Let's Read Some Cory Fucking Doctorow

month

July 2012

1 post

seriously though

Making fun of Cory is now on hold indefinitely until I put my life back in order. I don’t really need one more thing in my life to feel guilty about, so I’m gonna stop beating myself up about not updating. Also I’m still super bummed about that post that got deleted. It was pretty good. Sorry, y’all. I’ll be back in a month or two if everything goes as planned, AND...

June 2012

2 posts

just lost an entire post to backspace being the “go back a page” button in chrome y’all can thank google for not getting a new post today so mad

knee-deep in piss, episode 3

A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. “So melodramatic, Marcus. […]” Well, Severe Haircut Lady (I’m still half-convinced that’s supposed to be a crude dogwhistle for “lesbian”) has a point. Pronounced Winston has just given the hammiest performance about “the Bill of Rights” ever, probably to match her Movie Mobster...

May 2012

2 posts

knee-deep in piss, episode 2

They re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. A long time later, the truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then I was hauled back to my feet. I immediately fell over. My legs were so asleep they felt like blocks of ice, all except my knees, which were swollen and tender from all the hours of kneeling. No smug shit so far, just the facts and the visceral horror of imprisonment. ...

knee-deep in piss, interlude

We doin’ this. This chapter is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national chain of bookstores. As America’s mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and keeping long...

April 2012

1 post

knee-deep in piss, episode 1

Last time, Pronounced Winston et consortes were captured by a bunch of armed assholes and dragged off to God knows where. Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So was Jolu, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I was scared. What’s more, I had to piss like a race-horse. Piss becomes the major theme of this segment, actually. The next bit...

March 2012

4 posts

Prolegomena to a critique of Nerdism

I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what was going on with my friends. I heard them shouting through the muffling canvas of the bag, and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feet by my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shoulders screaming. Things aren’t looking too hot for Pronounced Winston right now; he’s been captured by some...

Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then he groaned and his head went back again. Last time, Pronounced Winston’s feverish douchebaggery has claimed its first victim, as his friend and only likable character so far, Darryl, was stabbed for associating with the biggest asshole in town. Well, we don’t know that, but we don’t know anything else about this...

My impression of the casual “tranny hooker” bullshit was that it was your standard casual privileged thoughtlessness combined with a desire to exhibit, in the narration, how cool Pronounced Winston is. Given the overall preachiness of the books (ha ha, just wait until you get to the afterword and other backmatter) it seemed clear to me that Doctorow was writing this book to an imagined mass of...

not gonna try to keep track of days anymore, that...

Then the world changed forever. Remember when I stopped posting and the world changed forever? “The world changed forever” is an interesting journalistic cliché, in that it not so much describes or analyzes an event as enacts it. Three thousand people, or three hundred thousand, could die of malnutrition or some natural disaster in the span of five seconds, but it is the voice of...

February 2012

13 posts

Day who even keeps track anymore: He Respects...

The physical component of today’s clue was a set of GPS coordinates — there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun Madness was played — where we’d find a WiFi access-point’s signal. That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it couldn’t be spotted by conventional wifinders, little...

Day ahahaha: ahahaha

Ahahaha FUCK I’m the biggest liar, aren’t I. But nevermind that! Back in the saddle again, let’s do this thing! Back when we left off, we met Van, who is a girl with crazy elaborate braids she researches on the net, and has mastered the ancient and mystical Far Eastern art of looking exactly like every other person of East Asian descent. I feel like it’s important to...

so here's the deal

I’m adjusting my schedule AGAIN, because: 1. I can, and; 2. Fuck Cory. I took a little break from this horrible book because I havd vastly more interesting and rewarding real-life things to do, and it turned into four goddamn days. Plus, work is actually picking up a little. Expect another post tomorrow, and one every other day afterwards. Also, I promise you I won’t go below a...

No post today, there probably won’t be one tomorrow. I DON’T OWE YOU ANYTHING. For reals though, sorry. I’ll try to do two posts on Saturday or something? Maybe? It’s a surprise.

Day 7: Stay Classy, Cory

When we left off, secret agent Pronounced Winston sent like a million messages to a bully’s cell phone through a botnet just to make him look the other way. And because this is Cory’s — sorry, Winston’s — story, not only do they manage to get away without a hitch, but the nefarious villain Charles gets caught outside by a teacher and chewed out as our protagonists...

Day 6: That Just Happened

So, yeah. At the start of every chapter, Doctorow inserts a paragraph plugging a different bookstore. In Chapter 1, it was some sci-fi store in Toronto; here, it’s fucking Amazon. This is the man who is concerned about “freedom of information”. This is the great champion of privacy and individual rights on the Internet and free expression and several other buzzwords. He writes a...

cory doctorow.txt

This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is amazing — a ”store” where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheesegraters), where they’ve elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where...

Day 5: On Truth and Lies in a Nerd Sense

There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in dojinshi — those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They can be as big...

No Cory today because fuck Cory. Updates resume tomorrow.

Day 3: Talking Slowly and Loudly

I wasn’t always into ARGing. I have a dark secret: I used to be a LARPer. What a way to start a paragraph. Last time, you’ll recall, Marcus was pestering his bro and probably-not-boyfriend Darryl (I’m still holding out hope for some radical undermining of heteronormativity) about ditching class to play a videogame or something. He ended up agreeing, and what happens next is...

Day 2: Harajuku Fun Madness (no, really)

Yes, there is a videogame in Little Brother called “Harajuku Fun Madness”. Yes, it’s as stupid as it sounds. We’ll get to that in a bit. When we left off, Marcus Yallow, codename Winston, shaken not stirred, master hax0r and high school student, was sitting in the vice-principal’s office. The school authorities have apparently gotten wind of his illegal activities...

Day 1: What Have I Gotten Myself Into

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Wait. Shit. Wrong Brother. Let’s try that again. I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. Yeah. Is this comparison unfair? I don’t think it’s unfair. Doctorow has chosen to allude to...

hey what is the deal here

I am @unhaunting, from The Twitter. After livetweeting my brief and painful time spent with Cory Doctorow’s short story Anda’s Game, I have resolved to read a chapter of his novel Little Brother a day, because I hate myself. I will strive to offer an extremely unsympathetic, nitpicky and ideologically motivated critique of this book. I hope to hit “funny”, but I’ll...