I’ve seen such changes
How old do you need to be to understand this gag from 1978?
pseudohistorical linguistics
I can’t remember how much I knew of Elvish languages before The Silmarillion, with a glossary, appeared in 1978. Can you tell from the text of The Lord of the Rings (not counting the Appendices) that Quenya and Sindarin are related? Are any words explicitly given in both?
sic transiverunt webcomics
About a dozen years ago I made a page of links to my favorite webcomics. Looking at that list now, I find that twelve that are still going (though a few are very sporadic), ten have stopped but remain accessible through a system of tubes, and eight have vanished:
- Fluble by Christopher Mastrangelo
- Bobbins by John Allison
- When I Grow Up by Jeff Rowland
- JoBeth by BJ Hiorns and Joey Hetzel
- Shaw Island by Zach Stroum
- The New Adventures of Bobbin! by Joycelyn Yik
- Catharsis by Jen Boeke
- Everyone Drunk But Me by Laura Beth Brandt
Other favorites now missing include
- Malfunction Junction by Matt Milby
- As If! by Amy Hebberson
- Life on Forbez
- meh~! (mathematically enhanced hares) by wing mui
- Warp 9 to Hell
- Knowledge Is Power by Laura Chapple
- Yourmometer by Hobbes (Laura LeGault)
- Killer Robots from Space by Adam Greengard
- Don’t Forget to Validate Your Parking by Mike Le
- Cyberbooty by Tony B
- everything at Graphic Smash, Modern Tales, ComicSpace, Webcomics Nation, Girlamatic, Activate, and (in about 2021) Smackjeeves
Maybe when a favorite series stops updating for a year I ought to save the content for myself before it vanishes!
ringy-dingy
My new telephone has dozens of ringtones and I hate them all: Newagey lo-fi orchestral crap, mostly laden with snare drums for some reason.
My last phone played the sound of an old-fashioned mechanical bell; the one before that, a pizzicato passage from a Ravel string quartet; before that, the quick part of Pachelbel’s Canon – in frankly electronic timbres that did not pretend to be an orchestra.
I want a ringtone that says “a digital device seeks your attention,” not one that sounds like something overheard on a cheap radio belonging to someone with no taste.
were-worms?!
Watched The Battle of the Five Armies. How many ways would the author be appalled?
Puppy-love between a canonical Dwarf and a non-canonical Elf. Their pheromones cannot be compatible.
There’s a Laketowner named Percy, a family name from France. (The other Laketowners at least have Nordic names, consistent with the author’s usage for Men and Dwarves of that region.)
The Orcs sneak up on Erebor using tunnels bored by non-canonical sandworms “were-worms”. Etymology time, since etymology was very much Tolkien’s thing: the first element of werewolf does not mean anything like ‘magical’ or ‘demonic’; it means ‘man’ (cognate to virile). Do these monstrous worms turn into men at other phases of the moon?
adrift in a sea of time
In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), the narrator says or implies that the events happened many years ago; so I’ve been watching for details that date it. Oprah Winfrey, whose show premiered in 1986, is mentioned; I think that’s the terminus post quem. More than anything else I’ve been struck by names of cigarettes: Silva-Thin, Vantage, Kool. Maybe these seem dated to me because I’ve been less exposed to tobacco advertising since ~1981.
Awake how often?
The protagonist of the TV series Awake lives in two worlds: one in which his wife died in a car crash, and one in which their son died instead. As we see it, he spends a day in Hannah’s timeline and then a day in Rex’s, alternating.
But (in the four episodes I’ve seen so far) no one ever asks him where he goes on the other days. On the other hand, if he lives each calendar day twice in sequence, he ought to be able to use knowledge of events unrelated to his family to win the occasional bet, and I haven’t seen him do that.
So I choose to suppose that his awareness forks each morning, and rejoins when he sleeps, so that he always has two yesterdays, neither preceding the other.