I'm an old-timer on the Internet - not so ancient as the Bulletin Board posters of the early 90s, but old enough to remember when AOL was a walled garden and all the links fit on one page. The internet was so big then: full to the brim with tiny sites featuring fun games and comedic rants. For the lonely and isolated (like me), it was a way of reaching out and finding new families - best friends we would never have met, constrained as we were by physical location and social habits. When the late 90s rolled around and commercialism seized the internet, we complained that the fun places were being drowned out by the big brands. You couldn't find Barbie parodies anymore, or teasing twists of trademarked phrases like "Ham, the Other White Meat," because those companies were sending out lawsuits left and right. But then things turned around a bit with blogs and MySpace and the connections people started making in the Oughts. Web 2.0 was all about bringing people together, about making collaborations and virtual families. The internet became a world where we could socialize even better than the local coffee shop.

But I think something's gone very wrong. And - admittedly - this may just be me being old and missing the point, but it seems to me that instead of becoming a place where people who don't fit in can find a niche where they belong, the internet has ballooned into a giant clique where the nonconformists are more scorned and isolated than ever. Blogging is a popularity contest and - for all I love to read Dooce and the like - as a consequence, the less popular are dropping off the map, drowned out and never seen. Instead of connecting by setting up a little home on LiveJournal or Flickr, you just get told every day how incredibly worthless and undeserving of companionship you are, staring at that zero counter month after month.

And the senior clique? They are more confident than ever that they are all the world needs to hear. The way the internet en masse attacks movies like The Crystal Skull, while blithely ignoring the other monumental failures of the genre. The way everyone reads the same books (from Harry Potter to Y: The Last Man). The way everyone knows the same celebrity gossip and CuteOverload vocabulary. You are either in, or you are out (and yes, they all watch Project Runway and blog their reality TV picks with zest).

And I've always been an outsider.

I wander the internet now and it's entertaining enough in a sugary sort of way, like green Jell-o for my morning doldrums. But it's all so same-y and predictable. Occasionally I find a new site that makes me laugh, but it wears off after a few months. I read odd books and wish I had someone to talk to about them. Someone who doesn't like Star Trek or SG-1 or Harry Potter. I wish I had a smaller community of artists where I could feel like I wasn't at the losing end of insignificant.

And I guess that's the real problem there. There are over 6 billion people on the planet, and more of them get on the internet everyday. And - as in real life - there are more desperate-to-fit-in sheep joining up than lonely outsiders. Maybe it was different once, maybe it was smaller and more selective. But it's not. The world's not. And we can't be special anymore. Even the statistical uniqueness of our fingerprints is about to disappear up against that huge number of people. And I don't know how to accept that.

I'm looking at the piece of fairy cake and I just can't grasp how very small I am.

I guess this is a milestone of sorts for me. Carlin is the first celebrity I've cared about to die. And today I am genuinely sad that his mocking comedy will now forever be in reruns.

I saw Carlin perform in Seattle when I first moved here, with my best friends Sean and Kristen. It was a brilliant show, and will always remain in my head as the moment when I first realized that I wasn't in Salt Lake City anymore - that I had finally escaped, and Seattle was such a great place to be living instead.

And I was in the audience for MadTV when they recorded the laugh track for his Touched By An Atheist. If you hear a really loud, high-pitched squeal of delight all through the bit - yup, that's me.

There is a great tribute page for him on The Onion AV Club. Many fans have left their (appropriate) condolences and I recommend the long, but fascinating, 2005 interview.

And let me add the memoriam my wonderful (and sarcastic) Significant Other contributed this morning: "He's with the angels now." LOL.

I just finished reading The Portrait. It was... disturbing. It was written very like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a meandering journal of observations with plot thrown in on the side. And the plot was good, but I think the novel stood on its own without it - maybe even stood *better* without the finality of the story - just because the musings were so frighteningly perceptive.

Excerpt 1:

To impose yourself, to take the public by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking; to scream in its provincial little ear that I am a genius. And if you scream loud enough and long enough, it believes you.

Excerpt 2:

"It's like an addiction," she said. "I go mad if I can't use my hands. It's all I have, the only thing that makes it worthwhile getting out of bed in the morning."

I saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this weekend, and I know everyone is gonna mock me, but I really liked it. Of course, I liked Stargate and The Mummy too, and I know those are both hated by all you jaded post-modernist cynics. But I hated the Star Wars fiasco, so it's not just that I have low standards and am easily entertained (although that is probably true...).

I watch the trilogy fairly often (I saw Last Crusade a week ago), and it really felt to me that this sequel was pretty much just like the other three (well, better than Temple of Icky Things, which was kinda stupid): it was B-movie fun, fast-paced silliness, no real surprises, and a lot of over-the-top action/acting. Sure, it was missing Tom Stoppard's dialogue in #3 and the small-budget hilarity of #1, but it had its own wacky hijinks.

Personally, I only wished it could have been longer. I felt like the comedy had to take a backseat to the plot, while I would have loved some more pointless bickering and silly car chase scenes.

It does puzzle me that people are so vitriolic in their loathing of this movie. Is this a peer-driven attempt at being cool by pretending nothing is good enough for you? Are American audiences turning into hyper-critical self-important back-seat directors? Can't you just settle in and have a little fun? Or are you one of those miserable bastards that go to Disneyland and spend the whole time bitching about the omnipresent branding and overpriced kitsch?

From the Onion commenters:

God literally popped out of a box to melt nazi faces in raiders. if you can suspend your belief for that, interdimesional, poorly rendered, non-aliens shouldn't be an issue.