I would buy cds that looked like little records.

I wonder how cat feels having someone like girl who’s almost always talking up a storm without ever saying anything pleasant or amusing. If he’s anything like me he just pretends to listen.

They actually have those. I don’t know if I can put URL’s in these comments, here, but if you search for cd-r retro verbatim on Amazon you can find them.

And certain pre-recorded releases (the Cowboy Bebop DVDs are among the most visible) are designed to look like records, which means less space to describe the particulars of the release.

Oh, and RicterShale, you can put a URL in the website box on the form, resulting in a link appearing on your name.

It accelerated; the first I heard it was years ago from my parents’ old college D&D buddies. Then it was my mom, then every fuckin kid in my class. Let me be the dick to side with girl on this one.

I’ll be the dick that makes fun of Girl for having a cellphone.

I definitely use a typewriter font on my computer.

You can buy a digital audio processor that ads hiss, pops, clicks and scratches to your CDs for that vintage sound. I sorta like that idea.

I say better a fake analog ring than a song.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

you know, I never thought of it, but you are dead on that technology is really bad at imitating old tech.

This has always been a discussion that I’ve liked in this comic. Girl would do well in an architectural theory class. Trust me, I think I’ve had this conversation about 1000 times in my academic career so far…

The idea of a hyperreal hyperrring makes me giggle. I just wish I could roll my tongue well enough to pronounce it.

We already associate the analogue ring with a telephone, so it makes sense to keep using it, especially to people who don’t see the point in learning a new sound just because a new technology has come along to produce that sound.

Also, the typeface for this comment box is Courier New, i.e. a monospaced typewriter font. SO ha.

Googled “cd-r retro,” and this was the first result.

http://www.switched.com/2009/01/15/floppy-cd-r-retro-looks-meet-modern-functionality/

so cool~

For what it is worth — tableaux takes an a. I feel that Girl knows that. That is, as currently spelt, she is mispronouncing the word as tab-leuh rather than as tab-lo. She isn’t the type to do that. Is she?

“this might be a while.” best line in this comic ever.

girl is impossible to please sometimes. here she is talking about how new is better than old. if cat made the same argument, girl would counter that “new” is really just recycled versions of old things, that “new” is hype- and with disgust for anyone that didn’t realize something that obvious. but the great thing about cat and girl is they’re both ridiculous, and clearly love each other anyway is some kind of unlikely (but possible) friendship. i’ve got friends like cat, they’re mental. and i probably deserve them.

I have a horse head on my car, but it’s okay, it’s a Mustang.

Baudrillard! Dorothy, you pwn my <3.

A more apt question would be: Do you still use a typewriter’s keyboard layout on your computer?

The answer of course is yes, you do. The seemingly anachonistic features of modern technology are not the zombified remains of its predecessor but the heritage that’s been passed down from its parents. That’s one thing that scifi constantly gets wrong about The Future; it’s not created whole-cloth by each new generation but deeply rooted in the vocabulary of the past. A cellphone goes ring. A digital camera goes click. A keyboard starts with q and ends in m. Flying cars will probably have Park, Neutral and Drive.

Anyway it’s better than hearing a garbled tinny recording of whatever inescapable, clamarous pop tune is popular this week, right?

I love this comic! So smart. It always leaves me thinking about somethin’.

Okay okay okay, I need to read the previous comments before adding my two cents to the midden.

That said the question becomes: Where do we draw the line between the seukomorphic and those things which are justifiably part of the lineage of a device?

Wait, was that the question originally posed by this strip?

Goddamn, I love this comic.

Great comic (as usual).

Yes, happens that I have a sample of an old analogue phone as my ring tone. Guilty as charged. My mother, by contrast, has a tune she really likes as her ring tone. Sometimes she takes ages to answer the phone because she is sitting there listening to the tune. Tool for the job. Etc.

I think the thing of it is that making it to the future is inevitable, only that it isn’t necessarily the future we were after. See also: my lack of silver air car.

I love the word querty it shows up on my blackberry storm every time my keyboard is on the screen pretty cool, huh?

I’d use a computer font on my typewriter, if I could.

I just wish it were as easy to address an envelope — or fill out a printed form — with a computer as it is with a typewriter.

Speaking of the new imitating the old, isn’t it about time for vinyl house siding to stop trying to look like wood? And what should it look like instead?

I, for one, much prefer the sounds of an analog ring (even if it’s digitized) to that of the incredibly stupid ringtones that cell phones ship with these days. Or even worse, ringtones of songs that people purchase/create. I’m sorry, “Shake Ya Ass” sounds horrid on cell phone speakers, and is completely inappropriate in any number of settings. The good old-fashioned “brrrring” of days gone by will always be apropos in a telephone context, cellular or otherwise, in any setting.

Don’t even get me started with people who use their phones to listen to music! I don’t want to hear your crappy music blaring from a crappy speaker. Use your headphones, please!

Sorry, this struck a nerve with me. Great work as always, keep it up. =)

Actually, I’ve spent a while pining for my mum’s old typewriter. No idea why, the ribbons for it are impossible to find anymore (how does Hollywood do it?!)
I did once fall in love with a computer that had typewriter keys on its keyboard (the keyboard looked like a typewriter and everything). I can’t remember what was done with the monitor, and I don’t think it had a mouse. But it looked very well-done.

As for phones, mine’s always on silent. I forget to change it.

“A more apt question would be: Do you still use a typewriter’s keyboard layout on your computer?”

nice, man of stijl.

Datamancer’s Steampunk computer keyboard with real mechanical typewriter keys:

http://www.datamancer.net/keyboards/ergo1/ergo1.htm

Awesomeness.

i’m mostly with girl on this one. i love technology, and making the most of what it has to offer seems logical.
down with the awkward qwerty keyboard, up with the faster Dvorak. screw consistency, the new generation can learn (and do, quite easily).

In the end, you can find something to complain about in anything if you just look hard enough. That’s our Girl :)

Ringtones are a dilemma of our times. I made a little effort and now Sarah Silverman sings “Dry Sheets, Ice Cream, Jelly Beans” when my mobile rings, to people’s general annoyance. I had a skeuomorphic “brrring” but not only did tones of that kind spread like the flu, they are also massively dissatisfying, as most digital ringtones are.

But! Dvorak is still build on the antiquated premise of striking a key downward to put one letter in place. It was developed for typewriters first, after all, and uses the same three tired rows and staggered columns that qwerty does. If we truly want to make the /most/ of technology we have to explore things like chording keyboards and blossom-style keyboards and input devices beyond keyboards; keys themselves are genes inhereted from the computer’s evolutionary ancestors.

*My* typewriter has a faux-cursive typeface.

Ditto Jake.

people that want to optimize **everything** (screw comfort zones, let’s do it all “better”) are probably putting stock in novelty, fads, and probably have no idea how many things they do out of tradition and for no other reason.

you can look at a keyboard and tell it’s just like a typewriter, that’s obvious. what you can’t do is measure the number of things you do without being aware you’re just doing it the old way. comfort isn’t the only reason to use a “time-tested” method either. sometimes this is also the most economical thing to do… and if you start spending loads of money on being trendy and modern, don’t think that’s going to get you any farther in girl’s opinion than if you put a retro ringtone on your cell, just for fun.

Skeuomorph – Daniel that is a great concept that I was unfamiliar with until now. Yes. Why is this concept centered around architecture?

Jake – Why do I find the cd-as-record tacky while being instantly attracted to the cd-as-floppy? It’s too easy a question, you don’t have to answer.

The 1899 Horsey Horseless would like to answer anyway.

Man of Stijl, I do absolutely hate the click of the digital camera. But I think Daniel’s link to skeuomorph makes short work of the distinction between the functions of an obsolete object and the obsolete object’s aesthetic values.

My phone still says “Beep-boop, beep-boop.”

Dorothy, I’m not sure if I would call it short work; while it is a lovely word (I am going to use it at least three times this week, not because I have to but because I want to) the distinction between unnecessary aesthetic embelishment and advantageous functional similarity is still as vague as ever.

Fr’instnace: The article mentions dials and sliders as being a seukomorphic carryover to modern touchscreen interfaces. However the dial and its linear brother the slider are superb interface elements! Unlike buttons you can instantly select a percentage of maximum with a single touch; both maximum and minimum range are intiuitively demonstrated and easily selected with a quick swipe in one direction or the other. They can be changed either slowly or quickly. They’re your go-to guys for selecting a value from a logical range and hardly obsolete.

Further the definition of seukomorphic doesn’t take into consideration the value of retraining – retaining the characteristics of a legacy device may be important in terms of user comfort. Have you ever heard of the Jitterbug, the ‘Only cellphone with a dial tone’? If there was ever a modern Horesy Horseless that be it. People trained on landlines find it easier to adapt to, though. Seukomorph or justified design?

I meant to say that ‘the definition only plays lip service to’ and not ‘doesn’t take into account’ and also that I should learn to proofread.

lawl. horse’s head on a car. this is just the kind of rant I go off on daily.

“At this rate we’ll never make it…” Do I detect a Chuck Palahniuk quote (Invisible Monsters), or did someone beat the two of you to it? I always liked that since reading it and wondered where it originated.

The case my Cowboy Bebop DVD came in was made to look like a Beta cassette.

The first thing I did with my new cell phone was delete all the ringtones that came with the phone, including the analog one. For some reason it won’t let you delete the Nokia and T-Mobile default ringtones. It’s strange that ten years ago if you had one of those as your ringtone and it went off in a crowd everyone would check their phone until someone called, “It’s mine!” Today, in the era of being able to download whatever you want to your phone, you would be almost certainly the only one with the default ringtone. My ringtone has been “Where Is My Mind” for so long that it was originally a MIDI file. Now, of course, it’s mp3.

I was also wondering what a futuristic hood ornament would look like? A flying saucer perhaps?

I’m not a big reader of Chuck Palahniuk, so put it down to an increasing cultural redundancy that comes with increased access to publishing words and pictures.

Since hood ornaments used to be horses and big cats – maybe a Suburban?

Actually, virtually all (okay, almost all) technology developed tries to emulate it’s predecessors. Computers and typewriters are obvious examples, but it doesn’t stop there: When radios where developed they where designed to look like pieces of furniture. Same thing with Television sets when they came along. Furthermore, TV inherited a lot from radio, like programming conventions, and a lot of people involved in radio went over to television, so there’s definite “inheritance” there.

Also,iconography and symbols associated with older technologies usually carries over to new ones: look at your e-mail client of choice – the buttons for writing and receiving mail, for instance. In Thunderbird it’s a pen and an envelope. These to have nothing to do with their associated tasks, but are still a useful visual clue as to the different functions of the software. “Simulating the old” is a necessity to allow people to relate to and understand new technology.

I could go on about this… about how music is still released as “albums”, even with no physical media in sight; about how the key to the success of the kindle e-book reader was to emulate an actual, printed book as closely as possible (pages, chapters and so on…), but I think this will do… I don’t think anyone will read my ramblings to the end anyway.

Verbatim Digital Vinyl 700 MB Multicolor CD-R Spindle (25 Discs)

they are very awesome.

http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Digital-Vinyl-Multicolor-Spindle/dp/B00009WO51

I feel morally superior because my phone still rings instead of playing music.

I bought some mp3s that look like CDs…

My ringtone is a recording of my kid’s voice. Taking advantage of some very old hardwiring indeed.