Sometime recently, my…

Sometime recently, my top page hit counter passed the 2.5 million mark. Coolness. :-) When it hits 5 million, I think I ought to have some sort of big party. A thank-you-for-the-net party. The gods know I owe most of the success of my career to its existence.

1 thought on “Sometime recently, my…”

  1. This post made me think of how important the net has been in my life.

    I first got online in 1989 as a 17 year-old college freshman, logging on to the first TinyMUD before even sending an email. Fourteen years later, I’m still a stupid end user barely able to do anything (though I can barely do anything with ancient versions of emacs as well as DOS and Windows), but nonetheless —

    1. Most of my romantic partners were net-inspired. If I didn’t meet them online, then I met them at a real life party for members of one online community or other, or met through mutual online friends.

    2. Most of my writing is net-inspired. My earliest publications were in Artpapers and New Observations wherein I examined MUD architecture as a subspecies of performance art. There is little functional difference between a ‘player’ object and a ‘room’ except for what reader/viewer/interactors bring to the ‘text’ of a MUD.

    All of my 200+ non-fiction publications have come from email queries; I’ve never made a phone or postal query in my life. Every one of my prose fiction sales have also come via email submissions, whether to slick magazines that pay $1000 for short stories like Razor, or to underground zines like The Whirligig.

    3. Most of my political activism emerged online. I was pushed towards the revolutionary left by arguing with the far “anarchocapitalist” right on the early tinyMUDs. Most of my primary source reading (Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Koprotkin) came from public domain translations available online.

    I also met the people at Disinfo.com, Soft Skull Press, and Kwangju activists, my major political/publishing sources, from sending email cold to the addresses found on their various websites.

    4. I’ve learned about real estate and even borrowed (and repaid!) cash from people I met online, which is what got me out of the day job thing and into the slumlord thing.

    5. I barely knew how to type before getting online. Now I do 80 wpm with two fingers thanks to it.

    Hmm, I don’t know whether this is exciting or depressing.

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