INCREDIBLE DOOM
       
       2023-11-01
       
       I just finished reading Incredible Doom volumes 1 and 2, by Matthew Bogart and
       Jesse Holden, and man... that was a heartwarming and nostalgic tale!
       
 (IMG) Softcover bound copies of volumes 1 and 2 of Incredible Doom, on a wooden surface.
       
       Set in the early-to-mid-1990s world in which the BBS is still alive and
       kicking, and the Internet's gaining traction but still lacks the "killer app"
       that will someday be the Web (which is still new and not widely-available),
       the story follows a handful of teenagers trying to find their place in the
       world. Meeting one another in the 90s explosion of cyberspace, they find
       online communities that provide connections that they're unable to make out in
       meatspace.
       
 (IMG) A "Geek Code Block", printed in a dot-matrix style font, light-blue on black, reads: GU D-- -P+ C+L? U E M+ S-/+ N--- H-- F--(+) !G W++ T R? X?
       
 (IMG) Partial scan from a page of Incredible Doom, showing a character typing about "needing a solution", with fragments of an IRC chat room visible in background panels.
       
       It touches on experiences of 90s cyberspace that, for many of us, were very
       definitely real. And while my online "scene" at around the time that the story
       is set might have been different from that of the protagonists, there's enough
       of an overlap that it felt startlingly real and believable. The online world
       in which I - like the characters in the story - hung out... but which occupied
       a strange limbo-space: both anonymous and separate from the real world but
       also interpersonal and authentic; a frontier in which we were still working
       out the rules but within which we still found common bonds and ideals.
       
 (IMG) A humorous comic scene from Incredible Doom in which a male character wearing glasses walks with a female character he's recently met and is somewhat intimidated by, playing-out in his mind the possibility that she might be about to stab him. Or kiss him. Or kiss him THEN stab him.
       
       Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying that Incredible Doom is a lot
       of fun and if it sounds like your cup of tea, you should read it.
       
       Also: shortly after putting the second volume down, I ended up updating my
       Geek Code for the first time in... ooh, well over a decade. The standards have
       moved on a little (not entirely in a good way, I feel; also they've diverged
       somewhat), but here's my attempt:
       
       ----- BEGIN GEEK CODE VERSION 6.0 -----
       GCS^$/SS^/FS^>AT A++ B+:+:_:+:_ C-(--) D:+ CM+++ MW+++>++
       ULD++ MC+ LRu+>++/js+/php+/sql+/bash/go/j/P/py-/!vb PGP++
       G:Dan-Q E H+ PS++ PE++ TBG/FF+/RM+ RPG++ BK+>++ K!D/X+ R@ he/him!
       ----- END GEEK CODE VERSION 6.0 -----
       
       LINKS
       
 (HTM) Incredible Doom
 (HTM) Matthew Bogart
 (HTM) Jesse Holden
 (HTM) "Geek Code"
 (HTM) Textfiles.com