HMK2
6d ago
Also Lord Peter Wimsey, who always heavily salts his conversations with quotes from some poem or other that nobody (who hasn't specifically majored in fin-de-siecle English poetry) has ever heard of. It gets annoying for the reader sometimes!
I'm reminded of Ring Lardner's story Haircut, which is a barber reminiscing to a new customer about a deceased regular, who the barber remembers as a salt-of-the-earth guy with a great sense of humor but who the reader comes to realize is a total garbage human being. Edit: included link to story
HMK2
6d ago
I saw a video on the history of the wheel. The oldest wheel ever excavated consisted of three slabs of wood pegged together and sawed into a circular shape - yet the video's images of this object mysteriously grew spokes and lost them between shots. Nobody bothered to edit this thing before posting it, obviously.
HMK2
6d ago
If the narrator is never seen on screen, I assume it's AI nowadays unless I hear the little hesitations and changes in tone of voice that proves it's a human.
HMK2
12d ago
I stay away from all clubs and live-music venues, because they're just too loud, and because I don't care for most modern music. (I like Lehar, Johann Strauss, and C.M. Ziehrer's output, and also pre-rock&roll pop music from across the globe. I despised Run Lola Run because the soundtrack, as I remember it, was just screaming with hardly a trace of rhythm or melody. How far has fallen the land of Walter Kollo and Paul Lincke. And seeing the film's music get praise in most reviews I've read is simply inexplicable.)
HMK2
12d ago
One example: Science-fiction conventions were huge in the 70s through the 90s, but barely seem to exist in the cultural zeitgeist any more. ("Convention" in popular parlance nowadays translates to anime, furry or whatever Dashcon was.) The ones that still exist all have woke codes of conduct that are seemingly aimed at eliminating fun and spontaneity. No -isms or -phobias, no flirting with women, etc. Plus they're a hell of a lot more expensive to attend than they were in their heyday.
HMK2
18d ago
I saw a TV commercial (or PSA?) in 1978 touting a phone number (presumably a call-forwarding service or perhaps voicemail) that runaway teens could use to assure their parents that they were alive and in good health.
The commercial also said "No tricks, no traps, no traces." If this wasn't a lie, then the "youth-lib" movement was still strong enough that someone could create this service to help teens remain "free" of parental "tyranny" and that the TV station agreed to air the ad.
HMK2
24d ago
Dead forum?
I guess there's just no-one left here who cares enough about the issues that energized discussion in Reddit days.
I think it was Dylan Roof shooting up a black church while wearing Confederate and Rhodesian flag patches. It was pretty soon after that, that Amazon and such stopped selling Confederate flag merchandise, and streets and schools started getting renamed.
More options
Context Copy link