Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis

I can see that a lot of thought went into this review, but I have to admit I can't see what came out of it. Perhaps someone with a clearer understanding than I might lend a hand?

The book, or the review?

The book outlines a world where franchisers run everything, including jails. It's a cookie-cutter world; instances of each franchise are very standardized, and this is a plot point. The hero delivers pizza for the Mafia run pizza franchise, when he's not hacking code. The heroine is a 15-year old skateboarding courier girl with a really good skateboard.

There's a big virtual world, run partly by the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. The VR world is a lot like Second Life but with VR and better graphics; you can buy real estate and build. The hero spends a lot of time in there, but that's not where the plot happens.

The Big Bad is a mega-preacher who has a visual data pattern which allows him to take over, or at least crash, human brains. This involves info from ancient gods and such. He's trying to take over the world.

It's a great exercise in literary world-building; the plot isn't much and there's little character development.

A movie was in development, but it didn't happen. It would be great to see it done it today, now that the graphics are good enough. Would definitely have been better than Tron 2.

Heh, yeah. Tron 2 was disapointing to day the least.

Stephenson's novels in general are like this, although Cryptonomicon for one certainly has better character development than Snow Crash: they're a disorderly jumble of whatever ideas Stephenson thought were interesting at the time, wrapped in a skin of plot, and enfleshed in the characters that surround, encounter, and explore them. Stephenson sometimes jumps the rails entirely, writing long monologues, dialogues, and digressions that barely refer to the characters or plot at all, just because he thought the ideas were neat (most of Randy and Pontifex's discussions in prison, The mathematics of Alan's bicycle chain, a good stretch of Hiro's discussions with the Librarian (although nowhere near all of them), and Hiro's adventures in Flatland on the raft (you can just feel the seeds of In The Beginning Was The Command Line, struggling to get out)), or for reasons known only to him (probably because he thought it was funny) (the TP memo, the stockings/Van Eck... thing). To some people this may be seen as a disjointed, overhyped, overcomplicated mess, but to the right sort of mind, it's an almost magical experience.

Curiously, these sorts of people tend to be heavily into computing, which is why Stephenson pervades that culture.

Or that's wrong, and I'm just completely mad. That's also a possibility.

It was Cybertown for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown

Oh dear god. I'm working on a virtual math world video game, and so I was obliged to check out Active Worlds which you linked to.

It truly feels lost in the 90s.. I can't say I could appreciate the UX. I probably won't be dabbling there. :/

Still, it's pretty cool that it's the oldest online multiplayer 3D world and still apparently has a friendly user base! (They helped me out when I started spouting wwwwwwawsd in the chat whilst trying to move my avatar)