internet citizens
This weekend I am starting my puppet class with John Tartaglia. I am looking forward to it. Continuing Education is a fun thing and opportunities like this don't come around every day.
Peter found a book I wanted and gave it to me as an early Mother's Day Present. It is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: the filming of the Douglas Adams classic edited by Robbie Stamp. (ISBN: 155704676X) One of the more through making of books I own. Lots of information on the costumes and the puppets.
There is an old joke that states that Gullible is not in the dictionary. Which prompts the person to go prove that it is. The internet community is a funny one because in some ways it consists of people that may or may not exist in the real world. I know people who have created characters on the internet for chat rooms or journals. For some it is a way to make their lives more exciting. For some they create people that fit in with a certain group that in real life they might not belong to. I think one of the funniest was when it was found out that a rabid feminist group was mostly made up of males who had created female persona. Scott Kurtz had a great sequence of strips in Player vs. Player about Jade going to a meeting of her all female online role-playing group. She gets to the meeting to find that she is the only girl there.
There are some that step over the line. One Internet denizen had his female anorexic depressed possibly pregnant because the rubber broke character commit "suicide". "She" sent out a notice that she had had it and was ending it all. This produced a hue and cry and a bunch of people trying to find "her" before she did the deed. Then someone posted a notice that she had died. Someone did some investigation and through some good detective work attached this to the person who created the whole thing and blew this guy's cover which caused another garbage storm to run across the internet. This was mostly harmless.
There are some that are not so harmless. They take people for money or property. They are the snake oil salesmen of the internet. They make it sound good but if you dig too deep their tissue of lies collapses. Those people annoy me. Fortunately if they step too far over the line they are subject to local laws as well as the federal ones.
But there are also a lot of good people out there on the internet. I think like any society there are a percentage of idiots who tend to screw it up for the rest of us. I have made a number of what I would term Internet friendships over the years. In some cases I have met the person on the other side of the keyboard in real life. In others we have not met yet but a lot of that has to do with distance and time. For some I met them in real life and then kept up with them on the internet. Without the World Wide Web, I wouldn't know people in some of the countries that I now correspond with but have never been to. It has been come the ultimate in pen-palling.
I am grateful to those I have "met" and gotten to know better because of the internet.
Peter found a book I wanted and gave it to me as an early Mother's Day Present. It is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: the filming of the Douglas Adams classic edited by Robbie Stamp. (ISBN: 155704676X) One of the more through making of books I own. Lots of information on the costumes and the puppets.
There is an old joke that states that Gullible is not in the dictionary. Which prompts the person to go prove that it is. The internet community is a funny one because in some ways it consists of people that may or may not exist in the real world. I know people who have created characters on the internet for chat rooms or journals. For some it is a way to make their lives more exciting. For some they create people that fit in with a certain group that in real life they might not belong to. I think one of the funniest was when it was found out that a rabid feminist group was mostly made up of males who had created female persona. Scott Kurtz had a great sequence of strips in Player vs. Player about Jade going to a meeting of her all female online role-playing group. She gets to the meeting to find that she is the only girl there.
There are some that step over the line. One Internet denizen had his female anorexic depressed possibly pregnant because the rubber broke character commit "suicide". "She" sent out a notice that she had had it and was ending it all. This produced a hue and cry and a bunch of people trying to find "her" before she did the deed. Then someone posted a notice that she had died. Someone did some investigation and through some good detective work attached this to the person who created the whole thing and blew this guy's cover which caused another garbage storm to run across the internet. This was mostly harmless.
There are some that are not so harmless. They take people for money or property. They are the snake oil salesmen of the internet. They make it sound good but if you dig too deep their tissue of lies collapses. Those people annoy me. Fortunately if they step too far over the line they are subject to local laws as well as the federal ones.
But there are also a lot of good people out there on the internet. I think like any society there are a percentage of idiots who tend to screw it up for the rest of us. I have made a number of what I would term Internet friendships over the years. In some cases I have met the person on the other side of the keyboard in real life. In others we have not met yet but a lot of that has to do with distance and time. For some I met them in real life and then kept up with them on the internet. Without the World Wide Web, I wouldn't know people in some of the countries that I now correspond with but have never been to. It has been come the ultimate in pen-palling.
I am grateful to those I have "met" and gotten to know better because of the internet.