I have finally managed to arrange my temporary office/lab
space in the living room in such a way as to be able to
comfortably use the Tandy 1000TX without sacrificing my ability
to use my desk as a desk. This is a good thing too, as I have
been going absolutely stir-crazy all summer without really being
able to mess around with any of my tinkering projects, either
with my electronics or in the garage with my mechanical and
woodworking projects. We are still in the process of getting the
old sun room (where my office/lab space used to be) ready to
do... whatever we end up doing with it, probably tearing it down
- I don't see a viable, affordable path to repairing it. All of
my things I kept back there are now in boxes and storage totes,
mostly in the garage. There are a few boxes left to move, and
then it is just the filing cabinets to move. One of the filing
cabinets, a short, wooden lateral cabinet I used for storing PC
components, is now serving as an 'L' for my desk, giving me the
workspace I was needing.
Yesterday, we made a rare trip to a department store - a
Kohl's location. As we wandered the store, I couldn't help but
keep thinking to myself how so many of the clothes reminded me of
things that were briefly popular or even already out-of-style
back when I was a kid. Shirts that looked like they were pulled
from the set of Magnum PI or The A-Team, jeans that seem to have
come from the punk era, and what appeared to be Member's Only
jackets. We normally shop thrift stores and discounters, so
seeing that the vintage styles I'm used to seeing in my closet
are apparently a thing right now was a bit surprising. It got me
to thinking a bit about my own sort of permanent nostalgia.
There is a huge scene nowadays for retro everything. Of
course there is the retro computer scene, I can provide plenty of
evidence for that myself with every keystroke I enter into this
ancient text editor running on a 286-powered computer produced by
a company that stopped making computers some 15 years before they
shuttered their stores nearly a decade ago. There has always been
the classic car scene - the only change there is what cars are
considered classic. The classic toy market that started to crop
up when I was young has only grown, and now there is a retro
video game market to go along with it, where a game I used to be
able to buy at a yardsale for a dollar is now valued at $70. Some
of this of course is just like the classic expression about
investing in real-estate - they aren't making it any more, and
that's why it is worth something.
Nostalgia has always been a part of the human condition, but
I feel like there is more to it than that now, though. Many of
the biggest television shows and movies from the last decade have
been period pieces. Corporate branding is more and more using old
logos in place of their modern versions. There is even a new
trend in home decor - the 'vintage' room. It seems to be
particularly popular among people of my generation. You set up a
room with furniture, wall and floor coverings and appliances that
were made decades ago or are designed to appear like they were. I
have one planned for my own home. Why is everyone so desperate to
pretend we live in the past?
I was reading some of nm03's entries earlier today, before I
started writing this, right after I had hooked the Tandy back up
to the modem emulator, as a way to make sure BananaCom was set up
correctly. After the entries about misery at work, deadly
heatwaves and record Covid numbers, there is one about this very
subject, nostalgia. To be honest, that entry is what inspired me
to make mine, specifically one line from that entry - "...who
will look back at the early 2020s with nostalgia?"
