Thursday 22 July 2010

TomorrowsYesterday

Hello once more, all is well I hope… this is the 28th episode of the Aldershot Woes, and it’s dead good.


Today is not only today, it is also tomorrow as I have decided that we pretty much live in the future… Some people have been living in the future for years, my dad for example has been in the future since about 1976, everything impresses him and scares him in equal measure, which as any fan of Sci-Fi will know is essentially what the future is all about, and once your there, you’ll know it. My father gazes in wonderment at his George Foreman grill, and a man who spent 59 years with out ever cooking a meal is now a home grill connoisseur, he boasts of its ability to all who will listen and he has upgraded four or five times (his current grill can cook a whole pig in 4 minutes flat). This simple 2 heated bits of metal technology knocks the socks off my old man, he has embraced it to his heart and he genuinely doesn’t know how he ever lived with out it. But some of today’s (and tomorrows) other technologies scare the shit out of him, you should see him use a PC for example, he does that single finger long armed type that old people do, where they look like the next key they hit could trigger some doomsday device. My old dad types an email with the same look in his eye as a military bomb disposal expert. He is also petrified of the internet and is sure that if you have 2 windows open at once Nigerien fraudsters can climb through the one you’re not looking at and nick the telly. Sat-Nav, which was forced upon him by his work, he has fallen in love with but if you asked him to play a song on an MP3 player or take a picture using a phone or buy a CD from Play.com he’d crumble under the pressure and run screaming like a man from the Twighlight Zone, whose realised he’s woken from a 20 year coma and all human life has been replaced by mechanoid android-o-bots.

He is in bewilderment of nearly everything, it either impresses the hell out of him or scares him shitless, and that is because he no longer understands what is going on, I don’t mean in a he’s lost his marbles kind of way, I mean because nothing is like how it was in terms of technology, he doesn't and never will understand the digital age! He understands cogs and cause and effect, but to my old man binary code sounds like some sort of Gay Club etiquette. For the last 30 odd years, music, film and all other contemporary medias and technological platforms are confusing and shit to my dad, he knows his time well and all else is the future. And the scary thing is… I am entering my own future with each techno filled day that passes…

Television, since I was a nipper I have been an addict. If I were to add up the amount of my life watching television, and were then to compare it to the amount of time I have spent doing anything worthwhile, I would probably get so depressed I’d want to jump in to a wood-chipper nuts first. But I am addicted, not in a fat middle aged woman watching every episode of Buffy kind of way, but in the sort if way that I can quite happily spend a day watching utter mind rot, only moving from the sofa for snacks and toilet breaks… I have always as long as I remember loved telly, its where I learned everything I know, which granted isn’t much but it did a far better job than my shitty comprehensive school did. But today in this scary future even my beloved TV has gone all tomorrows world on me and left me feeling like a complete Luddite. I can not pause live TV, I can’t rewind it, I can’t record one channel whilst watching another (not since the VCR packed in), I can’t see things On-demand, I can check football scores via the red button, but as soon as the BBCi screen appears, my typical cocky remote control slinging antics are washed away and I am there, long arm button pressing like my dad tying to find www.theinternet.com using Microsoft Word. I’m waiting for me to press the wrong button and consequentially getting arrested by the telly police for doing it wrong. The whole time wishing I could just switch it to the analogue and confidently go Ceefax>Push green for Sport>Page 316>Footy Results…. Yes (or no, I am an Aldershot fan)… But alas, TV has left me right in the lurch, and as for Hi-Def (or is just HD now?) I am just too scared to bother, because what’s the point, how clearly do I need to see the MOTD panel, plus I am a little scared that the detail on Noel Edmunds shirts on Deal or No Deal will make my eyes implode in Hi-def (HD?).

But its not just TV that’s left me looking like some sort of 90s throwback, now phones have done it as well, no one has a regular phone anymore, they have ultra sleek pocket PCs, which look like tiny marble coffee tables, and they have screens that tilt as you move them around, and they have apps? When did this happen, I see people drinking virtual pints, or swinging virtual light sabres. Apps, honestly when did this happen? I am still getting excited as I managed to get GhostTown by The Specials as my ring tone, mean while people next to me have an app that assimilates my dino-phone to their hyper-mobile-comu-infotainment-device and they extrapolate the data like a techno pocket vampire, so now they have GhostTown saved on there phone with detailed liner notes and 15 remixes… Cunts. When did I get so left in the dark? I was one of the first people I knew who had Snake 2. And I am petrified to get one as they look too awesome, and in order for me to learn how to use it I would have to spend a week feeling like a toddler with some mega blocks, and I am just not prepared to go through that.

And that is the crux of it, in my mind I got to the edge, I was up to date and modern and I knew what was what, and now I am far to stubborn to go back to being a novice, rather than be a student of today I prefer to be a scholar of yesterday. Want to set a timer on a VCR to record Re Dwarf whilst your on holiday, I’m your man. Want to know the quickest route to the bamboozle quiz on C4 teletext, give me a shout. Want to get top score on Snake 2, holla at me. Want to get swear words out of the type and talk program on an Amiga 500+, shout me out. Want to rewind live HD 3-D red buttoned hypervision then transfer it via USB 3.8 to an I-phone 7… you’d have a better chance speaking to my 16 month old daughter, we’d both dribble and poop ourselves trying to do it, but she’d get there far quicker than me…


So then that about wraps up today’s little Woe, I started writing it cos I was reading about this new military exo-skeleton which is being tested now by the US Army, and like all fans of Aliens the Exo-skeleton is something I really wanted to happen in my life… and that made me think, wow I’m in the future, and that exited me and scared me shitless all at once… Gulp.



You can’t follow me on Twitter as it has been replaced with new Twitter-HD, the same inane shit, but at a billion dpi resolution…



Woe.

12 comments:

  1. Provocatively penetrating that RBA. It reminds me too much of the dilemnas I'm facing but trying to ignore. Should I upgrade this or that, stick with the old, how much will I lose, how big will the window of incompetence be and for how long will it be open. Will there be a new and better and easier-to-use model along soon. Will I miss a call or an email or a text from that blonde with the big tits, maybe even a purchase order. Will my browser stop browsing. How to embrace the challenge of technoemotional conflict.

    As a wise old octupus once said "if you've got 4 feet in tomorrow and 4 feet in yesterday, you're shitting on today".

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  2. Haha, thats is put rather perfectly trotts my man... that certainly a wise old octopus...

    And thanks for reading and leaving words, i love words, there great.

    But as for technology, mate i am going to cease all updates and become a static anachronism of 2004...

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  3. Have I already read this or will I read it tomorrow?

    Or will I get my new cyborg to read it?

    Too many questions. Thankfully I have my new fangled question answering machine to help.

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  4. The future is yesterday, the past is tomorrow.

    What does that mean, well, nothing, it's absolute gibberish, but it sounds kinda cool in a techey comercial way and it makes about as much sense as I can make out of all these new fandangled gadgets.

    It sucks to find out you're not cool anymore and the techey's have triumphed and left you frolicing on the Beach of Ignorance knowing that in the near future you'll be taking a dip in the Sea of Obsilition.

    I owned a VCR with a clicky remote control (clapping hands worked too) goddamit, how can I not be hip? I had a pong(aka Grandstand console),an Atari and a ZX Spectrum (fuck you Sinclair for that piece of shit) and of course the creme de la cool a Sony Walkman. I had a mobile phone in the 80's, my customer number from Libertel/KPN was 00000055 ffs.

    Nowadays I have a smart phone, from those fruit company bastards, but that's no consolation if you're a techdummy. My girlfriend's daughter (9y.o.) can get it to do all kinds of absurd shit, I have trouble making a phone call with it, but I can tell you what the tempreture is in a village just outside Bangladesh.

    It's all going too fast, I need to take a lie down, before I go, GREAT blog maaaaannng! SNH5, Blam!

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  5. i will never own an i-phone because they are so cool i'll become one of those wankers who plays with it every 5 seconds

    but if i can get hold of one of those exo-skeletons i will so i can go on the rampage

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  6. SNH5 Hman... Your post is much better than my blog, haha...

    Cheers fro the words fellas, i am saving them all up for a book i am writing... its 500 pages of random blog comment banter... in stores by chrimbo!

    only 80 shopping days left!

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  7. Nice one RBA, DNB10

    I know what you mean about the smartphones. My father in law loves gadgets......well i say he does, what he actually loves is showing them off to people at his work....so he buys the latest expensive toy and then asks me to sort it out for him.

    An example is that he went to an O2 store to get the HTC Desire (i didnt have a fucking clue what that was....had to google it) and the shop assistant started showing him how it worked and my FIL said "does it make calls?"....cunt! So he wants the latest phone but pretends he just wants something simple.

    I prefer wanking to playing with an iphone and until that isnt the case then i wont buy one.

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  8. Scholsey, not even if it has a wank app?

    ----

    RBA, your too kind man, it's your blogs that inspire my comments, less then ayear ago I could hardly string together a coherant scentance..... now I can almost do two!

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  9. i lernt to read and rite on robbos blog

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  10. H, A wank app? Well i didnt think they bothered because the smug look on their faces implied it was sucking them off.

    Maybe i should buy the HTC Desire, only i would probably find out it was actually an iphone. It is hard to tell, but they say you should look out for the apple..........coat!

    ReplyDelete