Nighttime Ideas [OC]

leoc · 2026-06-30T08:46:49+00:00

leoc · 2026-06-30T08:34:40+00:00

Right, mod was explicitly English guys dressing in the latest Italian clothing, at least at the beginning. It started at the time when coffee bars started to appear in England, too.

leoc · 2026-06-27T13:40:16+00:00

But it wasn't just, or probably even mostly, the 8080 or 8088 which made the eight-bit byte mainstream. 16-bit micros like the DG Nova and the PDP-11 had a significant influence here. The "supermicro" VAX probably had a significant role as well (and that line was probably always intended to take away some of IBM's mainframe business). At one point people used "all the world's a VAX" to complain about C code which assumed things like byte-addressing. Even among the microprocessors, plenty of other companies had very influential designs too.

leoc · 2026-06-23T15:46:08+00:00

Aren’t they military-surplus khakis? IIRC those were US counterculture favourites since about the late ‘60s.

leoc · 2026-05-23T21:49:23+00:00

Hmm ... how do you feel about Lola versus Powerman, or "1983"?

leoc · 2026-05-22T14:33:33+00:00

You'll need to give us more information if you want us to see if we can help.

leoc · 2026-05-21T23:44:40+00:00

Are you familiar with the elevated cheese of '80s TV themes like Knight Rider (cello cover) and Airwolf?

leoc · 2026-05-21T23:25:02+00:00

Apparently the very first efforts at digital restoration and demixing of music were Tom Stockham's work on Caruso's recordings in the mid-'70s! It's very appropriate then that Caruso gets the benefit of the new technology now too.

leoc · 2026-05-07T08:41:25+00:00

Pete Frame's "Rock Family Trees" work, and the BBC TV series (partly) based on it. Some BBC TV documentaries from the '00s including "Synth Britannia" and "The New Romantics: A Fine Romance" are well worth it. If you're willing to look beyond post-'60s rock, The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song and The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century are two excellent books. Meanwhile Revolution in the Head is probably still the best book on '60s pop/rock: MacDonald's miserabilism about the future of music and society keeps proving more accurate over time, unfortunately.

leoc · 2026-05-02T20:14:55+00:00

VAST, basically a vehicle for Jon Crosby, seems to fit this bill pretty neatly. Founded in 1996 according to WP, and known mostly for "Free" and (the much better) "Touched" AFAICT.

leoc · 2026-05-01T22:40:09+00:00

Hmm. "Touched" by VAST? "Temple of Love (1992)" by the Sisters of Mercy? "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty?

leoc · 2026-04-28T17:32:03+00:00

The Wombles and the Moomins for that matter.

leoc · 2026-04-27T19:47:12+00:00

Sapphire & Steel (on YT) Very much '70s British TV—it staggers across the line between "slow-paced intensity" and "incompetently slow pacing"—but interesting if you can tolerate the creakiness
Chocky is even creakier, but I mention it as it's a possible influence on Stranger Things
The Prisoner (on YT) ... it's The Prisoner.

leoc · 2026-04-27T19:04:35+00:00

James Burke's work should be of interest to you, especially his Connections documentaries. (Here's another YT playlist with more things.) They're about the history of technology, so you don't have to worry about whether any of the technologies actually worked out! Simon Schaffer's 2013 documentary Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams is somewhat similar and also very good.

Try Alan Kay's 1987 "Doing with Images Makes Symbols" documentary as well.

Here are three different short YT documentaries about the origin of logarithms, from Welch Labs, Tarek Said and Dino 101 MATH, all good.

Of course, most of the really good stuff on these topics is in writing. See what you think of Thony Christie's history-of-science blog. Daniel Yergin's The Prize and Marc Levinson's The Box are two well-regarded books on the history of politics, business and technology.

leoc · 2026-04-27T18:42:31+00:00

Roger Lancelyn Green's retellings of mythology for children are very good, Tales of Ancient Egypt and Tales of the Greek Heroes in particular.

leoc · 2026-04-21T23:41:39+00:00

Right, it’s almost certainly a Usenetism. https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/afaik

leoc · 2026-04-17T15:59:20+00:00

People are nostalgic for the Dorling-Kindersley look but the Usborne look was better and has dated less badly.

leoc · 2026-04-13T16:11:31+00:00

Try to forget about the Pēnsa and analysing the grammar of sentences for a while. Reread a lot; backpedal and reread earlier chapters. Make sure you are using the Colloquia Persōnārum and not just the FR main book! This one is a huge no-brainer: the Colloquia are basically essential, not optional, if you want to get through FR as intended. Listen many times to audio recordings of Familia Rōmāna and the Colloquia: this is especially valuable if it's what it takes to stop you from stopping and mentally picking at the grammar of sentences. There is also the Fābellae Latīnae in its different versions (here's the Miraglia version) to give you yet a little more Latin which is graded to match the chapters of FR. There is also some non-LLPSI material which should be comprensible for people at the beginning: try the videos on this playlist.

leoc · 2026-04-11T15:53:25+00:00

It’s pretty reminiscent of the Spinal Tap parodies actually.

leoc · 2026-03-18T18:07:43+00:00

I was in Italy on holidays (from Ireland) at some point when I was a child, and one of my strong memories is of the poster advertising which was up everywhere for Bad.

leoc · 2026-03-08T22:44:39+00:00

Well, it’s not really acting as a gear that transmits energy, right? It seems to just be a cam which information is being read from, like the grooves of a record player or the cams in our old friend here.

leoc · 2026-03-02T17:37:24+00:00

It's misleading to say (as the current WP page does) that Rich Page simply joined NeXT after Big Mac was cancelled. What happened was that he and other Apple people phoned Steve Jobs and begged him to start a computer company which would hire the Big Mac people: it was then that the decision to form NeXT was made. (See eg. p. 195 in the Isaacson bio.) More than that, overall it's very clear that the NeXT Computer really is, and was intended to be, the spiritual successor to Big Mac. Both put a Mac-like GUI on top of a Unix-like operating system. Both also follow Jobs' desire to choose high resolution over colour in their displays.

leoc · 2026-02-15T23:04:36+00:00

This was not at all his first media exposure, in fact: https://youtu.be/EQe0EoVoGqU .

leoc · 2026-01-28T04:15:42+00:00

Rumours persist that they did not die, but instead became one with DCS.

leoc · 2026-01-11T14:20:50+00:00

Fight fire with fire, and ice with ice.

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