Friday, January 17, 2014

The Post-Net Neutrality Dystopia [NSFW]

I don’t recommend following any of these links. Some aren’t real. Some will get you fired from work.

Little Jamal has pimples and doesn’t like going outside, but he has needs. We all deny what his needs are, but we know them. We know them when he buys aloe lotion and Kleenex. He sure knows them when he tries to load redtube.com.

But it’s a brave new world, and because of his ISP, redtube.com doesn’t load for him anymore.

So he tries richgirlsmakingmistakes.com, but it times out too. It’s like they knew his browsing history and torpedoed it.

hottiesandnaughties.com. rule34.com. spankbank.org is up, somehow, but has blacked itself out in protest.

Little Jamal pulls up Twitter to complain and ask for links to good skin sites. Because Twitter hasn’t inked a kickback deal with Little Jamal’s ISP, it doesn’t load at all. After two minutes, the Fail Whale mocks his unopened box of Kleenex.

Many of the blocked links have a redirect to the ISP’s homepage, which has shoddy design and unappealing functions, which is why people only wind up there from redirects. It loads really fast, though, with its animated menu of contract options. Little Jamal scrolls around for some function to bitch them out and stumbles upon the bio of the CEO, a 68-year-old woman who smiles fakely.

Little Jamal looks into that JPEG of a smile. It’s Friday night and he doesn’t have anywhere to go, and he has needs. He squints at the JPEG and reaches for the aloe. The ISP has brought this upon our world.

23 comments:

  1. An ISP whose only content access is its own site... Flash back to AOL in the 90s.

    And hey, when you gotta aloe, you gotta aloe.

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    1. The funny thing is that I loved AOL back then, but it was the only internet I'd ever experienced. One comic book chat room was all it took.

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  2. It seems to me that the ISP is meeting little Jame;'s needs. ^_^

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    1. If a comment could have freaked me out, Helen...

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  3. Lmao very good. Maybe Kleenex should setup a fund to champion a free internet. Censorship will affect their profits after all :).

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  4. Poor little Jamal needs to go back to analoque...

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  5. Man, little Jamal just needed a first edition D&D Monster Manual:
    http://badgods.com/search/succubus

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    Replies
    1. Too true! The analogue world made us soft. Also, turgid.

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    2. *snerk*

      By the way, if you don't read Lore's Monster Manual comics, you really should.

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  6. Probably too true. Then the geeks will come to the rescue, building an undernet with modified wifi routers, and Jamal will have his needs met.

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  7. Eh. He just needs a few fashion magazines. Elle's 2014 ready-to-wear collection edition will either meet his needs or kill them forever and ever.

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  8. It's sad that I can see this happening in the not-too-near future. =(

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  9. Strangely enough, that line from Cool Hand Luke (grins) comes to mind: "What we got here..."

    Sad little man, that Jamal

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  10. It seems little Jamal's needs were met after all, maybe not as well as he's have liked though.

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  11. Is it weird that I was rooting for little Jamal to have his needs met? lol

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  12. Seems like just about anything would've done the trick for him by the end of the story.

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  13. I get the feeling part of the fun was coming up with the links...

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  14. What happened to old-fashioned magazines?

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