@Kidsandliz Not specifically. But it would be better than another round of expired snacks that nobody wanted to begin with. (Apropos that, I will note that the Frooze balls are actually pretty good. It can happen.) I think they would have trouble finding a supplier for some of the stuff that people might reminisce about.
@Kyeh@pakopako@PooltoyWolf Sigh. There are still places where some of us get treated worse than if we were wearing a fur suit. And there are powerful people hell-bent on making it worse.
@brainmist@Kyeh@pakopako@PooltoyWolf I will admit to having actually volunteered as Con Chair when it became apparent that everyone else on the concom was going to bail on it, leaving us with no concom and no con. I’d warned them at the outset that they really did not want to elect me as Chair for multiple reasons (I’m a flake, for one) but when push came to shove, I took the job. And I had absolutely amazing luck with the results, almost entirely down to having exactly the right person step up at precisely the right time to take Programming and get it done. Most of the rest of what I did was officiate and then stay the hell out of the way of the people who knew what they were doing.
@edsa I still have my landline number, but it’s a Google voice connection that rings on my cell phone now. Zero cost per month. I don’t get a lot of calls on it, but it’s handy to have.
@edsa They don’t even have the benefits they used to in a lot of (most? all?) areas. Once they installed a media converter at my house to convert the copper lines to fiber optic, I canceled my service. If it’s not going to work in a power outage, I might as well just use a cheaper VOIP option.
@edsa@werehatrack I also still have my old landline number via Google Voice that forwards to a VOIP phone with 5 cordless handsets distributed around the house. We live in a rural area in a house with a metal roof so cell reception inside the house is spotty. The GV phone works great and it’s free (and I honestly couldn’t care less if the Borg knows who we speak with).
@edsa We still (tenuously) keep our AT&T landline. For some reason long ago AT&T (or maybe PacBell at that time) decided to underground the phonelines in our areas, which mean they are usually the only thing operating in case of fires, power outages, earthquakes, etc. As we (and many in the area) have no cellular service, power-outages and other emergencies leaves us with no option for communication with the outside world. As roads are often blocked with downed trees and landslides during storms, functional landlines are essential.
I still maintain a land-line 512KB internet account with AT&T for emergencies.
Plus, my older sister back in Chicago still has her land line and considers it the only way to call us to see how things are.
AT&T is currently petitioning the county (and other counties in California) to release it from its “last communication option” requirements, an effort that seems to be politically losing in the rural and rural-friendly areas of the state.
@stolicat I still have a pushbutton off white Southern Bell phone and one of those phones that has battery operated extensions with charging bases - although not the landline to go with them anymore. When a landline became more expensive than a cell phone I broke down and got a cell phone. But you are right - there are service issues. I live in a cement and rebar building and in my apartment often only have 1 bar unless I stand by the window. I get dropped calls too often as well. But a landline costs nearly twice what I am paying for a cell phone so I just put up with it.
@edsa I still have my landline. Not fiberoptic, not Voip…a good old fashioned, antique wire-on-the-pole land line.
It costs a fortune, but when the cell towers go down, or the power goes out, people want to use my phone. lol
@edsa I converted by old landline number to voip two houses ago. Maybe 2010? No one noteworthy has called that number except one old friend who confuses it for my mobile sometimes. Lots of spammers and political zealots call though! I had it hooked to an old school answering machine until I couldn’t take the junk calls making it ping constantly any longer. Just yesterday I hooked it up to my AIO with a fax machine to get a little payback on the spammers. lol.
@blaineg@edsa@macromeh@werehatrack
My dad still has a land line through att, he refused to get a cell phone years ago and now he’s just too old to learn. I really hope att doesn’t cut the land line (and cable) any time soon bc he’ll have nothing.
a Motorola RazrV3.
I wish they made a new version with the modern 4/5G Radios.
Not the new folding touch screen rubbish, just remake the original phone with modern radios.
@earlyre I had something called a Samsung Uproar and I still think it was the coolest little phone. Held about a CD’s worth of songs in a small handset with the little flipper part on the bottom.
One I remember in particular was a perfectly working Panasonic Omnivision top-loading VCR I acquired from a thrift store. Parents mistakenly thought it was trash (???) and tossed it. Still salty about that, years ago.
Otherwise, most of my awesome obsolete stuff is still with me!
@ampersandranch@PooltoyWolf My collection of obsolete electronics has also only grown with time. I have played Hunt the Wumpus on the TI-99/4A with my son within the last month or two.
@ampersandranch@Limewater@PooltoyWolf My collection includes a tube-type Shure FM tuner with an external demultiplexer to provide the stereo output. It doesn’t get a lot more retro than that.
My handy dandy Sony am-fm knob controlled portable radio with the pull out antenna.
They sure don’t make them like they used to! That thing worked every single time no matter what abuse I subjected it to. miss listening to ball games with it
@StORMcAT444 Nothing about modern car radios is more fecking infuriating than the destandardization of the on/off, volume, and tuning controls. I seldom use mine as a result.
I have a landline (Ooma) and my car is old enough to drink, including a combo cassette/CD player, but I miss my old flip phone. I like having a computer in my pocket, but touch screens are a total PITA.
1963 Pontiac Grand Prix. Tri-carb motor. I was only the third owner. Bought it just out of high school from my uncle, who bought it from the original owner.
I sold it when the cost of insurance payments exceeded the price of the car.
My old Bose 501 speakers, along with my component system (tuner/amp, turntable, cassette deck) that my husband gave away without telling me. I bought them used in 1982 from a friend (who liked high quality equipment, and was ready to buy more). I took them to college, and had the best sounding system in the dorm. My heart misses these…
@robson I bought a 128K machine way back then. Spell check was the selling feature for me. At the time I was in school, papers could only have 3 typos a page and you couldn’t use erasable typing paper. It might take me 6 or 7 hours to type a 3 page paper due to that. At the time the choices were a PC junior, Apple 2e and the 128K Mac. The Mac won hands down due to the menu driven approach.
@Kidsandliz@robson My 20 something yo, artist, niece bought a functioning one of these a few months ago. Well, hers is actually a 512k model, but still, I am so envious.
@Kidsandliz Same reason people drive classic cars I think. For my niece, it was the ability to do bit mapped art. Nothing necessary about that. Just fun.
When I was a kid I had a ray gun that lit up and made sounds. The cool thing was had dials and sliders on it to change the sound and light patterns it made. Kinda like a synth to make hundreds of different ray gun sounds. Coolest toy ever.
Also miss all the toys that were potentially dangerous. Chemistry and electricity sets, cap guns that shot projectiles(with modification), Japanese robots that threw a plastic axe or shot missiles literally the length of the house, real fireworks. Electronic games aside, toys these days mostly suck.
@narfcake Do you mean gallium? We used to harvest mercury from thermometers and switches. My cousin had a huge kit that included sodium metal! Talk about something that could hurt you.
@narfcake@ponagathos@Star2236 This.
I was fortunate to have a chemistry set that had only been partly safety-neutered. The discovery of my Dad’s and Granddad’s hidden chemistry sets and chemical stashes definitely let me level up. I had a fascination for a variety of strongly exothermic reactions (and also was inspired by a 1930’s chemistry textbook that my Granddad had given me). Other than briefly losing my hearing a couple of times and getting grounded for a few weeks at a time, no harm done to persons or property. Also, the local police and school administrators had a much better sense of humor than they do now (but I still got grounded). (I suspect a couple of my science teachers also went to bat for me on at least one occasion).
Finally, when I was 16, my Dad had the (other) talk with me, where I discovered he and his Dad had been way worse than I was. E.g. My Dad and his best friend pooled their weekly job earnings to drop a baseball-sized chunk of Sodium into a Baltimore sewer after a rainstorm. After a few minutes of nothing happening, they were dejected and started to walk away. The ensuing boom and gusher from the sewer assuaged their disappointment. Apparently the following daily newspaper detailed a mystery ejection of sewage into some neighborhood homes with a couple of manhole covers departing their holes.
Decades earlier, my Grandfather was also grounded by his parents for destroying the bricks in their home’s sidewalk. He had come up with a novel way of making nitroglycerine, made a covert lab in the attic, and was testing the yield by tossing the test tubes out of the attic window to see how many bricks would be shattered vs. time of exposure to sulfuric acid fume percolation. As a bonus he also learned how to do some masonry work, repairing his parents’ sidewalk.
All this miscreant activity did bear some fruit. While my Granddad never got a degree, he had a technical career of some significance (He made the first manufacturing prototype of co-ax cable. He also had memorized the entire electronic schematics and pinouts of a Top Secret WWII anti-aircraft weapon (later known as Mickey Mouse Ears) and was sent by air to the West Coast to recreate them for manufacture. Security had refused to allow it to be committed to paper). My Dad served in the Army Corp of Engineers and got an engineering degree, also with an interesting career. My first and favorite degree was in Physics. My son’s first degree was in Chemistry.
Kids miss out on a lot now.
@mehcuda67 I may still have a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook if you are still feeling possibly-suicidally adventurous in those areas. (I haven’t seen any digital copies floating around, because I haven’t looked. This is not a suggestion. The last time I sold a copy of the Cookbook on eBay, I made a point of warning that if you’re very lucky, a lot of what’s in it will seriously injure or maim you even if the instructions are followed very closely, and can kill you if your luck is slightly worse.) (Did I mention that i grew up in the '60s, watching people around me do astoundingly stupid things? They didn’t all come away intact.)
@werehatrack Haha, one of the benefits of surviving my less than wise early decisions was an intense inner voice for when something was a Bad Idea. (As in “hey folks, this is a Bad Idea - what happens if this part over here fails?”) Several projects threatened to make me the safety officer, but I politely refused as I had no interest in the absurd paperwork and certification. But they still ran the proposals for projects and experiments past me.
All this reminds me that I have a fresnel lens from a projection TV around here somewhere. I’m just missing welding glasses. (A little of topic since I still own it but thanks for the reminder)
What are you trying to do? Help the buyers at meh get ideas for ancient liquidation inventory to buy that might sell more than 35 items?
@Kidsandliz Not specifically. But it would be better than another round of expired snacks that nobody wanted to begin with. (Apropos that, I will note that the Frooze balls are actually pretty good. It can happen.) I think they would have trouble finding a supplier for some of the stuff that people might reminisce about.
@werehatrack I was making a joke (grin)
@werehatrack Those almost-expired Quantum Squares are awesome…
OWLS! TOWELS! JOWLS! AWESOME!
My innocent youth.
@macromeh This comment hurts so much.
Doing away with childish things did not make me an adult.
@macromeh @pakopako I still sleep with plushies and watch Thomas & Friends. Fight the system!
@PooltoyWolf You kind of ARE a plushie!
@Kyeh When I’m in suit, absolutely!
@PooltoyWolf Right!
@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf sounds like life advice from an old webcomic
@Kyeh @pakopako @PooltoyWolf Sigh. There are still places where some of us get treated worse than if we were wearing a fur suit. And there are powerful people hell-bent on making it worse.
@Kyeh @pakopako Plot twist: the job being applied for is con chair.
@pakopako @PooltoyWolf Yeah - my thought was - it all depends on the job!
@Kyeh @pakopako @PooltoyWolf Con Chair is not a job you apply for, it’s one you get drafted into. (Usually.) (BTDT.)
@Kyeh @pakopako @werehatrack Depends on the con
@Kyeh @pakopako @PooltoyWolf @werehatrack And this is why it’s important to never drink too much at the con suite.
You might wake up as next year’s con chair.
@brainmist @Kyeh @pakopako @werehatrack Have personally seen this happen lmao
@brainmist @Kyeh @pakopako @PooltoyWolf I will admit to having actually volunteered as Con Chair when it became apparent that everyone else on the concom was going to bail on it, leaving us with no concom and no con. I’d warned them at the outset that they really did not want to elect me as Chair for multiple reasons (I’m a flake, for one) but when push came to shove, I took the job. And I had absolutely amazing luck with the results, almost entirely down to having exactly the right person step up at precisely the right time to take Programming and get it done. Most of the rest of what I did was officiate and then stay the hell out of the way of the people who knew what they were doing.
Landline. Aware still used by some but overall priced out.
@edsa yep, prices on those are stupid again.
@edsa I still have my landline number, but it’s a Google voice connection that rings on my cell phone now. Zero cost per month. I don’t get a lot of calls on it, but it’s handy to have.
@edsa They don’t even have the benefits they used to in a lot of (most? all?) areas. Once they installed a media converter at my house to convert the copper lines to fiber optic, I canceled my service. If it’s not going to work in a power outage, I might as well just use a cheaper VOIP option.
@edsa @werehatrack I also still have my old landline number via Google Voice that forwards to a VOIP phone with 5 cordless handsets distributed around the house. We live in a rural area in a house with a metal roof so cell reception inside the house is spotty. The GV phone works great and it’s free (and I honestly couldn’t care less if the Borg knows who we speak with).
@edsa @macromeh @werehatrack Google Voice and a VOIP box here too.
@edsa We still (tenuously) keep our AT&T landline. For some reason long ago AT&T (or maybe PacBell at that time) decided to underground the phonelines in our areas, which mean they are usually the only thing operating in case of fires, power outages, earthquakes, etc. As we (and many in the area) have no cellular service, power-outages and other emergencies leaves us with no option for communication with the outside world. As roads are often blocked with downed trees and landslides during storms, functional landlines are essential.
I still maintain a land-line 512KB internet account with AT&T for emergencies.
Plus, my older sister back in Chicago still has her land line and considers it the only way to call us to see how things are.
AT&T is currently petitioning the county (and other counties in California) to release it from its “last communication option” requirements, an effort that seems to be politically losing in the rural and rural-friendly areas of the state.
@stolicat I still have a pushbutton off white Southern Bell phone and one of those phones that has battery operated extensions with charging bases - although not the landline to go with them anymore. When a landline became more expensive than a cell phone I broke down and got a cell phone. But you are right - there are service issues. I live in a cement and rebar building and in my apartment often only have 1 bar unless I stand by the window. I get dropped calls too often as well. But a landline costs nearly twice what I am paying for a cell phone so I just put up with it.
@edsa I still have my landline. Not fiberoptic, not Voip…a good old fashioned, antique wire-on-the-pole land line.
It costs a fortune, but when the cell towers go down, or the power goes out, people want to use my phone. lol
@edsa I converted by old landline number to voip two houses ago. Maybe 2010? No one noteworthy has called that number except one old friend who confuses it for my mobile sometimes. Lots of spammers and political zealots call though! I had it hooked to an old school answering machine until I couldn’t take the junk calls making it ping constantly any longer. Just yesterday I hooked it up to my AIO with a fax machine to get a little payback on the spammers. lol.
@blaineg @edsa @macromeh @werehatrack
My dad still has a land line through att, he refused to get a cell phone years ago and now he’s just too old to learn. I really hope att doesn’t cut the land line (and cable) any time soon bc he’ll have nothing.
My 1976 Cutlass 442 and the 1981 Renault LeCar I traded for it. From the sublime to the ridiculous. I miss them both.
@Frcal The Cutlass, sure, but I too owned a LeCar. One thing I really don’t miss.
a Motorola RazrV3.
I wish they made a new version with the modern 4/5G Radios.
Not the new folding touch screen rubbish, just remake the original phone with modern radios.
@earlyre I had something called a Samsung Uproar and I still think it was the coolest little phone. Held about a CD’s worth of songs in a small handset with the little flipper part on the bottom.
One I remember in particular was a perfectly working Panasonic Omnivision top-loading VCR I acquired from a thrift store. Parents mistakenly thought it was trash (???) and tossed it. Still salty about that, years ago.
Otherwise, most of my awesome obsolete stuff is still with me!
POPSOCKETS! ROAD ROCKETS! SONNY CROCKETT! AWESOME!
@PooltoyWolf Over here with a jukebox (45s, fully functional), a pinball machine (analog), a few plushies, and an AARP card.
@ampersandranch @PooltoyWolf My collection of obsolete electronics has also only grown with time. I have played Hunt the Wumpus on the TI-99/4A with my son within the last month or two.
@ampersandranch @Limewater @PooltoyWolf My collection includes a tube-type Shure FM tuner with an external demultiplexer to provide the stereo output. It doesn’t get a lot more retro than that.
@ampersandranch @Limewater @werehatrack I’ve since lost track of the number of tube electronics I have, and that’s definitely not a bad thing.
My handy dandy Sony am-fm knob controlled portable radio with the pull out antenna.
They sure don’t make them like they used to! That thing worked every single time no matter what abuse I subjected it to. miss listening to ball games with it
@StORMcAT444 Nothing about modern car radios is more fecking infuriating than the destandardization of the on/off, volume, and tuning controls. I seldom use mine as a result.
@StORMcAT444 I still have a similar radio (Panasonic) that we use during power outages. Works great.
My ’95 Acura rode like it was on rails, and was also my last cassette player. Two in one?
@ampersandranch Lexus included a cassette player in the SC 430 all the way until 2010.
I have a landline (Ooma) and my car is old enough to drink, including a combo cassette/CD player, but I miss my old flip phone. I like having a computer in my pocket, but touch screens are a total PITA.
1963 Pontiac Grand Prix. Tri-carb motor. I was only the third owner. Bought it just out of high school from my uncle, who bought it from the original owner.
I sold it when the cost of insurance payments exceeded the price of the car.
@blaineg
I love the women’s dress and gloves, she looks so glamorous and gorgeous. I time period I would loved to dress up in.
My old Bose 501 speakers, along with my component system (tuner/amp, turntable, cassette deck) that my husband gave away without telling me. I bought them used in 1982 from a friend (who liked high quality equipment, and was ready to buy more). I took them to college, and had the best sounding system in the dorm. My heart misses these…
My very first car, a 1973 Levi’s special edition Gremlin. I do not miss the manual steering!
@membrr
/image AMC Gremlin Levi’s interior
My original Mac
@robson I bought a 128K machine way back then. Spell check was the selling feature for me. At the time I was in school, papers could only have 3 typos a page and you couldn’t use erasable typing paper. It might take me 6 or 7 hours to type a 3 page paper due to that. At the time the choices were a PC junior, Apple 2e and the 128K Mac. The Mac won hands down due to the menu driven approach.
@Kidsandliz @robson My 20 something yo, artist, niece bought a functioning one of these a few months ago. Well, hers is actually a 512k model, but still, I am so envious.
@Byter @robson What on earth are these still useful for that you can’t do better with a newer machine?
@Kidsandliz Same reason people drive classic cars I think. For my niece, it was the ability to do bit mapped art. Nothing necessary about that. Just fun.
When I was a kid I had a ray gun that lit up and made sounds. The cool thing was had dials and sliders on it to change the sound and light patterns it made. Kinda like a synth to make hundreds of different ray gun sounds. Coolest toy ever.
Also miss all the toys that were potentially dangerous. Chemistry and electricity sets, cap guns that shot projectiles(with modification), Japanese robots that threw a plastic axe or shot missiles literally the length of the house, real fireworks. Electronic games aside, toys these days mostly suck.
@ponagathos You mean back in the days in which kits included
mercurymetal that melts in your hands?@narfcake Do you mean gallium? We used to harvest mercury from thermometers and switches. My cousin had a huge kit that included sodium metal! Talk about something that could hurt you.
@narfcake @ponagathos
Dam kids gotta hurt themself and ruin everything.
@narfcake @ponagathos @Star2236 This.
I was fortunate to have a chemistry set that had only been partly safety-neutered. The discovery of my Dad’s and Granddad’s hidden chemistry sets and chemical stashes definitely let me level up. I had a fascination for a variety of strongly exothermic reactions (and also was inspired by a 1930’s chemistry textbook that my Granddad had given me). Other than briefly losing my hearing a couple of times and getting grounded for a few weeks at a time, no harm done to persons or property. Also, the local police and school administrators had a much better sense of humor than they do now (but I still got grounded). (I suspect a couple of my science teachers also went to bat for me on at least one occasion).
Finally, when I was 16, my Dad had the (other) talk with me, where I discovered he and his Dad had been way worse than I was. E.g. My Dad and his best friend pooled their weekly job earnings to drop a baseball-sized chunk of Sodium into a Baltimore sewer after a rainstorm. After a few minutes of nothing happening, they were dejected and started to walk away. The ensuing boom and gusher from the sewer assuaged their disappointment. Apparently the following daily newspaper detailed a mystery ejection of sewage into some neighborhood homes with a couple of manhole covers departing their holes.
Decades earlier, my Grandfather was also grounded by his parents for destroying the bricks in their home’s sidewalk. He had come up with a novel way of making nitroglycerine, made a covert lab in the attic, and was testing the yield by tossing the test tubes out of the attic window to see how many bricks would be shattered vs. time of exposure to sulfuric acid fume percolation. As a bonus he also learned how to do some masonry work, repairing his parents’ sidewalk.
All this miscreant activity did bear some fruit. While my Granddad never got a degree, he had a technical career of some significance (He made the first manufacturing prototype of co-ax cable. He also had memorized the entire electronic schematics and pinouts of a Top Secret WWII anti-aircraft weapon (later known as Mickey Mouse Ears) and was sent by air to the West Coast to recreate them for manufacture. Security had refused to allow it to be committed to paper). My Dad served in the Army Corp of Engineers and got an engineering degree, also with an interesting career. My first and favorite degree was in Physics. My son’s first degree was in Chemistry.
Kids miss out on a lot now.
@mehcuda67 I may still have a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook if you are still feeling possibly-suicidally adventurous in those areas. (I haven’t seen any digital copies floating around, because I haven’t looked. This is not a suggestion. The last time I sold a copy of the Cookbook on eBay, I made a point of warning that if you’re very lucky, a lot of what’s in it will seriously injure or maim you even if the instructions are followed very closely, and can kill you if your luck is slightly worse.) (Did I mention that i grew up in the '60s, watching people around me do astoundingly stupid things? They didn’t all come away intact.)
@werehatrack Haha, one of the benefits of surviving my less than wise early decisions was an intense inner voice for when something was a Bad Idea. (As in “hey folks, this is a Bad Idea - what happens if this part over here fails?”) Several projects threatened to make me the safety officer, but I politely refused as I had no interest in the absurd paperwork and certification. But they still ran the proposals for projects and experiments past me.
All this reminds me that I have a fresnel lens from a projection TV around here somewhere. I’m just missing welding glasses. (A little of topic since I still own it but thanks for the reminder)
@ergomeh oh, I wish I had one of those. I’d set it up in the backyard on a swiveling frame and use it as a solar furnace to melt things.