How the Internet Gave Us Access to Obscure Television
Up until the late-1990s, if you missed something on television then it was unlikely you were going to see it again any time soon. Even if you had – and I understand younger readers’ horror at this proposition – managed to position yourself in front of your television at a set time, you would need a hardy memory to remember it over the years.
curious british telly
‘How the Internet Gave Us Access to Obscure Television‘ is a nice short history of of British media trading as it transitioned from tape trading to BitTorrent and then onto modern Youtube.
A Paranoid Hoax: the enduring terror of ALTERNATIVE 3
Alternative 3 was an April Fools’ hoax, broadcast on Anglia Television and presented as part of a documentary strand called Science Report. April 1st 2021 does not mark its thirtieth anniversary, or its fortieth, or its fifty-seventh. This is because, in one of the most astonishingly unfortunate incidents in television history, strikes had led to scheduling changes, meaning it couldn’t be aired on April 1st. It aired instead on June 20th 1977, in the middle of a famously hot summer that the film itself seemed to predict.
horrified magazine
‘A Paranoid Hoax: the enduring terror of ALTERNATIVE 3‘ is a nice short look at the ‘Alternative 3‘, a spoof documentary from 1977 about the partial evacuation of Earth to Mars to avoid climate change.
A somewhat ropey YouTube copy of ‘Alternative 3’ can be seen below:
Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073)
This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Miguel Acevedo.
qntm.org
And, lastly, a rather horrific short story written in the style of a Wikipedia article about the transfer of human consciousness to a digital platform.