Burning a Magnesium NeXT Cube (1993)
10 comments
·July 10, 2025a3w
No image of the backup cube?
sim7c00
liked the read but it gets a bit confusing at some point, its abut unclear whos telling the story. moved the cube from sophies to _your_ basement, from that part. whos you? its like it was being recalled or confirmed by someone else not the writer (thats good) but not completely put in the right 'person' for the article.
totally love that the first thing on ur mind was burn the cube hah. also funny such an good opportunity eventually came by :D
voidUpdate
At the top, it has what looks like part of an email, addressed to "Dan Ruby, Editor, NeXTWORLD Magazine". I'm guessing "you" is Dan, and the narrator is "Simson L. Garfinkel, Senior Editor, NeXTWORLD Magazine"
sim7c00
yes totally missed it thanks. o found it at the end , being a note to Dan. had me scroll back to top :') totally comment too soon!
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tucnak
Is it just me or does this read a little boring and a lot longer than it should..? So much of the email is just him calling random people... whole paragraphs of it
prmoustache
That is what happened when you get used to modern tv shoes, doom-scrolling on social media, and immediate gratification in general: anything older than 2010 feels super slow.
v9v
I enjoyed the emphasis on all the real life snags the author hit when trying to realize a simple idea. Really makes the end worthwhile.
wowczarek
Dunno, I thoroughly enjoyed it, it was a, well, slow burn, but nicely written IMO, setting up the scene and all. Felt a lot like reading Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, with a bunch of engineers and the chemistry aspect. I didn't read it as an actual email; it's storytelling, and pretty good one at that.
The meandering and hyper detailed style was nostalgic to me. Maybe I'm misremembering but I feel like this style was a lot more common 15+ years ago. I wouldn't dream of including this much detail now, and I don't think my writing would be well received if I did. But there's a lot of character in it. It also had more and different typos than I'm used to reading now, typos on the Internet now are mostly the wrong correctly spelled word.