Accessing the Past
In this episode, we explore why some older media remain surprisingly accessible while other, much newer works become almost impossible to experience. We compare a 300-year-old piece of music that can still be played from notation with old computer games that no longer run because of lost code, outdated hardware, vanished servers or obsolete software. We discuss how digital media can be fragile precisely because it depends on layers of technology, compression and decoding, whereas older forms like printed music, books or physical records can sometimes survive in more direct and recoverable ways.
We then turn to a different kind of accessibility: whether we can still appreciate older works as their original audiences did. From silent films and early recordings to Trainspotting, Star Wars, strange 1970s cinema and old sci-fi television, we ask how much cultural context, nostalgia and changing technology shape our experience. We consider whether some art forms stop evolving or whether each generation simply mistakes its own moment for the endpoint. Finally, we share examples of older media we still enjoy, from Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy to cult sci-fi and ancient decorated stone spheres.
P.T.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game)
Difficulty of playing Black and White on the PC: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamesupport/comments/3glp00/black_white_the_first_game_on_windows_10/
Video game preservation efforts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_preservation
Appreciation or Nostalgia? https://from.ncl.ac.uk/nostalgia-in-retro-gaming
Bronze Age stone balls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. On this podcast, we look at a wide range of topics from an analytical viewpoint.
And today we're discussing accessing past media. Nick lead us in.
Speaker B:Right. So couple of recent experiences which I've realized give me similar but opposite reactions. Right. So I'll.
ant to say was from the early:Really fun, right.
Basically you have a little, maybe four or five little guys in each of them have different capabilities and you have these missions where you have to kind of infiltrate. It's set during World War II, so you got to kind of infiltrate a German base and, you know, blow stuff up.
Speaker A:It was computer based.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's a computer game, PC game called Commandos. And each of them can. Has different special skills.
Like one guy can set traps, another guy can poison people from behind, and you've got, you've got to get them to kind of work together to achieve your objective. I really enjoyed it back in the day. Anyway, I can't.
I can find places where you can download it, but it won't run, or if it does run, it runs in the wrong resolution or in a weird screen setup or the sound doesn't work. And it's basically too much of a pain in the ass to try and get this to work.
h is a piece by Cooperin from:Admittedly, I'm playing it on the piano and not the harpsichord, which is what it was written for. But despite the fact this is more than 300 years old, I can just play it.
There's the notation, I just play it and out it comes almost directly from the pen of Cooperanna himself.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker B:It's. It's extremely. It's also accessible, you know, cognitively in that the music itself seems very modern to me. It's not.
ent from music from, say, the:Why is it that I, you know, the Beatles sounds as fresh as a. As fresh as a daisy. Right. But music from only 20 years before that.
to, you know, a song from the: something happened in around:Black and white films cannot but feel old fashioned. Of course. Silent films, almost inaccessible.
I think you have to be a bit of a film buff to sit down and enjoy a silent film, you know, so bunch of different things, right. We've got PC games, very difficult to play, and they're only 20, 30 years old. We've got a piece of music from 300 years ago.
You can just get right into it. But there's a lot of things going on. There's issues about hardware and notation and encoding and all kinds of other stuff.
What is it that enables you to enjoy past media and what stops you enjoying it physically, cognitively or whatever?
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean, since you've asked that question, I'll answer it briefly. Go. I think one element of this is what feels like a frustrating and negative thing is maybe not.
And we could be talking, there might be elements here about cultural evolution and the fact that something is still exist, still accessible, and there's something quite pleasing about that could just mean that thing has stopped evolving culturally and potentially technologically. And so though we can access it and that's good, maybe it's. It speaks to something about that particular form which is. Well, it's just stopped.
It's died in a way.
Speaker B:Right, right.
Speaker A:Whereas stuff that is constantly. Or stuff that's less accessible, like the game that you mentioned. Hey, that's.
Maybe it just means it's living in what is a still thriving environment in which it's still evolving. And so maybe that is a good thing. Although it feels bad that we can't access it. But anyway, that's just like.
That's me just shooting from the hip classic Fraser. That's how I do it. Where do we want to go? We could sort of answer this in a more structured way.
Speaker B:Well, why don't I give you a few, a few more examples of lost computer games.
Speaker A:Go for it.
Speaker B:PT this annoys me actually because basically it was a teaser game designed to be a kind of playable trailer for a horror game sequel to I think Silent Hill. And so it's only about half an hour long, this game, and it involves walking around this increasingly weird and scary corridor.
Speaker A:When was this from?
Speaker B:I think it was 10, 15 years ago. It was a PlayStation game.
So I know I've never played it because it's never been available on the PC and it's now been removed from the PlayStation Store. So you can't even get hold of it.
If you've got a PlayStation and it turns out that you can, the only way you can play it is by buying a PlayStation which it was installed on. And they go for hundreds of pounds now because people want to play this game. But yeah, so there you go with withdrawn, no longer available.
te was huge. Game came out in:It had these kind of AI creatures in it. You could do all these exciting kind of open world where you were a sort of God. And it was massive. It was basically unplayable.
Now there is no way of getting it to play on modern machines, to say nothing of server dependent games like Star Wars Galaxies or Battlefield Heroes where the servers have been switched off. So you can't, you just can't play them anymore.
Speaker C:And then you have thousands and thousands of Flash based games.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, all of those.
Speaker A:What's Flash based mean? What's that?
Speaker C:So Flash.
Flash was a fairly early Internet technology for doing animation and interactive things like games that you could plonk on your website and just let people use. It did some things extremely well, but it was not fully adopted and looked after properly.
So it ended up being so full of holes and problems that most IT providers just prevented anyone from getting hot. So if you could not get Flash inside a corporate network, for example.
Speaker A:Yeah, this sounds familiar.
Speaker C:And eventually sort of died partly as a result of that.
It was also, I think it was highly proprietary and the company that kind of looked after it didn't want to keep it going and they didn't want to just open source it either.
Speaker A:Okay, so sorry, I slightly derailed us there.
Speaker B:No, no, that's.
puter game dating back to the: Speaker A:This sounds cool.
Speaker B:It does sound co. Original code. The source code has been lost, so it's had to been. It's been recovered.
Well, they built from sort of printouts of bits and stuff, so they've. They've put together what they think it was probably. But I mean, you know, that's not that it's like.
fact. Yeah, but it's from the:I mean, you know, for such a young medium, it's astounding to me that this is such an issue. But.
Speaker A:Yeah, okay, so this.
Speaker C:Well, I'd like to tell you why it's not astounding. I'd like to talk about what I was saying.
Speaker B:Yeah, do it.
Speaker C:So addressing the sort of technical accessibility side of the accessibility thing, distinct from what I think is a sort of appreciation accessibility. But yeah, it's software. It's got lots of dependencies in it that other media does not have.
So the score for your piece that you're learning is just a piece of paper. There's no other dependency on it. You know, it's just as long as you have a piece of paper with the symbols on it, you can pass that with your brain.
Not the same and the same with a book. As long as you can read the language, you can parse that media. Software is different, though.
Software's got lots of dependencies on the compatible hardware that you're running, the hardware that you're running on the operating system, other pieces of enabling software that are packaged with it. But also like your controller, did it come from a console that had some weird controller that had particular buttons and things on it?
But also crucially, who owns it? Is there some piece of DRM data rights management software in there that just no longer exists, that is no longer supported?
Console games often need to be played on a specific console because there's some chip on the console which unlocks the software, so you can't then emulate it on another machine. So there's loads of dependencies. I don't want to go too deep into this because I think it's not terribly interesting.
It's the sort of technical boring bit that makes it not work.
Speaker B:Okay, well, but there's also. It's not. The software is, if you like, is sort of how we choose to implement decoding the medium. But let's look at like an MP3 versus an LP.
Now you can. You can decode the information on LP with a needle and a yogurt pot. You know, you can. Because it's.
There's not much processing required to pull out the signal. You know, the actual thing you want, which is the sound file is physically represented in the. On an lp. Now, you know, you take a cd, it's.
Now it's a little bit further on. Right. It is like, I think a CD is still encoding a sound file, but the technology required to decode it is more complex. You can't just do that with.
With stuff you can, you can find at home. An MP3 is even more. I mean, quite apart from, let's say you can read the binary structure.
You then have to do things including Huffman decoding, reconstruction of frequency coefficients, performing some inverse transforms, rebuilding a time domain signal. It's a very long way away. And this isn't. In theory, you could do that by hand. Right.
Speaker A:You could.
Speaker B:If I presented you with the binary, which is a load of ones and zeros, in theory you could do all that by hand. So it's not so much even the software, it's actually the underlying algorithm. So pull out to reconstruct the sound wave is more complex itself.
So it's not that the software is, you know, obsolete or anything like that, but it's.
But it's actually just the way that it's been encoded is complex enough that it requires a lot of steps to pull out the thing that on an LP is just physically represented by bumps.
Speaker A:Yeah.
And I guess also I think what Peter was saying as well, so the necessary sort of corollary to that is the thing that can do all that is going to be the hardware that you need. Right. And then how quickly that. Which. And all the things that Peter listed that could be issues.
Speaker B:The pagery things.
Speaker A:All the Peter stuff. Yeah. Okay, so before you go, I don't know if you have more examples or somewhere else you wanted to go, but.
But also is it really what we're talking about? I forget how we framed the beginning of this episode, but accessing the past. Accessing past media. Right?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Is it actually just a question of the. Hey, it's how we access digital petri type stuff and everything else. And everything else. It's sort of fairly simple. You can access it.
It's just digital stuff, techy stuff. We can't. It's more difficult.
Speaker B:Well, but I mean, I think let's. Musical notation is a good one. Right. Because that as a technology is fairly recent, I want to say probably a thousand years old.
I Think the, the earliest kind of reconstructable pieces of music notation about a thousand years ago. Isn't it like summer is a coming in or something? Or maybe the DSE Rye or something is one of the earliest pieces of music.
But, but you know, that is contingent on us having the in inverted commas technology to decode a, you know, a piece of music notation which is not guarantee. I mean that's something which could be lost culturally.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:You know, but it's obviously robust. Like transferring the ability to read musical notation is obviously pretty robust. Like that's, that's, that gets passed on.
There are lots of ways that an individual can forget or you know, that, you know, we. There's probably lots of YouTube videos telling you about it, but if they all disappeared we'd still be able to do it somehow.
It's like it's locked into lots of other systems that guarantees that it gets passed on effectively.
So it doesn't feel like we're in a huge danger of losing the ability to look at a 300 year old score and understand what we're supposed to do with it. But obviously that is true of what is going on in bits of software.
Like we're literally losing the ability to process them into something we understand. So what is going on there? Right?
What is it, what is it about instantiating something in a piece of software or on a computer that makes it intrinsically harder? Right. So I mean, look, wax cylinders. Wax cylinders. We don't really have wax cylinder machines. Right. Anymore, but we could.
It feels like it's probably easier to build one because we can just look at a wax cylinder and kind of work out what it's meant to do it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:What I'm saying is what makes a particular encoding of media harder or easier more likely to be forgotten, more likely to get in the way of you enjoying.
Speaker A:I mean, is this to do with flexibility? So you know this, as you say, it must be built into the nature of the thing itself. Right. And one of the things about.
I don't quite have the vocabulary but I'm going to call it technology for a moment. Right. Is it the flexibility of it allow in its. So its usefulness is how flexible it is and how efficient it is is because of how flexible it is.
And that flexibility is itself what makes it potentially redundant and more difficult to access. Is it that.
Speaker B:I feel like there is a trade off going on here and I think it's something like that. Why have we, why, why have we. Why has the trend been towards more and more complex methods of encoding media like what we have.
Gradually, somehow you sort of feel like it might be the other way around, but instead what we. What we've. We've moved away from the objects, the media being expensive to the decoding being expensive, and the media being neither here nor there.
So what I mean is an LP from:But Spotify as a means of doing that, or even, you know, all the kind of software processing involved in translating a streaming file or an MP3 file into a piece of music, all of that is much more complicated and fragile. And so we become completely dependent on a much more complex decoding method. So why have we gone in that direction?
Speaker C:Yeah, my initial thought is convenience. So which wraps a load of things in. So LPs. Yes.
You could arguably even sort of look under a microscope at the LP and decode what it is without a needle and things. It's physically represented CDs. We've added an algorithm and some processing to make the whole thing smaller and more convenient. Yeah.
So you could then carry it around in your pocket. And then MP3s, we've made them small enough that you can stream it live over the Internet on your phone as you walk around.
So I think that's one of the drivers, is the sort of making it more convenient and accessible.
Speaker B:Compression. Compression, basically, I guess. Yeah. Compression. The more compression you have, the more decoding you need. Right?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:The more complex the software is going.
Speaker C:To be back out. We've added not layers of abstraction, but layers of complication in order to make it more portable and more convenient.
Speaker B:Yeah. And I guess a computer game is.
Is a computer game, obviously, it sort of feels like, well, there isn't really an, you know, kind of analog version of a computer game, but maybe there is, because there's. There's board games, for example. So, you know, but. So it is. I suppose where I'm going is a cave painting.
We don't need anything to be able to translate that. We can look at it and it can be 20,000 years old and we can go, that's a horse.
It feels like that hasn't changed, but of course it has, because the way that you look at most paintings now is going to be on a screen and it looks like you're just looking at a picture, but actually you're not. There's an enormous amount of processing that goes into capturing that picture in a digital form, uploading it to the Internet, putting on a website.
All of that is massively convoluted. So it feels like, well, I'm just looking at a picture of a horse on a cave wall.
But you're not, unless you're actually in front of that cave wall looking at it. So.
So I suppose the reason that I'm bringing this up is I was just going to say, well, why is this an issue for computer games and not other forms of art? But it, but it actually is because in fact, most of the way that we consume media now is. Requires enormous amounts of complicated computing power.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:Do we want to stay on this area of, of the tech side of it? Do we want to stay with that?
Speaker C:No, I think there's another.
Speaker A:Interesting, because I think we've kind of maybe sort of. Yeah, that's, yeah, we've got, we've, we've sorted that. We've sold that. Answered that. Are we interested in talking about content itself? Like.
Speaker B:Yeah, why is it that a picture of a horse is comprehensible but sort of, I don't know, Beowulf or something requires a bit more.
Speaker C:Yeah. I characterize this as accessibility in the sense of appreciation.
Like some, some forms of media are just inherently more accessible, even when they're not old. So a nice sort of landscape photograph. Okay, perhaps not terribly exciting art wise, but it's accessible.
People can look at it and go, oh yeah, I get, I see what that's about. Versus modern. Modern art or modern art forms. For it. You have to, you have to be in the know on something in order to really appreciate it.
There might be the levels to it which the more you see of that kind of thing, the more you, more you unlocks for you. And there are forms of. Older forms of art which just the cultural references people don't have anymore.
So it's only really the historian types who are into that world all the time really start to get the same depth of appreciation that the people at the time would have had for that piece of art.
Speaker B:Yeah, Like I sort of think in a way. Well, I feel like there's two things that we might be put putting together.
One is sort of translating it into modern, translating the medium into modern terms, which would be just be something like translating the old English in, in Beowulf into modern English or something. You know, it's like, let's try and translate. Or translating, I guess, taking a cave painting of a horse and.
And updating that to being a photo of a horse or something.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Like there's. There's that sort of trans translation into a form that makes it easier for me to understand what I'm looking at.
t the. The, you know, made in: Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B: Even films from the:So actually, you know, when you arrange to meet someone, you. It's a different kind of a thing. And you think, you know what? I need to know quite a lot about how society worked to understand.
Even if I perfectly understand what the. What I'm seeing, to understand what it means.
Speaker C:Playing devil's advocate I think this piece is 18th century that you're playing.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:You may be able to parse it and reproduce it on the piano, but does the style in which you play it bear any resemblance into which the style the composer had in mind for people to play it in? Given that you're also playing it on the wrong instrument, you may have more of a jazzy style because you've got the benefit of.
Of jazz playing and other forms of music which didn't exist back then. Artists back then interpreting the music might have a more, I don't know, more mechanical or classic style in their playing.
So your reproduction isn't what the composer had in mind?
Speaker B:No, in fact. And this exact piece of music is quite weird, which is why I'm learning it. It's quite an unusual.
It's unusual for its time, I think feels particularly accessible. It's quite modern.
When I first heard it, I assumed it was from the last 20 years, but there's a lot debate about, well, do you want to be playing it with lots of kind of emotion and pathos which you can do with this piece of music, but that's not anything like Cooperan would have played it. He'd play it much faster on a harpsichord and it would have been, you know, kind of mechanical and quite staccato and. And so. So what?
What's the right answer?
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm not sure what the question is at the moment, but, well, how.
Speaker B:Should you, you know, play it, Play it, but also listen to it? I mean, what is the correct way to make me appreciate it?
Speaker A:Yeah. But also, is it, like I sort of says right at the beginning, is that particular art form was sort of taken to a certain point.
And beyond that, although Peter said, oh, it may be intended to listen to it slightly play in a different way, but if it's sort of pretty accessible to us, that suggests that it's like, well, that's it. It's got to its point. Right. And the fact that we can still access it and play it and enjoy it, although that's great, suggests.
Well, that kind of reached, you know, the pinnacle of its artistic evolution. I don't know.
Speaker B:Yeah, I. I think there's something to. And I, you know, and the question is, I think it is interesting here to go back to recorded. To recorded music. You know, I think a big.
ething fresh about music from: you know, from music from the: Speaker A:I think that's only part of it, Nick, because I don't know, maybe I'm slightly influenced by. I was listening. One of the podcasts I listened to is Restless Entertainment, which I don't know if you listen to, but one of the things they, they.
They sometimes talk about music and the music business and, you know, streaming, etc. But. And one of the things. And I'll probably get some of this wrong, but the conversation was more or less as follows, which is that.
And I guess this is partly to do how we access stuff, but basically old music, for example, old pop music like the Beatles is pretty much as streamed as new music. Right. If not more so, actually. Okay.
And part of anything from the last 25 years or so, and this is definitely not being grumpy about this, I think there's more or less there's a consensus around this. It's not particularly evolving. It's kind of reached where it. Popular music has kind of reached where it ended.
Speaker B:It's just Taylor Swift. The end point of all pop music is Taylor Swift. And once you've reached that, you just have to stop.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:You just say, there is nowhere further to go from here.
Speaker A:Okay. And it's not sort of talking about in a grumpy, like in a judgmental way. It's just kind of saying, well, it's kind of all been done.
And that seems to be borne out in the fact that sort of youngsters are listening to what, you know, old stuff and stuff from, you know, when we were young and so on. And so it just means, hey, well, this medium has kind of reached its natural point. And, well, that's kind of that.
I mean, I think that's what they were saying on the podcast.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Although I do want to. I think maybe the people were saying the same thing about the Beatles. When all the pop music at the time was sounding a bit beatly.
People would be like, oh, is this the, Is this. Have we reached a. Sort of everything's coalesced on this local maxima?
And then actually what happened was new forms of music kind of develop from there. Maybe that's just, you know, the Taylor Swift is just a local max.
Speaker B:Heavy metal suddenly appears.
Speaker C:Yeah, we'll find different forms.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, I, I, because so on one hand, I sort of think, yes, maybe like, actually art forms do just sort of potentially stop evolving. And then, you know, everything, everything beyond that point is, could have been from any time, because it doesn't.
There's no indicator in, you know, because it's, you know, it's now static. It's like a fossil.
On the other hand, I, I think as Peter's alluding to, that probably every single point in time people have thought that about, about the art that they're looking at. And so, you know, and, and I, I feel like if we think about film or visual, you know, painting or something, something visual.
at, that we, you know, in the: realistic than films from the: and you go, God, it looks so:And I, and I wonder if, you know, that's always true, that we always think where we are now is the modern era and the modernity has solved all of the problems from the past and there's nowhere else to go. And then lo and behold, you do go somewhere else.
Speaker A:But I can see why that might be the case with technology, but not necessarily, you know, that people think, oh, here we are. When people talk about, you know, in the modern era, you're always on hiding to nowhere with that. Right.
Because there's always going to be another modern era.
Speaker B:That's what bothers me about modernism. Like modernism is really old fashioned now.
Speaker A:Yeah. I've got a great.
Speaker B:You need a new word for it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:What?
Speaker A:Could we have something that's after modernism?
Speaker B:Well, no, but even post modernism is old hat.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:It's like, you know, but.
Speaker A:Yeah, so. But with technology I can sort of see why, you know, you're sort of. It's a false premise. But with the actual thing itself, can that stop evolving?
That just reach a point? I don't know. I don't know if that's an interest. I don't know. I don't think that's particularly interesting what I've just said.
Speaker B:Well, no, I think, but I think it feels like that there is a lot of these things are kind of interrelated and particularly like the cultural, you know, we're talking about compression tech. Tech, the compression of, you know, of the signal if you like, you know, being able to make it easier and smaller and so I can just stream a film.
Instead of needing effectively a projector to watch a film, instead of physically having to get a piece of film from a shop and load it into a projector and have a screen, I can just press a button and it appears. You know, we need then in order for all of that to be true, we need to have the ability to compress, you know, the signal.
But it feels a bit like that might be true of the, of the kind of the non technological parts of the art as well. That actually, you know, quite a lot of what makes a piece of work accessible is that I have the ability to culturally decode it.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:That I have the, that you can compress quite a lot of stuff into.
Speaker C:I think you, you kind of, you touched on that earlier when you said you were watching a movie with your kids from the 90s.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:And it was a lot quotes, a lot needed explaining.
I think it's because your, your experience of the 90s, your memories that you have from there have compressed a lot of cultural references and things that you. That are without those. The movie doesn't have the same accessibility, to use the word that we've been using for people who don't have that.
Speaker A:Well, as a couple of examples. And I don't know if this takes us direction we want to go or not. But if you, for example, if you watch Team America, okay.
Which is from the early:And it's important for contextual reasons, I guess, and it definitely feeds into your understanding of it. Right. Okay. But the other thing I was going to say is I've got a little thing that I do every Friday, Weird Film Friday Club.
Speaker B:Right. Is it just at your house?
Speaker A:It is.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:Yeah. And it's me and a mate in my village who's a bit of an odd fellow, but that's a good thing.
And so we try and watch weird films on a Friday evening and we try and encourage our families to watch as well. They're not always so keen on Weird Film Friday.
Speaker B:Boring.
Speaker C:Yeah, sounds great to me.
Speaker A:Now, I don't know if you're familiar with a film which I was not familiar with until last Friday, called the Holy Mountain.
Speaker B:No.
Speaker C:No.
Speaker A: ct some Mexican bloke made in: Speaker C:Right.
Speaker A:And it's basically a psychedelic exploration of discovery of God, I guess.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:So far. So weird fits, weird Film Friday. But a couple of things about it. I mean, it's. I would say it's probably the oddest film I've ever seen.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker A: c, trippy film from the. From: Speaker B:Sounds awesome.
Speaker A:Yeah. And it's. It's. It's quite fun. It's Avalon. It's meant to be avant garde and it's. But it's just absurd and ridiculous. Yeah, but maybe knowingly so.
is. My God, is it a film from: Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Right. Yeah.
Speaker A:And, you know, it's just.
Speaker C:Whoo.
Speaker A:Right. And I was wondering if at the time, people watching it going, what the fuck?
Speaker B:You don't think they were thinking, this is so now?
Speaker A:Yeah, I think they were thinking again, yeah, man. He's totally destroyed and rebuilt storytelling and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
Speaker C:Or.
Speaker A:Or they were just sitting there going, oh, this is a load of pretentious shite. And I was kind of somewhat.
Speaker C:I suspect there were a whole range of different opinions about this.
Speaker A:Yeah. Well, there you go. All I know is I think the budget was a million quid and 50 years later it's made about 750 grand.
Speaker B:So it's getting there.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's getting there and I've added my little bit.
Speaker C:It'll go viral one day.
Speaker A:Yeah, but I guess it's. I think it's a similar kind of or same point as you were making about Trainspotting. Although maybe this film was even weird at the time. I don't know.
But there's definitely. It was a barrier, would say, to viewing it, to the content.
Speaker C:I would say, well, I. This nods towards something I found interesting. I was thinking about this. Is there a distinction between genuine appreciation?
So some sort of like, sense of awe you get from a piece of a film versus nostalgia? So you remember playing your computer game in the 90s and you, at the time you had. You loved it, that love of it. Right.
If you were able to play it now, would that love be the same love or would it be a more of a nostalgia thing?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Would it be. You know, because it's, it's base.
It's sort of your new love might be a different, equally valid kind of love, but it's also because it's, it's calling on memories and things that you don't have anymore, like the particular place used to play in your bedroom and the friends used to play it with and the school holidays and all these things which don't. Are no longer part of your life. Is it, is it different?
Speaker B:Yeah, no, I do worry about that. I mean, I suppose everyone should really. It's like, actually, do I like. And I suppose the clearest example of this debate is Star Wars.
I mean, you know, I was original trilogy guy, but I was too young to see the first two at the cinema. But it was huge, like a massive part of my life.
ry into Star wars until about:And you know, George Lucas and all of the defenders of the prequel trilogies were saying, no, you don't realize it's just your nostalgia which is making you think that the original Star wars is better. If this had come out, you'd have said the same. Don't forget the original Star Wars. That was for kids as well.
It's just, you know, and Then, lo and behold, same debate when the. When the sequels come out a few years ago, which are staggeringly bad, Like.
Like, it's just been a gradual degradation over time from the originals to the. To.
To my mind, very obviously, objectively speaking, very obviously the case that the originals were the best, the prequels and not very good, and the sequels are awful.
But it is really intractable, this discussion, because it is also consistent with there being nostalgia, with it being impossible for me to actually get away from the fact that. No, I. I really only think that the originals were better because I was a kid and it was all very exciting and it was new.
And I actually have got no way of. Of proving that that's false. Really. So, yes, it's a bit like, you know, you can't step in the same river twice. Right. You.
There is no way really, of enjoying past media in the same way ever, in the same way as you experienced it last year, let alone when it came out.
Speaker A:Okay, well, brilliant, because that leads me straight onto a question I want to ask and finish us off with, are we done? We good to go to that? And my question is this. Tell me a bit of old media that you really enjoy. Okay.
And it can be music, can be art, can be film, it can be a book, it can be whatever you want. I've got one straight out of the chat.
Speaker B:Can I go first?
Speaker A:Yeah. Charlie Chaplin.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker A:I love. And you can define old as you like, right? I mean, you might be talking about we could be thousands of years old, which Charlie Chaplin isn't. I love.
I love. And in fact, I'm gonna expand that a bit. Not just Charlie Chaplin, but also Laurel and Hardy. And I love.
Speaker B:I mean, I think.
Speaker A:I think it's. Yeah, because really, I think what we're talking about is clowning.
Speaker B:I would put the Marx Brothers in there as well. Absolutely tremendous.
Speaker A:I'm never. I'm not really a Marx Brothers kind.
Speaker B:Of guy, but now.
Speaker A:But I just think, especially if I think to Charlie Chaplin, you know, the way he moves his body and the way a story is told, you know, and that's on arguably, an old medium. I love it. Here's my point is I find it tremendously enjoyable now. And, yeah, that's a bit of an old medium that I really enjoy.
Speaker B:Sorry, Peter. Go for it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:I've got a guilty pleasure from the last couple of years is sort of like slightly trashy sci fi series. So I'm thinking old. Yeah. Oldish. So they're sort of. Peter says it's old.
Speaker A:It's old.
Speaker B: They're all like, oh God, mid: Speaker C: Yeah. With: Speaker A:I thought we were getting older than that, but. All right.
Speaker C:With the sort of the, the kind of like the increasing rate of new media, they're like right out down at the bottom of the pile.
Speaker A:I thought you were going to go to Blake 7 or something, but anyway.
Speaker C:No, no, no. I'm thinking they're just things that were only moderately popular at the time and now they're totally obscure. So they.
Things like Firefly, which is a thing. It's cowboys in space, basically.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker C:It's got quite a cult following and then there was a sort of. It kind of got killed off after the fifth series or something. There was a movie but there was no then attempt to sort of reboot it. It's.
I can't think of the name of the main act, but anyway, it's quite fun. It's bad script. It's. It is literally cowboys putting. They ride horses on these planets and things. It's fucking weird. It doesn't make any sense.
Anyway, that's, that's quite fun. And then there's a one that's a bit similar called Dark Matter, which was kind of supposed to be like.
I think it was another network's attempt at doing a Firefly. And it's, it's really. It's even worse. But it's kind of like. It's really easy background telling.
Speaker A:Why do you like this stuff?
Speaker B:I don't know.
Speaker C:Just fun.
Speaker A:It just sounds. Okay, fair enough.
Speaker C:It's just different. Zero brain activity required, relaxation.
Speaker A:Okay, all right, I'm sold. Yeah.
Speaker C:And it is. But yeah, as you say, it's not old in absolute terms.
Speaker A:No. Okay, all right.
Speaker B: rated stone Sphere from about: Speaker A:So about a 3,000 year old stone sphere, did you say?
Speaker B:Yeah, so. So in this. This was.
I mean it had some amazing stuff in there and it is like when you see something which is a piece produced, I guess it is a bit like the old. Those when you get very realistic cave painting, you think, I'm really like, could be standing behind this guy's shoulder.
Really connects you with that. And these, these. It's not clear whether they had a function, I think, but they. In quite a lot of parts of. Of Stone Age Britain. Sorry.
Of Bronze Age Britain, they've discovered these really nicely decorated stone balls. Right.
Speaker A:Perfectly spherical, decorated with in what manner?
Speaker B:Different. Loads of different designs. So some of them are fairly simple and just lots of dimples. Some have little swirls kind of. Yeah, yeah. Like carved.
And some of them have, like, grooves running around them in different patterns. I mean, the. The craftsmanship is amazing. They're so regular and perfect looking.
It's not, you know, it's not like someone's just chiseled out some random holes. It's so perfectly designed. And, and, you know, and I think to myself, well, I've got a big wooden ball in my living room.
I've got a big wooden ball which is. Was turned into a ball by an artist in France. And I liked it so much. I like this big wooden ball.
So I bought it and we got it home and it's in my living room. And I sort of think I could totally understand some, you know, some Bronze Age guy with a ball, with a nice.
Going home and look, contemplating his beautifully carved stone ball. And I just think. You don't need to explain. Stop it, archaeologists. We don't know what function this had. Maybe. Maybe it had ritual function.
No, it's just a nice stone ball. Sometimes it's nicely carved. Stone ball is a nicely carved stone ball and it's fun in itself. So, yeah, I like that.
That sprung to mind when you were talking about old media.
Speaker A:Yeah, lovely answer. And it just makes me think of some poor archaeologist two or 3,000 years from now, looking at Peter's sort of browsing history or something.
He's sort of watching this weird sort of. Even now, we think is some weird sort of space cowboy thing. And they're going, what was this for? What was it? Was this a worship? Was it ritual?
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker A:It's just for kicks.
Speaker B:Peter's been buried with his blue rays of firefly having to reconstruct it. Yes, nice.
Speaker A:Okay. All right, lovely. We'll stop there. You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe.
We aim to release an episode every week or two. If there are any topics you'd like us to cover, please email us at podcast@alephinsights.com thanks as always, for listening. Until next time, goodbye,.
