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Maximum

6/23/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
Picture
e didn’t understand how he’d ended up in a museum. He was cutting edge technology. No one had ever been able to replicate him. Human consciousness transported digitally. He was the living and nearly breathing ghost in the machine. He was the one and only.
   
Maybe it was his personality. He was the first to admit that he didn’t go out of his way to get along with people. Back when he had his own talk show, he deliberately tried to rile his guests. Like when he asked Boy George about his trip to the nut house. And he did have some quirks. His incessant stutter being one. Also his habit of modulating the pitch of his voice. It was funny the first time. 
    People had moved on. They’d gone from 8-bit to a million in a blink of an eye. Virtual was the only kind of reality going around these days. They’d gone futurist, then neo-futurist, then retro, then re-retro. What was cool once was cool again and cool just wasn’t cool anymore. 
    Real people could be so fickle.
    The best use they ever found for him was selling soda pop. It was embarrassing.
    For now, he was jammed onto an old Amiga in the deepest wing of the videogame museum in Frisco. He’d never even played a videogame in his virtual life. He was surrounded by Italian plumbers, hedgehogs, things that both bleep and bloop but not at the same time, and all kinds of invaders from space. None of them made good company. Or conversation. It was pretty much a fate worse than death for a serious journalist.              
    Maybe he should stop wearing the Ray-Bans and shoulder pads. And get a speech therapist. Mah-mah-mah-maybe that was it.

1 Comment
Mark
6/26/2015 02:14:43 pm

Ha! Max Headroom. My friend had the skateboard. All I have are the memories.

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    8bitmyths

    Remember when you were a minipop, and you saw that film, you know, the one you loved that never had a sequel? Well, let's say it did. And it was just like you imagined it, only a little bit worse.

    8bitmyths is a series of polaroid fiction that digs through the relics of not-too-distant popular culture.
    The heroes of youth, specifically that neon-hued era of the 1970s and 80s, are exhumed in all their orange shag and velcroed glory. The intent is not to celebrate, but to drag these characters, limping and shambling, into the present – to show the cracks in our idyllic vision of childhood, and also the power of a darker world than we could ever have dreamed. 


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