History

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words… but I only have 406 of them.

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President John Adams was always known for his epic swordsmanship.

Looking back on history can be more fun than people might realize. I was browsing my RSS feed during a break today and came across this article about American History as told during Japan’s Edo Period. It was quite a fascinating thing, looking through all of those pictures from a whole other era. This needs an anime or manga adaptation, make it happen and I’ll be on it like a bum on a bologna sandvich.

It’s funny to think that there was once a time when Japan wanted to remain closed off from the rest of the world, but at the same time they were fascinated enough to draw depictions of what they thought we were. The depictions of past presidents are astonishing… They had no idea about our culture, anything. There wasn’t much of a way for them to do so either given their strict rules about entering and leaving the country. As a result we have these artistic depictions of what life would be like in the US from the perspective of someone who has never set foot outside of their country or had any access to current events of the time.

This is both beautiful and terrifying to think about… considering I know people who feel that everyone should go back to their (dis)respected countries and stay there. Oddly enough that only seems to be reserved for folks that have skin tones of the spicy or chocolatey variety… I never see one white guy say to another to go back to Finland or England (though that would be amusing). I’m looking at these pictures, and thinking about quite a few of my co-workers or some of the neighbors that feel we can wear blinders to the rest of the world and be perfectly content with it. Hell, some of them don’t even understand why I even have international friends. I never thought that living in the 21st century, where anyone with even a cheap phone can talk to someone half way across the world, and even in this day and age we still have people that would be even the slightest bothered by the smallest speck of indifference.

Of course I would expect conflicts, especially from people that want to buy things from other countries because its cheaper… everyone seems to be all about their own home team until coins are involved.

The Malware Museum

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This is your computer, this is your computer on drugs.
This is your computer on drugs.

Want to look at some old viruses for nostalgia sake? There is a Malware Museum with neutered old MSDOS viruses that run in DOSBox within your browser, or you can download them as keepsakes if you have DOSBox installed on your system. Some of them are pretty trippy like LSD.COM, or weird like this virus featuring some old guy walking across the DOS screen. There’s even an interactive one that gives you the option to play one armed bandit to save your data, heh.

I remember a few of the ones on that page, but by the time I saw any of them they were gutted and turned into joke viruses. These truly are some fine examples of early trolling in the 80’s and 90’s.