I remember that! I've often made the argument we have god-like abilities at our fingertips compared to our ancestors. But we're still the same rugrats!

Louis C.K. is brilliant.

yep

I want to be Louis C.K.'s friend.

+1


But I still want my Moon bases.

I've been a Louis CK fan for years... really great comic.

And so true -- I've felt this way my entire life and am amazed at what our society takes for granted.

Could you ever have imagined we'd have something like the internet? Or that a device as powerful as a smartphone would exist in our lifetimes?

Except for the "talking to spaceships" thing, an iPhone is more advanced than the communicators on fucking Star Trek for God's sake.

Seriously. I've told the story before of how, back in, oh, 1980 or thereabouts, a buddy of mine and I were talking about gaming on computer networks -- we were huge PLATO gamers -- Avatar and Empire especially -- and he speculated that one day home computers would be able to network and play games like that, and that virtual D&D games would be played on computer networks, and I remember telling him, "Oh, sure, eventually -- but on the level you're talking about? Not in our lifetimes. Or, at least not when we'd still want to play."

Boy, was I wrong. Everything we talked about that night was easily surpassed by Everquest and WoW. And the quality of games you're seeing on the PS3 or Xbox 360? Hell, even the stuff you saw on the PS2 -- way beyond what we imagined you'd see in home game systems.

Let alone smartphones and things like the iPad.

Seriously, it's amazing that a community like IMWAN can exist.

The Star Trek never ceases to amaze me -- even in the 23rd Century, they couldn't imagine we'd have devices that powerful.

Or, for that matter, the 24th, since the tech in Next Generation isn't really all that much better.

When we were drawing up plans for my fraternity's new house in '83, one of the student members suggested that we might want to have a small room set aside for computers. After I stopped laughing he explained that, in the near future, most students would have computers hooked up to their phone lines, so it would be beneficial to have an area with phone jacks for that purpose.

I told him we'd put his "computers" right between the food replicator and the teleportation tubes.

Now that I don't find so amazing -- there were rudimentary versions of modern forums back in the PLATO days. In fact, a lot of things like e-mail and chatrooms/instant messaging were developed for the PLATO system in the '70s. I was logging on to the PLATO terminal in our university library and chatting and following nerd threads with people as early as '78. Hosted a small community much like IMWAN myself back in the day for about a year or so.

The bad thing about anybody mentioning Louis C K on IMWAN is that I then waste a half hour watching YouTube clips of Louis C K.

Yeah -- Don't you have research to conduct or papers to grade or awesome avatars to create?

What's with the new one, BTW? Some kinda prototype Totoro?

Prototoro?

It's a character from Azumanga Daioh. Looks kind of Totoroish.

Twitchyville was an awesome community! Ex-members still talk about it:

http://twitchyville.blogspot.com/

Actually, I think it was something involving "nightlight" or somesuch. I remember my login was "nighte" in usergroup "lighte".

Louis C.K. is great - this is my favorite bit of his.