Tag: nostalgia

April 5, 2025 THE COAL SPEAKER

The Gray Fade: On Fast Food, Isolation, and the Disappearing Color of Connection

Everything’s gray. Monotone. Lifeless. The buildings look more like bank branches or prisons than places to eat or hang out. Actually banks look more fun.
It doesn’t stop there. We stopped being fun, too.

March 29, 2025 THE COAL SPEAKER

Reimagining Centralia: What Might Have Been

AI helps visualize a Centralia that never had a mine fire..

March 15, 2025 THE COAL SPEAKER

Sara Gilbert was on the big picture. What did the big picture exist?

Pretty sure this existed in my school. Maybe yours, but I can’t find any traces that it did.

I am on a mission to find and buy presidents’ heads. Let me explain.

I’m talking about those iconic, oversized heads of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln that used to adorn classroom walls in the early 1900s. You know the ones—giant oval cutouts that loomed over children as they tackled their studies, offering a silent, patriotic presence, and in the case of honest Abe, a slightly melancholy and distinct stare..

But everyone I talk to says they are gone for good…

November 29, 2024 THE COAL SPEAKER

AND THEY’RE….HOME! BLACK FRIDAY BECOMES A SHADOW OF ITS ONE SELF

All of this is not to say that corporations won’t make money on Black Friday and that people are done Christmas shopping. Quite the opposite. Companies have slickly entered the market place of ideas in the tech era, making often even larger profits than when we all got in cars and went to malls. But what we will lack are the fun images.. the frivolity of fights and battle scars cash register wars. Those days are gone.

November 27, 2024 THE COAL SPEAKER

For the honor of Greyskull! He-Man and the nostalgia of the Thanksgiving day parade

Nostalgia can give us a feeling that memories were better than they really were. So can youtube videos of He-Man and She-Ra fighting off villains from Eternia at the 1986 Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade