The 21st Century... Bland Beyond Comparison...

[Franko]

The 21st century, just a tad over one decade in and it looks to become one of the most bland and unimaginative centuries on record since time began...

Why do I say this, well quite simply comparing it to the 20th century and many more before then hopefully the following will make it a bit more clear as to why I see this century as being bland and becoming more bland as time goes on...

While I could go on about many other centuries in past I'll stick to the one I know, was born in and grew up in to explain what's so wrong with this one...

I rolled off the production line back in 64 (stamped as faulty & reject) at a time when black & white TV's where still the norm in most peoples homes, radio stilled ruled and was still the most popular form of entertainment and news, computers... well back then most folk had never even heard of them let alone used them...

1970/71 we got our first colour telly, which despite only having 3 channels to choose from and started broadcasting about 9: am and went off the air at about midnight, it was amazing to see things in colour just like real life. Only trouble was my parents who found this even more fascinating insisted on having the colour turned up full so that everything was just a blur of colours (took nearly two years of me and my sisters gradually turning down the colour so they wouldn't notice)...

1975/76 Got my first ever digital watch, back then a good digital watch could display seconds as well as hours and minutes. Course they were red led watches that you had to press a button on just to see the time and shield them from sunlight to have any chance of seeing the time...

1977/78 First calculator, wow were these things amazing, batteries that almost lasted a full school day (but you weren't allowed to use them in maths  class) and best of all you could by turning them upside down spell things like "ESSO" or "BOOBS" with a little imagination...

1979/80 First "Pong" console, finally a use for the telly when there was nothing on. The most basic gfx ever (usually just black & white or if you rich and posh you got one of the "colour" ones that displayed in blue & white)...

1979/80 The thing that changed TV viewing totally and forever began to creep into peoples house... The Video Cassette Recorder (VCR), boy were these things huge (a small family of gypsies could easily convert one into a new caravan). These things were amazing, actually being able to the record the moving images on your telly and watch them back when you wanted, freedom at last...

 1980... The true start of this whole thing we call "Home computing" ok for the masses it really started with the ZX80 & ZX81 (but we wont mention those here) instead we'll start with the first computer that actually looked like a computer and had the first real keyboard... The Commodore VIC 20...

While my parents (and most friends of my age) didn't understand why I bought one or what I was going to do with it (neither did I if I'm honest), it soon became clear to me that home computers were here to stay and these things were the future as the possibilities for them was endless and limited by people imaginations...

So to cut all this short, basically in my lifetime we saw the introduction into the average home of the following (and a lot more besides)...

Colour TV, which of course was viewed with the colour turned up full till the novelty wore off...

Video Recorders, What an invention... actually capturing moving images from your telly and being able to watch them back whenever you wanted, course the first ones were so big you had to buy a special telly stand/cabinet to house them in  then keep an eye one them just in case a wandering family of gypsies moved into one of em and claimed squatters rights...

Walkmans (the cassette type), that used your batteries in about 4 hours (we didn't have rechargeables back then) and chewed your tapes on a regular basis

GhettoBlasters (with Twin Tape Decks), which ate more batteries than you could afford and chewed your tapes with double the efficiency...

Rubiks Cube, The most unusual and annoying puzzle ever, which could only be solved by removing the colour stickers and fixing them back on when no-one was looking...

CD Players, Wow no more scratched records, but somehow just wasn't the same as rushing to the record stores each weeks to buy the latest single from your favourite band (crap or not) just to try and get them to number one in the charts the following week...

Remote controls, Wired at first (nothing remote about them), followed by UltraSonic (which changed your neighbours TV channel & vice versa), which was then followed by InfraRed (at last they got it right)...

The SodaStream (fizzy drink maker), great idea fizzy drinks from tapwater, tasted like crap and always ended up in the loft never to be seen again...

So there you have it, just some of the things that suddenly appeared out of the blue and into the everyday lives of people around my age who never thought of or expected to see such things...

Don't suppose it's really just the 21st centuries fault as it all seemed to die around the late 80's and certainly the nineties. Music died and was replaced by manufactured talentless "boy bands" and "girl band" who couldn't play instruments let alone sing... :rolleyes:

Suddenly there was nothing new appearing that made you sit up and say "wow that's amazing" and for some bizarre reason people nowadays seem to get excited when they change the colour of a laptop case...

Kinda sad that there is nothing new anymore and certainly looks like nothing new is set to appear anytime again during my lifetime that is genuinely something you hadn't even though about and blew you away when it suddenly appeared...

For those who say but computers get more powerful and better all the time, that's not the point, all that's happening there are improvements and not something like when I was growing up and your average Joe in the street had never heard of a home computer or a VCR...

Guess folk who have grown up taking these things for granted have just become "users" and having never known what life was like before all these things came into being, well they don't have and probably never will know the true excitement from being around when all these wonderful gadgets suddenly became a part of our everyday lives...

So as the 21st century continues on it's ever downward spiral of being completely and utter bland and unimaginative, then age may be creeping up on me but I'm glad I was born when I was and grew up during a time when we actually saw new and amazing things invented and life actually still managed to surprise you...

[gunni]

SodaStream... awesome!!!

I blame the end of the cold war for it all, once the threat of everyone being wiped out by nuclear war at any given moment went out the window life slowly got duller. virtual reality turned into a damp squib and arcades died, playstation generation took over and what was once "computing studies" or even "computer science" in schools started its degeneration into "here's microsoft office and thats all you need to know about computers" or "ICT" as they call it which merely churns out drones for offices and callcentres.... bah darn kids! get off my lawn!
anyway yeah I agree, I've not been impressed by any tech so far this century - im still disgruntled that I dont have my home VirtualReality system, those hoverboards from back to the future have failed to appear and why... after all this time... people STILL can't believe it's not butter!

[Franko]

@ gunni

Gotta agree with you about the cold war, bring it back I say, things were much more lively back then when the yanks were paranoid about all things communist or even coloured red and Russia was a place I always wanted to visit simply because it was next to impossible to get into...

They never had "computer studies" or computer science" when I was at school mainly due to the fact that we didn't have computers anywhere in schools. We had electronic typewriters but you had to be a bit poncy and take "economic studies" to even get near one of them new fangled gadgets...

I'm afraid the 21st century is destined to be one of those periods in time where nothing ever happens and it get lost in annals of time much like the 2nd or 3rd centuries. You never hear anything about what happened in them two and it must've been so boring that nobody ever wrote a thing about them...

As for butter, blargh... I can't stand butter or margarine, it's the only thing on this planet guaranteed to physically make me puke, I could eat me dinner surrounded by jobbies or dung on a boiling hot day but give me a whiff of butter or margarine and I'll throw up uncontrollably all over anyone within a six foot radius like mount Vesuvius on a bad day...

PS: one of the things that's really, really sad about the 21st century is "Male Grooming", WTF... since when where men supposed to smell nicer than women and care about showing their feminine side, it aint natural I tell ya and should be ruddy outlawed, a world run by posers and soft gits fer gawds sake. Bring back wars (proper wars I mean not those pathetic little ones they have these days where we invade some third world country and pretend it was really tough and hard cos the locals were armed with rocks) that would sort them out, see if smelling good and looking clean matters when they enemy is about to garrotte you with a very sharp bayonet ... :eek:

[commodorejohn]

I blame commercialization. These days everything costs half a billion dollars to produce and has to be run by marketing (and marketing's marketing) (and ad nauseam) and retooled to be exactly like the last thing that made a ****-ton of money, and by the time all's said and done you're left with a lifeless little shrink-wrapped nugget of bland.

There's still good stuff being created, but it is (almost without exception) weird little independent projects, not mass-market products.

[Franko]

@ commodorejohn

It's not really commercialisation as that's been around for a long, long time (mainly kicked off in the Victorian days) it's more just like you say the crazy mentality that most folk have these days that nothing can be produced without it costing billions in research and all that crap...

You see it here on this very site posted over and over again by brain washed numpties who claim the Amiga could never make a comeback because it would cost all these billions just to develop it again... :rolleyes:

I've got no idea why folk think like that these days other than they have no imagination and are so brain washed by leading their bland monotonous existence that they cannot think for themselves and live their lives doing everything they are told just because someone in a grey suit somewhere tells them to do what the powers that be tell them...

There is absolutely no reason why anyone couldn't be the next Jay Miner or Clive Sinclair other than the fact that it seems most folk these days just exist and don't dare think outside the box anymore...

Still, like I say at least I lived through that exiting and innovative time and now I can smugly sit back and comment on the fact that bland things are and bland things will be as long as those I'm commenting about continue on their bland, boring, safe and wasteful little way through life...