No. 2

Ohai!

I'm just returning from a Hanna's sister place (Hannah's a mate from biomed) place. Had a pretty good time talking bout lolcats, life, uni (dreaded uni), and what not.

Tomorrow Uni starts. I'll save up the swearing as I'm semi-not-keen on going there to be honest. It's a new year, a 'new start', new papers, new people. Then again I'm repeating one of my papers, and two of them are damn cruisy, so I wonder how much of 'new' will be in there.

I'm really not here to talk about the papers I'm taking. They're only three, and only one of them is a proper science one, which is Physics. Other than that I have Linguistics and Statistics.

Twodais I'm gonna throw a random intro bout some of the websites I've been on and off during the years, whether they are social ones or not.

In order of appearance...

- Hotmail

Is this a joke? Of course 'hotmail' (bar google, aol or msn's search engine) was the first website most people my generation used constantly. At least in Tijuana. Most people surrendered to having a hotmail account. Aol was seen as something americans would join and Yahoo was kinda if you were into random chats with other teenagers (but deep inside you knew they were forthy rather than forthy-een!). For the first 3 to 4 years I only received a couple of proper personalized emails, everything else was either emails thanking me for subscribing to random websites or offers to make my wife happy by increasing my 'meat' (?). They usually had crap stories of how Mr. Johnson had a happy life after enlarging his average yet not satisfying tool. Now hotmail is something I'll visit everyday, and I do engage in writing letters to mates (that peaked in round 2005) and receive more interesting stuff than a 'free trip to Hawaii'.


- Gamefaqs/Gamespot/Cheats

Besides using the internet to check my 'emai' (or spam-mail), I used it to check walktroughs for videogames, to read reviews and watch upcoming games. Occasionally I would go on and find cheats, but I never been too keen on using them before finishing a game, cause it kinda ruins the moment for me. I can say that besides of helping me at becoming the semi-geek that I am and erradicating any possibility of being a normal kid who would go outside to the park and play soccer, this websites helped me at being good at navigating the web search engines and websites in general.

- Hi5

I wonder how my myspace and facebook would look like nowadays if it weren't for Hi5. That strange website in which you could have 'friends' and you could add pictures of yourself in which people would comment on you mainly saying 'oh you look really nice! :)' and what not. Websites in which people would start taking pictures of themselves in front of mirrors, in their rooms - they would start searching for the perfect angle. That one that would make them look great (in most cases they didn't realise they also made them look like somewhere they were not, as they were ugly as in real life), the one that would make their noses look normal sized, etc.

Hi5 was a lot of fun, it was probably one of the first websites I started talking to random people and actually meeting them. Something that at that stage would be deemed as very 'open-minded', but that now heaps of teenagers (and people of all ages) engage in. It's actually so much fun (in the 'not-funny' way) to meet someone you chat with online. Specially when they end up being that seedy bald guy from the liquor store right down the road. I even had a fake hi5 profile of myself being made up! So many epic adventures there...

- Myspace

Suddenly this new thing came up, which striked me as the same as hi5 but you could actually edit your profile in many ways. Personalize it, pimp it, rape it and what not. As usual, like with any other new thing on the web that comes on, I'm kinda reluctant on moving on to the 'next big thing'. So it took me a little while to get rid of hi5 and move on to myspace. Yeah, I did the 'taking pictures of myself' bit, and the 'new pic comment plz' thing as well (well, actually only to close mates, not to random people on bulletins). So far I've done little to my profile. In fact I have done almost nothing besides the writing and uploading the pictures, as one of my mates pimped it out for me.

- Autoliniers/Alberto Montt/Various random bloggers

Blogging was becoming something a bit more mainstream. People would use it for different reasons. To post every little detail in their life, to upload their work (in whatever area they worked in), to share with the world those dark and twisted thoughts they had (or so they thought they were), etc. I found myself mainly looking at cartoonist's blogs. Which meant watching countless of images till I found myself with nothing else to watch. There's a couple I see on a daily basis, while others post at random times. But the two first ones that are features in the 'title' are the ones that I actually read most days.



- BBC News/El Frontera/NZ Herald

And so those moments where I thought I knew heaps about the world, that I was real smart and cultured ended, with highschool altogether. I realised that I was one of those kids who could talk nonsense and look like they 'knew' stuff because most people didn't, but deep inside I didn't know a shit about the world. If ya asked me where Bahrain, Yemen, Cambodia, Indonesia was, or what the situation was like there I probably would've come up with a witty yet not very credible answer for it. The 'cable' company that we had just added the BBC News channel to their list, and me going to NZ was few months away, so I started watching the news there everyday, all the time, even just as background sound, to see if I found something about this new country I was going to. Pissed off my olds cause it was the only thing on the tv, and I was quite territorial about it. But they learned to live with it tho, they knew it was only going to last for a little while longer.

Later on as I went to NZ, and stopped watching tv altogether, I had to find other sources of news. I turned into the web. First I navigated the BBC News, then I turned into El Frontera, a Tijuana based new source, and then the NZ Herald, which is pretty self explanatory. Reading the news is a lot of fun, it gives ya things to talk about when you meet someone from somewhere else, and an insight on what to comment on or not. If you fancy local news more, then it gives ya knowledge on what happens around your block if you don't get to see it for yourself.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

- Wikipedia, Uncyclopedia, Lolcats, etc.

I actually knew of wikipedia since quite a while by the time I was in NZ. It had become a staple in my diet, or more like the website I would check if I came across something I didn't know about. It would also fuel my hours of procrastination, with a hundred tabs opened in my browser as I jumped from one article to another. Wikipedia rocks, I think it's one of the most awesome websites out there, just for bringing information (whether reliable or not) to everyone with internet access, for free!

Uncyclopedia is like the mischevious twin of Wikipedia. Do check the articles on Uncyclopedia itself, and on New Zealand. Look for 18+ stuff as well! wink wink

Lolcats well... Lolcats have been on the net since quite a fucking while, but I'm a bit like a grandpa when it comes to those things. I would probably go crazy about finding this 'new and cool' website, and I'll send it to all of my mates, just to discover everyone already knew about it and got over it more than 3 years ago. But hey, akshully they're really good. I've seen 4000 of em and you might end up seeing a lolcat of the day now and then!


http://icanhascheezburger.com/













Over and out