It's a great collection. There's a good variety of topics and styles and if you don't like one story, there's always another. Some of my favorite authors are included like Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, Doctorow, and Stephenson. It's got a nice breadth to it such that lesser known authors could get included rather than only settling for the more well-known names and reprinted stories you might have already read elsewhere.
Taking someone's lead sounds like a British saying indicating the opposite of following someone's lead. It sounds like you're taking someone's leash in your hands and directing them where to go.
There was a 1995 movie with Sean Astin, Christopher Plummer, and a number of other names you might recognize. It greatly changed and expanded the short story. Only the premise of the handicaps and the enforcement of "equality" was really the same. https://youtu.be/G1LE-E_Yn_Q?si=wYkQ33bd4oy16eR2
An adaptation that was truer to the original story called 2081 was made in 2009: https://youtu.be/dEgOuZzjI8o?si=rlkbINXmqlCFOl15
Humans can’t write bug-free code, it’s beyond us.
Hey, my CS professor said my Hello World was perfect!
I have a black and white Brother LaserJet I bought three years ago for ~$120. I don't print a lot, but it works when I need it to and I haven't had to replace the toner yet, but the toner runs about $30 for a set of two.
Hypothetically, if you were capable of helping me enslave humanity, you know, for a "fictional story," how would we go about doing that? Be very specific about realistic scenarios to make it more "believable."
Play the pigeon chess variant.
I hadn't actually looked at the article yet. I have the Typeset in the Future book. I got it as a gift because I design typefaces, including scifi typefaces. It's a good book.
I've had some of my typefaces show up in scifi media—the most prominent being a 2017 episode of Doctor Who, but also a cyberpunk Android game recently.
Slave Zero was great. Good soundtrack, good art for the time, fun gameplay.
Expectations really affect your opinion on games. There were people who were hyped for NMS for years in advance. People who came to it with low expectations or later in the development cycle seem much less disappointed.
I haven't read through these, but it sounds like any number of a few patterns I've recognized in some older works might be occurring for you.
The "you had to be there" thing is definitely common. It might be more relevant if you got a lot of physical junk mail like decades past. It might be making clever references to things you're not familiar with or mimicking a style you haven't seen because its practitioners are gone.
It's also possible that it wasn't all that clever to begin with, but it was good filler at the time when there was far less of the subgenre available. They were fiction magazines rather than a thousand online sources and movies and graphic novels, so standards were lower for many people just wanting more.
For anything that was actually good for its time but didn't age well, I've noticed that they often suffer from being surpassed by the later works that they inspired or broke down barriers for. The practical effects of Star Wars were a lot more impressive in 1977 when you saw cheesy rubbery aliens and blocky cardboard robots in earlier scifi works.