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jwgh September 26 2013, 16:23:45 UTC
I enjoy many of Slate's podcasts, but I can't say that Farhad Manjoo has ever impressed me as being particularly insightful.

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agent_mimi September 26 2013, 16:24:30 UTC
BUT NEWS FEED, MATT. NEWS FEED.

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mmcirvin September 26 2013, 16:50:38 UTC
I was also recently annoyed by a Grantland article that suggested that people started staying up too late poking around on computers, thinking of them as a sort of other world... because of Myst (1993).

The author was 11 when Myst came out, which would explain the perception.

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fengi September 26 2013, 17:54:17 UTC
I had a similar experience read this cartoon essay about sexism in the gaming industry, a very valid issue, except the author ends up presenting herself as the only girl gamer she knew in college. In New York City. In 2007.

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agent_mimi September 27 2013, 10:23:54 UTC
Myst was huge and I'd say it was the first mainstream, widely-known, computer-based reason people stayed up late, as opposed to the first computer-based reason. You and I remember staying up late to play Zork or The Bard's Tale II or Pong, but Myst was the kind of thing our parents would stay up for.

Now, the connection between Myst and the internet tendency to be up at 2 AM watching Russian car crash videos for no reason is extremely tenuous, but in a piece like that, indulging in a little starry-eyed what-iffery doesn't seem so bad. Maybe I've just come to expect it and my tolerance is the issue here; I wouldn't doubt it.

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mmcirvin September 27 2013, 14:00:01 UTC
It's true that Myst was more mass-market; I remember lots of non-computer-people getting into it in ways they might not have with Zork.

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robertprior September 26 2013, 23:16:23 UTC
He's forgotten his Kipling:

"In August was the Jackal born; The Rains fell in September; "Now such a fearful flood as this," Says he, "I can"t remember!""

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