Andrew Gilhooley's Blog

What's that fool Gilhooley talking about now?

Category: Technology

  • News has recently begun to circulate that mid-2000s social networking site MySpace might be looking to make a comeback. Details are scant at this point, but the company’s current owners confirmed their plans in a recent documentary about the site’s rise and fall. If you were online during the early 2000s, you may remember the…

  • Chances are that you have experienced enshittification without even knowing there was a word for it. If you can remember the dial-up days of the internet, you might remember that when Google first appeared, it was absolutely amazing. The other search engines of the time, like Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Infoseek and AltaVista, were clunky and…

  • Video games are such a ubiquitous part of people’s lives now, being played on phones, tablets, consoles and computers. Their variety and complexity are such that it’s easy to forget that for members of Generation X, playing a video game usually meant a trip to the arcade to play simple games like Space Invaders and…

  • 1977. Star Wars, Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, the death of Elvis Presley and the arrival of punk rock in the UK. What a time to be alive! I was there, busily chanting my multiplication tables in unison with my classmates at junior school. It’s hard to convey just how dangerous, how subversive those first…

  • After writing last week’s post about nostalgia, I started thinking about the fact that the things people get nostalgic for are often cultural: Television shows (the 1960s adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, Bagpuss, and The White Horses often come up in discussions by British people around my age), board games (Mouse Trap, Operation and Bloik!!), sweets…

  • I am well aware that writing a blog is something of an exercise in vanity, and that as well as being the author of this blog I am also probably its only reader. However, I write it mostly for the pleasure of getting my thoughts out on the page and to be able to read…