Imikimi Makes Me Slightly More Ill

I don't go LOOKING for online kitsch, it just comes along and hits me. Similar to the terrifying Dance Heads gimmick, I've just noticed an even more bizarre phenomenon: Imikimi.

The Imikimi idea seems to be that online artists create thematic images, and then leave a spot in the frame for you to place your picture. This is like those fairground "stick your face in the hole and look like the fat lady" displays, except it's instantly customizable and therefore totally disposable.

Most of what you see on Imikimi is unbearably cute in that "angels and hearts and babies" sort of way. Tellingly, in their "Editor Tips" FAQ, topic four of six is "How to make a heart" (or rather "Hot to make a heart," since the Imikimi instructions are rife with typos).

The great thing about Imikimi is that most of the content is user-generated, so you get all sorts of crazy stuff that you'd think nobody would ever want, and then you find out that those things are extremely popular and people really do want them. Here are some of my favourite discoveries:

The Cabanting family, pill-shaped...but something's wrong with Lebrado!

Sweet baby with horn in ear!

To appreciate this one you must understand that the kitten's eyes blink and its paw waggles up and down. And it sparkles.

There's lots of Twilight on Ikimimi.

Cthulhu fhtagn!

If you've got a minute or two and you feel a bit insecure about your sense of style and taste, check out Imikimi. You will learn SO MUCH MORE about the world.

Stereotypes Come True

Jesus Christ. Just LOOK at them.

(From the July, 1985 issue of Antic Magazine)

From the Dot Matrix Digitizer to the Thunderscan: '80s Technological Kludge

Hey kids! Put down your DNA-sampling iPhones and listen up. This is how it used to be.

During the mid-80s, scanner technology was just entering our consumer consciousness. We knew that lucky businessmen had something called "Fax Machines," but those of us at home were totally unable to get photographs of lingerie models into our 8-bit computers (without tracing them on a transparency, sticking the transparency to the television set, and then drawing under it with a joystick-driven "fun with art" program).

But all this changed during April 1985, when Antic Magazine published instructions for..."The Dot Matrix Digitizer."

Here's the basic (and totally ass-backward) idea: you remove the printhead from your dot matrix printer and replace it with a homemade light pen. Instead of putting blank paper in your printer, you roll in the picture you want to digitize...say, this picture of handsome devil Sam Tramiel.


Then you ran a program which fooled your printer into thinking it was actually printing something, meanwhile retrieving the information from the light pen which was now creeping back and forth over the picture in your printer. Sixty minutes later you got this!


That's right! Not only could you cheaply digitize pictures of Sam Tramiel in the comfort of your own home, but you could ALSO make him look like Gene Shalit!

When I first read this article I thought "Wow, what a ridiculous Kludge...I bet nobody ever did it except the staff at Antic Magazine!" Then I learned about the "Thunderscan," a product for the first generation Macintosh which did exactly the same thing.

We truly live in a world full of inventive and crazy people. It's a good thing the inventors of this technique never decided to "Go Galt!"

Nineteen-Eighty

The Real Reason for the Death of Laserdiscs

There are a lot of reasons why Laserdiscs never caught on. They were bulky, they couldn't hold more than about thirty minutes of video a side, they tended towards glitchiness, and you couldn't record on them. Videotape was bound to win out in the consumer market.

But ever since I've discovered this 1977 article about "Videodiscs" I'm convinced that the REAL reason Laserdiscs failed was because they were being promoted by a guy named Alfred Bork, and he looked like this:


Crazy Sasquatch! Considering the rigid standards of cleanliness required during the manufacture of laserdiscs, his Rasputin beard and woolly-mammoth arms must have sent scientists and technicians fleeing their laboratories.

All that said, however, I do have a point to make about computer technology in the '70s...they were so darn obsessed with the EDUCATIONAL potential of computers, in the same way that everyone was ga-ga about the educational applications of laserdiscs. Even in the 1980s, the manufacturers of home computers were insisting that their personal computers had the best quiz and tutorial programs, even though the children forced to PLAY those programs ran like scientists from a tech-guru's beard.

As computers got smaller and more affordable they entered schools and homes for the first time, and I imagine that educators and parents had to convince themselves that they weren't buying toys, they were buying TOOLS, and the companies were more than willing to play along. Jeez, remember all those awful exercise and recipe-storage programs they used to try to sell us, and all those "educational games" to teach you touch-typing?

Eventually it sank in that playing games WAS a great reason to buy a computer, and as the price of memory decreased the home computer became a viable business facilitator as well. Nowadays I suppose most people buy computers so they can use the internet and get email, which makes me wonder if the PC will be supplanted by the Smartphone someday.

I'm just happy as long as we never see software like this again:

Another in Our Series of "What the '80s Were REALLY Like Pictures"

For the record, this is Fernando Herrerra and his son.

Fernando wrote "My First Alphabet," a bizarre and obnoxious game that I remember far too well from my childhood.

The eyeglasses, the collars, oh shit.

Portrait of the Rich '80s Nerd