As a younger geek, I loved reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! It would be a good intro to his other more-scientific works too.

If making a reliable long-term electrical connection between neurons and circuitry continues to be as hard as it has been so far, then this technique could offer a superior way of coupling the brain to cybernetics. Neurons would only need to be near the input device, not need to be touching it. The brain would figure out what the signals meant just as easily.

Actually the forums are still quite active, with several comics posted in the Guest Strips forum every day.

If you want the technical details, read The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege (a fascinating read).

To avoid floating-point problems and to allow continuous loading, the world was split up into nodes with specified transformations between them. This resulted in a world that often cannot be mapped, as it would pass through itself. There were also many tricks that were used to fit the huge number of objects in memory. Many things self-destruct, or disappear if out of sight for more that a few minutes.