This is why you fail!
Well, to be interesting to anyone important anyway.
This interview with some asshat behind Second Life has the following-
Q: Have you ever read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? I don’t know much about Second Life but it sounds similar to the Metaverse in the fiction novel.
A: When Snow Crash came out, I was already really intent on the idea of creating a virtual world like Second Life — I had been thinking about it and doing what small experiments I could since I was in college. But Snow Crash certainly painted a compelling picture of what such a virtual world could look like in the near future, and I found that inspiring.
See, now, while the _idea_ of Second Life isn’t inherently bad, the crap level is all explained by this one question and answer. Why? Because Snow Crash was a shitty book, by a shitty dude, with a shitty vision of a virtual experience. Sadly, since it was total crap, many of the world’s tiny minds relate to it easily.
December 16th, 2007 at 4:40 am
Failed sf writer, are we?
December 16th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Haha! Nah, I just read way too much. Snow Crash held some interesting ideas, but almost none of them were computer related, and the ideas that were interesting were either tossed out stillborn or inexplicably aborted a short ways in. Then there’s the feel of a missing chapter, where suddenly Protagonist knows everything about the viral language, and goes about some incredibly bald exposition while riding his motorcycle.
The virtual world stuff was just plain boring. I know it was written during the earlier years of modern home computing, but it just struck me as the way someone who wrote a macro for Word, or, more likely in his case ClarisWorks, would imagine the pinnacle of a virtual experience.
It might have been less crappy if he wasn’t also collaborating with someone to try and make a rich media interactive whizamagig to release with it, but people with ADD should still be told their book sucks, and maybe their prescription needs adjustment.
December 16th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Also, how the hell did you find my blog??? Like, nobody reads the crap I write.