Charlie Harvey

October 2012 Reading

Written by Charlie on

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  • JPod by Douglas Coupland

    A sort of dark follow up to microserfs, I got the impression that Coupland was trying a bit too hard with this one. Its just a bit too self-consciously futureshocked-cool for my taste. Funny moments and kitsch cultural analyses are mixed with art-school-experimental pretentiousness (big lists of prime numbers, ingredients from junk food packets). It did make me laugh out loud a few times. It also made me cringe when a character talked about a 56K floppy disk. 56K modem maybe. Even the old 8-inch IBM memory disks from the late 60s had a capacity of 80K, by the mid 70s you could get disks with a megabyte of storage. I think that the old 5.25s Coupland thinks he’s talking about were 320K or maybe 360K. I reckon he was just making shit up, though.

    2012-10-04 by Charlie Harvey


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