Week 2: Connections

We began this week with two readings: Cory Doctorow’s “Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature”, and an excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”. Doctorow’s piece was an interesting read, but as soon as I finished the excerpt from Snow Crash, I was searching the Barnes and Noble website to see if the nearest store had a copy in stock. I’ve recently gotten back into reading, and I think I might enjoy the rest of that book. We spoke on these readings a bit in class, and transitioned into a conversation about the “metaverse”.

The concept of the metaverse was the theme of the rest of the week: we explored LambdaMOO and the Wayback Machine, watched a comical clip from Johnny Mnemonic, and dove into the lost realm of GeoCities to wrap up the week. I thoroughly enjoyed the podcast we listened to, “The Lost Worlds of Geo” from 99% Invisible; it had me searching google for every mention of a video game or website that sounded worth the search (can confirm, they were all worth the search).

On Friday, I installed Homebrew onto my Macbook so that I could use telnet to access some great examples of older sites, like Under the Black Flag and Heatwave. Having taken a bit more of a reading-intensive DGST 101 course, I am thrilled to partake in hands-on things like these.