/b/search

BAM! To behold, a public bulletin board, built of both brilliance and barbarity by bastards with boners. This bastion, no mere bulwark of boredom, is a brutal barrage of blistering bullshit, barely benevolent… but behind the bigotry and boobs, beyond the bitter broadcasts of bragging buffoons: here be the body politic. A brotherhood of blasphemy, blessed with more balls than brains, battling the bland, the bogus, the benign. Bedlam? Bring it on. But I babble… better to be brief. You may call me /b/.
– Anonymous

I am bored

I’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet. From the days of eWorld, PPP dialup access, 2400bps modems, the excitement when 14.4bps modems came out. Then came broadband. After the tech installed the cable modem, I really didn’t know what to do first - sure, seeing big sites load really fast was nifty. Then came fast Usenet downloads, Hotline replaced the dialup BBS, no more having to first transfer downloads to my ISP and then to my computer. It was great.

Then came bigger and better - Web 2.0, AJAX, MySQL, PHP, and so on. Now, even with 5Mbps downstream at home, things still move slow. BitTorrent, Gnutella, Flickr, YouTube - I’d kill for more speed. Not the 7Mbps I could get from jumping to some sort of DSL package, but the 40Mbps promised by fiber connections.

So I’m stuck with a so-so connection, but on-demand entertainment is lacking. Nothing is on-demand when music and movies can take more than a week to “obtain.” How do I get my fix when I need to kill time, or when I’m just bored?

The answer is /b/.