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By
Carman
I don’t really know what to call this Rebel, so I will just call it something gay like:
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ The Internet Killed the Perks of My Youth ~
Here is a short list.
Porn… where would people be without it? Probably killing each other in the desert. This used to be some hard shit to come by. You had to work at it, and be ingenious and stealthy at the same time. Remember finding your uncle’s stash of Nina Hartley flicks? Sneaking around like some ninja while he was at the store buying beer. Rummaging through that weird box under his bed, hoping you wouldn’t get caught because hell would rain down on you. Ka-Ching! There it was. Like hitting the jack pot! Up and away! Not anymore, because these days it is all on his hard drive (pun intended). And even if he hasn’t passworded his computer, you can’t drag the thing with you to your friend’s basement den, without the old bastard noticing anyway.
Just about any decent site wants a subscription that will make you mortgage your house in the end. It’s goddamn annoying. That is one of the reasons why I don’t even bother trying to look at it online anymore. That, coupled with the spyware and all the other shit that attaches itself to your computer like you’re some Velcro strip for all the viral tumbleweed of The Matrix to cling to. Is it really worth douching your computer just to see a damn 5 second crap-quality clip of some little whore getting rammed? Not for me. I am sure there are sites out there that are free, but I just don’t care anymore. Besides, the shit is just getting too damn weird. Aside from the fashionable “squirters” (that are really just little girls pissing) the girls are also starting to look younger and younger, which just makes me feel like a fucking pederast. No thank you.
Next is Music. Lars Ulrich catches a lot of shit for this, but I don’t blame him. He may still be a cuntlipped little troll, but I don’t blame him for not wanting his property stolen. Gather around, children, and I will tell you of the long long ago… a time when people did not have the internet. Music was actually good and there was something called a tape trade. I am sure it worked different from town to town, but this is how we did it: I would get hold a tape just marked “Hate Eternal”, and I would love it. I’d scour the local music stores looking for a CD or two by these guys, and then actually buy the albums. Enough people did this, and the band got bigger and bigger. Back then you had to buy the albums if you liked the band because you couldn’t really rely on the shitty cassette tapes, since they always wore out, or the quality of the recording wasn’t that good to begin with, or the fucker would melt in the car. Anyway, if the band was not signed, they would get noticed because more and more people were going to their shows. Next thing you knew, the band was famous, and you would feel a certain pride in knowing that you helped getting them there. They were your band.
I am not saying that I am against downloading, because I have quite a bit of music on my computer right now. No, what I am saying is that good bands are going unrecognized because they cannot compete with one hit wonders on such vast markets as kazza or soulseek, because, really, not many are going to download a song from a band they have never heard of anymore. People are so damn trained by MTV, to only listen to what they are supposed to listen to, that they are afraid to take risks. A few people, like me, might, but the band is not going to get that underground following like they would have had back when the tape trade was around. I think Grace wrote an article on this subject - kind of.
Lastly, Gore and Movies. I am lumping these two into the same category for a reason, and I will get to that. But, regular movies first. When "Terminator 2" came out, for instance, I had no idea about the plot, who was in it (besides Arnold) or how it ended. If I had had the internet back then, in it’s current form, I could have found out every plot detail two weeks before the film was released, read all the reviews, watched any number of trailers and probably downloaded an infinite number of different versions of the damn thing with alternate endings. Fuck, probably two MONTHS before it was released even. And that is sad. It takes the charm out of watching movies. I try to stay away from trailers and spoilers for that very reason.
This leads into Gore; classics like “Faces of Death”, “Traces of Death”, etc etc .
“I saw Faces of Death,” says the 10 year old kid to his buddies. “I saw it at a special One Time Only Midnight Showing at the movie theater!”
Wonder fills his friends’ faces, while they question him about everything in it, like it was the inquisition, and he goes into great detail about things that are NOT even in the fucking film.
“Faces of Death” and all the Gorgon pictures are obsolete now. With the internet, I can just download the shit I want to see, and also other fucked up stuff, like real people crashing their motorcycles and cars, without ever leaving my home. It used to be so exciting, waiting for the new gore film to show up at the local video store, somewhere on the back shelf. My father and I used to watch that shit together constantly. We would play the really fucked up stuff in slow motion, just to see where the film was spliced, if it was spliced, or just for the hell of seeing it in slow motion.
The internet took the fun out of all these things. Call me old fashioned, call me bitter, but these things were a kind of rite of passage into adulthood… Fucking with the cable box to see scrambled porn. Getting into music no one had ever heard of. The little things that made everyday shit exciting and fun. And now it is dead. All because of a fiber optic cable running underground and into a plastic box in my house. They don’t make “Faces of Death” anymore, since the clientele is hanging out on YouTube and other media centers. And if I hear one more person telling me “Myspace finds new bands all the time” I am going to show them my mute button (which strongly resembles my fist in their mouth). They should make a new genre of music these days, after emo and mall core and all that shit, just called “myspace”. All that shit sounds the same.
I am not going to spend an arm and a leg for porno, and I am NOT going to go wasting my time looking for fucked up videos.... OK, I AM going to go waste my time looking for fucked up gore videos, but think about what I said. The internet killed all the fun. You know I am right.
So pour a 40oz for the lost perks of youth.
