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Dort_Owl [they/them, any]
askchapoI hate the past. To me, the past is something we should learn from but never return to. I have no desire to return to the days where gay and the r-slur were every day jokes and and "Tits or gtfo" was a common reply to women on the internet.
But I love old machines and gizmos. I love gears and levers and buttons. I love things that clunk and whir. Vinage music boxes, Clockwork toys and VHS machines that sound like they're trying to go into orbit when you rewind a cassette. I've always liked old stuff for as long as I can remember.
Is it nostalgia or just autism? Is it something I should be ashamed of?
It's nostalgia and autism! But also you just like things that are well made. Better materials, better design, better aesthetics, and a better tactile experience. The real question is why the fuck everyone doesn't feel this way and what the fuck is wrong with them
Don't worry. When the logistical chains for "high-tech" start bottoming out, analog and human-powered inputs will be back in a big way.
You will love this payphone I saw at a job site last week.
I do love me a whirring doohicky!
I'm the same way, and I actively use a lot of old tech day-to-day. I use a lot of mid-century hand tools and kitchen appliances, and I think basically all of my lawn equipment is 40+ years old. I actually started with more modern tools, and then eventually started gravitating towards old stuff just because it felt better to use, and had that ineffable "character" that old stuff has.
I also fairly regularly watch TV shows on an old CRT TV, especially if they're from the standard def era (it just straight-up looks better on a CRT).
A lot of old tech was genuinely bad and deserved replacing, but I appreciate what has really survived the test of time. It's funny that the OP mentioned VHS tapes, because that's one particular tech I re-visited and decided "actually, I'm glad we moved on from this".
Oh vhs tapes are for sure worse. But ive got a soft spot for em. I am weird and try to collect pan and scan versions of mocies cause it's interesting what some guy chose to cut out of the frame. They're official half assed re edits of popular movies that you cant find on other formats cause theyre objectively worse. But I am fucking weird.
I hope to find the modified-for-television edition of The Matrix someday. The Wachowskis had the cast dub over the swears with things a child would exclaim in 1960s TV.
Keanu cries "Jeepers creepers, that thing is real!?" when they take the bug out. Carrie-Ann Moss mutters "Shucks" before riding away when she sees Neo getting arrested.
I remember that! The security guard saying 'holy smokes' when Neo shows he has 50 guns on him and the mouth doesnt match at all
Pan and scan is such an interesting artifact of the standard def era. Most of the movies I watched in the 90s were VHS recordings from when they played on TV, and so I ended up becoming very familiar with the 4:3 version of movies like Jurassic Park and Empire Srikes Back. When I saw Empire Strikes Back in theaters during the re-release in 97, it was a revelation - as a kid, I hadn't even internalized that I was missing a big chunk of the picture.
You don't yearn for the past, you yearn for a less alienated relationship to technology. The exploiters just hadn't had as much time to set up all the alienation in design they wanted yet, back then. Waves of planned obsolescence, monopolization, and major defeats for the labor movement were required to give rise to the generation of miserable engineers and designers who spawn today's abominable consumer devices.
You can get these new, but I'm enamoured of my 'antique' potato ricer. Looks kinda like this:
That looks fucking HARDY. The long sturdy heavy handles would make using it repeatedly a lot easier and more comfortable as well. When my work did gnocchi we went through 3 modern ricers in a year, they had a third of the capacity of that one and the handles were aluminum and not even solid, they were basically just square metal frames, so they were fragile and dug into your hand. They were short as well so you werent getting much leverage so it was more on operator strength.
As usual, I'm with the owl.
Gimme a bunch of big switches and buttons that go thunk and click, make it plausible I can solder a broken connection just by following the wiring without fully knowing how it works, make it mechanical so giving it a Fonz-style smack often does make it work
Understanding wiring without fully knowing how stuff works is a huge part of why I try to keep as much if my music gear analogue as possible, cause I know how a lot of that stuff works on a basic level. I can make a microphone from scratch, its not even hard.
Modern devices obfuscate how they work while old technology didn't do that as much. It's the difference between being able to take apart an old-school alarm clock with a screwdriver vs some bullshit smart^TM^ device that measures time that you can't even take apart without ruining the plastic case because outside screws aren't minimalist enough.
Absolute peak design was 90s electronics with transparent cases like the transparent Gameboy. We have regressed so much since then.
Seconding what others have said about alienation from technology. Also, peak tech vibes will always be the tech from 12 monkeys, I love the way technology is portrayed in that film.
Devices are evil. Machines and gizmos are cool. Contraptions are the best.
a contraption is just a large gizmo
While contraptions are generally larger than a gizmo this is incidental rather than defining of their relative natures. A contraption has some sort of inherent risk, be it of breakdown or explosion. While a gizmo is a specialised or unknown/not understood by the speaker gadget.
So something can be both a gizmo and a contraption.
The reason we like contraptions but dislike devices is both because of the intrusive nature of devices, but also because of the Freudian nature of ti. The unstable nature of the contraption and the risk bound to it stimulates the Todestrieb as Freud would have called it. While the experimental and creative nature of a contraption stimulates the eros
I too make vibes based definitions to make synonyms distinct. Cause they fucking are. They are different sauces on the same food.
:wittgenstein: All communication is ultimately vibes, and as long as we have a shared sense of those vibes it is correct use of language.
What about a doohicky
10/10
Which in this case makes it cooler.
This is gadget erasure.
Im iffy on gadgets cause that's what they called what would become devices in the 2000s
This person gets it
My music setup being a tangle of cables and doohickeys that take up a quarter of my living room is way better and cooler than a digital interface cause mine is more fun. I get to plug in cables and move dials and press buttons!
That reminds me, I bought an old theremin i need to put back together
Gonna learn to make spooky skeleton music
I want a theremin so bad. If you make anytjing ill put out a tape. Working on a using my long time punk network to set up a little tape label for experimental music.
Hear me out: I think you're just experiencing old stuff the way the designers were hoping. Which is really sweet and cool in a way: we're connected to other people's creativity through the medium of thinking about how some gizmo would sound and feel nice to use.
Someone went "this button is fine and everything, but it should be a little clickier and the spring should be a different material so it doesn't sound weird" or whatever. And now here we are decades later thinking "damn the experience of using that old thing is GREAT. Iconic even."
Good news slimer: you got pranked by the enduring human spirit, as we all do.
This is a large part of why I hate touch screens. That consideration is now out the window because the worst format became standard. I find them bad from a practical standpoint but there is also just a better vibe to pressing a real button that exists. Commodity fetishism fits in there really well. It is easier to consider the designers who make buttons more ergonomic than the coders who code what parts of a touch screen count as keyboard cause one feels nice and the other has me making typos constantly cause I can't feel the letters. Slide phone keyboard I could text with perfect grammar and syntax without autocorrect or even looking at the screen cause I could feel the buttons.
Building Gundam models becoming my latest main hobby has led to me looking up the names of the people who engineered the model kits ive enjoyed. That's gotta be a pretty difficult task requiring quite a few different skills. They should be credited on the boxes. Same goes for Lego or whatever
Good news slimer: you got pranked by the enduring human spirit, as we all do.
ugh I hate it when that happens
one of the reasons i'm a big fan of what i like to call "star wars aesthetic".
like they're traveling in space, shooting lasers and shit, but the way you have to flick all the lil buttons and tune all the lil dials is just..ugh...i love it
I really love the 70s idea of the future look. These are totally different types of sci fi movies, more hard sci fi fictionalized just barely ahead of contemporary technology, the plots are a bit less hard sf but both are super fun and are super focused on buttom and dial tech. Andromeda Strain and Phase IV. Andromeda Strain is based on a Micheal Creighton book from 1969 about and asteroid carrying a space disease and how Science People handle it in a state of the art containment bunker lab. Phase IV is about what if for spme reason all the ants in one region really got their shit together and made a coordinated attack taking out a small town which then turns into a mutual siege between the ants and the scientists who came to investigate, it sounds really silly but it is a genuinely good movie that takes the idea dead serious. Both have 5 minutes into the future tech but from the mind of the early 70s.
I really love the type of 2001 inspired sci fi movies that Star Wars killed, but I also count the first Star Wars as one of those movies, it has one foot in that pond still. Which is why its my favorite Star Wars movie. It dirties up the click click machines and dials but those were there before. Just usually in more austere settings. THX 1138 is a good example as well.
"But you gotta hand it to the Empire though, they had great UI design" - redditors in the starwars universe whenever someone brings up warcrimes
tarkin doctrine tho
Yeah I'm big on old gizmos and gadgets. Well made physical controls are just
I wish I could get more and had more time to fix them up. I have a small collection of film cameras and electronics.
Nah I like old machines built for singular purposes that aren't little spy contraptions or trying to get me to buy junk or AI slop. I bought a retro packard bell to fix up for retro gaming alongside some vintage consoles last year.
old tech is cool, we used to do things in weird elaborate ways and that made it charming in a way i can't put into words.
sure, flatscreens are better in almost every way, but CRTs created super high voltage to shoot focused electron beans then magnetically bent them super fast with unbelievably precise control into a coated grid to make an image, isn't that neat?
yeah, EVs are great, but combustion engines are engineering marvels built from intricate clockwork timed and sized just right to extract as much movement as possible from exploding a whiff of flammable liquid. how cool is that?
Im trying to find that a quote from matrix 2 where a guy talks about knowing hiw to operate his mech but having no idea how it works
I recommend you read Less is More by Jason Hinkle, that book I think really shows the resurgence of low tech nowadays
Think you mean Jason Hickel—Hinkle's the ACP guy. I always remember it as "Hinkle Stinkle" thanks to @MaoTheLawn@hexbear.net.
And I think that's the second recommendation for that book I've seen on here, so I'll have to add it to my ever-growing plan-to-read list!
Yes Jason Hickle xd his book is really good because he whether knowingly or unknowingly taps into knowledge that is beyond consumption and actually asks "what's necessary?" In a world filled with stuff, he is a breath of fresh air
Same, that retro stuff was built to last and had curves from here to ya-ya
It might could be the autism, but it could also be an appreciation for things that other people disregard
older tech is more romantic
In the realm of music production and instruments, there’s often an association between vintage gear and “character.” The modern stuff is great for pristine exactness, but there’s something people find attractive about the imperfections in the old gear; unpredictable behaviors in analog circuits, old janky digital to audio converters, the “sizzle” 12-bit samplers add, myriad flavors of tape artifacts/effects. Today’s flaws are tomorrow’s je ne sais quoi‘s.
I’m thinking there’s a similar thing going on with other vintage technology. Blu rays or streaming will give you perfect 4K visuals, but the perfection makes the delivery mechanism invisible. Old VHS tapes and machines, their imperfections made them feel like they’re part of the creative process rather than a pass-through.
I have a vcr and crt bexause they hit different. The pan and scan version of the phantom menace on an old tv makes it seem like an episode of a tv show like xena, the bad cgi is too blurry to tell it isnt a bad practical effect. I'm also using it for music, got a aux to patch cable so I can run my tv audio through pedals to an amp. So im gonna record some stuff, dub it to vhs, run a magnet over the tape and then play that back again through pedals for an analogue deep fry
I love CRTs, I wish I still had one. I gave mine away in 2016 (I think) and regretted it ever since.
I like that they sound like they're going to electrocute you to death every time you turn them on. Also they're heavy as hell, like heavier than you'd think they are.
Fun fact about CRTs, did you know that the sound of untuned channel snow/noise/static is the sound of 13.7 billion year old cosmic radiation?
This is your useless Dort fact of the day
My parents got a big screen CRT
Believe you me, I know how heavy they are
Damn thing took me (a stout lad) and three men who were even stouter and laddier than me to move
I did know that! However ot isnt exclusive to a CRT. You can still get the snow channel on a 4k tv. That isnt a cathode ray thing. It's a radio signal thing. That's another reason I like analogue stuff. I know how a lot of it works
For anybody who doesn't know a pedal steel guitar is a fascinating contraption that raises or lowers strings via mechanisms.
The player can bend notes with their feet or knees. Here's a Youtube vid cued up the "Pedals & Knee Levers" section - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5bRnMfp5XU&t=230s
Have you ever seen someone play a theremin? Such a weird and cool instrument
The first time I saw someone perform with it was at the movies. Jimmy Paged used it in Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same concert documentary. I was perplexed and I had no idea what he was doing. That was the mid 1970s so there was no net or google to explain. I must've been years before I learned what the hell it was. Youtube uploads are shit so I used vk.com. For anybody that doesn't know - that site has regular hq movies too.
01:56:40 https://vk.com/video313620_456239469
I used vk.com just the other day to watch a few minutes of the famously bad Ishtar to check if I should download it. I hoped it was so-bad-it's-good but I expected it just really, really bad. After ~5 minutes I could tell it was awful.
Later in the video - he uses an E-Bow to make the pedal steel sound like a Theremin - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5bRnMfp5XU&t=1220s
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Gizmos? VHS? Just give me a spatula
