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>>> This story also uses the anti-hero trope successfully. Good work. :)
>>
>> How so?
>
> I identified Adam as the protagonist of this story, who the first-person
> narrator describes entirely in unflattering terms.
Oh, I don't know. At the time, he was one of my favourite people. But,
like most of the people in my school, he wasn't exactly the sharpest
tool in the box. Using a reserved file name to hide stuff is... actually
surprisingly astute. It's the sort of thing *I* might try.
(I do wonder if he actually knew what a "reserved name" was, though. He
probably just thought it looked pretty innocuous and would be likely to
get ignored. He /did/ correctly figure out how to persuade DOS to create
this folder though. That's not too easy...)
> This anti-hero would likely
> be interpreted in modern parlance as a "wannabe script kiddie", a very negative
> stereotype.
I'm not so sure. Usually a "script kiddie" is somebody who /claims/ to
be brilliant, but isn't. Adam never claimed to be brilliant. He never
pretended to be a super-elite hacker. He /did/ claim to have hidden some
stuff where the teachers would never find it - and he succeeded!
Nobody likes people who pretend to be more special than they are. But
everybody likes a guy who manages to out-smart the people who are
supposed to be the "experts".
> In fact, none of the characters in this drama are portrayed very
> positively, and the narrator self-identifies as a co-conspirator; both of these
> characterizations are common in the darker or more cynical stories involving
> anti-heroes.
It was a school. ALL children unconditionally hate school! Almost every
tale of school life is therefore one of the kids verses the evil school
system (sometimes with the aid of someone on the inside - i.e., a rogue
member of staff who sympathised with the kids).
> The antagonists in this tale (identified explicitly as "our adversary") come
> across as severe and backward, perhaps even Luddites, but ultimately law-abiding
> authority figures in a difficult situation.
Nobody likes going to school. But very few schools deliberately try to
shut out the Real World and pretend it doesn't exist to quite the extend
of this one. All items of modern technology were confiscated. TV and
radio was banned. All letters in or out had to be examined by a member
of staff... The comparison to a prison may seem extreme, but it
certainly felt like that at times.
> Yet a reader's sympathies lie with
> the anti-hero, who is generous enough to share his smuggled contraband and
> cracking skills with, at the very least, his partner in crime.
In the mind of any school kid, the only "crime" is forcing defenceless
young kids to go to school. ;-) Anything that makes that time less awful
is an obvious victory.
> Although the
> presumed ages of the protagonists mitigates the seriousness of the
> transgressions described, (because of the "innocence of children" and "youthful
> indiscretions" tropes) I don't read much of a confessional tone in this story,
> nor see evidence of a great deal of regret since the events transpired. (This,
> "Would I do it all over again? You betcha," attitude also seems to be common in
> the stories of anti-heroes.)
The school had a rule: No computer games. That rule was stupid and
arbitrary.
It is a rule which should never have existed in the first place. In
fact, the only reason it existed in the first place was that computer
technology, and computer games in particular, were deemed to be "against
God's wishes". There /are/ valid reasons for not allowing computer
games. Kids fighting over them, lack of exercise, the potentially
antisocial nature of it. But "because it's not in the Holy Bible" is a
stupid and hateful /excuse/ for a reason.
Having just said all that... Letting teenage boys play DOOM? Yeah,
that's /probably/ not a very defensible position. ;-)
> Personally, I was left wondering if Adam continued in IT, as vocation or
> avocation, and how long he stayed on the "black hat" path. Was there some kind
> of redemption in his future?
Yeah, I wonder. After we left school, he vanished off the face of the
Earth. It's /plausible/ we went into IT, but I suspect not. He was more
of a games expert than a technology expert. (There IS a difference...)
> It's not easy to get a reader to care about a character in so few words,
> especially in a technical tale for a technically-minded audience.
Heh. And to think I wasn't even expecting anybody to bother reading it,
much less "care about" the main character... ;-)
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