Nostalgia and the Death of Monoculture

This morning as I was making a coffee, barely awake, something came floating out of the aether and lodged itself into my brain. I was awake less than five minutes and the universe had already bestowed on me my earworm for the day: the theme song from The Snorks

I haven’t thought about this show in probably 30 years or so? But I could remember every word of the theme song. As these shows go, it’s pretty niche. It’s not like it’s The Smurfs or something. But if I was to ask anyone of my vintage if they remembered The Snorks, I’d say most probably have some memory of it. We could get all nostalgic and be all “hey remember this?” “oh yeah, that was great! And remember this other thing? Good times.” It’s embedded deep and wide.

This got me thinking, what are my kids going to suddenly remember in 30 years? What theme songs are going to unexpectedly pop into their heads as they’re barefoot and bleary-eyed one morning? Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese is on hard rotation in my house, so probably that. Little Lunch maybe, but I don’t even know if that has a theme song.

This is just our house. But what are their friends going to remember? Now that we no longer have a monoculture and everything is so completely fragmented, what’s going to happen to communal nostalgia? In 30 years? Will it even be a thing? “Hey, remember Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese?” “Nah I never watched that” or “We didn’t have Netflix, we only had Prime”. What is going to happen without these common cultural touchstones?

A couple of things to bear in mind here.

The first is that there’s still a couple of franchises that still hint at a monoculture. Pokemon and Bluey are the big ones. It’s small but it’s still there. So maybe it’s not entirely dead yet.

The second and most important thing is: maybe this isn’t a bad thing? During the pandemic, I wrote about how nostalgia was helping me protect my peace as my anxiety was spiking pretty hard. I don’t think nostalgia is, by itself, a bad thing. But maybe, just maybe, there’s such a thing as too much nostalgia and that’s why my generation are, by and large, emotionally stunted adult babies? So perhaps we could achieve more with less of it?

At least the next generation won’t have to put up with jokes about leaving the immersion on.

Visual Sorting aka The Sound Of Sorting »

This is a great tool for learning about the different sorting algorithms but also if you bump the delay enough, you get the kinds of beeps and boops that make for some wonderful nerd ASMR.

Deanna Dikeman - Leaving and Waving »

27 years of photos of parents waving goodbye. This wrecked me. I’m ringing my mam right now.

Hugh Grant Answers the Proust Questionnaire | Vanity Fair »

Hugh Grant has fully entered his idgaf stage and I love it

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Drinking a pint of London Pride while munching Twiglets and reading about Colin Firth having a critical and box office catastrophe.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Scandiwife. Sociopathic children. Cunty cats.

Night Train Map 2024 - Back-on-Track »

Erik Braa’s train series on Calm, specifically his Nordland Night Train sleep story has been the thing I reach for whenever my anxiety spikes pretty hard at night. And I guess it’s influenced me enough that now I really want to go on a sleeper train around Europe. I realise this isn’t likely to happen any time soon, at least until my kids get a bit older. But this map makes for some wonderful daydreaming.

Nintendo Music

Nintendo have released a music app! Nintendo Music has songs from over 40 years of their games. And it goes deep, even including the weird incidental variations of songs. Are the 30 seconds from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s 2014 E3 trailer your favourite Zelda song? This app has you covered.

I mean, that’s great and all, but let’s be honest, all we really care about is the Wii Shop music. And it has a drop-down to let you loop this for 60 minutes.

Bliss.

And this gives me an excuse to link to the best version of the Wii Shop music, from Nirvana the Band the Show

cv-pandoc

A rare bit of self-promo! I’ve released some code I’ve been sitting on for a few years now. A way to make a PDF of your CV from YAML.

https://github.com/johnke/cv-pandoc

Some background!

I’m one of those sickos who actually likes YAML. As a format for structured data, it’s actually kind of readable and human-editable. I’m also one of those sickos who quite likes LATEX. It’s a beast to edit but I love that it’s at the exact intersection of word processing and direct programming.

The last time I was job-hunting, I was maintaining my CV in LATEX. But after a while, I realised that my CV is mostly structured data. It’s a list of sections, sub-sections, keys and values. Perfect for YAML, right? So for funsies, I rewrote my whole CV so I’d get the best of YAML and the best of LATEX.

And that’s what cv-pandoc is. I don’t expect it will be of any use to anyone but myself, except as a cautionary tale.

Lucasfilm EGA adventures appreciation - superrune »

For olds like me, you might remember playing Lucasfilm adventure games back on EGA displays back before they got uprezzed to glorious VGA. This is a collection of comparison shots between the 16-colour EGA and the 256-colour VGA versions of Loom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade so you can appreciate the amount of work that went into the more limited display.

3D Workers Island »

An excellent bit of creepypasta about a screensaver and told through screenshots of forums.

I love that horror has apparently left VHS and is now in its Windows 95 phase.

Shrek ASMR | (Full-Length Movie Remake) - YouTube

ASMR isn’t really my thing but the amount of work that must have gone into this is really staggering.