Blog / 307 Pages I Got Back, Part 1

He didn’t know he was about to win a paperback book.

Cover image of William Shatner's TekWar book: a spaceship flies to a floating purple mountain sky city. A chrome robot appear to the right. A naked woman with a panel missing above her chest, exposing some wires, is beckoning to the right. In the background can be seen a man's face.

Maybe you can tell by the last post, but I have a deep love for 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back. It began with Ready Player One, which I was gifted one Christmas by my sister in-law. I loathed that book (but appreciated the gift!). It might have hit close to home for me since I wrote that kind of garbage when I was fifteen, my target audience being other fifteen year-olds. Seeing that junk become highly acclaimed in 2011 was embarrassing.

We’ve since moved on from Ernest Cline’s dreck, through the dust-splattered swards of The Eye of Argon, and into the plasfuture of TekWar. I made a sound resembling a laugh as crusty detective Jake Cardigan (yes really) Austin Powers his internal monologue to racist robot cabbies. My thumb pointed at the ceiling every time someone made an inscrutable hand gesture. And on January 26, 2019, I won Conor Lastowka’s copy of the book.

In the spirit of usually being one of the 300 folks who doesn’t win a thing, I thought I’d share pictures of Conor’s notes. Some of them you’ll recognize from the podcast, other ones are thoughts he didn’t mention.

This is part 1. I’ll share more next week. Photographing and cropping all these images takes a lot of time!

1 - Ctrl F chrome; ho boy; Does he polish himself?
2 - Air vs sky?
3 - Does his shirt say 'I am just home from a moon camp?'
4 - Because everything is grey!; in case you forgot
5 - She says this??; Paper tickets make a comeback
6 - Lots of paperwork in the future; DSOTW (dumb sentence of the week)
7 - The future is pretty much about printing. Kinko's wields so much power!
8 - Horrifying
9 - Good one to imagine Shatner typing; Ecstasy when he put that period?; 4 year old dump
10 - Robots = Inspector Gadget
11 - So... Shatner?
12 - A common way we all remind each other what year it is
13 - Exposition bot!
14 - Vocab!
15 - Which type??
16 - How do they know this?; Is he a bowery boy?
17 - They were??
18 - Mr Burns?
19 - He just sits there in silence; Amazing; Sports??; Skit with awful dot matrix printing noises
20 - WTF? Why is this a realization
21 - Romantic!
22 - He actually says all this aloud??
23 - Herky jerky paragraph
24 - Cassettes make a comeback!; Why is this time unusual
25 - Jake short for Jonathan?