2006, huh?

It's 2006 and there are no jet packs or flying go-karts. Then again, imagine those things in the hands of the typical commuter ... every ten seconds someone would crash into a hill or flame someone else's eyebrows off.

Flash Gordon would not be impressed. Just goes to show that sci-fi writers really ARE optimists, crediting us with these great advances. But in the real world the advances sneak up on us and the whole world changes with hardly anyone noticing.

Must ... avoid ... politics. The US Gov keeps getting more psychotic, doing everything we don't want them to do, making the whole world hate us. The news keeps us comfortably isolated. We're just little pawns. I do hope that the corporate-run cyberpunk world isn't the next big change to sneak up on us, but maybe we're already there and just don't hear about it. Damn. Things just don't add up the way they're reported.

Scratch that. Oh darn, the backspace is just too much of a hassle. Then I'd be playing along.

I'm still annoyed by the fantasy "Net" you see in movies. Where the internet is a pretty world of lights and zappy data, and you can walk around in it. At the moment, it's just a lot of disconnected text and pictures and stuff, with the potential to work wonders ... instead, we get victimized by dumb-ass spammers and our machines spend all day updating our virus definitions and spyware lists. I even have spammers attacking the guestbooks and order forms on my business websites. They just have to send me incoherent and obscene links to shit no halfway intelligent person would ever click on. But I'm trying to run a business! To survive, you know. It's insulting. They must think we're all stupid little marks just waiting to cough up money. Well, fuck them.

It's sad, trying to run an honest life, trying to do the right thing, knowing that there are people doing better than I am by being assholes and thieves.

Hmm. Not the Happy New Year I was thinking. But then again, it really isn't.