this old girl was waiting for me outside school, near the electronics waste, and up until last week she was hanging out with the ramshackle typewriters in the basement (ramshackle typewriters only wax nostalgic).

but after a decade in the basement, she finally made it outside again, braving the chilly summer nights and the torrential seasonal squalls; wading alone by herself in the flood and rain for days.

knowing she could be dangerously full of water, i was careful not to rush things and plug her in too hastily.

she shed her plastic shell after some unscrewing with my tool (screwdriver)

she wasn’t that wet inside anymore, so i tried plugging her in, but as expected, i couldn’t turn her on.

i played with her connections and blew on her components, but she just laid there silently.

on the inside i could see some kind of treasure - her optical magic - so i was persistent

learning her ins and outs, i started to think maybe she’d just run out of time and succumbed to the senility of the product life cycle.

but i was drawn to her details. her optics and circuitry and mechanisms excited me, and i wouldn’t stop until she told me so

i turned her over and found the box where she keeps her light source

following the power chord into the machine and using a multimeter, i learned that her buttons just weren’t being pushed anymore by the old rusty rod stuck inside her.

with a gentle touch, some sticky tape, and a few screws, i finally turned her on again.

WOWOWOW she flashed me and made soft sweet noises as the motors inside her started to drive again for the first time in years

she finally calmed down after twenty seconds and then she just sat there, radiating analogical beauty.

i hope she has a few more tricks for me in that dusty old box. she might smell like lube from the 1980s, and she might be out of style, but for such a cheap date, she’s pure class.

tomorrow we’ll try to clean out her old rollers inside and see if we can’t make her print like she did in the 80s when she was still fresh, and then we’ll live happily ever after or we’ll sacrifice her to the technological gods on a copper spire. when we hit that mercury switch, it rains greek fire.

a brilliant light will shine down on her from the sky above, god will say ‘thanks for your servitude, sorry about the humans’, and she’ll ascend righteously to silicon heaven where 72 virgin users are waiting to have their minds blown by the way she displays micrographics.

carl zeiss jena microscope ~1940-1960. my first attempt at photomicrography; taking a photo of an image of myself the baby.

this obviously isn’t the right way to do it, but it works more or less

there’s an episode of red dwarf about how lister was found in a box labeled ‘ourobouros‘ - basically lister was his own father or something.

this doesn’t really have that much to do with me looking through an old microscope at an old image of myself as a baby with cute red overalls, but it’s a small step toward describing this strange feeling.

here is this tape from 1984.

with a regular old bulb we can see some images, but they’re SO FUCKING SMALL

cutting film into 100mm long strips, taping the edges to a piece of thin acrylic ( .5 mm)

mounted between another piece of acrylic, taped together on 2 sides

viewed through a 35mm projector on the wall:

in the video below there’s an amazing demonstration of the quality loss that takes place between an original and a copy and a copy of a copy and a copy of a copy of a copy and so on.

and björk talking about her television:

this is the final scene of the movie alcatraz, starring nick cage.

this chick is waiting for nick to come running out of the church. she’s a get-away driver.

nick comes running out of the church but he’s below this frame:

he scrambles to the car clutching a piece of wood, slides through the dirt, jumps in the car, and they speed away

out of the piece of wood comes a metal container WITH MICROFILM!!!!!!!!!!
holy shit!!!!! the whole movie was just a lead in to this moment.
“honey..! do you want to know who shot JFK?”

with just a magnifying lens, he can confirm or deny your wildest suspicions!

microfilm holding secrets.

they speed off down a dirt road

the end.