Watching old Westerns, constantly have to remind myself that they’re not making Red Dead Redemption references, they’re both just riffing on the same locations that exist in reality north of Los Angeles
You know, it’s actually kinda weird for telling tales of the settling frontier that the Red Dead Redemption universe has a Texas analogue, a New Orleans analogue, a Northern California analogue, but no San Francisco analogue.
Watching Tales of Wells Fargo on the bar TV and realizing that it was a thing for the mid-20th century Western genre to use the limitations of period doctoring to implicitly highlight mid-20th century (from Korea if not WWII!) advances in trauma care
Also a little thrown how every shot I’m like “hey I recognize the Red Dead Redemption location based on that standing set!”
People don’t often look back on the early 1900’s for advice, but what if we could actually learn something from the Lost Generation? The New York Public Library has digitized 100 “how to do it” cards found in cigarette boxes over 100 years ago, and the tips they give are so practical that millennials reading this might want to take notes.
Back in the day, cigarette cards were popular collectibles included in every pack, and displayed photos of celebrities, advertisements, and more. Gallaher cigarettes, a UK-founded tobacco company that was once the largest in the world, decided to print a series of helpful how-to’s on their cards, which ranged from mundane tasks (boiling potatoes) to unlikely scenarios (stopping a runaway horse). Most of them are insanely clever, though, like how to make a fire extinguisher at home. Who even knew you could do that?
The entire set of life hacks is now part of the NYPL’s George Arents Collection. Check out some of the cleverest ones we could find below. You never know when you’ll have to clean real lace!
Plunging cut stems in hot water is still a thing in the florist trade.
101 uses for water, apparently
Ooooh, I can use the “unstick glasses stuck together” trick!
BTW historically, runaway horses were like car malfunctions; it’s a thing that happened sometimes because horses sometimes get freaked out and just nope out real hard, but it was obviously a far more common hazard when everyone got around by horse.
me: wow these frustrating RDR2 hunting request missions basically require me to learn to recognize bird species by their songs, and thus creates a more visceral sense of earned outdoorsmanship than I expected
also me: it’s great how you’re putting your desire for self-betterment and appreciation for nature in service of making the numbers on your vidya go up!
me: setting aside that real-life birdwatching spawn rates are too low to provide this reinforcing feedback, if as many Americans who are having this vidya experience actually did it tomorrow we’d clear the skies in a week, this questline is why the MBTA
