you didnt miss much

jumpingjacktrash:

3liza:

i revolt secretly every time i see an article or post about how we’re all addicted to our screens and never go outside and have no human contact etc etc. 

listen, this is what i wanted. 

i saw star trek, and i wanted to walk around with small flat tech that tells me everything i want to know. i never wanted to talk on a phone, even when there wasn’t an alternative. i didnt want to memorize phone numbers for each of my friends; i was terrible at it anyway. how many fucking times did i go to a public library when i was 10, and the book i needed to answer the question i’d been asking for a week was checked out, or lost, or damaged, or getting rejacketed or, and this was the worst, the library had never heard of it and never owned a copy.

do you have any idea how many of those unanswered questions went into cold storage in my jumbled memory until the internet finally answered them or let me order that book or showed me a dozen other paths in the woods to follow and get even better answers? 

i’m old enough to remember what it was like before we had this, and it was steaming garbage. it was impossible to put a photo of yourself on the internet without a consumer grade camera, film of the right type, access to a photo lab, and $10 to get the roll developed, most of which would be unusable or blinking or sneezing or ugly or blurry, and then the final insult, you had to scan the dirty, smudgy, badly exposed thing into a computer and then, jesus christ, where would you even host it? do you remember how expensive it was just to get some storage space that would display pictures to other people? i do.

this isnt a “kids these days” post, either. its a post for every newspaper cartoonist who’s made fun of a twenty year old for taking a selfie. that middle aged cartoonist spent the 90s doing exactly what we all did in the 90s: worked our asses off trying to make up for the lack of simple contact books, free cameras, free hosting, accessible image editing, inexpensive and tailored music, and internet access that didnt charge by the minute.

it’s not anythig like a utopia but sometimes its such a god damn relief

THIS THIS THIS