“…and [turtles and other shelled animals] are, at the same time, the caravan and the caravaneer, the lodge and the lodger.” - Markus Kajo (a Finnish comedian).
Sorry, I don’t currently have the book at hand to have the exact citation but will probably edit this.
It’s one of those things that make me say “OK my parents MAY have a few of those in their garden. Gotta see them to be sure, maybe. But it was a thing in that ill defined era maybe, so, you know, maybe.”
I remember when one of our local publications asked their readers “what kind of old appliances you still have around at home that you use regularly?” and the article was flooded with photos of 1970s kitchen appliances. Well duh, of course those still work, if you take them out of the cupboard once a year to bake a cake or whatever.
Oh good. I was just thinking “Hmm, I haven’t tried Fortnite in a long while, maybe I should check it out again.” …Yeah. …No.
I want 1990s Internet back. Except for background MIDIs, which should be banned elsewhere but which should be made legally mandatory on music-related pages. Forcing record companies to share literal performance instructions for their music would annoy them gloriously.
Flash was a solution for a real problem that web creators were having at the time. Unfortunately, it was a stopgap solution that ended up being incredibly popular and nobody was concerned about building a smooth transition to a standardised way of doing things.
In the 1990s the web browsers didn’t really have any real interactive multimedia capabilities. Browser makers said “eh, that’s the plugin makers’ responsibility”, and so someone made a plugin all right, and the creators said “eh, that’s good enough”.
In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say that browser makers and the web standards folks should have just gone for the sort of stuff we now have in HTML5. But that’s because we nowadays see the standards as a good thing. This was taking place in the late 1990s, and the browser makers, Macromedia and the creators were not really all that concerned about standardisation and interoperability. Which, of course, ended up hurting everyone when it all collapsed on its own.
Things might have been different if Adobe had actually turned Flash into a genuine open format (like PDF, which is still very much a living and useful format despite the fact that you shouldn’t touch Adobe’s own PDF software with a ten foot pole) and it had become part of the landscape of web standards, but that’s for the alternate history buffs to debate.
My own weird fantasy worldbuilding thing:
Common people usually picture the vampires the usual way, as aristocracy living in seclusion in spooky fancy castles. But in actuality, most of them come from lower classes. Vampires had a whole little communist revolution because they had no civil rights (on the account of them being deceased), and set up their own little autonomous grand duchy. Vampires elsewhere get mildly tolerated as long as they behave themselves but still have to work crappy factory jobs… in the Night Shift. (title drop)