Most of the content before you is the product of Berlin’s mind, not mine. I stuck around as a sort of “Useless Emeritus”, which in a happy coincidence was (and is) an accurate description, however parsed. The pages moved from their longtime URL at Primus Consulting to their next longtime URL at Chaco Communications. So he took over, and uselessness blossomed anew. That man, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, was Steve Berlin. Hand ’em over.” Those were not his exact words, but paraphrase is not my specialty. It was at this moment that someone who was simply BORN for this job stepped forward and said “Hey, you stupid twit, the Useless Pages are not cutting it any longer. My “pending” mailbox grew even as the volume of submissions finally started to subside. So maintenance lagged, update frequency diminished. Can you imagine trying to come up with new and creative ways of insulting people, every day? I know, it sounds like a walk in the park (Central Park, anyway) but let me tell you, kid, it wasn’t. Okay, so maybe “throngs” overstates the one time somebody took my picture, and maybe I did request it, and maybe there were no picket lines. The pressure started to wear on me early in 1995 fighting through media throngs and angry picket lines to get to my home was wearing me down. Persistence paid off, and they and I were eventually featured in a whole bunch of online and offline publications, inaccurately enumerated on the Awards Page. I shamelessly promoted the pages to anyone who would listen, and many who wouldn’t. If you can tell which is which, you’re one up on me. Research into that phenomenon is left for a future project.) Furthermore, some of these pages are intentionally useless: that is, they poke fun at their own subject matter. (I have been amazed at the number of people that submit their own pages for inclusion. If you see your own pages here, don’t come after me with a pickaxe, I didn’t choose all these personally. “Useless” in this context doesn’t mean poorly done or of no value at all, it just means that there isn’t any point in making these things available on the web. If you see a page and think “Good God, WHO CARES?” you have found a likely submission. I just thought the subtitle was amusing. Actually, they’re quite well represented. The discovery that someone had typed in his entire 30K CD collection for Since you’re wasting your time even now, the useless pages page is first on the list of useless pages.I don’t mean to preclude those outside the Americas from being considered useless. Through Usenet I brought this to the attention of other like-minded sorts who experience pleasure through the ridicule of others, who deluged me with pointers to ever more useless creations.Īnd so the Useless Pages were born, christened with approximately the following text, inaccurately preserved for posterity (it is uncertain just how much this has mutated from its original form.) Its utility was nil, its style banal, its content embarrassing, its unintentional humor value high. Sometime in 1994 (yes, Virginia, there WAS a web back then) I encountered “ Kenny Z’s CD list” during a late night search session. (Unlike most of the Useless Pages, I’s in this text refer to Paul Phillips, not Steve Berlin. What you will read in the next lines, is an article written by Paul Phillips in 1996! This is a work in progress, you can expect changes as soon as I get my hands on new material about the useless pages. You are going to witness the birth of The Useless Web, the real and original one, not our contemporary one. Big as in Colossal, something like the Big Bang of pointless, useless websites. In search for new useless websites to offer our visitor we came upon something really big. A Brief History of Uselessness on the web
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