This isn't exactly the same, and isn't a new thought, but is at least tangentially related.
One of my memories is around finding my dad's record collection and seeing the music he and my mom would listen to. There weren't any mind-blowing secrets, but it felt like a window into a world I didn't know about before and somehow was a slightly formative experience.
I don't know what that experience looks like in a world with subscription services where there's nothing to be stumbled upon by others. There's fewer bookshelves or movie collections to leaf through at a friends house everything is guarded by a password and hidden away, there's less opportunity to stumble across that secret hidden collection and that feels like a little bit of a loss to me.
Probably just me getting older and complaining about the good ole days though haha.
>I don't know what that experience looks like in a world with subscription services where there's nothing to be stumbled upon by others.
I collect physical board/card games, some out-of-print (and some just particularly fancy playing cards). None particularly "alien" (except maybe my gothic skull-festooned playing cards that play a little flipbook animation when arranged the right way), but I think someone of a future generation might have a fun time psychoanalyzing me based on what I included and didn't. I also have a couple of physical books that might catch someone's interest (I can particularly recommend "S." and "The Museum of Lost Wonder" as books that transcend the writing on the page).
I don't really have any plans to squirrel them away and keep them hidden, but it's totally plausible that in the future I pack them away as some of the games in particular aren't appropriate for young kids (a couple are horror-themed with some slightly graphic images).
Great point! We stayed at an Airbnb about a year ago, and part of the fun was seeing the record collection they had, along with a record player we could use. We queued up Jolene by Dolly Parton, some live Allman Brothers Band, Meet the Beatles... it was a great reminder of the experience, and also a way to get to know the host’s musical tastes.
Is there some equivalent where I could say, “Here’s what I listen to the most” ? Seems like some kind of fun little utility opportunity... maybe even just a publicly-shared playlist of top-played songs / albums?
I never followed through: had the idea to make my own "TV channel" at home with various ripped DVD movies, television. Maybe "Twilight Zone" on Friday night at 9:00 PM followed by an old horror film. It would be always "serving" in real time, unable to be paused or queued up. You "tuned in" if there was something you wanted to watch. No binge-watching: wait until next Friday for the next episode.
This was my idea for raising my kids with "TV" but not TV if you know what I mean. No crap, no commercials.
Would still be fun to do. And now I am inspired to try a "radio station". You know there is a ton of "old time radio" on archive.org. CBS Radio Mystery Hour on Saturday night? (Wouldn't want to compete with Twilight Zone's Friday night spot.)
It kinda feels like public playlists are what it would have to become, but there's a sense of curation with a public playlist that might not be present with something more akin to a private collection. I'm not saying i want to find the playboys in a box under my grandpa's bed, but there's a difference in what we present to the world at large vs what we keep to ourselves that feels like it almost requires something physical.
There is also something nice about it being bound to a physical space, ideally the person's dwelling.
This brings up nice memories of sitting around late at night at an eccentric, older friend's apartment, drink coffee and chat. Occasionally someone would notice an interesting sounding album wed then listen to or discuss or someone would notice a book that would become the topic of conversation.
All my recent favorites are digital now. The dynamic is so different when it's shifted from "what's this book?" to "Oh, let me tell you about the book I just read".
That's not (necessarily) due physical vs digital though. One is you asking about something you find interesting and the other is someone telling you about something they find interesting.
True, and FWIW, I am on your side of the 'argument'. While I love the convenience of digital and sometimes wonder if things I believe were 'better' is just age/nostalgia talking, I do think there's a genuine loss of character in the world, and even sense of community, with the gradual disappearance of physical media/art.
> Is there some equivalent where I could say, “Here’s what I listen to the most” ?
In the old days (at least up until the late 1990s) and especially on music newsgroups, people would write at the end of their posts what was now playing as they posted, eg:
https://listenbrainz.org/ "commits itself to safe-guarding the ListenBrainz data indefinitely." It might be a better intergenerational communication medium than last.fm
I’ve been continually using last.fm for 14 years now. I think that when I’m older, or if something happens to me, it might be a cool way to see who I was.
I 7my wife and I have talked about this. I think we are going to fill a CD binder with our favorite albums and DVDs (all burned, but still) for our kids to "discover".
I can't imagine how my tastes would be different if I hadn't had access to my parents records.
There is the other side, too. My mum died two years back and she collected many, many, many things. We haven't started going through the stuff yet. But we will someday. And I get horrified when I think about that day. It will be sad and it will take a lot of time.
I remember there used to be this old AM late night coast-to-coast radio show that had the strangest topics sometimes. I only occasionally tuned in by accident on the hours-long drive back to college from home. It was always when it was dark and the highway was empty and endless yellow highway street lights were all you could see.
It was like an x-files for radio. It was the first time I'd heard of Bob Lazar. It was mysterious and inquisitive and something you fell into unexpectedly.
Wish I remembered what it was called. I feel like that sense of mystery and discovery is hard to replicate today. Everything's at your fingertips.
Literally "Coast to Coast AM"! The host was named Art Bell. The show is still on the radio with the host George Noory.
The show is a bit different now, I don't listen to it often so I could be wrong but it seems to me that Art Bell always had a bit of a smirk or wryness, while Noory just comes across completely serious. Also with Art Bell it was simpler times, with the more entertaining aliens and cryptozoids and MiB. Now there is a lot more of the modern political deep state/Q/child trafficking stuff. Religious fundamentalism always showed up a lot in the "conspiracy theory" world. Before it would be things like how aliens are actually angels or something and signs of the rapture. Now you regularly hear guests talking about how God chose a certain person to clear out the demonic deep state, so there's a more disturbing undercurrent.
I think the contemporary podcast Mysterious Universe has solidly taken the torch from Art Bell. They always seem to sincerely dance with subjects while occasionally throwing a wink your way. Their storytelling skills are phenomenal.
I remember driving in the dark through Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming, you could find Coast to Coast on three different AM frequencies at once. Turning the dial you'd hear Art Bell, static, a rebroadcast of a church service, Art Bell, static, and then Art Bell again. He owned the night.
I think part of what made it great is the time slot that it was available in. The only people listening to radio that late at night were people driving in remote areas. If you were at home you had the tv, if you were at work you were busy. If you were driving at 1am, you had Coast to Coast. So it wasn't just the content, it was the content + being alone in the dark, in a vast expanse somewhere. You can't do that anymore because everything's replayable, not bound to a time slot.
I can relate and drove on the highways that mostly didn't have lights. Connecticut/NY to Montreal almost every weekend for a year (except in inclement weather), usually late at night.
Lots of great radio programs. This American Life, Art Bell, Hearts of Space. Hell going back far enough even Loveline had it's moments. I forget which university (in Burlington) had a great radio station that played good music and recorded every episode. Would get home and download the recordings and still listen to them (introduced me to a bunch of artists I didn't know).
As other's have mentioned, it was Art Bell with Coast to Coast.
If anyone really enjoyed that stuff, and enjoy video games, the 2006 version of Prey has Art Bell doing his show in the game. You can find snippets of his radio show with people talking about all the weird lights and alien craft and stuff that they are seeing in the "real" world of the game. It was a really nice touch.
When I was a kid in the 90s we had two old walky-talkies, the kind that predated the digital FRS systems you can buy today. They were the size of a brick, took 9x AA batteries and the antenna was a solid 3 feet long when fully extended.
We used to use them to play cops and robbers, but late at night in the summer, if you fiddled with the squelch settings and the antenna length (and I assume when the ionosphere was cooperating) I could pick up what in hindsight must have been some kind of numbers station.
It was a male voice repeating a bunch of nonsensical phrases, most of which have faded from memory except for something about having Buffalo Soldiers and then the recording would end with the phrase "I just got downnnnn" where the word "down" was drawn out in some kind of strange electronic vocal fry, like a tape recorder running out of batteries. After that it would loop back to the beginning.
This was in southwestern Ontario in the summer of 1996, maybe 97, and it thoroughly creeped me out. I've always wanted to figure out what it was.
The internet has made so many of my youthful amazements obsolete. I don't think kids who have been exposed to high speed internet and youtube would find much interest in exploring HF radio signals or using an acoustic modem to talk to people on the other side of the world.
That said, the internet has a whole new dark underbelly. If I were young again and granted the "get out of jail with a slap on the wrist" card again, I'd be poking at open ports and using an SDR to probe security weaknesses in modern RF systems. Getting strange music at Tower Records or from anarchist collectives out of zines has given way to youtube and a thousand other outlets. The effort may be less but there is still a world to get lost in.
There was a lot of magic in the old days, but it's still there in other ways now. Maybe the biggest danger is the end of boredom and the torrent of on-demand dopamine surrounding kids of today.
I'm not sure it's the end of boredom. Kids still get bored, even with all this stuff at their fingertips. I suspect the act of consumption itself becomes boring, even discovering new things can be boring, and you have to shift somewhere else. Maybe it's one reason why there are so many kids (and adults) on the internet creating content of their own. If consumption is boring... make your own stuff?
Great link! I have a cassette of HoS I recorded off public radio in the 1990s and still listen to (perhaps an alien signal for someone down the road who can still get ahold of the alien technology required to play it). Glad to know they still have a presence online... (the announcer on my cassette suggests you look up HoS on The Well or on Gopherspace -- more obsolete(?) alien technologies...).
Another place to find "alien signals" back in the day were in comic book shops and card shops (those that sold various sports cards).
They'd almost always have sections of weird periodicals that were made by completely unknown people. We used to share them at school, full of inappropriate content that would probably get kids expelled these days. Also things like the Anarchist Cookbook (and similar collections) which felt extremely illegal at the time, but you can pick it up on Amazon now.
I remember one that was dedicated to gruesome crime scene photos and detailed descriptions of horrific crimes. Half the pictures looked like photocopies of photocopies, which is far less jarring than what you can find online these days.
There's all kinds of things which would blow kids minds if they were exposed to it. A friend of mine who grew up and was (mis)educated in Berkeley was mind-blown by the old BBC art history documentary Civilization.
There's a whole lot of British material from the early era of color TV which makes most of what is watched today look like the low-IQ childish rubbish (albeit with high production values) it actually is. Compare BBC 1979 "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" with, I dunno, anything made in the last 10 years.
I like to listen to foreign radio stations on http://radio.garden. They speak languages I don't understand and (once you find a good station) play music I'll never hear again.
Thanks a lot for that link. I just browsed throug a few stations in Siberia located hundreds of kilometers away from anything and it is quite an experience to imagine these places through a radio.
I would say that some of the recommendation engines for media services have this feeling. Walking home late at night, sometimes it feels like Spotify recommends a supernaturally appropriate song, a little gift from the robo-gods.
Or go take a look at the comments for those beats to study and relax to streams on YouTube, young people seem to sit at home and think about how those songs connect them with each other.
How to get alien signals today: browse art from a different culture. It doesn't have to be high art. I'm fond of youtube videos.
The surface impressions are available immediately. All the references and set dressings and context in the literature, however, slowly bubble up over time, as you learn more about other works and the origin culture.
Delay, distance, and mystery.
(I had a friend in school who remarked that his mother watched exclusively movies about "two people who love each other but can't marry because they have different forehead dots." I often think about that phrase while watching non-bollywood fare, asking myself how the director+team have communicated the colours of the virtual dots.
e.g. 2:08 marks the switch from V- to T-pronouns. As for the band's name, it's ambiguous, and I still don't know which is the intended referent for native speakers.)
I remember the magic of sending away for and then getting a stack of Ubuntu Warty Warthog install cds in the mail from Brazil. In all it's dirt brown glory.
I saw John Darnielle in a coffee shop in Durham, NC a few years ago. Me and a coworker walked up to him and told him we loved the Mountain Goats. He said thanks and immediately started talking about Durham and how great it was. He talked about the vibe and the community and how weird a place it was. What a really cool guy.
The closest thing I can think of that emulates a similar feeling today is the "group buy". Kids (of all ages) see new/interesting things online that aren't mass produced and they can kickstart or otherwise pay for a spot on the next/only run of this item.
The radio - one of the last refuges of opaqueness - is still alive and well. I recall tuning into a random station a few months ago and hearing some insane industro-psychedelic drone-jazz (think Coil plays "Bitch's Brew").
I love the very slowly changing hue of your site. It's very artistic. When I started, it was a golden brown, by the time I reached the bottom, it was a lime green. I thought I might be crazy until I spotted in in dev tools.
> The safety and serenity of Alaska provided an atmosphere conducive to deprogramming, despite the pandemonium that ensued. Mark Phillips was the first man who not only did not abuse us, but cared for our welfare and well being.
rec.arts.wobegon Dec 28, 2001, 2:32:26 PM
That's a snippet of the Epilogue from "Trance-Formation of America" by Cathy O'Brien, a book about how Cathy O'Brien is either a schizophrenic or acts like one for publishers. It got spammed across Usenet right when I was into it the most, reading alt.religion.scientology and alt.fan.cecil-adams and a few others, so I got slapped across the face with it one night completely unexpected. I've since come across stranger, such as the QAnon cult, but that was my first taste of High Weirdness.
So maybe the next time we all get hyped up for another Apple keynote we can reflect on that sense of excitement, anticipation and - holy shit is this still possible? - delayed gratification.
