I've just moved house, due to the whim of my former landlord being that I be evicted, and hence I now live somewhere else with a different interweb connection. Amongst other things this means I now have an NNTP server connection, so I installed slrn and went back onto the Usenet. Due to the unpleasantness of Google Groups, formerly Yahoo Groups, formerly Deja News, I hadn't ventured from my favourite group on Usenet in many years and had only gone there intermittently, so I search for my old self on Google Groups to see what groups I used to be on. Turns out they're all dead, more or less. Even alt.shenanigans, which I stopped reading because of the volume of posts is now completely dead. No posts in years, possibly excepting some spam, at alt.dont.get.even.get.odd, alt.chips.salt.n.vinegar, alt.startrek.vs.babylon5, and so on. All the rage when I were young, were Usenet. Now Ubuntu doesn't even come with a pre-installed Usenet client while you can set your Facebook status from the toolbar.
That's another thing, when I were young Linux were something different to how it is now. Slackware, I used back then. Red Hat was the most popular. X-Windows wasn't around, or at least it was only in beta. And the websites I used to look at, they're all gone now. The Rockall Times, nessie's sfbg page, even all those mad right wing conspiracy theory websites.
I feel like a Christian c. 200AD: who are all these people? They weren't at the last service. Where were you during the last persecution? Fed to a bear was my wife, what you lost for standing up for Jesus? Gave ten per cent of your last business deal to the poor? Just what the poor need is that, a dozen amphorae of olives and half a crate of purple. That's my seat! Get out my pew!
