2002-01-28 - 8:56 a.m.
Last night I got the following piece of spam:
"Miguelito, Cupid�s calling you to eBay."
So that�s what that sudden, piercing pain in my asshole was.
Remember when you could actually find cool (albeit geeky) stuff at reasonable prices on eBay? Granted, you found geeky stuff at outrageously inflated prices there, too, but no one put a gun to your head or filled your inbox with junk e-mail to force you to buy it. And you could find just about anything on the planet. All those people who used to howl about how eBay takes the magic out of collecting can go get bent; if all I want is a Simpsons lunchbox or an out-of-print MST3K poster or a hard-to-find copy of one of Rocket from the Crypt�s early vinyl albums, I vastly prefer getting it online to hunting through a kerjillion dank holes in the wall in bad parts of town and haggling with an equivalent number of scary real-life counterparts of the Comic Book Guy. Fellow geeks trading with each other in a spirit of brotherhood without ever having to smell each other�s BO--isn�t that what the Internet was designed for?
You can�t find anything good on eBay anymore. Or, you can, if you want to wade through the fake corporated-sponsored auctions and all the other incursions by the Buy Our Shit-ocracy that infests every corner of the universe both online and off. And now eBay is hectoring me to buy cubic zirconium and digital cameras for my nonexistent partner. I think I�ll just go back to the mall.
***
|
 |