Books I’ve read in 2007:

• The Umbrella Man - by Roald Dahl
  
• Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life - by Roald Dahl
  
• Boy - by Roald Dahl Roald’s childhood biography. Man, schools really beat the hell out of kids back then.
  
• Going Solo - by Roald Dahl Mostly a bunch of Roald’s personal war stories from WWII. Which, for some reason, I really enjoyed.
  
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - by Roald Dahl I read this one in just one evening.
  
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - by Sieur Louis De Conte, translated by Mark Twain Somehow I’d never read the story of Joan of Arc in any form before. I’ve never even seen a movie about her, aside from Bill & Ted. This was a great book and she ruled. It was written by a childhood friend of hers who went to war with her and was present at all her trials.
  
• Cell - by Stephen King: Another one of his “the whole world has ended so me and a small group of people must travel somewhere” books. I really liked it though!
  
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator - by Roald Dahl: This one was stupid. Really stupid. I didn’t even like it a little. Stupid stupid stupid.
  
• The Mysterious Stranger - by Mark Twain: My favorite Mark Twain story from the past couple years. This is about the fourth time I’ve read this one. It’s short - just 100 pages or so.
  
• The Prince and the Pauper - by Mark Twain

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Angela and I went to see Juno this evening, which was as awesome as I expected. After that we snuck into I Am Legend, which means I’ve seen it THREE TIMES in the theater now. The kids and I snuck into it last weekend after seeing The Golden Compass. It’s been great every time.

The other day a guy posted on my 618 BBS shrine page a link to his page at telnetbbsguide.com. So I decided to give some BBSes a try yesterday. I logged into two of them and played around on them for about an hour. One of them was a WWIV BBS, which I haven’t seen since the late 90’s. It’s weird, because they still scroll slowly as if I’m on a 9600 baud connection and they still use ANSI graphics and you have to hit the space bar after each page to scroll through long posts and stuff.

The two BBSes I visited weren’t exactly active. The WWIV board hadn’t had hardly any posts from this year. A few of the games (Tradewars, Pimp Wars, etc) seemed to be somewhat active. There were files areas, voting, and all the other stuff that used to come with BBSes. I don’t know if they still update software like WWIV, but it looked and felt just like it always had. It was neat, feeling like I was in the early 90’s again.

But I really don’t understand the point of running or visiting a BBS. I mean, anything that can be done on these things can be accomplished just as well on a website. Forums and file areas, obviously. The games are mostly text-based with a few ANSI screens thrown in. It’d be easy to port those into web sites or flash. Seems like the only appeal to BBSing would be to connect with people in a certain geographical area. But since these are all using telnet instead of dialup now, that part of it makes no sense either. Besides, you can find local people, things, conversations on Yahoo Groups and Craigslist.

I just don’t get the point of any of it other than to feel retro. A lot of the posts on the WWIV board were things along the lines of, “Oh, this brings back so many memories!” and there wasn’t much conversation besides that. I guess that’s all BBSing is good for. If someone wants to point out something to prove me wrong, I’d like to hear your opinion on it.

Tomorrow’s gonna be busy.

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