Bowels of the Internet: Oubliettes

You can dislike internet culture for lots of legitimate reasons. Fanwank. Child pornography. 4chan. Comment sections. Youtube. 4chan. Vampires. Memes. 4chan. All that. I've covered some of these before. But there's another side to that coin. There's sites out there you don't want to visit, not because they're 4chan, but because you know that when you do, you're not going to be done with them for at least a couple of hours. These are the internet dungeons you'll be happy to waste away in, the Brave New World of information. Tread carefully.

The Devilfish Connection: Chapter 2

A Song of Beef and Squire


'twas high moon on a cloudless night when I made my way through the filth-strewn labyrinth of hovels and beggars to the unnamed tavern in the harbor. The pregnant moon shone silver like coin tossed by a trickster god, frozen in the cold blue dome of night as if the fate of the world would be decided once the coin touched the horizon that held the fate of this world and many world with it, the stars a million eyes staring down on the wild hunt that is the heart of our land.

Bowels of the Internet: Fandom

I remember a time before the internet. It wasn't all that great. I remember reading books, seeing movies and playing games that I instinctively loved, the kind of love that is usually reserved for a child or spouse or really cool pet. I also remember shutting the fuck up about it, because the chances of anyone in my small town having seen the same thing and having made the same sort of connection with it were minimal at best, non-existent at worst, and the risks of running around town asking kids if they also liked the big book with the elves and the orcs was just not worth the potential gain. (Giving a girl a wedgie is not cool you guys.) Little did I know that those days were when I started my slow transformation into a fangirl.

Guilty Pleasures: American Idol

We had our own nation's American Idol knockoff once. It was just called "Idol", because Belgian Idol would be inaccurate (Flemish people only) and the producers do not have a sense of humor about these things, so Flemish Idol was off the table too. It lasted for two seasons. Nobody remembers who won, but that one girl everyone liked but didn't win did some stuff on a local TV channel for a while. Good for her.

Flaming Hell: Religion

Introducing the shiny new unofficial PI Squirrel internet series (unofficial means it doesn't get its own page for now), where I paint a big red target on my ass and talk about topics that are guaranteed to start forum flame wars. These are the discussion that always, always go wrong in several directions at once. Anyone who starts a thread on these is almost certainly trolling, new to the internet or delightfully naive. No matter how delicate or sensitive or empathic you are, there's always one idiot who messes things up and reminds us why we can't have nice things.

Points of view may differ and there's no point arguing about that, like whether chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, but some things are always wrong, like underpants smoothies.