REASONS NOT TO SURF THE WEB

[alandhopewell]

     You run into tripped-out stuff like this....



http://pixyland.org/peterpan/petersFashionPage.html

[The Burgomaster]

Cool shoes, though . . . 

[Umaril Has Returned]

     You run into tripped-out stuff like this....



http://pixyland.org/peterpan/petersFashionPage.html

On a special "Big Bang Theory", Howard Wolowicz comes out of the closet!

[Rev. Powell]

I had forgotten about the "Peter Pan guy." I stumbled across his website years ago. Believe it or not, he started that website as an attempt to find a girlfriend! Worse yet, he actually did find one---an overweight, middle-aged Tinkerbell impersonator! Think about the honeymoon... ew...

[indianasmith]

That's still better than www.lennonmurdertruth.com , where some nutjob tries to prove that it was horror writer Stephen King who actually shot John Lennon, acting under coded orders from Richard Nixon concealed on the covers of Time Magazine!!!

[claws]

I had forgotten about the "Peter Pan guy." I stumbled across his website years ago. Believe it or not, he started that website as an attempt to find a girlfriend! Worse yet, he actually did find one---an overweight, middle-aged Tinkerbell impersonator! Think about the honeymoon... ew...

Randy Constan is a self-taught computer programmer, residing in Tampa, Florida, and founder of "Through the Crack Ministries". He gained notoriety as a Peter Pan impersonator who posted his cosplay pictures on a website in 2001, in what he stated was an attempt to find a girlfriend. The website became a widely-circulated, and in 2001 Constan's website, pixyland.org (aka Peter Pan's Home Page) won a Webby Award in the "weird" category.

knowyourmeme.com

The Peter Pan guy was one of my first "OMG!" experiences on the Internet back in 2001. Ahhh the memories ...Some of my all times favorites from yesteryear are Mosh Girl (Moshzilla) and the legendary white couple with black friends site.

[Mofo Rising]

Ah. Peter Pan guy. That is a blast from the past.

It's an interesting exercise in examining what the internet really is. When it first came to prominence, it was billed as the "information superhighway." That is, the internet was a repository of information that could be accessed at any time. None of this going-to-your-local-library-to-read-their-encyclopedia. Now it's all at your fingertips, and if you're interested, the darkest and weirdest aspects of the human condition are now at the ready.

Don't get me wrong, that is what the internet is in many ways.

But that viewpoint obfuscates the true revolution that the internet embodies. A communication revolution. Sure there are vast repositories of information at your fingertips. Sure you can see some horrible stuff (remember rotten.com?). But it is vastly more important that it allows people to communicate with each other in ways they never could before.

I'm currently friends on Facebook with people who were always a very peripheral part of my life. Not great friends, but I am now aware of their lives. That is something that would never have happened without the internet.

And more to my point, that Peter Pan dude would have just been one more lonely guy with a weird hobby. If Rev. Powell (a notorious liar) is to be believed, that guy was successful in finding another who shares the same interests. Pre-internet, a virtually impossible task.

Easy to make fun of that guy. But imagine a world where a group of people have an obsession with really cheesy and bad movies, and they get together to discuss them, and they had a forum. Maybe I could make an arbitrarily mean accusation against one of them, fully expecting that they knew I was joking, even though I had never met them in real life.

The internet is an information repository, but more importantly, it has changed the way people communicate. Irrevocably.

[ghouck]

     You run into tripped-out stuff like this....



http://pixyland.org/peterpan/petersFashionPage.html

That's Ariel, The Prince of Darkness!

http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com/Ablert_Fred1.html

[Paquita]

There's this giant brownish seagull that sometimes shows up outside the window at work among the normal looking seagulls.  It looks very interesting and there seems to be only one, so I wondered if it was some rare species and maybe I should take pictures of it, or even catch it to prove it exists!  So I started by searching for "brown seagull" in Google... one of the first results was an Urban Dictionary definition partially showing on the search page so I didn't even need to click into it to see what it meant.  This quickly ended my quest for knowledge about the brown seagull.

[ChaosTheory]

There's this giant brownish seagull that sometimes shows up outside the window at work among the normal looking seagulls.  It looks very interesting and there seems to be only one, so I wondered if it was some rare species and maybe I should take pictures of it, or even catch it to prove it exists!  So I started by searching for "brown seagull" in Google... one of the first results was an Urban Dictionary definition partially showing on the search page so I didn't even need to click into it to see what it meant.  This quickly ended my quest for knowledge about the brown seagull.

Google can be your friend, and it can most definitely be your enemy.

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

Easy to make fun of that guy. But imagine a world where a group of people have an obsession with really cheesy and bad movies, and they get together to discuss them, and they had a forum. Maybe I could make an arbitrarily mean accusation against one of them, fully expecting that they knew I was joking, even though I had never met them in real life.

Yuck, buncha sick bastards....
You knowthe Internet IS the worlds greats library of well, everything... Its jus stuff thats odd, or involves cats, seems to float to the surface. 

[Leah]

You forget, the internet rarely has things sacred, it's mostly polluted.

[Bushma]

Its jus stuff thats odd, or involves cats, seems to float to the surface. 

You mean like this?

[tracy]

Either she's not very pretty...or he's not very pretty.

[alandhopewell]

There's this giant brownish seagull that sometimes shows up outside the window at work among the normal looking seagulls.  It looks very interesting and there seems to be only one, so I wondered if it was some rare species and maybe I should take pictures of it, or even catch it to prove it exists!  So I started by searching for "brown seagull" in Google... one of the first results was an Urban Dictionary definition partially showing on the search page so I didn't even need to click into it to see what it meant.  This quickly ended my quest for knowledge about the brown seagull.

Google can be your friend, and it can most definitely be your enemy.

     Indeed.