days_of_innocence_lost Pilgrim Many the words have I written as text laboriously crafted here, only to have them swept away by the capcha. Damn you KX21! Your mechanical meddling percipitated this paranoid security state causing Me to Read far more than I Write. 140213 ... n o m i don't think the captcha resulted from kx21's use of blather, did it? i seem to remember there being instances of bot spam. 140213 ... n o m i copy text before posting 140213 ... n o m also i liked a lot of kx21's posts 140213 ... flowerock I had to look up "captcha" to understand this... I wonder... does blather ever just let pages go/delete them? is there limited space to be filled here? is there a way to find the very first blather? things I wonder... and speaking of captcha I have reloaded 3 times trying to post this... I can't read this crap. 140213 ... Pilgrim I access blather from an LG flip phone these days. Small screen and bad eyes. A double whammy. I believe KX21 WAS a Spambot, No? 140213 ... raze the_first_words_on_red_blather were on "test", on january 24, 2001. that looks to be the day red went live. i think the first blathe on blue was "time", in august of 1998. i seem to remember there being a sort of test phase pre-blather blue blather for a short time before that. i wasn't around to see it at the time, but i think someone on blue dug it up in all its long-dormant strangeness some years ago. kx21 wasn't a spambot. if the research some people conducted on blue is to be believed, he was a dude named alfred. in the beginning i thought he was pretty fascinating. he had some interesting things to say and an interesting way of saying them. it was fun trying to decode his message. i think english not being his first language might have had something to do with the way his writing sometimes read like the work of a computer trying to understand human thought processes. it was during the iraq war that his original content dried up and he started copying and pasting war-related internet news results all the time, everywhere. that got hard to take. you literally couldn't go anywhere on blue without running into some coldly-written news article about bush and oil and weapons of mass destruction. i did think the whole "kx21 must die" thing went way too far, but there were also people who tried very gently to reason with him, who asked him to explain what he was trying to accomplish and suggested to him it would be more effective if he used his own words and told us what HE thought about all this. he went right on spamming, undeterred. i don't think he ever engaged with another person one-on-one again once he started doing that stuff. he made blather his place to dump every news article he found, and that was it. i think it was the brazen lack of consideration for anyone else on blather that got some 'skites up in arms. oddly enough, he never said a thing over here. i have a hard time believing in all his years at blather he never found out about red, so i'm not sure what that was about. i just think it's a shame that he didn't keep the regurgitated political stuff in one corner of blue if he felt a need to preserve it there. spreading it all over the place without any regard for where it was going made a lot of people angry, and made it easy to forget the worthwhile contributions he'd made. the captcha wasn't implemented until october 2006 when we were getting bombarded with viagra spam. the birth of the captcha can be traced back to these two blathes: http://blather.newdream.net/c/can_something_be_done_about_these.html http://blather.newdream.net/d/dallas_speaks.html blather has "eaten" a few blathes when the captcha has timed out and someone has hit the refresh or back button on a browser that didn't save their words (i learned the hard way to always highlight and copy my text), and in years past there were a few blathes in which people expressed a fear that blather was being erased. but i think they were just having trouble finding all their blathes because they'd changed their email address a few times, and when they'd click on their name in any given place they were only getting a partial list of their stuff. to my knowledge, the only instances of anything ever being erased on blather have been: (1) when one 'skite kind of vandalized the personal space of another, and then realized they'd gone too far and asked dallas to remove what they'd written; (2) a lot of the viagra and cialis spam being deleted. i don't think there's any of it left on red, but some of it survives on blue. and there were the "squishyfish" and "arglarglarglar" people who went around typing the same thing on a hundred pages because they were bored, which i guess was a more human form of spam. that's all still there too. given that blue has been up and running for fifteen and-a-half years now and red just turned thirteen, and given how little space most blathes take up (it takes a lot to get anywhere near a megabyte), i don't think we have to worry about blather running out of space anytime soon. it looks like it's going to be here as long as the server keeps breathing and the blather gods keep giving it food and water every once in a while. blather could theoretically outlive us all. how funny would that be? talk about the ultimate internet time capsule... 140213 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Hmm. Both blather-places are teenagers now. I don't know about innocence lost, but teenagers are supposed to get all grumpy and rebellious, aren't they? 140213 ... e_o_i (Oh, and if "the cave crumbles around me," I just press the back button and cut and paste the text - which is still there, just not blatherable - before going back to the original word and blathing again.) 140213 ... n o m kx21 seemed to express thoughts and opinions, in a certain way, whereas the spam bots that i saw were just posting spam 140213 what's it to you? who go blather from