The Guardian published A History of the Internet (in 2009) to celebrate 40 years since the development of Arpanet, and frankly it’s pretty cool. Did you know that Queen Elizabeth II was the first Head of State to send an email (1976) or that the first online “bulletin board” was developed during a particularly bad snow storm in Chicago (1978). Did Al Gore really “invent the internet?” All this gets covered in a beautiful and simple to read interactive timeline. Continue reading
Marshall McLuhan, By Yousef Karsh. From MarshallMcLuhan.com
The University of Toronto is hosting a conference this week: The McLuhan 100 · Then | Now | Next from November 7 – 10. Sadly I’m not attending, but my heart is there.
I gave up drinking coffee years ago when I lived with a caffeine-addled boyfriend and our coffee-drinking hazes lead to increasingly loud arguments over petty issues. For me, those first few weeks without coffee were like quitting smoking – I suddenly realized that there was a lot more air to breathe now that my life was not overcrowded by coffee’s tanic, nauseating odour. Continue reading
There’s no Frivolous Sunday feature this week because I have some serious personal stuff to get through (read: school apps, finding an apartment, finding a job, buying a car, etc). So, I’m going to be few and far between (more so), but here’s a YouTube video I watched that inspired this project early on. Pop some popcorn and enjoy!
Posted in Frivilous Sunday, The Future is NOW
Tagged good old fashioned fun, remember when
I will never write about this again, I promise.
But suddenly, I have a craving for the 90s. I’m in Banff, it’s summer, and suddenly it just isn’t complete without the following things:
1. Smarties with Shades: For all the Canadians in the room, remember when Smarties chocolate candies came with sunglasses printed on the purple ones? I just ate a box of Smarties and was sad that the purple ones didn’t have faces….(and you’d think I’d be able to find a picture on the web, but no dice…does no one else get nostalgic for this?
2. On a more international note: Crystal Pepsi. Blah blah blah novelty branding, blah blah blah cola wars. All I know is that the summer of 1992 meant Crystal Pepsi.
To make this more topical: The 90s is an era which is still in limbo — we haven’t developed romanticized version of it yet because it is still so vivid in our memory. However, this is only a matter of time. So: what consumer product do you miss from the 90s? Should we take bets on what’s most likely to be brought back when the 90s becomes hip again?
Last year, I had the privilege of hearing Jon Cohrs talk about his OMGimon.tv project, an analog/pirate TV station based in New York City. The idea behind the project is/was that as soon as TV stations went digital-only (many consumers were required to buy a digital converter box), OMGimonTV would temporarily take over the analog airwaves that were now open. Continue reading
It’s still Sunday somewhere.
Lately, little Post-Luddites, I have been preoccupied with finding malts. Malts, for those of you who don’t know, are milkshakes with malted powder, giving your drink a rich flavour. If you had Whoppers or Maltesers as a kid, this is what a malt tastes like.
The malt makes it here today because it’s hard to find outside of the east and it’s increasingly something that’s only known from movies and tacky poster art. Every time I order a malt in a diner, I feel like I’m in a Frank Capra film. So today’s post is a salute to malt, with some delicious and tacky recipes. Continue reading
Forgive this Post-Luddite’s absence this past week — it’s not you it’s me. I’ve been doing what a good Post-Luddite ought to do — playing in the sunshine, swimming in the creek, walking in the woods. It’s been in the 80s here in the mid-Hudson valley, so it’s been perfect.
This week I stumbled across an episode of the Twilight Zone featuring one of my all-time favourite actors: Buster Keaton. It’s not a particularly good episode — but it deals with the whim to go back to “a simpler time” and has a funny take on virtual nostalgia as one of the characters gets back in time and discovers that things aren’t as good as he thought they would be. Continue reading
In an earlier post, I discussed how no matter what our form of transport, as long as it was the quickest and cheapest, we’d also be satisfied with it being stressful and uncomfortable. My target, of course, was airlines, and not long after that post, you became more limited in what you could bring on an airplane. So in summary, you may bring between 0-2 checked bags, only 1 carry on, which may not include liquids, probably not food, and if you have a computer or a cell phone, it must be pulled out and inspected. For some time, you weren’t even allowed to bring books. You still have to arrive 1-3 hours before your flight, you still have to pay between $150 – $1000 to cancel or change your ticket, and in may cities, transport to and from the airport is inconvenient and expensive.
So, in summary: Yuck. Traveling is already a stressful ordeal — why would we want to put ourselves through another ordeal in getting there? Continue reading
Very late, very frivolous, I’m sitting in Ottawa waiting for some important travel documents to be returned to me. So this Frivolous Sunday is sponsored by Canada Post, which tracks packages going forwards and not backwards and shuts their doors firmly at 4:25. Thanks, Canada Post.
Anyways, I ventured outside Ottawa to historic Merrickville, Ontario, just 20 minutes southwest. Merrickville is known for a few things, but there are two things of interest to Post Luddites: the Locks, which you can stand next to and watch open and close (manually), and the Alloy Foundry, at which on a good day (not this day) you can see a real iron pour. Continue reading
Posted in Frivilous Sunday, Old School Technology
