The Guy I Almost Was (1998) | Hacker News Reader

The Guy I Almost Was (1998)

electricsheepcomix.com

105 pointsjuliankrause25 comments

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.

What do you guys like about it? I'm ~20 pages in & I don't get it.

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've read them all before, way back in high school. Then the site went down, and I've literally been waiting five years for it to come back up.

I remember reading this years ago. Reddit maybe?

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.

The first time I read this, I was still on dial-up. Every page would take an agonizingly long time to appear onscreen.

This is bloody amazing.

Right there with you, man - I'm mesmerized.

I just wish the "Next" arrow would stay in the same place..

try clicking the picture

That does the job, thanks.

This is a comic written during the previous bubble. There is lots of discussion of how the future is viewed from that perspective.

One of my favorites when I was in college. I had the good fortune to graduate right after the bubble popped.

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 :-)

This seems to be reflected in the title of his blog (http://pfarley.livejournal.com/) too:

"Elements of Past & Future Combined Into Something Not Quite as Good as Either"

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!

Please go to the home page and check out his other stories - especially Shapeshifter (which is not back online yet, but you can find some fan-uploaded versions online - http://e-sheep.sansara.net.ua/www.e-sheep.com/shapeshifter/i...).

See http://webcomicsreview.com/examiner/issue041213/farley.html for a good critique of farley's work.

That said, I dont see why this is HN-worthy.

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.

Thank you for posting this, I loved it! I wish I had read this 11 years ago.

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.

Very true. For example, I grew up hearing about the lessons of the early 1990s recession, but they never really sunk in until this last year.

That being said, I was reading quite a bit of Gibson in 1998, so I would have loved that first part.

So where's he now?

According to wikipedia he's working in the film industry now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Farley

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