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January 28, 1997, Tuesday

I feel sorry for Justin over there at Links from the Underground. He's been so manic putting his life online that he's destroyed his carpal tunnels and has fallen virtually silent on the Web. It's a tragedy on the order of a concert violinist losing a finger. It's also a cautionary note. I am very hypochrondriactic about my wrists and I do not push them if they feel the least bit funny. And sometimes just thinking about them as I am doing now makes them feel funny.

I was drinking Rum and Orange Juice in the Cocke Hall lab as I did a little Internet stuff. I was feeling really pleasant being such a bad boy ("no food and drinks" say all the signs, but they are routinely ignored). I notice these days as I approach Cocke Hall, I look at it looming up towards me and think of it is as a point of departure for cyberspace. It's really an anachronistic notion, since, like many things at UVA, it resembles an ancient Greek Temple.

I was passing the White Spot on University Avenue when I ran across Morgan Anarchy and Jenfariello's old boyfriend Austin. They were out securing cheap calories and smokes and invited me back to the horrid crash pad for beer. And in the refrigerator there were two and a half cases...

We played the card game "Asshole" again, which was pretty big fun, all and all. It's almost as fun as Astrology in a way. I'd like to figure a way to make it into a fortune-telling mechanism in addition to being a crass excuse to get fucked up.

At a certain point Cecelia the Brazilian Girl and Vanna the Increasingly Gothic Punk Rock Girl both showed up, but soon after everyone but Cecelia left to get Jagermeister at the ABC store. While Cecelia and I were together, we passed the time by me piercing her ear with a safety pin. That was a painless operation, but to replace the safety pin with an earring resulted in a notable amount of pain. We used cigarette lighters to sterilize everything.

It's like a significantly less sick version of similar things that happened in David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
Speaking of pain, Cecelia has very strong masochistic tendencies. Her sister Leticia, on the other hand, is more of a sadist. For years, then, they have had a sort of benign sisterly sado-masochistic relationship. Leticia especially likes to scratch Cecelia's arm roughly while Cecelia adopts a look of strained rapture on her face. The other night Cecelia kept asking me to slap her face...and what the hell, I did. But not with nearly the force she wanted me use. It's like a significantly less sick version of similar things that happened in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Morgan Anarchy is also a bit of a masochist. He's more into self-inflicted pain, though. He's been accumulating cigarette burns on his arm and neck for which he has only himself to blame. He also likes to hit his head against hard objects. All of this masochism manifests most of all when the parties just mentioned are intoxicated.

Vanna the Increasingly Gothic Punk Rock Girl used her connections at Gumby's (the cheapest pizza venue on the Corner) to get two large and gluelike pizzas, which I helped pay for. We all ate this with greedy abandon. People at the horrid crash pad eat fast or starve.

I was fairly drunk as I went back to my house to get a three hour pre-work nap, and when I awoke I had a mild hangover. But it wasn't too bad.

I've been in Sam 'n' Ellas again, this time chatting with a somewhat manic girl (Pi-eyes) and her boyfriend (John) from their place in Michigan. Pi-eyes had found the Big Fun Glossary and written me an enthusiastic letter of endorsement, and I'd told her to meet me at Sam 'n' Ellas. I taught them both many HTML tricks to try in the chat window. Their previous chat experiences had been only within the limited world of AOL.

I notice that Altavista has reversed the relevance significance of timeliness in its index. This means that now the most recent submissions come up last in a search. This is bad for authors of new material, and it gives more rank to venerable sites (which may not even exist anymore). This was done to curtail repeat submissions, I guess. Repeat submissions enabled ranking to be highest after every submission due to the value that Altavista once placed on timeliness. Interestingly, though, Altavista used to not accept repeat submissions. They lifted the repeat submission block in the Fall of '96 and then quickly imposed a ban on the number of URLs that can be submitted from a particular domain such as Xyz.com.
Such a child, if he exists, is worthy only of mockery and humiliation at the hands of his classmates.
Now, with the inversion of timeliness relevance, they appear to have also lifted the URLs per domain rule. As you can see, I track developments in the search engines closely.

Here's a URL I found that some of you may appreciate: Fetish.com. I get a kick out of the convention these days to have a link to Disney.com at the "Damn I'm Under 21" button on the front page of adult sites...as though such a path would ever really be followed by some righteous child web surfer. Such a child, if he exists, is worthy only of mockery and humiliation at the hands of his classmates.

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