Hasta La Gadget!

I watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from a young age. I was so young that my hands weren’t strong enough to turn the knobs of my parents’ retro TV. I’m totally serious. I had to have someone turn on the TV and change the channel for me. And somehow there was never an adult who thought that I shouldn’t be watching that show if I wasn’t even strong enough to turn a knob. Explains a lot. Anyway, the point is that that was the first TV I ever knew. The tech I interacted with consisted of a Panasonic cassette player and that TV. What was sitting in your family’s living room or your grandma’s basement when you were little? Journey back to your earliest tech interactions and reminisce below.

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In this infinite universe of ours, every event that occurs and every choice that we make continually split away into countless individual timelines—alternate realities, if you will. So who’s to say that Bigfoot, Kraken, Martians, even Cthulu himself aren’t perfectly real but simply residents of a now divergent reality? Matthew Buchholz, author of Alternate Histories of the World illustrates just a few major alternate historical events of the last 6,000 years.

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Last month was spent in a state of upheaval. After seven years in New York I was heading back to the opposite coast, which had led me to go though of the hundreds of pounds of accumulated junk one accidentally collects in boxes over the years.

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Believe it or not, the history of Nintendo goes all the way back to 1889. And before you ask—no, they were not selling Mario figures carved from wood.

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It’s nearly impossible for us to imagine how the Earth might look to someone who’s only ever seen it from a local’s vantage point. But thanks to the Library of Congress, we don’t have to imagine—newly posted images of 19th century drawings show us exactly what humans thought the Earth looked like far before we could ever have known for sure. The Smithsonian compiled a few of them, and some of our favorites lie below. You can see the rest over at The Library of Congress here. [Library of Congress via The Smithsonian]

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