Hot tubs aren’t the only things that can double as time machines. Your computer can, too, with a bit of help. YouTube Time Machine is a website that allows you to pick a year, and watch video content from that year.
The site is pretty simple. A slider across the top allows you to pick a year (currently from 1860 through 2010). The content is pre-selected by the folks who run the site, and is fed to you randomly for the year that you select. You can filter content by type, allowing or disallowing certain categories of content. The current categories are Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies, and Music.
As an example of what you might get, when I selected 1986, I was presented with a video montage of television commercials that aired in 1986, the music video for Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On a Prayer, a trailer for Short Circuit 1, a montage of television show openings, and Marv Albert’s best sports bloopers of 1986.
The site isn’t perfect, but it is still in alpha status. Often, videos that I skipped kept returning as I skipped through content, and there is no way to list all of the selected videos for a year. Still, YouTube Time Machine offers a nice journey down memory lane. Does it bring back memories for you like it does for me?
Social Media’s Darker Side Has Reared its Head Outside My Door
Normally, I like to stick to light and fluffy things like how-to’s and reviews. I don’t get up on my soapbox often and I don’t like to mess up people’s days by spreading things that I wasn’t happy to learn. Today is a bit different. The fundamental shift in the way we gather, process, and spread information, while having a hugely positive affect on social efforts like fund and awareness raising, has an equally destructive affect when in the hands of those whose moral centre lays somewhere a billion or so feet below ground. What happened on Facebook over the past week — and is still happening now — is every bit as horrible and disgusting to me as the act that preceded it. I am, quite frankly, unable to fully process it, which is why I am writing about it, trying to put it into some sort of sense. Read more