Readit NewsI have stayed up all night waiting for RHCP's "Otherside" to come on MTv to record it on tape..
Will kids today even understand something like that, is anyone captured by music like that these days?
Nowadays people are captured by music differently, as they were captured by music differently before music could be mechanically or digitally reproduced.
Other than that you'd go to a LAN party and find someone's file share of goodies, find again the things you were into and now you had a new friend who probably liked things you never knew of and now you two are sharing new things to each other on top of that.
It was really an age of connecting people and exploring the world for me, even as a young kid.
Either way, that still took ages to download, etc, so, it was less immediate. And somehow, I remember it more as a source for stuff that's already well-known ...
Never was too much into LAN parties though ...
I enjoy having a computer that allows me to create all kinds of things that weren't possible in 1993 ... mash together all kinds of audio, video, text ... put it in a backpack, bring it somewhere, perform on stage, with an 800$ laptop. Amazing.
I'm one of those "Encarta kids" who dug through Encarta for nights on end while the parents were out, and still spend slow Sundays reading random Wikipedia articles.
Having the archives that have been created since 1993, whether Wikipedia, Youtube (to me still one of the most amazing music discovery tools I've ever encountered), Archive.org, Google Scholar, Zenodo, at my fingertips has probably widened my personal horizon beyond imagination. Not sure who I'd be without it.
So even sadder to see it all drown now in AI slop ...
For me, youtube is only nice because of the decades old content that people have put on it. But that is because there is no such quality content made in the world anymore, and that is partially because of the enshittification bought on by the internet.
If it was not the case, youtube won't be that big of a deal. Let me disclose here that I am not a big fan of "on-demand" content.
Also, music ... back in the 90ies, if you were drawn to the obscure side of music, you'd read about it, and could, at best, imagine what it was like, because your local record store didn't have it, the bigger store the next town over didn't have it, and IF anyone could order it was with a non-refundable down payment.
Nowadays, you can probably find it on YT, and that's great IMHO. I my musical horizon would be so much more limited without it.
Also I've learned a lot about guitar repair ...
bike ride in the rain? -> waterproof messenger backpack
downtown stroll to satisfy my inner hipster? -> tote bag etc ...
All I know is that I'm a "single compartment" person ... I've always found that having a separate compartment for everything just comes at excess weight and loss of flexibility.
I'd give the movie prop a try for sure. Still looking for a decent source of Tyvek to take an attempt at making my own bag (it's not super commonly used where I live).
You never could. Before suburban mass transit became a thing, enabling low ~80% of Paris workers to live outside and commute every day, they had to live in Paris. They all lived in communal apartments, several unrelated people per room, in most awful conditions imaginable just because of density (see "Down and Out in Paris and London").
Also, Paris is an extreme example. There's plenty of mid-sized cities (400k to 1 million or so) in Europe and presumably elsewhere where you can live in a quiet space, maybe even have access to a garden, and hop on the tram or your bike, and be downtown in 20 minutes, without parking lots.
So, you can definitely have both. These places exist.
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IMO OpenClaw or a similar agent will be on everyone's phone in a couple years. It's basically what Siri was always supposed to be. For the average user it's obvious that this is the way computers are meant to be interacted with.
I often quip that I became a programmer specifically to avoid having to use spoken language. I always twitch at the thought of using any voice-based assistant.
Thinking in systems and algorithms is more enjoyable than using human language when it comes to computers IMHO ...