Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/30/original-backrooms-photo-of-yellowing-office-dungeon-finally-identified-as-oshkosh-hobbytown.html
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the things Zoomers find “unsettling” and “liminal” make me laugh. they never would’ve survived the '70s.
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As a teenager in the 70s, I worked odd jobs for a landlord who owned a suite of offices that, between tenants, looked exactly like this. Our crew loved hanging out there between projects. I look at this and “creepy” is the farthest thing from my mind — I hear “Baker Street” and smell coffee and donuts (or “2112” and cigarettes and beer).
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exactly! i see this kind of thing and i think… looks normal… warm… maybe even comforting, or cozy. definitely not scary at all.
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… the squatters parking their auto-generated nonsense at the same domain today are continuing the tradition of uncanny wrongness
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Could do with a couple of windows.
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It somewhat seems the word “liminal(ity)” has shifted in meaning from boring old dictionaries?
noun. That temporary state during a rite of passage when the participant lacks social status or rank, is required to follow specified forms of conduct, and is expected to show obedience and humility.
it used to just mean a place of transition like a foyer [shrug]
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Oh, “fourier” was a typo? Bummer.
The transformation to the correct word was very fast, though.
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Likewise, someone who is entirely new to it and dives into the deep end of the fandom pool does a fast furrier transform.
:: drops to four legged form and runs away ::
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It’s even looser, if anything, just anywhere that makes you feel on the threshold of something uncanny, dangerous or alien
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I remember a HobbyTown USA in Wichita I would go too. They were kinda pricey on stuff…
What is odd about these pics is the carpet - I don’t recall any business really being carpets. Office space, yes.
If I’m understanding the post correctly, it had been a furniture store previously, which would make some sense for the carpet. That aspect probably didn’t survive the HobbyTown remodel.
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I never understood a liminal space to be uncanny… it’s just a space that’s transitional. An airplane trip is a liminal space or a car ride.
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My experiences of the 1980s in Britain was part Billy Elliot, part Scarfolk. The media suggested that there was another Britain that would be familiar to zoomers (Late stage capitalist arseholes looking for maximum profit at any non-financial cost), but I never saw that part in real life, just its after-effects.
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