I delete a lot of things, yes. What I don't delete in full I end up going back to again and again, months after I first thought it was finished, to delete small parts and fill the void in with other drivel. Like this. This part was not here originally. If you first came here months ago, go back and look at the first thing you saw. Chances are I've changed it since then. I don't, of course, mean to insinuate that you'd come here more than once. I would never insult you like that. I'm just saying that you read really slowly, like at a sub-first grade level. Probably out loud, too. But as I was saying, I know my visitors very well. I know I check for them a whole lot more often than they show up. It's pathetic how often I view the "unique visitors" list (if indeed unique was any word that could describe the standard homogenous internet person) and find myself wondering: "was that one me? I think I might have looked at the page with a connection and triggered the tracking thingie. No, I defintely wasn't using the internet right before 9 pm. Aw, beans. Which time zone is this set to? Did I enter my location as "Swaziland" again? Curse you, dynamic IP! Everything I've ever done on the internet I can be embarassed by. That's why I fear the internet archive. Just look at this. It's nothing terribly humiliating, but it could have been, had a number of odd events not stopped me from making it worse. The snokpeal era. Oh yes, them's were the days. If memory serves me correctly, first I signed up for cjb.com, and shortly afterwards they were sued by cjb.net (who owns the domain now), and then I think they were sued again, unimpressing their oppressors with the phonetically identical "ceejb.com" alteration that they had come up with after the first time. What resulted was the immediate termination of all hosted web-page-thingies. But I had already moved on by this point; I had another account at freespeech.org, who requested only a link back to their main page in exchange for absence of advertising. What a fool I was to not have gone there sooner, I thought. Well, that didn't last. It couldn't have been more than a month before pop-up advertisements from them started showing up. I investigated, and the best explanation they could come up with pretty much said "yeah, we put the ads there, we were hoping you wouldn't notice. We just realised, like, last week, that it costs money to host websites and stuff for free." Well, doiy. I can recall years ago overhearing stuff like "man, when I have kids, I'll never make them go to school." And then one day their parents bought them computers, and they would see a geocities page and think, "hey, that's so mean to put all those ads there. If I had a hosting service, I'd never make pages have ads on them." And thus freespeech.org was born. But... it bothered me. Enough to abandon the whole thing. True enough, it was only one pop-up distraction, with a very simple URL, so you probably think it was foolish to leave that for this. Well, I wasn't gone long before I get e-mail telling me, more or less, "Dude. No one was clicking our ads. That's so mean. Yo (pronounced yahl), tell you what, you give us 15 bucks and we'll hook you up. No ads or nothin', and you can help yourself to Jimmy's Froot Loops. I don't think he's waking up for a while." This is a funny mentality to me. No, I didn't come to you because you were free. I came to you because woe is me, I'm so persecuted! No one will try to silence me at freespeech.org! I will gladly pay to be affiliated with you! (As for Homestead... no one knows what their excuse was.) Believe me, I'd love to be persecuted. You need to do more than have a substandard website to be hated. People like me just get ignored. Indifference. Except for this one time...

Don't worry, this is only a picture of Saturn. Evil, evil Saturn. Oh, you're a real help. This is snokpeal, by the way. I hadn't by that point decided if it was a snokpeal or if snokpeal was its name, or why I ever thought I could get away with having something like this on a page without someone calling me gay over it. As a side note, at the side of the page, right about the time it started charging money, freespeech.org also started calling itself FSTV. Hey, wasn't Dave Thomas great on that show?

But never any real, actual hate mail. Hate mail is an important part of the internet. Without it, we might not always be able to tell someone that we don't like them. It comes purely out of anger, makes accusations, false claims, and inhumane use of the caps-lock function. Most people don't like it, and get rid of it. Not even stories about all the malnourished starving sites on Tripod can make them change their over-indulgent selfish ways. Occasionally people realize how lucky they are, and come to thrive upon the hate mail, occasionally even devoting whole pages to publicly displaying and ridiculing it. Maddox does this very well. He does it so well that he actually gets fake hate mail.

But some people just can't handle it. Often not being able to sensibly respond or effectively ignore it, they too will display it, but this time pity is the goal. They want non-hatemail senders to see what a victim they've become. We see a lot of incomprehendable profanity, generally more than in the e-mail itself, with the essential message, "oh yeah? Well, why don't you die?" This is excusable, but only to an extent. After a while, I start to wonder if the "hater" isn't the sane one. Responses like "I didn't make you come to this website" often leave me wondering who made them read the hate mail. Another common response is to post the complainer's e-mail address and urge site visitors to send nasty e-mail right back. So they're essentially saying "you know, you're right, but how dare you say something I don't like!" I've even seen encouragement to send viruses and e-mail bombs and stuff like that. So you're a coward, too. You know it's illegal to do that, so you try to get other people to do it for you.

I know who will protect you from villainy! John Ashecroft believes freedoms, such as that of speech, come at a price. $15 per month in this case.

I will make some promises to you right now (you you, not the you from the last paragraph). I will make you come to this site, if it will get me hate mail. I will not hate it back. And I will not ridicule it. I will make it feel like it is wanted. I will love my hate mail.

What better way to watch television than in a 160 x 120 uber-jpeggy sponsor-clogged RealPlayer window?