Friday, August 23, 2024

Well, it looks like another Friday. So here's a newsletter. Hope you love it.

Item 1: a link

Part of me wishes I had never discovered the Obsolete Sony newsletter, because it's going to be hard to resist just linking to it every week (and because Substack is bad). But I couldn't resist this recent post about "5 Sony VAIO Designs That Changed the Look of Personal Computers" - because I personally wanted to buy all of them and never got one.

I think VAIO is best known (to the extent anyone remembers it at all) as a line of fancy, overpriced laptops - and it was that - but look at this from the year 2000:

The absolute pinnacle of CRT monitor industrial design. And they didn't stop there. They made a flatscreen computer, too, the same year (i.e., about 10 years before they really should have done that):

I'm sure they weren't worth the money (at the time, with limited resources, I was in the middle of a Dellaissance), but every time I saw an ad for one in Wired Magazine I made a mental note: someday... Sadly, that day never came, and if it ever does it won't really be the same. As for whether they really changed the look of personal computers? Nah. But I wish they had.

Item 2: a list

Old McDonald’s farm animals, ranked:

1. cow
2. newt
3. pig
4. chicken
5. komodo dragon
6. goose
7. snake
8. capybara
9. mosquito

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Triumvir

We rejected monarchy, we've tried democracy, we've dabbled with fascism. But America has never given three triumvirs, each with an equal share of the responsibility for the executive function, an honest chance. It's time to shake it up!

Item 5: a photograph

See ya!

Thanks for reading. It's been a pleasure. See you next week.