Why This Blog Continues

When I first got online in 1982, there weren't very many of us. We paid $6 an hour to play at 300 baud on a text-based system. We had to learn modem codes to dial and to turn off call waiting so an incoming call wouldn't boot us off. We invented LOL and ROFL and emoticons.

When we were really lucky we could get a dozen people in a chat room. We'd have people swapping puns and old movie references into the wee hours of the morning. By '85 the predators had found us, and it was impossible to have an intelligent chat without the cybersex freaks and TVs interrupting it with their sick bullshit. Very quickly the chat rooms went from a fun and intellectually stimulating experience to an almost impossible one.

With the advent of the internet in '95 or so, I expected that somehow I could recapture the fun of early chat rooms. It never happened. It probably never will. I've found this blog to be a good fill-in for that, though. For whatever reason, I haven't attracted any idiots. Even the people who have come here and argued with me have been articulate and could compose a sentence.

In case you haven't noticed, I value that. Having no editor, I make misteaks, but I try to be careful. Everybody who comes here seems mostly to take the time to capitalize and punctuate and spell. That means to me that you're thinking about what you're writing. That means I think you're smarter than the average jackass commentard I read on the other sites. Which means further, that my time is well spent doing this because I enjoy the interchange.

You all are awesome. You make this fun. I'll keep making fun of everything as long as you keep coming back to tell me I'm full of shit. That's cool. You can laugh with me or at me. It really doesn't matter.

Blame Baxtrice. She started it.