• blazeknave@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    We started Chronicles of Narnia at bedtime last night. The first line is that it takes place when the reader’s grandfather was a child. I flipped to the copyright page and did some math. Found myself having to do a lot of prefacing with the little one. “Okay, so there used to be like no electricity at all anywhere ever. Not that long ago. Even though everything you see is electronic…”

    • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      My daughter likes the old Looney Tunes cartoons. But there are a lot of things mentioned or shown in those cartoons that don’t exist anymore and it’s been fun having to explain what certain things are. There was a one cartoon where my daughter asked why there would be a knob on a car’s dash that said “choke”. I have a very old car that has a carburetor (long story) so thankfully I could show her, but even that old bucket of bolts has an automatic choke.

      Another cartoon had a sort of proto-Elmer Fudd that was taking pictures of wildlife, and I had to explain what all this equipment was he had with him. He had a camera that used a squeeze bulb for the shutter and had a hood to cover the operator.

      For me, I think it’s interesting that in the original Star Trek, there were no screens with text on them. There were screens, but they showed video or images instead of text. That’s because back when ol’ Bill Shatner was on the camera putting commas in places they don’t belong, there was no such thing as a computer screen with text. You entered data into a computer with a teletype, and it gave your answers back on a printout.