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Launch Meet the new kids on the block. By Damiana (damiana@diarist.net)

Archives Past Launch Sites Submit Get Launched!   Roughly three years ago, the first online journals crawled out of the sea. These were shocking things, these chronicles of lives, these barings of innermost thoughts and feelings right there on the Internet. Putting your private life online? Absurd! That was a long time ago. Now opinions are changing. It seems nowadays that a homepage without a journal is unheard of. The largest journal webring boasts upwards of five hundred members, and the numbers are growing every day. With the constant outpour of new journals, readers are finding it increasingly harder to wade through these emerging life stories. Launch serves to spotlight these journals, the new or relatively unknown. Oftentimes, a quality journal gets overlooked in the tangle of the more established. Here, the "underdog" has a venue. Each week, two to three journals will be presented and given the opportunity to gain new readers into their lives. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4 Mental Hypochondriac Who’s bad? She is. Bad as in good. There’s nothing like that vast feeling of independence the first year of college can give you.  Well, that, and some mood swings. Oh, the memories... I'm "bad" because I'm an adult now and my father can't tell me what to do anymore. I'm "bad" because I'm majoring in Spanish instead of majoring in business like they want me too. I'm "bad" because I can think for myself. I'm "bad" because I refuse to be ordered around anymore. I'm "bad" because I'm finally strong enough to tell my father what I really think. I'm "bad" because I'm growing up, and I guess I'm not supposed to according to my father. Mike Jasper’s Constant Commentary Is he a member of SmokeRings? He’s certainly obsessed with it. Well, actually, he seems to be obessed with all things long and orally intended (no, please, hold those Clinton/Monica jokes, I simply cannot bear another one). Hilarious, tho, and hailing from Austin, Texas, the latest in "cool places in the United States to live" (and what is this thing with Texas lately?). This is another one for the "not politically correct, and certainly not polite" list I’ve become so fond of. (I’d give you an excerpt, but I just went back there to find one that was "work-friendly" and he’s got a happy thanksgiving message up there. Trust me on this one tho -- if you like it rough, you’ll find it here.) Adorable "Fashionably unfashionable, and too uncool to care." It’s cute, it’s fuzzy, and well, no, it’s not, not all the time. Take a ride on the ups and downs of medication, hatred of "Susie" (read the cast bios), and what it’s like to work on Y2K issues in the UK. "The tagline "Strong words softly spoken" would at one time have been a good description of the voice i had. Then came medication, and freeing of the social ties that many of us have. I no longer felt the need to stick up for people who had treated myself, and others, in a fashion not-suited to a friendship that they claimed. The loss of control in my thought and word drove my journal into heights of plain-speaking never reached before by me."