Fuck iPads, having kids look at glossy pieces of paper with diagrams of castles and pictures of cool pirate swords is what the children need.
These kinds of books with giant pages stuffed full of illustrations and text about interesting stuff were absolutely crucial to my own development.
I got tricked into buying the software version of the one about colonial era ships, because the person working the book fair told me you could launch cannon balls and blow up the dude in the toilet, like it was some kinda wacky action game, and I was a wacky little action dude at the time so of course I had to check that out.
Turns out it was closer to Encarta but without the Mind Maze part. The guy blowing up was a tiny little animation, and you could not, in fact, fire the cannon at all. Something something disappointment immeasurable etc.
Encarta was such a fascinating relic of the time
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encarta’s moon orbit simulator was goated
kind of a cool idea in retrospect.
anyone know?: is there an archive version available anywhere?
cross section edutainment game but crossed with The Incredible Machine
Encarta 98 and 2000 lost the Mind Maze part, which is a shame.
Truly the last good year in Western history was 1997.
Don’t need those here. We have @Tervell@hexbear.net posting
truly the best of us
There’s a pipeline from these books to communism
my impression as a child was that these books were mostly associated with fascist tendencies
I can feel those pages on my finger tips
I loved finding cute little details in the illustrations, like one the pirate ship cross sections they’d have like a monkey that shows up in some corner every page. It’s like educational Where’s Waldo.
Literally my earliest memory ever is me walking into preschool carrying the Dinosaur book
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lol they think that’s intense - wait until they see the EDC load out on:
- BACKEND DEVELOPER
- CIVIL ENGINEER
- PERSON WHO POSTS ONLINE ALL DAY
Dorling Kindersley, and as a result Eyewitness Guides, shall be nationalised and issued to all children along with I Spy books and Graeme Base’s Anamalia
This will, of course, include Stephen Biesty’s cross sections books
All children will witness the serf in the oubliette being shit on from above, and they will understand
In the UK it would be the same meme but replace the book with Horrible Histories.
the fossil one changed my life
The four humours
I had the one on bugs
Wasn’t there a star wars one of these
I had the visual dictionaries when they started with The Phantom Menace. There were also books with super detailed schematic illustrations of all the ships in the series. The Death Star section had a double fold out to fit everything in
I got one for the Star Wars spaceships and the binding fell apart in days, so I had to hole punch the pages and put them in a big binder. I think it’s still around somewhere
It doesn’t have little mammoth showing you how things work, so it’s not the best book possible.
I had one that was all the machine guns from ww1 and ww2
