Our founder, Sir Bloody William Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William. He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This image was rumoured to have been commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!

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Rants >> Rant 253

::Today's soundtrack: Kommonity FK "Something Inside Me Has Died" ::


The internet is a thing of beauty, is it not? I look at it nearly every damned day, and I never get tired of it. It's always got something new and interesting to show me. It can make me laugh, and sometimes cry. It brings me personal messages, and it shows me videos. It tells me sweet secrets.

Yes, I, William the Bloody, am an internet addict. I never used to understand addicts. How they can let the recreational use of something become so strong and compulsive and let it have so much control over their daily lives. I get it now. I never used to have the internet. I come from a computer-less childhood. It started out innocently enough. I got the internet for e-mail so I could keep in touch with my friends who went off to university. Then that branched off into using it to research specific topics of interest such as when the latest movie and album releases were going to be. Then my friends started to forward me things. Links. That's when I started to realize there was a whole internetty world out there. Not that I'm blaming them. My friends. It's always so easy for an addict to say it's their friend's fault for introducing them to whatever it is they abuse, but I could have restrained myself. I could have only looked at the one fan-cartoon on Newgrounds, but no. I had to do a search for other things. And another. And another.

Now it's to the point where I SAY, "oh I'm just going to check my e-mail" and then THREE HOURS later, I couldn't even tell you what I was doing. Check e-mail. Check website for comments. Check out the sites of those who commented. Check tagboard. Read at least six daily webcomics. Read at least three semi-regularly updated blogs of interest. And that's if I manage to show restraint. Who knows what other clickables I'll see on these places which shove me on a tangent? A webcomic could be based on a meme. There is a link to the source meme. Then links to other memes. Which goes back to Youtube. Oh man, don't even get me started on Youtube. It is the devil incarnate for a struggling addict like myself. And the E-bay. Great googly moogly E-bay! All the stuff I've been searching for my whole life is right there on E-bay! Comic books from twenty years ago, long lost LPs, short packed action figures....

The horrible thing about this? I only realized my addiction recently. My internet connection has been really spotty for the past couple of months. Oh sure, sometimes it would cut out, but I'd just unplug the Wi-fi thing, plug it back in, click repair connection, and be golden. But now? That only works fifty percent of the time. I could be in the middle of something, and it'll just stop for no apparent reason. Then I get it going again, but only for thirty seconds and it conks out again. I'll be in the middle of typing an e-mail and I click send, only to have "page cannot be displayed" show up and the e-mail is lost. Is it just me, or is "page cannot be displayed" the four most dreaded words on the internet? You see that and you feel your heart sink into your stomach and you want to do something about it but you don't know what and then you can't think because somebody is screaming and then you realize that somebody is you. Screaming. That's when I knew I was an addict. When my connection started cutting out and I began panicking. That's when I took a metaphorical look at myself and thought "when, how, did this happen?" I didn't used to have internet at all and I was fine, now look at me! Freaking out because page 2 of the latest Lolcats won't display! The hell??

Hello, my name is William and I am an internet addict. Someone's got to develop a twelve step program for this.

William the Bloody (off the wagon)