Everything Today is Thoroughly Modern

[rain_gryphon]

I am so going to have one of these! I can just see myself lying on my deathbed with the bubonic plague, and a little yellow thermometer shoved up my ass cheerfully tootling the 'Spongebob' theme.

*****

A wiki about obsolete skills. Some of the ones listed are by no means obsolete, such as focussing a camera, or using FTP from the command line. Much of it is weirdly part of the past, though. Using a rotary phone, for instance. There are young adults today who have never done that. I know that somewhere, right now, someone is looking at an old pen made with a ball on the non-writing end, and wondering why it was designed that way.

*****

The Sorrows of Young Werther email server. A stunningly imaginative, and appropriate, use of technology. Young Werther sends his letters to your mailbox. It's sometimes the simplest ideas that are the most impressive.

*****

A dystopian, but ultimately well written and interesting, Rudolph fanfic. The author apparently can't conceive that anyone would ever volunteer to be a reindeer, though.

*****

Land Ironclads. I especially love the bronze war-rabbit.

Comments

[mejeep.livejournal.com]

A wiki about obsolete skills. Some of the ones listed are by no means obsolete, such as focusing a camera, or using FTP from the command line.

I've been musing about such things for a while, but the web site is mostly blank, looking for others to "fill in the blanks". I'm more amused by the way technology advances is making many phrases obsolete ("you sound like a borken record" "dial this number" "don't touch that dial").

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The domain was only registered on the 16th of February, so it'll be kind of sparse yet.

don't touch that dial
I'm not sure when I last had a TV with a true tuning dial. Sometime in the 70s, I think. For a bit, we had this odd one that did have tuners, but they were hidden inside a door, and you used them to tune preset buttons which were used for the actual channel-changing.

[rev-marcus.livejournal.com]

Looking over the obsolete list, I'm feeling old again. I've done a large majority of those things over the years, especially down here in rural Ohio. There's quite a few that I wish weren't obsolete, like Freethinking. I still do a few of the things, like those related to VCR's, photography, & DOS.

My mom still has a old B&W TV with a tuning dial. Don't know how well it works anymore. She's only had color TV a few years, and we just upgraded her to CD's/DVD's last Christmas.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I started poking around, and look what I found! Somebody still makes real Ditto machines (http://www.film-source.net/spirit_duplicators_31_ctg.html). These are the ones that made the smelly purple copies, back before Xerox machines became cheap. You're old enough to have gotten school handouts on those, I'm sure.

I wouldn't mind having one, just for the coolness factor (I'd love to pass out ditto copies at Morphicon), except that they want $1500 for what's essentially a novelty device, and then another $400 for a case of the special master paper. One could get a fairly nice photocopier for that price.

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

Some of the ones listed are by no means obsolete

That's what I thought. I have still never owned a clock radio with push-button tuning, for example; my current Hitachi has lasted nearly a decade with no real problems. Nor has anyone in my family ever owned a car with rear electric windows; not a problem except for the fact that Peugeot windows wind the other way from Ford ones!

[xolo.livejournal.com]

My car has window cranks, as do most American cars. I'm not quite sure who thinks manual windows are obsolete.