As I clean up and sort through the lower reaches of Camp Borepatch, I find long lost wonders. One was some Kodak slide carousels. A couple were slides taken by my late Father-in-Law; the ex will be wanting these, no doubt. One was slides taken by me no doubt on a vacation around 1990 or so - I posted some of these here, and these are very likely of the same vintage.
But one was slides. As in, Presentation Slides. On Network Security. Circa 1994-1995.
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I'm trying to remember when I had these made and for which venue, but two decades are somewhat thwarting my memory.
To add to the feeling of "old fartness", it seems that the crazy hipsters use the term "slidemanship" for something out of Mario Kart. Back In The Day it was the process of establishing dominance over your audience by first establishing dominance over your projectionist. Somewhere I have a hilarious writeup about that, which involves backwards slides, slides that are two pieces of film stuck together with wax that slide apart and de-focus when the heat of the lamp melts it, obscure references in Cyrillic typefonts ("Russian? No, no - Bulgarian, old chap!").
Mario Cart, indeed. Get offa my lawn, punks.
2 comments:
Slidesmanship! That's in one of the books on one of my shelves... not gonna dig for it right now.
I remember a slide with a predicted curve made of thread, glued in place, and observed data points held on with wax, so they'll settle onto the prediction as the wax softens. And... was it two identical slides followed by a blank? And the slide that clearly belongs in an advanced presentation on an unrelated topic - "Sorry; another of my little foibles, you know."
Somehow, between my age and my career path, I never had the opportunity to use any of those tricks.
My very first presentation at a scientific meeting, my friend walks up to the projector, trips over the cord, drops the slide carousel and the damn locking ring pops out, slides go everywhere. I was nervous BEFORE this happened. After the horrified 'why is everything in slo-mo?' feeling, it actually loosened me up, and I joked about how I fully expected to suddenly realize I was in my underwear just before waking up. Got a few laughs, and it set the tone for an irreverent 9 minute talk on sea urchin sex.
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