Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's literally a story about this thing happening.
In the past. The comment said "increasingly impossible," looking toward the future.
> In the past.
“This is a photograph of me when I was younger.”
Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
91–100 of 158 posts
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#92I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.
Not sure how many people will get the reference, but I was thinking this just yesterday about the Pokémon red and blue games. Back in the nineties many rumours spread about hidden secret in those games, but we didn’t have the internet to verify or debunk them. Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because…
I think about this every once in a while. I've grown up playing those games and others like them. I remember how cool the world seemed in World of Warcraft when it first came out, but once I realized players had mapped out the entire game and knew where everything was it really took away from the mystery of it all. This is part of why procedurally generated content interests me. No one else has played through the exact same Minecraft seeds that I have (or at least I don't think so, I'm not 100% sure how it works).
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are "things like this"? Is it things that exist in public but which don't have clear attribution? B/c in 2020 there were the "monoliths", which were pretty cool. Or, you know, Banksy still exists. Or @fog_karla / @karlthefog for that matter. Is it playful, non-scalable experiences? There's Improv Everywhere. My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries". There's a guy who keeps doing extremely l…
Banksy is a marketing man. He pretends to be anti-establishment but his organisation defends his IP as fiercely as Disney defends its. He is all about the money. I agree that that the world is full of weird, creative people, but you won't find them at Sotheby's.
Depends what you mean by anti-establishment.
Even most hardcore anarchists believe in some form of cooperation. Just because you criticize parts of an establishment doesn't make you anti all kinds of establishment.
You can both be anti establishment and supportive of some parts of it.
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
2nd link for Europeans: http://archive.is/2017.08.07-014013/http://www.capitolhillse...
I appreciate you putting out an alternative link. Unfortunately I cannot access archive.is (shows a Cloudflare page with Google reCaptcha). Why not using the more well known archive.org instead? Also IIRC archive.is is hard to access for some users depending on the DNS server they're using.
I get those from time to time. Isn’t just solving the captcha enough to reach the page?
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are "things like this"? Is it things that exist in public but which don't have clear attribution? B/c in 2020 there were the "monoliths", which were pretty cool. Or, you know, Banksy still exists. Or @fog_karla / @karlthefog for that matter. Is it playful, non-scalable experiences? There's Improv Everywhere. My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries". There's a guy who keeps doing extremely l…
Say you set up this vending machine today. More and more people quickly find out about it. Eventually a few people are waiting for it to be restocked so they can quickly buy all the rare cans and sell them on eBay, so it's empty most of the time. Maybe the owner gets discovered. The fun is gone and it gets removed.
This is subject to survivorship bias, though. These days it's certainly easier for things to go viral, but things can only go viral if they get found in the first place and, crucially, if those who found it choose to share it. Maybe the clout economy of instagram etc. increases the odds that people will expose such things for likes, but I personally know of at least one fantastic, incredible (, almost certainly illegal) thing in the woods in my hometown of Pittsburgh that I'll never tell anybody for fear of it becoming popular. Look for it yourself. :P
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must not have read the article, it is on Capitol Hill in Seattle, which is in the state of Washington, not Washington D.C.
Seattle may have or influence tech secrets Russia wants.
Exactly. Even our most obsolete soda flavors could cause untold chaos if they fell into the hands of the Russian government.
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#97I used to live nearby and would walk past the machine every day on my way to work and way home. Over time, all (?) the options went from specific flavors to the "MYSTERY" option, but I always attributed it to them just getting lazy about filling it with specific flavors.
I remember that one day it just disappeared. They were redoing the sidewalk and had to put the machine away and it never came back.
I'm pretty sure the locksmith owns the machine, but it's fun to pretend it's a mystery. :)
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>And it's sad that people associate having a sugary beverage as a 'good time with friends.' Lets enjoy poison together?! :-/ Oh boy, just wait until you learn about alcohol.
I might be able to compartmentalize slightly better than GP, but as much as that machine is charming as hell and brings warmth to my heart, soda has more or less been a plague on humanity. Unlike soda, alcohol has a lot going for it, because unless you abuse it, it can be a pretty wonderful, unique inebriant.
Talking about compartmentalization, the earnestness of you anti-fizzy-dinkers struck me as a little silly, and then I realized that outside of childhood I avoided carbonated beverages and sort of hold a mental prohibition on them for some of the reason you allude to. I do enjoy the rare root beer or ginger-ale, though.
Now, where did I put my cigarettes?
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#99From the title I expected an article about a soda machine near the US capitol that was secretly full of Russian spy gear or something.
Pleasantly surprised, and yes it sounds like the locksmith was involved even if he didn't personally stock it.
Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are "things like this"? Is it things that exist in public but which don't have clear attribution? B/c in 2020 there were the "monoliths", which were pretty cool. Or, you know, Banksy still exists. Or @fog_karla / @karlthefog for that matter. Is it playful, non-scalable experiences? There's Improv Everywhere. My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries". There's a guy who keeps doing extremely l…
Banksy is a marketing man. He pretends to be anti-establishment but his organisation defends his IP as fiercely as Disney defends its. He is all about the money. I agree that that the world is full of weird, creative people, but you won't find them at Sotheby's.
I do think the stunt of the artwork that destroyed itself during the auction was cool in that it seems to have surprised everyone, and anyone in the room who _didn't_ buy it also got a surprise performance art experience.