Well now boys and girls, today I have been on E2 for 20 years. Which is kind of astonishing if you think about it. When I logged on as a smelly student bum on a slow Sunday lunchtime in the no longer extant Commonwealth Hall in London those four lustra ago, did I think I would still be posting here in two decades' time? I don't think I did. I thought that I'd bumble along for a couple of years then get bored with it. I actually thought this place would end up being defunct because that seemed to be the lot in life of most online spaces back then.

456 writeups later, here I am.

Of course, 2005 was now I look back at it the absolute high water mark of the web. Back then, effortposting was compulsory, pretty much, most online content was vaguely thoughty because the skill wall to post anything online filtered out the loudmouths and narcissists that would later become legion, and content farms were not really a thing to you weren't served with wall to wall clickbait, listicles,

American science fiction mystery novel, written by Carrie Vaughn and published by Mariner Books in 2017. 

The book is set an unspecified period in the future in an area known as the Coast Road, somewhere on the West Coast of the former United States. About a century ago, the world suffered a profound collapse of the economy and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people died and civilization worldwide fell completely apart. The Earth is now in a recovery period -- so

A "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" method of governing characterized by centralized control, blurred lines between public office and private gain, and a reliance on personal networks over transparent processes.

"The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity. It has become corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain; political, personal, and