The Cyclops

I struck out in search of an antithesis to the culture of eBaum's World. I wanted to see passion, even if the focus of that passion was horrendously misguided. What I found was the Drudge Report. At first glance the site seemed exciting, it was littered with links to all over the Internet; a morally black and white social hub of politically-minded intelligence. But I gradually discovered that only one man was responsible for keeping it all moving, and that long ago he was driven insane by his loneliness.

"Show me a damn birth certificate!"

Proving that a man can, in fact, be an island, he filtered everything through a single-eyed perspective. Then, lacking any voice of opposition, he slowly transformed into a righteous, angry giant. Also, he eats people. Just eats them raw. Not in a metaphoric sense where he cuts his teeth on the bones of politicians. He literally consumes human flesh. Don't ever go there.

Hades

Having witnessed cannibalism, I thought I had seen the worst the Internet has to offer, but nothing could have prepared me for the wastelands of 4chan. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" does not adequately describe the fall I took into relentless hell of /b/. The pedophiles, furries, racists and trolls have all gathered together in a seething pile of sweat and hatred to take "random" to its logical conclusion. I wandered through pictures of corpses, silicon breasts and what I can only assume was a body egesting out of every orifice. There is no organization to any of these sensory attacks, just thread after thread of weaponized horror. In fact, the community can turn anything into a weapon, including sex, something I used to love.

The Sirens

The littering of breasts on 4Chan, despite the terrifying context, sparked my biological imperative in ways that make me less than proud. I wish I could say that I simply drifted past the sirens' call of pornography on my journey, but I didn't. I stopped to listen, because I am only human and because "listening" is the most polite euphemism I can muster.

Like the bonobos, the people of YouPorn.com solve all of their problems with sex. No matter what the members of the community may encounter each day -- from running out of gas in the desert heat, to getting caught cheating on an academic test -- you can rest assured that order will be restored through the magic of fornication. Yet the system is fragile, their culture is dependent on everyone adhering to a few distinct rules:

Rule #1: Massages only end one way.

• Nurses are incompetent at everything except physical exams.
• Maids are terrible house cleaners.
• Braids or pigtails on a woman denote high school status, despite what the bags under her eyes may tell you.
• If a man and a woman coexist in a room with a chair or a bed, they are obligated to bang on it.
• And finally, the most important rule is that no one is having any of this sex for reproductive purposes, as evidenced by the weird ritual finale of every copulation session, or in their native language, "the money shot." It is a constant reminder that everything that happens here is for recreational purposes only.

Charybdis and Scylla

I spent considerably more time docked in the warm, gentle waters of YouPorn than I had anticipated. Hours felt like seconds, days like hours in that reverse naked-Narnia. Yet even with the site's potential to hold my attention hostage, I had yet to face the biggest time-sucks of the Internet. Passing between TV Tropes and YouTube was the greatest test I may ever face.

There is no right choice.

TV Tropes is a veritable black hole of hyperlinks, each leading further into the center of oblivion. The entire site is made up of a community that spends its life collecting patterns and commonalities between fictional worlds. It applies names to every plot device, every story arc and every cinematic tool ever captured by a camera and then links them to one another. The result is like being in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic deciphering hidden codes in newspapers. Clicking on one link will ensure that you click on another, and another until you have lost your way back home and forgotten who you are.

And behind every pattern presented by TV Tropes, there is the video proof on YouTube. It is not so much a community as it is a collective made up of millions of heads, all struggling toward the same goal of immortality at any cost. There is

no shame, no etiquette and no structure -- just a monstrous blob of fame-hungry faces, and barely legible insults. Yet, even knowing all that, I still couldn't turn away. I was certain YouTube would engulf me if I explored it for too long, but I couldn't help watching children fall asleep while eating, or drunken geriatrics fight in the street. It was all the entertaining aspects of life distilled into three-minute videos. How could reality hope to live up to that? I realized that therein lies the threat of the Internet as a whole.

If there is anything I hope you glean from my adventure, it's that that the true danger of the Web is its relentless intent to keep you. To keep you occupied, keep you entertained and keep you rooted perpetually. It is hoping that you forget about everything else in your life and stay here forever. Worst of all, I'm part of it. You can't trust anything I say. So as you venture out into the great abyss of the World Wide Web, take my warnings with a grain of salt, but take them. Also, remember my name. Remember it when I am gone or when you're floating name options around for your first-born.