Someone recently pointed me to http://abandonware-magazines.org/, a Web site dedicated to old French computer magazines from way back when. The creators of this web site took hundreds of magazines from the time, scanned them and made them available for all to see.-- Otaku, Cedric's weblog
I truly love the Internets.
The site is in French, which makes me wonder if the French language police are going to cite them for the site's name, an Americanism if there ever was one.
Despite the potential language barrier, it's worth having a quick look. First, notice their clever logo, a riff on the old DOS prompt. Second, even if you don't speak much French, it's fun to look at a site laid out in the usual way, and pick up the differences. Kind of like going to a Montreal Expos game, back in the day.
My favorite is at the sign-in section (not required): instead of username, the French webmasters ask for your nom de jeu.
If I remember correctly from high school, this translates literally as play name.
By the way, I saw no mention of les pommes frites des libertés.
2 comments:
Babelfish won't help you much with that last line -- how do you like them apples? -- so I'll state here that pomme frites are something Americans eat with ketchup, and not mayonnaise.
As for the meaning of liberté in this context, you'll have to ask a Republican.
My friend Dan sent me an email about this post, when I called it to his attention with an email of my own. The rest of the words in this comment are his. (His first postscript refers to my question about a fire in his area.)
You're right. I do hate blogs. To prove to myself that I hadn't just ossified, I took a look at your blog. Those old computers were downright scary. Since you brought up pommes-frites de liberte, let me say that...
In the French "devise" (motto): liberte, egalite, fraternite, they apparently did not apprehend the self-contradiction that free women are not compelled to share their toys with their equal peers without losing their freedom, or that men with state-guaranteed equality have no need of family-guaranteed (fraternal) support.
We suffer the same delusion: with liberty and justice for all. Too bad liberty and justice are antithetical. Social justice means dragging down the successful, liberty means jettisoning the parasitic baggage holding you back.
I have no trouble with the concept of a people collectively ceding individual liberty to support the welfare of all, but to pretend that increasing one does not decrease the other is delusional (Democrats) or deceitful (Republicans).
Too bad honest politicians (oxymoron?) cannot be elected, or we could finally forge an explicit social contract by consensus. In fact, you can summarize the left-right divide with the simple observation that each side is referring to a fictitious and unratified strawperson social contract as though all had at one point ratified it, and now the other side is breaking their promise, justifying righteous (or lefteous) indignation.
Random proof: I am not displeasing god by my disbelief in Him.
Either there is no god (therefore no displeasure), or
There is a god but my disbelief does not displease Him (QED), or
There is a god really pissed off at my lack of faith but is powerless do anything about it (impotence inconsistent with omnipotence), or
There is a god who wants to make me believe but knows that the act of making me will blow His cover (thus giving me power over Him, thus making me a god, inconsistent with monotheism), or
There is a god unwilling to provide any shred of evidence of His existence but willing to punish me for it (sadism towards innocence turns god into Satan)
Therefore, if god exists, then god is not displeased with nonbelieverdom.
Damn, here I am blogging! Well it is kinda therapeutic...
Dan
P.S. The fires didn't, but the noxious smoke did, and now I have black lung.
P.P.S. I assumed god is a man above despite the misperception of sexism because I proved that there is no god worth believing in, and its gender is immaterial (vacating any judgment of sexism). His and Him are capitalized because using "his" and "him" IS sexist, since him (unlike Him) does exist and does not deserve favoritism. In computer science terms, Him is an irrefutable (lazily-bound) pattern (sexist only when evaluated) whereas him is a refutable (strictly-bound) pattern that makes the statement immediately sexist when bound to the predicate. god is not capitalized because god does not exist. Satan is capitalized because Hugo Chavez claims that Satan does exist, and I am as yet unable to find a proof to the contrary.
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