Monday, July 28, 2003 5:48:02 PM Joe Coluccio

Things are more not now than they had even been then.
La plus ça change, la plus change seems like a lot.

I thought I had, for a guy 58 years old, weathered the fast and ever quickening pace of the electronic frontier. I do not quake at the sight of code written in almost any flavor from pre-assembler to 4GL and beyond. Can't say I understand them either, but they don't scare me a whit! No more than looking at some twisted Cyrillic or a diagrammatic Hiragana and Katakana or some squiggling Semitic Notations or High Order Partial Differentiations. I merely sigh; to me they look beautiful, unattainable and full of a promise.

I have embraced blogs and moblogs and wikis. Believed them? Hell, I've used them. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Praxis, praxis, praxis! I can watch a high res copy of a movie on any of my computers. I can turn key strikes on a piano keyboard or from the strings of my guitar through a synthesizer into instant music notation in a file residing somewhere on my high hard drive. I listen frequently to KQED San Francisco and Wisconsin Public Radio and LBC London and WGN Chicago and 2GS Sydney Australia as freely via the internet as if they were in this same region (It is all that I can do not to pound my fists on this flimsy desk at the state of radio in this city this country because of the mole like vision of the industry and its regulatory agency. Local radio is as dead as the bland formats that it tries to foist on us.). And via router and WAP I can sit in wireless glory at my backyard lawn glasstop table and stay connected.

An aside.
I gathered all this great wireless equipment only to be defeated by the rain. The amount of rain we have had for the last forty days and nights should have me mizzening the mainmast on a schooner heading for Ararat. Proof once again that the testaments old and new are more mythically drawn than accurate real. All we've gotten for the extreme amount of rain is soggy grounds, the inability to stay dry and an aching summer cold that two aspirins and an antihistamine do nothing to alleviate.

Given all my easy acceptance of what most people face with a daily horror I must admit that I was given to pause this weekend when I heard the following story on NPR.

The names are changed 'cause I can't remember them and it doesn't really matter. There is a fantasy game played on the internet 24 hours a day and forever and a year. Let's call it ElvenQuest. It might really be the name. You enter this world formed by the force and imagination of a myriad of others, create a character and have adventures with a hapless group of fellow travelers. If your character is unfortunate enough to stand in the fiery breath of a Dragon from the next zip code you and your creation expire and are no longer a part of the game. Tu es mort, mon ami! Being a mere mortal and possibly a thief or a third level sorcerer and hence not immune to the dangers of your quest, you are able through guile, robbery or just plain old fashioned bludgeonery to obtain objects with power to protect you and keep you swinging on a star. The Magic Sword of Arthur, the babushka of Babiyaga, the Tongue of a young toad or a deferred annuity. So that when, Clem, the Dragon, puffs cigarette rings toward you, you can throw up your asbestos cloak given you by someone who abates hazardous compounds, or jump through the center of the rings with a flubber powered pogo stick. Leaving you, whole and healthy and able to move on to yet another level of adventure.

Let us back to the world that we think we inhabit for a short second and watch as it crumbles. There is this new institution called EBay, an internet agora where you can find, buy and sell just about anything, less the Nazi trinkets just banned and some extreme antisocial forms of pornography.

It turns, Meine Damen und Herren, that you can buy, with real dollars, taken from your working pockets, many of the implements that will save you in the world of ElvenQuest with a mere twist of credit card on an EBay Auction! Stunned I continue!

I thought I was clever looking for the first baby that would be born during an internet tryst. Sexual liaison would be done via a hot chat session which would provide as a result some container full of male seed which would be shipped cross country or world and implanted in the woman partner and Viola (her name) nine months later a spawn of that virtual passion would be the issue. Welcome CyberInfusedBaby !

That seems downright plebeian now in the light of this new Republican Revelation. Who, I ask, will become the first entrepreneurial and very real billionaire, selling these evanescent wares to be figuratively used to save characters overwrought by imagination in a fantasy game spread across the planet into eternity?

Gives new perception to the cave doesn't it, Plato?