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Inkfeather.com
The Lighthouse
August, 2008
Keeping Up With The Jones
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Life on the internet has changed, especially for those of us who started out when ISP’s were only one line after another of text. It seemed like a chat room that never stopped chatting, one line streaming into another, one would wonder how this was entertainment and how it would ever catch on. Within what seemed no-time at all, but I think it was actually about a half-dozen years; the services became friendlier to every-day users. A greater number of people began feeling that this may be something they can do and the introduction of windows reassured even the most technophobic potential cyber cadet that you would not erase the hard drive by pressing just one wrong button. Service providers like AOL, CompuServe – oh geeze I remember their traffic light seeing to be red forever – started advertising and making their services more usable. They services themselves were expensive. I knew people who accrued billings larger than their rent at the $2.95 per hour most of the services charged. But, even at that rate the inevitable increase in the number of people who would outlay over two thousand dollars for a PC would balloon near the holidays. Each year more people began their journey on the internet super-highway. Things got worse before they got better. Service providers began lowering their hourly fees and the number of subscribers surpassed the number of connections available. Everyone had frustrated fingers trying to sign on and the fear of being booted ran as high as losing electric in the middle of a game or tarot card reading. Somewhere between my potential internet bankruptcy (the computer was worse than a slot machine.) and my depositing $2.95 an hour into my piggy bank, opting for a flat-time billing, I realized that this machine took a lot more than cash out of my life. I had spent hours behind the keyboard. I was addicted to this machine that demanded that when a component didn’t work – a mouse – a modem – I had to immediately find a store that had a replacement – with an excuse of course – I had work to do on line – none of which ever paid me real money – like the cyber world – all you got was cyber cash redeemable for more time on line. (Looking back it is something like the dealer who gets you hooked – work for me and I will give you what you need.) Once, I had to return a monitor for a warrantee repair. The UPS man who has already been alerted that I expected something brought it back on Valentine’s Day. The gift from my boyfriend lay unopened while I opened the monitor and hooked it up to the CPU. Two hours later I remembered the box I had left on the sofa. Soon, and since my phone was always busy, people stopped calling me, people stopped inviting me and people stopped wanting to come over having to share their time with my computer. My legs hurt. My back hurt. My eyes got blurry from watching a monitor all day and I got fat. I did meet many of people on-line. Some of my new made friends are good friends and we are as close today as we were back then when we met in some cyber chat room. I hate to think of the amount of time that has passed since we first met – for some -their teen-aged kids have grown and some even have kids of their own, others have moved several times, some have divorced and started new lives, some just disappeared. Most of my friends never lived close enough for us to share a cup of coffee, other than in our land of make-believe where we would bring our mugs to our desk and drink while we chatted, but there were good things too. One of the good things about the internet is The Lighthouse. I started this literary magazine as a weekly back in 1995. Originally it was an offshoot of Inkslinks my original weekly that ran items of interest. I was always the curious type and Inkslinks allowed me to share my findings with my readers on line. (Of course I was hoping to get picked up by some publishing syndicate.) The Lighthouse’s signature foghorn would frighten most first time visitors but they tended to came back to visit again. Eventually The Echo – a series of poetry chap books I created and linked together became another weekly, but it was becoming a time where the service providers were getting strict about sending out bulk e-mailings. Even though I had confirmed mailing lists where people subscribed and requested the weekly mailings, AOL would say I violated their Terms Of Service (TOS) by sending out the weekly announcements. I risked being banned from the world I had come to love. It got to the point where I was spending hours pushing other people’s writing, providing interesting content for AOL subscribers and all I got back was flack from AOL and some of the writers. One writer who had a potential buyer for his book asked that I stop running chapters immediately so loyal readers who looked forward to reading each week’s installment were cut off from the ending of the book. Another writer got an agent – and … oh well the agent had high hopes – I am still waiting to see that book in print. One writer disappeared. A few other things went wrong here and there, but the one that pushed me out of the on-line publishing business was a poem. The poem submitted by a girl who claimed to be deaf. She signed a release saying it was her work and that she owned the copyright. Then, about a year later, I received an e-mail from the real writer demanding that I take the poem down and threatening me with legal action. In response, and not wanting to get in the middle of an argument, I sent her a copy of the release and suggested she chase the woman who submitted the poem as her own. I decided that a vacation was needed from the internet and now, I have decided that the vacation is over. I am writing again. I have again started to paint. I am enjoying my photography. I am hoping to be able to update this page more often. If you have something you would like me to look at feel free to drop me an e-mail Inkfeather@aol.com. If you would like some guidelines as to what I would be interested in posting up to the site, feel free to write as well. Thank you for your patience, and if you like what you read here, tell your friends. They are always welcome and we’ll keep the light on for ya - at The Lighthouse. |
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Darlene's World |
Poetry and Prose by Inkfeather ·
Cheers & Jeers about my Peers
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