Great article on the history of the arcade and its demise. I didn’t realize how far it had fallen. There is an arcade here in Portland — actually a chain of them — called Wunderland Games that has been around forever. And there is a thriving arcade on the coast in Seaside, which is a little tourist town. I did drive by the house I grew up in and noticed the one we used to go to when I was a kid was gone.
Honestly, I wasn’t much of a gamer. I never liked losing money — didn’t have much to begin with. Dumping coins into the slot never really appealed to me. Given that, history does appeal to me and I learned a lot from this The Verge feature article. Enjoy!
I’m done being serious for the week so thought I’d share some additional posts. In this week’s What If?, Randall Munroe discusses the possibility of flying a Cessna airplane above various Solar System bodies. These articles are usually pretty funny as they tackle some of extremely off-the-wall questions. My favorite line, though, is near the bottom, in response to flying a plane on Titan:
If humans put on artificial wings to fly, we might become Titan versions of the Icarus story—our wings could freeze, fall apart, and send us tumbling to our deaths. But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
In my early 20s I walked into a pawn shop and bought my first camera. It was a Canon SLR with two lenses and a bag for a couple hundred bucks. I loaded it with film and started shooting. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but, on occasion, took a really nice shot.
After a few years of getting non-repeatable results I decided to up my game and took a class at the local community college. I had an incredible teacher. We ended up becoming friends and until he moved east we’d take pictures together. By that time I’d updated to a newer Canon SLR, learned to use a tripod, learned what f-stops were, learned the importance of 18% grey, and started shooting Velvia and Sensia slide film. The colors were incredible and my pictures kept getting better.
Then the digital revolution happened and the first DSLRs became reasonably priced. I bought one. I shot photos off and on after that, never really feeling the same way about it. Eventually I stopped using my SLR — it sits in a bag in the closet. Instead my daughter’s lives have been captured with point-and-shoot or an iPhone. Every once in a while I think of getting back into photography but frankly I never really liked digital photography and, even if I could get past the part of doing more work in front of the computer than behind the lens, I don’t have the time. I’m now in the process of reviewing all these old pictures, negatives and slides, ready to digitize the entire lot.
As you may know, slide film (maybe all film) is pretty much dead and gone. Fuji discontinued my favorite Velvia and Sensia film years ago. Kodak, whose demise is well documented, did the same with the historic Kodachrome film.
And that leads me to photographer Steve McCurry, who took what is probably the most iconic photo in National Geographic history. The last roll of Kodachrome went to him. Not only did he shoot the roll, he also recorded a half hour video on the process. After all, what do you take with the last 36 frames of the most iconic film in history? Watch the video here to find out:
I’ve been writing a lot on this blog the past year and based on the number of visitors, a lot of people enjoy my writing. I love writing and sharing my insights and knowledge with others. It’s no good locked solely in my head.
But the reality is writing every week day is taxing. It’s extremely hard to come up with topics every single day, write well and coherently and always spell and use correct grammar. Most of the time my process is pretty simple. I write my posts and re-read them at least once. Then I read them again as soon as I get the post in my RSS feed. Each time I inevitably find something to fix.
As you probably can sense by now, I’m pretty anal retentive. I hated this when I was young but have found that it is a benefit for what I do now. One of my pet peeves is poor spelling and grammar. Hey, I’m not perfect. Nor is my ego tied up in it.
So I ask, if you see something I spelled incorrectly or used the wrong word or need to re-write something grammatically, please tell me. I won’t take offense.
The question as I see it: how do you live within legal bounds if your God-given talent is, well, illegal? Fundamentally, that’s the question asked in this excellent New Yorker article on pickpocket artist Apollo Robbins. The start of this one is amazing:
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.
“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
Elia Insider 