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Take Your Children Offline NOW: Twenty-One Years Later

In July of 2005, I published Take Your Children Offline NOW on this blog, and the comments arrived in two distinct waves. The first wave came from parents who said the article forced them to think, and several of them removed every photograph of their children from their websites within hours of reading it. The second wave came from parents and bloggers who told me, with varying degrees of contempt, that I was hysterical, paranoid, anti-celebration, and ill-positioned to speak on parenting because I was married without children. One commenter wrote that if he lived in fear of someone furtively masturbating to pictures of his kids, he would never get anything done. The post was held up by a few critics as a case study in childless people moralizing at parents.

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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 14 (2023) is Now Here!

It’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the pleasure of your continued, kind, support for this blog by joyously buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 14 (2023) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments.

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Three Eras of Preservation and the Scourge of Magnetic Tape

In the Modern Age of Entertainment, we have — so far — sustained Three Distinct Eras of performance preservation. The First Era was Film.  The Second Era was Magnetic Tape. The Third, and current, Era is Digital. The most cursed of all the Eras, is the misbegotten second — Magnetic Audiotape and Videotape — where performances were not actually preserved, they were only perpetuated to die!

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Finding Reality at Easy Street Records

A thin man — maybe it was a woman (honestly was hard to tell in my tired state) was looking through one of the several bins of used records in front of Easy Street Records in West Seattle. I was walking to a friend’s apartment to take a short nap and my wife and I thought we saw our friend walk into the store.

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iPad or iPlop?

Yesterday’s announcement of the iPad left me feeling disappointed.  There’s no built-in camera at all — let alone a forward-facing one for doing live iChats — and the thing doesn’t do voice and it doesn’t multitask and it doesn’t have a lot of storage.  “An iPlop in the toilet bowl,” was my first thought in the flushing.

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Real Guitar or Toy?

Misa Digital announced a new “guitar” this week that is more computer than guitar.  Instead of frets and strings, you have buttons and a touch-sensitive panel.  Instead of Bending the Soul of The Blues, you get to Press the Electrosynchrisity of Midi.

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Digitizing the Human

I was having a discussion the other day about the digital books movement and saving a university money, and when I took the next logical step in the argument:  “If we’re digitizing books to save space and money, why don’t we digitize librarians, too?”  I was given a look in response  intended to freeze fertile fields and euthanize rabid dogs.

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