The Meme That Roared

The issue of my not having a website came up at the pub one Tuesday morning, when the loose collection of borderline sociopaths I call friends were discussing Swine Flu.

“I refuse to blog it,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. “Partly because it has nothing to do with games but mostly because there’s almost no way to talk about it ironically. Swine flu. I mean - what the hell?”

“Hear hear,” said my extremely rich friend Silver. “I mean, when people come to my blog they’re there to read about what it would be like to own an awesome car and have a hot girlfriend in a hot tub, not about some kind of boring respiratory disease.”

The thing about Silver that still amazes me to this day is that he’s able to say these sorts of things without coming across as a total bastard. He’s a big sunny, rich guy who honestly believes people like it when he reminds them how rich he is. I sucked at my Lemon Lime and Bitters, bitterly.

“What about you dude?” asked Vic, who’d just finished telling us about how he was blogging on the 17 greatest 1980s ABC afternoon TV fillers set to progressive rock. (Number one was of course the four minute, thirty-nine second mash-up of moonwalk footage set to Mike Oldfield’s Incantations Part IV.) “What’s your blogging policy on Swine Flu?”

“Um,” says I. “Thing is guys, I don’t really have a blog.”

I might just as well have announced that from now on I was strictly a sheep man. There was a shocked silence around the rickety table. Cmos choked on the olive from his Beertini.

“Wait just a second,” said Vic, greasy palm out in the universal gesture for wait just a second. “You mean to say that you, dude, a renowned or at least regularly published PC games columnist, don’t have a website?”

I shrugged. “I had one for a while, but you know how it goes. The URL lease renewal came up, and then the hosting fees, there were spambots all through my comments system and a bunch of Russians were using my spare bandwidth to shuffle MP3s around the planet.” I shrugged again. “So I just let it all slide.”

Vic threw himself back into his chair in shocked disgust. It overbalanced and he crashed to the floor in a swirl of filthy tracksuit pants and leather greatcoat. So it was Silver who spoke.

“But dude, guy. I mean, it’s like hacking off your FACE. How can you survive without people knowing what you’re thinking every moment of the day?”

Cmos was using his iPhone to update his Twitter account with a comment that probably read something like “shocked to discover close friend not on Twitter.”

“Look,” said Silver, holding out some kind of expensive mobile phone that was so disgustingly awesome I refuse to even give it the satisfaction of product placement. “Twitter is free, dude. You can sign up right here. Or MySpace. Or I can even spot you forty bucks to get one of those hosting packages in a Texas data centre, the really cheap ones with no virus protection or backups.”

I felt like the wolves were rounding on me, preparing to cut me down and thus strengthen the herd… or something. The worst part was how they all looked so concerned, like I’d just announced I was suffering from a terminal disease.

“Seriously guys, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m happy on my various fora and browsing. I don’t need a permanent base of operations on the internet.”

“The man speaks, like, in a nonsense backwards language,” said Vic theatrically. “The net is the seething mass of pupated maggots closeted in the carcass of the human experience. You have to bust out of your grisly chrysalis and become a beautiful butterfly.”

“You mean BLOWFLY,” I said.

“Look dude,” said Vic, glancing at the other two. “We’ll be straight with you. We didn’t call you down here to convince you to get a Twitter account. We need you to buy webspace. We NEED webspace.”

“What the hell for?” I squawked.

“The Russians,” said Cmos. “We… we signed some stuff. Now we owe them bandwidth. It’s sort of like a protection racket, only much more cyber.”

“Very zeitgeisty,” nodded Silver.

I just stared at them.

“You gotta help us man,” said Vic, the words flowing with practiced ease from his rubbery lips. “Big Leonov said unless we came up with eighty more gig a month by Friday he’d give us all a Moscow Enema!”

“Moscow enema?” I said. “That’s a euphemism right?”

“Yes and no,” said Silver. “But mostly no.”

“Why don’t you just BUY some more bandwidth?”

“It’s not that simple,” said Silver. “It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme. Or a Ponzi scheme. I can never remember which is which.”

“This is the internet, after all,” nodded Cmos.

“Forget it!” I screamed, and fled the scene. I never did find out what happened. But the next time I saw Vic, he sure was walking funny.