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OMNI Magazine Remembered
An anonymous reader noted that Slate is doing a bit of a retrospective on OMNI. If you're anything like me, reading it was a treat. At home I suffered through Popular Mechanics, but OMNI was what I wished I had. There's many interesting things in the article, like the fact that OMNI is the place where William Gibson first coined the term "Cyberspace."
I probably shouldn't reply to your post but here I go way off topic. I grew up as kid during the Vietnam war. I had friends with older brothers that had been to Vietnam and some that did not come back. When I was in college I was very anti-war and anti-military and never considered it for a split second. As a matter of fact your comment sounds like something I would have said back then if someone mentioned the idea.
After finishing my 3rd year of college I was thousands of dollars in dept from tuition and going nowhere. Friends that had graduated where taking jobs as school teachers and making no money. This was in 1981 and believe me the economy sucked and there were no decent jobs. I had a friend in about my same situation and he talked me into looking into the AF. I ended up going in and it was a great experience. I was in four years and it was total peacetime. No action going on anywhere that I was aware of.
The main reason I got out was that the air force eliminated the flight simulator technician job and it became a civilian contract position. My post is not recruiting anyone for that job because it no longer exists in the air force as far as I know.
No, it died because they replaced Ben Bova (An actual SciFi writer) with Kathy Keeton (Who was some kind of penthouse writer) then it got all about frilly style and such crap.
Later that year, I was at a trade show in Dallas. His other publication, Penthouse was present as well as his competitor - Playboy.
The contrast between the two companies could not have been more different. The Playboy booth was marginally tasteful and people were laughing and enjoying themselves with the pretty 'girls-next-door' - OK, 'fantasy-girls-next-door'.
The Penthouse booth was full of wary, pouting sluts who paced from side-to-side as they were beeing leered at by the mostly male passers-by. It looked more like a zoo enclosure than a booth.
Omni was somewhat similar in that it wrote in a style that was condescending and often trite. Here or there, I enjoyed an article, but most of it was so fanciful as to be disengenuous.
In short, I don't miss it.
*** Don't be dull.***