Helpless In The Face Of Your Beauty

While casually browsing my website’s logs for hits from people looking for CICCU, rocking backwards and forwards and crooning “Soon, my precious! Soon!”, I noticed that some people from Facebook had been talking about the Losing my Religion page.

Coincidentally, Varsity recently interviewed one of the admins (PDF, look on page 7) of the Cambridge University mail server, hermes. The article mentioned Facebook, so I suppose it’s where the hip kids hang out these days. The article’s a bit odd. It’s one of those “the young people always think they invented it” things: apparently, email began in 2003. That’s more than just too late, for me, but I’m pretty sure that back in 1994 there was the joy of Pine and the anxiety of using finger to see whether New Hall girls had read their email (oh good, I seem to have navigated that sentence without saying “fingering”). There was none of this webmail nonsense. Things were starkly terminal based on the frontier of the Information Prairie, the bleached bones of our text lying on the dark surface of my wildly mixed metaphor. There was a greater awareness of the fragile underpinnings of it all, a rough justice needed to preserve order in our fledgling society: I got a sternly worded email from the man who became the author of Exim, telling me to stop pissing about sending myself mail from god@heaven. And we liked it.

So, Facebook. I joined. It seems to be a gentrified version of Myspace. There’s the bit where you can leave people messages and look at the pictures of them looking pale and interesting, but the residents’ committee has clamped down on the flashing purple text on a black background and the humourous cross-site scripting attacks. I didn’t have the de rigeur photo of myself exhibiting Internet disease (warning: Encyclopedia Dramatica is rarely safe for anything, although there’s nothing specifically worthy of summary dismissal on that page at the time of writing), so I just used the one off my website. I wandered around and laughed at the community called “FUCCU”. It’s all harmless fun I suppose. I’ve e-friended some of you on there, just cos: I’m not sure of the etiquette of friending on Facebook, so friend me back if you like, but don’t do it just because I know where most of you live.

I never did find out what people were saying about the religion page, the referrals were people following links from private messages. I expect it was the CICCU people wondering when I will actually overtake their official site in Google’s rankings. Soon, my precious, soon.

Anyone up for Isolatr? It’s where the cool people aren’t.

10 Comments on "Helpless In The Face Of Your Beauty"


    1. Naughty but nice! Does Google pay attention to links on here though?

      I note that the actual CICCU site currently has this symbol on it. It almost looks like they have a keen interest in transgender issues too!

      Reply

    1. Yes: there’s a category for “alumnus/alumna” which you can get if you’ve got a cantab.net address. A cantab.net address is surprisingly easy to obtain without much verification: why not be I.Newton.61 AT cantab.net, for example?

      Reply

  1. Hummmm. Well you’re currently page-ranked 3/10. CICCU is 5/10. So I think you have a quite a way to go! (Particularly as the ranking is non-linear).

    I want someone to explain to me the facebook etiquette of poking.

    Reply

    1. Yes, I did wonder about that. Perhaps I should poke some people and see what happens.

      I also want to know what “random play” is. 🙂

      [reposting now I’ve logged in]

      Reply

      1. When I google, my entry on the talk at the Union is in at number 5, above the original essay at number 8.

        You’re googling Culture ship names?

        Reply

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