You are. Wanna watch Matlock?

lol ortho we had an old Royal like that when I grew up. I used to do papers on it for middle and early high school...

then I got a Trash-80 with some ancient wordprocessing software on it (wordstar?).

Yep. Same here. Royal typewriter. No "1". And I'm old too. I didn't have a computer until I was out of college for l0 YEARS!

I worked at a retail store once where an angry customer came in demanding a refund because his calculator didn't work. You can probably guess what his problem was. I explained to him that he'd bought a ten-key, showed him how to use it, and explained that they were very common in business because they worked like the adding machines they'd replaced. He didn't believe me.

I was flat-out amazed the other day to see actual typewriters (well, if you can call those plasticky damn things typewriters) on sale at Office Depot. I literally stopped and stared.

And I'm old enough (34) to remember bashing on a manual typewriter in high school. Yeesh.

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

holy grandmother of chimpanzee-molesting midgets loquacious!!!!! Best. Link. EVER!!!

you are my new best friend.

We're not older, we're just smarter.





Okay, fine, we're older.

God, I knew the answer to that question instantly. I guess I'm old too - I remember typing assignments for high school on one of those beasts. It didn't even have a $ key, but made up for it by having a £ instead.

We're older and smarter.

And more beautiful.

I was flat-out amazed the other day to see actual typewriters (well, if you can call those plasticky damn things typewriters) on sale at Office Depot.

Typewriters are good for physical imprinting stuff like metal self adhesive tags.

loquacious: You just made my day. That's a fantastic story.

loquacious, I love that story.

But am I the only person in the world who wants to stab himself in the eye with a fork until the pain of everything(2) goes away?

You?! I feel so damned old.

No, scrump, you're not the only one. The story was great, but I very nearly didn't bother reading it when I was the formatting.

scrump: Not me. I love that place. It was and is way ahead of its time - the hypertextuality in the hard links in the article text, the tables of soft links at the bottom, the various tools and 'nodelets' for drilling down and tangenting through the infospace. It's like, web 2.0 years before AJAX and CSS. Sure, it's not shiny, pastel, or pretty, but if you're logged in you can skin the pages. Mine looks a bit like an old green CRT terminal. (The "EKW theme" codes for it are on my homenode somewhere.)


Everyone else: Thank Igloowhite. He's a damn fine writer, and I've enjoyed many of his stories. Here's two more: Happy Birthday From Planet Motherfucker and The Fire Danger Today: Extreme.

Also: according to rumors E2 is the secret home of more than a few published/professional writers. You really don't know who you might be reading over there, which is ten kinds of awesome. I love that place. There's nothing like it anywhere on the web.

Quoting myself: E2 is the way the internet was supposed to be. E2 is a reference collection, a novel that writes itself, poetry that reads to itself, and the shiny toy that never grows dull. It is the potential to exceed the sum of its parts.

I knew the answer to the question right away too. My friend's coffeeshop in L.A. has an old Corona on the counter. And I'm itching to buy an Olympia again. They are indeed plasticky. I'm resigned.