I hate the past. To me, the past is something we should learn from but never return to. I have no desire to return to the days where gay and the r-slur were every day jokes and and “Tits or gtfo” was a common reply to women on the internet.
But I love old machines and gizmos. I love gears and levers and buttons. I love things that clunk and whir. Vinage music boxes, Clockwork toys and VHS machines that sound like they’re trying to go into orbit when you rewind a cassette. I’ve always liked old stuff for as long as I can remember.
Is it nostalgia or just autism? Is it something I should be ashamed of?
Don’t worry. When the logistical chains for “high-tech” start bottoming out, analog and human-powered inputs will be back in a big way.
You will love this payphone I saw at a job site last week.
I do love me a whirring doohicky!
It’s nostalgia and autism! But also you just like things that are well made. Better materials, better design, better aesthetics, and a better tactile experience. The real question is why the fuck everyone doesn’t feel this way and what the fuck is wrong with them
Devices are evil. Machines and gizmos are cool. Contraptions are the best.
a contraption is just a large gizmoWhat about a doohicky
10/10
While contraptions are generally larger than a gizmo this is incidental rather than defining of their relative natures. A contraption has some sort of inherent risk, be it of breakdown or explosion. While a gizmo is a specialised or unknown/not understood by the speaker gadget.
So something can be both a gizmo and a contraption.
The reason we like contraptions but dislike devices is both because of the intrusive nature of devices, but also because of the Freudian nature of ti. The unstable nature of the contraption and the risk bound to it stimulates the Todestrieb as Freud would have called it. While the experimental and creative nature of a contraption stimulates the eros
I too make vibes based definitions to make synonyms distinct. Cause they fucking are. They are different sauces on the same food.
:wittgenstein: All communication is ultimately vibes, and as long as we have a shared sense of those vibes it is correct use of language.
Which in this case makes it cooler.
This is gadget erasure.
Im iffy on gadgets cause that’s what they called what would become devices in the 2000s
This person gets it
My music setup being a tangle of cables and doohickeys that take up a quarter of my living room is way better and cooler than a digital interface cause mine is more fun. I get to plug in cables and move dials and press buttons!
That reminds me, I bought an old theremin i need to put back together
Gonna learn to make spooky skeleton music
I want a theremin so bad. If you make anytjing ill put out a tape. Working on a using my long time punk network to set up a little tape label for experimental music.
Hear me out: I think you’re just experiencing old stuff the way the designers were hoping. Which is really sweet and cool in a way: we’re connected to other people’s creativity through the medium of thinking about how some gizmo would sound and feel nice to use.
Someone went “this button is fine and everything, but it should be a little clickier and the spring should be a different material so it doesn’t sound weird” or whatever. And now here we are decades later thinking “damn the experience of using that old thing is GREAT. Iconic even.”
Good news slimer: you got pranked by the enduring human spirit, as we all do.
This is a large part of why I hate touch screens. That consideration is now out the window because the worst format became standard. I find them bad from a practical standpoint but there is also just a better vibe to pressing a real button that exists. Commodity fetishism fits in there really well. It is easier to consider the designers who make buttons more ergonomic than the coders who code what parts of a touch screen count as keyboard cause one feels nice and the other has me making typos constantly cause I can’t feel the letters. Slide phone keyboard I could text with perfect grammar and syntax without autocorrect or even looking at the screen cause I could feel the buttons.
Building Gundam models becoming my latest main hobby has led to me looking up the names of the people who engineered the model kits ive enjoyed. That’s gotta be a pretty difficult task requiring quite a few different skills. They should be credited on the boxes. Same goes for Lego or whatever
Good news slimer: you got pranked by the enduring human spirit, as we all do.
ugh I hate it when that happens
Same, that retro stuff was built to last and had curves from here to ya-ya
It might could be the autism, but it could also be an appreciation for things that other people disregard
In the realm of music production and instruments, there’s often an association between vintage gear and “character.” The modern stuff is great for pristine exactness, but there’s something people find attractive about the imperfections in the old gear; unpredictable behaviors in analog circuits, old janky digital to audio converters, the “sizzle” 12-bit samplers add, myriad flavors of tape artifacts/effects. Today’s flaws are tomorrow’s je ne sais quoi‘s.
I’m thinking there’s a similar thing going on with other vintage technology. Blu rays or streaming will give you perfect 4K visuals, but the perfection makes the delivery mechanism invisible. Old VHS tapes and machines, their imperfections made them feel like they’re part of the creative process rather than a pass-through.
I have a vcr and crt bexause they hit different. The pan and scan version of the phantom menace on an old tv makes it seem like an episode of a tv show like xena, the bad cgi is too blurry to tell it isnt a bad practical effect. I’m also using it for music, got a aux to patch cable so I can run my tv audio through pedals to an amp. So im gonna record some stuff, dub it to vhs, run a magnet over the tape and then play that back again through pedals for an analogue deep fry
I love CRTs, I wish I still had one. I gave mine away in 2016 (I think) and regretted it ever since.
I like that they sound like they’re going to electrocute you to death every time you turn them on. Also they’re heavy as hell, like heavier than you’d think they are.
Fun fact about CRTs, did you know that the sound of untuned channel snow/noise/static is the sound of 13.7 billion year old cosmic radiation?
This is your useless Dort fact of the day
My parents got a big screen CRT
Believe you me, I know how heavy they are
Damn thing took me (a stout lad) and three men who were even stouter and laddier than me to move
I did know that! However ot isnt exclusive to a CRT. You can still get the snow channel on a 4k tv. That isnt a cathode ray thing. It’s a radio signal thing. That’s another reason I like analogue stuff. I know how a lot of it works
Yeah I’m big on old gizmos and gadgets. Well made physical controls are just
I wish I could get more and had more time to fix them up. I have a small collection of film cameras and electronics.
one of the reasons i’m a big fan of what i like to call “star wars aesthetic”.
like they’re traveling in space, shooting lasers and shit, but the way you have to flick all the lil buttons and tune all the lil dials is just…ugh…i love it
I really love the 70s idea of the future look. These are totally different types of sci fi movies, more hard sci fi fictionalized just barely ahead of contemporary technology, the plots are a bit less hard sf but both are super fun and are super focused on buttom and dial tech. Andromeda Strain and Phase IV. Andromeda Strain is based on a Micheal Creighton book from 1969 about and asteroid carrying a space disease and how Science People handle it in a state of the art containment bunker lab. Phase IV is about what if for spme reason all the ants in one region really got their shit together and made a coordinated attack taking out a small town which then turns into a mutual siege between the ants and the scientists who came to investigate, it sounds really silly but it is a genuinely good movie that takes the idea dead serious. Both have 5 minutes into the future tech but from the mind of the early 70s.
I really love the type of 2001 inspired sci fi movies that Star Wars killed, but I also count the first Star Wars as one of those movies, it has one foot in that pond still. Which is why its my favorite Star Wars movie. It dirties up the click click machines and dials but those were there before. Just usually in more austere settings. THX 1138 is a good example as well.
“But you gotta hand it to the Empire though, they had great UI design” - redditors in the starwars universe whenever someone brings up warcrimes
tarkin doctrine tho
Modern devices obfuscate how they work while old technology didn’t do that as much. It’s the difference between being able to take apart an old-school alarm clock with a screwdriver vs some bullshit smartTM device that measures time that you can’t even take apart without ruining the plastic case because outside screws aren’t minimalist enough.
Absolute peak design was 90s electronics with transparent cases like the transparent Gameboy. We have regressed so much since then.
old tech is cool, we used to do things in weird elaborate ways and that made it charming in a way i can’t put into words.
sure, flatscreens are better in almost every way, but CRTs created super high voltage to shoot focused electron beans then magnetically bent them super fast with unbelievably precise control into a coated grid to make an image, isn’t that neat?
yeah, EVs are great, but combustion engines are engineering marvels built from intricate clockwork timed and sized just right to extract as much movement as possible from exploding a whiff of flammable liquid. how cool is that?
Im trying to find that a quote from matrix 2 where a guy talks about knowing hiw to operate his mech but having no idea how it works
Nah I like old machines built for singular purposes that aren’t little spy contraptions or trying to get me to buy junk or AI slop. I bought a retro packard bell to fix up for retro gaming alongside some vintage consoles last year.
older tech is more romantic
You don’t yearn for the past, you yearn for a less alienated relationship to technology. The exploiters just hadn’t had as much time to set up all the alienation in design they wanted yet, back then. Waves of planned obsolescence, monopolization, and major defeats for the labor movement were required to give rise to the generation of miserable engineers and designers who spawn today’s abominable consumer devices.
As usual, I’m with the owl.
Gimme a bunch of big switches and buttons that go thunk and click, make it plausible I can solder a broken connection just by following the wiring without fully knowing how it works, make it mechanical so giving it a Fonz-style smack often does make it work
Understanding wiring without fully knowing how stuff works is a huge part of why I try to keep as much if my music gear analogue as possible, cause I know how a lot of that stuff works on a basic level. I can make a microphone from scratch, its not even hard.
