"A new vinyl record sounds wonderful", yeah, aside from the dust from the envelope, jacket and processing.
The best darn thing about seeing "Clones" on a digital screen was NO gaps, NO missing frames, NO broken film, NO mis-tracked film, NO dust, NO scratches, etc.
You obviously don't have a kid. Chemistry sets are alive and well, although probably don't include gunpowder-making instructions. Electronics wire 'em up sets are as near as your closest ratio shack and as you mentioned, there's Lego, Konnex, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Zoob, and oodles more. Also consider train sets from the wooden [Brio] type all the way through very big boys with their steam engines.
Such things are out there, and are easy to find via a specialty catalog or at a good toy store [NOT Toys'R'Us or FAO Schwartz].
As another person mentioned, as a culture we're being sold on the latest and "greatest" new [licensed!] thing, regardless of its merits. Rather than running and re-running Warner Brothers cartoons, we end up with New! and Improved! drenn splattered across the kids' advertising channels.
We have a kajillion opportunities to watch "Miracle on 34th Street" every year because someone forgot to copyright it, and it gathers viewers, so it's highly profitable to sell ad time during its broadcast.
Consider all of the card-based games sold for children. [Ignore PokeMon and all of the other collectible card games such as Magic The Gathering!] There are a finite set of games:
1. Get all the cards (training for life in our aquisitive society) 2. Get rid of all of your cards (not very popular anymore) 3. Use the cards as a distributed randomizing agent for attaining a goal, with strategy involved (Mille Bournes, for example)
The kid's games take the first two types and build a theme around them, usually Educational such as Math or Patterns. Once you have one of each type, you end up seeing that the rest are ways of selling card artwork or getting odd card shapes.
Rolling back to our Licensed Property theme, each Hot New Thing (PokeMon, Harry Potter, Disney's latest Blockbuster) ends up spewing out fully licensed copies of old "favorite" games. What a waste. "Oh thanks. Another copy of Monopoly. Joy!"
Ah, "once it [catalogued] my mp3 drive" - you can control what you give it. If you had kept your PD mp3's in a separate place and not intermixed them with your personal copies of licensed property, there wouldn't have been a problem.
Actually, Blair started scribbling everything by hand -- he was being harrased by the same mad dog, as well as a number of others. When I saw Blair going through this so slowly and painfully, I said that I could write a program to do it and delivered one in short order.
Blair's funeral service was something else. All of his tormenters standing up and saying that they really loved the guy. Made me want to commit acts of violence, it did, but his family was there and they deserved to be comforted, even by hypocrites.
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"A new vinyl record sounds wonderful", yeah, aside from the dust from the envelope, jacket and processing.
The best darn thing about seeing "Clones" on a digital screen was NO gaps, NO missing frames, NO broken film, NO mis-tracked film, NO dust, NO scratches, etc.
More power to Geo. Lucas!
You obviously don't have a kid. Chemistry sets are alive and well, although probably don't include gunpowder-making instructions. Electronics wire 'em up sets are as near as your closest ratio shack and as you mentioned, there's Lego, Konnex, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Zoob, and oodles more. Also consider train sets from the wooden [Brio] type all the way through very big boys with their steam engines.
Such things are out there, and are easy to find via a specialty catalog or at a good toy store [NOT Toys'R'Us or FAO Schwartz].
As another person mentioned, as a culture we're being sold on the latest and "greatest" new [licensed!] thing, regardless of its merits. Rather than running and re-running Warner Brothers cartoons, we end up with New! and Improved! drenn splattered across the kids' advertising channels.
We have a kajillion opportunities to watch "Miracle on 34th Street" every year because someone forgot to copyright it, and it gathers viewers, so it's highly profitable to sell ad time during its broadcast.
Consider all of the card-based games sold for children. [Ignore PokeMon and all of the other collectible card games such as Magic The Gathering!] There are a finite set of games:
1. Get all the cards (training for life in our aquisitive society)
2. Get rid of all of your cards (not very popular anymore)
3. Use the cards as a distributed randomizing agent for attaining a goal, with strategy involved (Mille Bournes, for example)
The kid's games take the first two types and build a theme around them, usually Educational such as Math or Patterns. Once you have one of each type, you end up seeing that the rest are ways of selling card artwork or getting odd card shapes.
Rolling back to our Licensed Property theme, each Hot New Thing (PokeMon, Harry Potter, Disney's latest Blockbuster) ends up spewing out fully licensed copies of old "favorite" games. What a waste. "Oh thanks. Another copy of Monopoly. Joy!"
Ah, "once it [catalogued] my mp3 drive" - you can control what you give it. If you had kept your PD mp3's in a separate place and not intermixed them with your personal copies of licensed property, there wouldn't have been a problem.
Yeesh.
Blair's funeral service was something else. All of his tormenters standing up and saying that they really loved the guy. Made me want to commit acts of violence, it did, but his family was there and they deserved to be comforted, even by hypocrites.