Although I should have done this a long time ago, I just got around to setting up an account with DynDNS. I now have dave-slusher.is-a-geek.com pointing to my house. Here is my local copy of this weblog. Pretty slick. If my NetGear router gets a new IP address via DHCP, it is supposed to notify DynDNS of the new one. We'll see if that happens. I don't think I've changed IP address in the last year, but someday it will happen. hooked. "C'Mon Juliana" is my favorite of the 6 or so I've listened to. Eventually I'll listen to them all. heir adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred was available via RealAudio. You'd think they pissed on Hugo Gernsback's grave! The prickly hordes arrived to decry this horrible crassness. Nevermind that 50% of the posts in the group at any time are absolutely idiotic, off-topic nothingness, usually smart-assed and pointless replies to someone else's smart-assed post. THIS wrong must be stopped. I killfiled many of the hair-shirt, usenet purity crowd around them. Most of those filters have expired, but I've never really posted much or even read much since then. I have upfilters on a few people and topics. I'll read everything Charlie Stross or Lois Tilton or Brenda Clough or Lawrence Watt-Evans posts, but that's about it. Most of it is of low enough value taht I don't miss it when it is gone.

In aro-t the hot button topic is mentioning the sale or even *purchase* of anything to do with old time radio. It is impossible to say "I have this for sale" without a furor. One might argue that those are off-topic in a non-marketplace group. OK, I'll agree. The same people that protest that protest people that mention buying things! One guy posted information about a stack of reels he had purchased at on OT Radio convention. The group consensus was that he was an asshole for talking about radio stuff when he wasn't going to post MP3s of them. Nevermind these are on reels and he may or may not even have the capacity to do it, unless you post the stuff you are just bragging (actual words used by a poster.) To this day, I have more killfile entries in that group than any other.

The thing that bugs me most is the fundamentalism. I don't believe in zero tolerance rules, and this is what exists in these groups (or would, if they were evenly applied but that isn't even true.) The atmosphere that this stuff engenders is a generally chilling effect on conversation. A few years ago, the late George Alec Effinger made a post on rasfw, and rather than being greated warmly (as such a great and friendly guy deserved), a group of the same people who got under my skin during the above replied with "How do we know that is really GAE?" It was all too ridiculous, even more because GAE had the most unique voice in posts I've ever run across. Everything he wrote, whether fiction, e-mail or a GEnie post shone with its own weird light. The only person who could successfully mimic that would be, well, George.

I probably have posted fewer than once a month since then, almost always answering a specific question on a narrow topic. Today I posted in response to a query about Michael Moorcock reading order. I can't see ever really hanging out as a social thing there unless I stop hating most of the residents so much. Hate is a waste of time and resources anyway, better to just put that heat elsewhere.