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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

I really, _really_ miss printed magazines as a concept. Everything has moved online and there it commenced racing to the bottom. Back in the 90s you could make a business case of selling a printed magazine written by talented writers with insight and expertise. Now? Not so much.

I tried purchasing a few magazines about music production this summer but they read mostly like advertisement brochures, all “reviews” read like ghost written blog posts and there was no soul, for the lack of a better word, to be found.

In short - get of my lawn you damn kids, things were better in my days.

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Membership to the Association for Computing Machinery (acm.org) is affordable and comes with a high quality monthly printed magazine. - https://dl.acm.org/magazine/cacm

It also bundles in O'Reilly Learning membership, and is cheaper than you would otherwise pay for the same...

Very interesting. But honestly I can't figure out if the membership price is per month or per year or what time division?

But... do people join ACM? They seemed like a supreme institution back when I was in the University but rarely hear about them nowadays.

It's $99 per year for regular membership, or $198 per year to get access to all the journal archives etc. There are special rates for students and for those living in developing countries.

I honestly joined because of the O'Reilly Learning membership, but since joining I've found value in the magazine and community.

I also rejoined ACM last year (after a 10 year hiatus), mainly for access to the O'Reilly stuff (what used to be safarionline). Tremendous value, and the monthly ACM mag is actually quite interesting.

I don't. I had to drive out 150kg of printed amiga and pc magazines to local recycling center, because they didn't want to take it and I got less than I spent on fuel. Noboty wanted to buy it and it was too hard to just burn it, because nice glossy paper with special anti-flammable additives burns rather awfully. Re-reading it is almost pointless, maybe for nostalgia about how AGP will be THE BEST in graphics soon.

What you miss is quality, not printed magazines.

You burned Amiga magazines? Heretic!

No, I didn't even try. I gave them to a company which gave them second life as recycled paper. I'm still missing my amiga, that was a fine piece of hardware and started my programming career, essentially made me who I am.

Me too. In the early 2000s when I was a teenager I earned money from a paper round and would regularly buy a PC magazine (Computer Shopper) and the Playstation 2 magazine. I would read them cover to cover.

I'm sure there are good articles online, but it seems very hard for me to justify spending the time reading them when there is so much else. There is too much choice.

I remember a teacher at school telling me how once he bought all his favourite films on DVD he never watched them again. Once it becomes a conscious choice to spend your time on this rather than that it often ends up spent on nothing at all.

I've come to realise that choice (or freedom) is just not the greatest thing for humans. I firmly believe most people benefit from some kind of external structure and constraint. I think declining happiness, especially for women, is mostly due to this structure being removed. I also notice that the best art tends to be made under tight budgets and strict constraints. Artists tend to produce worse work when they are given freedom to do whatever they want.

Music magazines - give Sound on Sound a try. High quality content and has a long pedigree. https://www.soundonsound.com/

Yes I love it. It used to be one of my go to reads on long train trips together with C'T magazine.

There's also this, pre order now available

https://fusionretrobooks.com/products/the-story-of-the-commo...

Interesting, thanks! I got a book [1] covering similar topic from Bitmap books earlier this year - was stunned by quality of production and ordered a bunch of others. Turns out I don't actually have time/inclination to play through a bunch of games from my childhood - but tremendously enjoy reading quick blurbs for that hit of nostalgia :-)

1: https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/collections/all/products/commo...

Well, it doesn't help you, but supporting independent online "magazines" give you much more quality articles than in the good old days. I support "The Pod", a german-based video- and computer game podcast. The quality is beyond everything I had in the years before and I bought magazines since the mid 80s.

I am pretty sure there are far more magazines/podcasts/blogs which work with just supporting readers, but you have to find them.

Me too, there are so very few places online with good quality stuff.. it's sad.

Let's not forget the case of the beloved H-online.com which could not sustain themselves despite top-notch quality.

Race to the bottom indeed...

You might like this https://www.quantamagazine.org/. Top quality, free, online

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