Lästips: Ftrain

En liten Flickr-bild på Mymarkup fick mig att återvända till den gamla favoriten Ftrain.com, som jag glömmer bort mellan varven. Jag vet inte hur det går till , jag har ju läst Ftrain sedan, tja, 1999 kanske? (Som den här texten på en födelsedag förra årtusendet). Paul Ford finns numera i tryck, hans roman Gary Benchley, Rock Star kom ut för ett par veckor sedan. Vilket sammanträffande, snart är det jul…

Den nyaste texten på Ftrain heter Followup/Distraction, och den rekommenderas.

I’ve gone back to basics. I stopped using my fancy word processor and installed WordPerfect for DOS, which was last updated about a decade ago, and which lets me type in gray letters on a blue screen without using any windows and without the need of a mouse. It never crashes. I also bought a little device called an AlphaSmart Neo, which is mostly sold to schools. The Neo is just a keyboard that stores text as you type it. It does nothing else. It doesn’t tell the time or let me play games. It runs off of double-A batteries and the batteries last for hundreds of hours. Using the AlphaSmart and WordPerfect I’ve started to enjoy computing again. There is no Wikipedia, no email, no constantly changing the MP3s I’m listening to, no downloading going on. The spam still piles up but I’m not aware of it, because my email program is shut down until I want to send a message.

och

should I try to make contact with the culture that existed before 1992?

Till exempel.