A couple of years ago I found an opportunity to refer to Synectics, an idea generating system developed by George Prince and William J. J. Gordon. Both the originators of the system, and the system itself, seem to have found their way to obscurity, though I remember very fondly studying their method and reading their books. The Wikipedia blurb about Synectics notes that Gordon emphasized that an important aspect of generating ideas was making "the familiar strange and the strange familiar". By making us relate to today's technologies as though they were once new and difficult to adapt to, a comic sketch like the Medieval Help Desk and John Spencer's Adventures in Pencil Integration blog help us gain perspective on technologies that today we take for granted.