Do you ever have this…? I get it all the time…

But what triggered this now, was looking (yet again) in disappointment at my “favourites” list at the regular lack of updates, when I realised one was missing. It took me a good five minutes to remember the title - “Glass Rafters” SO I did a Google search…and eventually proved my sanity by turning up an URL for this old DUCK place with the magic words “featured comic”. See, I knew I wasn't mad … I guess the creator deleted it… anyway, it has disappeared off the face of the Earth.

But this kind of thing happens to me all the time ! Being old, my memory goes back a long way.. and yet, some things I clearly remember from childhood/youth are just NOT searchable on the Web - T.V. shows and all kinds of things.

What do you remember, that has evaporated into thin air ?

Lime Skittles. Don't give me that “original flavor” nonsense on your package and pretend you were always apple. You were lime once!

usedbooks wrote:
Lime Skittles. Don't give me that “original flavor” nonsense on your package and pretend you were always apple. You were lime once!

You're right! I remember it too. Supposed to return as Darkside Skittles in 2019.

There's a kiwi lime in the wild berry assortment.


There are so many great retail websites that I used the frequent that have vanished in this Amazon-Ebay age.

My local hobby shop Avenel hobbies that went out of business. A lot of great local toy stores.

Everybody remembers but it's as if they never existed. Where did those things go?

There are tons of things in the world of plastic model building. Companies, molds, kits, and then they turn up someplace and it's like “remember that?”
And they reply, “that really did exist once upon a time!”

Kinky Dan The Bubblegum Man. We used to stick these blighters everywhere in the early seventies, but for years I couldn't convince anyone they existed or find anyone who remembered them. I started to doubt my own sanity, but proof has finally emerged:

How did Madonna and Kylie Minogue become music royalty? XD
It's like I fell asleep and woke up to an inverted world.

Or the veneration that The Lion King gets… WTF? Meanwhile I still can't work out how people don't remember Kimba The White Lion, and that The Lion Sleeps Tonight had been a hit for decades. How can anyone love a pastiche derivative pile of open copyright theft.

ozoneocean

Or the veneration that The Lion King gets… WTF? Meanwhile I still can't work out how people don't remember Kimba The White Lion, and that The Lion Sleeps Tonight had been a hit for decades. How can anyone love a pastiche derivative pile of open copyright theft.

It's Disney. They now own everything so they can crib any thing whenever they like.

There was this genre of music that had electric guitars and hard driving beats and stuff called “rock” . Whatever happened to it? There are geriatric nostalgia shows and like “classic” stations but one day I woke up and there were no new rock recordings.
I have to listen to country now?

Yesterday Keanu Reeves was that terribly wooden actor who stuck out like a sore thumb in “Bram Stoker's Dracula”, and today he's Jesus returned from the dead…? @__@

bravo1102 wrote:

ozoneocean

O

There was this genre of music that had electric guitars and hard driving beats and stuff called “rock” . Whatever happened to it? There are geriatric nostalgia shows and like “classic” stations but one day I woke up and there were no new rock recordings.

Haha what was that 1999 movie where some guy in a bar says
"Well there's no new music anymore, it may as well be the end of the world !" ?

@Bravo - rock is being made, good rock, but it'd not going on the radio at all. You're stuck looking for youtube vids, word of mouth, small concerts, maybe podcasts or streaming radio?
But yeah, it does not exist for the mainstream now. The shit music that Kylie Minogue stated out doing with her synth back cover of “do the Locomotion” back in 1988 (?) has taken over.

Abt_Nihil wrote:
Yesterday Keanu Reeves was that terribly wooden actor who stuck out like a sore thumb in “Bram Stoker's Dracula”, and today he's Jesus returned from the dead…? @__@

Agreed. Not getting the Buddha Keanu.

Well there's plenty of new classical music being done so I'll give up on pop and just listen to a piano concerto or opera.

Gets to the point where everything else really does become noise and only classical is music. :D

Never thought I'd be that old guy saying it's all noise.

Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.

bravo1102 wrote:
There was this genre of music that had electric guitars and hard driving beats and stuff called “rock” . Whatever happened to it?

Have you tried Sumo Cyco?

bravo1102 wrote:

Never thought I'd be that old guy saying it's all noise.

Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.

Haha.. I was never going to be ‘that’ old guy either. In fact, I often used to argue with my annoyingly pre-geriatric contemporaries who were always saying “All the good music stopped in (select year of choice) !”
It is bollocks and was always bollocks- ever since my old man told me “They'll never last !” about the Rolling Stones, in about ‘67. who are still touring and he’s dead. I argued that there was good and bad music in any era, and the bad got tossed in the bin.
The problem this past decade or so, is that you have to go looking; find it by accident; be pointed st it by a like-minded mate, who emails you an URL and says ‘have a listen to this’
I've found heaps of reasonably new and not-so-new stuff those ways. Plus more of people I ‘half-knew’ about, but have since found much more of.
In recent times, for me, that has included “Everything But The Girl” , “Cigarettes After Sex” “Still Corners” and plenty of others.
I doubt there are many 70 y.o.'s listening to these, but I don't give a shit B-)
Go looking for your genres by type and see what you can find !
…and plug your headphones in for better sound B-)

p.s. My mind hasn't gone, but it tends to diverge into several lanes at times

I argued that there was good and bad music in any era, and the bad got tossed in the bin. ***

*** Um….well that's not strictly true, at least for the last half-century or so, as some of the most abysmal crap of the 60s and 70s is still touring the likes of returned veterans clubs, working men's clubs and bingo halls…
Acts such as “Freddie and the Dreamers” and “Gerry and the Pacemakers”, who, due to modern medicine and their afore-mentioned pacemakers haven't actually died yet, despite being older than yours truly.
Still, they are easily avoided by never frequenting those soul-destroying-at-that-time venues.
Now, where's that heavy-metal compilation…..

On the dodgy and tired argument that “there's no good music now”…
Well of course taste is subjective and we tend to like what the grew up with because we develop a more personal association and deeper connections with it.

On the other side there's the fact that the music industry has changed completely from what it was when rock ruled the radio.
Think of it like this:

In the early days of 20th century pop music people were scouring for ANY content that could go on the radio so in the early days you have a big creative burst in… I dunno, the 1910s to the 1920s… All different styles of stuff from all genres.
After that commercial interests took back the reigns completely and music started to get more controlled by the gatekeepers of the industry (publishers, radio people etc). There were a lot more manufactured songs.

WW2 brought more change with music being imported and exported everywhere, styles mixing… We eventually get rock in the 1950s and more artist driven music again. Commercial interests take over again but they're resisted when there are scandals about the “pay for play” with publishers paying radio stations for their songs to show up…

In the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, there's more change with TV taking over from radio and image becoming more important. Commercial interests are really entrenched…

In the late 90s the old distribution and record sales model took a massive hit with internet file sharing, as well as the democratisation of media consumption over the internet so the industry couldn't market their published bands as easily anymore over just a few channels. In this period there was a lot more artist driven creation taking over but much less money.

In the mid 2000s the industry has again wrested control of the channels and distribution has been funnelled down again into limited areas (itunes, google play, Youtube, commercial radio, Spotify, some TV shows like The Voice etc) so most mainstream stuff from 2010 to now does sound the same because it's polished and produced by the industry to their standards rather than being artist driven.
There's also the fact that many artists use the same digital music creation apps so a lot of the timing, compression, and samples come out the same too.


So there IS some truth to the idea that music gets worse! (and better). It's NOT just subjective. Things do change a LOT for a lot of reasons.

Ozoneocean that's a great summary of the past century of music.

Ever since that last fall down the elevator shaft any music harder than doo-wop gives me a headache. It's not that the music is bad, it's my mucked up head. :(
Muck as in sinuses.

And when did every store get “dollar” in its name?

…another “matrix glitch moment”
It didn't occur to me at first, because it wasn't apparent immediately, but this was a ‘matrix glitch’ moment for me…
My cleaner now comes on a Wednesday. A fortnight ago, after she left, I went down to use the en-suite and the bedroom light was on - it has 2 switches - one outside the bedroom door, and one on the side of the fitted wardrobes, next to the en-suite.
Jezza, my young mate was here by then, and I mentioned it to him - he said maybe she'd turned it on to see in a corner, as it was a dark, wet day. Yeah, fine - but it hasn't worked for 2 years !!
It ‘died’ in that period after my wife left, when I dislocated my shoulder, broke my original walker, was rolling around on an office chair over Xmas, destroying my slate floor, etc., so it just went in the “Yeah, that'll be right” category. I was beyond climbing on the ottoman to change it, by then.
It got mentioned to my son Rhys a few times, when he called in, but never got done. SO it got ‘normal’ and I just lived without it, except for the odd absent-minded ‘click’, when going into the en-suite during the night. My wife even complained about it, one time, when she stayed over with a friend, called in and went in there to retrieve some old item of clothing or something…
I was so used to it, I even forgot to ask my handyman, when he came to do multiple things (door lock and bolts, new shower head in family bathroom, new mixer tap in kitchen…), a few months back
SO we figured either Rhys had done it in the last day or two, or the cleaner must've clambered up to do it. although she hadn't asked where spare bulbs were. When I was trundling down to go to bed that night, Rhys came out of his room to go to his bathroom, and I said it was nice to have a light again. No response, but sometimes I only get a grunt anyway. So, next day, in the kitchen I thanked him for changing the bulb - “What bulb ?”. So it wasn't him.
This week when the cleaner arrived, I asked her about it. No, it wasn't her. Hmmm….so a bulb assumed to be dead - and offering plenty of evidence of that - suddenly decides to spontaneously renew itself, after over 2 years !?? cue ‘Twilight Zone’ theme B-)

BearinOz wrote:
so a bulb assumed to be dead - and offering plenty of evidence of that - suddenly decides to spontaneously renew itself, after over 2 years !?? cue ‘Twilight Zone’ theme B-)

I've actually seen this happen:
It was with an old incandescent bulb.

They have a filament which in this case was a teeny little tightly coiled string of wire. They die out when it snaps usually because a piece in the middle burns out and weakens to much to hold together and the circuit breaks, as we all know.

In this particular case the filament snapped close to one of the wire supports holding it so there was a long piece of filament left to swing free. So what happened was that any time the light was bumped the filament would swing up and reconnect with the broken piece and the “burned out bulb” light would work again.
And then it would eventually fall apart again… I think that each time it hung down the coil would stretch a bit from gravity which allowed it enough length to reconnect when it swung back. It was fascinating. Eventually the filament broke in another place though and wouldn't reconnect anymore :(


———————–

With your bulb (which is probably fluro, LED or Halogen right?), it could be a wiring fault (maybe a dead rat is bridging a gap in a broken wire? haha or moisture), or a lose socket maybe. Might be a good idea to get it checked. Don't let your house burn down!

ozoneocean wrote:
I've actually seen this happen:
It was with an old incandescent bulb.

They have a filament which in this case was a teeny little tightly coiled string of wire. They die out when it snaps usually because a piece in the middle burns out…
In this particular case the filament snapped close to one of the wire supports holding it so there was a long piece of filament left to swing free. So what happened was that any time the light was bumped the filament would swing up and reconnect with the broken piece and the “burned out bulb” light would work again.

———————–

With your bulb (which is probably fluro, LED or Halogen right?), it could be a wiring fault (maybe a dead rat is bridging a gap in a broken wire? haha or moisture), or a lose socket maybe. Might be a good idea to get it checked. Don't let your house burn down!

I loved this theory - and it IS an old-fashioned filament type - but its position mid-ceiling in a glass globe means being bumped is definitely out as a possibility…
The ‘dead rat’ one is a goodun - as I've had rats in the (flat) roof before and -
a: heard one die and fall through the studwork, while on the dunny one day B-) (it got removed, when the brickwork came off for a house extension, and our then dog, an OES, was running around with it, until intercepted by the builders)
b: another stepped onto my en-suite extractor fan, one night and got catapulted across to the outer wall, presumably dead, stopping the fan, which gradually wound back up again. I got my handyman to go up and check it was all clear
c: the possum I've had for some years, galloping across the colorbond plain, has apparently seen 'em off ! B-)

My “I'm going bonkers moment” is sometimes when I think all nerd culture is just in my imagination. It happens when all one is surrounded by nothing but “thug life” mentality, people who are heavy into drugs and binge drinking and when ever I try to bring up anything remotely connected to anything not connected to screwing hoes and gangbanging it's met with “that baby crap” before they pump themselves with more heroin and smoke spice.

Trying to find friends interested in TRPG, comics and furries here in Baltimore is hard. But still not as bad as rural Texas though.

Also I can't wrap my head around gamer's obsession with “realism”, but only focus on shooting in a Michel Bay way instead other things like bus driver, EMT, fork lift operator, so on.

Furwerk studio wrote:
It happens when all one is surrounded by nothing but “thug life” mentality

My condolences man!

That sort of thing always mystifies me. The “thuglife” behaviour is actually the true baby stuff ;)
Think about it… what people really tend to be interested in when they're growing up is all that fun universal pop-culture stuff. That what you form your interests from and define your personality by.

Drinking culture, drugs etc is not from US but what we get from slavishly imitating our parents, older siblings, friends , or what we see on TV. That's us tagging along and faking what we see as adult, “bigboy” behaviour.

The reality is that stuff is pretty tedious, unfulfilling, and dull. Sure, in a time before modern society with all its conveniences and advances club and bar culture had a place, but these days it's really just the ultimate LARP event.

—-
I know I look at things weird, but please bear with me.

I had a “shadow man” (glitch in the matrix ?) moment, a few evenings back.
I take SO many tablets, it's like a smorgasbord, and I have to take them with food. I sit on a stool in the kitchen, facing away from the idiot box & half-turning to watch it, as I eat, drink and pop pills.
My son @ 190cm and 140kg is like a ‘stealth’ NFL defence player - you will never meet such a large bloke who can be SO quiet - sometimes I half-turn, or reach around for the fridge…and jump, because he's suddenly there to get a beer or whatever…

SO…whoever was on the t.v. at the time, said something and I turned to watch…and had this odd 2-way reaction. I saw black (Rhys wears black a lot) and initially thought “Ahah, not startled, this time” - but then had about a second, watching this “tyre-smoke” black person-shape ‘solid shadow’, at brisk walk pace, do the 2.5 steps to emerge from the passageway and disappear into the wall under my old-style ‘Chinese office’ clock. THEN I got a shiver.

In ‘stunned mullet’ mode, I just sat there for several seconds, thinking "Did I just see that !?“ - doubting myself, plus trying to recreate any effect I might've had from ‘floaters’ in my eyes (I have one in each), replaying the last few minutes of the show, etc. No. Nothing.

I'd heard of the ‘shadow men’ phenomenon, and the various explanations of what they are, most of which I'm very sceptical of. Just about any odd occurrence, these days, I just put down to a ”glitch in the matrix" and move on.

I'm seeing shadow figures too. However with my detached retina repair surgeries my peripheral vision is weird. Things aren't as distorted as when I look straight on, so it's hard to make sense of it.

With the light sensitivity from the cataract surgeries every little glimmer of light or shadow looks like movement of something when it's all light and shadow.

So between all four, I don't trust my eyes.

I recently gotten into a very confusing twitter war about porn.

There was this post showcasing the horrors of live action “parodies” of cartoons shows like Spongebob, Lego Movie, ninja turtles and so on. I brought up something that always, always bothered me about these kinds of “parodies”.

For the cost of hiring actors, getting materials for the costumes, somebody to design said costumes (even if they are thrown together), a camera man, a sound guy, an editor, a director, a fluffer and so on the producers could had hired an independent animator on Newgrounds at half, or third, of the price.

Basically I was saying, “some animators were going to do it for free anyway, might as well pay them so they can make a living for it.”

Two things happened, one was many people were confused at the idea of actually paying animators to make porn. It was so foreign that many mocked it, saying things like “half the price of free”.

I have no idea why animators never get any respect, and I don't mean just independent ones ether but the SFX artists that make so many unbelievable things to happen on screen tend to get overlooked for the actors that don a big green gimp suit and roll around a massive sound stage, a lot of times getting screwed over out of pay.

Sorry for the vent, it's still irks me.

The other is, and this is an actual thing said, “some times you don't want to bust a nut, but bust a gut.” “Porn is suppose to be funny, not sexy.”

I feel like I slipped into a weird universe that has things very backwards.

Porn has lost a lot of its appeal over recent years, I think, particularly with the younger adult demographic. I think it's partially because it's so ubiquitous online that it's lost a lot of its mystique, but also attitudes toward it (and sex in general) are different. The generation of people born in the mid 1980s and after had on average less premarital sex than their parents. I don't know what that tells us in and of itself, but I get the impression that counterintuitively this generation is less sexually awakened, for whatever reason. Porn for porn's sake is no longer cool or interesting.

There's definitely still interest in seeing sexualized parody and ribald comedy, especially in an illustrated format. Porn can be a successful vehicle for some other type of expression. But if you're just showing people having sex, a lot of the reaction is going to be, “Okay… so what's the point?!”