770 replies to this topic

[caltrek]

+1 for WJ Fox.  Very nice concept.

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

Goddamn me... seeing these people of a century ago in such life, color, and fluidity... it all sends shivers down my spine and connects me to them in a way that the original films never could.

Those old films, with their grain and lack of color and poor framerates, felt so distant and unreal. Yet perfectly "historical" if that makes any sense. But with upscaled features, these videos look like any other one you might see on YouTube taken on a phone's camera in passing, and you almost feel as if you could go there and talk to them, until you realize these people have been dead for decades, if not a century. No, really; plenty of those people in those videos, especially the ones from the 1890s and 1900s, probably died before 1920. Anyone older than 70 probably clocked out; loads of young men definitely drained their blood on the battlefields (and, coupled with the women, might've died in cots from the Spanish Flu); even many of those children might've succumbed to diseases before their 10th birthday. Hell, some of the children in those earlier videos probably did make it past the wall of childhood mortality only to be slain by the Flu in 1918.

Yet we still have them on record. And using methods far more arcane than they ever could have understood, we can now even see them as they saw themselves.

 

I believe I even mentioned this before in this very thread about how melancholic it sometimes makes me feel to imagine the lives of those from this era. 

 

We still lack longevity escape velocity and AGI. But we can at least imagine how we might get there in our lifetimes. Immortality may yet be ours. We might actually make it to stars, or at least inner space. 

 

They never could. But they didn't know it and had no reason to despair. They were people who lived lives all the same as yours or mine, with all the same sorts of daily bullshit and yearly trends of bullshit that we go through as well. They were born and knew they were going to die. That doesn't mean they necessarily accepted it; especially in this era, this was the time of esotericism and magickal thinking when many Europeans idealized the far-east and dreamed that, somewhere beyond the misty mountains of Tibet and Nepal, there were secretive monks who possessed supernatural powers. Others believed that the Fountain of Youth may still lie somewhere in the great unexplored regions of Earth, or that, deep in the untamed and savage jungles of Africa and South America, there were fantastical fruits and ancient rituals that bestowed eternal life upon people. Here we are a century later, preparing to create technology to grant ourselves abilities far beyond any of those mythical powers.

And yet something about that just feels so melancholic. To know that their death was absolutely certain and there was nothing they could do about it except live this life, and even then, many fascinated themselves about what might be done to prevent their mortality while others just never thought about it. For most, more pressing concerns were how they were going to pay off debts to city bosses or if they had the charm to move up the ranks of their job.

In a time when "computer" was a job title and automobiles were a futuristic new innovation and the only alternative you really had to current-day industry was the wild bucolic fields of the countryside, you didn't know you were going to be spied on by denizens of the future, watching you through AI-washed lens to see you in a way that even the camera you were recorded on couldn't.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

 

Upscaled with neural networks footage from the dawn of film taken in Belle Époque-era Paris, France from 1896-1900.

[Yuli Ban]

Some of the older people in this clip met individuals who were born in the 1700s when they were younger. Some of the younger ones heard The Beatles

[Yuli Ban]

1840’s – A Doctor and his tools

[Yuli Ban]

1847 – unidentified woman

[Raklian]

1847 – unidentified woman

 

I'm sure she was considered extremely attractive in her time.

[Yuli Ban]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[Outlook]

hell on earth

 

[Outlook]

greatest world war 1 video on youtube

[Jessica]

[Yuli Ban]

[wjfox]

31 years ago today.