Softlink surfing

The act of moving swiftly through E2 using only softlinks to travel from node to node. Softlink Surfing is very amusing when you have run out of sensible things to do and just want some general amusement. (Just as is the case when you use the Random Node link.)

Softlink Surfing brings a new aspect to browsing E2. Sometimes you are confronted with tough descisions, and few softlinks to choose from! Sometimes you may even hit a dead end! In any case it is guaranteed that you will have an interesting and unpredictable journey. Of course if you wanted you could use softlink surfing to stick to the same topic... and that would be useful for 'browsing' a topic of interest. Of course theres little fun and excitement in that :)

And really, Softlink Surfing doesn't limit you much...afterall, we all know that you can always get to Breasts from anywhere on E2, via softlinks alone!

Oh and finally, softlink surfing doesnt create any new softlinks! So it decreses the everpresent problem of every node being linked to every other totally unrelated node!

Even for years before I ever actually thought to register on E2, softlinks were the ultimate timewasting tool for me. I visualised a tree-like structure of nodes, where, beginning with some random node, the number of individual browser windows I had open increased exponentially.

Each and every node would contain, on average, 3 other nodes that I wanted to visit. You can see the problem.

This was not a good thing. After many hours of trying and failing to regulate the number of windows that were open (ok..only allowed to click on one softlink this time), one of two things will happen:

1) IE crashes with about 50 windows open (and yes, Netscape too)

2) I'll have to go back to the real world and hundreds of potentially life-altering nodes will have to remain unread (for now). This can be really, really disturbing.

I still haven't found a way to read all the nodes I want to. Opening a text editor and pasting links for later reading, perhaps, but if every node leads to 3 others... anyway, suffice to say that Softlink Surfing can become incredibly and scarily addictive. Don't try this at home.

Of course, now that Mozilla/Netscape, Opera and a couple of other browsers supports tabs, softlink surfing is much easier.

If you haven't tried the magic world of browsertabs, you should try to download one of the (free) browsers that supports it.

In short, it allows you to open lots of new pages in the background for later browsing. Then you can just pile up a bunch of interesting softlinks that will just sit and wait for you to close your current tab. Makes multiple browser windows completly redundant.