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I've Seen It, It Is Murder
May. 11th, 2006 10:19 am"Man, Woman, Child, all are up against the Wall of Science!"
Matt Freeman asks:
Question for all of you that love the future: What will it be like?
I was wondering how to answer that until Berit's brand new iMac arrived by FedEx yesterday. We unpacked it, set it on a table, and stared in amazement. A hugely powerful computer -- she got the whole damn package, chopped and channeled and lowered and louvered with an eye towards the best quality graphics, audio and video -- contained in three pieces: 20" screen and backing, keyboard, and mouse. Berit said, in wonder, "We live in the Future!"
So the Future is beautiful, monolithic, efficient, streamlined, cool, powerful, terrifying, and mortality-awareness-inducing.
My great-grandma Veronica Josephine Gregory (ne Moreno) was born on January 1, 1900. Always easy to remember her birthday and age. I thought she was born in Italy and came here as a little girl but I was surprised to find out recently she was born here, and went back to Italy with her parents when she was 2 (she always called her hometown "Rose," but there are several towns/cities in Northern Italy that include "Rosa" in their name so I have no idea which one it is), and then came back to the USA several years later. She died in 1989. I have always wondered with awe at what she saw in her lifetime. I'm sure she didn't quite remember a world before man could fly, but she lived in it, and lived to see men walk on the moon, as well as everything else that changed, for better or worse, in the first 9/10ths of the 20th Century. I never thought that I could have anything comparable in my own lifetime, that things wouldn't, couldn't, change so quickly ever again. I'm beginning to revise that opinion.
Nothing so impresses me and at the same time unnerves me as the advances in computers I've seen. For god's sake, I remember having a manual typewriter and feeling like hot shit when I got my first electric (and when I got my IBM Selectric II with the moving ball? that was typing POWER!). I first started working on computers when I was 9, in 1977, writing programs in BASIC on terminals at my school in Greenwich, CT, which were connected by modem to a mainframe at a sister school in Riverdale, The Bronx. The modem, at that point, involved dialing up a number (for REAL, with a DIAL, on a ROTARY PHONE) waiting to hear the little tones on the other end, and then shoving the receiver into the rubber cups on the modem to hold it. It lost signal quite often.
(It has been my curse, it seems, to always have women in my life just enough years younger than me to tease me about it, say 6 or 8 years, which always gets me -- when I sat at the new iMac last night and basically went through the previous paragraph for Berit, again, she asked in wide-eyed wonder, "And then you went out and killed a mastodon?" Sweet girl. Lucky I love her enough to live with her forever . . .)
"I like the Future, I'm in it."
I miss the Old Future. I've always been into the new advances in technology -- enjoying each advance in home computing as it happened, as each friend one-upped each other with the newest system: Kendrick Wakeman had the TRS-80 (with the Radio Shack cassette deck for storage), Bryan Dunn had the Apple IIe, David Shusdock the Commodore 64, Robert Roper had something, I don't remember what, then Kendrick had the first IBM, then I wound up with the very first Macintosh in November, 1983 (we got it 2 months before release; my mom was doing some work for Apple). Now I have a computer in my home that keeps talking to us like its our damned friend or something at unexpected moments (whenever the thing would suddenly pipe up to welcome us to its system or whatever I kept muttering to Berit "the fucking thing's out to get us, I swear, it's HAL and it's gonna get us;" I was only partly joking).
But the Future more and more is looking like clean curved plastic and soft glows, earth tones and meditative screensavers, genetics and gases, cleanrooms. Logically, I'm sure that's for the best, but I miss the Future of chrome and neon, big levers and solenoids, steam and petroleum smells and candy-colored light-up buttons that you can FEEL activate something when you push them, rockets and steel and things that spark, scientists with crescent wrenches in oil-stained jumpsuits, wiping their sweaty brows as they stand back to consider their work.
I want my Personal Jet Pack. Berit wants the Climate-Proof Dome. It's the Future now, we were promised these things, dammit.
"I say 'live it or live with it'!"
Of course, it's ever this way. I just realized recently 3 of my 4 parents are/were older than rock 'n' roll music and that startled me (if you consider the first rock record to be "Rocket 88," that is, if you think it's "Gee" by The Crows or "Rock Around the Clock," then all of them lived in a pre-rock world, I think). So, whatever. Maybe it's just the disconnect between the fabulous advances that have been made that I never imagined in my little childhood SF-geek world versus all the horrible things that have stayed the same I thought we wouldn't have to worry about by now. A Future that has that amazing machine on a table in my living room shouldn't have half of the things I saw on the front of today's Times.
"Turn up the Flash Gordon noise and put more Science next to it!"
Matt Freeman asks:
Question for all of you that love the future: What will it be like?
I was wondering how to answer that until Berit's brand new iMac arrived by FedEx yesterday. We unpacked it, set it on a table, and stared in amazement. A hugely powerful computer -- she got the whole damn package, chopped and channeled and lowered and louvered with an eye towards the best quality graphics, audio and video -- contained in three pieces: 20" screen and backing, keyboard, and mouse. Berit said, in wonder, "We live in the Future!"
So the Future is beautiful, monolithic, efficient, streamlined, cool, powerful, terrifying, and mortality-awareness-inducing.
My great-grandma Veronica Josephine Gregory (ne Moreno) was born on January 1, 1900. Always easy to remember her birthday and age. I thought she was born in Italy and came here as a little girl but I was surprised to find out recently she was born here, and went back to Italy with her parents when she was 2 (she always called her hometown "Rose," but there are several towns/cities in Northern Italy that include "Rosa" in their name so I have no idea which one it is), and then came back to the USA several years later. She died in 1989. I have always wondered with awe at what she saw in her lifetime. I'm sure she didn't quite remember a world before man could fly, but she lived in it, and lived to see men walk on the moon, as well as everything else that changed, for better or worse, in the first 9/10ths of the 20th Century. I never thought that I could have anything comparable in my own lifetime, that things wouldn't, couldn't, change so quickly ever again. I'm beginning to revise that opinion.
Nothing so impresses me and at the same time unnerves me as the advances in computers I've seen. For god's sake, I remember having a manual typewriter and feeling like hot shit when I got my first electric (and when I got my IBM Selectric II with the moving ball? that was typing POWER!). I first started working on computers when I was 9, in 1977, writing programs in BASIC on terminals at my school in Greenwich, CT, which were connected by modem to a mainframe at a sister school in Riverdale, The Bronx. The modem, at that point, involved dialing up a number (for REAL, with a DIAL, on a ROTARY PHONE) waiting to hear the little tones on the other end, and then shoving the receiver into the rubber cups on the modem to hold it. It lost signal quite often.
(It has been my curse, it seems, to always have women in my life just enough years younger than me to tease me about it, say 6 or 8 years, which always gets me -- when I sat at the new iMac last night and basically went through the previous paragraph for Berit, again, she asked in wide-eyed wonder, "And then you went out and killed a mastodon?" Sweet girl. Lucky I love her enough to live with her forever . . .)
"I like the Future, I'm in it."
I miss the Old Future. I've always been into the new advances in technology -- enjoying each advance in home computing as it happened, as each friend one-upped each other with the newest system: Kendrick Wakeman had the TRS-80 (with the Radio Shack cassette deck for storage), Bryan Dunn had the Apple IIe, David Shusdock the Commodore 64, Robert Roper had something, I don't remember what, then Kendrick had the first IBM, then I wound up with the very first Macintosh in November, 1983 (we got it 2 months before release; my mom was doing some work for Apple). Now I have a computer in my home that keeps talking to us like its our damned friend or something at unexpected moments (whenever the thing would suddenly pipe up to welcome us to its system or whatever I kept muttering to Berit "the fucking thing's out to get us, I swear, it's HAL and it's gonna get us;" I was only partly joking).
But the Future more and more is looking like clean curved plastic and soft glows, earth tones and meditative screensavers, genetics and gases, cleanrooms. Logically, I'm sure that's for the best, but I miss the Future of chrome and neon, big levers and solenoids, steam and petroleum smells and candy-colored light-up buttons that you can FEEL activate something when you push them, rockets and steel and things that spark, scientists with crescent wrenches in oil-stained jumpsuits, wiping their sweaty brows as they stand back to consider their work.
I want my Personal Jet Pack. Berit wants the Climate-Proof Dome. It's the Future now, we were promised these things, dammit.
"I say 'live it or live with it'!"
Of course, it's ever this way. I just realized recently 3 of my 4 parents are/were older than rock 'n' roll music and that startled me (if you consider the first rock record to be "Rocket 88," that is, if you think it's "Gee" by The Crows or "Rock Around the Clock," then all of them lived in a pre-rock world, I think). So, whatever. Maybe it's just the disconnect between the fabulous advances that have been made that I never imagined in my little childhood SF-geek world versus all the horrible things that have stayed the same I thought we wouldn't have to worry about by now. A Future that has that amazing machine on a table in my living room shouldn't have half of the things I saw on the front of today's Times.
"Turn up the Flash Gordon noise and put more Science next to it!"
