Chris Peterson

Zack Parsons (also known as elpintogrande) of SomethingAwful.com has written a fantastic book. It’s called Your Next Door Neighbor Is A Dragon.

As Zack writes, it is a colorful guide to Internet subcultures and the people who live them. Not in the sense of people who make cat macros, but people who believe they are dragons.

From his description:

Pretending that any author could write a comprehensive guidebook to the Internet is the sort of dumb crap that publishers dream up. “Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon” is not a comprehensive guidebook, it’s a travelogue about the Internet in which I visit and talk to people outside the Internet. I focused on the subcultures and fetishes I was familiar with and I took the dangerously stupid step of leaving the Internet and going outside.

Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon details my encounters with otherkin, vores, furries, and erotic fan-fiction authors. It includes interviews and adventures that reveal the truth about aspartame, self-diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, the Ron Paul blimp, and how much white power you can download. I even risked my life and visited a doomsday religious cult in Texas against my will.

I am through the first few chapters and it is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Does it provide deep insight into the cultural anthropology of the Internet? No. That’s not the point. The point, the book puts it, is that the Internet is a spectacle, like Caligula’s brain swimming around in a fish tank, and he pokes the glass a bit.

Buy the book. It’s funny as hell and Zack is a good guy too.