"a few words from your lord and master"
by scott crawford
Some random thoughts on this, the CT's 3rd anniversary...
Three years ago...:
I read comics a hell of a lot more often than I do presently.
Need to work on that soon.
I didn't have a ...just an . Back then, I was getting about the same amount of site
traffic in a year that I get in a week now.
I knew significantly less about HTML than I do (which is
getting to be quite a bit, for someone who doesn't take it very
seriously), and nothing about Perl, which I'm just starting to learn
now.
I wasn't working on music, and had lost my drive to do it. As
you can see ,
, and
, I'm getting it back,
little by little.
I'd never been to Canada. Now, I want to move there.
I'd never been to Texas, either. It's probably a pretty close
second on my "places to move" list.
There were a lot more places to go, and things to do in the New
York metropolitan area. A lot of what I love here has either been
, or outright destroyed.
None of us had ever seen .
It was still
world...the rest of us just lived in it.
I didn't possess a driver's license, or own a motor vehicle.
After almost 2 years of having both, the novelty's just about totally
worn off.
and
were both
still a little ways off from being "fads". I have yet to decide which
are worse.
I was less than a month removed from a pretty serious,
long-term relationship. Today, I'm a day shy of 4 months removed from
a very serious relationship, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2
months into something that could end up being one. Only time will
tell, I suppose.
i didn't capitalize any text that i typed on the internet.
"Oops...I did it again."
didn't exist yet. It was a lot harder to find smut and garbage on the
'net as a result...
...but not impossible, as
made the name "Lewinsky" synonymous with "fellatio" back then.
Matt's still getting himself in all sorts of trouble, the wacky kid. As an aside, I think
that is actually a lot
cooler than he is, and I'm pretty sure Matt would agree with me.
Speaking of the devil, Bill Clinton was still president of the
United States. Funny, it's only been a few months since that changed,
but it already feels as remote as the Reagan presidency to me.
I had a lot more drive to collect material things than I do
presently. Perhaps it's the lack of space and/or funds, maybe it's the
realization that my belongings have cost me a lot of mobility, or
maybe I've realized that you really can't take it with you, but I'm
looking at things rather differently these days. (Mental note to self:
must get some proof (photographic or otherwise) that all this stuff
really WAS in the same place at the same time, while I still have it.)
I might've been drunk while I was typing this. As of this
writing, it's been a while.
I still worked in a .
I'm not there anymore, and neither is the mall.
I would've been typing this either on the Pentium 100 I had at
work, or the Mac SE30 with the black and white, 9" screen (with 8 megs
of RAM) that I used then. I'm looking at this text on a 21" color
monitor right now, and typing this column (using the same
application!) with 8 other applications running, and a respectable
49.4 megs of RAM unused. See, some things do actually improve with
time.
weren't
quite as fashionable as they are now.
Those goddamn Pokemon hadn't made their way to the States yet.
The had
3 less world championships, 2 guys named David in their starting
rotation (who hadn't pitched perfect games yet), and a helluva lot
more faith in Darryl Strawberry.
The were still getting their asses kicked by
; Owen Hart
was alive, well, and still part of a WWF faction called the "Nation Of
Domination" with a relative newcomer named Rocky Maivia; Mick Foley
hadn't fallen off the roof of the Hell In A Cell yet; and Kurt Angle
was just some ex-Olympic guy from Pittsburgh. Anyone who doesn't
follow professional wrestling can undoubtedly click on the above links
and see how things have played out for the involved parties.
In a somewhat related note, the notion of Time-Warner, WCW's
former parent company, was ludicrous back then, and people within the
company had a lot more job security. How this bodes for
in the near future is
anyone's guess. Hopefully, they'll get
done
before anything bad happens.
Speaking of comics,
had a few less balls than he does today. Money really can buy anything! :D
A few of my friends from back then aren't around anymore.
Everyone, pour a 40 on the ground for Mary,
,
(who actually left us on
April 1, 1998...), and anyone else that I'm forgetting at the moment.
I had far fewer
at the time than I do now, to counterbalance things a bit.
"Who the hell is Eminem?"
An X-Men movie was still filed under "Yeah, I'll believe it
when I see it" in most comics fans' minds.
On a similar note, if you told me that
would
be doing a weekly column for a Disney owned web site, you'd have
gotten a "Yougoddabefugginkiddinme!"
We were living in the Shitty 90's, rather than the Oppressive
Oughts.
And, finally...
Not many people had
MP3s, never mind . There
was no place great to look for them, and if you found them, it'd be
hell storing them. Back then, was just some geek kid. Come to think of it, the more
things change...=)
That's it for now. Thanks for reading me
when I have something on here, thanks to Sheryl and the gang for
having the CT here in the first place, and here's to another 3 years
of it.