Snow Crash Chapters 20-42

The first third of Snow Crash seemed dominated by the new developments, technologies, society, culture, and way of life in general. Alternatively, the second third instead seems focused on the past--the far past. I read through the first third fairly quickly, but the conversations between Hiro and the Librarian have so much information crammed into every sentence that it takes a lot longer to get through a chapter with a full understanding of what just happened. About halfway through, I realized I had forgotten who L. Bob Rife was! There's so many secondary characters and names that it's difficult to keep them all straight. It's odd to read a book of this magnitude with only two real central characters. I do find the feds extremely amusing, however, as they seem stuck in a world that is much more like ours than the one that Hiro and Y.T. live in. Paperwork and B.S.

Alright, so this whole nam-shub thing is pretty confusing. It seems to me that you can't become infected by the virus through hearing, it must be visual (Da5id's bitmap, Sumerian cuneiform). I wonder why Da5id can only speak in babble, but the girl that Y.T. found in the Falabala camp can speak English and communicate, albeit in a fairly childish way? Why does Rife want to infect everyone, and what is the blood used for? (I'm to page 320, btw). Hiro seems to think that it's used to infect other programmers, but I haven't seen anything like that. I think this is a book I'm going to have to re-read.

And just a few random questions: Can you tell who someone is in the Metaverse even if their avatar looks nothing like them (i.e. a walking penis)? Also, are you committed to the avatar you originally chose until "avatar death", or is there a way to update/change them?