The one with the Life in the UK test
There's no reason why hundreds of people in California should know the future any better than ten people based in Yorkshire. — Charles Cecil
I think I'm at that moment in the lockdown, where I've burnt though my adrenaline reservers that I filled up in the beginning of the year with climbing. Well, while browsing the Prime Video catalogue of shows I found 6 seasons of Fear Factor and I decided to rewatch them all.
It is quite interesting, how the 00s TV resembles the 2020s social media. People eating sheep's eyeballs, or getting waterboarded for popularity and money? Sounds familiar.
The number of cuts for the ad breaks on the other hand - we sure were patient back then!
If you were looking to have a great night out on January 15, 1834, Thomas Pettigrew’s sold-out event was definitely the place to be. The lucky Londoners who had managed to acquire a ticket for the Royal College of Surgeons that night, were looking forward to a rare sensation: before their eyes, Pettigrew was going to slowly unroll an authentic Egyptian mummy of the 21st dynasty–for science!
Apparently Victorian party people unrolled mummies for fun. Today it might sound insensitive, but in the Victorian times I cannot imagine myself saying no, if given a chance to attend it!
Stumbled across one of the most nostalgia provoking place on the internet: the Winamp Skin Museum
I found 3 skins that I used in the past.
Someone mentioned how much of the nostalgia for that era is actually rooted in limitations and the way that they made certain things exciting.
Owning a new album was exciting, because previously you couldn't listen to that album.
Getting a new mp3 player whose storage was suddenly measured in gigabytes was exciting, because previously you couldn't carry around that much music.
Getting a new phone was exciting, because it probably had a camera, or internet access, or the ability to edit files, or some other fundamentally new feature that your previous device couldn't do.
Spending a Saturday curating your music collection and updating metadata was exciting, because that couldn't be done for you automatically.
Each stage where some barrier was overcome - be it a small, personal barrier or a large, technological barrier - came with this intoxicating sense of progress and improvement and possibility. If you assembled the solution yourself from existing products - software or hardware - it was all the more potent of a feeling.
These days everything just works, amazingly well. That's a testament to progress, but it's also incredibly boring. There's little left in consumer tech to solve, by consumers or by companies. You have one miraculous device that does everything you could possibly want in your digital life, and does it really well, out of the box. It has as much bandwidth as you're likely to use, you can stream enough media to fill a thousand lifetimes for less than twenty dollars a month, it can shoot photographer-quality photos and orchestrate your smart home and play console-quality video games and run a fully-features office suite.
Progress is what gadget-lovers like us miss. Tragically, the the very act of indulging it erases opportunities for it.
I find the comment no only really insightful, but also love that it reminded me about one of my favourite gadget of all times: The Creative Muvo MP3 player. What a fantastic piece of technology that was.
Virtually indestructible, really cleverly designed, and so feature-rich.
In other news, I have passed the Life in the UK test, which means that I am now free to prepare my naturalisation application!