OMG, Omegle

Now, normally I don't like to play around on the internets too much. It's not really my cup of tea. Porn? Sure, there's porn on the internet, but you can only watch so much before you need to start watching harder- and harder-core stuff, until you need to see two female midgets covered in poop just to be interested. So I don't watch much internet porn, because it's a gateway to internet snuff.

There's also news to be followed, but I hate reading the news. It's depressing. There's always another mass shooting spree, another Republican telling someone to fuck off, another economic plan that looks like a rich person wrote it as a way of getting his rich buddies to high-five him, another celebrity doing something embarrassing, another war in some foreign country that is tragic in the same way that Lucy pulling the football out from underneath Charlie Brown is tragic: you wish it would stop happening, but you are powerless to make it cease. It's always the same.

Mostly I use the internet to check my auto-email-bloated gmail account or find directions, and that's where it stops. But lately I have been in between jobs - I have a job, but the trainers keep pushing back the starting date to where it looks like I'll be lucky to get paid by Christmas - and I don't have cable, and Netflix doesn't run properly on our apartment complex's over-burdened WiFi, so I've been doing a lot on the internet lately. It has been shockingly unproductive.

Let's start with Facebook, which I used to frequent every day until I realized that I was so uninterested in the mundane trivia of the lives of people I know (many of whom I only know on the internet) that I couldn't look at another request to play Farmville without being physically ill. Well, I've been at it for the past few days, and I have so much of nothing to do that I find myself enthralled by the "hilarious" pictures people post and their hiking, biking, and motorcycling adventures, even though I am not really interested in any of those things per se. I find myself posting just to read my own posts, hoping that people will "like" them or - dare I dream? - respond to them. Meanwhile, nothing productive is being accomplished, I'm just holding court with the ghosts of people's lives, a kangaroo kingdom where the artifacts are photoshopped or instagrammed.

The bulk of my time has been on 4Chan's random board, where the most despicable human beings dwell in the darkness of their filth. It's like traveling to a pirate ship, except that there is porn, and intersex porn (can anyone say "trap thread"?), and Rule 34 (look it up) porn, and occasionally scat porn, and REALLY creepy stuff I don't want to even mention. Beyond the porn, there are endless political debates between downright cretins, and there are threads devoted to marijuana, and there are threads designed to incite the viewer to do damage to the feelings and property of other people, and there is just so much fear and loathing. /b/tards (self-affirmed moniker) use the n-word and call each other faggots the way most people inhale and exhale. It is the absolute dearth of decorum and decency. I kind of like it. But it's actually a counter-productive website, as it instills negative value into your life, actually makes you a worse person for being there.

I created some memes on quickmeme.com, which is a way to pass the time if you are particularly cruel or witty, neither of which I am. My favorite was one that pictured The Most Interesting Man In The World from the Dos Equis commercials, which read, "I don't always eat wings, but when I do, it's red wings." I am proud of this as I would be proud of teaching someone to read, which is probably what I actually ought to be doing with my free time instead of finding creative ways to belittle people with unfortunately popular photographs on the internet.

Tonight I experimented with chat rooms and ChatRoulette-style websites. Big mistake. It was a seminar covering what I had initially discovered in college in 1999, when I first visited a chat room: chat rooms are gay. Not as in bad, but as in they are full of gay men trolling to find other men to participate in clothing-free chatting with vigorous hand motions.

To be fair, not everyone in the chat rooms is gay. A fair number are straight men holding out hope that women will be attracted to a live image of the men ruthlessly fapping away like they are trying to start a goddamned FIRE with that thing. I saw more men rustling their jimmies tonight than I ever need to see in my life. It's not like they wait for you to say, "May I please watch you try to give yourself a hotdog handshake right now?" NO, they just come on camera (no pun intended) guns blazing, knives out, if you know what I mean.

And there is the occasional woman, some of whom are even quite attractive. I logged onto ChatRandom.com and saw a nice young lady I tried to strike up a conversation with, but she wouldn't have it. I guess "total creeper here" is not the way to approach the young ladies. (I was trying to joke, but I forget that there is only one person in the world who would take that as a humorous comment right off the bat, and she's my girlfriend.) I left the site ashamed, probably creeped that young lady right the fuck out.

Non-cam chat rooms are even more of a headache. Case in point, Omegle.com. Half the time, the other person has a connection so slow (or their typing speed is that of a sloth on sedatives) so that you can't really have a conversation that isn't one-sided. "Hey...asl [age, sex, location]...are you there?...fine...be that way...connection terminated. The other half the time, you end up with someone who insults you right off the bat, or someone who is clearly batshit crazy. "Hi." "SO TELL ME WHAT YA WANT WHAT YA REALLY REALLY WANT" Okay, then. I want you to stop.

The only really useful site I found is CounterPunch, which is an anarcho-leftist publication that really brings me down. The utter hopelessness of the left to change anything in this country is shameful. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to tell tales of the internets!

That's all I've got so far.

If there's more to it, please tell me. Leave a comment or email me at andrewkottwitz@gmail.com.