colin smith

I think that's somewhat missing the point. I write novels and in all honesty it doesn't take much craft skill to write a novel: it's basically a lot of typing. But to write a good novel you also need imagination, invention, psychological insight, self-criticism, research skills, self-discipline, and so on and so on. The same applies to creating things in VR. Just look at the work on Annie's Virtual Pre-Grouping, Grouping and BR Layouts & Workbench thread.

I haven't played it and for quite a while I was cynical about it. I actually thought it was something to do with mining! Then it was explained to me and I realised just how complex, educational, and creative it is. I'm too old to get into it but I can see its potential.

I saw that episode of Toy Stories and enjoyed it but I don't think we see the world the same way or even want to live in the same world. Incidentally, James May's entire TV career is based on the premise that it's all a bit of a joke.

The TV cameras weren't a distraction. TV was the whole purpose and I would argue the children responded in exactly the way the camera wanted.

Have you ever played Minecraft?

Of course it was a joke to them. It's an antique. I'm not sure what was a popular toy some fifty years before I was born but I bet the young me would have thought that was a joke as well. Bear in mind many of these kids will be happy building entire civilisations on Minecraft so manky bits of metal and a few bolts are unlikely to appeal. As for fuses, I can't remember the last time time I changed a fuse but I have flicked more than a few trip switches and while I can change a bicycle tyre it's not my favourite job and I'd happily pay someone to do it. Never owned a car but I think I'd just take it to the garage. Life moves on and the skills people need or want to develop move with it.

That's dreadful. If you 'd let me know the address of the dodgy website I'll send them a stern warning.

Please, I think that's unfairly singling out Youtubers. We need an exhaustive list of subjects that cause arguments on RM web.

Of course, producing material for YouTube, Facebook, and even Twitter, requires a lot of creativity, craft, and dedication if you intend to build an audience. In particular, producing material for YouTube is no more "filming yourself doing things" than writing a novel is typing. That the material or the medium doesn't appeal to any one individual is besides the point. There's very little in this world that does appeal to everyone. For example, I have no interest in opera or GWR 4-6-0s but I can appreciate that both are well made and each have their fans and I don't feel any need to denigrate them. So don't use snarky terms like 'Choobers' and for heavens sake don't start a discussion on the value of something if (a) you've already decided it doesn't have any value and (b) you don't know much about the subject. As for the hobby, well of course it has changed and it will continue to change because everything changes: I have 2,800 albums of music on a hard drive the size of a pack of cards; I've written a million words every one of which only exists on a screen; almost all my friends I only know through social media; via Google street view I can visit anywhere on earth (a god-send for writing fiction); none of which I could even have imagined a mere thirty years ago. As for the future of the hobby, I wouldn't mind betting that in twenty years time craft-skills like soldering and painting will be as relevant to model railways as the starting handle is to a modern car because most of us will be modelling in virtual reality.

To a degree yes. Though whether it's a threat is a matter of opinion: after all, mass transport and then the car completely changed society and not altogether for the better. As Kurt Vonnegut put it “Our close cousins the gorillas and orangs and chimps and gibbon apes have gotten along just fine all this time while eating raw vegetable matter, whereas we not only prepare hot meals but have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than two hundred years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels.”

That's not a can't do situation. That's a 'I'm not doing that if you're not prepared to pay me a living wage' situation and quite right to.

Err. I am reasonably educated but just thought it was an archaic bit of phrasing. I suppose it depends on what one chooses to be educated in and parliamentary history isn't for me.

Yes it is, thankfully. I'm confident the UK will not be involved in a prolonged war of defence like WW1 or WW2 within the next century, if ever. I think the 'war mentality' is an issue for people around my age (60) and older because we grew up within the shadow of WW2 when the images and cinematised events swamped the national consciousness. Our sense of what Britain was was founded on the events of the last world wars. Thus we see the future in terms of that shadow. In reality the grievances that would support a civil war in the UK are simply not there and the nature of warfare and countries capacity to fight a prolonged conventional international war are simply not there. The world is too interconnected for any one country to go it alone. The real threat to our way western of life isn't war: it's climate change and the disruption we've seen over Covid is nothing compared to the potential havoc climate change could do.

They are better at using it and maximising its potential. Plus you're thinking solely in terms of the physical object and its parts which are unimportant in a world where technology is digital. I can't take Facebook apart or fix it when it's broken, but I have learnt how to use it in ways that are helpful and beneficial to me.

I haven't had to fit a plug in decades. On the other hand, buying an item that relies on mains electricity and it not having a plug was always silly. You wouldn't expect to buy a car and then fit your own tyres would you?

On the other hand, there are many things children/young people can do that the older generation can't. The problem is that what they can do is often rather bewildering to the older generation and so is disparaged and even seen in a negative light. It's useful to compare this thread with the comments about Sam's Trains on the YouTube thread and the thread on Francis Bourgeois. In both examples you see young people who have made something that, at least in terms of audience and monetisation, older people just couldn't do. They couldn't do it partly because they don't know how to and partly because they don't see the value in doing it. It's something I've seen in the book/publishing world. The way books are written is vastly different from the advice I was first given at at age seventeen (pencil first drafts? typewriters? gone with the dodo) the way authors network with each other and with their readers is vastly different. The relationship between author and publisher (assuming they don't self-publish) is vastly different. The way books are marketed is vastly different. And most significantly, in my view, the very nature of what a book can be, thanks to digitisation and the internet, has barely been investigated because most writers have had to adapt to the information super-highway rather than being shaped by it from birth. Of all the skills children need to be taught, I would say practical skills are some way down the list. More important are skills such as how to engage with people online and build social networks, how to maintain (and end) relationships in an online world, how to discriminate between information that's true and information that's false, how to understand their own biases, to understand how mass media affects personal development, how to look and how to listen, how to not judge and how to ignore the judgement of others. How to be and how to be happy.

Many of the skills I possess could not have been envisaged thirty years ago because the technology did not exist. At he same time, if you're earning good money you may prefer to spend quality time with your family or pursuing things that interests you, rather than hanging wallpaper or fitting carpets, and so paying someone who is better at it than you while you go off and enjoy yourself makes sense. There's nothing whatsoever virtuous about having a miserable time doing something less efficiently and less well than a professional. In short, people can still 'do' it's just that the things that they do are different to what people used to do.

Of course, some us simply are superior. Luckily, I am utterly brilliant at hiding it.

I'll raise you historical novelist. Among other things I've learned how to smelt copper, dismantle and clean a flintlock pistol, whether you could buy an ice-cream in 1850s Odessa, and whether in 1860 you could send a telegram from Gravesend to Odessa.

That article is brilliant and should be required reading for anyone with an opinion on the jury's verdict. I was particularly taken with this line which came after many hundreds of words of informed and persuasive analysis: And his conclusions at the end are right... and chilling.

I'm afraid that is entirely in your imagination.

And I wonder which has more readers...

Totally agreed. I can't claim to be an informed observer, though I am certainly a highly sympathetic observer and for what it's worth I lived in Bristol for several years so believe I know the place reasonably well. Not least, it may surprise some that the majority of Bristolians are glad the statue had gone. In both cases I don't think it was a case of the juries arguing the defendants did not do what they did: clearly, Colston's statue ended up in the dock and trains were delayed. It's more a case that the specific crimes with which both groups were charged did not, in the jurors' opinion, fit the circumstances of the incidents when the protesters' motivations were taken into account. Now whether you sympathise with either group's motivation, or think they are both deranged, is a matter of opinion, but the targeted toppling of Colston's statue is not the same as a bit of drunken vandalism on the way back from the pub and interrupting transport to protest against damage to the environment is not the same as a bit of mindless trespassing on the tracks, and the juries' decisions, I think, were an acknowledgement that they are not the same.

I agree. But he appears to enjoy what he's doing and he's making money from it. That is an achievement and therefore he is interesting. I'm detecting a slightly earnest, 'hair-shirt' attitude on this thread that regards railway modelling as a worthy endeavour and anyone putting their work out there, be it exhibiting at a show, writing articles for magazines or blogs, or producing YouTube videos, should be serving the modelling community and hobby in some way. Some may want to do that but I think it's perfectly okay, even admirable, to turn your modelling into a form of self-promotion, either because you like being a showman or because you want to earn money via YouTube advertising, as Sam does, or through commissions for modelling work. I mean, when we were young who didn't one day want to see their work splashed all over Railway of the Month in the 'Railway Modeller'? Well, today you don't have to worry about pleasing Mr Flint: you just need YouTube and a dedicated following and you're Railway of the Month every day of the week.

Ahem. I've fixed my typo. Indeed, Craigshire was a county, not a country in it's own right.