I admit it. I am biased towards old methods, materials, and designs. Unless a modern improvement exists that’s better in ways that are important to me.
Then, even though I'll admit their superiority, I'll still usually prefer the appearance of the old materials and designs. There's just something classic about them.
If there's a brass and glass version of something that's now usually made of various types of plastic, I'll probably prefer the brass and glass version unless the plastic version is a whole lot better. And some of them are.
I'm a big fan of my polymer and steel guns, but for style, they can't hold a candle to my wood, steel, and brass guns. I understand the pros and cons of each. But I like what I like, and not always for rational reasons.
One thing that bothers me is when they try to make plastic look like wood and brass- that's lying, and it looks bad. At least they don't do that with guns as much as they do with other products (although I do have a 1940s shotgun with an original "wood-like" plastic stock). I hated the old TVs that had a plastic case that had a "wood-grain pattern"- if you're going to make it out of plastic, just do it and don't try to make it look like something else. When they stopped doing that and just left the plastic black, it was an improvement.
I don't even mind honest modern reproductions of old things as long as they are made of the real materials and work like the originals did. (I'd prefer an original, but that's not always practical.)
Liberty is the original original. It existed from the beginning- long before crooked, power-hungry humans invented the warped idea that someone should govern others. None of the modern plastic substitutes for genuine liberty are worth anything. They are cheap (yet excessively expensive), ugly, and broken from the beginning. They are not an improvement on liberty.
Yeah, the fake "wood grain" stuff has always annoyed me.
ReplyDeleteExcept for on old '70s station wagons. That was presumably supposed to make them look like the old "Woodies" of the 1930s/40s, and it definitely didn't, but it was still just weirdly cool to me for some reason.
Even those station wagons are classics now. My family had a station wagon in the '70s, but it was solid blue. My sisters and I used to sit in the rear-facing back seat and make faces at the drivers behind us.
DeleteI think about that sometimes as I play albums I bought in 1968 on my turntable, while my cassettes, CDs and early iterations of .mp3s sit in boxes.
ReplyDeleteWhat about your 8-track tapes? Mustn't forget the 8-tracks!
DeleteMy first car (circa 1984) was a 1966 Chevy Impala. It had AM radio, and that was all. My dad had an old 8-track player lying around in the garage, so I wired it in and raided my older brother's early 1970s stash. Good times.