The Null Device
2004/7/29
The battle for domination between the Baby Boomers and Generation X is being fought in the realm of fashion:
Generation X, he said, had been hoodwinked by boomers into embracing their ageing culture. Popular culture is still stacked with fading sex symbols such as Pierce Brosnan and Mel Gibson. Black, a slimming colour, has been in vogue since the boomers began getting corpulent in the mid-1990s. Buzz cuts became de rigueur when balding 40-something men decided anything was better than a comb-over.
He said a fashion revolt had been spearheaded by the daughters of the boomers - generation Y - who began to flaunt their toned midriffs at the turn of the century. Future male generation Y trends might be body-hugging lycra in pale colours with patterns or hairstyles that can't be worn by balding men.
Apparently the black rectangular glasses worn by emo hipster types are also a baby-boomer baldness-camouflaging device, and too will disappear as we welcome our new buff, tanned Generation Y overlords, along with such 1960s trappings as zen and meditation.
I wonder, though, what this means for music. The rise of hip-hop/R&B into dominance of the charts could bear out this trend (the resurgence of 1970s-style rock goes against that; though perhaps those are the last death throes of Boomer-dominated pop culture?). In the indie sphere, classicist Beatles/Bacharach-inspired pop could give way to glitchy electropop made with laptops. The (late) boomers' punk-rock DIY aesthetic could give way to the UK Garage PlayStation DIY aesthetic. And with the backlash against wearing black, things don't look too good for goth, do they?
Stupidity of the day: a nightclub night, advertised on the front of a street paper from a few weeks ago, calling itself "Le Belle Donne". If they're going to act all sophisticated and Frenchified, it would help if they actually got the word genders right.
There are now quite a few emulators running on PalmOS devices; from an expensive commercial Atari 2600 emulator to a lot of Sinclair Spectra to the Frodo C64 emulator. This actually runs quite well on my Tungsten T3 (with the slight exception of Paradroid going into pause mode every time one pushes the joystick down). I remember real Commodore 64s, and, some time after that, the hard-won satisfaction of seeing PCs (486s or low-end Pentiums, I think) finally get fast enough to emulate C64s well enough for games at full speed (possibly without sound, though); to think that now you can run a nigh-perfect C64 emulation on a pocket organiser is, well, strange.
Elsewhere, there was a project to port MAME to PalmOS, and someone collecting donations for it. The donations page seems to have disappeared, though, and the MAME site has no links to it. Hopefully someone will pull it off sometime soon. (There is Xcade, a commercial arcade emulator, though this only supports a handful of ROMs.)