Cotton Candy (2010)
cottoncandy.net
cottoncandy.net
Cell phones
Space flight
Air travel
Modern medical miracles
And then cotton candy became something you buy off the shelf at Kmart or whatever and it pretty much ruined the magic of it. I ate a few because I could, but it really wasn't the same.
The value of cotton candy was never the chance to eat something sugary. It was the chance to eat something magical that belonged in faerie tales, something that seemed like it shouldn't exist because it was a food that was mostly air and seemingly defied physics.
Cotton candy was food for thought. It was food for a young child's imagination. Tasting it was such a minor element of the whole thing.
We've grown jaded.
I don't agree that this is true in general. It doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both. Kids love sugary things, and it also has an appealing "melt in your mouth" texture.
It was that, plus the mouth feeling and "magical experience". If it did not taste like sugar (ie. did not contain sugar), kids would fancy it less, if at all. You cannot simply discount one or the other; it is the whole experience as a package.
I'd even go as far as say that for me, it was part of going to a traveling carnival or amusement park (if I was so lucky that my parents allowed me to eat this). Nowadays, kids have different choices. It goes without saying that if it is more common, it is less special.
Soft drinks contain a lot of sugar, so this comparison doesn't really support the claim.
Basically tech disappeared from the world but not the knowledge (won't go into why to keep it short). The guy with the knowledge is in a race to get his tech level up to protect himself from stronger people. In the process he's having to reinvent tech from scratch.
At one point the makes a cotton candy spinner. First he makes cotton candy to test. Then they poor in liquid copper to make copper wire (no idea if that's actually possible but the show claims the science is sound).
I wonder how mobile might have evolved differently if there was a hypothetical arficial restriction: there shall be no concept of responsive mobile design; it's all desktop shaped.
Tables + hard-coded sizes in the HTML are the opposite of simplicity. It was a big hack, not something I look back with a smile.
This meant it was easier for _anyone_ not just webbie people to make and share websites.
I don't think it was easier, but there was less pressure to get it right, so the barrier to entry was lessened.
Now one has to worry (they had to worry then, it just wasnt as publicly well known or visible) about accessibility, identity theft, domain theft, natonal and specific laws that must be worked around, scams, marketing, lawsuits, etc.
Back then you'd just throw up your geocities site about (Fox owned) X-files Scully fan-fic and be on your merry way; now you have to worry about an ad somewhere generating revenue from you having had posted Scullys' face, prompting a foreign script-kiddy to harass you with threats of legal tattling if you don't pay his bitcoin ransom, and when that's all done you receive a DMCA complaint from Fox to forward the revenue or take down Scullys' face, anyway.
One can see why domain experts are more prevalent now. There's a lot more ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
Website creator suites have just about always existed, well at least since the internet had any level of popularity, anyway.
I haven't seen a statement this wrong since someone last said they like Internet Explorer 6.
Web design back in those days (around 2000-2005, say) was terribly frustrating. Getting, for example, such a column layout to work across browsers involved either tables or a thousands tricks to get it working in CSS, in more than one browser. And those were the times we still believed in semantic markup, making frivolous tables and divs almost sacrilegious.
Today, it isn't uncommon for a website developed on, say, Firefox to flawlessly work in Safari and Chrome as well. Back then, you were about halfway done when it worked in one browser, because the other one needed different set of abominable tricks for its different set of bugs and inconsistencies.
Expectations also weren't quite as low as you make them out: All the cool kids did Java applets or Flash, two very annoying plugins, non-free binary blobs hiding their code and content from the world, but occasionally letting anyone who sends the right handshake remote-control your browser.
One thing this has forced me to do is request desktop sites to be loaded from my browsers options menu to allow me to "Pinch Zoom" in order to read the text.
I like the fact that I dont have to do this exta step on YC , it is one the reasons I frequent HN.
I'm joking, but it does actually work. (Not sure about the CTRL-+ keystroke though.)
There was no responsive web then. These column-based grid sites worked alright.
For the first year or so I disliked the sites that redirected me to a mobile version (like m.wikipedia.org), since I considered my iPhone perfectly capable of rendering the desktop version.
But I do miss sites that were done just because someone loved something.