programmers: capsule history of the internet.

[Additional Fixing You magique. Forgive me.]

prior to the advent of the digital american online there wasn't all that much to do; you'd watch a tv show on your actual tv, for instance, and the absence of spoiler websites meant you didn't know what was going to happen until you saw the actual show, which is stupid - how do you know you want to see the show without knowing how it ends, what the online encyclopedia 2.0 says it means, what kind of numbers the tv-industry professional webblogger/marketers think this "skein" will garner? in the holy name of american christ what is a "skein"? also newspapers were hand-delivered to the doors of hardworking organization men and their nuclear families by pauper children, selfish malnourished little jerks who'd come around every couple of weeks begging for money. "please sir, i have nothing to eat!" "leave me alone, {charming ethnic slur}, my atlantic-salmon-and-liquid-gold smoothie is getting cold." you remember what it was like: it was like we were on top of the world where we belonged. there was little to do, nothing to say (except, sternly, to the paperboy), and you didn't have an audience of several dozen strangers from the web-based online community webblogs to share your well-formed important opinions with. so you kept them entirely to yourself; it's not like you can talk to your family about that shit.

(do you remember the time little beauregard chased the paperboy all the way back to his "home" under I-45? we thought we'd die laughing! apparently the paperboy, too, was afraid he would perish.)

Comments

[Sherv]

Honestly, I'd much rather read this than about Phish. But even being as profoundly uninterested in Phish or Medeski Martin & Wood as I am, I would still read what you have to say about them than any piece about anything from, say, PopMatters.

(One recent exception: A piece about George Orwell, his smoking habits, and the connection they had to his work. See http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/94064-bumming-smokes-in-paris-and-london-orwells-obsession-with-tobacco/)

[Wax Banks]

Yeah, I figure no one's interested in the Phish shit. Well, that's always been the case. If I had any idea why I write any of this shit I'd know better what to do with it. As it is, I have nowhere else to put it, and accumulating 'lost words' in my fucking ~/writing folder is just depressing.

Eventually I'll have nonstupid hobbies and I'll try to learn how to write about those too.

[Sherv]

No no, you misunderstand! I find your writing *about* Phish much more interesting than Phish 'emselves. That's probably how you'd feel about anything I would have to say about Merzbow or Sutcliffe Jügend. The key thing is that I think I understand you better, not that I care any more or less about Phish.

[The Good Doctor]

Of all the actual definitions of 'skein' that one might choose from to answer your question, perhaps a non-definitive metaphor will make the sense you seek.

Wild geese (think Canada Geese, for instance, that fly in what is most-often called a V-shape) are said to be a skein of geese; but the real and true point about this is what they DO: they fly. They are a skein or a 'flight' of geese.

Just so one of y/our tv programs might be called a flight, whether of the imagination, something put over the head of the American public, or a gambit by writers and producers flown up their very own kind of floagpole to see if anyone salutes with dollars.

It would be wonderful (in the original sense) to learn that skein and 'scheme' are derivatives of the same ole Indo-European root, eh.