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
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.
There's a pipeline from these books to communism
my impression as a child was that these books were mostly associated with fascist tendencies
Yeah a lot of kids that read these in my class grew up to be weird right wing chuds obsessed with german artillery from WW2
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
lol they think that’s intense - wait until they see the EDC load out on:
In the UK it would be the same meme but replace the book with Horrible Histories.
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
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
I had one that was all the machine guns from ww1 and ww2
It doesn't have little mammoth showing you how things work, so it's not the best book possible.
adults need these as well, just have to add up to date references and better illustrations than the 3d garbage that has replaced a lot of the art in these books
could just be marketed towards adults as a curated hobbyist subreddit knowledgebase, kids are mostly only there for the pictures anyway
This is the sort of shit I need to get my kids. I'm already so happy they know how to use a DVD player and we can put things on for them instead of streaming shit on our phones. They already like to have 'reading time' where they flick through these cheap hardcovers we gave them
He'll yeah, arms and armor was one of my favorites, I still have them somewhere. Very cozy.
my first library overdue fine was the viking one
i also had one about reptiles and one about mammals. maybe different book series but same style. i still have the mammal family tree etched into my brain, elephants, manatees and some african mountain rabbit belong together (guess the science changed since then though)
These must be why I turned into thed kind of nerd who always loves going to museums when I visit places.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.