2006 Rabbit Hole
My new network card arrived off Ebay today. The instruction manual was printed in some kind of Asian gibberish, but really, it's just a network card. Who needs instructions? Okay, so I never got my graphics card to work, but that was some kind of bizarre incompatibility between it and the motherboard that even tech support and the magic of Google couldn't fix. But this was just a network card.
A very shiny network card. It looked like something out of anime, all streamlined and with random LEDs. I'm not really sure why, but hey, it was cheap. And it had the right connectors, so I just shut the computer down, stuck it in, and rebooted. Beep Boop, Windows login, enter, detecting new hardware, yadda yadda. Even detected it without the CD. Len Nor Ver 23.5. All seemed well, so shut down, plug in the cable, reboot. Again. It's really annoying how often you have to reboot when trying to install something. Ah well.
Okay. So just to make sure it worked, I pointed Firefox at Google. If you can't get to Google, either your connection's crapped out, or the rest of the Internet has ceased to exist. Google wasn't there. There was the white page, and a colorful logo, but it wasn't Google. It was some kind of weird lettering. Not Asian, not Arabic, but it looked naggingly familiar. Maybe some new movie coming out, or some obscure holiday I missed, or some Google programmer joke. Since reloading and retyping didn't make it go away. Good to go.
When I went to Yahoo to check my mail though, it was all in the same weird moon letters. What? BBC, CNN, /., all the same. I had no idea what any of it said, but it still looked familiar. Squiggles, but familiar squiggles. And it wasn't April 1, either. Hang on, let me check some settings.
Okay, there. Somehow Windows got set to display in Elvish. I hate when things change settings without asking me, must be the stupid network card. Had been loading fast though. Okay. Time to check out some webcomics and get back to my regularly scheduled time-wasting. When did Gossamer Commons start a new story? Ah well.
I didn't really get worried until I came here to LJ. During the night, my friendslist somehow got taken over by a bunch of kids writing slashfic. I don't even know anybody who writes much slashfic. But that's not the worst part. The worst part was it was all written by exceedingly bubbly or angsty (or both) teenage girls, but it was all so incredibly boring. It was all about people in the suburbs doing laundry and things. It was slashfic about the mundane, with obligatory sex thrown in.
And that's when Trillian popped up with a name I didn't know. "A/S/L?" somebody named Druidicia asked.
Maybe I'm just exceedingly boring, because that kind of thing never happens to me. Not that I really want it to, so I didn't answer.
"A/S/L?" Druidicia asked again, "ill go first. 147/f/lorien."
What the hell. Maybe I could figure some of this out. "26/M/US." I typed back.
"dude ru a kid or r u playing?"
"I'm not a kid."
"sure. rofl. bye kid."
At this point, I had a pretty good idea what was going on, but honestly, it seemed ridiculous. So I checked the userinfo on a couple of those ficcers. First, I realized, their icons weren't CG anime elves, they were photos. And their userinfo led me to several communities, all about RPing in an exotic world of humans and cars and day jobs. And that clinched it.
I shut down the computer and put back my old network card, then came and posted this. But I'm thinking about reinstalling the other one. Because, dude. They were tons of them fantasizing about boring humans. C'mon, you can't say you wouldn't do it. I wonder if their version of mapquest would work here.
A very shiny network card. It looked like something out of anime, all streamlined and with random LEDs. I'm not really sure why, but hey, it was cheap. And it had the right connectors, so I just shut the computer down, stuck it in, and rebooted. Beep Boop, Windows login, enter, detecting new hardware, yadda yadda. Even detected it without the CD. Len Nor Ver 23.5. All seemed well, so shut down, plug in the cable, reboot. Again. It's really annoying how often you have to reboot when trying to install something. Ah well.
Okay. So just to make sure it worked, I pointed Firefox at Google. If you can't get to Google, either your connection's crapped out, or the rest of the Internet has ceased to exist. Google wasn't there. There was the white page, and a colorful logo, but it wasn't Google. It was some kind of weird lettering. Not Asian, not Arabic, but it looked naggingly familiar. Maybe some new movie coming out, or some obscure holiday I missed, or some Google programmer joke. Since reloading and retyping didn't make it go away. Good to go.
When I went to Yahoo to check my mail though, it was all in the same weird moon letters. What? BBC, CNN, /., all the same. I had no idea what any of it said, but it still looked familiar. Squiggles, but familiar squiggles. And it wasn't April 1, either. Hang on, let me check some settings.
Okay, there. Somehow Windows got set to display in Elvish. I hate when things change settings without asking me, must be the stupid network card. Had been loading fast though. Okay. Time to check out some webcomics and get back to my regularly scheduled time-wasting. When did Gossamer Commons start a new story? Ah well.
I didn't really get worried until I came here to LJ. During the night, my friendslist somehow got taken over by a bunch of kids writing slashfic. I don't even know anybody who writes much slashfic. But that's not the worst part. The worst part was it was all written by exceedingly bubbly or angsty (or both) teenage girls, but it was all so incredibly boring. It was all about people in the suburbs doing laundry and things. It was slashfic about the mundane, with obligatory sex thrown in.
And that's when Trillian popped up with a name I didn't know. "A/S/L?" somebody named Druidicia asked.
Maybe I'm just exceedingly boring, because that kind of thing never happens to me. Not that I really want it to, so I didn't answer.
"A/S/L?" Druidicia asked again, "ill go first. 147/f/lorien."
What the hell. Maybe I could figure some of this out. "26/M/US." I typed back.
"dude ru a kid or r u playing?"
"I'm not a kid."
"sure. rofl. bye kid."
At this point, I had a pretty good idea what was going on, but honestly, it seemed ridiculous. So I checked the userinfo on a couple of those ficcers. First, I realized, their icons weren't CG anime elves, they were photos. And their userinfo led me to several communities, all about RPing in an exotic world of humans and cars and day jobs. And that clinched it.
I shut down the computer and put back my old network card, then came and posted this. But I'm thinking about reinstalling the other one. Because, dude. They were tons of them fantasizing about boring humans. C'mon, you can't say you wouldn't do it. I wonder if their version of mapquest would work here.