41–50 of 74 posts
True story: in the '90s, I used to buy print editions of the Onion for $1 at the Tower Records at Bay and Columbus in SF. How times change.
There is absolutely nothing like print for some things...
While I do like that everything is moving towards paperless, I hope we keep archives of all our knowledge in some permanent form. Should a world wide power failure or some other catastrophic event occur and we were "sent back to the stone age", the amount of knowledge we would lose from losing the internet is unimaginable.
If it's catastrophic enough that the event destroys all of our computers and generators forever, I would be doubtful that humans would still be around in any capacity where knowledge would be an important factor.
Reading The Onion every Saturday morning at the diner was one of my favorite habits. Their brand of satire works so well in the context of a traditional newspaper. Since they shut down print in New York City, I missed that a lot. I tried looking at the web site on a tablet over breakfast, but the presentation ruined it for me. While I was an avid reader of The Onion since college in the '90s, I've moved on. The web s…
While I do like that everything is moving towards paperless, I hope we keep archives of all our knowledge in some permanent form. Should a world wide power failure or some other catastrophic event occur and we were "sent back to the stone age", the amount of knowledge we would lose from losing the internet is unimaginable.
If humans were still around after being sent back to the stone age (without 100% infrastructure destruction), how long would it take to figure out how to generate enough power to boot a computer? I would hope that there are enough humans who know what electricity is even at a basic level to be able to get some generators running within a couple of years. Even still, there should still be a few power sources left that…
The real loss would be the engineers -- without people manning these systems I'm not sure we're getting that data back very quickly. What if you lose the key players -- the people who have the passwords, the knowledge, and control over these systems? It's losing the combination to the worlds most valuable vault, but the vault is digital and restoring it takes privileged information.
It's just a matter of time before someone starts a service to print out all of these online-only sites so you don't have to read them on a screen.
Reading The Onion every Saturday morning at the diner was one of my favorite habits. Their brand of satire works so well in the context of a traditional newspaper. Since they shut down print in New York City, I missed that a lot. I tried looking at the web site on a tablet over breakfast, but the presentation ruined it for me. While I was an avid reader of The Onion since college in the '90s, I've moved on. The web s…
Reading The Onion every Saturday morning at the diner was one of my favorite habits. Their brand of satire works so well in the context of a traditional newspaper. Since they shut down print in New York City, I missed that a lot. I tried looking at the web site on a tablet over breakfast, but the presentation ruined it for me. While I was an avid reader of The Onion since college in the '90s, I've moved on. The web s…
Their videos are great, especially their series genre parodies. Sex House and Onion Talks are my favorites. Their brand of surreal/sardonic humor translates well to television.
I'll shed a single tear because I have nostalgia for the print version, but this isn't really such bad news. The Onion has evolved, not died. They grew quite successfully into digital (especially with video & social media), and they're now completing that transition by cutting off what has by now become a vestigial distribution channel.