Radiooooo: Discover the Musical Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Different Times & Places

in History, Music, Radio, Technology | April 13th, 2018

Radio has always been a fair­ly trans­portive medi­um.

Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, entire fam­i­lies clus­tered round the elec­tron­ic hearth to enjoy a vari­ety of enter­tain­ments, includ­ing live remote broad­casts from the glam­orous night­clubs and hotels where celebri­ty band­lead­ers like Count Basie and Duke Elling­ton held sway.

1950s teens’ tran­sis­tors took them to a head space less square than the white bread sub­urbs their par­ents inhab­it­ed.

Dur­ing the Viet­nam War, South Viet­namese sta­tions played home­grown ren­di­tions of the rock and soul sounds dom­i­nat­ing Amer­i­can air­waves.

The Radiooooo.com site (there’s also a ver­sion avail­able for the iPhone and Android) allows mod­ern lis­ten­ers to expe­ri­ence a bit of that mag­i­cal time trav­el­ing sen­sa­tion, via an inter­ac­tive map that allows you to tune in to spe­cif­ic coun­tries and decades.

The con­tent here is user-gen­er­at­ed. Reg­is­ter for a free account, and you too can begin shar­ing eccen­tric faves.

Find a user whose tastes mir­ror your own? Click their pro­file for a stat card of tracks they’ve favor­it­ed and uploaded, as well as any oth­er sundry details they may feel like shar­ing, such as coun­try of ori­gin and age.

There are fun awards to be earned here, with the most sought after pelts going to the first to upload a song to an emp­ty coun­try, or upload a track from 1910–1920. (Cameroon, 1940 … go!)

As with an actu­al radio, you are not select­ing the actu­al playlist, though you can nudge the nee­dle a bit by tog­gling to your desired mood—slow, fast and/or weird.

And you need not lim­it your­self to a sin­gle des­ti­na­tion. Embark on a strange musi­cal trip by using Radiooooo’s taxi func­tion to car­ry you to mul­ti­ple coun­tries and decades. (I closed my eyes and wound up shut­tling between Ukraine and Mau­ri­ta­nia in the 60s and 80s.)

Dot­ted around the map are island icons, where the ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion is sort­ed accord­ing to themes like Hawaii, Nev­er­land (“for chil­dren big and small”), and 8‑Bit video game music. Le Club, float­ing mid­way between Europe and North Amer­i­ca, con­tains brand new releas­es from con­tem­po­rary labels.

The Now Play­ing win­dow includes an option to buy, when pos­si­ble, as well as the artist’s name and album art­work. Share, like, get your groove on…

And stay tuned for Radiooooo’s lat­est baby, Le Globe, an inter­ac­tive 3‑D map of the world and a decade selec­tor dial mount­ed on a “beau­ti­ful con­nect­ed object.”

The bound­aries are extreme­ly per­me­able here.

Have a browse through Radiooooo’s Insta­gram feed for a feast of cov­er art or head to France for one of their in-per­son lis­ten­ing par­ties. (There’s one next week in the secret lis­ten­ing room of Paris’ Grand Hotel Amour.)

Read­ers, if your explo­rations unearth an excep­tion­al track, please share it in the com­ments, below.

Down­load the Radioooo app for Mac or Android here, or lis­ten on the web­site. (You may need to fool around with var­i­ous browsers to find the one that works best for you.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 1,500+ Gen­res of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insane­ly Thor­ough Inter­ac­tive Graph

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

Google’s Music Time­line: A Visu­al­iza­tion of 60 Years of Chang­ing Musi­cal Tastes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her radio dial is set to Roma­nia 1910 in antic­i­pa­tion of the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain , Mon­day, April 23 at the New York Soci­ety Library. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Young Steve Jobs Teaches a Class at MIT (1992)

in Apple, Technology | April 10th, 2018

Ask­ing whether there will ever be anoth­er Steve Jobs seems to me like ask­ing whether there’ll ever be anoth­er Muham­mad Ali. While there may be lit­tle com­par­i­son between their respec­tive domains, both unique indi­vid­u­als mas­tered their cho­sen pur­suits, fought like hell to keep their titles, and “thought dif­fer­ent” than every­one around them. Also Jobs, like Ali, didn’t hes­i­tate to speak his mind, as in the clip above, in which he declares Microsoft’s Win­dows “the worst devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment that’s ever been invent­ed.” It ain’t politic, but it’s maybe… kin­da true? I don’t know…

My opin­ions on the mat­ter aren’t worth much—I wouldn’t know the back­end of an oper­at­ing sys­tem from the back­end of a trac­tor-trail­er. But Jobs didn’t attain tech guru sta­tus just for the sleek­ness and sim­plic­i­ty of Apple’s designs, but for his keen insights into the refine­ment of con­sumer com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy and his abil­i­ty to con­vey them with the unpre­ten­tious direct­ness of a black turtle­neck and dad jeans. The clips here are of a young-ish Jobs teach­ing at MIT cir­ca 1992, when he was 37 and run­ning his com­pa­ny NeXT, found­ed in 1985 after he was orig­i­nal­ly forced out of Apple.

He stayed plen­ty busy dur­ing his Apple inter­reg­num, help­ing to launch a lit­tle com­put­er graph­ics divi­sion that would become Pixar and devel­op­ing the tech­nol­o­gy and designs that rev­o­lu­tion­ized Apple when it bought NeXT in 1997—and when Jobs retook his empire through pro­pri­etary ruth­less­ness.

Here, five years away from that fate­ful event, we see him explain­ing his phi­los­o­phy of inno­va­tion to stu­dents who may or may not have fore­seen the break­throughs to come. Just above, he describes how “you can use the con­cept of tech­nol­o­gy of win­dows open­ing, and then even­tu­al­ly clos­ing,” refer­ring not, this time, to Bill Gates’ hat­ed OS.

Rather, Jobs talks of a sit­u­a­tion in which “enough tech­nol­o­gy, usu­al­ly from fair­ly diverse places, comes togeth­er, and makes some­thing that’s a quan­tum leap for­ward pos­si­ble.” One of Jobs’ many leaps for­ward in con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy might rea­son­ably be summed up in one word: porta­bil­i­ty, as in, the abil­i­ty to car­ry an entire library of music or a cell phone/music player/personal com­put­er in your pock­et.  Just above, he dis­cuss­es “the ene­my of porta­bil­i­ty,” name­ly such mar­ket demands as pro­cess­ing speed, stor­age space, and high-speed net­work­ing. And in the clip below, he talks about a sub­ject near and dear to every tech exec­u­tive’s heart—poaching tal­ent from com­peti­tors such as, well, Microsoft.

The uni­form of turtle­neck tucked into jeans, the delib­er­ate pac­ing back and forth, the expres­sive hand ges­tures and gen­uine com­fort and con­fi­dence in front of a crowd: all of the man­ner­isms we remem­ber from those hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed launch events are there in a shag­gi­er form.

Through the var­i­ous appli­ca­tions of his tech­no­log­i­cal acu­men, Jobs remained always him­self. The “next Steve Jobs,” or rather those aspir­ing to his lev­el of rel­e­vance should take note—he did it by insist­ing on doing it his way.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 20 CDs Curat­ed by Steve Jobs and Placed on Pro­to­type iPods (2001)

Steve Jobs Mus­es on What’s Wrong with Amer­i­can Edu­ca­tion, 1995

Steve Jobs on the Rise of the Per­son­al Com­put­er: A Rare 1990 Inter­view

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Vending Machine Now Distributes Free Short Stories at Francis Ford Coppola’s Café Zoetrope

in Life, Literature, Technology, Travel | April 6th, 2018

I loved the idea of a vend­ing machine, a dis­pens­ing machine that doesn’t dis­pense pota­to chips or beer or cof­fee for mon­ey but gives you art. I espe­cial­ly liked the fact that you didn’t put mon­ey in. — Film­mak­er Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la

Thus­ly did film­mak­er Cop­po­la arrange for a free Short Edi­tion sto­ry vend­ing machine to be installed in Café Zoetrope, his San Fran­cis­co restau­rant.

The French-built machine is the per­fect com­pan­ion for soli­tary din­ers, freely dis­pens­ing tales on skin­ny, eco-friend­ly paper with the push of a but­ton. Read­ers have a choice over the type of story—romantic, fun­ny, scary—and the amount of time they’re will­ing to devote to it.

After which, they can per­haps begin the task of adapt­ing it into a fea­ture-length film script. Part of Coppola’s attrac­tion to the form is that short sto­ries, like movies, are intend­ed to be con­sumed in a sin­gle sit­ting.

Short Edi­tion, the Greno­ble-based start-up, has been fol­low­ing up on the public’s embrace of the Café Zoetrope machine by send­ing even more short sto­ry kiosks state­side.

Colum­bus Pub­lic Health just unveiled one near the children’s area at its immu­niza­tion clin­ic, pro­vid­ing Ohio kids and par­ents from most­ly dis­ad­van­taged back­grounds with access to free lit­er­a­ture while they wait.

Philadelphia’s Free Library won a grant to install four sto­ry dis­pensers, with more slat­ed for loca­tions in South Car­oli­na and Kansas.

Part of the allure lays in receiv­ing a tan­gi­ble object. You can recy­cle your sto­ry into a book­mark, leave it for some­one else to find, or—in Coppola’s words—save it for an “artis­tic lift” while “wait­ing for a bus, or mar­riage license, or lunch.”

A café patron described the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance of watch­ing her cousin read the sto­ry the Zoetrope machine picked out for her:

The scene seemed archa­ic: a woman frozen in con­cen­tra­tion, in the mid­dle of a buzzing crowd, read­ing from a line of print instead of scrolling through Insta­gram, as one might nor­mal­ly do while sit­ting solo at a bar. 

“When peo­ple ask [if] we have wifi for the kids,” Café Zoetrope’s gen­er­al man­ag­er told Lit­er­ary Hub, “We point to the machine and say, ‘No, but you have a story—you can read.’”

Those with­out access to a Short Edi­tion sto­ry vend­ing machine can get a feel for the expe­ri­ence dig­i­tal­ly on the company’s web­site.

Scroll down to the dice icon, spec­i­fy your pre­ferred tone and a read­ing time between 1 and 5 min­utes.

Or throw cau­tion to the wind by hit­ting the search but­ton sans spec­i­fi­ca­tion, as I did to become the 3232nd read­er of “Drowned,” a one-minute true crime sto­ry by Cléa Bar­reyre, trans­lat­ed from the French by Wendy Cross.

French speak­ers can also sub­mit their writ­ing. The vend­ing machines’ sto­ries are drawn from Short Edition’s online com­mu­ni­ty, a trove of some 100,000 short sto­ries by near­ly 10,000 authors. Reg­is­ter­ing for a free account will allow you to read sto­ries, after which you can tog­gle over to the French site to post your con­tent through the orange author space por­tal at the top right of the page. The FAQ and Google Trans­late should come in handy here. The edi­tors are cur­rent­ly review­ing sub­mis­sions of comics, poems, and micro fic­tion for the Sum­mer Grand Prix du Court, though again—only in French, for now. 

Short Edi­tion hopes to start con­sid­er­ing oth­er lan­guages for vend­ing machine con­tent inclu­sion soon, begin­ning with Eng­lish. For now, all sto­ries being dis­pensed have been trans­lat­ed from the orig­i­nal French by British lit­er­ary pro­fes­sion­als.

Bon courage!

via Lit­er­ary Hub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 19 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, April 23 for the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How to Use the Rotary Dial Phone: A Primer from 1927

in Technology | April 5th, 2018

Most every piece of tech­nol­o­gy, no mat­ter how sim­ple, comes with a user man­u­al of some sort. Even the seem­ing­ly straight­for­ward rotary dial phone.

Although Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell patent­ed the first tele­phone in 1876, the first rotary dial phones did­n’t make their way into Amer­i­can homes until 1919. Then came the oblig­a­tory tuto­r­i­al. Cre­at­ed by AT&T in 1927 and orig­i­nal­ly shown in the­atres in Fres­no, Cal­i­for­nia, the silent film above breaks down the process of dial­ing a call–from using a phone direc­to­ry and find­ing a num­ber, to pick­ing up the receiv­er and lis­ten­ing for that steady hum­ming sound called the “dial tone,” to turn­ing and releas­ing the rotary dial mul­ti­ple times, and so on. This primer would car­ry Amer­i­cans through 1963 when the first push-but­ton phones start­ed to pop up. That advent of the push-but­ton phone also came with a video, of course.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Voice of Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell for the First Time in a Cen­tu­ry

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

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Aldous Huxley Tells Mike Wallace What Will Destroy Democracy: Overpopulation, Drugs & Insidious Technology (1958)

in Politics, Technology, Television | April 4th, 2018

Over­pop­u­la­tion, manip­u­la­tive pol­i­tics, imbal­ances of soci­etal pow­er, addic­tive drugs, even more addic­tive tech­nolo­gies: these and oth­er devel­op­ments have pushed not just democ­ra­cy but civ­i­liza­tion itself to the brink. Or at least author Aldous Hux­ley saw it that way, and he told Amer­i­ca so when he appeared on The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view in 1958. (You can also read a tran­script here.) “There are a num­ber of imper­son­al forces which are push­ing in the direc­tion of less and less free­dom,” he told the new­ly famous news anchor, “and I also think that there are a num­ber of tech­no­log­i­cal devices which any­body who wish­es to use can use to accel­er­ate this process of going away from free­dom, of impos­ing con­trol.”

Hux­ley’s best-known nov­el Brave New World has remained rel­e­vant since its first pub­li­ca­tion in 1932. He appeared on Wal­lace’s show to pro­mote Brave New World Revis­it­ed (first pub­lished as Ene­mies of Free­dom), a col­lec­tion of essays on how much more rapid­ly than expect­ed the real world had come to resem­ble the dystopia he’d imag­ined a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ear­li­er.

Some of the rea­sons behind his grim pre­dic­tions now seem over­stat­ed — he points out that “in the under­de­vel­oped coun­tries actu­al­ly the stan­dard of liv­ing is at present falling,” though the reverse has now been true for quite some time — but oth­ers, from the van­tage of the 21st cen­tu­ry, sound almost too mild.

“We must­n’t be caught by sur­prise by our own advanc­ing tech­nol­o­gy,” Hux­ley says in that time before smart­phones, before the inter­net, before per­son­al com­put­ers, before even cable tele­vi­sion. We also must­n’t be caught by sur­prise by those who seek indef­i­nite pow­er over us: to do that requires “con­sent of the ruled,” some­thing acquirable by addic­tive sub­stances — both phar­ma­co­log­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal — as well as “new tech­niques of pro­pa­gan­da.” All of this has the effect of “bypass­ing the sort of ratio­nal side of man and appeal­ing to his sub­con­scious and his deep­er emo­tions, and his phys­i­ol­o­gy even, and so, mak­ing him actu­al­ly love his slav­ery.”

Wal­lace’s ques­tions bring Hux­ley to a ques­tion of his own: “What does a democ­ra­cy depend on? A democ­ra­cy depends on the indi­vid­ual vot­er mak­ing an intel­li­gent and ratio­nal choice for what he regards as his enlight­ened self-inter­est, in any giv­en cir­cum­stance.” But democ­ra­cy-debil­i­tat­ing com­mer­cial and polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da appeals “direct­ly to these uncon­scious forces below the sur­faces so that you are, in a way, mak­ing non­sense of the whole demo­c­ra­t­ic pro­ce­dure, which is based on con­scious choice on ratio­nal ground.” Hence the impor­tance of teach­ing peo­ple “to be on their guard against the sort of ver­bal boo­by traps into which they are always being led.” The skill has arguably only grown in impor­tance since, as has his final thought in the broad­cast: “I still believe in democ­ra­cy, if we can make the best of the cre­ative activ­i­ties of the peo­ple on top plus those of the peo­ple on the bot­tom, so much the bet­ter.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aldous Hux­ley Reads Dra­ma­tized Ver­sion of Brave New World

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

An Ani­mat­ed Aldous Hux­ley Iden­ti­fies the Dystopi­an Threats to Our Free­dom (1958)

Aldous Hux­ley Pre­dicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hidden Ancient Greek Medical Text Read for the First Time in a Thousand Years — with a Particle Accelerator

in Books, History, Physics, Stanford, Technology | April 3rd, 2018

Image by Far­rin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Com­mons

Long before human­i­ty had paper to write on, we had papyrus. Made of the pith of the wet­land plant Cype­r­us papyrus and first used in ancient Egypt, it made for quite a step up in terms of con­ve­nience from, say, the stone tablet. And not only could you write on it, you could rewrite on it. In that sense it was less the paper of its day than the first-gen­er­a­tion video tape: giv­en the expense of the stuff, it often made sense to erase the con­tent already writ­ten on a piece of papyrus in order to record some­thing more time­ly. But you could­n’t com­plete­ly oblit­er­ate the pre­vi­ous lay­ers of text, a fact that has long held out promise to schol­ars of ancient his­to­ry look­ing to expand their field of pri­ma­ry sources.

The decid­ed­ly non-ancient solu­tion: par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tors. Researchers at the Stan­ford Syn­chro­tron Radi­a­tion Light­source (SSRL) recent­ly used one to find the hid­den text in what’s now called the Syr­i­ac Galen Palimpsest. It con­tains, some­where deep in its pages, “On the Mix­tures and Pow­ers of Sim­ple Drugs,” an “impor­tant phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal text that would help edu­cate fel­low Greek-Roman doc­tors,” writes Aman­da Sol­l­i­day at the SLAC Nation­al Accel­er­a­tor Lab­o­ra­to­ry.

Orig­i­nal­ly com­posed by Galen of Perg­a­mon, “an influ­en­tial physi­cian and a philoso­pher of ear­ly West­ern med­i­cine,” the work made its way into the 6th-cen­tu­ry Islam­ic world through a trans­la­tion into a lan­guage between Greek and Ara­bic called Syr­i­ac.

Image by Far­rin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Com­mons

Alas, “despite the physician’s fame, the most com­plete sur­viv­ing ver­sion of the trans­lat­ed man­u­script was erased and writ­ten over with hymns in the 11th cen­tu­ry – a com­mon prac­tice at the time.” Palimpsest, the word coined to describe such texts writ­ten, erased, and writ­ten over on pre-paper mate­ri­als like papyrus and parch­ment, has long since had a place in the lex­i­con as a metaphor for any­thing long-his­to­ried, mul­ti-lay­ered, and ful­ly under­stand­able only with effort. The Stan­ford team’s effort involved a tech­nique called X‑ray flu­o­res­cence (XRF), whose rays “knock out elec­trons close to the nuclei of met­al atoms, and these holes are filled with out­er elec­trons result­ing in char­ac­ter­is­tic X‑ray flu­o­res­cence that can be picked up by a sen­si­tive detec­tor.”

Those rays “pen­e­trate through lay­ers of text and cal­ci­um, and the hid­den Galen text and the new­er reli­gious text flu­o­resce in slight­ly dif­fer­ent ways because their inks con­tain dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of met­als such as iron, zinc, mer­cury and cop­per.” Each of the leather-bound book’s 26 pages takes ten hours to scan, and the enor­mous amounts of new data col­lect­ed will pre­sum­ably occu­py a vari­ety of experts on the ancient world — on the Greek and Islam­ic civ­i­liza­tions, on their lan­guages, on their med­i­cine — for much longer there­after. But you do have to won­der: what kind of unimag­in­ably advanced tech­nol­o­gy will our descen­dants a mil­len­ni­um and a half years from now be using to read all of the stuff we thought we’d erased?

via SLAC

Relat­ed Con­tent:

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

Try the Old­est Known Recipe For Tooth­paste: From Ancient Egypt, Cir­ca the 4th Cen­tu­ry BC

Learn Ancient Greek in 64 Free Lessons: A Free Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Shazam for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Identify Plants, Animals & Other Denizens of the Natural World

in Biology, K-12, Photography, Science, Technology | March 30th, 2018

Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breath­less with the antic­i­pa­tion of catch­ing Poké­mon on your phone screen?

If so, you might enjoy bag­ging some of the Pokeverse’s real world coun­ter­parts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new pho­to-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion app. It does for the nat­ur­al world what Shaz­am does for music.

Aim your phone’s cam­era at a non­de­script leaf or the grasshop­per-ish-look­ing crea­ture who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the rel­e­vant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get bet­ter acquaint­ed.

Reg­is­tered users can pin their finds to their per­son­al col­lec­tions, pro­vid­ed the app’s recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­duces a match.

(Sev­er­al ear­ly adopters sug­gest it’s still a few house­plants shy of true func­tion­al­i­ty…)

Seek’s pro­tec­tive stance with regard to pri­va­cy set­tings is well suit­ed to junior spec­i­men col­lec­tors, as are the vir­tu­al badges with which it rewards ener­getic upload­ers.

While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is build­ing a pho­to library, com­posed in part of user sub­mis­sions.

(Your cat is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille…)

(Dit­to your Por­to­bel­lo Mush­room burg­er…)

Down­load Seek for free on iTunes or Google Play.

via Earth­er/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Play a Collection of Classic Handheld Video Games at the Internet Archive: Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Tron and MC Hammer

in Technology, Video Games | March 20th, 2018

Equipped with smart­phones that grow more pow­er­ful by the year, gamers on the go now have a seem­ing­ly unlim­it­ed vari­ety of play­ing options. A decade ago they relied on hand­held game con­soles with their thou­sands of avail­able game car­tridges and lat­er discs, whose reign began with Nin­ten­do’s intro­duc­tion of the orig­i­nal Game Boy (a device whose unwrap­ping on Christ­mas 1990 remains one of my most vivid child­hood mem­o­ries). But even before the Game Boy and its suc­ces­sors, there were stand­alone hand­held pro­to-video-games, “LCD, VFD and LED-based machines that sold, often cheap­ly, at toy stores and booths over the decades.”

Those words come from Jason Scott at the Inter­net Archive, where you can now play a range of those hand­held games again, emu­lat­ed right here in your brows­er. “They range from notably sim­plis­tic efforts to tru­ly com­pli­cat­ed, many-but­toned affairs that are tru­ly dif­fi­cult to learn, much less mas­ter,” Scott writes.

“They are, of course, enter­tain­ing in them­selves – these are attempts to put togeth­er inex­pen­sive ver­sions of video games of the time, or bring­ing new prop­er­ties whole­cloth into exis­tence.” They also “rep­re­sent the dif­fi­cul­ty ahead for many aspects of dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment, and as such are worth expe­ri­enc­ing and under­stand­ing for that rea­son alone.”

What kind of games came in this form? The Inter­net Archive’s cur­rent offer­ings include vague approx­i­ma­tions of 70s and 80s arcade hits like Pac-Man, Don­key Kong, and Q*Bert;  even vaguer approx­i­ma­tions of such major motion pic­tures of the day as Tron, Robo­cop 2 (as well as Robo­cop 3), and Apol­lo 13; and sports titles like World Cham­pi­onship Base­ball, NFL Foot­ball, and Blades of Steel. You’ll even find pop­u­lar odd­i­ties like Bandai’s Tam­agotchi, the orig­i­nal vir­tu­al pet, along with less pop­u­lar odd­i­ties like MC Ham­mer, a dual-direc­tion­al-padded sim­u­la­tion of a dance bat­tle with the auteur of “U Can’t Touch This.”

So as you play, spare a thought for the devel­op­ers of these hand­held games, not just because of the dire intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty they often had to work with, but the severe tech­no­log­i­cal restric­tions they invari­ably had to work under. “This sort of Her­culean effort to squeeze a major arcade machine into a hand­ful of cir­cuits and a beep­ing, boop­ing shell of what it once was is an ongo­ing sit­u­a­tion,” writes Scott. “Where once it was try­ing to make arcade machines work both on home con­soles like the 2600 and Cole­co­v­i­sion, so it was also the case of these plas­tic toy games. Work of this sort con­tin­ues, as mobile games take charge and devel­op­ers often work to bring huge immer­sive expe­ri­ences to where a phone hits all the same notes.” And the day will cer­tain­ly come when even the most impres­sive games we play now, hand­held or oth­er­wise, will seem just as hilar­i­ous­ly sim­plis­tic.

Enter the hand­held video col­lec­tion here. And find more clas­sic video games in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play “Space War!,” One of the Ear­li­est Video Games, on Your Com­put­er (1962)

Pong, 1969: A Mile­stone in Video Game His­to­ry

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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