Vinyl (for music, not floors).
Casual Conversation
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES (updated 01/22/25)
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling. To be concise, disrespect is defined by escalation.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible. You won't be punished for trying.
- Avoid controversial topics (politics or societal debates come to mind, though we are not saying not to talk about anything that resembles these). There's a guide in the protocol book offered as a mod model that can be used for that; it's vague until you realize it was made for things like the rule in question. At least four purple answers must apply to a "controversial" message for it to be allowed.
- Keep it clean and SFW: No illegal content or anything gross and inappropriate. A rule of thumb is if a recording of a conversation put on another platform would get someone a COPPA violation response, that exact exchange should be avoided when possible.
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc. The chart redirected to above applies to spam material as well, which is one of the reasons its wording is vague, as it applies to a few things. Again, a "spammy" message must be applicable to four purple answers before it's allowed.
- Respect privacy as well as truth: Don’t ask for or share any personal information or slander anyone. A rule of thumb is if something is enough info to go by that it "would be a copyright violation if the info was art" as another group put it, or that it alone can be used to narrow someone down to 150 physical humans (Dunbar's Number) or less, it's considered an excess breach of privacy. Slander is defined by intentional utilitarian misguidance at the expense (positive or negative) of a sentient entity. This often links back to or mixes with rule one, which implies, for example, that even something that is true can still amount to what slander is trying to achieve, and that will be looked down upon.
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
CRT screens and incandescent lamp.
Yeah those things would get HOT. like, hot enough to melt plastic. And they were really wasteful.
Pagers. Having to find a pay phone. Looking through newspapers for jobs. Absolutely gutless emissions- strangled malaise era cars with horrible brakes and numb steering.
Looking through the paper for a job was in some ways better. Now it's so hard to even get past the initial filters to an actual human because job postings get spammed with hundreds of applications, many from people who are underqualified and/or straight up lying on their resume. For remote jobs, you're competing against the whole country whereas with jobs in the paper you were mostly competing against those in your local area.
At the risk of becoming too anti-casual, anti-gay slurs were so common in the US up until the mid/late 90s, if you weren't there for it you just have no idea. One of the Bill and Ted movies (I think the first one?) just randomly dropping it in there as a joke, where the slur is the joke, is a good example of just how it was then. There's still bigotry but it's not as casual and pervasive.
Eminem has a song where he casually drops an F bomb.
He dropped like a thousand of them. He was using it regularly until sometime in the 2010s.
Eminem is weird cause he leans left but will use any word— save for n word and now f— as long as it rhymes or fits the scheme, then does nearly nothing else offensive. It’s like words are exempt from his morality.
Dial-up internet. I would open a website and go do something else for a minute until it loads, then fight with my parents when they pick up the phone when I've been downloading something for 3 hours.
We had very late internet infrastructure upgrade, so at the end we had a bluetooth dial-up internet router in the early 2010s...
Internet over bluetooth is a crime against humanity
Medicine in general has gotten a lot better. I'm also able to buy stuff like silken tofu without having to drive quite far to find a specialty store that sells it.
The lack of privacy, independence, and freedom that generally comes with childhood.
I'm glad that Furbys, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras are no longer mainstream. And may they never return.
Henry Kissinger
May he rot into nothing and be forgotten
Smallpox
CRT displays.
Still using mine daily! Older shows and movies just look better on it.
I like to have one around 😅. I like the look and it'll probably survive me
Survive you or outlive you?