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@70hz Yeah, I wrote my first million words on one of those too.

@pheedbackPhil @Steveg58 There were no buttons on phones when I grew up. Just rotary dialers talking to Strowger electromechanical exchanges at the Post Office. (Motors and relays!)

@rafa_font No, but a few months ago my wife and I should have celebrated our joint 120th.

@lizmeyer Yep, calculators weren't permitted in maths exams until I was 15, and we had to learn to use a slide rule. (I was right on the cusp of the transition—got my first basic four-function calculator aged 13, and I'd already learned how to do the operations longhand, so it was a time-saver, not a replacement for learning.)

@Steveg58 Yes, my older sister owned a Morris Minor for a few years. No synchromesh on first and second gears so you had to double-declutch every time or (DEAFENING SHRIEK OF TEARING METAL AS GEARS FAIL TO MESH)

@christineburns No, I just put up with the leakage.

@jmax When I learned to drive, you learned to drive on a manual transmission because if you learned on an automatic you were only licensed for automatics, and at the time that meant only about 4% of the cars in the UK. (Automatic transmission cars cost about 20% more and burned 10% more fuel.)

Age verification challenge:

Growing up, I used a gramophone to play my mum's 78rpm jazz records (on shellac, not vinyl). And was taught to indicate I was about to make a turn by sticking my arm out the driver's side window on vehicles that didn't have indicators. (It was on the driving test back then.)

@MicroSFF Psst: buy cheese futures, there's going to be some *really* valuable cheese on the market in due course, when they find they need an export industry in a hurry.

@dragosmcmaster Oh, in my case the customers all showed up *months* ago—this is me going on tour to a rainy industrial estate near Dublin to sign the printed books for the kickstarter they all backed.

@dragosmcmaster That's a video. I don't do video (and I don't touch youtube). What's it about?

@dragosmcmaster Who?

@eedly @morix No, a damp industrial estate outside Dublin.

@morix Naah, more like making good on a kickstarter higher tier (signing copies in a warehouse).

Welp, new album by KMFDM just dropped and Sasha's getting angry and political again, in a good way!

ONLY ANSWER THIS QUIZ IF YOU ARE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR:

Is it a signing tour if a publisher is flying you somewhere to sign books ... but there's only one stop, and no members of the public present?

@christineburns Given his track record he should probably have been titled "Director of Sloppy Sharts".

Why Charlie isn't allowed to work:

@Toasterson @Gina Most of the British railway operators are European national carriers.

@Toasterson @Gina Brit who has travelled on DB as well as the British post-privatization network here: this is EXACTLY right. The UK privatization was made attractive to investors by skimping on maintenance for a few years (to offer them cash inducements once they bought the pig in a poke). Said investors turned their noses up at the resulting sickly porker and stayed away. Upshot: DB now has a huge backlog of technical debt.