December 8, 2006
Futures of the Recent Past
Patrick S. Farley’s The Guy I Almost Was is Web comic that I recently looked at again. It resonates with my experience of mid-1990s San Francisco. It’s been around for several years, and it has aged well. Chapter 2 is particularly amusing for those who plugged into Wired and the like during those tumultuous times. (It picks up around 50.)
December 8th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Thanks for the link–I, too, thought it held up well. Enjoyed it enormously.
December 8th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
It must be something in the air. I sought out and re-read TGIAW no more than an hour before reading this post. Well, I guess that’s my freaky coincidence for this week.
It is very good, isn’t it? And if anything, it seems better eight years later.
December 9th, 2006 at 3:11 am
That was pretty great.
God, I forgot about Mondo 2000 until now.
December 9th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
The first few panels really reminded me of high-school in the early 80s. My friend Paul and I were totally into Omni, hacking on his TRS-80, the movie Altered States, and generally imagining some cool cyberdelic future that was just around the corner… Later I was totally into Reality Hackers/High Frontiers/Mondo 2000. Paul created Future Hi, and I’m doing my Expressive AI thing, so I guess we both, to some degree, kept the faith.
December 9th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Wow — that’s brilliant, though of course it makes you want to read the after-the-crash-till-9/11 chapters as well.
It occurred to me recently, walking down a hill in the rain on the way to a norwegian EXAM, that I was thinking about existentialism for the first time in years (sort of like, gee whiz, when I was twenty-one, finishing college, would I ever think that I’d be walking in the rain down a mountain confronting fear of failure in an old style European exam conducted in a fucking church, what happened to my future [this is not an unpleasant wonderment but a relatively pleasantly perplexed or mystified one] and how can it rain for seven weeks straight in the dark anyway? existence precedes essence kind of way). Also, I thought about the recurring motif of stones in sartre’s road and beckett’s pocket, for no particular reason other than the mountains. And of course I thought of Kafka. And this cartoon made miss Gillespie’s typewriter.
I wonder how much Flaherty’s life has changed since 1978, after all.