G4's Attack of the Show mentioned the Paleo-Future blog last night. For some reason they gave the domain as paleofuture.org. Does that mean I have to set up a nonprofit organization now? Maybe I could create a foundation that donates used jetpacks to at-risk youth.
Paleo-Future readers in the Twin Cities may have noticed a certain blogger on the front page of today's St. Paul Pioneer Press. No, it wasn't my idea to pose, fake-blogging on my bed. We have a small apartment. The living room is filled with books and there's no place to sit. The photographer didn't have many options.
A couple friends of mine made a bet about how early in the piece Disney or EPCOT would be mentioned. Nic won. He guessed the sixth paragraph.
It was the fifth.
Matt Novak has seen a vision of the future. A lot of visions.
That's because in the past year or so, the 24-year-old St. Paul resident has turned himself into a sort of accidental expert on the paleo-future: depictions of the future from the past.
He collects and comments on yesterday's predictions of tomorrow on his blog, www.paleofuture.com, which has become a sort of online museum of a promised world of jet packs, meals in a pill and sex with robots.
Novak said the project, "a look into the future that never was," started in January 2007 when he was taking a writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. One of the assignments was to create a blog.
He'd always been interested in the fantastic, strange or goofy predictions of the future, dating back to a childhood visit to Disney World: "In the 1980s, EPCOT was a thing that already looked dated." There also was his second-grade diorama in 1992 of what the world would look like eight years in the future: "Cars on magnetic tracks, all sort of crazy things like that; 2000 was such a magic number, the world would be so different."
The Paleo-Future blog made PC Magazine's list of their 100 Favorite Blogs. It's truly an honor and I'd like to thank everyone for reading. Pretty soon, all this attention is going to go to my head.
When starting a blog, the simplest ideas are sometimes the best. High-concept sites are often better left in the conceptual stages. Occasionally, however, really terrific concepts are even better in practice, as is the case with Paleo-Future, a blog dedicated to cataloging concepts of the future as envisioned by denizens of past decades, from the 1880s through the 1990s. Paleo-Future is a fantastic trip through days of future past, from Victorian air travel to Zemeckis-era Nikes. But it's a sobering reminder of the sideways march of technology. Flying cars, my butt.
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