It seems to me that I have mentioned "Madison" a few times without making clear that it is the name of the town that my house is in. Now that I have said this, I will continue being unclear. The story you are about to maybe read is true. The avatars have been changed to protect the innocent –me– from internet weirdos' parents' lawyers. MySpace. You'll be shocked, but I hate that, too. If you don't know what that is, good. Do not read this. Never find out. Go eat broccoli. You'll enjoy it more. Especially if you actually like eating broccoli. But ehhh, If you've ever used el Friendster, this is exactly like that, except you need to enter all your information again. While I might praise mehspace for not encouraging people who should not to write things, like previous free admission, template driven dopefests such as weblogs, blogs and webls have, M'space encourages twice the whoritude, twit cliquiness, and arbitrary retardation. I've given up trying to figure out everyone's inside jokes, because they either aren't funny or aren't jokes at all. If those things weren't enough (and I mean to assure you they are), it also is impossible to use in a sentence without sounding foolish. You would do as well to call it MyLittlePonySpace. At least that way you might grasp the slightest bit of remaining free, non-regurgitated Vh1-approved nostalgia. Plork, my sister ventured to some place selling Care Bears gunk manufactured this year, so hold on to whatever you can, I say. If you lose it and want it back, you're either going to have to pay twice what it's worth new or eight times what it's worth old. In 2004 I was told "you should get one of these" in regard to a Live-Journal, by two people both fully aware of this website here. Maybe they thought the more limiting format would force me to condense and reduce these things into a more socially acceptable and mass consumable form. Instead, I just did not use it. Tell me this was worth the trouble. I did not respect you anyway. That is why, when the same fine citizens and also another one tried to force theirspace onto me, I did what I could to resist. Even if I did trick someone to come here through one of those, it would probably be an illiterate mirror-posing goon anyway. I can say whatever I want about them because even if they got here they could not read this. Yoy, why do they always pose in the trashiest mirror-room available? They cannot find a minimally supervised hotel wedding to borrow the use of one from? If one fears mirrors or merely claims itself to be a vampire and so will not admit to reflecting, it will be an eerily forward staring mutant, whose dominant hand seems to reach almost forward, grabbing at something just beyond one edge of the picture. I suppose that means the people are holding cameras with those hands, but I feel like they're grabbing me instead, and that can be scary with certain people. Subject change. A couple of people have been baffled by my ability to remember the html code for displaying an image, but that's a lot easier than entering mere words (of which a picture is worth 1000) into myspace. It will show you every editable field on one page, but you need to click to a new page to edit each one individually, and then confirm the change, even though all it shows is the thing you just typed. This is just to give the system more time to log you out, become "busy," or not expect errors, so it can make you wait some more and show you more ads. You can save whatever you came up with if you typed it in another window first, but you probably won't do that. The server is always "busy," but it won't admit that until you've seen the ads, whose server is never busy. When I have to wait two minutes for each page, and have to go through a page with just an advertisement first, that's four minutes of waiting per attempt. I could have beaten Donkey Kong in that time. But I hate Donkey Kong. So I keep waiting. I used to worry that I spend too much time using computer machines, but it turns out every acquaintance of every person I'm related to spends twelve to twenty-five hours per day asking what is up and, I assume, waiting for stuff to be up on MehSpace. Every hair bleaching, chain-smoking, chain-wearing, nose-piercing goth goof in the whole village has its own space, and that seems to me the best reason yet for me to stay the gump away from there. They like to make their user pictures 50 megabyte MPEG video clips that load first, even before the sacred advertisements, so it's impossible to view on our modem computer but not the ones at Madison Misery High School, so it's somehow my problem when you can't get any pages they drop comments on to show up? As if they said anything worth reading? Who am I talking to? They themselves acknowledge the "not worth reading" aspect by choosing backgrounds which text colored to their specification cannot be read upon. You can tell that's a background worth seeing at all times. There was no point to changing this user's picture since it's too messed up by the translucent effect to be recognizable as anyone. That's like two layers of protection from one's own daftitude. A lot of themspaces are more analogous to the geocities template pages of yore than more recently popular diary factories, so it's sort of like the internet's first retro-phase. Except now the obnoxious imbedded java applets are written under the assumption that every person has broadband internet rather than everyone but me (what happened to the good old days when people used highspeed connections for software and movie piracy?). Also: lots of pink. Always. I once wore a pink and yellow striped shirt at school, and my room's teacher made fun of me. And I was twelve years old. And in the special education program. How do these bozoids get away with it? If all things are not pink, that probably just means whoever is in charge has not figured out how to change the default settings yet. While it is true that the person whose space it is selects the colors for all of that page's comments, the commentors do not protest the palette-swapping of their own words, and often exhibit similar preferences when given the same choice. I do not remember if this one did or did not. I just found the strike-through effect interesting. And conducive to reading. Hey, how about those fancy links which bloat themselves and adjust the whole page layout everytime a mouse cursor passes by them? Those are something. Something bad. Oh, thnap. If there are two things MehhhSpace people strongly believe in, beside the ones I already mentioned, and there are, they are the numbers 1 & 2. Very popular is the concept of things being less than three. Search any page for occurences of "<3" and you will see this to be true. If you typed, submitted, and submitted again =3 or even, dare I to say it? yes, >3, you'd probably be tracked down and given a negative amazon.corn feedback rating. At first I thought: Maybe they like to pretend those two objects beside each other resemble sideways heart-shapes with gaps at their equators, those being indispensable assets to all great writers, but then I found out that MySpace provides fools with a means to display properly oriented heart-shapes sans gaps as plain text items, so the less-than-three-philosophy theory has no choice but to be true. In an act of denial regarding all the pop-up advertising junk on this website which I command in most aspects beside that one, usually I view pages in Netscape, but I know there are a lot of visual internetting features not supported by it. This sort of thing, you know. Unless you are using Netscape also. I thought maybe I was making an unfair assessment of myspace ugliness, looking at pages and judging them based on how they appear from a visual-featurely inferior internet browser. No. The pages are actually more ugly working properly! It's like clown and/or whore* face-paint. It is best not applied. It's like a brand new 1978 Xerox copying machine. You're better off if Nazis come along and burn whatever book you want to copy pages out of. Ehhh. It's like an Atari 5200 cartridge with really neat label artwork. You're better off if a crocodile comes along and eats it when you try to turn it on. However, if Steve Irwin shows up immediately afterwards, subdues the crocodile, and starts talking to you, then I suggest looking at a MySpace in Internet Explorer and deciding for yourself which is worse. *this depends on which region of France you are in. Ha ha ha. No. I did have a look, though, at how the whole thing works (after the third "fare dincum"). It asks a lot of questions, but not questions I ever feel like answering. Just general junk that is not dependant upon personality, or, if it is, not in a way you could infer anything from. Age, Race, Religion, Marital Status, the sort of thing the Census Bureau wants to know. It does not concern itself with what you've ever done beside watch television shows other people made, but it does give you a space to list those shows. There is a rectangle to type things in specifically devoted to "television." Translation: I do not know what "boycott" means. Most people list shows they watch, but I suppose you could define the word or explain how a cathode ray tube works if you want. Bhuneayah, there are no such rectangles for food, weather or architechtural preferences. Personal accomplishments? The overlords assume, correctly, I suppose, that if you are using MehSpace at all, you are not making any. Maybe that's a lot of the appeal of the whole thing. By not being prompted to mention a thing they do well or an unusual thing they enjoy, persons cannot be made to feel bad about lacking one. I love the "umm ya." Have I ever been the reason two automobiles struck each other? Like, duh. Ehhh, who gives a pringle that you've been 0n a train, really? Who wants to know that? Who wants to know that who also wants to know if you have run into a wall? Well, at least you've never burned a p0tat0 chip. I do that all the time. Wait, does right now count? What is great about pink letters: Regardless of the background's brightness level they still look horrible. MySpace MyAstronauts typically have over 100 people listed as friend, but how many of them would you really have anything to do with if you met? People are so concerned with the overall number that they'll list anyone at all as friend, and "anyone at all" is so concerned about the same thing that all friend requests are approved without thought. Also: I've found that I can only enter a comment about someone who has "me" listed as a friend. How do they know they are getting honest, unbiased responses if only screened applicants are allowed to drop them? It's like the 2004 George Wuh Bush Town Hall meetings, except instead of "how can I thank you for being such a great president" is "OMG I luv ur new pic." Who's going to be there to say "no, actually, you look like a crack-whore" ? Not that these strikingly similar to each other individuals would hesitate to approve my friend request if I made one, but I'd never make that request for 95% of them, and quite honestly I'd feel bad saying something like that to a friend of mine. Sometimes, only approved persons can even read the spaces. I will occasionally allow "private" livejournals, as sometimes certain people want to tell only certain persons certain things, and in rare situations may even be justified in thinking anyone else gives a clobbered lobster what they're saying, but no one on MySpace typically has anything deeper to say than Not that they don't try sometimes... AH-HA! Right here look yes merely by omitting punctuation and laughing unprovokedly anyone can appear to be psychotic HAHAHAHAHA you see that it works that way EEHEEHEEHEEHEE but also it turns out that NYIHIHIHIHIHIHEEHEEHEEHAWHAHAHEH! some of them do not need the help. Now that you mention it, I'm sick too. Sneeze! Vomit! Donner and Blitzen!