The Phone Graveyard

I’ve been tidying up various cupboards, drawers and boxes, and look what I found?

I mean, I knew that I’d had a few phones over the years, but…

And what do you do with old phones, anyway? I put the old one in a drawer and think “I’ll keep that one as a backup in case my new phone breaks down”, and then… it stays there forever.

But since I found all these phones, I thought it might be slightly amusing to see if they still work, and if so, try to salvage any data they had (mainly pictures; messages are probably too hard to exfiltrate).

So that means a lot of charging. Behold my wonderful charging station.

Let’s see if I can order them approximately by the order I bought them… (Or were most of these bought by the job? That’s not impossible.)

I think this was my second phone — before this I had a Nokia with a rubbery cover, but this had some sort of extra functionality that I had to have? I don’t remember what, though.

This Nokia is so light and fits just right into the hand. The front cover slides out and has the microphone. Very cool late 90s (?) phone.

I don’t have a charger for this, though, so I don’t know whether it still works.

The Motorola Razr is a classic… and uses USB charging, so that’s easy enough to get going. And it works fine.

Nokias E71 and E72 — these were so nice. The keyboards on these are very easy on the thumbs. I had to buy a new old Nokia charger to get them to boot, but they still work fine. Very slow, though.

This is a phone I’ve used a lot — the Nokia Communicator. The screen slides out sideways, and the keyboard is very, very nice. It also has ssh, so I would ssh in to a server and use Emacs to read mail and stuff. The memories…

Microsoft planted their fifth colonist inside Nokia to drive them to bankruptcy, so that Microsoft could have somebody to buy. But Nokia made a couple of Windows phones before that happened.

This is physically the most pleasing phone I’ve ever used. I mean, I’ve never actually used-used it — it was a work phone that we got to test out apps and stuff — but it feels just incredible in the hand. The screen isn’t flush with the melamine body, but protrudes in a soft and rounded way.

And the Windows OS is so stylish.

Too bad it was doomed from the start, because Google actively sabotaged the effort (you couldn’t use Youtube from the phone, for instance), and because Microsoft sucks. But physically this phone is fantastic — among the last ones designed by Nokia, and they knew what they were doing.

This Blackberry Priv was the last phone I had with a keyboard, and I didn’t use it for a long time — I thought it was just too big. When the keyboard slides out, it becomes really unwieldy to handle — it wants to tip over. So not really a good phone.

Ahh. So many phones.

After this, I’ve had a series of smaller Android phones, none of which I still have — I think they either stopped working, or I’ve managed to give them away over the years.

So now what? These things don’t have a sales value… so I guess the logical thing to do would be to recycle them, especially since I’ve now recovered all the pics from them. But… on the other hand, I could just put them all in a box marked “obsolete gadgets” in the attic? No, that would be stupid.

OOPS!

Last Week’s Comics Tonight

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past couple weeks.

I bought another one of these DC collections of 70s comics for nostalgic reasons — I vaguely remember reading some of these when I was, like, ten.

What I remember most is Jim Aparo’s artwork (who does all the art on all the issues) — it’s not hard to describe it, it’s basically “Neal Adams but with a bit less drama”. It’s super attractive.

These sort of team-up books are difficult to write, I bet — and this is a bi-monthly series with absolutely no continuity. And Bob Haney writes all the characters without any character, so what we get is plot, plot, plot. One issue after another with a brand new hokey plot — like the above where the commissioner Gordon is fired… and then Batman is also fired!? And he just quits?

OK, this may be the hokiest of the stories, but… it’s a lot.

And every issue is divided into three chapters for some reason or other, which makes things seem even more cramped, plot wise. It feels like a throwback to 50s/60s super-hero comics in that way.

(By the way, this reminds me of a joke from a friend when we were talking about the phenomena of “Batman shampoos”, as one does:

“Why on Earth haven’t anybody launched a “Conditioner Gordon” product?!” You’re welcome.)

Anyway, I worked my way through this book for three weeks, reading an issue now and then, and when I got halfway there, I decided that I’d read enough of these, so I ditched the book.)

It’s been some very normal weeks for Spirou.

One thing I had to skip here — the Smurfs. I just smurfin’ couldn’t smurf the smurfin’ meaning of any of the smurfs. I mean words.

But there’s good stuff, too.

This is one of those award bait comics by veteran Norwegian comics artist Flu Hartberg. (Who seems like a good guy — he’s heading up an anti-LLM task force or something. Which is nice.)

But the book is just a collection of the tritest things you can come up with for a “serious” “graphic novel” — it’s a coming of age story, where we follow the protagonist from his small town to the Big City. I mean, look at the artwork — limited palette to make it serious, and the extremely clear artwork and storytelling to appeal to a non-comics-reading audience.

The dialogue is just risibly bad.

Oh, and what does the protagonist do in the Big City? Yes, he goes to art school where the teachers are just into Pointless Awful Conceptual Art and hate comics/illustration.

The book feels extremely unnecessary.

Jesse Lonergan does something very different.

I mean, look at this! Striking, eh?

Unfortunately, despite it looking really cool, I couldn’t get into it. It just feels oddly put together — it starts off almost totally wordless, but then it seems like he loses confidence in the reader, and starts putting in more dialogue that Explains It All, and that’s pretty jarring.

And the entire thing is mostly fight scenes and Spiritual Important Things, and meh.

But the artwork and design sure is great.

Another old French(ey) album…

Jessica Blandy isn’t very present in this one — it’s mostly about these evil, evil, degenerate, evil, insane and evil characters that live in a swamp (and one of them drinks blood) that kidnap Blandy to marry her and stuff.

I did really enjoy the sheer hatred of Americans that shines through.

Unfortunately, I learned something, and that’s never good! I hate learning stuff! But that preacher up there is quoting Proverbes 2.16: “Mais à la fin elle est amère comme l’absinthe, Aiguë comme un glaive à deux tranchants.” And I went… “Bitter like absinthe? Sure, that’s bitter, but did they really have absinthe in the olden days? Isn’t it “bitter as gall” or something? But it turns out that the Hebrew word apparently means “wormwood”, which is the ingredient in absinthe, so the French translation is much closer than the English one…

Don’t you hate learning things, too? So now we’re even.

(I think it works that way.)

Another oldie from Dick Briel, who is Dutch (but this is translated into French).

The art style is, I guess, “Edgar P. Jacobs but from Ikea”. I like it.

And the adventures are nice and stupid, which I like. So… nice.

I don’t know who Christopher Fink is…

… but apparently he’s been doing comics for a while and stuff?

I didn’t connect at all with this one. The artwork is extremely tablet-ey, which isn’t my thing.

And it felt like I was perhaps supposed to have read his previous books to get this?

So… perhaps this is a work of genius? I don’t know; I ditched it after about fifty pages.

And that’s all from… Last Week’s Comics Tonight!

Catalogues

I found more stuff in the attic — this time around some comics catalogues from the 90s (and the year 2000). I really thought I had more of these, but I guess I must have had a previous spate of I”VE GOTTA CLEAN SOME STUFF UP and threw them out.

The Fantagraphics catalogue is, of course, called “The Ultimate Catalog”. They’re nothing if not shy, reticent and demure.

But interestingly, they’re also selling stuff from all kinds of companies, so perhaps the name is warranted? They must have had a pretty big mailorder business going for a while. I think they only sell stuff they’ve produced themselves these days?

And a random Bud Plant catalogue. I remember looking at one of these back in the 80s (lost in the mist of times) and being kinda fascinated.

Because there’s just all kinds of weird stuff in here, and I remember just wondering (when I was, like, twelve) how anybody could ever even dream of spending this much money on art prints and the like… I mean, it’s not even comics!!! ONLY COMICS ARE WORTH SPENDING MONEY ON!!!!1!

Anyway! I scanned them now and put them here, as well as incorporating them into kwakk.info.

Catalogue

I found this in a box in the cellar, so unfortunately it’s absorbed some moist cellar air over the years. But! Let’s have a look at it anyway — I think it’s a mildly interesting artefact (if you’re into 4AD).

So it’s a catalogue from 4AD from the early 90s. Well — mid 90s, I guess…

I just love the design and typography here. It’s all so thoughtful and well done — it’s by v23, of course (Vaughan Oliver and Chris Bigg, 4AD’s in house design team).

But, of course — it’s a pretty expensive publication, offset printed, so they can’t just run off a new edition every year when things go in and out of print, so:

They have to include a sheet (also well designed, but laser printed) to list what’s actually in stock now.

It rather feels like this catalogue sums up 4AD in one object — very pretty, but not really sustainable.

Anyway, I scanned it and put it here.

My First Compact Camera

I found more stuff in a drawer! This is, I think, my very first compact digital camera. Looks like it was released in 2003? So I probably bought it shortly after that.

It’s very scuffed, and I think I remember carrying around in my pants pocket while going around on holidays and stuff.

I charged the battery, and:

It’s alive!!!

I did not 1) expect the twenty-three year old battery to hold a charge, and 2) the motors in the camera to still work.

It’s a bit creaky, though (sound on):

Poor little motors. *grind* *grind*

It even works! That’s Gowron on the TV!

I’m amazed.

I wondered whether the camera was worth anything (I’ve sold several other compact cameras, and they’re surprisingly valuable (with hipster kids)), but I can’t find anybody selling this. Which either means that it was super rare… or just so bad that it has no value, so nobody’s selling it.

In addition to that, I also found my very first digital camera, but not so compact:

I do remember walking around with that camera, too. It was launched just two years before, so I didn’t use it a lot, I think. I remember it being pretty sucky. In addition to being so bulky.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t any battery inside, for some reason or other. I couldn’t help myself — I’ve ordered a replacement battery, just to check whether the camera still works. That makes no sense, but eh whatevs.

Sometimes it’s fun to root through forgotten cupboards…