Requiem for the Internet

I grew up on the Internet. Back in the 90's, it was a great place for hobbyists—you could search for all sorts of things and learn and learn and learn. Nowadays, it's so cluttered up as to be useless: the signal is drowned in noise.

This bit me hard this weekend. I was doing another pass over my summary of the myth of Isis and Osiris, relating the various pieces of the myth to its Greek equivalents, and trying to use alternative sources to fill in Plutarch's prudish gaps:

These are nearly all the important points of the legend, with the omission of the most infamous of the tales, such as that about the dismemberment of Horus​ and the decapitation of Isis.

Ultimately, I managed to accomplish my goal, but, tellingly, had to do so, painstakingly and by hand, using the books in my own library. (Gold stars go to the Loeb editions of Diodorus Siculus and Manetho, and to E. A. Wallis Budge's Legends of the Gods.) It is obvious in hindsight, but perhaps should have been obvious beforehand, that searching the internet for anything remotely related to "isis beheading" was inadvisable.

The days of the internet being a useful tool are coming to an end in general, but this weekend marks when it ceased to be a useful to me, personally. If you want to know something, endeavor to become a human encyclopedia on some topic, and try to cultivate friends who do similarly on others.