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Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems
A comprehensive collection of cyberculture pioneer Gareth Branwyn’s best work, Borg Like Me spans a 30-year writing career. The book covers Branwyn’s coming of age in a commune, his involvement in the 90s zine publishing scene, his tenure at influential cyber arts and culture mags Mondo 2000, bOING bOING, Wired, and his eight years at MAKE, spearheading the growing maker movement. Previously published material is woven throughout with Branwyn’s unabashedly honest commentary, personal anecdotes, and original essays.
Read about the smart-druggies behind Mondo 2000, impersonating Billy Idol in cyberspace (for Billy Idol), the making of the iconic early 90s hypermedia book, Beyond Cyberpunk!, and Branwyn going positively Phillip K. Dick after a heart attack and a bad blood transfusion.
Borg Like Me is a smart, passionate, intense trip along the bleeding edges of art, technology, and culture at the turn of the 21st century.
Read about the smart-druggies behind Mondo 2000, impersonating Billy Idol in cyberspace (for Billy Idol), the making of the iconic early 90s hypermedia book, Beyond Cyberpunk!, and Branwyn going positively Phillip K. Dick after a heart attack and a bad blood transfusion.
Borg Like Me is a smart, passionate, intense trip along the bleeding edges of art, technology, and culture at the turn of the 21st century.
296 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 1, 2014
5 people are currently reading
61 people want to read
About the author
Gareth Branwyn
32 books5 followersGareth Branwyn is a writer, editor, and media critic.
He has covered technology, media, DIY, and cyberculture for Wired, Esquire, the Baltimore Sun, Details, and numerous other publications. He was an editor at Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing (when it was a print zine), founded the personal tech site, StreetTech.com, and worked for MAKE magazine for 8 years, lastly acting as their Editorial Director.
Gareth co-edited The Happy Mutant Handbook (with Boing Boing) and is the author of Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati, Jamming the Media, The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots, and Mosaic Quick Tour: Accessing and Navigating the World Wide Web (the first book written about the Web). His most recent book, a collection of his best work, with many new essays, is called Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems. The book was crowd-funded and self-published.
He has covered technology, media, DIY, and cyberculture for Wired, Esquire, the Baltimore Sun, Details, and numerous other publications. He was an editor at Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing (when it was a print zine), founded the personal tech site, StreetTech.com, and worked for MAKE magazine for 8 years, lastly acting as their Editorial Director.
Gareth co-edited The Happy Mutant Handbook (with Boing Boing) and is the author of Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati, Jamming the Media, The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots, and Mosaic Quick Tour: Accessing and Navigating the World Wide Web (the first book written about the Web). His most recent book, a collection of his best work, with many new essays, is called Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems. The book was crowd-funded and self-published.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 29, 2015
Do you know Gareth Branwyn? If you’ve gone to any of the Maker Faires east or west in the past decade or so, you have certainly seen him and if you’ve seen him, you’re bound to have noticed. My first sighting at the World Maker Faire in NY was of a tall man with flashing LED’s apparently embedded in his bald scalp (a costume designed by Diana Eng of Project Runway). He had a stooped, scholarly way of carrying himself, and when I talked to him he peered intently up at me through his glasses. In short order, we were confiding with each other about amazing stuff we had seen at the Faire, good-looking makers, and common experiences around music and drugs.
Because of my own personal experiences (we have a daughter with Cerebral Palsy), I am very attentive to physical disabilities. I am a little obsessed with the technologies and other ways and means in which people, disabled and otherwise, enhance and sustain our lives and our own attitudes toward dis/ability. I even created an exhibition called Human + about technology and human ability that is currently touring the country. Gareth’s personal relationship with his disability (he has an extreme and intrusive form of arthritis) is straightforward without guile or misdirection.
So, with a budding friendship with Gareth and my interest in disability and technology, I was thrilled when I got a copy of Gareth’s new book, Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems. Oddly enough given the technological sheen suggested by the title, it is a trade size paperback book, one of the few that I’ve actually bought in the past several years. Gareth’s frankness is catching, so I will share that the book was installed with honor in our throne room, which I found offered the perfect intervals for dipping into the book and savoring each of the chapters.
The book mostly consists of collected articles that Gareth has written for various publications and web sites over the past 20 years. Each essay is graced by a short introduction in which the current Gareth reflects on the circumstances that shaped the writing. Gareth describes himself as an “extreme extrovert,” which conjures images of back-slapping, glad-handing banter. It is probably more accurate to say that Gareth is obsessive sharer, happiest when he is revealing and examining some surprisingly intimate experience. If he weren’t so disarmingly interested in everything around him, the essays would run the risk of being mawkish, self-involved, or irrelevant. As it is, the extremity of his personal circumstances, the losses he has suffered, the trials of his physical disabilities are placed like boulders in the rushing river of his fascination with the world.
Borg Like Me isn’t entirely dependent on whether the reader shares Gareth’s preferences for Eno, Cyberpunk, and Blade Runner, and his fascination with the freedom of expression potentially offered by technology. But the reader can be left feeling a bit distanced from the essays if s/he doesn’t share these enthusiasms. Gareth does his best to convey the awesome experience of falling in love to a Brian Eno composition, and paints the music in cosmic terms. I can take or leave Eno so went I went to Spotify to check it out and was thoroughly (and predictably) unmoved. Similarly, I missed the whole ‘zine movement and have a hard time relating to the ardor with which Gareth describes the impact of these self-published broadsides on the world.
But these are the relatively rare distancing moments in this collection. The depth of Gareth’s frankness and apparent guilelessness in the face of extreme suffering is thoroughly mesmerizing. His description of the psychosis brought on by a bad drug reaction after open heart surgery is as vivid a description of madness as I have ever encountered, and also hilarious. He is convinced in his hallucinations that the world’s deep structure is made of koosh balls, and in the interstices between the balls, a loosely knit collection of 50’s wrought iron lawn furniture. He talks of draining wounds with insouciance, and if it seemed like an effort, I would say that he bore all his wounds and his tribulations with inspiring courage. But it does not seem like an effort when he writes with heartbreaking clarity about surviving the abandonment and subsequent suicide of his beloved wife. It all seems part of the fabric of a deeply felt and deeply lived life.
His enthusiasms are wide and passionate, if generally geeky. He uncovers the quirky characters who founded the Jet Propulsion Lab in 1950’s Pasadena. He makes a convincing case that William Blake, his beloved Romantic poet and artist, was a forefather of the 20th century self-publishing revolution. He publishes a catalog of “saints” generated by readers of Boing Boing, a geek-friendly online zine and blog with which Gareth has had a long and fruitful association. Gareth forthrightly recognizes the unsurprising fact that Boing Boing’s readers prefer their saints with penises, rather than otherwise, but the very act of surfacing this group’s heroes shows the range of their passions, from physics to tantric Buddhism to punk.
As much as Gareth identifies with musicians, artists, makers, technologists, and philosophers, he is above all a writer. His form of “making” is shaping prose that is rich with his personality but seems effortless and transparent. Borg Like Me includes Gareth’s Tips on Suck-less Writing, a genuinely useful guide to lucid writing, with a clear bias toward precision and clarity directed at budding journalists. I’m not sure how William “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” Blake would respond to Gareth’s advice: “Is this the simplest most straightforward way of saying this? If not, toss or revise.” But for the kind of writing that Gareth is teaching, his advice is excellent.
The most deeply felt parts of the book are about intimacy, sharing love, music, hope, community, and the early hope of sex. This intimacy is distributed pretty evenly throughout the book, and not just isolated to the moments of romance. Illness and disability, desktop publishing with his beloved wife and son, a night at the movies, online communities are all shot through with the most disarming sense of revelation and Gareth’s eagerness to take the reader by the shoulders, shake him a bit, and say “this is ME, this is who I am. Who are YOU?”
For all of its self-revelation, the book does not have the narcissistic flavor of the contemporary memoir. I believe that is because Gareth is defined as much by his passions as by his personal tribulations and triumphs. By sharing his interests, he is sharing himself and inviting us to live more intensely, more openly, and with only a reasonable regard for the weaknesses that plague us all.
Because of my own personal experiences (we have a daughter with Cerebral Palsy), I am very attentive to physical disabilities. I am a little obsessed with the technologies and other ways and means in which people, disabled and otherwise, enhance and sustain our lives and our own attitudes toward dis/ability. I even created an exhibition called Human + about technology and human ability that is currently touring the country. Gareth’s personal relationship with his disability (he has an extreme and intrusive form of arthritis) is straightforward without guile or misdirection.
So, with a budding friendship with Gareth and my interest in disability and technology, I was thrilled when I got a copy of Gareth’s new book, Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems. Oddly enough given the technological sheen suggested by the title, it is a trade size paperback book, one of the few that I’ve actually bought in the past several years. Gareth’s frankness is catching, so I will share that the book was installed with honor in our throne room, which I found offered the perfect intervals for dipping into the book and savoring each of the chapters.
The book mostly consists of collected articles that Gareth has written for various publications and web sites over the past 20 years. Each essay is graced by a short introduction in which the current Gareth reflects on the circumstances that shaped the writing. Gareth describes himself as an “extreme extrovert,” which conjures images of back-slapping, glad-handing banter. It is probably more accurate to say that Gareth is obsessive sharer, happiest when he is revealing and examining some surprisingly intimate experience. If he weren’t so disarmingly interested in everything around him, the essays would run the risk of being mawkish, self-involved, or irrelevant. As it is, the extremity of his personal circumstances, the losses he has suffered, the trials of his physical disabilities are placed like boulders in the rushing river of his fascination with the world.
Borg Like Me isn’t entirely dependent on whether the reader shares Gareth’s preferences for Eno, Cyberpunk, and Blade Runner, and his fascination with the freedom of expression potentially offered by technology. But the reader can be left feeling a bit distanced from the essays if s/he doesn’t share these enthusiasms. Gareth does his best to convey the awesome experience of falling in love to a Brian Eno composition, and paints the music in cosmic terms. I can take or leave Eno so went I went to Spotify to check it out and was thoroughly (and predictably) unmoved. Similarly, I missed the whole ‘zine movement and have a hard time relating to the ardor with which Gareth describes the impact of these self-published broadsides on the world.
But these are the relatively rare distancing moments in this collection. The depth of Gareth’s frankness and apparent guilelessness in the face of extreme suffering is thoroughly mesmerizing. His description of the psychosis brought on by a bad drug reaction after open heart surgery is as vivid a description of madness as I have ever encountered, and also hilarious. He is convinced in his hallucinations that the world’s deep structure is made of koosh balls, and in the interstices between the balls, a loosely knit collection of 50’s wrought iron lawn furniture. He talks of draining wounds with insouciance, and if it seemed like an effort, I would say that he bore all his wounds and his tribulations with inspiring courage. But it does not seem like an effort when he writes with heartbreaking clarity about surviving the abandonment and subsequent suicide of his beloved wife. It all seems part of the fabric of a deeply felt and deeply lived life.
His enthusiasms are wide and passionate, if generally geeky. He uncovers the quirky characters who founded the Jet Propulsion Lab in 1950’s Pasadena. He makes a convincing case that William Blake, his beloved Romantic poet and artist, was a forefather of the 20th century self-publishing revolution. He publishes a catalog of “saints” generated by readers of Boing Boing, a geek-friendly online zine and blog with which Gareth has had a long and fruitful association. Gareth forthrightly recognizes the unsurprising fact that Boing Boing’s readers prefer their saints with penises, rather than otherwise, but the very act of surfacing this group’s heroes shows the range of their passions, from physics to tantric Buddhism to punk.
As much as Gareth identifies with musicians, artists, makers, technologists, and philosophers, he is above all a writer. His form of “making” is shaping prose that is rich with his personality but seems effortless and transparent. Borg Like Me includes Gareth’s Tips on Suck-less Writing, a genuinely useful guide to lucid writing, with a clear bias toward precision and clarity directed at budding journalists. I’m not sure how William “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” Blake would respond to Gareth’s advice: “Is this the simplest most straightforward way of saying this? If not, toss or revise.” But for the kind of writing that Gareth is teaching, his advice is excellent.
The most deeply felt parts of the book are about intimacy, sharing love, music, hope, community, and the early hope of sex. This intimacy is distributed pretty evenly throughout the book, and not just isolated to the moments of romance. Illness and disability, desktop publishing with his beloved wife and son, a night at the movies, online communities are all shot through with the most disarming sense of revelation and Gareth’s eagerness to take the reader by the shoulders, shake him a bit, and say “this is ME, this is who I am. Who are YOU?”
For all of its self-revelation, the book does not have the narcissistic flavor of the contemporary memoir. I believe that is because Gareth is defined as much by his passions as by his personal tribulations and triumphs. By sharing his interests, he is sharing himself and inviting us to live more intensely, more openly, and with only a reasonable regard for the weaknesses that plague us all.
September 30, 2014
This is one of the best books I have read in a very long time. Gareth Branwyn is one of my long time writing heroes in that he is successful while writing essays. These essays in particular will spark a nostalgic upheaval if you grew up with cyberpunk diligently reading William Gibson and searching Austin's Bookpeople for copies of Mondo2000. This fine selection of his writing is insightful, funny and clever. The title essay "Borg Like me" is a harrowing account of the writers own transformation via hip replacement surgery into a "borg". The other essays are just as good and teach much about the writing process, especially writing for magazines. I cannot recommend this book enough.
November 7, 2014
(This ended up becoming almost more like a blog post than a review, but let's call it new Books Journalism - a riff on new games journalism, which is really just Gonzo from the 70s repackaged for the children of the 80s and 90s)
I heard about the Borg Like Me Kickstarter on Boing Boing. I read the titular essay and, for some reason I was hooked. I participated in the Kickstarter (you can find my name on pg 273 according to my Nook) and anticipated the release. Like the majority of the crowd-funded projects I supported, this one was late. Once it arrived, I loaded it on my Nook and couldn't wait for the chance to read it.
Before I get to the content of the book, I'd like to address the production, especially since the ePub version (the one I got) was delayed a little extra by formatting issues; apparently it wasn't as simple as tranforming the PDF into an ePub. Even though Gareth has the icons as separators between his introductions and the actual article, I do appreciate the use of different fonts for each section. It helps me make sure I'm in the right headspace for each section. I read it in a black and white e-ink Nook. The illustrations and photos worked just as well in black and white as they would in color. I would have liked a way to jump back to the table of contents from each article, but other than that, it was well put-together.
Now for the content of the book: Gareth represents the penultimate generation that did not grow up with ubiquitous computing. He used typewriters and worked on zines that had to somehow find a distribution method. Nowadays anyone can post anything on a blog, Facebook, or Twitter and it can go truly viral. Back then, self-produced things could only go viral within a niche culture. Whenever I read about the time period Gareth eventually gets to - late 80s through mid 90s computer and Internet culture, I have mixed emotions. My age group (not even my whole generation) is the last to have known a world before the World Wid Web. We had to go to libraries to do research. We had to go to the store to buy things. I get mixed emotions because I understand this world that Gareth talks about, but for social and economic reasons, I didn't get to participate in the culture.
I remember seeing BBS numbers in the back of my computer game manuals. But I didn't know what those were. I should have been on BBSes and the early web. I was a nerd and no one around me seemed to be in my tribe. I could have found them online - but my family was very low middle-class and we could barely afford our first Windows 3.11 computer. It didn't have a modem and, even when we did eventually get a computer with a modem, we didn't have the money for the monthly rates. We surfed from free trial to free trial. We even tried the CompuServ attempt to have a hip off-shoot, WOW. So it's somewhat sad that I could have interacted with these people who would have validated me and my struggle. Although, I would have been a quite different person, and I like me the way I am.
While Gareth's essays stand on their own, they are also products of the time and publication they were a part of. The book would not be nearly as effective without his introductory essays (sometimes 50-75% as long as the essay they proceed). He's also done a good job of structuring the essays so the content of the essays is roughly chronological (even if the publication date isn't). The reader is essentially given a view of how Gareth grew up into the person he is today and how his formative experiences coincided with the growth of what might be called Cyberculture if the cyber prefix hadn't gone out of style with the mid-to-late 90s. Web culture wouldn't be an adequate replacement, because it's about so much more than just being online - it's the Maker culture, the punk rock political stylings, and more. I can almost see Gareth as a character in one of fellow Boing Boing writer Cory Doctorow's novels. He grew up expecting Gibson's future, the way children of the 50s were sure we'd be traveling the stars by now, he thought we'd be traveling the net. We've had various fits and starts - Second Life - came quite close to Snow Crash's realitya, but it doesn't seem to have caught on widely. The Occulus Rift seems like it may finally make VR a reality that won't make people sick and Facebook's acquisition means it may become mainstream, but we will have to wait and see.
Gareth's writing definitely drips with a humor and pathos that leaves the reader understanding his mindset and his feelings - both as a wiser man looking back and the way he was feeling at the time. Even though I was a backer because of his nexus to technology as it evolved and his work at Wired and Boing Boing, the stories that affected me most profoundly were the ones that weren't really about technology. They were both about his wife and, fittingly, were about the beginning and end of his time with her. The first story tells of his time at the hippie commune and, in the belief that spoilers can't ruin good writing, he meets his wife. In the second he recounts his attendance of a Thievery Corporation concert after his wife's death and some memories of her final performance with the band. Both of these stories hit me for different reasons. The first story reminded me of how I met my wife in the summer before college as we lived in the dorms. It was a similar bit of serendipity that led to us coming together and eventually getting married. Now I've been married for nearly a decade and the fragility of the relationship is ever-present as we navigate being parents and the extra stresses that brings to the relationship. Additionally, some people very close to me have dealt with depression and we just had Robin Williams die of depression and if he, the source of hilaritas of the universe, can't get over it, what chance do we mere mortals have? Also, death has always fascinated me in every possible way - thoughts of fear, nihilism, hope, faith, and more have come through thinking of mortality.
Finally, I always envy people like Gareth who can have such full lives. I don't have the flexibility and risk tolerance to do what he's done. He lived with hippies for a few years, lived in a group home, lived at the Patch Adams house, written for a living, and more. Meanwhile, I'm cursed with the risk profile of a salaryman while yearning for a more exciting life. Then again, we always want what we don't have - curly haired people want straight hair and vice-versa, small-breasted women want larger breasts and vice-versa, tall people want to be short and...well, you get the picture. (I know I'm violating a lot of Gareth's rules of suck-less writing)
A while ago I read that there's a reason most reviews hover around upper numbers - and it has nothing to do with stats. It's supposed to be a confirmation bias thing. Unless something has pissed me off so badly that I want to write a 1-star, I'm going to unconsciously want to rate it higher to show that I have good taste - I bought something that's a 4 or 5 star item. I imagine this is doubly so for a Kickstarter project. This is not just something I bought, it's something I believed in and funded before I even knew exactly what the final product would be. That said, I think this is a great book. I can't predict whether or not it will appeal to a general audience, but I am fairly certain it will appeal to people who grew up during this time and people who are curious about the time before and during the WWW. It helps to like autobiographical material. If that's you, I'd seek it out.
I tend to end my reviews with the content warnings to try and head off those who rate something a 1 star just because it had profanity or talked about Jesus the wrong way. So, this book has consequence-free drug use, mild profanity, mentions of sex and arousal (no explicit descriptions of sex acts), and mentions of the occult and descriptions of occult practices. None of that bothered me, but if it bothers you to the point of inhibiting your ability to enjoy a book, this is probably not the book for you.
I heard about the Borg Like Me Kickstarter on Boing Boing. I read the titular essay and, for some reason I was hooked. I participated in the Kickstarter (you can find my name on pg 273 according to my Nook) and anticipated the release. Like the majority of the crowd-funded projects I supported, this one was late. Once it arrived, I loaded it on my Nook and couldn't wait for the chance to read it.
Before I get to the content of the book, I'd like to address the production, especially since the ePub version (the one I got) was delayed a little extra by formatting issues; apparently it wasn't as simple as tranforming the PDF into an ePub. Even though Gareth has the icons as separators between his introductions and the actual article, I do appreciate the use of different fonts for each section. It helps me make sure I'm in the right headspace for each section. I read it in a black and white e-ink Nook. The illustrations and photos worked just as well in black and white as they would in color. I would have liked a way to jump back to the table of contents from each article, but other than that, it was well put-together.
Now for the content of the book: Gareth represents the penultimate generation that did not grow up with ubiquitous computing. He used typewriters and worked on zines that had to somehow find a distribution method. Nowadays anyone can post anything on a blog, Facebook, or Twitter and it can go truly viral. Back then, self-produced things could only go viral within a niche culture. Whenever I read about the time period Gareth eventually gets to - late 80s through mid 90s computer and Internet culture, I have mixed emotions. My age group (not even my whole generation) is the last to have known a world before the World Wid Web. We had to go to libraries to do research. We had to go to the store to buy things. I get mixed emotions because I understand this world that Gareth talks about, but for social and economic reasons, I didn't get to participate in the culture.
I remember seeing BBS numbers in the back of my computer game manuals. But I didn't know what those were. I should have been on BBSes and the early web. I was a nerd and no one around me seemed to be in my tribe. I could have found them online - but my family was very low middle-class and we could barely afford our first Windows 3.11 computer. It didn't have a modem and, even when we did eventually get a computer with a modem, we didn't have the money for the monthly rates. We surfed from free trial to free trial. We even tried the CompuServ attempt to have a hip off-shoot, WOW. So it's somewhat sad that I could have interacted with these people who would have validated me and my struggle. Although, I would have been a quite different person, and I like me the way I am.
While Gareth's essays stand on their own, they are also products of the time and publication they were a part of. The book would not be nearly as effective without his introductory essays (sometimes 50-75% as long as the essay they proceed). He's also done a good job of structuring the essays so the content of the essays is roughly chronological (even if the publication date isn't). The reader is essentially given a view of how Gareth grew up into the person he is today and how his formative experiences coincided with the growth of what might be called Cyberculture if the cyber prefix hadn't gone out of style with the mid-to-late 90s. Web culture wouldn't be an adequate replacement, because it's about so much more than just being online - it's the Maker culture, the punk rock political stylings, and more. I can almost see Gareth as a character in one of fellow Boing Boing writer Cory Doctorow's novels. He grew up expecting Gibson's future, the way children of the 50s were sure we'd be traveling the stars by now, he thought we'd be traveling the net. We've had various fits and starts - Second Life - came quite close to Snow Crash's realitya, but it doesn't seem to have caught on widely. The Occulus Rift seems like it may finally make VR a reality that won't make people sick and Facebook's acquisition means it may become mainstream, but we will have to wait and see.
Gareth's writing definitely drips with a humor and pathos that leaves the reader understanding his mindset and his feelings - both as a wiser man looking back and the way he was feeling at the time. Even though I was a backer because of his nexus to technology as it evolved and his work at Wired and Boing Boing, the stories that affected me most profoundly were the ones that weren't really about technology. They were both about his wife and, fittingly, were about the beginning and end of his time with her. The first story tells of his time at the hippie commune and, in the belief that spoilers can't ruin good writing, he meets his wife. In the second he recounts his attendance of a Thievery Corporation concert after his wife's death and some memories of her final performance with the band. Both of these stories hit me for different reasons. The first story reminded me of how I met my wife in the summer before college as we lived in the dorms. It was a similar bit of serendipity that led to us coming together and eventually getting married. Now I've been married for nearly a decade and the fragility of the relationship is ever-present as we navigate being parents and the extra stresses that brings to the relationship. Additionally, some people very close to me have dealt with depression and we just had Robin Williams die of depression and if he, the source of hilaritas of the universe, can't get over it, what chance do we mere mortals have? Also, death has always fascinated me in every possible way - thoughts of fear, nihilism, hope, faith, and more have come through thinking of mortality.
Finally, I always envy people like Gareth who can have such full lives. I don't have the flexibility and risk tolerance to do what he's done. He lived with hippies for a few years, lived in a group home, lived at the Patch Adams house, written for a living, and more. Meanwhile, I'm cursed with the risk profile of a salaryman while yearning for a more exciting life. Then again, we always want what we don't have - curly haired people want straight hair and vice-versa, small-breasted women want larger breasts and vice-versa, tall people want to be short and...well, you get the picture. (I know I'm violating a lot of Gareth's rules of suck-less writing)
A while ago I read that there's a reason most reviews hover around upper numbers - and it has nothing to do with stats. It's supposed to be a confirmation bias thing. Unless something has pissed me off so badly that I want to write a 1-star, I'm going to unconsciously want to rate it higher to show that I have good taste - I bought something that's a 4 or 5 star item. I imagine this is doubly so for a Kickstarter project. This is not just something I bought, it's something I believed in and funded before I even knew exactly what the final product would be. That said, I think this is a great book. I can't predict whether or not it will appeal to a general audience, but I am fairly certain it will appeal to people who grew up during this time and people who are curious about the time before and during the WWW. It helps to like autobiographical material. If that's you, I'd seek it out.
I tend to end my reviews with the content warnings to try and head off those who rate something a 1 star just because it had profanity or talked about Jesus the wrong way. So, this book has consequence-free drug use, mild profanity, mentions of sex and arousal (no explicit descriptions of sex acts), and mentions of the occult and descriptions of occult practices. None of that bothered me, but if it bothers you to the point of inhibiting your ability to enjoy a book, this is probably not the book for you.
July 12, 2018
Solid collection of short essays
I really enjoyed this collection, it gave me much better insights into what makes this author tick. Branwyn is an eminently humanistic guide through a world increasingly intertwined with technology.
I really enjoyed this collection, it gave me much better insights into what makes this author tick. Branwyn is an eminently humanistic guide through a world increasingly intertwined with technology.
September 1, 2015
This book is bad, but in a way that appeals directly to my worst sensibilities. It offers itself as a good example of what happens to fringe cultures as they age, providing teeth-grittingly uncool examples of early computer slang. It made me pine for a day when cyberpunk is cool again, an aesthetic of technological resistance that feels even more necessary now than when many of these essays were written. In any case, I've started using my membership to the Seattle goth club more frequently and I own a few more teeth-grittingly uncool EBM albums thanks to this book. So even though this wasn't a good read, I guess it was an effective read. And damn, would I love to hang out with Gareth.
May 1, 2024
A collection of recollections and articles that get around to summarizing Gareth! I dunno, but by the time I got to the wrong blood transfusion bit... dang! I shant go too deep here, but if you've ever had any cyberpunk leanings throughout the 80s/90s/00s, along with an interest in on the ground transgressive culture, then read this book. Gareth is not only a good writer with a ton of great 'n weird stories to tell, but an all around awesome person! Go G!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews