I have been trying for over 10 years to learn to draw on a computer. It has become my zen exercise. And after all this time I am really not as good at it by far as I am with a simple pencil or an old fashioned Rotring Rapidograph. I believe that I am even slower with a computer than I am with paper. But I will keep on trying.
Ooooh, you do? That is phantastic! I once had a little stirling motor, it got lost moving house, still miss it (sometimes, don’t think of it every month, but still…). Scientific American had a shop where they sold such stuff, but making it yourself? Kudos.
I was thinking actual Kindles and the Kindle smartphone app, actually.
That is not at all what I’m getting at. It’s not keeping older versions of stuff that still works the same as it used to. I mean, if you’re like my mom, and your 1968 kitchen knives are doing the job, then by all means keep on using them. And I’m not talking about things that are not clearly superseded by modern advancements. Something like cast iron cookware- it’s undergoing something of a faddish renaissance in culinary circles, so there’s a furor to get old pieces and refurbish them, as well as a slew of new manufacturers supposedly making “better” ones. Which is fine- cast iron has always been somewhat popular- you have always been able to buy it at Wal-Mart for example.
I’m talking about stuff that’s got a pretty big technological component involved, and that technology has passed by. Like audio and photographic technology…
Just this. Exactly.
(Only to find out one time after another, when looking it up, that it was not actualy where I thought it was. Surprising every time)
That’s exactly where economies were made. Dad made sure that all of the family milestones got filmed on the Brownie, but then the film would be kept until we could afford to pay for the processing. Sometimes four or five reels would be processed at once. Then we’d go have film night at Grandma and Grandpa’s, because they had a projector.
I can understand enjoying, using and collecting film cameras. Some of my best and most memorable photos were taken on them, including a series of photos of a lunar eclipse on a twin-lens reflex camera. What I have difficulty comprehending is lust for old-time Polaroid cameras, despite the “lovely vintage aesthetic” (according to one enthusiast) of the prints. What I most associate with Polaroids are being forced to pose for home photos as a child by my parents, for the sake of curling, poor quality prints that had to be squeegeed with a noxious chemical roller so they wouldn’t rapidly fade or disintegrate.
One example of “old crap” I’d hate to do without is physical newspapers, which beyond the tactile/visual experience are something you can accidentally dribble food or spill coffee on without causing potentially serious damage.
It turns out there’s a term for nostalgia for things you never experienced, anemoia, which sounds to me like an unpleasant medical condition.*
*Speaking of which, are there people who look back fondly on polio, scurvy and trichinosis? Think of those great experiences, potentially reproducible by spending time in Pakistan, living on a diet of salt beef and hardtack, or consuming wild boar meat.
There actually is a community of people who collect VHS tapes and VCRs and some prefer to watch them on a tube TV. (They say the low quality of VHS tapes is exacerbated by watching them on high def LCD televisions.)
Tube TVs are also popular among fans of retro-gaming–collectingf and playing outdated video game consoles from the 80s and 90s. Much for the same reason above about video quality. Also the light guns used on games such as Duck Hunt apparently only work on CRT televisions.
It is true that the hi-def screens we use today highlight the deficiencies of old, NTSC signals. The new displays simply make the bad parts of that format stand out more (the “bad” stuff is more easily seen) which means the whole thing looks worse.
I am not getting an old CRT to watch old stuff though but if you are really into 70s/80s TV it might be worth it.
I am, and yet I have no trouble watching 50s-60s-70s-80s TV on a widescreen HD TV. The only artifacts I’ve ever noticed is sometimes you can see the plywood grain in the walls of the USS Enterprise.
On the other hand, I’ve seen the Universal backlot in so many shows I think I could draw a map. “Hey that warehouise Squad 51 is putting out a fire in? Didn’t Adam-12 just visit there?” “Yes, and Sally Mcmillian was held hostage in it.” “But she lives in San Francisco!”
Cameras are well and good, but what about lenses? I remember going to a camera shop and buying a Nikon, that was about $500, but I was not going to be doing much photography with that alone; the lens I wanted was another $500.
There is some digital magic that can replace conventional optics to some extent, like compressive sensing and the use of avalanche diodes etc., and of course snapshots are one use case, but how obsolete is what an old friend used to do: carry at least a couple of camera bodies and a bag full of lenses?
If you want to zoom in on something, or go very close, or get a 180 degree view, you still have to get a different lens to go beyond the resolution of the censor (or view angle of your basic lens).
Random apropos: In Norwegian the kind of “lens” you by for your camera body is called an “objective”(which doesn’t have the other meanings it has in English). Calling it a lens will get all your pedant friends and family to tell you that a “lens” is a single optical element. I know the meaning in English has changed to include camera optics, but it still grates on my pedant ears.
I’m fine with batteries though, those are named wrong in both languages.
As a compromise, I settled on a K-Mart 80-200 zoom, F3.5. large objective lens. It was under $125, probably about $80 IIRC. It worked OK, lasted me for probably 15-20 years.
Would I recommend it? No way. But it gave me decent results.
I had a low cost flash that lasted 20 years before something gave out inside and it kept “prematurely firing” before the charge built up.
The cheap stuff wasn’t crap back then, just not tops.
Again, I don’t get it. I can see watching old shows, but what is the point of deliberately watching them on the shitty old TV and VCR, unless that is literally the ONLY way that you can watch that? I mean, if I wanted to watch my old high school football games, a VCR would have to be involved at some point, but I’d digitize that as soon as possible. But for re-runs of The A-Team? I’d probably get the DVD, Blu-Ray, stream it, or catch it in syndication. What would be the point of watching it on some dumpy old tube TV off a VCR? It would look and sound so much cruddier than what we can achieve these days with the same old show.
Same goes for the old video games; what’s the point of digging out an old NES and a 14" tube TV to play them on, when there are no shortage of emulators, or even modern-day hardware that works with modern TVs and monitors via HDMI?
As far watching movies and TV series on VHS-- as time goes and more and more old stuff is being released on DVD/Blu-Ray and streaming services your point makes more and more sense.
There was a lot of stuff not available in those formats so the only way to watch them was on VHS. There was a community of tape trading with bootleg recordings of shows and sports events up(I actually don’t know if there still is; I haven’t looked in years.) As a pro wrestling fan there are plenty of old wrestling shows that have never been commercially released and in fact will never be released because the rights to the shows are tangled in a legal quagmire. A lot of them are uploaded to YouTube now at from fan tapes; some are pretty low quality too because the fans recorded in Extended Play–cramming six hours of video on a T120 tape.
As far watching on CRT some people it looks better than on LCD high def screens but I don’t know the truth about that.
As far video games go one of the points of hardcore retro-gaming is trying to recreate the look and feel of how the original consoles(such as Atari 2600 , ColecoVision, and the original Nintendo Entertainment System) were meant to played hence on a CRT television. And like I said the light guns from such systems don’t work on LCD televisions.
Today I learned in Britspeak anorak means more than a winter coat.
Here is “8088 mph”, a demo meant to run on real hardware: an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz with CGA driving a composite color CRT. Be sure to turn on your sound; it is also using the original PC speaker:
In contrast, this is what happens when you try to run it under the DOSBox emulator:
This experience applies to millennials too. People seem to forget that the world only went fully digital within the last decade.
You can play old games online in your browser today, if you want to see what the experience was like, or indulge in a bit of nostalgia.
There are hundreds of games available free here:
I was fond of the old Space Quest games, especially SQ 5 and SQ 6, in the early 90s. The stories and humor were great. The original Doom and its successor Quake (FPS) were a revelation.
Absolutely if there’s no other option. Like I was saying, my old high school sports stuff is on VHS somewhere, and I’d be willing to bet there’s other stuff like that which someone’s parents recorded with a camcorder. That would require a VCR to watch or transcribe.
But I think I disagree with the idea that VHS looks better on a CRT. I think at best, it’s like putting vaseline on your filter in photography; the limitations of the actual TV mask some of the limitations of the VHS, so it looks “better” in the sense that it’s more uniformly bad, rather than actually “better”.
I guess what I don’t get is what the aesthetic reasons are for wanting to watch VHS tapes on an old CRT. It’s just worse all around.