Awesome. Yahoo managed to lose the first copy of this post. No worries, it was a small post.
I've been online long enough to know that when one starts a site of this nature, certain things tend to happen. Very likely, somebody out there has a wild story about some incident that Tim Skirvin or some other member of the self-named "Usenet Cabal" would rather forget. Maybe it's true. Probably it's not, but even if it is, thanks, but no thanks. I don't want to hear about it.
The purpose of this blog is not to attack Tim, but to deflect attacks made by him and others of his ilk against myself and others, and maybe to take issue with any attempts on their part to claim power that they don't honestly possess. Which might mean that this blog will never see much posting. Circa 2008, Usenet is a badly outdated technology, clung to by the kind of diehard who desperately tries to keep the 90s alive, while the rest of us ask "why?". It's a pure text environment, with nothing but a hierarchical organization to the generally very low grade material present, in an era in which a simple .html page with photos seems almost quaint. The last era was defined by the hate filled fanaticism of a generation that seemed eager to find something, anything, it could be fanatical about, no matter how stupid and bizarre that something would end up being. In this era, one can't even get the new kids to be judgemental about the use of torture. "We all have our own paths, dude. "
A much different era. I won't say a better era, but one less likely to produce the floating lynch mobs I wrote about in years past, not because people have become any more civilized, but merely less motivated and more spread out. Where there was one forum that everybody used - Usenet - now there ... who knows how many? So many that the traffic in any one place tends to be diluted until it is very thin, indeed, and so any call to action as one targets somebody for a little "irritainment" is unlikely to be seen by very many people. That being so, I suspect that whole notion of THE Cabal, that rotting social grapevine of old, might be a little dated. Maybe even that Skirvin, Lewis, et al., if they haven't grown up, have at least managed to find more interesting playgrounds on which to loiter.
But I could easily be wrong about something like that - and often am - so this little journal stands ready, just in case. How enthusiastic I would feel about that case can be gauged by the fact that I didn't even bother to go down to the Lake to snap the profile picture. I'm sure I could have found one - it's not like Chicago is going to run out of dead, washed up fish on its beaches - but let the use of the public domained imagery convey just how much enthusiasm I feel about the need for something like this.
