Redartz: Hello all! For awhile now I've monopolized the conversation selection here, so today we put the subject matter back in your ever capable hands. So while I work up a (hopefully) titanic topic for next week, this week you're back in the driver's seat. You remember the routine: he (or she) who pops in first gets to name the discussion subject. It's been an eventful few months, so perhaps there's something on your mind; something you have been waiting to bring up to this assembled band of Bronze agers. Now's your opportunity, and the podium is yours!
10 comments:
I've got a twofer:
1) In this era of pandemic and lockdown the internet has never been more important, connecting us all to the outside world but do you wish the internet and social media had existed in your youth - or are you glad it didn't?
2) According to a recent UK survey, fewer than 10% of respondents want life to return to exactly the same as before the pandemic. Do you agree? What changes (if any) do you hope to see after coronavirus is gone? Will you do anything differently? Do you hope society will change and how?
1) I don't wish the internet was around when I was a kid, but then I don't tend to wish that anything which currently exists was around when I was a kid as I feel that's sort of a pointless exercise. My nieces (8,6,4) are growing up as "technological natives" and I'm a bit dismayed when I see one of them constantly watching YouTube videos, but then I also notice another who is just as happy sitting in the corner with a book. So I try not to let my current middle-aged ambivalence towards technology cast a shadow on how my past self would have reacted to it all, seeing that it seems to be all in how you integrate it into your life or not.
2) Boy, Colin, I'm not sure how to take that result! It's a little surprising prima facie. I caught myself almost missing airports the other day. Not just air travel. Airports. So I might be getting closer to that fewer than 10% with each passing day!
Cheers!
I'm glad there was no internet when I was a kid; with all the vitriol that one encounters online, it would've been overwhelming. I don't know how kids today handle it, but I guess they don't know anything else.
I think most people will try to get back to the way things were, even if it's just out of a sense of defiance. But some things are bound to change: the way people work (more telecommuting) and the way a lot of retail stores do business. Howie Mandel said he thinks the handshake will disappear as a form of greeting after this is all over.
EXCELLENT questions, Colin. I’ve got lots of thoughts on the first (but no time to type em up at the moment) and have to really think about that second one. Back soon.
- b.t.
Hmm, I'm not too sure about wanting the internet and social media back when we were kids. My personal opinion is that it's a mixed bag - sure, you'd have loved the instant, always on connectivity the digital age brings us, but you'd also have the negative aspects too (internet addiction, hate speech, general lack of civility, cybercrime, etc) and you can't really separate those divergent aspects. So, my short answer is - no, I don't wish I had internet/social media when I was younger, but I'm glad I have it now when I'm old enough to appreciate it!
I don't want things to be exactly the same as before the pandemic hit (hooray for enforced vacation leave!), nor do I expect things to be the same anyway. Mankind looks like it will have to adjust to the 'new normal' at least for the near future. Of course, with the passage of time years from now our grandkids will look back and ask us about the Great Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 in much the same way as kids in 1960 asked their grandparents about the Great Spanish Flu of 1918.
- Mike 'looking on eBay for 80s tech boombox' from Trinidad & Tobago.
Ahhh... the very sharp double-edged sword of the internet. As a kid I would not have wanted it though as an adult it is soooo valuable.
I suspect things will go back to pre-covid days fairly quickly whether I want it to, or not, lol. And, I will live my life exactly the same, once there is a vaccine. What I really, really have enjoyed during C19 is the lack of traffic, cleaner air and I wish that would stick around but surely it won't.
I wonder if it will accelerate some trends though, like declining church attendance, allowing employees to work from home, internet shopping...
Intriguing questions, Colin!
1. Having the internet 'back in the day'? No thanks. I feel that we got the best of both worlds, having the old school childhoods that we enjoyed; while getting the benefit of advanced technology in adulthood. I'd agree with some of the comments above, regarding the potential for negativity on the net. Looking back, I liked doing things with my hands, building real structures, reading real books and comics, and so on. And realistically, I spent enough time reading; I'd probably have spent too much time on a tablet as a youth (I spend too much time on it as an adult). Plus, experiencing the inexorable advance of technology through the years was fascinating (and still is). From the first early pocket calculators to my current constant companion Samsung Galaxy Tablet, I was sort of following cultural history.
2. Actually, I don't wish things to be as they were. I hope for improvement locally, nationally, and globally in all areas of society and life. A lot to ask, I know. It's been quite a year, but if I've learned anything over my nearly 60 years it's that change happens, and you can deal with it or get left behind. I prefer to keep moving. Using a mask in public is a bit annoying, but hopefully that won't be a permanent thing. I don't believe that it will. And the social upheavals we're witnessing , while controversial, give me some optimism. Dare we hope that society might become a bit more equal, more tolerant, more prone to brotherhood than to prejudice and hatred? I dare hope...
When I was a kid, I developed an appreciation for Rare Things.
When I first started collecting comics, I had to ride my bike all over town, hitting every grocery, drug store and liquor store in a two-mile radius for my weekly dose of four-color treasure. Later, when I got my driver’s license and could borrow the family car, I suddenly had access to amazing things like back issues (YES!) and early indie comics like STAR REACH and HOT STUFF. Fantasy Castle in Tarzana, American Comic Book Company in Studio City, Cherokee Bookstore and other magnificent Paper Palaces in Hollywood — I spent countless hours of my precious late teens and early twenties in these places, digging through long-boxes and teetering stacks of old magazines, and loving every dusty second of it.
I’d been collecting comics for almost a year, and had already bought a few of Marvel’s B/W mags but until I saw a copy of EERIE 59 on the magazine rack at Food King, I’d never even HEARD of the Warren magazines. And when I saw that Back Issue page with tiny thumbnails of all the previous issues, I was gob-smacked! How could such a wonderful thing have been in existence all those years without my knowing about it? And wait — there was also a CREEPY magazine? And VAMPIRELLA too ??? The fact that they were hard to come by “in the wild” just added to their appeal.
I became a Conan fan because of the comics, and really wanted to read the original stories. Unfortunately, the paperbacks were out of print at the time, and tied up in litigation, so I had to settle for crap knock-offs like Thongor and Kyrik, Warlock/Warrior. In ‘75, some genius at Zebra Books realized there was a hunger for REH material and started releasing cheap paperback reprints of Donald Grant collections — THE SOWERS OF THE THUNDER, TIGERS OF THE SEA, LOST VALLEY OF ISKANDER, etc — with gorgeous Jeff Jones wraparound covers, illustrated by guys like Krenkel and Kaluta, the magical words “Robert E. Howard, creator of CONAN” emblazoned across the top. O my brothers, it was like stumbling upon an oasis in the Sahara! I bought and devoured every one of those books, and kept my love of All Things REH alive until the Conan books finally became available again in late ‘77 (from TWO separate publishers!).
I was kinda/sorta into Lovecraft as a young teen, had a few of the Ballantine editions with the weird-ass Holmes covers. That whole conceit of Rare Books of Forbidden Knowledge is a big part of the allure, and his books themselves were pretty rare and fringe-y, which of course added to their mystique (Cthulhu plushies were decades away). I remember reading an enthusiastic review by Gahan Wilson of Brian Lumley’s Lovecraftian collection THE CALLER OF THE BLACK, and thinking it sounded SUPER-cool. Man, the title alone conjured up shadowy images of terrifying extra-dimensional wonders! It was on my mental Book Search List for decades but I never came across it in all my years of haunting used bookstores. The individual stories all showed up in later Lumley collections, but it just wasn’t the same. I wanted to — no, NEEDED to — get my hands on that damned book!
(I finally did find and buy a reasonably affordable copy of it at SDCC, about ten years ago. Was it anti-climactic? Well....)
There is something to be said for delayed gratification, for NOT having the world at your finger-tips. I think it definitely helped me learn to appreciate the value of things.
Do I love having instantaneous access to practically every pop song ever recorded, and innumerable clips of movies and tv shows, and scans of comics and complete pulp magazines, and hi-res images of everything from historic photographs to classic illustrations (not to mention gazillions of pix and gifs of unclad Czech and Russian beauties)? You bet your ass I do! But I wouldn’t trade my formative years as they were for ANYTHING.
- b.t.
Red - I appreciate your sympathies towards leveling the playing field in the US of A. In that regard, I certainly hope post-corona is better than corona or pre-corona.
Thanks for the interesting comments - they echo my own opinions. I love the internet (and blogs like BiTBA of course) but I'm glad the internet didn't exist when I was a kid. My family had little enough money as it was without all the added expense of laptops, tablets and phones - and I've heard about the horrible cyber-bullying that children endure nowadays. I also think that reading comics and books was far healthier than the pass-times of modern kids who are never off their phones and computer games.
As for changes post-pandemic - so far the only change I've made is paying for my groceries with my debit card. I've always preferred to pay for goods in shops by using cash but during the pandemic my local supermarket has asked customers to pay by card if possible. I don't know why I was so averse to paying by card because I already used my card to pay utility bills over the phone and to pay for e-books from Google's Play store. I will still use cash (and I have £180 in my wallet which needs spending) but I will use my card in shops much more often from now on. And as for wider societal changes - BP (British Petroleum) has just announced it won't even bother developing new oil fields because they believe we should move to a greener future and the UK's National Grid (which provides this country's electricity supply) announced it had gone two whole months without using fossil fuels to generate electricity so maybe green energy is really coming. According to surveys, the British public wants a kinder, more inclusive society post-Covid and the death of George Floyd is having ramifications here too - the government has announced an inquiry into inequality, the statues of slave-traders are being taken down and just this morning Lloyds Bank and the Green King pub chain apologised for their links to slavery in the past. Whether society will really get kinder and more tolerant post-Covid is impossible to say and I'm a bit cynical but we'll see...
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