old technology

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an incredibly short introduction

is it odd to be fascinated by something i was never around for? i've never used a tape recorder, never listened to a casette player, never been in the same room as a scanimate, but they're entrancing to me all the same. i think it's because they're

a look backwards

sometimes, when i read about history, i get the same feeling i do when i read the comments on that real life checkpoint video. (i'm gonna talk about computers, i promise. hang tight.) it's a very intense and very specific look into a stranger's life, and it feels very intimate. it's like a little reminder of how every one of the 8 billion people on this earth has their own inner world, their own struggles, their own relationships, their own wants and fears. just earlier, i was reading someone's blog on here. they were talking about how they were afraid they wouldn't get into college, and how they weren't even sure how they'd pay for it. they talked about how they liked science fiction, and how they wanted to get in shape over quarantine. how their friends were outperforming them. it made me cry. even if i couldn't 100% relate, i felt a connection with another person that i wasn't sure many other people had, and it was really powerful.

i talk about that because i had a similar feeling when i listened to the first computer to sing a few months ago. the first time i heard it, when i was in 8th grade, i was terrified of it. it sounded so weird and unnatural to me, and that's all i could focus on. but now, when i listen to it, i don't hear that. i hear excited engineers crowding around their machine, chattering and speculating on what to tweak. i hear wide-eyed children flipping through their father's newspapers, inventing the sound in their heads. i hear a past without drone strikes, without q-anon, without amazon, and so i hear the future we fell short of. we made it sing a love song! a team of us, working atop the shoulders of giants, saw a box of metal that could not feel and we made it love. what's more painfully, wonderfully human?

or, of course, i'm being pretentious again.

weirdly tactile

today, if i cut open my galaxy s7 and try to take a little peek at how it works, it will not like me very much. i will see a bunch of chips and very small wires and a battery and probably the inside of a hospital room.

☆

1/27/21: started the page, up to weirdly tactile