nostalgebraist:

It’s funny – anything that has any kind of detailed oral history acquires this kind of grandeur to me when I read about it

Even if it’s like, I dunno, people who collect phone books (that is not a real hobby AFAIK, it’s something I made up to sound as uninteresting as possible), if people are saying things like

“oh yeah, 1981 was a great year for phone book collectors, those were the days, the yellow pages changed its print size which sent the market into a frenzy, and everyone was talking about the controversial Carl ‘The Mutilator’ Hornsby, whose ‘artistically’ torn and cut-up phone books were attracting high prices as well as the disapproval of a vocal minority”

then I’ll imagine some sort of golden age, depicted in gorgeous sunny mental imagery, like the way propaganda might depict the early days of a great nation

(I think this first crystalized for me when I was reading about the “Rangerphiles” a while ago.  I can get into some pretty odd topics because of this – it’s convenient if I want to while away a lot of time pleasantly)