![]() An exchange is made and the woman bares herself, rewarding you with a illicit flash adorned with tassels. There is a moment where Duke finds himself inscrutably in a strip club. To my adolescent self, the game achieved its raison d’être in its first scene-establishing that Duke was a badass. This game had almost no semblance of plot. There is little to tell about Duke Nukem 3D. I am playing Duke Nukem 3D, the latest iteration of a 2D side-scroller. I am sitting in the second-to-last row-not quite willing to commit to the damnation that is the furthest row, but far enough back that I could play games without fear of a wandering parent, in search of their little angel, judging me. and the back row of the computer lab at La Salle is effervescent. I believed it with the same incredulity that I believed that our sister school “smelled like douche” and that having sex was “like sticking your dick inside of a toaster.” La Salle had the added benefit of a T1 line, which we were told was the only of its kind “on the East Coast.” This was one of many “truths” that were shared with me as a freshman. Reserved for crime-scene photography non-human vaginal intercourse, if I am correct from my single visit to that row and a public viewing of a sex comic entitled “Jamie Lee Coitus.” I am positive that everyone who sat here is dead or in jail. Where newcomers sat, mistaking the relative distance from authority as an invisibility cloak. This was where we put our networked PCs to good use-playing first-person shooters. Row 2: Close enough to the teacher’s perch that it felt naked, but in reality, was far enough away for a quick Alt-Tab window-switching maneuver. (Yes, we were underage also.) Also, actual schoolwork. Reserved for actual, SFW activities such as checking the Sarah Michelle Gellar legal-age countdown timer. On a given day, the arrangement might look like this: ![]() Schmiedekamp’s presence created a panoptical structure wherein the computers that were within his sightline were the models of virtue and the others made a Lord of the Flies-like descent into madness and depravity. Without the distraction of a blossoming opposite sex, this ability defined those four years at La Salle College High School.Īs a child who grew up in a nameless Protestant denomination, this was my first insight into the doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants namely that sin, as such, for them was only reified by getting caught. One’s ability to commit a given indiscretion is circumscribed only by what the teachers actually see. One of the first things that you learn at an all-boys high school is boundaries. Schmiedekamp, an avian man with a bristling briefcase who, as far I can remember, never actually left the confines of his aquarium-like office, but chose to occasionally peek at the lab though the window. His absence left responsibility for the lab in the hands of Mr. Sigmund would pack his bags and shuttle his team to the banks of the Schuylkill River, a site known for its now-yearly ritual of uncovering dead bodies in the scull’s wake. Sigmund did a reasonable job of maintaining order.īut when his coaching duties called him away, Mr. Given the 300-esque odds of the task, Mr. He looked like a man who could summon a temper if needed, so these daylight sessions were occupied mostly by endless sessions of Mavis Beacon and the occasional webpage cobbled together on Microsoft FrontPage. This was chiefly about preventing this one thing when we weren’t learning how to build webpages or research assignments. The freedom of the internet (you can search for anything!) combined with the budding libidos of the two-dozen-odd teenage boys stuffed in the lab created a unique problem for Mr. It was, however, the same discipline that kept his rowers in good order that also maintained stability in the computer lab during waking hours. Sigmund’s arch-concern was defending the yearly rowing titles that adorned the awards case. That a man who seemed to barely understand computers was tasked with ushering a generation of teenagers into the one of most significant technological and ideological shifts in human history is truly unbelievable. Sigmund, the rowing instructor demanded by the necessities of higher ed to possess some semblance of academic utility and who, like, many sports coaches at small, academic-minded schools, was parked in a secondary role he neither seemed qualified for nor was interested in. The computer lab was helmed by poor, tow-headed Mr. Like many schools flirting with the internet during the late ’90s, my high school was in the midst of negotiating exactly how its students would use this new online world.
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