a little while …

of all the websites i check regularly, postsecret has undoubtedly claimed top spot as the one i’m most anxious to check when updated. early in october, someone sent in a postcard marked with coordinates, these coordinates: 39 08.060 N 77 19.270 W, pointing to a forested area somewhere in rockville, maryland which, definitely not owing to serendipity, is really really really close to the postsecret mailing address. shortly after, and this is where it leapfrogs from quaint to eerie, someone sent in a picture of a cave located in that forest. (owing to the somewhat ‘buddhist sand art’ overtones of this whole postsecret project, i can’t find the postcard with the coordinates written on it or the cave pictures online at all anymore, as every week the previous weeks’ postcards are replaced by an entirely new batch).

this is one of those things that gobbles up insomniacs with overactive imaginations and self-imposed agoraphobic tendencies.

so one late night, working with the rather obvious assumption that a murder had been committed and the body hidden in that cave, i started scouring the web for reports of missing persons in the rockville area, and any other information pertaining to the forested area and its immediate vicinity. among the more fascinating results (i use fascinating here not in the ’spock’ sense of the word, that there is any ‘truth’ to whatever it is i was looking for, but as something that fueled my imagination to invent a newer even less plausible back story) were these: the blair witch project, a haunted townhouse across the street from a graveyard in germantown, and also that black rock mill, somewhere in the forest, is haunted by the ghosts of two teenage girls who were killed in a car accident on a bridge.

after a few hours of idle searching, i scared myself to sleep and as easily as i had latched on to this web-based caper i managed to pretty much forget about it … until a couple of nights ago.
the point of this post: mystery solved.
to make a long story short: people googled the coordinates so much that abcnews took notice and did a piece on it … turns out someone left a copy of frank’s new postsecret book in the cave and it’s become a geocache version of the postsecret site where people leave their postcards for each other to find.

anti-climactic? pretty much.

here’s a link to something funny: something funny

here’s the deal with web2.0, there’s no doubt about its success being a function of online social interaction – there are a million articles written every day about it. despite its cult-of-buzz and despite its near-spontaneous creation by the web’s most influential person nobody’s heard of, tim o’reilly (unless you read wired magazine, itself a real springboard for everything web2.0) there definitely is something about web2.0 that interests and (*gasp*) excites people like me. this blog and wordpress are a testament to that.
so yay for web2.0 …

backtrack a little, who remembers the early days’ attempts at social networking through personal sites? geocities? angelfire? tripod? they had ‘communities’ and ‘neighbourhoods’ and all that other crap. and, most importantly, and especially compared to the elegance with which more and more websites are being designed, they were UGLY. music would just spontaneously start playing (not REAL music, but the most hideous thing ever to pretend to be music: MIDI!), images would cover so much real estate as to require sidescrolling, get stretched to infinity, distorted, barely fit inside borders, grouped between random spurts of retarded text, yada yada yada. nothing had come out before or after with such a haphazard attempt at aesthetic design … until myspace showed up.

to say myspace has “showed up” is a gross understatement, this shit’s virtually taken over and i don’t even know what the fuck makes it so special.
here’s an excerpt from an angry email i wrote earlier today which provided a link to a myspace profile page:
“jesus christ, i can’t even scroll down this page. look, here’s the deal with webpages, unless it’s a fucking photo-essay I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SIDESCROLL to view the content. if the internet were a comedy club, myspace would be amateur hour and people would vomit. i don’t hate gay people, but myspace is a fag.”
if you’re reading this (there’s only two of you anyway) and wondering: “how come waleed, handsome devil that he is, hasn’t linked to myspace at all?” well, cause it sucks. if you don’t know what myspace looks like, i envy you like i envy young children and i’d rather not be the one who rips that innocence away from you.

i hate myspace. i’d rather not live in a world whose future is myspace.