As I sit here alone at Dragonfish, a swank sushi joint across from my hotel, I wonder how i'll act on my next visit. The fact that i'm thinking about it outside of the weird, geeky confines of my "internet time" definitely means that the site has hit a nerve - I certainly never think "this will be great on Facebook" and rarely think to update my twitter profile except when i'm bored (a fact made abundantly clear by my updates, i'm sure), but this one is different. It's got human-style interaction, sort of. It's got that anonymity that brings us back to the old days of the pre-commerce web. It's got erections.
Shitloads of erections.

enough bullshit - if you don't already know what i'm talking about, you should. The site in question is ChatRoulette, and it's amazing.

The thing about ChatRoulette is that it's weird.  Really weird.  There are quite a few erections on it, but that's not all there is. There's an amazing variety of people on here, probably averaging 25,000 at any given time.  Tonight, I've seen military guys, couples, tons of asians, groups of people sitting around, parties, lots of creepy guys (I'm probably one of those, given that I'm old and alone on here), and even a few girls.  The thing about it is that you can be anyone you want (like what you told yourself before you went off to college, only in 3-second bursts) - and people really are.  Apparently, a lot of them want to be watched as they jack off.  How are these folks so on top of things?  Like, they're just waiting for new ways to expose themselves, and get the memo before the normal people do, somehow.  Anyway, it doesn't matter, because you, too, can masturbate for strangers' amusement, too.  You can also practice your one-liners, your funny faces or voices, your crazy lies - whatever you want, because you can't find those people again and they can't find you.  Yet.  Also, you've gotta do it quick, because the denizens of CR are fucking FAST on the "Next" button.

This post has already taken three sittings and two days to complete, partially because ChatRoulette is so ineffable.  The other part is because I've been at work, but that shouldn't be an excuse.  Anyway, check it out.

So the Apple tablet has everyone's knickers in a twist.  Apple is going to blow up your expectations of what a slab of silicon and a plastic screen can do.  They're going to sell you rainbows and angels' wings in a oversimplified white box and everyone is going to pee on themselves about how awesome it's going to be.  And it'd better be awesome.

Here's why.

After Apple releases the tablet, that'll be it.  The same week that the iphone came out, everything in the cell phone industry ground to a halt and here we are, twenty years later (in tech time, anyway), with no innovation beyond the addition of wifi, eventually.  So Apple defined the new generation of phones, and here we are, waiting for them to define the budding generation of tablet PCs.  And it's not going to be awesome.

If you hung out with me during a very specific point during the late spring of 2007, you heard one of my rants on what I wanted from a tablet, so you should probably stop reading this now.  In fact, I'm going to put the rest of this rant below the break so that you don't even see it if you don't want.