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Too good not to share

robert952

Brilliant
I asked my son if he had seen the newspaper.

He told me newspapers were obsolete and handed me his iPad.

That fly never had a chance.

Source: American Legion Magazine (Sept or Oct issue, can't recall which one I read it in. I always try to give credit where credit is due.)
 

carmen indorato

Extraordinary
Funny!
In a world of forced obsolescence we sometimes forget where we come from and how to use the basics.
When I got into digital I worked in a facility that catered to different clients especially in the visual” communications area.Lne day the owner of a small design firm upstairs came down to me in a breathless huff and begged me for a non photo blue pencil.
I just looked at her briefly with a sarcastic grin (I found out later of course) and without actually answering! I pointed to my workstation.
She blushed and huffed and said their computers were down and a project came in that needed immediate attention and no one, not one of her 8 designers had a non photo blue pencil she could use for a quick and dirty camera ready layout. In fact half of the younger of the lot did not even know what that was!
I nodded sympathetically and looking at her as seriously as possible I pulled out a non-photo blue pencil and holding it in front of her smiling!just asked her why SHE din’t Have at least one herself.
Mumbling something I just did not make out she thanked me declared. E a life saver and ran out of my facility. Of course we became friends but just to say how our culture somquicky learns to depend on newer things forgetting about how older things can also do the job and when faced with a situation such as yours or mine flounder.
 
D

Deleted member 325

Guest
And here I am still preferring to scribble in spiral bound notebooks and leatherbound sketchbooks or on Bristol-board pads when my arthritis is manageable. Though I have switched from No.2 pencils to refillable mechanical pencils in the last 10 years, so progress is catching up to me.
 

robert952

Brilliant
Thanks for sharing Carmen.

I thought it a great example of how people overlook the simple things that still work well today. My newspaper delivered my daily information, served to swat flies, and lined the bottom of my parakeet cage, or was wrapped around a fish I caught and carried home. Try that with an iPad! And talk about reuse and recycle!

I don't know if changes can be categorized as forced obsolescence - though some of that exists. It is more along the line of what you say about things people don't know. Many today fail to understand the evolution of technology. Jason Dorsey (researcher of today's generation gap) pointed out in one of his videos (TED Talks and YouTube), millennials are not technology savvy. They are technology dependent.

People don't understand, using your blue pencil example, how the technology works. (You have any rubylith or amberlith in your desk? A 'snotty Oscar'? )

(I don't know how common that last reference might be. It is a 1/2 inch thick, 2 inch square of a material that cleaned up excess rubber cement when you were done doing REAL cut and paste work. When you roll up rubber cement it looks sort of like ... well, I think you can take it from there.)

They don't realize that simple pencil and real masks cut using rubylith evolved into chromakey technology used today in Photoshop, video, movies and even PowerPoint when you set a transparent color. And it seems taken for granted that chromakey was always around. (To be fair, the concept behind chromakey is old, but it was also very manual processing.)

Your story reminded me of something that happened quite a few years ago. Also shows how people get wrapped around using technology for specific tasks when other software can do the job.

A co-worker was cussing at Photoshop. He also had PowerPoint open. I asked him what the problem was. He explained what he wanted done on an image he wanted to use in PPT. He accepted my offer to assist.

I closed PS, inserted his image into a PPT slide; cropped, resized, recolored and added a gradient box then put his text box over top. Took about a minute. He was shocked how easy it was and that he really didn't need to use PS.

I walked off using an old movie reference (in a bad Spanish accent) 'We don't need no stinkin' phot-o-shop!' (He knows I am not a big fan of PS. I prefer GIMP and PaintShop Pro.)

He responded "I know that movie: "Blazing Saddles!" I told him "Nope...actually a 1948 movie... Google it."

I don't know if he ever found it out.
 

robert952

Brilliant
And here I am still preferring to scribble in spiral bound notebooks and leatherbound sketchbooks or on Bristol-board pads when my arthritis is manageable. Though I have switched from No.2 pencils to refillable mechanical pencils in the last 10 years, so progress is catching up to me.

Take it a step at a time. Wait until you discover erasable ink!
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
A friend and I went down to SanDiego and caught the Maxfield Parrish show which was at the Art Museum in Balboa Park a few years ago. There was an extensive range of his works (and he was *very* prolific) over the course of his career.

One of his early commercial pieces, done B/W for print in a magazine I was amused to see he had use a forerunner of Zipatone in. It couldn't have been the self-adhesive stuff that I remember, because the glue used in that stuff would have severely discolored by now, but it was clearly a pre-printed regular dot percentage screen used for shading one of the areas.
 

Terre

Renowned
Around 25 or so years ago I was in a mall in a town nearby and a teenage girl wanted to place a call from the payphone nearby. It was about the last rotary phone I ever saw in such a place and the girl got frustrated very quickly trying to dial it. She stomped off with her friends grumbling about finding "a real phone".
 

robert952

Brilliant
Around 25 or so years ago I was in a mall in a town nearby and a teenage girl wanted to place a call from the payphone nearby. It was about the last rotary phone I ever saw in such a place and the girl got frustrated very quickly trying to dial it. She stomped off with her friends grumbling about finding "a real phone".
ROFLMAO!
 

Terre

Renowned
Which reminds me... My husband has a laugh-at-himself-story from his teenage years in the late 70s. He was visiting a friend and needed to make a call and got pointed to their phone. A very nice rotary dialed candlestick style one. He stood there wondering which part you talked into before his friend showed him.
 

Terre

Renowned
Speaking of someone not being as tech savvy as they thought, I knew a guy many years ago who wired a new radio straight into his car battery and then wondered why the battery kept dying on him.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
That reminds me of a story one of my professors told me many years ago, about a guy who kept complaining that a floppy disk he had didn't work, so when one of the tech guys from his company came to check it out, the guy took the floppy disk, which he had tacked up on the cork board on the wall in front of his desk, and gave it to the tech to examine.

The tech flipped it into the nearest waste basket, and told the guy to NEVER tack a floppy disk up on the cork board ever again. The guy said "Why, I put it up there so it would be easy to find?" The tech just turned and walked away, shaking his head as he went.
 

Willowisp

Adventurous
Rotary phones.. good grief.. I remember struggling with them even back when that was what a phone was! No wonder young'ons can't figure it out!
 

carmen indorato

Extraordinary
I went from painting in acrylic cell paint in reverse on big sheets of Mylar the same techniques used at Disney for background matt painting for their animations, to cutting detailed cut Pantone film poster creation and finally to Macromedia freehand vector art back in the early 90’s.
Though I loved using paint in reverse order on film and loved using an assortment of blades to carefully cut the film to paste it onto a double weight frosted Mylar, I took to that beautifully elegant vector app which I got from my brother in law on a single floppy disk. With all my experience in previous analog methods of creating similar “looking” art, it was simple for me to learn its methodology (not interface!). It was my first digital app I used on my first computer a 9,000 dollar Mac ll ci with a whopping 8 megs of ram!
To this day I hate Adobe for buying the app and killing it one version Later (v. 10) pretty much forcing a large Freehand following to turn to their “flagshit” app Illustrator. Never liked that and though I got pretty proficient in it along with Photoshop (which is great.....way better than PowerPoint mentioned here...... for image creation not only from an artist POV but also from a Service Bureau/Prepress tech POV) it just never warmed my digital imaging cockles! lol
I guess in part I was referring to stuff like that when I mentioned Forced Obsolescence or what software and hardware manufacturers excitedly refer to as progress!
I miss my Rapid-O-Graph pens, my loud toxic airbrush workings, the smell of paint and linseed oil or pine tars, slowly carefully and lovingly cutting rubilith and Pantone Color films and of course, most of all the acidy toxic stink of working for hours and hours in the photo darkroom.
Somehow sitting for hours on a stupid chair staring unblinking at a monitor burning your retinas to tears trying to meet a deadline and not having a SOLID PRINT of some sort to show for it all in the end just feels ALL WRONG to this old picture dawg! Almost glad my time is closer to its dusk than it’s dawn...would not have missed the pure pleasure of analog art creation all those years in my wake!!!!
 

carmen indorato

Extraordinary
Rotary phones.. good grief.. I remember struggling with them even back when that was what a phone was! No wonder young'ons can't figure it out!
wish I still had one. I can’t tell you how many damn push button phones I have had to replace because the buttons go bad. This old Stromberg/Carlson or Bell rotary phones were built like tanks. Also that tactile feel of turning that rotary mechanism and hearing that sound of it spinning, was cool!
 
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