We have some old devices laying around: iPod, digital camera, CD player...
My young daughter loves them. I think we forget how magical an ipod can be.
Also, a number of families have gotten land line phones, now the girls are calling each other and talking on the house phone like it's 1985. I think it's a good thing.
Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" is a ridiculously fun book. Very short, and stuffed with melodrama. My copy has an excellent introduction to Gothic architecture, literature, and politics by Nick Groom, which goes much deeper than this article.
I have Thucydides and Herodotus, both are amazing. I don't know how I would read Thucydides any other way. There are so many place names and directions, you really need the maps these editions provide.
With the rise of online streaming and satellite radio, plus the demise of physical record shops, magazines, MTV, and local radio, everything is way more fragmented. The 80s & 90s were probably the last decades of 'common' songs based on shared media.
When I was a teenager, my music teacher always had a copy of the Real Book around. I went to a local music store and was looking through their music books when one of the employees asked, 'is there something I can help you find?' When I said the Real Book, he said, 'oh, we don't keep that out here'... he disappeared for a minute and came back with a copy from the back room. At the time, I felt like I had been admitted into a secret club.
I'm not sure the circus ring finale works on its own. It's the denouement of the whole film that has been building to this point. Mastroianni is struggling with all his relationships: his work, his wife, girlfriend, producer, then he finally turns a corner and is able to celebrate his life for what it is. What I love about 8 1/2 is how the camera is always moving and spinning, taking on Mastroianni's point of view. Characters keep popping up in your face and you feel swept along with the movement. Now that I'm older, I enjoy it more than when I first saw it: it's a film about life, not just Mastroianni/Guido's problems and relationships, all the other characters have their own issues as well. But the surrealism and humor keep it from becoming a downer: when Guido's girlfriend shows up at the same cafe with his wife, Guido has to pretend he doesn't see her, but of course his wife does...awkward ! When Guido quits the film, his critic tell him he made the right decision, never mind the money, it's part of a producer's job to lose money! And when it all becomes suffocating, he climbs out of his car window and flies away.
If you're already doing C#, then it's easy to start using F#. You probably are using VS Studio/Code, you already know the standard .NET libraries. etc.. F# is a little weird because there are accommodations to ensure it will interop with C#. But it is fun.