up on it, whether you’re into Scrapbooking or S&M. And it can sell more stuff than any other entity in history. Andrew, if you’re still out there, if no-one’s slipped nightshade in your Red Bull or defenestrated you yet then of course you know this: You were right and I wish I’d bought shares.

Anyhow, heaven help us, now there’s Lolcode. I don’t know what it does but I think this is what it is: a programming language based on IRC-speak, engrish game-speak, texting-speak, snowclones (‘catch-structures’ like, “To X, or not to X”) and lolcats. Lolcats are those cutesy photos of cats with pidgin captions, e.g., “o hai. i make u cookie but i eated it,” which go round and round and round in places like myspace (and your inbox if you’re careless enough to have given your email address to a nitwit).

I’ve posted before about Making Light, how entertaining it can be. In a recent open thread, they did some literature in sort of lolcode. The ritual deployment of This Is Just To Say is in there, naturally. There’s some Chaucer and Shakespeare, there’s all three parts of The Lord Of The Rings, how could there not be, and lots more. I once promised to keep this blog silly, so this makes up for any lapses in silly that might have occurred - Here’s Pride and Prejudice:

Rich man can has girl.

Bngli: i can has dance?
J4N3: k
l12: i can has dance too?
DarC: no u ugly go way
l12: LOLz
Bngli: BRB

MrC0lnz: l12 i can has heart?
l12: no gway
Chrltt: u can has me
MrC0lnz: K BRB

Wikm: IM IN UR TOWN SEDUCIN UR DAUTERS
lyd14: o hai

DarC: i can has heart?
l12: no gway u rude

l12: IM IN UR PEMBERLEY ADMIRIN UR STUFF
DarC: hai
l12: OMG thought u were AFK!!1!

J4N3: OMG lyd14 & Wikm BFF
l12: WTF?
lyd14: i can has wikm, k?
Wikm: i can has $$$? LOL
DarC: k

Bngli: hai, back. i can has heart?
J4N3: k lol
DarC: back
l12: thx 4 ur help
DarC: i can has heart?
l12: k lol

If you are far enough gone to have liked that, that is if you are ROTFLYAO, then here's a whole anthology, to distract you from your work for the next two days at least. Scroll down to comments #119, 120 and 130 for LOR. “Is one ringtone enough to rule them all?”

All your silly are belong to us.

:-) kthxbye

All you ever needed to know about Zombies

Over at Making Light, they’re good at grabbing a thing and running with it. They can take a piece of spam and turn it into a couple of days worth of entertaiment. I wonder where they get the time - maybe they actually live inside the internet and their comment threads are like other people’s walking the dog or dusting behind the bookcase.

This particular subthread, which kicks off at comment #53, begins with: “A spammer writes: ‘We will appreciate if you will use the following information to link us back from your web site’. I hope no-one on ML minds, but I’ve been running a Zombies simulation on a 2 Mqbit SQUID using the comment threads here as modelling data. This is not a Vingefied AI system with trapped, sentient copies of the contributors here: the agents modelled are guaranteed soulless empty software shells…”

While I suspect that the stuff re 2 Mqbit SQUID and vingeified AI systems etc was aimed squarely at gaming geeks (because that is the type of alarming language that I’ve come to associate with people of that ilk) and other ML insiders, and therefore not at me, I nevertheless had a lot of fun reading what followed.

They also have what they call a “Ritual deployment of This is Just to Say”, which is always cute. Here’s the Zombie deployment:


This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the brains
that were in
your cranium

and which
you were probably
saving
for grad school

Forgive me
they were delicious
so gray
and so warm

Would the real Doug Shaw please sit down

At a Star Trek thing I was at last year there was an individual going by the name of Doug Shaw. He said that he was a writer of books on economics, and was busily speed reading (both of which habits I associate with psychopathic conditions) through a huge book (the kind you could use as a weapon) on the History of Western Philosophy. He had a tense, unhinged charisma and a scar on his cheek and struck me as being someone on whom I could loosely base one of the villains in a story that I'm working on. So who was this person? I embarked on an epic google, but it turned out that trying to find a specific doug shaw is tricky. There are hundreds of them. They even have a collective website, dougshaw.com. But then, if I were a real villain, I might also purposefully choose a name that allowed me to get lost in the crowd.
I finally found one with genuine villain potential. A MENSA member with a scheme for every occasion; a rampant capitalist whispering into the ear of politicians, offering the planet up for sale in so many ways; the host of strange pay-at-the-door parties and then: the piece de resistance – some sort of rabid underground religious evangelist. ACME Evil Genius! Absolutely perfect! I don’t even care if he’s not the right doug shaw! So, Doug Shaw, if you’re reading this (no, the other doug shaw. No, not that one, the other one… ) I hope you don’t mind too much. It’s a compliment.

Verily, my friends (and VERILY, my enemies!!!), I have risen up in the world. I have been quoted and also shamelessly flattered in a real article by a real editor lady: http://www.women24.com/Women24/Columnists/Article/0,7173,12-147_9791,00.html
The article is all about silliness, and how it’s okay to be silly, and about how silliness can actually save the world. I am vindicated, and newly galvanised to the promotion of the Great Way of Silly. From now on, this blog will be nothing but silly, silly, silly!