19 ms·

The Guy I Almost Was (1998)

305 points by wallflower 6y ago

genjipress 6y ago
This is one of my favorite webcomics of all time.
postingpals 6y ago
It's like I'm reading a comic about my own life, except as it is happening in the 21st century.
zabuni 6y ago
Given the whole #vanlife craze that is happening now, Spacehawk look prescient.
cubano 6y ago
So in some ways, I feel that maybe the youngster in the comic wasn't totally wrong. Well, our cars didn't shoot around the world in hamster-tubes, but our thoughts and ideas sure did and you know, I think in the end that was probably a lot smarter. The "hedonism" stuff? Well don't know about you guys but I sure lived that thru the bands and the all the raves and shit I managed to find myself at in the late 80's and 90's. Yes..of course life almost always smashes our childhood dreams. Big deal get over it, but I think it's important to always remember the positive along with the crap.
- postingpals 6y ago
  This story is deeper than 'life crushed this one individual's childhood dreams'. At any turn during the story, the author could have become something much worse. He could have become a drunk, he could have become homeless. The invisible hand of the economy dangled his future in front of him as a tease and then handed him a job in the end as a threat, telling him never to be ungrateful or else. It's a retrospective on the ways in which average people can have their lives warped by externalities. At the end the author wonders about the version of himself that became beatnik, but what about those versions of himself that became drunk and homeless? Well, those don't exist in parallel universes. They exist in this universe, as other people in the same situation as him, the same situation shared by 90% of people.
  - cubano 6y ago
    So I made the huge mistake of replying after only reading a few panels, so all your criticisms are totally valid and I feel kind of silly now. I think an alternate reading of the well-written story perhaps is how much of what we do is driven by dumb luck, and those just as smart and driven as we are here commenting are, through very little fault of their own, homeless and addicted because they just were not "in the right place at the right time" once or twice, or met the wrong person at a bad time in their life? You talk about lives "warped by externalities" and man, ain't that the truth.
  - hckrnwsthrwwy 6y ago
    What's the difference between a beatnik or a drunk? It's all perception, to one person you're a wageslave drone wasting your life working for a boss, to another you're earning a living the honest way and are a model to look up to
    - adamsea 6y ago
      You can combine being an alcoholic with pretty much anything, so ...
everdrive 6y ago
What a great little comic. It reveals a truth I've felt for a while: that most people can't really explain their success. Their success was some combination of luck and talent, and if they had to lead their lives over again, they'd end up in a very different place. Or, if they had to lead their lives in a different time (let's say 60s vs. 2000s) they might be successful in one time, and unsuccessful in another.
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Duplicate.
- ivanbakel 6y ago
  You should link to previous (more active) discussions if you want to claim that the submission is a duplicate. That said, the statute of limitations has expired on this one, since the most recent big discussion I can see was 11 years ago[0]. Those comments are an interesting read-through, since more than one person directly challenges the relevance of the submission. These days, not many people on this website would feel that a short personal retrospective on cyber culture and the 90s is out-of-place. Was the HN of a decade ago more hardline with its focus on interesting hacker pieces? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740760
  - NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
    Same thing was posted 5 times as that is the only content on that web site. Last time was commented 6 years ago ... not 11 years ago. - The Guy I Almost Was (electricsheepcomix.com) 2 points by smacktoward on July 18, 2017 | past - The Guy I Almost Was – Graphic Novel by Patrick Sean Farley (electricsheepcomix.com) 1 point by msh on May 17, 2017 | past - The guy I almost was (1998) [techno-futurism expose comic] (electricsheepcomix.com) 4 points by coldtea on Oct 29, 2015 | past - The Guy I Almost Was (electricsheepcomix.com) 6 points by niels on Mar 30, 2014 | past | 1 comment - The Guy I Almost Was (1998) (electricsheepcomix.com) 105 points by juliankrause on Aug 4, 2009 | past | 25 comments
    - ivanbakel 6y ago
      The "most recent big discussion" is still 11 years ago. As your list shows, all the more recent submissions got much less attention - most don't have even 1 comment. HN permits some duplicates, particularly over a long enough time. Even recent duplicates are allowed, if previous submissions did not generate discussion but the moderators feel that the content is interesting enough and that it didn't get a "fair shake".
dusted 6y ago
What an excellent read! It captures my own disappointment with both the future at large and my own failure at it :D
ErikAugust 6y ago
I found myself in this maybe 10 years after the author did. The idea I have gotten from it (and my own life) is that "big movements" (zeitgeists) don't really end up meaning much personally. They are created by the media and historians, either before or after things happen. This guy got into tech by getting a temp job. He needed the money, and Apple needed somebody to enter data. I guess a moral of the story is, if you want to be a part of the "future", you are better off entering data for a company actually building the future, rather than hanging out with people who sit around talking about what it might be like. Even if there are nothing to be learned here, very enjoyable and it's old enough that I think I may have read it before 15+ years ago.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  > I guess a moral of the story is, if you want to be a part of the "future", you are better off entering data for a company actually building the future, rather than hanging out with people who sit around talking about what it might be like. Corollary: spend less time reading and writing comments on HN.
  - lollmao 6y ago
    I found the comic very ammussing and insightful, likewise for some of the thread. But I am impressed at how well I delude myself into thinking that this was, at all, time well spent.
- Mc91 6y ago
  > I guess a moral of the story is, if you want to be a part of the "future", you are better off entering data for a company actually building the future, rather than hanging out with people who sit around talking about what it might be like. I read once Google makes one hire for every thousand applications. He lucked out getting into a FAANG company when he did (albeit at a lowly position). Someone of his means can not snap their fingers and get a gig in FAANG. With those gates up, he is just marinating in the culture which is accessible. Also, being in that culture, he sees opportunity when he lands at Apple. Plenty of other people who worked alongside him qprobably saw it as just a data entry opportunity to pay rent. While Mondo 2000, Wired etc. may have been forced, I don't think they were completely fraudulent. The people and subcultures they covered already existed, they just kind of cobbled them all together. Of course the editorial biases put a slanted tint on things - the average hacker is not as libertarian as Louis Rossetto envisioned or as into extropianism as RU Sirius imagined. But those magazines put people on their covers who were not on magazine covers before as far as I know (example - free open source pioneer and Cygnus founder John Gilmore). The zeitgeist was created by the media, but not out of whole cloth, there was something going on and raw materials to work with. In retrospect, the media in the center of it got some things right and some things wrong.
everyone 6y ago
I feel like HM Ludens vision was realized.. Millions of idiots buying shit like Juicero, Alexa, iphones etc. Great!
- jamiek88 6y ago
  I don’t think the utility of iPhones and juicero are in any way equivalent. iPhones really did change the world.
ubermonkey 6y ago
I read this when it was new, and I"ve had a bookmark for it (and for the author's other work, Spiders) moved from browser to browser and computer to computer for more than 20 years. It's really really good.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  His Delta Thrives story was my favorite webcomic work. He took it down for some reason. Someone else had it up for years, but it looks like it's finally completely vanished now. It's a shame.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    And The Jain's Death is gone, really liked that one. "Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything" I imagine might have got sued out of existence.
    - superkuh 6y ago
      You can still find them all on archive.org if you dig deep enough. For about 10 years there was no e-sheep site at all. I've kept a copy of the original "The Guy I Almost Was" (slightly different images in the ending, and no javascript) on my local mirror (http://superkuh.com/almostguy/ http://superkuh.com/almostguy/) for decades. Almost Guy is still my favorite but "Night at the rave" is just so wholesome I love it too. "A Suitable Seed"s message still hits just as hard today as it did in the 90s. Farley makes great comics.
    - miles 6y ago
      Here you go: The Jain's Death http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/jain/01.html http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/jain/01.html Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything https://web.archive.org/web/20001109233800/http://www.e-sheep.com/rusheats/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001109233800/http://www.e-shee...
fspacef 6y ago
Fascinating. Can't think of another story that captures the nuance in coming of age for the average 90s futurist kid. The fact that this was written in '98 is interesting too. Seems like every generation goes through this journey. A bright optimism followed by intense disillusionment and then reaching a compromise and balance with their visions of the future and the complex realities of life. I wonder how Gen Z will respond to their trial, especially in the hyper-competitive world where everyone wants to be a "founder".
- offtop5 6y ago
  I actually fear for gen Z. Imagine the meanest dumbest thing you ever said at 19 or whatever. Now that's a part of a permanent record that could come back to haunt you well into your thirties. I often shake my head whenever I hear of a story of someone who wrote something nasty as a teenager on Twitter or something, and as an adult their life is ruined over it. Like we all didn't say stupid mean things in our youth. Now it's just easier to broadcast it all over the world. With Social media the only winning move is not to play
  - keiferski 6y ago
    I used to worry about this, but I realized that at some point, it will cease to matter. When everyone has dirty laundry, no one does, and the guy with none seems fake. We’re just in the one or two decade window where deepfakes aren’t prevalent yet and people still get outraged over stuff they read on Twitter. I give it another 10-15 years, tops. Future startup business idea? Reasonably scandalous fake social media posts, enough to seem real but not enough to truly exclude you from anything.
    - phaedrus 6y ago
      Your last paragraph is actually an idea fleshed out / minor plot point in a Neal Stephenson novel.
      - keiferski 6y ago
andi999 6y ago
Real HM Ludens is not unhappy about this depiction. https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-interview-with-r-u-sirius/ https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-in... (2 3rd down the page)
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  Direct link: https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-interview-with-r-u-sirius/#nd-i-often-look-back-at-the-comic-the-guy-i-always-was7-by-patrick-s-farley-and-consider-how-_mondo-2000_-was-more-of-a-publication-that-invented-the-future-in-both-a-dreaming-sense-or-simply-making-things-up-instead-of-simply-reporting-on-it-do-you-think-that-would-be-an-accurate-way-to-put-things https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-in...
- lioeters 6y ago
  Interesting to read a more recent retrospective on Mondo2000 and similar zeitgeist. It led me to: https://www.mondo2000.com/ https://www.mondo2000.com/ From an interview on the front page, a snippet that captures a bit of that feeling: > ..There was this whole alternate, intellectual, metaphysical kind of thought in the 90s about where things were going. The Terrence McKenna school — we are going to find a way to get free of these monkey bodies and we’re going to find a way to enter other dimensions and we’re going to expand intelligence and extend life. We’re going to break free of a lot of these things that have held us monkeys back for thousands of years. > There’s a sadness when you hear [Robert Anton Wilson] talking about that now because it didn’t happen. The world now is even more fucked up than when he wrote Illuminatus! It just seems like we’ve been completely incapable of breaking free of that stuff. We’re still fighting the same pathetic cultural wars, the same primitive religious wars, despite our best angels pushing us forward to get better. The vast majority of humanity is just this epic failure. It’s sad.
- bitwize 6y ago
  I love how he drops a hint at who H.M. Ludens is supposed to be by having the protagonist ask him "Are you serious?"
  - 6y ago
hapless 6y ago
The most painfully 1990s thing in this whole essay is a man surviving on minimum wage, however modestly If you were to re-tell this story in 2020 it ends with the fellow living in the homeless encampment but still trying to stay clean and timely enough to make it to his data entry job -------- To put it another way: The author happened to be born very close to the peak for average Americans' wages, and every year since then has been an ever-tighter vice squeeze between declining wages and rising rents (in both the real estate and economic senses of the term) The "guy he almost was" is homeless in 2020, if he isn't dead. There's nothing to envy in that life.
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  The American Dream has been replaced by perseverance porn: the only way to succeed is through hardship and the people who fail are losers.
  - ishjoh 6y ago
    I'm a millennial, I have never been drafted to fight in any war, I did not spend my childhood or early teens working on a farm, I was educated by a public school system, I have enough disposable income to have a computer, iPhone, and internet connection through which I can learn anything, I live in a safe community, people of all colors and religious beliefs are willing to do business with me. In history there might be one maybe two generations that have had less hardship than mine, every other generation ever has had more hardship.
    - troupe 6y ago
      You sound like someone who is looking at your opportunity rather than trying to find reasons you can't succeed. :) It is easy to complain about how hard life is, but I really don't think most people would be willing to trade it for some other time in the past--no matter how bad they like to think things are today. It is surprisingly inexpensive to live like people lived in the 1950s when TV, air conditioning, and even indoor plumbing weren't things you'd assume you had to have.
  - 6y ago
pram 6y ago
I don't think framing it in terms of 'what could have been' was really necessary. To me it seems like there was absolutely no chance of him ever being the 'other' guy to begin with. It was just another temporary escapist fantasy like the cyber stuff. What happened doesn't resemble a meaningful fork between two possible lives. Fate (and Apple) really made the decision for him, it's implausible he would have ever rejected that job given the circumstances.
floren 6y ago
It seems that his beatnik dreams were still largely based on the things he'd own. Instead of shiny future-clothes, he'd wear Red Wing boots and horn-rimmed glasses. Instead of a computer, he has the typewriter and his vinyl records. He already couldn't afford to eat or pay rent on his bakery salary, can't afford a $10 library card (a purchase explicitly called out as part of Project Beatnik), but his new plan doesn't include moving or getting a new job. I guess the good intentions of buying all his clothes at Goodwill or the hardware store (clothes are not cheap at the hardware store) would just magically allow him to afford prints of classic Abstract Expressionism paintings? My read is that "the guy I almost was" would be a homeless dude who lugged around an old typewriter with him. I enjoyed the critique of the whole cyber/futurism movement, though.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  He said he couldn't hang out at a library because he didn't have a library card, which struck me as odd. Do libraries not let you inside unless you have a card in California? Because there's not a single library I've been to that required a library card to enter or spend time at the library. I only have a library card for my city, but I've been to libraries all over the suburbs to read their books (on the premises), write, attend events, and even secure meeting rooms (just needed my driver's license). Actually when I was poor that was one thing I did a decent amount of, was just hang out at libraries. Although I've never been so poor I didn't own a working computer, either, although I came close once. One time, when my computer died I spent a couple weeks hunting down a cheap one (just the tower) for $80 on Craigslist that wasn't too much of a downgrade from what I had (mine was kind of old to begin with). I don't remember exactly what was wrong with it. I want to say it was the power supply fried, but if that's the case, I don't know why I thought I couldn't just buy a replacement for the same cost. Maybe I just felt I couldn't afford to take the chance.
  - troupe 6y ago
    > He said he couldn't hang out at a library because he didn't have a library card But at the same time his plan for changing his life was to start going to the library. :)
  - 6y ago
cafard 6y ago
Hah. Omni Magazine. I remember seeing a copy in 1979 and thinking how odd it was.
phaedrus 6y ago
One of my best friends in college was in the same position as the guy at the start of this comic: he was paying for his own college so he had to work for a year (restaurant jobs) to pay for each semester of college. When I met him I was sitting in a diner bummed that I hadn't met any futurists at the college I just started, and I was amazed to suddenly find myself having a deep conversation about such topics with my waiter. Even though I started several years later than he did, we graduated the same year. We got computer science degrees not art degrees (though we both are equally interested in art) so we didn't graduate into poverty like the guy in the comic. We just had to live through poverty to get our degrees. But it's such a societal waste: this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's, if he hadn't had to work low wage jobs to pay for his own school.
- troupe 6y ago
  > this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    It wasn't a personal waste, but it was an inefficient allocation of our overall resources. There are a lot of kids who don't care about college at all but don't have to work through it either. In an ideal world, the people who would work the hardest in college would get the free rides, because not only do they benefit from it the most, we all benefit from them the most.
    - troupe 6y ago
      I think you are assuming that the person in question having a PhD would be better for society as a whole than the path he chose. I don't think that is necessarily a given.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
dghughes 6y ago
This is close to me even age-wise. I was always a dreamer and the future, computers, programming, electronics, all there but I never had the motivation. I never went to college until decades later. Magazines were my Internet in the 80s. Heck I even watched koyaanisqatsi on TV not Internet I was so into all things weird.
minitoar 6y ago
Haha, seems to be set in a fictionalized Santa Cruz, my home town!
johnchristopher 6y ago
That was good. I link it to that previous entry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25547448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25547448
njharman 6y ago
Man, reading Electric Sheep was the best. I really feel blessed to have been born 50 years ago, today in fact. Living through rise of personal computer, birth of internet, and the explosion on electronic and online art engendered by both.
- silentsea90 6y ago
  Happy birthday! How was living through the 80s? I wasn't born then but find the subculture fascinating. Did you make gazillions from being invested in tech through the 90s until now (lots of assumptions made here). Do you miss anything about life in the past(beyond nostalgia)?
  - ubermonkey 6y ago
    I'm not who you replied to, but I'm the same age. Your questions are interesting so I'll answer anyway. 1. The 80s sucked. I was a dateless nerd in a shitty town in a shitty state for most of it. They got marginally better when I went to college in the more sophisticated and urbane state to the immediate east. And that state was Alabama. No kidding, UA was MILES more sophisticated than the crappy college town I grew up in. I think this is probably because the University had much, much more influence in Tuscaloosa than USM had in Hattiesburg. The music was cool, though. The last waves of punk plus the waves of more indie-style stuff, plus the explosion in Athens, GA, all made for great tunes. To this day, the opening chords of REM's first albums are incredibly transportive and soothing to me. (And one of the only times I've ever been truly star-struck is when I found myself in line at an airport bookstore behind Mike Mills.) 2. In the late 90s, I was briefly (and theoretically) rich on paper. Not "Netscape stock" rich or "MSFT rich," but worth about $5MM. Sadly, it was not liquid, and became worth $0 in short order. I was an investing partner in an Internet tech consultancy -- mostly, custom web sites and software, which at the time you could charge a lot of money for -- but didn't have enough stock to turn the boat. We got sucked into the massive-land-grab mentality, and tried to go toe to toe vs. firms like Agency, and predictably lost. But had we aimed lower we could've been a tidily profitable regional player. The lesson is that there's nothing WRONG with mid-market, you know? The experience cost me actual money (not options), but it was also incredibly educational, and cheaper than grad school would've been, so I'm not sore about it. Sadly, the dot-com crash left me richer only in skills. I had to burn savings to keep my house from late 2001 through early 20003, when I started making money again. 3. I have enjoyed my life in every state. At 50, I could prattle on about this or that that used to be cooler, but so many things are manifestly cooler NOW it's a bankrupt enterprise. And God knows I don't want to come off like some bellyaching boomer. I mean, think about it: how much would this pandemic have sucked in an era without broad connectivity and online community? There's widespread enough bandwidth, and good enough software, that my 80 year old mother can very easily initiate a video call with anyone she likes. Sure, most of the folks who post on HN probably had online pals they were gaming with or chatting with or working with a decade ago, but the non-digital would've been materially more isolated. However, I will admit I definitely miss the Internet before Eternal September happened. There's more HERE now, but the broad internet culture moved from fairly intelligent and articulate to, well, nihilism. Few places reward multi-sentence or multi-paragraph expression now. (HN is a very notable exception.)
duxup 6y ago
What we think we want to be and do and the randomness of life are strange. We reject fashion, or certain types of work, or various things in order to find something else or define ourselves, but it's not really clear if we ever really understood those things or that by doing so we learn / go anywhere. It reminds me of what Roger Ebert said of the film "Reality Bites" (sticking to the 1990s vibe): "the deep-seated prejudices of the movie, which are that anyone who shoots documentary video footage of friends is a genius; anyone who is pushing 30 and has a good job has sold out; and anyone who is simultaneously unemployed and hostile is a reservoir of truth."
scythe 6y ago
It's a little sad to see that a kid obsessed with building a better future could grow up reading about technology throughout the '80s and into the '90s and never know about the GNU project, which was closer to what he wanted to believe in than everything else -- but not gussied up with marketing glitter. The people who most deserve to make an impact rarely do.
germinalphrase 6y ago
Wired might have been fairly mainstream (and by the author’s telling - ridiculous), but it was also a light in the dark of my small midwestern farm town. What are the current equivalents to the 90’s cyber magazine culture?
carlospwk 6y ago
After I clicked a few panels I got this weird feeling and then I realized it... I actually remember reading this when it came out! 1998 was 22 years ago :$
bencollier49 6y ago
The really odd thing about this comic is the way that the final panel is missing; where the dot-com bust happens, and he ends up back with the muffins.
microtherion 6y ago
As a teenager, I did not own a computer, and my high school's computer room with its SuperPETs was closed over the summer break. So I spent my 1983 summer break on our porch with my dad's Hermes 3000 writing the primitives of a FORTH interpreter in 6809 assembly language (I may have written an earlier draft in long hand; I don't recall). When school started again in the fall, I entered my manuscript and got the interpreter to run with not all that much trial and error (considering I had little prior assembly programming experience). I swear I was not trying to be a hipster!
yongjik 6y ago
I liked the ending, but just a second... did the main character actually say "in 1990, we're gonna be 21 years old" in 1978? That would make him 9, and he was dreaming about driving around visiting never-ending orgies in future pleasure domes? Well, I guess some kids grow up earlier than others ...
romwell 6y ago
I just started reading it, but I just wanted to say THANK YOU to whoever implemented keyboard navigation for this (scrolling with arrows). Makes it so much more enjoyable to experience.
neilv 6y ago
I love this, and have mentioned it on HN elsewhere before. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24267176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24267176 Around the time the comic first came out, I wish I'd seen it earlier, since I hadn't been skeptical enough of "magazine visionaries". He hit some of the traits and behaviors on the head.
0b01 6y ago
Reminds me of this guy who graduated from Harvard Law School but ended up homeless: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-homeless-man-who-graduated-from-harvard-law-school-with-chief-justice-john-roberts/2015/07/13/63257b5c-20ca-11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-homel...
ableal 6y ago
IMHO, "Yes album covers" is worth an image search, if you never saw one.

305 points by wallflower 6y ago

genjipress 6y ago

This is one of my favorite webcomics of all time.

postingpals 6y ago

It's like I'm reading a comic about my own life, except as it is happening in the 21st century.

zabuni 6y ago

Given the whole #vanlife craze that is happening now, Spacehawk look prescient.

cubano 6y ago

So in some ways, I feel that maybe the youngster in the comic wasn't totally wrong. Well, our cars didn't shoot around the world in hamster-tubes, but our thoughts and ideas sure did and you know, I think in the end that was probably a lot smarter. The "hedonism" stuff? Well don't know about you guys but I sure lived that thru the bands and the all the raves and shit I managed to find myself at in the late 80's and 90's. Yes..of course life almost always smashes our childhood dreams. Big deal get over it, but I think it's important to always remember the positive along with the crap.

postingpals 6y ago
This story is deeper than 'life crushed this one individual's childhood dreams'. At any turn during the story, the author could have become something much worse. He could have become a drunk, he could have become homeless. The invisible hand of the economy dangled his future in front of him as a tease and then handed him a job in the end as a threat, telling him never to be ungrateful or else. It's a retrospective on the ways in which average people can have their lives warped by externalities. At the end the author wonders about the version of himself that became beatnik, but what about those versions of himself that became drunk and homeless? Well, those don't exist in parallel universes. They exist in this universe, as other people in the same situation as him, the same situation shared by 90% of people.
- cubano 6y ago
  So I made the huge mistake of replying after only reading a few panels, so all your criticisms are totally valid and I feel kind of silly now. I think an alternate reading of the well-written story perhaps is how much of what we do is driven by dumb luck, and those just as smart and driven as we are here commenting are, through very little fault of their own, homeless and addicted because they just were not "in the right place at the right time" once or twice, or met the wrong person at a bad time in their life? You talk about lives "warped by externalities" and man, ain't that the truth.
- hckrnwsthrwwy 6y ago
  What's the difference between a beatnik or a drunk? It's all perception, to one person you're a wageslave drone wasting your life working for a boss, to another you're earning a living the honest way and are a model to look up to
  - adamsea 6y ago
    You can combine being an alcoholic with pretty much anything, so ...

everdrive 6y ago

What a great little comic. It reveals a truth I've felt for a while: that most people can't really explain their success. Their success was some combination of luck and talent, and if they had to lead their lives over again, they'd end up in a very different place. Or, if they had to lead their lives in a different time (let's say 60s vs. 2000s) they might be successful in one time, and unsuccessful in another.

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

Duplicate.

ivanbakel 6y ago
You should link to previous (more active) discussions if you want to claim that the submission is a duplicate. That said, the statute of limitations has expired on this one, since the most recent big discussion I can see was 11 years ago[0]. Those comments are an interesting read-through, since more than one person directly challenges the relevance of the submission. These days, not many people on this website would feel that a short personal retrospective on cyber culture and the 90s is out-of-place. Was the HN of a decade ago more hardline with its focus on interesting hacker pieces? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740760
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  Same thing was posted 5 times as that is the only content on that web site. Last time was commented 6 years ago ... not 11 years ago. - The Guy I Almost Was (electricsheepcomix.com) 2 points by smacktoward on July 18, 2017 | past - The Guy I Almost Was – Graphic Novel by Patrick Sean Farley (electricsheepcomix.com) 1 point by msh on May 17, 2017 | past - The guy I almost was (1998) [techno-futurism expose comic] (electricsheepcomix.com) 4 points by coldtea on Oct 29, 2015 | past - The Guy I Almost Was (electricsheepcomix.com) 6 points by niels on Mar 30, 2014 | past | 1 comment - The Guy I Almost Was (1998) (electricsheepcomix.com) 105 points by juliankrause on Aug 4, 2009 | past | 25 comments
  - ivanbakel 6y ago
    The "most recent big discussion" is still 11 years ago. As your list shows, all the more recent submissions got much less attention - most don't have even 1 comment. HN permits some duplicates, particularly over a long enough time. Even recent duplicates are allowed, if previous submissions did not generate discussion but the moderators feel that the content is interesting enough and that it didn't get a "fair shake".

dusted 6y ago

What an excellent read! It captures my own disappointment with both the future at large and my own failure at it :D

ErikAugust 6y ago

I found myself in this maybe 10 years after the author did. The idea I have gotten from it (and my own life) is that "big movements" (zeitgeists) don't really end up meaning much personally. They are created by the media and historians, either before or after things happen. This guy got into tech by getting a temp job. He needed the money, and Apple needed somebody to enter data. I guess a moral of the story is, if you want to be a part of the "future", you are better off entering data for a company actually building the future, rather than hanging out with people who sit around talking about what it might be like. Even if there are nothing to be learned here, very enjoyable and it's old enough that I think I may have read it before 15+ years ago.

pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
> I guess a moral of the story is, if you want to be a part of the "future", you are better off entering data for a company actually building the future, rather than hanging out with people who sit around talking about what it might be like. Corollary: spend less time reading and writing comments on HN.
- lollmao 6y ago
  I found the comic very ammussing and insightful, likewise for some of the thread. But I am impressed at how well I delude myself into thinking that this was, at all, time well spent.
Mc91 6y ago
> I guess a moral of the story is, if you want to be a part of the "future", you are better off entering data for a company actually building the future, rather than hanging out with people who sit around talking about what it might be like. I read once Google makes one hire for every thousand applications. He lucked out getting into a FAANG company when he did (albeit at a lowly position). Someone of his means can not snap their fingers and get a gig in FAANG. With those gates up, he is just marinating in the culture which is accessible. Also, being in that culture, he sees opportunity when he lands at Apple. Plenty of other people who worked alongside him qprobably saw it as just a data entry opportunity to pay rent. While Mondo 2000, Wired etc. may have been forced, I don't think they were completely fraudulent. The people and subcultures they covered already existed, they just kind of cobbled them all together. Of course the editorial biases put a slanted tint on things - the average hacker is not as libertarian as Louis Rossetto envisioned or as into extropianism as RU Sirius imagined. But those magazines put people on their covers who were not on magazine covers before as far as I know (example - free open source pioneer and Cygnus founder John Gilmore). The zeitgeist was created by the media, but not out of whole cloth, there was something going on and raw materials to work with. In retrospect, the media in the center of it got some things right and some things wrong.

everyone 6y ago

I feel like HM Ludens vision was realized.. Millions of idiots buying shit like Juicero, Alexa, iphones etc. Great!

jamiek88 6y ago
I don’t think the utility of iPhones and juicero are in any way equivalent. iPhones really did change the world.

ubermonkey 6y ago

I read this when it was new, and I"ve had a bookmark for it (and for the author's other work, Spiders) moved from browser to browser and computer to computer for more than 20 years. It's really really good.

TigeriusKirk 6y ago
His Delta Thrives story was my favorite webcomic work. He took it down for some reason. Someone else had it up for years, but it looks like it's finally completely vanished now. It's a shame.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  And The Jain's Death is gone, really liked that one. "Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything" I imagine might have got sued out of existence.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    You can still find them all on archive.org if you dig deep enough. For about 10 years there was no e-sheep site at all. I've kept a copy of the original "The Guy I Almost Was" (slightly different images in the ending, and no javascript) on my local mirror (http://superkuh.com/almostguy/ http://superkuh.com/almostguy/) for decades. Almost Guy is still my favorite but "Night at the rave" is just so wholesome I love it too. "A Suitable Seed"s message still hits just as hard today as it did in the 90s. Farley makes great comics.
  - miles 6y ago
    Here you go: The Jain's Death http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/jain/01.html http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/jain/01.html Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything https://web.archive.org/web/20001109233800/http://www.e-sheep.com/rusheats/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001109233800/http://www.e-shee...

fspacef 6y ago

Fascinating. Can't think of another story that captures the nuance in coming of age for the average 90s futurist kid. The fact that this was written in '98 is interesting too. Seems like every generation goes through this journey. A bright optimism followed by intense disillusionment and then reaching a compromise and balance with their visions of the future and the complex realities of life. I wonder how Gen Z will respond to their trial, especially in the hyper-competitive world where everyone wants to be a "founder".

offtop5 6y ago
I actually fear for gen Z. Imagine the meanest dumbest thing you ever said at 19 or whatever. Now that's a part of a permanent record that could come back to haunt you well into your thirties. I often shake my head whenever I hear of a story of someone who wrote something nasty as a teenager on Twitter or something, and as an adult their life is ruined over it. Like we all didn't say stupid mean things in our youth. Now it's just easier to broadcast it all over the world. With Social media the only winning move is not to play
- keiferski 6y ago
  I used to worry about this, but I realized that at some point, it will cease to matter. When everyone has dirty laundry, no one does, and the guy with none seems fake. We’re just in the one or two decade window where deepfakes aren’t prevalent yet and people still get outraged over stuff they read on Twitter. I give it another 10-15 years, tops. Future startup business idea? Reasonably scandalous fake social media posts, enough to seem real but not enough to truly exclude you from anything.
  - phaedrus 6y ago
    Your last paragraph is actually an idea fleshed out / minor plot point in a Neal Stephenson novel.
    - keiferski 6y ago

andi999 6y ago

Real HM Ludens is not unhappy about this depiction. https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-interview-with-r-u-sirius/ https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-in... (2 3rd down the page)

ricardobeat 6y ago
Direct link: https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-interview-with-r-u-sirius/#nd-i-often-look-back-at-the-comic-the-guy-i-always-was7-by-patrick-s-farley-and-consider-how-_mondo-2000_-was-more-of-a-publication-that-invented-the-future-in-both-a-dreaming-sense-or-simply-making-things-up-instead-of-simply-reporting-on-it-do-you-think-that-would-be-an-accurate-way-to-put-things https://famicoman.com/2017/12/29/on-music-mondo-mayhem-an-in...
lioeters 6y ago
Interesting to read a more recent retrospective on Mondo2000 and similar zeitgeist. It led me to: https://www.mondo2000.com/ https://www.mondo2000.com/ From an interview on the front page, a snippet that captures a bit of that feeling: > ..There was this whole alternate, intellectual, metaphysical kind of thought in the 90s about where things were going. The Terrence McKenna school — we are going to find a way to get free of these monkey bodies and we’re going to find a way to enter other dimensions and we’re going to expand intelligence and extend life. We’re going to break free of a lot of these things that have held us monkeys back for thousands of years. > There’s a sadness when you hear [Robert Anton Wilson] talking about that now because it didn’t happen. The world now is even more fucked up than when he wrote Illuminatus! It just seems like we’ve been completely incapable of breaking free of that stuff. We’re still fighting the same pathetic cultural wars, the same primitive religious wars, despite our best angels pushing us forward to get better. The vast majority of humanity is just this epic failure. It’s sad.
bitwize 6y ago
I love how he drops a hint at who H.M. Ludens is supposed to be by having the protagonist ask him "Are you serious?"
- 6y ago

hapless 6y ago

The most painfully 1990s thing in this whole essay is a man surviving on minimum wage, however modestly If you were to re-tell this story in 2020 it ends with the fellow living in the homeless encampment but still trying to stay clean and timely enough to make it to his data entry job -------- To put it another way: The author happened to be born very close to the peak for average Americans' wages, and every year since then has been an ever-tighter vice squeeze between declining wages and rising rents (in both the real estate and economic senses of the term) The "guy he almost was" is homeless in 2020, if he isn't dead. There's nothing to envy in that life.

spiderfarmer 6y ago
The American Dream has been replaced by perseverance porn: the only way to succeed is through hardship and the people who fail are losers.
- ishjoh 6y ago
  I'm a millennial, I have never been drafted to fight in any war, I did not spend my childhood or early teens working on a farm, I was educated by a public school system, I have enough disposable income to have a computer, iPhone, and internet connection through which I can learn anything, I live in a safe community, people of all colors and religious beliefs are willing to do business with me. In history there might be one maybe two generations that have had less hardship than mine, every other generation ever has had more hardship.
  - troupe 6y ago
    You sound like someone who is looking at your opportunity rather than trying to find reasons you can't succeed. :) It is easy to complain about how hard life is, but I really don't think most people would be willing to trade it for some other time in the past--no matter how bad they like to think things are today. It is surprisingly inexpensive to live like people lived in the 1950s when TV, air conditioning, and even indoor plumbing weren't things you'd assume you had to have.
- 6y ago

pram 6y ago

I don't think framing it in terms of 'what could have been' was really necessary. To me it seems like there was absolutely no chance of him ever being the 'other' guy to begin with. It was just another temporary escapist fantasy like the cyber stuff. What happened doesn't resemble a meaningful fork between two possible lives. Fate (and Apple) really made the decision for him, it's implausible he would have ever rejected that job given the circumstances.

floren 6y ago

It seems that his beatnik dreams were still largely based on the things he'd own. Instead of shiny future-clothes, he'd wear Red Wing boots and horn-rimmed glasses. Instead of a computer, he has the typewriter and his vinyl records. He already couldn't afford to eat or pay rent on his bakery salary, can't afford a $10 library card (a purchase explicitly called out as part of Project Beatnik), but his new plan doesn't include moving or getting a new job. I guess the good intentions of buying all his clothes at Goodwill or the hardware store (clothes are not cheap at the hardware store) would just magically allow him to afford prints of classic Abstract Expressionism paintings? My read is that "the guy I almost was" would be a homeless dude who lugged around an old typewriter with him. I enjoyed the critique of the whole cyber/futurism movement, though.

cableshaft 6y ago
He said he couldn't hang out at a library because he didn't have a library card, which struck me as odd. Do libraries not let you inside unless you have a card in California? Because there's not a single library I've been to that required a library card to enter or spend time at the library. I only have a library card for my city, but I've been to libraries all over the suburbs to read their books (on the premises), write, attend events, and even secure meeting rooms (just needed my driver's license). Actually when I was poor that was one thing I did a decent amount of, was just hang out at libraries. Although I've never been so poor I didn't own a working computer, either, although I came close once. One time, when my computer died I spent a couple weeks hunting down a cheap one (just the tower) for $80 on Craigslist that wasn't too much of a downgrade from what I had (mine was kind of old to begin with). I don't remember exactly what was wrong with it. I want to say it was the power supply fried, but if that's the case, I don't know why I thought I couldn't just buy a replacement for the same cost. Maybe I just felt I couldn't afford to take the chance.
- troupe 6y ago
  > He said he couldn't hang out at a library because he didn't have a library card But at the same time his plan for changing his life was to start going to the library. :)
- 6y ago

cafard 6y ago

Hah. Omni Magazine. I remember seeing a copy in 1979 and thinking how odd it was.

phaedrus 6y ago

One of my best friends in college was in the same position as the guy at the start of this comic: he was paying for his own college so he had to work for a year (restaurant jobs) to pay for each semester of college. When I met him I was sitting in a diner bummed that I hadn't met any futurists at the college I just started, and I was amazed to suddenly find myself having a deep conversation about such topics with my waiter. Even though I started several years later than he did, we graduated the same year. We got computer science degrees not art degrees (though we both are equally interested in art) so we didn't graduate into poverty like the guy in the comic. We just had to live through poverty to get our degrees. But it's such a societal waste: this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's, if he hadn't had to work low wage jobs to pay for his own school.

troupe 6y ago
> this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  It wasn't a personal waste, but it was an inefficient allocation of our overall resources. There are a lot of kids who don't care about college at all but don't have to work through it either. In an ideal world, the people who would work the hardest in college would get the free rides, because not only do they benefit from it the most, we all benefit from them the most.
  - troupe 6y ago
    I think you are assuming that the person in question having a PhD would be better for society as a whole than the path he chose. I don't think that is necessarily a given.
    - whatshisface 6y ago

dghughes 6y ago

This is close to me even age-wise. I was always a dreamer and the future, computers, programming, electronics, all there but I never had the motivation. I never went to college until decades later. Magazines were my Internet in the 80s. Heck I even watched koyaanisqatsi on TV not Internet I was so into all things weird.

minitoar 6y ago

Haha, seems to be set in a fictionalized Santa Cruz, my home town!

johnchristopher 6y ago

That was good. I link it to that previous entry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25547448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25547448

njharman 6y ago

Man, reading Electric Sheep was the best. I really feel blessed to have been born 50 years ago, today in fact. Living through rise of personal computer, birth of internet, and the explosion on electronic and online art engendered by both.

silentsea90 6y ago
Happy birthday! How was living through the 80s? I wasn't born then but find the subculture fascinating. Did you make gazillions from being invested in tech through the 90s until now (lots of assumptions made here). Do you miss anything about life in the past(beyond nostalgia)?
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  I'm not who you replied to, but I'm the same age. Your questions are interesting so I'll answer anyway. 1. The 80s sucked. I was a dateless nerd in a shitty town in a shitty state for most of it. They got marginally better when I went to college in the more sophisticated and urbane state to the immediate east. And that state was Alabama. No kidding, UA was MILES more sophisticated than the crappy college town I grew up in. I think this is probably because the University had much, much more influence in Tuscaloosa than USM had in Hattiesburg. The music was cool, though. The last waves of punk plus the waves of more indie-style stuff, plus the explosion in Athens, GA, all made for great tunes. To this day, the opening chords of REM's first albums are incredibly transportive and soothing to me. (And one of the only times I've ever been truly star-struck is when I found myself in line at an airport bookstore behind Mike Mills.) 2. In the late 90s, I was briefly (and theoretically) rich on paper. Not "Netscape stock" rich or "MSFT rich," but worth about $5MM. Sadly, it was not liquid, and became worth $0 in short order. I was an investing partner in an Internet tech consultancy -- mostly, custom web sites and software, which at the time you could charge a lot of money for -- but didn't have enough stock to turn the boat. We got sucked into the massive-land-grab mentality, and tried to go toe to toe vs. firms like Agency, and predictably lost. But had we aimed lower we could've been a tidily profitable regional player. The lesson is that there's nothing WRONG with mid-market, you know? The experience cost me actual money (not options), but it was also incredibly educational, and cheaper than grad school would've been, so I'm not sore about it. Sadly, the dot-com crash left me richer only in skills. I had to burn savings to keep my house from late 2001 through early 20003, when I started making money again. 3. I have enjoyed my life in every state. At 50, I could prattle on about this or that that used to be cooler, but so many things are manifestly cooler NOW it's a bankrupt enterprise. And God knows I don't want to come off like some bellyaching boomer. I mean, think about it: how much would this pandemic have sucked in an era without broad connectivity and online community? There's widespread enough bandwidth, and good enough software, that my 80 year old mother can very easily initiate a video call with anyone she likes. Sure, most of the folks who post on HN probably had online pals they were gaming with or chatting with or working with a decade ago, but the non-digital would've been materially more isolated. However, I will admit I definitely miss the Internet before Eternal September happened. There's more HERE now, but the broad internet culture moved from fairly intelligent and articulate to, well, nihilism. Few places reward multi-sentence or multi-paragraph expression now. (HN is a very notable exception.)

duxup 6y ago

What we think we want to be and do and the randomness of life are strange. We reject fashion, or certain types of work, or various things in order to find something else or define ourselves, but it's not really clear if we ever really understood those things or that by doing so we learn / go anywhere. It reminds me of what Roger Ebert said of the film "Reality Bites" (sticking to the 1990s vibe): "the deep-seated prejudices of the movie, which are that anyone who shoots documentary video footage of friends is a genius; anyone who is pushing 30 and has a good job has sold out; and anyone who is simultaneously unemployed and hostile is a reservoir of truth."

scythe 6y ago

It's a little sad to see that a kid obsessed with building a better future could grow up reading about technology throughout the '80s and into the '90s and never know about the GNU project, which was closer to what he wanted to believe in than everything else -- but not gussied up with marketing glitter. The people who most deserve to make an impact rarely do.

germinalphrase 6y ago

Wired might have been fairly mainstream (and by the author’s telling - ridiculous), but it was also a light in the dark of my small midwestern farm town. What are the current equivalents to the 90’s cyber magazine culture?

carlospwk 6y ago

After I clicked a few panels I got this weird feeling and then I realized it... I actually remember reading this when it came out! 1998 was 22 years ago :$

bencollier49 6y ago

The really odd thing about this comic is the way that the final panel is missing; where the dot-com bust happens, and he ends up back with the muffins.

microtherion 6y ago

As a teenager, I did not own a computer, and my high school's computer room with its SuperPETs was closed over the summer break. So I spent my 1983 summer break on our porch with my dad's Hermes 3000 writing the primitives of a FORTH interpreter in 6809 assembly language (I may have written an earlier draft in long hand; I don't recall). When school started again in the fall, I entered my manuscript and got the interpreter to run with not all that much trial and error (considering I had little prior assembly programming experience). I swear I was not trying to be a hipster!

yongjik 6y ago

I liked the ending, but just a second... did the main character actually say "in 1990, we're gonna be 21 years old" in 1978? That would make him 9, and he was dreaming about driving around visiting never-ending orgies in future pleasure domes? Well, I guess some kids grow up earlier than others ...

romwell 6y ago

I just started reading it, but I just wanted to say THANK YOU to whoever implemented keyboard navigation for this (scrolling with arrows). Makes it so much more enjoyable to experience.

neilv 6y ago

I love this, and have mentioned it on HN elsewhere before. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24267176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24267176 Around the time the comic first came out, I wish I'd seen it earlier, since I hadn't been skeptical enough of "magazine visionaries". He hit some of the traits and behaviors on the head.

0b01 6y ago

Reminds me of this guy who graduated from Harvard Law School but ended up homeless: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-homeless-man-who-graduated-from-harvard-law-school-with-chief-justice-john-roberts/2015/07/13/63257b5c-20ca-11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-homel...

ableal 6y ago

IMHO, "Yes album covers" is worth an image search, if you never saw one.