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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."
The Alien Chicks with the glossy lips were hot!
But yeah, loved that magazine and especially the short stories. Not very reliable science stuff but overall a very optimistic and stylish mag that back then was a nice counterpoint to Heavy Metal which was less rooted in reality.
But both had Hot Alien Chicks! :)
OMNI had the coolest illustrators of the day - about the only one of my longstanding favorites that I don't recall ever seeing
in the mag was Frank Frazetta.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It was more on an entertainment magazine than a science magazine really. I always prefered to get my Sci Fi straight up via publications like Analog, but I found Omni to be entertaining often enough in my youth. It really was more Sci Fi than a true science mag though.
"Why pizza burns the roof of the mouth" articles that ran on the last page. 2 or 3, IIRC, arguing over whether it was the Melted Mozzarella Layer (MML) or Tomato Sauce Layer (TSL) that caused the burning.
Best Slashdot Co
It lived with a solid core of futurism. Futurism is kind of dead now, now that we're using phones to surf the web and cops are using sonic weapons against crowds. The future's here and Omni guessed a lot of it right in the 70's and 80's.
Only if Letters to Penthouse could be this accurate. BRB. Pizza delivery girl is here.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
and global warming will mean no more shoveling of snow.
Tell that to my driveway!
Oh man I used to love this mag, I had long forgotten about it. I subscribed for several years. I was in college from '78-'81 and that is that main period I remember reading. I read an article about the development of video games and how flight simulator technology was being applied. When I left college I went in the air force and became a flight simulator technician. I chose that job from the list based on reading about it in Omni.
Definitely the best decision I ever made. I found I had a knack for technology and working on/with computers. At my high school there were no computers, most people had never seen one. I never saw a computer in college except maybe in the administration building when they took my money. If I had not read that article and chosen a technology field in the AF I would probably be a burnt out school teacher.
I read it occasionally when I was a little kid. The combination of actual science along with fringe or outright pseudoscientific claims (alien visitations and hauntings seemed common choices) left a lasting impression on me as a kid. I ended up eventually adopting a sane, skeptical outlook but it took many years. I have to wonder how many people got lost in nonsense from reading OMNI at an impressionable age and never really recovered.
Anyone remember Mondo 2000? I bought & read issues of that, but looking back, it was just pure performance art garbage. I swear that magazine tried to worship anyone related to The WELL in every issue. Oooh! Circuit bending! Ooh! My life on a webcam! Boy did that get old.
Actually, there's a tech way to handle driveway snow. Google for "driveway snowmelt system". A heated driveway will take care of all that pesky snow, and help ensure global warming for the rest of the planet with the wasted energy. :)
Actually, Wikipedia says that automatic systems are fairly efficient, only running while snow is falling at your driveway.
I don't know how long they've been available, or how good they are. I don't live in snow country. Gimme a robot that'll clean up after a hurricane, and I'd be happy. Hmmm, the car is upside down in the neighbors yard, but his roof is in mine. Fair trade.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
OMNI rocked in all the ways that matter.
As mentioned, the sci-fi, the science, the palpable sensuality of it's envisioned future ... it was the death of OMNI which led me to seek solace in the emergent WIRED. For a time, it was a suitable heir.
And the death of WIRED (just try and argue that it ain't) has led me ... nowhere.
I'd gladly pay $36 a year for a worthy successor to either one.
See you space cowboy
I cut and pasted the top of the page here, go to the link to read it in all its glory.
http://www.deepscience.com/justsilly/fun006.html
Results of a contest for "theories" sponsored by Omni magazine.
Back -- Next
GRAND PRIZE WINNER:
When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet. And when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning inches above the ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago. [see below for further info on buttered cats - Ed.]
RUNNERS-UP:
#1 If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary works in Braille.
#2 Why Yawning Is Contagious: You yawn to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change outside your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so they must yawn to even it out.
#3 Communist China is technologically underdeveloped because they have no alphabet and therefore cannot use acronyms to communicate ideas at a faster rate.
#4 The earth may spin faster on its axis due to deforestation. Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases when the arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.
HONORABLE MENTION:
The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Omni died for one simple and oft overlooked reason - it stayed in stasis from the day of it's birth. Really, pick up practically any issue from the late 1980's and compare it to any issue from the early years - and it's exactly the same, stylistically, thematically, and in content. The world moved on and Omni didn't.
Hence, it's readership and ad revenue declined steadily across the 80's, leading to the now infamous 'ad-on-the-cover'. In the background, but increasingly visible in the contents, the editors frantically tried to update their material without actually changing their editorial philosophy. By the time it died, it was already a relic propped up only by the unwillingness of Guccione to either change the status quo or to disconnect the feeding tube.
You can melt snow in your driveway just by looking at. It may take a few months, 'tho
rewriting history since 2109
Careful, with attitudes like that, you may get deported to Cyberia.
rewriting history since 2109
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.***
Browsing Wired's old issues online, I see a number of other hyped stories. No name VCs making "power plays", sexy new markets that don't quite pan out, more no name VCs extolling the virtues of "dumbass" investors. There's the worry about what to do if things get too good in the decade that just passed.
The market will fluctuate daily, but by 2010, the Dow will soar past the 50,000 mark.
There's a lot more pie-in-the-sky predictions which fortunately have been thwarted by circumstance and incompetence.
One sees much the same in the other direction, it's not until more than a year after March, 2000 that one sees a title story that has the dotcom decline as a key part of the story (Andy Grove, then Chairman of the Board for Intel, the story discusses Intel's problems coming from the market and demand declines). There's still plenty of "power plays" and other VC games hyped throughout the issues.
OMNI magazine is alive and well in 2010. What's the matter with you people?
Here's proof. (Ignore the Apple IIgs thingy he hauled to the beach though..)
Clip from 2010: The Year We Make Contact
Has it ever crossed your mind that they might not be conmen, but in fact were as surprised by the bursting of the dot.com bubble as everyone else? Note that, if it was obvious, it would never have occurred to begin with. The fact that the bubble inflated to begin with is incontrovertible proof that it wasn't obviously a bubble. You seem to be promoting them as being either part of a conspiracy or of being both omniscient and dishonest (for not telling us the truth they supposedly knew when millions of other people did not), rather than simply wrong...
Didn't say Wired consisted of conmen (though they might have had more than a few). Just said that they hyped conmen. There's a difference. As for the activities of Worldcom and Enron (as well as a number of dotcoms that engaged in similar fantasy accounting), the magic line between serious business and fantasy might not be well marked, but at point they ended up clearly in scam territory. Incontrovertible proof that bubbles are bubbles? Both the dotcom and the more recent real estate bubbles were obvious to me well before their peak. The signs were there for those who chose to look. Stupid business decisions, exaggerated claims of profitability, complete insensitivity to risk, and of course, ridiculously hyped stories like those in Wired (stock market at 50k, baby!), and of course, the smart money staying away from the final burst (remember when Warren Buffet got out of the dotcoms or Bill Gates started moving his Microsoft stock over to a non-profit?).
As for the accusations of dishonesty? My impression is that there was quite a bit of it going on in Wired, but I can't prove anything. I'd rather just skip them altogether, than read them on the off chance they weren't being deceptive and were merely being wholly gullible. They're a failed, deceptive (whether intentionally or not) news source and nothing I've heard off and on over the years has changed my mind about them.
Back in the early 80s my mother developed angina, and was prescribed nitroglycerine tablets for it - you popped one under your tounge when you felt the onset of chest pains and it helped keep your coronary arteries open. Although they worked, as they were reactive rather than proactive, they weren't so useful if the chest pains and breathlessness were particularly debillitating. Then OMNI had a short piece about a new treatment from the US: a patch that contained the drug and slowly released it through the skin to stop the angina attacks happening in the first place. I showed this to my mum, who showed it her doctors and she became just the second woman in the whole UK to receive the treatment.
Thanks OMNI, I still miss you.