Lately I've been watching episodes of a film called BBS: The Documentary. BBSes were a form of communication that were around long before the World Wide Web, and after studying their history and culture for the past couple months or so I must say that this era of networking was really something special. A BBS was a Bulletin Board System, basically some software that was running on someone's modem-connected computer somewhere. People could call the computer and leave messages on the board, or chat with the person who ran the BBS (known as the sysop), or play games and read textfiles and all kinds of stuff. It was extremely primitive, but it was a magical thing. A BBS wasn't just some abstract construct of cyberspace; it was an actual place. A BBS was much like a club, or a little town. People grew up together and fell in love and made friends and lost friends and were saved through BBSes. This was back when you had a handle, and you stuck to it. Nowadays nobody does handles. There was a BBS for gays and lesbians in D.C. that allowed hundreds of homosexuals to finally come together in some way and realize that they were not alone in the world. The Homestead BBS provided a meeting place for recovering substance abusers. Numerous pirate BBSes were crowded with warez d00dz uploading and downloading cracked software. People would get into gang wars over who owned what hardware. There were places that wouldn't let you in if you had a Commodore, and people would taunt you for only having 1200 baud rather than 2400. In the budding stages of the personal computer era, computers were an extension of people's personalities and thoughts and feelings, not just ubiquitous hunks of metal, and this fact was reflected thoroughly in BBS-goers' behavior. You would sometimes meet up with the people from your BBS, and you would make lifelong friends that way. Through their computers, people found a way to connect in a way much more profound than what we see now with facebook and twitter. People really got to know one another, and that mattered, deeply.

Apparently BBSing was something one did at night, always. During the day real life was wont to bother you too much, and so the peace and quiet that came with a nocturnal cycle was better appreciated. Kids would rack up massive phone bills, and grades would dive, but who cared? Participating in this new dimension of life was much more important than grades or money. If you want to get a feel for what kind of content one would encounter on BBSes, I suggest browsing textfiles.com, preferably late at night. It's the equivalent of a BBS known as "The Works", and it contained thousands and thousands of textfiles, aiming to be the most complete archive of BBS culture in the world. If you like what you see, then head over to archive.org and peruse their collection of BBS Documentary episodes and content. It's worth it - seriously. The BBS is the symbol of an online era that was much deeper and more meaningful than the superficial (in comparison) communication that takes place through the World Wide Web.

For those of you not very interested in BBSes, I have something for you anyway: a fun poem for you to investigate. Enjoy, either way!

A friend and I were recently talking about the rampant self-absorption that occurs among people, and we were listing off all the dumb things people do. Eventually we got around to classifying a group of people that we termed "the mentally conscious". "Mentally conscious" we defined as the quality of knowing that one does not know. Socrates, for one, was very fond of reminding people that he did not, in fact, Know. With that he gave us a basis for intelligence, rather than just knowledge or wisdom. I attempted another criterion for determining whether or not someone was intelligent, and ended up with this: intelligence is the ability to "jump" out of a system and inspect its workings from outside. We're surrounded by systems of social behavior and stigma and rank and all manner of things, and those who are capable of exiting those systems and looking at them in a different light are those who are truly mentally conscious. The two definitions arrive at the same conclusion, really. They point to the idea that intelligence lies in the desire to learn, because if you know that you don't know, then it's a pretty safe bet that you'd like to know. And if you jump out of systems often, then you know that the systems you live in don't tell you everything about the world, and you'd like to know more. So: one who has the desire to learn, due to the fact that he is aware of his lack of knowledge, is truly mentally conscious.

There's an interesting anecdote that illustrates this point pretty well. My dad once had a coworker who'd graduated from some big-name business school, and he (the coworker) was impressed as all hell by this fact, and he thought everyone else should be too. He would waste no opportunity to tell people that he had attended such-and-such school and that he was extremely highly qualified and such nonsense. He thought no one could tell him anything about how to conduct business. Of course, the moment this joker was faced with a real business situation, he had no idea what to do. So there's an example of a guy who thought he knew everything and was thus a total dumbass. Such things actually happen more often than I would like.

If you're anything like me, then you have a habit of compulsively looking up anything you talk about on Wikipedia. Okay, so maybe you're not like me. Regardless, here's the Wiki page for the topic I just talked about. There're tons of excellent theories on intelligence listed on it, so take a look.

Since I have a summer job, I've been thinking quite a bit about what I'm going to spend all my hard-earned money on. At first, I considered buying one of the current generation of consoles, but I reconsidered once I got a look at the price tags on those particular machines. Somehow I arrived at the conclusion that I would buy consoles from older generations instead, because they now sell at maybe $30-$50 and they still have the world's greatest library of games (I am referring, of course, to Nintendo's line of consoles). Thinking about those old consoles got me thinking about the 80s and 90s, and every cultural oddity that I knew to be associated with those decades. The 80s and 90s were when my world was created. Massive computer networks became available to regular consumers, culminating in the public birth of the World Wide Web in the year of my birth. Just as V.S. Pritchett, born in 1900, always remembered that he was "as old as the century", most kids my age are "as old as the Web". That wasn't the only thing to come out of it, though. Nintendo's Legend of Zelda games set the stage for modern videogames where players may explore vast worlds and act out multiple storylines in one game. The greatest among these was obviously Ocarina of Time, considered by many to be the Greatest Game EVAR. Not only that, but id Software's Doom and Quake games were the great-grandfathers of Half-Life, Halo, and Crysis. Final Fantasy also hails from the 80s, originally created as the dying breathe of a destitute game company. Their final fantasy became the forerunner of pretty much every single RPG made since then. Entertainment as we know it evolved in those two decades. Musically, the 90s carry much more importance than the one-hit-wonder mania of the 80s, although alternative music began to gain one hell of a following around the beginning of the 80s. Without hardcore punk and Metallica and the Sugarhill Gang to pave the way in the hearts and minds of the world, Nirvana and gangsta rap and all manner of alternative music would never have exploded onto the popular music scene, where they maintain quite an influence even today (Nickelback and 50 Cent are among the many wannabes who continue to try and recapture the awesomeness of the 90s).

So thinking all these crazy thoughts about how important the 90s and 80s were to me led to me actually missing them. I wasn't even alive in the 80s, and I remember hardly anything of the 90s! Yet I know almost anything and everything about the culture back then, and it's something I wanna live. A couple of days ago, I idly mused out loud to a coworker how great it would be to turn back the clock and live through the 80s and 90s, and he heartily agreed. It sounds like a crappy modern knock-off of romanticism: let's recapture the spirit of the good old days, when we were more like us, not these obsessively consuming morons! I for one would like that. The 90s pretty much kicked ass, and I'd live through the 80s just for the thrill of getting an NES when they were still new, and for going to Minor Threat concerts and hating conservatism. To learn more about how the world you live in now was shaped, check out the relevant Wikipedia articles. We live in fascinating times.

Yeah, so I don't write on this blog very much any more. That can be attributed to laziness, and a stolid refusal to put any of my ideas up on my site. I convince myself that I can't be bothered to type up some thought, and I suppose some of the time I really can't. But it's summer vacation right now, and I have a great job and tons of free time, so I should probably get onto a good regular schedule for the blog. I'd like to update maybe three times a week at least, and if I'm not blogging legit thoughts, I'll blog links. I'll eschew a minimum size requirement for posts, because actually taking the time to type anything up for this is pretty much monumental for me. So yeah. I just put this up here for the sake of writing something. More (and better) content will follow, I'm sure. In the meantime, feast your eyes on this.

Reading Cannery Row. Listening to Muse (they have their moments).

Every statement in the body of this post is false.

I'm reading a Goddamn book, thank you very much.

So Mozilla just released Firefox 3 TODAY, Download Day 2008. I'm ridiculously stoked -- I'm using FF3 right now, and I'm practically vibrating with excitement and joy at its Godlike perfection. My almost religious devotion to the thing reminds me of an xkcd comic where a character suddenly has a moment of clarity regarding Firefox, which then quickly subsides (thank God). Anyway, you can get Firefox 3 at Firefox.com, so get it now, because they're trying to set the record for most downloads EVAR.

Oh, and here's the comic: