Something that really was better in the olden times

Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as:

A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.

This definition is kind of depressing! But it captures the main things I’m interested in when it comes to nostalgia:

  • yearning
  • sentimentality
  • wistfulness

When I get nostalgic, it’s usually because I’m thinking about something pleasant from my past, and not recent past, but a time long enough ago that it feels good and gone now. An irrecoverable condition, one might say.

However, if I start chipping away at a particular bit of nostalgia, the imperfections of the past reveal themselves. I see the things that were less than ideal, the stuff we’d think of as archaic or even unacceptable today.

But are there things that really were better back in my youth, which was primarily in the 1970s and 1980s? When I came up with the premise of this post, I didn’t have an answer, I wanted to start writing and see if something obvious came to mind.

Nothing has so far. I remember the overall feel of my childhood, which was relatively safe, pleasant and uneventful. I have oodles of good memories, and the bad ones–and there are bad ones–have been blunted by time, and most of them were not that bad to begin with. Fights (verbal, never physical) with friends over stupid things. Having a crush and being thus crushed. Sometimes they were more tactile: finding out what happens when you ride a bike with no feet and hands (you crash).

But what about something specific, something where I can say, “This [thing] in 1975 was way better than today, in 2024”? Also, good lord, that’s almost 50 years. I feel a little better knowing I still hadn’t hit puberty in 1975, at least.

The more I think about it, the more I come to realize it wasn’t something that existed back in the 70s or 80s that was better than today, it’s the opposite–the absence of something. And the most obvious one that comes to mind is social media.

I appreciate the irony of writing that on a blog.

There are lots of great aspects to social media, but its ills form a long and well-known list. For the moment, leave aside the potentially addictive nature, the negative effects on culture and specific peoples, the things we all know are bad about social media.

When I cast my mind back to 10-year-old me in 1975, what did I do during my free time after school or on the weekends? I’d hang out with friends, playing board games, or the very first video games (yes, including Pong), riding bikes, play-acting (usually based on some current TV series or movie). I’d draw comics or write stories, or listen to music. Sometimes I’d just read a book or magazine. And it’s when I think of that last category–reading–that makes me appreciate the difference between the world back then and now. News came in slower. I learned about contemporary issues and ideas through magazines. There was TV, too, but even that was restricted to a handful of channels.

And books! I would spend hours just quietly reading, lost in imaginary worlds, or being enthralled by breathless “non-fiction” covering the nonsense I loved as a kid–monsters, ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot1I’ll grant that not everyone will see these things as nonsense. Heck, even I’m still not sure what’s up with UFOs.. And the thing about reading was the sense of quiet. The world moved, but the pace felt deliberate (also allowing for the difference in how time is perceived when you’re a kid).

That quiet simply doesn’t exist in 2024, unless you make a concerted effort to isolate yourself or head to a place where you can be reasonably confident you will be left alone, just you, your thoughts and a smartphone that can’t get reception.

So that sense of quiet, that’s something that was better in the olden times. I’m not sure how well I’ve explained it. I may revisit this post later. I’ll make a note2Seriously, I’m adding it to my reminders app. In olden times, this would have gone on a slip of paper that I would inevitably lose..

The Macintosh was released 40 years ago today. I am mandated to tell a story about it.

macintosh classic
Kids, ask your parents about floppy drives. Photo by Sidde on Pexels.com

Because everyone else on the internet is doing it.

I did not use a Macintosh in 1984, My home computer at the time was a Commodore 64, which, at $200 U.S., was somewhat more affordable than the $2495 Macintosh.

But I did use a Macintosh in 1985, when, as part of a job entry program, I was placed into a small advertising firm that was outfitted with Macs and a LaserWriter. The LaserWriter fascinated me as a child of dot matrix printers that were slow, loud and mangled paper as soon as you turned your back to them. The LaserWriter was silent1OK, silent-ish and sexy.

I remember three things from my time in that early Macintosh office:

  • I didn’t have a lot to actually do, so I spent time writing a parody screenplay for a Friday the 13th movie I called “Friday the 13th, Part VII: Orville Finds a Meat Cleaver.” I printed out a copy on that sleek LaserWriter and still have it today.
  • I am left-handed but learned to use a mouse right-handed because the mouse cord was not long enough to place the mouse on the left side of the Macintosh. I still use mice right-handed today.
  • The owner of the company, a serious young man named Arnold Brown, got mad at me for adding helpful directions into a database of local businesses. I remain as adept with databases today. I could have easily fixed the entries, but he insisted on doing it himself, perhaps as penance for having agreed to bring me on.

My own Mac journey is thus:

  • 2013: I got my first Mac, a MacBook Air. This was just after they got bumped to 8 GB of ram. They still come with 8 GB of ram, more than 10 years later. I didn’t really like macOS back then and traded the Air for a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. There are people out there who are probably wondering what kind of madman I was, but the SP3 had a better display, pen support (I used it for doodling at times) and I was able to crank out an entire novel on it.
  • 2018: I got a Mac mini. It had the flakiest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth I have ever encountered in a computer. I got rid of this, too.
  • 2020: MacBook Air M1. Finally, a Mac I genuinely liked! The one-monitor limitation was stupid, but I used a USB adapter to work around it. I used it exclusively at home, so eventually sold it, as it seemed silly to have a laptop that sat on the desk 100% of the time.
  • 2022: We arrive at my fourth Mac. We’ll see how long this one lasts. It’s a Mac Studio with the M1 Max SoC. It generally runs everything very well. It is silent. The design is surprisingly ugly (a stretched up mini is not much to look at). Bluetooth is better, but also still flaky. It’s like Apple keeps the secret sauce to how it works for their own peripherals. The worst thing, though, is the way software will randomly crash out with no warning. This happens across all apps, including Apple’s own. I reboot the Mac every once in a while and just hope for the best. It’s a fine machine, otherwise, and while macOS has regressed in some ways recently, it’s better than it was in 2013.

Bonus story with me and a Mac in it: Four days before Christmas 1998, someone broke into my apartment while I was at work and stole my PC (a Celeron something or other, whose processor I had upgraded just a few weeks earlier) and my roommate’s strawberry G3 iMac. I think my roommie eventually got another Mac, though I have no recollection of what it was. The strawberry iMac was much prettier than my PC.

Is nostalgia good or bad?

The real answer is probably both.

I will say this, though, it seems to grow more potent as you get older. This makes sense, as you have longer to look back, and more chances to trigger that nostalgia. I find this is especially true of music, since I probably bought more music in my 20s than at any other point in my life. I was in my 20s from 1984 to 1994, so the music of that era can send me off in a reverie pretty quickly1Excluding excessively cheesy synths and that weird snap drum sound that sounds extremely 19080s now.. Also, this decade saw the rise of rap, hip hop, grunge and R.E.M. probably my favourite band.

I may have more on this later. In the meantime, have a cat:

Rediscovering old music

I wished my living room had looked like this when I was 30. (Image generated through NightCafe)

I don’t mean old-timey music like ragtime or something, rather I’m talking about eschewing a streaming service like Apple Music and going back to my old music collection, which consists mostly of CDs I’ve purchased and ripped over the past 30+ years. All of the files are local, tucked into a folder on my PC. The app to play them, Windows 11’s Media Player, provides album art and metadata, and that’s it. It doesn’t curate, recommend, provide radio stations, “for you” or anything else. It just lets you listen to your music library.

And it’s kind of refreshing. I can listen for hours and know I’m not burning bandwidth (I know I have the bandwidth, it’s more a principle thing). There’s a tangibility that’s missing with streaming. And everything is something I’ve already picked out, bought and listened to many times already. There is a welcome familiarity, but also a chance to revisit albums (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is) I haven’t listened to in years. Certain music invokes memories of other times and places. It’s weird and, usually, kind of wonderful.

Unlike my phone, which has a truncated version of my music library, the PC has everything, so when I hit shuffle, I never quite know what will come up. I like that.

Now I’m off to listen to Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe, which sounds more like a law firm than a majority of the members of Yes.

A New Business Attitude!

It is time again for me to randomly go through old issues of The Computer Paper on The Internet Archive and delight in the old-timey world of tech print ads.

Behold, an ad from the November 1999 issue for a Samsung multi-function printer:

Business woman has her arms crossed and means business. Also, is she leaning on something we can’t see or just have good balance? My favourite part may be the single word New! callout, as if it’s a feature. I can’t mock too much, though, because my current Brother multi-function printer can still fax, too.

Fun facts (fax?):

  • The samsungcanada.com URL is actually available. It doesn’t even redirect! (The current URL is samsung.com/ca.) With the way companies scarf up addresses, this kind of surprises me.
  • The Samsung logo was changed slightly in 2005, with the changes easiest to see in the ‘M’. It looks like they ditched the oval, possibly at the same time: https://www.samsung.com/ca/about-us/brand-identity/logo/
  • As near as I can tell, Samsung no longer makes printers of any sort. They do offer a smart fridge, though.

Bonus:

In the same issue is this ad for Stupid Computers. It is amazing. stupidcomputers.com does not have a website, but according to dan.com (“a GoDaddy brand”) it has been sold.

Also, uh, what kind of gun is space chick holding there?

The wisdom of my Grade 8 Foods & Nutrition teacher

bowl of cereal with marshmallows
Photo by Carlie Wright on Pexels.com

Her name was Ms Anderson, and she was the first teacher I had who went by Ms. She was very modern. I took Foods and Nutrition (a fancy name for Cooking) with her for Grade 8. Back then–the late 1970s–cooking was still widely perceived as a “girl/woman” thing1I made history at my junior high by being the first male recipient of the year-end cooking award in the groovy year of 1978. This was reflected by my class only having four guys in it (I was one of the four).

Looking back, the three things I remember most were:

  • A mystery recipe she put on the board, tasking each unit (four people) to figure out the recipe and then make it. There was no internet to cheat with back then. Our group correctly guessed baking powder biscuits. Another unit incorrectly guessed cookies and the results were more akin to lethal projectiles than anything edible. And were treated as such.

The other two were things Ms Anderson said:

  • Most breakfast cereals are basically candy. It was true then, and I think, is even more accurate now, as a lot of “adult” cereals are very high in sugar content, even though they present themselves as “nutritious.” I still feel a bit guilty when I have a bowl of Reese’s Puffs because of what she said (I only buy them on sale, I swear).
  • Clean as you go. This is one of those little nuggets of kitchen wisdom that is transformative when you first hear it. I still clean as I go over 40 years after taking her class, and nothing beats finishing a meal with minimal dishes to clean up afterwards.

So a thanks to Ms Anderson. She was young, so might only be in her 70s now, probably retired. I’d love to hear the kinds of stories she’d tell.

Hair nostalgia

While looking for something unrelated in amongst the many backup CDs/DVDs I have dating back as far as 2000, I found this photo I apparently took of myself around 2003 or thereabouts (20 years ago as I type this). I was still in my 30s! I look wistful here, as if I knew the hair wouldn’t last. Or that the beard would shortly turn white, like Gandalf’s.

Also, dig those old school monitors. I think their combined weight was equal to mine.

Fun facts:

  • The photo is a self-portrait taken with a Kodak DC280 Zoom Digital Camera (box pictured to the left of me), taken at a then-crazy resolution of 1760×1168.
  • The date stamp claims it was taken on May 3, 1999, but I did not move in to the place pictured until September 2001. The “modified” date is October 26, 2003, which is probably the actual date taken.
  • mytechbuyer.com no longer seems to be a thing, which is weird considering how SEO-sounding the name is.
  • This was the end of my Big Glasses™ era.
  • I was probably north of 180 pounds when this was taken. THICC, as they say.
  • It was the only time I ever had two PCs set up side-by-side (old and new). I never ended up using the old one and eventually removed it.
  • The window was at ground level (basement suite), which let anyone walking by peek into my living room, so I always kept the blinds shut, hermit-style.
  • The house was sold recently and will likely be bulldozed to make way for an apartment or condo complex. I lived there for 10 years.
Ah, to be young again. Except without those super heavy old monitors.

Partying like it’s 1998 (with Unreal)

Don’t shoot the Nali! Also, there are more colours in the game than brown, I swear.

After some chat about the olden days of gaming in Discord that include recollections of the original Unreal, released in 1998, I felt the silly urge to re-install the game–and did!

For other people who are thinking, perhaps unwisely, of giving in to their nostalgia, here is what I did:

  • Went to my gog.com library to install the game from there. It turns out I never got the game on gog.com. I then checked Steam. On both platforms I have:
    • Unreal Tournament
    • Unreal Tournament 2004
    • Unreal Tournament 3 (re: UT2007)
    • Unreal 2
    • No original Unreal. Sad face.
  • I pondered whether I wanted to buy a 25-year-old game, but the decision was made for me because Epic delisted the game on all digital stores last year (along with all the others I listed above).
  • I dug out my binders of game CDs (BOGs) to see if I had my original Unreal disc. I did!
  • I dug out my USB DVD drive and plugged it in
  • I inserted the CD and waited to see what would happen
  • I got a pop-up about compatibility mode, clicked OK and waited
  • The installer launched!
  • The game installed!

Amazingly, the unpatched original CD version actually worked. It defaulted to 800×600 resolution. I then applied the UnrealClassicPatch227i, a community-made patch that builds on the efforts of Epic to allow the game to work with modern renderers and fixes a few bugs and glitches. The patch is on the community site OldUnreal, found here.

I made the following change to the console in the unreal.ini file, found in the Unreal/System folder, under the [Engine.Engine] section. This enables the UT-style Umenu system, which gives access to some of the newer options (and makes changing keybinds easier, too):

Console=UMenu.UnrealConsole

The original line is Console=UBrowser.UBrowserConsole.

I set the resolution to the same as my monitor, 2560×1440, which looks fine, though the HUD shrinks to micro-sized. Apparently HUD scaling is coming to the 227j patch.

I originally chose OpenGL for the renderer, but it was too dark and changing brightness had no effect. I switched to the Direct3D 9 renderer and was able to change the brightness from Impenetrably Dark But Undoubtedly Moody to Moody But I Can Actually See Some Things Now.

Finally, I installed some high resolution textures, which look fine, though there’s a jarring difference when you see a fuzzy original texture next to a high-res one. You can fix most of these by also installing the HD Skins pack, available from the same link. HD Skins is actually a mutator, but the readme.txt file doesn’t note that you must start a new game to first enable the mutator. You can save the configuration so the mutator always runs after that.

The game itself plays great, of course. I could probably run it at 100,000 x 100,000 resolution and still get 140 FPS. Now we’ll see how long a 25-year-old first-person shooter can hold my interest.

Bonus shot:

Looking back at the crashed Vortex Rikers ship you escape from.

My vulgar youth

I have recently begun digging through my old creative stuff–sketches and stories from back in the olden days when I had hair and dreams. Now I just dream of having had hair.

One of the things I’ve noticed about some of the old short stories, dating back to the early 90s or even earlier–so some 30+ years ago, written when I was in my mid-20s or so, is how vulgar they are. Everyone curses, the guys are all leering monsters you wouldn’t let within 20 metres of a woman, or perhaps any other human. Everyone drinks or is drunk. I’d say I was repressed and letting it all hang out in my fiction, except:

  • I never drank other than an occasional beer, and never wanted more
  • I rarely swear in the flesh, feeling I can draw on more colourful metaphors to express myself than common cuss words
  • I have never leered at a woman, nor have wanted to

Also, a lot of stories revolve around death, which is also weird, because ruminations on mortality usually start when you’re, well, older. But I apparently had it on my mind a lot when I was 24 or 25 (this might partly be explained by my father dying when I was only 27, but that goes beyond the time when most of the referenced stories were written).

Anyway, no grand point here, just one of those things I noticed. That, and a lot of the writing is very first draft. I “finished” a lot of short stories that were never really done.

Gum Gum drag racing, before and after

First, the original pencil sketch, probably done back in the 90s:

And my modern interpretation of it:

And some miscellaneous notes and observations:

  • I tried to incorporate the ZOOM!! text but never liked the way it looked, so off it went
  • I originally resisted adding the reins to the bananas, because I don’t see the Gum Gum People needing them, but with their poses it looks a little better
  • If I redid this, I’d have them leaning forward, like they were riding motorcycles, without the reins
  • I removed the dialog because it is now canon that Gum Gum People do not speak
  • The motion lines/puffs don’t seem to convey the motion that well, probably again due to the posture of the racers
  • The shadows are iffy
  • I slightly reduced the size of the background GGP, but they still look too close together?
  • The GGP in the back has bigger feet, but, uh, it’s just a trick of perspective!

Drawing: Godzilla 1978

I was totally into dinosaurs as a kid, and Godzilla was a dinosaur. Or close enough. I watched all the Japanese Godzilla movies from the 1950s on the Tacoma station KSTW (channel 11). They aired as part of their Sunday noon SCI-FI THEATER. It was all the sci-fi schlock I could handle–and then some! So many terrible, yet amazing movies.

I drew a lot of dinosaurs, and in my 14-year-old mind, Godzilla would have absolutely been a tyrannosaurus rex if he had been a REAL dinosaur. So I drew him as such in 1978.

Below is a traced copy of the sketch. I tried to keep the line work as close to the original and I think I came pretty close, using the Narinder Pencil in Procreate, with an HB Pencil for the shading.

Why do this when I still have the original sketch? This was both an experiment and a nostalgic trip back to my hippie-haired youth. The nostalgia part is obvious, the experiment was to see how easily my hand could follow the lines I drew 45 (!) years ago, and, really, just to see what it felt like.

It felt weird. It felt weird not because it was dead simple to trace (it’s a pretty straightforward sketch), but because as I traced over it, the lines felt like mine, right down to giving Godzilla puny little arms that were still pretty ripped. And giving him a funny-looking snout that would probably work as the front end of a car.

And I still draw rocks pretty much the same way in 2023.

Anyway, it was an interesting way to reacquaint myself with some of my oldest surviving artwork.

And the original scan (this is not a great scan, I’ll probably redo it at some point):

I wonder if I should do a modern take on this…as an experiment.

Bonus: I tried to imagine how I might have coloured it back in the age of disco, and this is what I came up with. I think it’s pretty close:

If I could turn back time

First, I am not linking to a video of the Cher song.

OK, I totally am. Here you go:

But really, if I could travel back in time for only one day and not actually change history, just noodle around and take in the sights, and I was restricted to only visiting years during which I was alive (yes, this is an oddly specific set of restrictions), I’d go back to July 3 (nice weather) in the following years:

1973: I was 9 years old, so I actually remember a fair bit about 1973, but it would be groovy to walk around my hometown of Duncan as it was back then, when the world felt simpler and smaller (but I was also only 9 years old). Seeing it with adult eyes would be entertaining, if only for the fashions.

1993: 20 years later and I’m now 29 years old. Why this year? Because Vancouver has changed so much in the past 30 years. 1993 was pre-internet, pre-Windows 95 and yet still feels “modern” in my memory. I’d like to see how that would hold up to the reality. Plus, I could visit all those old computer stores I wrote about recently, and relive the last hurrah of computers that weren’t just IBM compatibles or Macs. And secretly invest in Apple stock. My runner-up choice would be summer 1986 or 1987 when Vancouver was the big new city, and I was taking my first initial steps into coming out to others and being part of a larger community. So much of what was back then is gone now. Actually, maybe I wouldn’t want to go back to those years, it would probably just make me sad. Although I’d totally take the time to check out Expo 86, which I really didn’t get to see much of when I worked there.