I Joined the SOPA Strike. Sort of.

Did you miss me yesterday? You didn’t? But I wasn’t on Facebook, or Twitter, or Salt in Wound. I didn’t “like” your posts. (And I do like your posts. I like them a lot!) I didn’t post any photos of crazy signs I saw. (Don’t worry, I didn’t see any crazy signs yesterday. I mostly stayed in.) I didn’t make my moves in Scrabble or Words With Friends. Because I was on strike! Mostly. I think.

This is because I am against SOPA. I’ll be totally honest: I don’t really know what SOPA is. It has to do with the Internet and censorship and censorship is bad, so we want our Congresspeople to vote against SOPA so we’ll still have YouTube and Facebook and other sites that might contain objectionable content, and I certainly love objectionable content. It’s one of my favorite things about the Internet. We are against piracy (arrrr!) but SOPA goes too far! And… foreign governments have something to do with this? China, maybe? I know they don’t like Google, they censor the Google over there. I’d look this up to have a better sense of things, but, it’s Wednesday as I type this and I’m sort of trying to not use the Internet at all today. Was that a positive goal of mine? Was anybody else doing this? I spent a few minutes Googling it last night but it was getting close to midnight, so, you know, decision time. I wouldn’t be the first person to make a decision without all the facts in front of me.

So, midnight to midnight, that was my plan, and definitely no Facebook. Except I immediately broke that, because I had to wish a few people a happy birthday, it would be rude not to. So, between midnight and 12:30, I took care of that.

And no blogging. Salt in Wound was ON STRIKE! Look, see, it really was:

Not that anybody noticed. But I got HTML code from some website that would place a black bar across your site’s name and, you know, pasted that code into my “header” whatever the fuck that is (see, I can cuss, because this is a free country, don’t censor my interweb, man, and when I say man I am referring to you, The Man). And as you’re reading this—if you’re reading this—I do have some sort of “Google Analytics” thing installed in which I could see how many “hits” I got, you know, from different countries and stuff. None from China I hope, but if so I apologize for using the F-word, please don’t censor me. I wonder what ever happened to that guy who stood in front of the tank? Well, anyway, if you don’t see a black bar across the top then I successfully got rid of it, but, as I’m typing this I’m scared that I won’t be able to, and I’ll be the blogger guy with the big stupid black bar across his page. Actually, maybe that could become my “thing,” that will propel me into Huffington Post awesomeness.

Did you see that article the other day about Brian Williams e-mailing Gawker.com and giving them shit (note to self: learn how to say “I’m sorry” in Chinese) for not trashing Lana Del Rey’s performance on Saturday Night Live? Granted, she did seem pretty terrible, albeit very sexily terrible. And Brian Williams seems like a pretty cool dude. You know, good sense of humor and all when he’s on Letterman, and he played himself on 30 Rock, etc. But it made me feel all creepy that Brian Williams, just because he’s a super prominent guy, can e-mail the head of a prominent website and likely get them to change their content. (The overall gist was, he hoped they would beef up their weekend presence.) I mean, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, he’s probably not thinking like that, he’s just writing a note to his buddy. But if you got an e-mail from Brian Williams, giving you a friendly “suggestion” about your job, you’d do it, right? Even if he was a pal. Because he’s Brian F-ing Williams. (That was for you, China.) (If you like baseball and music, check out a song called “Ted Fucking Williams” by the Baseball Project, it’s a winner. (Sorry, China.) (Too many parentheses.) I don’t know if it’s on Spotify, I’d check for you but I’m trying to not use the Internet today.) And then I got really scared, because Brian Williams isn’t the only prominent person out there, and he isn’t the most prominent. (Who is? Jon Stewart? Harvey Weinstein? Jay-Z?) So I have to imagine that every minute of the day, prominent people are sending friendly little notes to websites, networks, newspapers, corporations, Congress, etc., and that’s how decisions are being made. And that’s not how decisions are supposed to be made! They are supposed to be made based on the personal whims of your intimidating supervisor! (That was sarcasm, if you didn’t notice.) Where’s the petition against this? That’s the one I want to sign. But no, the news story that gets picked up is “Brian Williams Thinks Lana Del Rey Sucks.” And life goes on.

I guess I digressed there a little bit. Although maybe still circled back to the subject somehow? I thought maybe I’d stick to just e-mail today. Except, my friend Matt sent a link and I didn’t even give it a second thought, I clicked on it, that’s what we do. Reminds me of a slice of pizza I had on Passover one year. Habits is hard to break. But I wasn’t going to Google anything. Except at some point I did, and saw they also had a black bar over their logo, which was cool, but actually, not cool, because they could’ve shut down the site for one freaking day and really proven a point. And I know that because it was in the first couple of sentences of the couple of SOPA articles I skimmed. In the Google results, they also had a black bar over it. But not in Google maps, you lazy sons-of-bitches.

But I wasn’t on Facebook at all. Except, I was. Because Facebook messages are e-mail-esque, often used instead of e-mail, and I used to get an e-mail notification every time someone sent me a Facebook message but now I only get those notifications sometimes, part of a master plan to wean me off e-mail for good, I suppose. So I went on there and replied to a couple of messages and then looked at a few status updates, but didn’t linger, didn’t scroll. And then I saw an awesome one from my friend Martha, with words blacked out, you know, “redacted,” and that reminded me that the site where I got the black-bar code had a feature like that, I could enter text that would come out redacted when I posted it to Facebook, that might be cool. So I went back to that site and typed up something and went to Facebook and pasted it and… then deleted before posting because, no, I wasn’t going to post anything on Facebook for 24 hours. Well, 24 hours minus the birthday-messages writing time.

I certainly didn’t do any blogging. I mean, I visited this site, did some “behind-the-scenes” maintenance, that was OK, wasn’t it? Or by merely visiting the site did I counteract my own boycott? I really should’ve read up on this stuff. And then I got panicky because a post I wrote Tuesday night had the date “January 18, 2012” on it. People will think I crossed my own picket line! But the website is on California time or something like that. So if you post late at night the date will be tomorrow’s. Ah but who’s going to read this far to see that very valid explanation? So I went in there and edited the date. You can do that. Don’t trust anything. I also monkeyed with some “Like This on Facebook” and “Tweet” buttons I’ve installed and re-installed. I like the idea of having those buttons, but don’t want them to be intrusive. Still, if I’m going to reach HuffPo-type numbers, these are the things I have to do, must do some Search Engine Optimization. So “Like” me, “Tweet” Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me.

Even typing this feels like I’m cheating somehow, since I would be posting this immediately if it wasn’t for the strike. Is this me just getting a quick fix? Well, I’m writing this in a Word document, not on the site itself, so I guess that’s something. I’ll cut and paste and italicize stuff after midnight.

Which is 3 hours and 19 minutes away. What to do, what to do. Eat food, sure. I’ll watch TV; I like TV. Wow, I hope they vote down this SOPA bill. At least during the hurricane, I could still screw around on my smartphone.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget those buttons down there.