I’m Matthew and this is my personal bit of the Internet where I (may) share a few thoughts and various bits and pieces going on in my life.

I’m an old-school lnternet user, having started out jumping from JANET to the nascent Internet late 80s early 90s playing on baymoo.sfsu.edu 8888 and chatting on USENET. The Internet was very different then, with the WWW just a twinkling in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee. We used GOPHER, WAIS and other tools to find resources on the ‘net. I witnessed the first corporate websites and the changes in the domain name system as we were limited to only a handful of TLDs. I’m not really into social media but you can find me on Mastodon, if you so choose: @virek@mastodon.social.

I’ve had a blog in some form or another for well over twenty years, but some of it has been lost to bitrot or just falling off the end of the Internet, or I haven’t had time to reincorporate it here, having moved platforms numerous times. I don’t take myself too seriously here (I have otehr places for that) so I feel no pressure in writing or over-sharing to feed the algorithm slave-masters. I’ll post as I see fit on whatever takes my fancy.

Note: In the early Internet, I used the handle Virek from the character Joseph Virek in the William Gibson novel Count Zero that I was reading at the time. The Internet was a very different place then, with nicknames the norm on sites like baymoo.sfsu.edu and USENET. I have kept it ever since out of nostalgia. The irony of the prescience of the super-rich character’s will to free himself of his physical form is not lost on me, given the childish obsession of the modern-day tech-bro billionaire. Some of us read Science fiction as intended; others read it like a playbook or a documentary.

I hope this brings you some use, and perhaps makes you smile now and again. My best.