The Off Topic Topic

[Grey Fox]

Quicksand, I've actually never seen it in real life. 😅

Yeah, why was that such topic during our youth Was it in tv a lot or something?

It must have been all those Australian tv show we watched.

[Josquius]

Yeah I definitely remember quicksand as a 'thing'.

Its weird as similar but much more likely to be found as a problem is marshland that works similar.

I have to guess it was globe trotting adventure cartoons and mega drive games.


GPS and roads- I was just thinking about this yesterday curiously. I was driving down the A1, the really quiet single lane patch around the border, when I noticed at a round about a weirdly large number of people were turning off the A1 into some village....
20 minutes later.
Ah. Thats why. Traffic jam ahead.
Likely caused by the  fact at the end of it was a traffic light right on a road turning into that village.

Though with increasing knowledge/default built in privacy, fragmentation of online ecosystems, etc... I wonder whether this age of google maps might be limited.

[HVC]

I think of the multiple factors is that it seems that we expect today's children to do these things like adult and alone.

There used to be gang of children roaming everywhere.

That's true, there are less kids overall. My going theory, as mentioned before, is that less kids means each one is less expendable and so more guarded. Add 24 news paranoia in there.

One demographic was real hurt by the phenomenon though, serial killers peaked in the late 70s

[Sheilbh]

Re. 1970s public safety things. Jesus Christ

Looks like the BFI have done a compilation of films from the Central Office of Information - and I've discovered a really interesting book on them that I may get. The trailer for that compilation also looks absolutely fantastic. I am intrigeud:

Looks like a lot were worked on by very impressive people - Peter Greenway did one on Zandra Rhodes, the director of The Long Good Friday did a series about kids dying in accidents playing on a farm etc.

[HVC]

In Canada they over corrected on the doom and gloom message by the 90s and got weirdly joyful while explaining all the things that can kill you. Catchy songs though

[Syt]

In 1986 we had children's TV explain why we shouldn't play in the rain or spend too much time in the sandbox or be careful around mushrooms. (Though my part of Germany was thankfully barely impacted by Chernobyl fallout. We read a book about a family in the aftermath of nuclear war in school, though )

[Josquius]

The zoomer / millenial divide is really weird isn't it.
What other generation split has something on the scale of covid working as a "your time has passed grandad" moment.
Millenials just couldn't accept we were 30 without being forced to stay home.

[Razgovory]

The zoomer / millenial divide is really weird isn't it.
What other generation split has something on the scale of covid working as a "your time has passed grandad" moment.
Millenials just couldn't accept we were 30 without being forced to stay home.

The thing I find weird is that so many don't know how to work a computer.

[HVC]

The youngins use tablets and phones.

[The Brain]

Once you learn to navigate AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS it's not that hard to load enough stuff high to run your little games.

[Tamas]

Once you learn to navigate AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS it's not that hard to load enough stuff high to run your little games.

True dat.

[Syt]

Then again, colleague (41 years old) asked another colleague, "How did you manage to copy the link for the Zoom meeting into Whatsapp??"

[HVC]

Yeah their are people in every age group that are missing one skill or another. Probably including all of us hah.

The one that I find mind boggling, in a business environment, are people who don't know how to use excel. I don't expect people to be masters at macros, but you use this thing every day for years, how do you know so little? Yes, it's a sore point for me

*Edit* I worked with an old dude that used a calculator to add up columns or rows and manually enter in the data. I tried, in vain, to show him a simple formula. He preferred the calculator. I may have weeped at my desk that day

[garbon]

My new boss wanted to me to do something for him in the SAP Ariba procurement system but I didn't have access to the 'event'. I told him I knew it was trivially easy for us to add each other (once you'd had access) as a colleague had done last week for us both...but he proceeded to first just write to client to ask them to do it.

When they inevitably didn't add me (as client expects us to do it), I went in, checked an old event, and saw once you clicked on an event, there was a button to add team members. I then proceeded to show him, while sharing my screen, how to do it. That wasn't good enough, he had to share his screen where the whole system was in Italian and through image memory, I had to show him how to do give me access.

[garbon]

Btw, I'm surprised how computer challenged by husband is (he prefers to use his iPhone and iPad). I've decided it is because he is an apple head; permanently stunts one's computer literacy.