New Schedual - Same Sloth

Yep. Almost forgot again.

Free cookie to whatever stray reader forsaw that one coming.

So. Once again, here I am at the tail end of my night, desperately trying to dredge a topic from the depths of my mind (you know, I really do have to start giving thought to having a direction for this blog. Seinfeld may have run season after season on nothing, but I do not think I have the same constitution.) and present it as an offering to the dark internet gods.

Huh. Dark Internet Gods. Hee. Doubt I am the first to come up with that particular idea (anyone who has read even a little Neil Gaiman is nodding their head right now) but let's name some of them.

Swocharns, the Dread Beast of Glitches and Viruses. Every time your screen fuzzes oddly and spots appear or you find that opening an e-mail from your favorate cousin Binky has infected you with twenty-seven different form of spyware, worms and trojans, you know that Swocharns has lifted his eyes of binary-junk murk to skewer you with his baleful fury. Your data is not safe. Your OS? It will fall to his bloody assault. You aren't safe. You aren't even protected. Those virus updates you got this morning? Useless - he got backdoors past all of them written by some teenage hacker in Holland or New Jeresy or down the street, and your system, with all those hours of data entry work and frustrated, ultimately triumphant effort will be flushed away, and all you'll see is a blue screen of death as everything you have worked for since 1998 is rewritten into unimpressive dribble. He is chaos that is smart enough to hold together just long enough to destroy just a little more of your harddrive. Swocharns - the faceless hatred of ten thousand black hats pureed and concentrated and given form for one purpose. To shatter what little sanity you have left after you realize just how much of your life is invested in a machine you have so little control over the survival and protection thereof.

Less threatening, but just as out to get you, is the Faceless King. He is Nigerian, and he just died and left you a fortune, if only you would divest yourself of all protection and give him the information that he needs. Nevermind how sensitive - he assures you you can trust him. He's also a long lost friend, recently passed away who wrote you into a will, a brother you never met, an admirer from so far away you never realized he could be, a professional just needing that one missing piece to put together a treasure map. But he needs you. She needs you. Gender isn't important, and he or she is whatever you most want to believe. If you miss a lover, the Faceless Queen will be your lover. If you want to feel important, the Emperor of Uncounted Wishes will grant you all the value you could ever want. He wants to give you things, too. What do you want? A credit card with a limit that never runs dry? Done. Better body, with larger attributes to the bust or the scepter? She understands, and will discretely provide. What do you want, what will pull you into his land, out of your own. What price to render your life, your years of carefully invested wealth, your future? He can offer a bargain that would make Mephisto green with envy, a Faustian bargin to shame every two bit fool who sold their soul on the cheap. All you have to do is listen. Listen carefully - to your e-mail, on your social networks, throughout all the lines and cracks, because he has a thousand mouths, all looking for the one promise which will pull you to his million hands. He doesn't need your service, he won't help himself to your home one moment longer than he has to. All you have to do is reach out, and contact him. Just the once. It's all he wants. It's all he needs. Because once you do, the Faceless won't ever need another thing from you. That once is enough for him to have everything.

Last of those I have identified is the Tricker. The one that pulls you into the internet, convinces you that it means more than it does. Convinces you that a piece of the life is all there should be. We've known him longest, feared him more than anything else. He is seduction, not of the lustful variety, but of the sweet pro-offering of having the world at one's fingers without need to go out and risk it. They've made movies about his promise, his lie is in a thousand TV programs almost as far back as computers were beginning to enter our lives. We know the other two by their teeth and their claws, by the whispers in the electronic night and a thousand signs glittering like deadlights over a shadowed sea. But the Tricker, the Sleeper, the False Dream, the one we've figured was waiting to be born with this new Information Age before we even walked in the door? He's no surprise, and like the other two he doesn't advertise. Its crass, and he's no fool. He merely lets those who would be seduced come into his web, and he lets them rest. In their sundry idles, he drowns them, and like those who have come into his den since a poor settlement in mythical ages found lotus fruits and smelled sweet smoke, he'll embrace them as lovingly as a parent. They'll not even notice his gentle grasp is choking them. He isn't addiction, he isn't madness. He's worse, and he's got millenia of practice before he looked laughingly at the feast we offered as a trade for all the good we get from this time of dawning advancement. Read old sci-fi. Hell, read old science journals. It was the bargain. For the thousand easements of this world wide web, we let one of the oldest spiders of the human condition crawl forth, looking for those caught in it's strands. If you watch the news, occasionally you'll see a story about the caccooned madling found; some victim who lost his sense of reality to Fascination and never came back.

...

Dang. That didn't come out anything like where the first fleeting random thought on it looked like. Oh well. This is supposed to be stream of consciousness - whatever comes out, goes up. Least until I can come up with a direction.

Anyhow. That's enough for now. Goodnight hypothetical readers.

Fear the Three.