I'm simultaneously amazed by how good this is, and by my uncertainty as to whether I've read it before.
I guess I'd better get used to that feeling as I age - but on the other hand, I can look forward to watching all those great movies again for the first time.*
* some comedian must have already made this observation, but I can't remember.
It's a very honest account of living a bleak life and not having any idea how to get out.
Further, it postulates that the kind of puff pieces that used to fill Wired, Mondo 2000, et al are all pretty much fake. While not literally true, it does seem like those guys were putting an awful lot of spin on what they were writing about.
you mean you weren't 19 in 1993, spending your daylight hours wandering around campus like a zombie, hoping you might pass maths this time and your evenings going home from a nightclub called cybersomething (to which you had a laminated! membership card!) to stay up till dawn on a 9600 baud modem, digging rooms in a MUSH, chatting to marines in Palo Alto, wondering what exactly that girl earlier meant by that comment about Tantric sex?
I'm not sure why this sort of fluff is on the front page. Self-affirming and relatable? probably. Interesting? Not at all. I learned nothing going 30 pages in.
Think about it in more distant terms. He has explained for us why some people make a point of pride about wearing cheap plastic glasses, trucker hats, and the ugliest second-hand shirt they can find. A kind of luddite rejection of one kind of perception of the rules of the game, for a whole different set of constraining rules.
I remember reading this when I was 14 and I didn't understand a single thing but just knew that it was important. It was the reason why I read Neuromancer. I miss 1998.
I love the fact that even though he's hung up on the traditions of the past he just can't bring himself to let go of the future. It's just too enticing :-)
patrick farley is a genius - both in terms of story telling and animation technique. i'm one of those who's been waiting for electric sheep to return. good to see it back!
The epiphany about the typewriter cracks me up. I had a similar one a few weeks ago when i found K&R's The C Programming Language for sale at the library.
If you had read it 11 years ago would you have understood it? I relate to it a lot because I've had a similar "dropping out" urge for the last while. If I had read this over a decade ago when it was written it probably would have had little effect.
I guess I'd better get used to that feeling as I age - but on the other hand, I can look forward to watching all those great movies again for the first time.*
* some comedian must have already made this observation, but I can't remember.