Internet usability

I have become recently frustrated at the unusability of teh internet [sic]. No, I don't want your cookies or to run Flash... and as a consequence, many pages simply don't load, or they load forever, taking up memory and bandwidth without ever deciding to display some frakking content. I don't understand why the internet has trended this way. There must be other users like me out there, who are increasingly shut out of miscellaneous internet browsing.

Do most users not notice? Is this because, in my reluctance to buy any new hardware, I have finally fallen behind the lagging event horizon of "supported"? Are my computers' software/hardware combinations now actually too old to browse the latest, grooviest incarnation of teh internets [sic]? Maybe most users:

1. Regularly destroy and cannot rescuscitate computers, and thus purchase new computers every... 2?... years. (I remember hearing a statistic like that once: the average laptop lives for 1.5 years. My last store-bought new computer is from 2005.)
2. Accept cookies.
3. Accept and install whatever plugins claim to be required.
4. Don't block ads. (<-- N.B. this must be the case, since otherwise the advertisers would figure out a different way to attack our eyeballs.)
   

It's frustrating, and I feel like a whiny old dinosaur. I long for the "good old days" that are so old I never witnessed them: text-only browsing, with pure content right at one's fingertips.


This post's theme word: anomie, "social instability and alienation caused by the erosion of norms and values." Modern anomie is based upon flash cookies and banner ads.
This post written like Cory Doctorow.

Je suis arrivée

I am home, and tired. It's the wrong time here, and the apartment smells funny, and the podcast I listened to on the subway made me mad about sexism. Then the first news article I plucked out of my RSS feeds was also about sexism, and now I am angry in a futile way -- I can't change the story on the podcast or the news. Just my own story.

Right now, my story is about sleep. And doing my laundry. Tomorrow I will continue my consistent policy of smacking sexism in its metaphorical butt and telling it to move along, now. (Condescendingly.)

Further, retro-dated posts about my trip forthcoming.


This post's theme word: menhir, "upright stone monument." Want an easy way to remember it? Think of any phallic upright stone monument: it loudly proclaims, "There were men here!" Stupid men.
This post written like Cory Doctorow.