I brick’ed my workstation about 3 weeks ago when BFU’ing to the December Crossbow Beta. Thanks to ZFS no data was harmed, just reinstall a fresh Solaris SX:CR and reimport the pool. I was busy and didn’t have time to reinstall Enlightenment, so I just put up with JDS. JDS sucks…. GNOME in general is just lame.

Tonight I built Enlightenment 16.8.5 (kwo is the man). I’ve been running DR17 for several months so I thought it was time to give DR16 a run again. It got me wanting to re-pimp my desktop. I started digging around for my old themes, PCF fonts, terminal settings, etc. It was fun going back down memory lane and pulling out some great themes for masters like my friend Pixelhead (seen in many places as “pixelmoose”).

The 21st Centry is, I’m starting to think, a fairly boring place. The 80’s and 90’s were filled with a growing desire to meet the future head on. We were reaching toward it, looking for it with open arms. I think Y2K was the big letdown because we were reminded that time is a human invention… cars didn’t start flying, we didn’t replace wood grains with steel plates, we didn’t see the final end of flannel. As a result retro came back with a rage. The 70’s came back into style in a big way… perhaps because we needed to go back to where we left off prior to this search for the future.

A lot of things that I really enjoyed have left the building. Style has gone retro. Electronic music has returned underground and in many genre’s (namely dark-roller and techstep) virtually vanished. Inflatable furnature has become obscure once again. Stylish and funky desktops are being replaced with boring Windows and OS X look alikes.

Orbital: gone. Future Sound of London: gave it up. Aphex Twin: Who knows. Reflex Records: idle. Squarepusher: Idling. Dieselboy just can’t pick up the slack and is idling.

I remember when sharing screenshots was all the rage. We all would spend hours making out desktops a thing of art and then boast for weeks about our kick ass screenshots. No more. I can’t remember the last time I went to a home page with screenshots prominantely displayed. I’m guilty I suppose, I removed them from my home page as well in favor of a more stylish design.

Not everything is a bust in this 21st centry. Metal has come back in a big way, which is good to see. A lot of it is still obscure but metal had all but died in the 90’s. Films still suck. SciFi films are scarse although at least Fantasy films have done alright. Anime trudges along as always…. just can’t keep the Japanesse down. And maybe there is a glimer of hope in the fact that the Japanesse never seem to cease reaching toward the future.

Wired Magazine sucks ass. ‘zines in general suck ass. The ‘zine revolution of the mid-90’s was a great time, and maybe the last great surge of the medium of paper prior to the internet revolution.

This blog entry has no point at all… maybe the next decade will glve up on retro bordom and return to a more optimistic view of the future where once again women all wear latex, we all sit on inflatable chairs, look forward to getting our next implant, elect Bruce Sterling president, proudly wear mirror shades and high-tops, listen to 300bpm music with breakbeats that cause small insects to implode and have desktops with interfaces kooler than the crap in movies. Here’s to the future that slipped through our fingers.