The slides look pretty similar to the illustration. I don’t think those are actually slides that end over the edge, they’re slides that have a transparent section where they hang over the edge so you can get a little glimpse of being over the open ocean. Which I guess is an extra kind of thrill? I would pass.

Here’s a screenshot of the video for comparison.

https://i.imgur.com/gHiVLF6.png

That looks to me like a drawing by the design/architecture team, but there is a real boat like that and it’s a pretty close match for the design. Here’s a video with drone footage from the launch; 1:39 you can see a view kinda similar to the drawing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bw4_PUtqdF4

Oh, yeah, the voice is a big part of it. “Everything is possible with zombocom.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com

You can use that kind of HP cartridge and also modify it to take ink from a reservoir. It’s perfectly possible to buy ink suitable for an inkjet printer in bulk for much cheaper than HP will sell it to you, and that kind of reservoir mod will let you use the print head built in to the HP cartridge.

That’s not the C&H I expected to see in this thread.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/cyanideandhappiness/images/9/90/The_Genie_of_the_Lamp_-_Gallery.png

It’s directed by Terry Gilliam, and it’s brilliant. It’s set in a bureaucratic totalitarian state, and follows a minor functionary who is slowly losing his mind. There are multiple overlapping plots, involving a rebel heating engineer, a man mistakenly abducted and tortured to death by the government after a computer glitch, the functionary’s politically ambitious mother, a quack plastic surgeon, a beautiful truck driver, terrorist attacks, and the functionary’s ever-growing escapist fantasy life. It’s one of my favorite films. Right up there with Delicatessen in terms of dystopian comedy sci-fi.

Thanks! I debated whether to include it, because it’s definitely one of those “well my brain sure isn’t normal!” things, but now I’m glad I did.

And the ringer in the phone was a physical bell with a little magnetically-actuated hammer, so if you slammed the receiver down hard enough, the bell would actually resonate for a little while after. You know how some people use a bell slowly fading out as a meditation tool? That’s the association I have for that sensation.

I grew up near a place called the “McGuffin Lumber Company.” It was just a tiny storefront business, and I never saw anyone go in. And, of course, “MacGuffin” is a Hollywood term for an arbitrary thing that motivates the plot of a movie, like the Maltese Falcon in that film. So it was a running gag in my family that it must be a front.

HID headlights were just as bad, and those go back to the 90’s.

You are agreeing. They said we must be INtolerant of intolerance.

Oh, you’re right, it’s right there in the link you shared–it was built in to MS-DOS, but only from version 6 on. I must have misremembered it as paid because it was something we didn’t have, and then later we did.

Ah, yeah, I think that may actually have been a paid program. It was something folks were willing to pay not to have to do, because, as I say, it was surprisingly tricky to manage the memory below 640K.

IIRC the application was just “edit.com”, as in “edit autoexec.bat”. The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game–maybe you didn’t load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes–you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.

It’s the “with which we are okay” that sounds a little stilted. Most speakers would probably phrase that part of the sentence as “which we’re okay with.” It’s just because “okay with” is so common that it almost feels like a transitive form of the verb “to be okay,” so splitting apart sounds odd.

Note that there’s already a different transitive verb “okay” which means “approve” or “authorize,” as in “the boss okayed your plan to use the forklift,” implying that the person doing this has authority or control over whether the thing happens. “I’m okay with it” by contrast typically means something like “I have no control over it but it also doesn’t trouble me.” “Unfazed by” (spelled in this way, not related to “phase”) would be a similar expression.

The code name of the first Steam Box, before it was released, was Piston, which fits the theme pretty well. e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3