Still life with A54 and Nori. Oil on Canvas.
Coworker in the office: “What’s AOL?”
“It’s where you go if you’re bad.”
(As I understand it, the last quivering bits of AOL are now a dial-up internet access provider in parts of the US where the local phone companies don’t offer broadband.)
I have exactly two friends/contacts still on AOL. Anyone else? What’s the headcount?
For the record, I have never been on AOL. We were a Compuserve family. And I had to listen to all my friends at school talk about the AOL only games they played… Arena…
Later, when AIM was a free alternative to Skype, it felt like such a luxury to install it and set up an account. I think I was CheekyRooster on there for some reason… there’s a stray neuron I didn’t know could still fire…
Oh, another one. CheekyRooster came from one of my Linguistics textbooks when they were discussing how semantic meaning gets passed to children - with a line drawing of a mother holding a child looking at (you guessed it) a Rooster. And the mother saying “What a cheeky rooster!”
Wow. It’s like an attic in here.
AOL Dial-up was officially shuttered last September.
At the moment, it’s just a news aggregator “homepage” and a webmail provider. My mother-in-law still uses her AOL email address.
Ah, AOL. Once the largest distributor of free shiny drinks coasters in the world.
Even better when it was free floppy disks. A drink coaster that holds 1.44MB (of your own data!)
My wife and I met on AOL 30 years ago. She still has an AOL email address.
I can’t remember if they were running the dialup or if it was a third party. Either way it got shut down because it wasn’t making money, and it was the infrastructure that other providers used…,
“First time I’ve had a pancake cake”
“It’s not pancake, it’s crêpe!”
“Hurry up, you’re moving like molasses.”
“No one even knows what that is!”
the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour)
Pretty speedy!
Not to be confused:
(the Dominion Theatre at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road is now on the site)
And if you need a distractinn this afternoon:
‘…but I mustn’t be mean — oh. [brightening up] I keep forgetting it’s not Lent any more.’
“Fortunately, the Twilight War happened before anyone invented Generative AI”
“No, that’s impossible. Anyone with Engineer (Stutterwarp), make a self-control roll not to explain why it’s impossible.”
“The way your brain works is wonderful but don’t do it near me.”
'As Nietzsche famously said: “If you gaze for long into an abyss, you’ll notice that the abyss gazes also into a second abyss, and there are two… abysses? abyssi? Anyhow, you get the idea.” ’
- You gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
- There is an infinite recursion of abysses each staring into the next
- You gaze into the abyss, and it is you.
- You gaze into the abyss, and it is you, but mirror imaged (Möbius Nietzsche)
- Sign up today for Abyss as a Service!
Very similar to something I say very often to my youngest - “I love the way your brain works but can you do it a bit quieter?”
“My nose is full of tree sperm.”
“Can you just call it Hay Fever like everyone else?”