Southloop [he/him]

Oh, no, nobody buying these things in the US can afford them. These things roll off the lot powered more because of subprime lending than gasoline.

StarTAC! Then I had a Nokia 5100 when I went to college with a blue airbrushed lighting faceplate so it looked like the cover of Ride the Lightning. I might have made three total calls between the two of them and never texted, only partly because it was 10 cents a text.

I’m actually just a bit younger than you. We had it because my dad worked at Bell Labs and Scientific Atlanta way back when, so we could get the hook ups and build out whatever computing or network machinery we needed at the time. It was like sci-fi legos learning it as I grew up. It was great!

Half my duties at my first job as a maitre de at an Italian restaurant.

I can’t help but picture this being the size of a cinder block, like something tied to the gas station bathroom door’s key.

Your library of self-made notebooks were the pelts on the wall of your past game conquests.

Yes! The Harvard Family Health Guide or the American College of Physicians Home Medical Guide! And my dad always bought every new edition of the Green Beret Medical Handbook!

The typical Fox News addict of today also probably wouldn’t have been caught dead watching anything news related outside of local evening and maybe 20/20 depending on the subject matter. The CNN nerds were still watching though.

There was also a better spread of educational programming in popular circulation (talking NASA-owned TLC days and prior here).

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I started flying as a kid and remember getting mad at the GPS messing with my uptake on map reading in Boy Scouts and driving class. I also remember thinking to myself how grateful I was it’d never leave the cockpit and invade my daily life.

An IBM Selectric is the last one I ever used. Meanwhile, I’ve had internet since ‘88 and a family computer in the home since ‘85. I’m described as elder Millinial, but I prefer Digitally Native Gen X frankly.

Books, sketchpads, knitting or some other portable craft, table games like flick football and pocket chess, crystal radios. Plenty to do to pass time. There’s nothing on my phone that’s new.

I do remember people considered “in the know” were much more savvy with consumer protective information. Reviews were treated as reviews from relative or expert opinion rather than validation of taste. There were also options for children, teens (the magazine “Zillions” for example, my first taste of criticizing capitalism provided by Consumer Reports for kids), adults and the elderly.

Now, there’s a much less robust testing, renting, reviewing and demoing environment it feels.

Any ambulatory mecha would have massive motion sickness issues for the pilot whenever it walked. Suspending the operator in a fluid would possibly dampen the effects of bobbing around on the vestibular system and dampen shock from collisions or high-G turns. At least I imagine. I haven’t played Peace Walker but that’d be my reason for that to be in the design.

For me it’s the same as watching a ballet, but without the predetermined outcome of narrative theatre/dance. In the process of this, I need a protagonist I relate to. The easiest emotional connection I’m going to form is to my hometown teams given my mnemonic and experiential connection to it, especially having lived prior to the genera death of monocultural and regional identity in the US.

In the case of my alma mater and college sports, I tend to relate it as imagine your local sporting club association football team, but attach it to an entity that plays a gigantic part in educating you, housing you for your first time alone (in a walkable community no less), feeding you, facilitating your first experiences as a young adult away from home, setting up your professional network and several adult friendships — and in my case — hooks up your first big-boy job, licenses and the high pay that follows. So yeah, I’ll buy the sweatshirt and hoot like a doofus for my alma maters’ bottom-wrung Big Ten and PAC 12 teams every January and March. Hell, I’ll wear the free suits they gave me every quarter while I’m at it.

Tell me about it. The oldest continually operating team in the league now has a big yellow sack of concrete on their shoulders.

Dab your fingers on the produce like a stamp sponge. Works like a charm.

I effectively had the same convo with a friend back in high school and pointed out the Gundam’s biggest canonical battlefield tech breakthrough was its armor, which let it potentially take anything to the face (until beam weapons see widespread use in the original). Then I compared that a real-life analog, the Abrams, which can hide behind hills and things despite being a taller tank than its counterparts. The Gundam— or anything else it’s fighting — can’t hide.

He still thought the army should use mechs after that…

I don’t know. Saying “milk drinker” makes you sound like a total Melvin.

Nah, I’d say that’d be fuel they’re better at dumping into the water than anything. The bombs go into dirt nine times out of ten during practice.