Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 03, 2022

And don’t forget 3-D printers which allows you to make your OWN pseudo-retro items!

Jef, you’re done it again. Brilliant!

Sounds like a Berraism. Or is that a Caulfieldism?

If you truly believe the Internet contains the whole bulk of human knowledge and experiences, you are direly deceiving yourself.

Example: You can now buy a replica of Fisher-Price’s record player music box that was a favorite of children from multiple generations. Except, it’s cheap trash from China, a sad, flimsy knockoff of the original that breaks as soon as you use it (according to many online reviews.) You can have vintage retro antiques, but you’ll never recapture the quality.

Thanks to the internet we can now listen to a fresh new version of a song we’ve known for centuries. Oh, wait, no, that’s because of pop producers who are too scared to try anything even remotely new (and good), because it might not make money.

I miss Usenet groups, and webrings.

I have a nostalgic yearning for furniture that has just a bit of grace, style, and comfort. But then I’m old and Danish and Italian Modern and ’50’s comfort have been replaced by the cold, hard angles of airport waiting areas or hospital waiting rooms. Some of this stuff makes even the insane bean bag chairs of the ’70’s look like good choices.

Now memories of you can live “forever” or as long as the Internet lasts.

Things you can find on line that were nearly impossible to find before. How to diagnose and fix and appliance problem, how to reassemble a Shimano derailleur you pulled apart a little too quickly, wood working advice, at the family Christmas party, info that instantly proves your loud mouth uncle is full of sh@#, and my favourite, an old song that my mother loved.

It has never been otherwise.

The internet has weaponized nostalgia.

Bring back BBS’s.

if Yogi Berra were alive to read this, he’d be rolling over in his grave

Nostalgia: Cleverly re-selling you your past so that you can temporarily forget that you’re old and you’re going to die soon.

At least once each time I visit an antique store/mall, I see a booth that makes me proclaim: “That’s the stuff that was in my dad’s tacklebox!!” Nothing wrong with that.

Good thing I invested in all these Beanie Babies, Hummel figurines, and collector plates to fund my retirement.

“Forward into the past!” — Catherwood

I wish I had my Grandma’s floor model radio. Paris, Rome, Moscow, Berlin, London – a dial full of names a world away and a cabinet with not a single water-ring on it. Hope it didn’t end up in someones garage.

In Ted Chiang’s short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” (46 pages, anthologized in Exhalation) we are treated to two interlaced stories bracketing the era of human literacy, one of the future, in which the journalist narrator describes how Remem personal video memory (lifelogging) is making writing obsolete, and one of the past, in which Jijingi’s village in Tivland learns of reading and writing from the European missionary Moseby. The story’s narrator discovers that he has completely misremembered an argument with his dottir Nicole. Jijingi describes the difference between literal truth (what’s precise: vough) and emotional truth (what’s right: mimi).

The entire anthology is brilliant, and highly recommended!

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

Except it’s not the future anymore.

What is old once were new.

Ow, ow, my head!