So make stuff up
on November 13, 2016 at 12:01 amChapter: Missionary Position
Location: Joyce's parents' house
And here we go, the retroactive-ish acknowledgement of Joyce’s religious status in Roomies!, which wasn’t really brought up often, if ever. And that was mostly on purpose. I didn’t want to touch that stuff. But, years later, increasingly, I did.
The way this was played out in this continuity, you had some longtime readers who didn’t even realize Joyce was Christian, making this strip something of an infobomb. And in Dumbing of Age, when I actively characterized her as such, some saw it as a departure. Christianity (specifically the evangelical kind) was the default, which means it’s not really brought up except in contrast. As your characters diversify, you start seeing those contrasts more and more.
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If Joyce’s parents have the Internet at her house, she could do some quick research on what she used to believe before the mindwipe so she can better make stuff up. If not then I don’t know, hope there’s an encyclopedia in the house?
This is in like 2001 or something. I don’t know so much about “quick”.
dial-up is bizarre to think about in this age of public Wi-Fi accessible at street intersections of all places (I’m a passenger)
I’m pretty sure broadband was around by 2001/2002. from 1995-1999 I used 56k dial-up, then in 1999 I got internet service through my cable provider, which I had at least through 2001.
When I moved out to my mom’s house in the boonies and had to go back to dial-up, what used to feel blazing fast felt crawlingly slow.
Back in the day, 56k felt really quick! Web pages back then were mostly static text and images, and written in basic HTML and relatively low resolution images, with a little JavaScript for flavor. If you really wanted to fly, you turned images off entirely and only downloaded the ones you wanted. Sure they were only 22k JPEGs but every kilobyte counted!
Modern web pages are slow over dial-up now because they’ve been stuffed with relatively data-heavy heavy eye candy like video and high-resolution images. You just don’t notice it because of the bandwidth at your disposal. (3G is “slow”? It’s 384k when you’re at highway speed, and 2000k when you’re standing still!)
Look at the basic Google homepage. Sure it looks simple, but the file size has exploded so they can give you all those personalized links and the animated (sometimes interactive!) Doodles. Half of what looks like plain text is generated by heaps of client-side scripting that you never see, but your browser had to download and execute. 15 years ago it was just a logo, a text entry box, and two buttons.
That YouTube video you didn’t watch all the way to end consumed more bandwidth than an entire day’s worth of ca. 2001 web browsing.
That said, would I want to go back to dial-up? Hell no, but it would be nice if we could get back to writing light web pages again.
https://xkcd.com/1605/
This is pre-Google.
yeah, you had to use Yahoo! for that!
All this talk about how the internet used to be makes me feel ancient.
Tell me about it. I grew up in a world where nobody (except maybe a handful of scientists and academics) had ever heard of an “internet”. I learned to type on an actual typewriter. Hell, I can remember when having a phone with push-buttons instead of a dial was cutting edge.
Now, I carry a ridiculously powerful networked computer in my pocket, and my car packs more computing power than the Apollo moon capsules. I recently got a letter from the manufacturer telling me that I needed to take my car to a dealership so they could update the software for the transmission controller. This blew my mind a little when I really thought about it, since I can remember a time when that sentence would have been complete gibberish, yet now it seems perfectly routine.
No way, AltaVista all the way!
Huh. So I wasn’t the only one, then. It kinda felt like that at times.
Webcrawler~
AltaVista.
This isn’t pre-Google (That’d be before 1998), but it is pre-wide-knowledge-and-adoption-of-Google.
And if DOA is applicable here, too, her internet access may have been limited to safe sites. (Which would be no hindrance in this special instance, except that she probably doiesn’t remember her access data, which would be part of the protected internet access sceme.)
Bess can’t go there.
Or, and I’m just spitballing here… she could have said no?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they use Netscape. Gods, web page creation then…
and then the dog spoke.
If only it were so easy to forget the outrageous things I was programmed to believe.
But then, I’d have no context for how dehumanizing and outright dangerous they can be. Why, who even knows what I might wind up doing in such a situation? Perhaps even for years, until it would cause me to hurt good people for its own sake yet again?
Yes, who indeed…
There’s a reference/allusion here, and I’m not getting it…
Originally posted:
February 26, 2002
It’s funny because since I was raised Catholic, I default to that when people mention Christianity.