Sunday, August 28, 2022
               
               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?"
               
               The answer, to me, is clear.
               
               
               -Prokyonid