I don’t mean BETTER. That’s a different conversation. I mean cooler.
An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.
If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.
That’s just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.
Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.
Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don’t make money so they don’t make them. People don’t buy station wagons so they don’t make them. And they’re pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.
The internet?
Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.
Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I’ve heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-
Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅
I’m going back to video games that had multiplayer before we had network connectivity. If I wanted to play against a friend, we would have to get together in person and hang out. Game was done, you had a friend over for dinner. Or just a friend to come over and help you with the game. I miss when games were actual social events.
I MISS CLEAR COMPUTERS >:(
I mean LOOK AT IT it’s so much cooler than just a box!
The SteamDeck community has been cooking with some clear cases which I would buy if I didn’t have to risk breaking my beloved $500 indie machine.
YOOOOO that purple one! I wonder how hard it would be to do this to mine… time to add this to the Christmas list lol
I miss plastic electronics. Oddly enough glass and metal feel more fragile.
HTC knew what was up with the HTC One series. Their polycarbonate bodies felt Nintendo 64 controller levels of durable.
I bought the translucent nitro purple back plate. Very easy to install.
YEYEYEYEYEYEYE
One of my dream projects would be to get a dead iMac G3 and make a modern-day sleeper build inside it. It was honestly the COOLEST a computer has EVER looked.
Ships’ sails. I mean, I know some small vessels still use them, but look at any paintings from 1500s-1800s and tell me those huge white pieces of cloth don’t look cool.
Trains and railways are cooler and better than cars and highways. Imagine making everyone get their own personal vehicle, engine, tires, fuel, service, license, and insurance, just to watch them all crash into each other and die constantly.
Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.
Trains aren’t old tech though. Just tech that got pushed out by auto-maker lobbying. In places (like Japan, or China, or parts of Europe) where they kept evolving they only got better.
I love that about CRTs, man.
How the fuck could we invent a tiny pocket sized particle accelerator electron beam gun that magnetically aimed its fire with such precision as to hit every individual phosphor, with the appropriate charge to make the right color, across an entire fucking screen, and do that 30+ times a second (for TV, or 60+ for a monitor)…
Yet the LCD is the high tech fancy monitor when its just a little grid of globs being electronically fired? How did the CRT get invented before the LCD?!
Turns out manufacturing individual, low-power-draw, micron-sized lights is not easy. Even if it’s conceptually not as cool, it requires much better manufacturing processes and materials.
LCD isn’t LED.
Neither sure how to call it, nor is it a technology, more like a mindset. I am just gonna name it: “Prideful Craftsmanship”
Basically the incorporation of “useless” decorations and embellishments, to show off ones skill and maybe market oneself a little. Definitely superseded in the capitalist world. Things were just prettier or more interesting to look at, even stuff that wasn’t meant to be flashy.
But with nearly everything being made to a price point, this practice has been somewhat lost.
You’ve set off something in the woodworker’s side of my brain.
There’s a style of furniture called Arts & Crafts. The Arts & Crafts movement was bigger than furniture, but in the furniture world there was kind of a clap back at both ostentatious Victorian furniture a la Chippendale, and the mass produced crap the industurial revolution brought forth. So a style of well built, hand made furniture arose. The joinery was often exposed and in fact celebrated as features of the piece; through tenons would stand out proud, pinned joints would be done in contrasting wood exposed on the face side of the piece. I’ve heard it described as “in your face joinery.” The intention is to say “Look at this table. This table was not manufactured in a factory, it was built in a workshop. Look. At. It.” In the United States this movement often went for an aesthetic reminiscent of the furniture and fittings of old Spanish missions, so over here we often call it Mission furniture.
Compare this to the shaker style of furniture. The shakers were a sect of Christianity who were so celibate that men and women were required to use separate staircases, which is why this paragraph is largely written in the past tense. They led very modest lives in communal villages, and were known for their simple and yet extremely well made wooden furniture. A shaker table is the universal prototype table. It has legs, a top, and whatever apron or other structure is required to hold it together. Decoration was often limited to choosing pleasing proportions and maybe tapering the legs. I think a shaker craftsman would see the exposed joinery of the Mission style as sinfully prideful.
Video games. Way back then there was imagination involved, and companies took risks. Nowadays every game seems to iterate on the same tired formula. The only recent entry I can think of that bucked this trend in the past few decades was maybe Portal, but there have been few to no other recent games that come to mind. Fight me.
Literally play any indie game.
You’re talking about the AAA space. Fuck those games. Play indies. There are so many creators carrying out the legacy of game development you’re talking about. Don’t buy the games directed by suits. Currently I’m playing Factorio: Space Age, which is great. I recently played Lorelie and the Laser Eyes, which is a really cool puzzle game where you’re actually going to want to write notes on paper, which feels very classic. There are so many out there, but you actually have to look because the don’t have the marketing budget of Ubisoft or EA.
What is the formula you’re talking about? Games are so diverse it’s pretty hard to see what single formula there could be that covers them all.
Along with the others I’d also mention Outer Wilds and Viewfinder
The imagination came from the limitations of the hardware.
Computers today are too powerful for gaming. Its resulted all the famous studios racing to the bottom with graphics their primary and generally only concern, and everything else coming a distant second.
But at least it left the door open for indie devs, whose lack of resources and experience are still capable of keeping that ember of imagination and innovation burning.
Not a fan of indie games are you?
Baba is you, is a pretty original puzzle game. I’m not really into factorio, but it made tower defense cool again. There’s lots more that are weird and interesting like brigadore, airships conquer the skies, cruelty squad, superliminal.
As far as I remember, portal was a mod or indie game that valve picked up because they thought the idea was really good. It was really good.
A student project, actually. Valve saw a college student doing fun/weird shit inside their engine and went “You’re hired”.
That only makes it cooler
If you’re only talking about AAA games, sure.
Alan Wake 2 and Control are fantastic!
CDs and DVDs, because ownership beats convenience when you can get them second hand for pennies on the pound
And the technology has evolved that I can actually record and re-record to these plastic discs using lasers and it all fits inside a 1cm-tall drive that sits on my desk. And if the manufacturer uses high-quality materials, the disc will last hundreds of years.
Also some discs I can then either ink-print or laser-print on the top of it? Simply amazing.
Also:
FUCKING LASERS DUDE! Lasers will never NOT be cool.
Sex toys and local multiplayer is a way better combination than cybersex and online matchmaking
Tell that to the furries. Every furry I know that has a VRChat avatar feels more at home with a VR headset strapped to their face.
cybersex and online matchmaking
For when your team literally gets fucked.
I generally can’t be arsed with online multiplayer – Just as a concept.
But I made great memories with my cousins playing Wii/GameCube local multiplayer titles. Smash, Mario Kart, Sonic Adventure 2, et cetera.
I have never played a game with random strangers ever. But! My brother and sister both live hours away from me (and each other), and we keep in touch by playing online co-op games every week.
I have a group of friends that I have mostly kept in touch with by playing online games too.
So I agree with what I think you meant, but I’m very glad online multiplayer exists in some form.
I mean. All my friends who match my freak live 120Km+ away from me and so I have played online games with them.
But man it’s just not the same as the experience of snacks, a beat up sofa, crowding around a television, yelling at each other, yanno?
Who said you can’t do it anymore?
Clothing and towels made with asbestos fabric. During the middle ages you could clean them by throwing them in the fire and they would come out clean. Eventually your lungs would give up on you but for a while you had a very cool way to impress your guests.
… We (as in humanity) made a lot of cool shit before we realised it was slowly killing us.
And we’re still making stuff and slowly realizing it’s slowly killing us. Isn’t that neat?
Maybe one day we’ll have it all figured out. :p
Usually it’s killing us slower though. I don’t know if that’s progress
Or we’ll keep chasing horizons that will forever be deadly but cool.
But now we’re leaving “this old invention is cool” territory and getting into “humans are space orcs” waters.
BlackBerry (RIM)
Most weapons. Bows and swords are cooler than guns and knives. Trebuchets and catapults are cooler than any form of modern artillery.
Modern warfare, when it becomes necessary, should be fought purely with weapons designed prior to the 16th century. Just replace horses with dirtbikes and ATVs.
Modern warfare, when it becomes necessary, should be fought purely with weapons designed prior to the 16th century. Just replace horses with dirtbikes and ATVs.
You do not want this, the level of suffering that came with these battles was insanely worse than the fighting we have today with guns/explosives.
I disagree, firearms are way cooler than bows or swords. Sure, swords are cool but there’s only so many ways you can make a pointy sharp metal stick, or put a string on a piece of wood. But firearms in the early 1900s where absolutely wild when it comes to internal mechanics. Same thing goes for siege weapons and artillery, a trebuchet, catapult or ballista are cool at a medieval exhibit, but they ain’t a Schwerer Gustav railway canon.
But this is a statement on its own. Now every gas operated gun is either a AR-15 or AK. Every “new” gun is a “Tactitech Eaglefire XK-34-1050-Superbadger Ultradog”, and at the end its just another AR-15 with some sharp bits added to it.
Older firearms where way cooler an they don’t make them like that anymore.
Surprisingly, 3D printing is where most of the firearm innovation is happening now. Some use off the shelf parts from common guns like the AR-15, others are completely printed. It’s a weird rabbit hole to fall into, but definitely interesting.
The “should this be legal/illegal” debate is its own rabbit hole as well.
While yeah, AR and AK patterns are everywhere, there’re still neat things to find. The Kriss Vector has their innovative approach to recoil control, the Boberg pistol reverses the usual way rounds are stripped drom the mag.
The magic is still out there, but it never was nor will it ever be common.
When you break it down, yeeting a small piece of metal, accurately, up to a mile, through the use of handheld controlled explosions, is way cooler than just yeeting a pointy stick with another stick and a string. So, I am inclined to agree with you.
From an engineering standpoint, firearms are so much more fascinating.
Guns are pretty neat once you start to understand the engineering and extremely precise tolerances that go into them.
Dune style personal shields can’t be invented soon enough.
Then knife fighting will make a big comeback.
