BEg2 ch 31 references

[Michael Bailey]

 “He’s a greedy little shit,” Eric’s head now in a halo of Daffy Duck froth
droplets, “eternity in a motel lounge in Houston Texas with a Andrew Lloyd
Webber mix repeating forever on the stereo is too good for his sorry ass.”


- Daffy Duck frothing - easy to visualize, hard to find an image of

- Andrew Lloyd Webber - also dissed in _Vineland_



“Seems [Eric] has recently launched the Vomit Kurser, named in homage to
the ill-regarded Comet Cursor of the nineties and developed in partnership
with a bruja from one of his old neighborhoods. Via eye-catching but fake
pop-up ads promising health, wealth, happiness &c, the Kurser will
surreptitiously lay old-school curses on selected targets—click in once,
your ass is grass. Somehow, as the Latina sorceress has explained to Eric,
the Internet as it turns out exhibits a strange affinity for the dynamics
of curses, especially when written in the more ancient languages predating
HTML. Through the uncountable cross-motives of the cyberworld, the fates of
unreflective click-happy users are altered for the worse—systems crash,
data are lost, bank accounts are looted, all of which being
computer-related you might expect, but then there are also the realworld
inconveniences, such as zits, unfaithful spouses, intractable cases of
Running Toilet, providing the more metaphysically inclined further evidence
that the Internet is only a small part of a much vaster integrated
continuum.”


       -  I remember buying in Books-a-Million, in the late 90s, an issue
of an apparently short-lived periodical devoted to applications of Chaos
Magick on the Internet. People trying similar ideas in cockeyed
half-seriousness. Seemed less implausible back then, maybe?

But also, here extending the idea - propounded in other places by Maxine’s
father, inter many alia - that the Internet isn’t all rainbows and
unicorns.

And warping the mundane notion of malware into
fantastical/science-fictional shape.