Retro

[SameSelf]

"Retro" is trending. Some call it old school. Vintage. Blast from the past. When going retro is a purposeful activity, it can look like this. Someone running Win10 on the latest Skylake cpu might suddenly get an urge to build a Win98 box. This will quickly involve cobbling together parts off ebay, searching the web for obscure drivers, and so on. When they are finally playing their favorite first-person-shooter from the late 90s, nostalgia engulfs them. Other times, however, what is old is new again. For example, the return of vinyl records.

However, being curmudgeonly often masquerades as retro. While there is currency in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage, some people just refuse to change with the times. Physics calls this inertia. I call it static friction. Either way, a considerable amount of energy is spent in trying to stay put.

Lately, I have been thinking into which camp I fall. I resisted the calls to upgrade from XP right up until MS pulled the plug. But even then, I only took a small step forward by upgrading to 7, not 8. Looking back, my time on XP was quite long, nearly ten years. And I wasn't alone. I had most of the world as good company. But recently, I upgraded to 10 which means my time on 7 was only two years, aided by the fact that MS offered a free upgrade.

But more often than not, staying current requires currency. And capital investments require some sort of cost benefit analysis. The cost to upgrade AND retrain can quickly outweigh any incremental gains. There are some very thoughtful essays on the web about the true costs of the upgrade cycle. And I am not just talking about OS's. Long before I started getting seriously into video, I built a small recording studio. Music is my first love, and upgrading my recording equipment would be very costly indeed. Fortunately, I made wise investments and have the ability to record and mix at 24/96, so I am not feeling the pressure of upgrading (yet).

But video is a different story. When I look back on the last four years, it has been a wild ride. I started out even before that with Adobe CS2, riding the wave from CS3 all the way to CS6. Those upgrades were fairly painless because of the similarities while bringing important support for things like AVCHD. So, I was heavily invested in the Adobe universe which is why I was so angry when they ditched their CS cycle in favor of SaaS. Lucky for me, other tools came along just in time. Of course, this has required a substantial amount of re-tooling along with some investment. Recreating old workflows just isn't possible. But new and exciting ones are.

Am I state of the art? Hardly. But I feel like I have definitely moved out of the retro camp and into the camp of being current. And it is fun. The stuff I am learning blows my mind daily and makes me excited for the future.

[andysimi]

Hey I'm obsessed with RETRO vibes too. It's melancholy.