How it started / how it's going

[regehr@mastodon.social]

@dan @ricci it is real, it's where we get the snakes for PhD defenses. also ask for the punchcard-- once you've rented 10 adders you get a king cobra.

[tedmielczarek@mastodon.social]

@aburka @ricci @jonny yeah wow unrelated here's a Reddit comment from 7 years ago that uses the exact same analogy: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vvds2/comment/dtvdtio/

[ricci@discuss.systems]

@tedmielczarek @aburka @jonny oh gee what a coincidence, I'm sure

[dan@discuss.systems]

@regehr @ricci I was never allowed to have a pet as a child but my parents would occasionally rent me a hamster or something from the pet library* and I think they had snakes too. Probably not venomous though.

*this sounds so ridiculous I had to look it up recently to make sure it wasn’t just something I had hallucinated, but no, it really was real

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@regehr @dan @ricci As opposed to the architecture department where renting ten adders gets you a discount on an FPU?

[regehr@mastodon.social]

@dan @ricci hahaha I also often have this same feeling about my childhood

[regehr@mastodon.social]

@wollman @dan @ricci no there you get a python

[regehr@mastodon.social]

@dan @ricci I don't really watch stuff like Stranger Things, but I did watch the first season and felt like it was sort of validating, like yayyy the early 80s weren't actually a fever dream

[gwozniak@discuss.systems]

@regehr @dan @ricci I watch the shows so I can find out what other people did.

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@regehr @dan @ricci The 80s were like the last time I watched any scripted television! I don't know what happened, I just never got into anything made after I went to Finland in 1988. (Lots of memories of action and procedural dramas of the day: The A Team, Airwolf, Knight Rider, Remington Steele, Manimal, The Powers of Matthew Starr — and even a few comedies like Night Court and Family Ties.)

[regehr@mastodon.social]

@wollman @dan @ricci you know what really seems like a fever dream... I spent a few summers in Seattle in the late 90s and the public access tv had some really off the charts weird programming, like there this one show was just these five people's heads on a black background and they were chanting or doing spoken word, I swear this really aired

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@regehr @dan @ricci Try explaining public access to a kid today. I'm not even sure I could explain cable properly (and I didn't even have access to cable until 1990, while it seems like a long time the heyday of the cable bundle was really only twenty years, 1990–2010).

[regehr@mastodon.social]

@wollman @dan @ricci try explaining that TV came over the air, but not wifi or bluetooth

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@regehr @dan @ricci "It's like YouTube but without ads and everyone had to pay for it if they wanted to watch sports or HBO"…

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@regehr @dan @ricci And you had to watch shows on a fixed schedule! New shows only came out once a week, at a different day and time for every show, and if you weren't home at that time, too bad, you couldn't see it!

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@regehr @dan @ricci And for people like my parents (so a young kid's great-grandparents I guess) the only reason to get cable at all was because my mother thought antennas were ugly. (And satellite dishes even uglier.)

[regehr@mastodon.social]

@wollman @dan @ricci in my house the antennas didn't really work. you could go into the one closet that had a big dowel rod connected to the antenna in the attic and spin it around, but it didn't help. you could put tin foil on the rabbit ears and that didn't help either. we finally got cable like a year or two before I moved out in 1990.

[dan@discuss.systems]

@regehr @wollman @ricci and don't forget that the TV station would sign off at the end of the night