from boingboing today i learned that all of the OMNI magazine runs (1979 to 1995) are freely available at archive.org (in the usual multitude of useful formats).

the covers and layouts still look gorgeous (at least the pre-90 stuff), the ufo/para/nutter stuff is very much not my cup of tea but there are still some interesting gems in there (wanna see a mugshot of william gibson as a youngster or wozniak with really disgusting sunnies? i couldn't resist laughing about some of the reverse time capsules:

• 1982's idea of fashion in 2001 is just as ridiculous as the real thing.
• 1984's forecast 2000 predictions are almost all duds, but their naivety is pretty touching sniff.
• what they thought of the home office in 2020 in 1991 is a bit closer to reality, but only in some regards.

apart from the weirdo stuff there's another really obnoxious aspect of this (and many similar) american magazines: "story continues on page NNN". ripping apart stories in this fashion and forcing the reader to puzzle them together laboriously is a very american sin - cf: ad breaks forced into films every 5 minutes, dvds with their unskippable anti-everything nasties and so on. no surprise that the modern unwashed masses tend to have the attention span of a gnat, and that the yanks overdiagnose and hype ADHD...