Wow. When the hell did it get all hot again?? This morning I put on pregnancypants and a biiiiig feminist t-shirt and a bandana (because I need to wash my hair). Then I took a nap and woke up covered in sweat. Now I'm dressed like a knocked-up hoochiemama. This cute little t-shirt doesn't cover my belly (even with the high pregnancyshorts waistband doing its job), but at least I'm only very hot instead of completely soaking in perspiration.

Again: when the hell did it get this hot? I was enjoying the crisp. I love the crisp. Give me back my crisp!!

As you can see, I haven't really woken up yet. Also, the belly shirts: they make the brain go la-la-la. This is why you see so many vacant expressions in night-club line-ups.

I'm currently downloading another Adobe Upgrade so I can stop playing the everfun Restart My Crashed Browser game. I'm starting to wish that we as a culture still had physical forms for various purposes...I'm tired of being asked to download calendars and application forms and then being made to feel like a Luddite because I don't have the latest software that some corporate hack decided was indispensable to the "look" of their site. I think that in the future we'll be asked to spend a significant portion of our online life just upgrading stoopid software like Flash & Adobe Reader & the like. Really, what can Flash do that a good flip-book can't? Oh yeah, it can entertain me without papercuts.

I'm starting to feel like my time on this here WWW has passed. Oh, I don't mean that I'll stop writing. It's more like I feel that I'm turning into Dana Carvey's Cranky Old Man character. Last weekend I spent almost an hour in the computer section of a big Chapters, and for most of the time Grinning Skull & I were complaining about excessive advances in technology. I've reached the point where I don't feel the need to learn anything big anymore. Poet wants me to syndicate the site so he can read it remotely, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort (i.e. I don't know who would care other than himself). I'm left with the idea that I'm just lionizing stupid, cumbersome web publishing techniques simply because I know how to do them.

"In my day, we didn't have LiveJournal or Diaryland or Blogger! We wrote our sites in Notepad and FTP'd them to Geocities for hours over a slow dial-up connection! And we didn't have digital cameras to instantly document an event! No! None of that crap! We took conventional pictures with a regular camera and we waited for the supermarket to develop them! Then we'd use the big ugly scanner at work when the boss wasn't looking! And we didn't have Friends pages where we could find all our buddies making a movie date or telling the world what kind of yoghurt they were!! No! We linked to the three other online journals of people we'd never met. When you said Kymm or Al everybody knew who you were talking about! You would cower in fear that the Gus would play a joke on you and make you look lame! Pamie was just a gleam in some comedian's eye, not a world-wide phenomenon!

"And we LIKED it! WE LOVED IT!! We made rings and suburbs and bragged that we'd never use an HTML editor if it meant our death! We called our sites journals, and we were damned snotty about writing quality. There was none of this "three lame updates about my pimples and a link to a Matrix parody" every day blog shit! We would've laughed that crap right out of Open Pages! There were no Diary Awards, just Archipelago, and only 20 people could get into it and that's the way we LIKED it!"

(Oh man. That's been building for a few years.)

You know, I distinctly remember Scott showing me weblogging software one day before even Blogger had appeared. I was visiting him & Stacy, and he called me over to the computer to look at something that would make keeping my diary so much easier. I dutifully read the screen, noted the low writing quality, pushed back in my chair and said the words that make me a psychic superstar: "that's stupid. I can't use that. Nobody would want to use that."

Ta da. Welcome to today, Rocketbride. It's been a bumpy ride.