Making the best of it, here in the Future.

Don't kid yourself, we're living in the future over here.

Think of that storage!  How many times could you store the data of your first hard drive on, for instance, your phone?  Crazy.

It's not like I've operated a punch card computer here, but the rate at which neat stuff passes us by is fantastic. (Although, as Louis CK reminds us, we're still not happy.)

I noticed it today as I sometimes do - in an electronics store.   And not for the first time. It's happened to me before, in a gamestop, when an employee was trying to describe the then-elusive and sold-out classic controller accessory for the Wii.  Because I'm very helpful, I jumped in and said it looks just like a Super Nintendo controller.  Yeah, says the clerk, but with sticks.  Kid customer turns to me then.  "What's that?"  What's what?  "What's a Super Nintendo?"  Right.  I'll just be going now.  Can't be late for the bus back to the retirement center or I'm stuck in gamestop for a week.

Today, it was by my lonesome, in a Best Buy, checking out camcorders.  And for around $100, I can get a thing that fits in my pocket and shoots 1080p. That's one hundred United States Dollars.  That's crazy.  And I considered it briefly.  It'd be just fine to shoot some shorts for the internet, and I could do some post trickery and make it look perfectly usable - more than youtube needs, anyhow.  The hardest part would be trying to get actors to take it seriously when it's sitting on its tiny tripod.  The SVHS shoulder mounted monstrosities I shot on at SCTV weighed a ton, but at least you had an air of authority during an interview.

And even then, what I was doing was more or less a technological miracle!  This used to be so hard - at least by comparison.  It used to require taking dozens of actual photographs per second!  You had to wait until Thomas Edison invented a way to develop your film before you could even see what you'd shot!  And what do we do with all this completely amazing stuff?  Well, we do the exact same thing humans have been doing with motion picture technology for the past 120 years.  If only Étienne-Jules Marey and his big luxurious beard could see what he'd started....