& Tina

Loves farm animals.

I found pieces of ripped up paper in my Physics textbook from an unknown time that, when put back together, rendered this phrase.

Who is Tina? Why does she love farm animals? HOW does she love them what came before the &? Does someone else love them and the author merely had bad grammar, or is there an entirely different subject there?

Also in physics, the teacher has a book he works the problems in so we have something to check against to see if we've done the work right, and he's collected waste paper for *twenty years* to fill that book. I am not kidding. There is a page from January 01 1980 with a class roster, complete with social security numbers. There are many pages from the morning announcements in 1997, photocopied with their all caps word-processor font.

It's like delving into a lost world, except it was my school. Yet just ten years ago it was so different. Few of the teachers mentioned are still there, the high school back then still had the 7th and 8th grade (it just now dropped 9th grade), after prom consisted of paintball and a movie, rather than laser tag, an obstacle course, a mechanical bull, a rock wall, karaoke, texas hold 'em and other things.

It reeks of a time when the student body was probably 100 students less, despite having three grades more included, closer and more tight-knit, more school spirited and less filled with flagrant debauchery (of course there was still plenty of debauchery, that was when my sister was starting to get into drugs and the crowd they consist of, but I would hope that the freshmen didn't hump one another in the middle of the court yard. Heck, they didn't do that last year)

But my topic is broader than this. I have always been interested in the ways things have been. I love to dig through old records and imagine the world as it existed then, nostalgia for things I never experienced. I explain this as it relates to computing on the front page of my web site, but it's more than that too. I think it stems from a desire to know things, and to find out anything I can. When I was little, instead of doing things with my grandparents at their house, I would run upstairs and snoop around in the old bedrooms of my mom and uncles.

Do you guys do this? Do you have an archive.org addiction, looking back on how webpages used to be and thinking back to how the users acted then, or perhaps you're a yearbook junkie, looking past the bad fashions to the club and organization pictures for insight on how students then spent their time and effort doing. Maybe you spent hours in your attic looking through your brother and sister's old belongings, looking at notes and pictures with faces cut out, wondering who they were and why they were gone.

It's like modern-day archaeology, that's what it is.

Yep, I'm exactly like that myself.:beer:

It really depends on what it is that I'm looking at. Say, old war photos or parents' pictures with family or friends. Nah, not that stuff. The story about the weird phrase in the book, though: total yes. I'm all about strange things that seem to have so much more meaning behind them.

50%. :rolleyes2

Meh, watching somebodies photos with them is the worst thing that can happen to your weekend... Totally different story if they are your or directly related to yourself photos.:)

I love to read old newspapers and magazines, especially from more than a year ago. It makes me go 'oh yeah, I remember that!' and it takes me back to what I was doing at the time. I was listening to a CD (actually I had transfetrred it to Minidisc so I can listen to it on the go) that I haven't listened to in ages, and it really reminded me of being at college. Some of the tracks on it I had completely forgotten about!

I also like to read the On This Day pages on the BBC website, particularly about accidents and disasters, goodness knows why... :confused:

Yeah; me'n my friend rambled through our school library one day, and we were trying to find the oldest books we could. It was kinda cool that we found stuff from -- what...1983? From before I was born. Granted, they were boring reference books on science and philosophy and stuff :p the paper inside one of them was so old and it was that nasty tea colour and it had that nasty aged smell, and someone had checked it out on 21st January 1983. Some ancient alumni person.

I love it. I don't like personal archaeology/nostalgia-hunting overmuch, because it makes me sad -- but stuff about the house I'm living in, my school, people I knew in my childhood and stuff. I love finding stuff linked to when I used to live in SA; the memories and things are so fragmented. Like a great adventure, it is! :D

I love that kind of stuff too <3