f03a744
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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
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earth
humour
unfashionable
watches
primitive
cosmology
galaxy
digital
perspective
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Douglas Adams |
bfadd82
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You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.
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digital
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Neil Gaiman |
de1c914
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"You're innocent until proven guilty," Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones... but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be... maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. "We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed." The 1960's and 1970's were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend's house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn't exist... she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn't fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought... she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles... she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other... the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now. Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light."
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earth
grief
loss
death
convenient
old-school
reporter
taxi
retro
cape-breton
nova-scotia
stuck
moving
digital
medications
leaving-home
environment
canada
cars
stop
crying
gone
misery
trapped
lonely
sad
crazy
insane
dying
mental-illness
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
4440d30
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"Yeah, you're right about having entire rooms full of film and photos... in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage... I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides... I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that's happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs," Alecto responded. "People say that a time machine can't be invented, but they've already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world's first time machines... The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I've been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to."
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memories
industrial
polaroid
steel-mill
kodak
coal-mine
darkroom
kodachrome
cape-breton
super-8
nova-scotia
photograph
smog
photo
digital
coal
pollution
train
capture
film
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
97e3315
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"I guess if there's one thing I can say about the 21st century, it's that the 21st century is all flash and no substance... everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones... it's sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? ...What's most annoying is that nobody cares, they've just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it... none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, "you're all a bunch of sheep!" and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen... they're all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they've got these days... it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again."
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photography
future
books
bleak
cell-phones
celluloid
depressingly-honest
super-8
camera
digital
paper
doom
apocalypse
book
film
scary
poison
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Rebecca McNutt |
efd305b
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Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on... places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills... a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.
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photography
earth
television
future
past
love
cook-stove
glow
laundry
traditional
nikon
kodak
kodachrome
cell-phone
farm
pie
massachusetts
grim
country
digital
missing
nostalgic
small-town
film
peace
texting
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Rebecca McNutt |
181fc05
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"We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not "we might have to eat the dog" poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor... poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They'd saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera... I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then... this mall doesn't even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it's depressing..."
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poverty
future
past
cardboard
coins
washing-machine
instamatic
kodak
cape-breton
nova-scotia
mcdonald-s
camera
digital
birthday
mall
canada
nostalgic
shopping
film
poor
insurance
wishes
dog
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
cd15dac
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Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.
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photography
history
magic
nature
human
future
compassion
cellulod
hd
kodak
instant
robot
camera
photo
digital
art
film
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
893be34
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"...I'm afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important... it's almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they're robots and forget altogether that they're real, living people... but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that's why I'm afraid for the world," Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried. "So am I... but I'll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they'll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards," Alecto explained. "I'm sure that they'll be able to realize how wrong it all is... even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it."
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earth
grief
human
next-generation
cell-phone
environmental
nova-scotia
robots
digital
apocalypse
canada
dystopian
gone
scary
hopeless
horror
lost
technology
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Rebecca McNutt |
28cb9ec
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"Why is it that if you say you don't enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren't going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as "loathing" it?
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reading
e-reading
e-books
digital
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
5dc8a7b
|
"Every day it's something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they'll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples' minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck," Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. "Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone."
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led-lights
microchips
retro
nanotechnology
telephone
digital
obsolete
sinister
minds
film
technology
mental-illness
memory
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
b482ddf
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It's good netiquette to look for every opportunity to compliment others online. NetworkEtiquette.net
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digital
facebook
netiquette-rules
rules-for-netiquette
social-networking
social-media
online
manners
social-network
etiquette
internet
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David Chiles |
bf81d56
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Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn't care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn't just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life's best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.
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photography
integrity
future
future-shock
home-movies
kodak
projector
retro
super-8
vintage
popcorn
digital
lonliness
movies
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
cff3ccd
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Solution - A method of fixing a problem or situation. Solution is a positive Netiquette Word. NetworkEtiquette.net
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words
good
positive-words
digital
netiquette-rule
internet-etiquette
netiquette
netiquette-rules
fix
online
solution
word
nice
internet
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David Chiles |
f7898e9
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Traditional values are not gone. They are good netiquette. NetworkEtiquette.net
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traditional-values
digital
web
internet-etiquette
mobile
netiquette
netiquette-rules
rules-for-netiquette
social-media
online
manners
etiquette
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David Chiles |
d39ed44
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"Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?" Mandy questioned sadly. "All these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers... Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now... I've only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?" "C'est la vie," said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield."
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change
life
cell-phone
environmental
windshield
cape-breton
nova-scotia
organic
yoga
digital
tower
street
drive
car
modernity
technology
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |