If the character was Phil Coulson then it probably was the same story.
I can sort of understand it. I've only had email for slightly less than half my life, and yet I can't imagine living without it anymore. I'm apparently now old-fashioned because I still use email, rather than texting or IM'ing exclusively.
I still remember when fan fiction was first moving to the internet--on mailing lists!--rather than fanzines. The old fogeys then complaining that back in the days of fanzines stories were edited and the stories were selected for quality. I laughed and laughed and then I think I cried, because I remembered paying twenty to thirty bucks for more than one collection of badly written, misspelled, unreadable crap in fanzines.
At one convention a group of us took turns reading aloud an incredibly badly written piece of "adult" fan fiction that one of us had paid good money for. Each person's turn at reading lasted only as long as they could keep a straight face while reading--I think the "winner" managed two whole pages. My strongest memory was the male protagonist holding the female protagonist up over his head, one-handed, while he performed cunnilingus on her, while standing under a waterfall.
Tangentially linked (to the original post rather than the waterfall etc.); I have wondered if young folk today (!) reading older mysteries wonder why the character doesn't just use his mobile/cell phone to make the critical phone call, rather than walking miles cross-country looking for a phone box. Or how a character could be so sure that a letter would be delivered on a specific day. I seem to remember that one Agatha Christie plot turns on the letter's arriving by a specific delivery (second delivery as opposed to just when the postman happened to get there). And some plots depend on trains running precisely to time!
Diane Duane's "To Visit the Queen" has time travelers failing in their attempt to intercept a critical letter before delivery (or mailing? I forget) because they thought it would take *two days* for a letter in Victorian Britain to get from Scotland to London or vice versa. Their local/temporal ally expresses extreme bogglement that they thought a letter wouldn't be delivered the same day. Of course what we tend to forget is that the stamps back then cost closer to FedEx prices than today's stamp prices.
Meanwhile, I used to have a bumper-sticker that read, "Email: for when it absolutely, positively has to be lost at the speed of light."
Oh I just lusted after a word processor. In fact I took a truly awful job once (selling insurance) because it came with a cool portable computer and it had a word processing function and I was so going to start writing my novel. The damn thing was bigger than my suitcase I take on overseas trips and weighed twice as much.
Oh! You had a Kaypro too? My dad has one--he probably still has a few, the non-profit he worked for collected them when other non-profits were upgrading because they had files that could only be opened with the Kaypro software and they were worried about their machines breaking down.
It's hard to remember, as I sit in my easy chair using my laptop to communicate to people in other countries, that at one point I couldn't email my professor from across campus--and that he or she couldn't email me to tell me that my 8AM class had been canceled. I can imagine how foreign that would be to someone who grew up with email on their smart phone. It's like I know my mother only had a party-line telephone as a child, but I can't quite picture it.
(I have in fact lived two years of my life without a telephone of any sort, let alone email--on Guam in 1977 or thereabouts, when there was a long waiting list for them.)
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I can sort of understand it. I've only had email for slightly less than half my life, and yet I can't imagine living without it anymore. I'm apparently now old-fashioned because I still use email, rather than texting or IM'ing exclusively.
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IMing bugs me and I'm the only one among my friends who doesn't have an unlimited texting plan. Viva la telephone and email!
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At one convention a group of us took turns reading aloud an incredibly badly written piece of "adult" fan fiction that one of us had paid good money for. Each person's turn at reading lasted only as long as they could keep a straight face while reading--I think the "winner" managed two whole pages. My strongest memory was the male protagonist holding the female protagonist up over his head, one-handed, while he performed cunnilingus on her, while standing under a waterfall.
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I've never done this. My life feels incomplete, now.
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Ahh, the olden days.
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Meanwhile, I used to have a bumper-sticker that read, "Email: for when it absolutely, positively has to be lost at the speed of light."
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Oh I just lusted after a word processor. In fact I took a truly awful job once (selling insurance) because it came with a cool portable computer and it had a word processing function and I was so going to start writing my novel. The damn thing was bigger than my suitcase I take on overseas trips and weighed twice as much.
Yeah. I get you.
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-J
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(I have in fact lived two years of my life without a telephone of any sort, let alone email--on Guam in 1977 or thereabouts, when there was a long waiting list for them.)
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