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

I’m an old-school Internet user, having started out jumping from JANET to the nascent Internet in the late 80s and early 90s, playing on baymoo.sfsu.edu 8888 and chatting on USENET. The Internet was very different then, with the WWW just a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. We used GOPHER, WAIS and other tools to find resources on the ‘net. I witnessed the emergence of the first corporate websites and the evolution of the domain name system as we were limited to only a handful of TLDs. I’ve written on the internet in some form or another and for a couple of indie Amiga magazines over twenty years ago, but most of it has been lost to bit rot or fallen off the end of the Internet conveyor belt. For some of it, I haven’t had time to reincorporate, having moved platforms numerous times.

I don’t take myself too seriously here (I have other places for that), so I feel no pressure in writing or over-sharing to feed the algorithm slave-masters for their digital plantation. I’ll post as I see fit on whatever takes my fancy, as and when I feel like it.

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.

Connect with me

I have implemented fairly strict usages of platforms and social media, ensuring I’m not exposed too much to the worst of those worlds:

  • I prefer email for connecting. If you know, you know.
  • I’m not on any social media site barring Mastodon, where I tend to lurk rather than feed the beast: @virek@mastodon.social
  • You can comment if you like. I’d be happy to hear from you. Just be polite.

I hope this may bring you joy or be useful in some way. And perhaps makes you think about things differently now and again.

My best.