The big ones that really cross at least a few age brackets, have wide general recognition and probably aren’t going anywhere in the near future (I may take some liberties with what I consider to be a franchise) in no particular order-

Star wars

James Bond

Lord of the rings

Sherlock Holmes

Batman

Superman

Spiderman

Mission Impossible

Mario

Zelda

Pokemon

Indiana Jones

Back to the Future

The Karate Kid

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Friday the 13th

Child’s Play

It

Rambo

Rocky

Jurassic Park

The Matrix

The Terminator

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Transformers

The Simpsons

Barbie

GI Joe

He-Man/Masters of the universe

Mickey Mouse

Toy Story

Looney Tunes

King Kong

Godzilla

Planet of the Apes

Mad Max

The Muppets

The Godfather

Ghostbusters

Alien

Star Trek

Robocop

Frankenstein

Dracula

Tarzan

Conan the Barbarian

Jaws

Harry Potter

The Incredible Hulk

The Dollars Trilogy

Sesame Street

The Hannibal Lecter series

MASH

I think in general, most people have at least heard of these properties, would probably recognize at least a few of the main characters, objects, logos, memes, quotes, the theme song, etc. they’ve probably made some reference to them, and could give at least a vague explanation about what they’re about or what the major themes are whether or not they’ve actually seen/read the source material

In general, I’m kind of counting a franchise as something that has had at least 3 major installments, iterations, episodes, series, remakes, reboots, etc. so a stand alone book, movie, etc. wouldn’t count, nor would a book or movie and a sequel, a book and a movie adaptation, etc. A book, a movie adaptation, and a reboot movie would, a film trilogy would,a tv series would, a movie that’s been rebooted/remade a couple times would.

Barbie feels like a weird one on this list to me, unlike GI Joe who’s had pretty big movies and cartoons and such that make it pretty hard to argue that it’s a franchise, most of Barbie’s notoriety comes from the dolls themselves and I’d be kind of hesitant to label a line of toys as a franchise instead of a brand, sure there’s been animated movies and video games and such, but none of them had really been particularly noteworthy. And I wouldn’t feel quite right labeling, for example, Lego as a franchise despite having had pretty considerable success with movies and video games and such. But the character of Barbie, branding, marketing, etc. kind of puts her in the same league as Mickey mouse and I just felt like she belonged on the list.

Some of the classic characters - Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, are arguably not really a franchise, there’s not necessarily one company or person who owns their likeness and is marketing them, but they loom large enough in the public consciousness that I think they deserve to be mentioned in this list as well

I tried to keep this relatively universal, though I’m sure my biases as a cis straight white American millennial male showed through in places. There’s a lot of franchises that form pillars of pop culture for specific demographics but not necessarily in general, and I tried to stay away from them, but a few of them just felt significant enough to me to warrant inclusion, in particular I kind of question how much general appeal He-Man has, for example, but I feel like if you say “He-Man” everyone has a mental image of the character seared into their brain (personally, I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen a whole episode of He-Man or really engaged with any masters of the universe media in general, but there he is in my brain and I don’t really know how he got there)

If you take up the project and decide to make my dream your reality, all I ask is that you share the code

I haven’t done a deep dive into how I’m going to make it happen, my programming is rusty as all hell, and I’ve never tinkered too much with a pie or this kind of project

But on its surface it seems like an easy enough problem, just need to turn on the appropriate lights when an emulator starts.

Easier said than done I’m sure, I also suspect you’d probably need some kind of led controller or maybe an Arduino or something between the pie and the lights, I don’t think the 3.3v it puts out from its GPIO pins would be enough for some light strips.

If someone had a lot of money to throw at the project, I imagine you could also do a pretty cool setup with smart lights like Philips Hue that would be pretty clean and require minimal tinkering with the physical electronics side of things, but you’d probably be throwing as much or more at it in bulbs as the rest of the project put together.

Yeah, I like to bring it up and put the idea out into the world whenever I get an opportunity because part of me is kind of hoping that maybe someone out there will do the hard work and write the code and share it online so someday when I have the space for it all I have to do is wire up the lights

Also when it comes time to fill in the gaps in my collection, I can save some money and still get the same effect because the console doesn’t even have to be in working order, it just has to not be too beat-up looking. I could probably even 3d print some dummy consoles to hold me over (though of course I’d prefer to have actual working consoles if possible)

A dream project for me, when I have the space for it, is to have a set of Ikea kallax shelves with a cubby for each retro console with some LEDs inside hooked up to a retropie emulating those consoles so those cubbies light up when that console is being emulated.

I have a lot of the actual consoles and they’re in working order, but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to get them hooked up, swap cartridges, etc. sometimes. And I have just enough programming and electronics background that I feel up to the task of trying to make it work, just don’t have the space for a big display shelf at the moment.

I can appreciate the experience of playing on the actual hardware and the cases where it’s superior, but for me the experience emulating them is 99% as good with significantly less effort. Totally cool if others prioritize things differently though.

I believe when talking about naval ships, commissioning is when they enter active service, so construction probably began early 90s, maybe even late 80s, and probably a few years of designing, bidding, etc before that. And of course there were probably all of the usual idiot politicians, bean counters, stubborn assholes, sales people, etc. involved who pushed for older tech. Maybe because everything else they had worked on the old disks, maybe they were skeptical of the new tech not being robust or tested enough or wouldn’t catch on, maybe it was just cheaper, etc.

I’m willing to bet that they somehow locked themselves into using 8 inch disks in the early to mid 80s if not earlier, when the 5¼ discs were still new-ish and the 3½ were brand-new or not even available yet.

In general, that’s probably a pretty OK income, not amazing, but probably a bit better than average depending on where you are in the country, but far from being wealthy, you’re probably not struggling, but you’re not above needing to worry about money sometimes either.

And since public defenders are lawyers, that’s kind of a shitty income given that they had to go through law school and such.

Pockets-

Front right:
keys if they’re not clipped to a belt loop
Lighter
Cigarettes if I don’t have a shirt pocket or cargo pockets Phone - pixel 7 pro, otterbox case

Keys: Carabiner
NiteIze DoohickKey FishKey
Small comb
House and car keys
A couple frequently used store membership cards
Mostly held together with s-biners, or niteize g series biners

Front left:
Mustache wax
Pixel buds
Knife- depends what I’m doing, most commonly an opinel, but

Back right:
Bandanna

Back left:
Chums Zipper Wallet, with key to my bike lock attached
A couple bandaids and safety pins in the wallet

Cheap sunglasses, no real brand or style preference, but I like metal frames, usually hanging from my shirt collar when not in use

Left wrist- Casio Protrek prg-550 with a cheap nato strap

Work bag:
Maxpedition Kodiak gear slinger (I like this bag’s functionality but I’ve fallen out of love with the military styling, and it’s probably bigger than I need these days, but it takes a beating and hasn’t fallen apart in over a decade of regular use so I can’t bring myself to replace it)
My work headset
Phone charger
Cheap Lenovo tablet for reading (M8 I think?)
Sometimes my switch
I normally keep a small first aid kit in my bag but I took it out for something a little while ago and keep forgetting to put it back, I believe it’s whatever the smallest ultralight/watertight kit that adventure medical sells
1l narrow mouth nalgene bottle ’ Maxpedition pocket organizer

In that organizer:
Zebra f-701 pen
Pentel graphgear 1000 pencil in .9 lead
Spare lead
Zebra pm-701 permanent marker
Yellow sharpie highlighter (if anyone knows of a highlighter thats less cheap looking, preferably metal with replaceable ink, I’m interested)
Thrunite ti4 NW flashlight
Pocket screwdriver, little plastic pen shaped thing, double ended with 2 double ended bits at either end, I think mine is Stanley branded but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other brands selling the exact same thing with different logos
Small crescent wrench (I think channel lock brand)
County comm widgy pry bar
CRKT CEO flipper
Tide pen
Lighter
Eraser
Field notes pitch black notebook
County comm titanium ruler
Samsung bar flash drive
Eraser
Spare AAA batteries
Small sewing kit
Small spool of some very strong thread (I think dyneema, not sure, pretty sure I picked that up from county comm as well) Wrapped the handle in some Paracord
USB A to C adapter (my wife borrowed it a while ago and I haven’t gotten it back yet)

Metal Stanley lunchbox
20oz Stanley thermos/travel mug thing (I don’t think they make my exact model anymore but the “trigger action” one is pretty close

As far as straws go, I agree that for most people in most situations they’re unnecessary for most soft drinks. I do, however, think they’re a pretty important part of the experience with some cocktails though, it has some effect on how fast you drink it, how it hits your tongue and you experience the flavors, if the drink is layered it effects how those different layers mix, what order you get them in and how the drink evolves as you drink it.

That said, I think most reusable straws make for a bad substitute in a lot of cases because they’re too thick compared to the coffee stirrer type straws I usually tend to get in bars when I order a cocktail that calls for a straw. Thinner straws would probably be kind of a pain to clean though.

I’m not a huge fan of metal straws, they’re just too hard and kind of unnerving if they crack against your teeth.

I have some bamboo straws I like, and they fit my vibe since I make a lot of tiki drinks at home.

I was in Montreal for the eclipse, I’m sure it was a very busy tourist weekend and they were ready for the influx of us English speakers coming to town, but I didn’t have any issues anywhere.

It was probably my favorite city I’ve ever visited. Everything we ate was amazing, even when we just stopped into some random hole in the wall Chinese takeout place for a quick bite.

Public transit blew anything I’ve ever experienced in the states clean out of the water. I was also kind of in awe at how bikeable the city was.

There’s not many cities I’ve visited that I’m itching to go back to, but I’m definitely planning to go back sometime.

To be fair, you didn’t say it had to be a modern technological invention, just that it impacted the modern world

So I don’t have any specific insight to what’s available in the Netherlands

But I kind of feel like maybe you’re explaining what you’re looking for poorly

First some terminology

SIM and e-SIM are basically how your cellular service provider knows that your phone is connected to your account. The phone that has either that physical SIM card inserted, or that e-SIM data gets the calls, texts, data, etc. that are supposed to go to you. Take the SIM card out or change the e-SIM, and that phone no longer gets those calls, texts, and data. Put that same sim or e sim on another phone and it starts getting all those calls texts and data.

VoIP is Voice over Internet protocol, basically sending a phone call over the Internet instead of over phone lines. This might be from a computer, or from something that looks like a landline phone (or maybe even is a regular landline phone with some sort of adapter) or from a cell phone with a VoIP app installed. To use it from a cell phone you’d need to have either a WiFi connection, or a cellular data connection, and to have that cellular data connection you need to have either a sim or e-sim.

I don’t think there’s any VoIP provider that’s set up to just use your phone’s dialer and text app to directly handle calls and texts (though I could be wrong on that, I don’t try to keep up with all of the different types of phone services out there) everything would have to go through their app. If you want to do that, and you’re either ok having no cellular data and all of your calls, texts, and data use would have to go over WiFi, or if you keep paying for a cell plan (and the associated SIM/e-SIM) maybe either just a data plan with no talk/text, or a regular plan and you just don’t use the talk and text parts, then you just need to track down a VoIP provider, sign up for an account, and install their app on your phone.

If you want to transfer your actual phone number from your cell phone to a VoIP account, either to use on your cell phone through that VoIP app, from a computer, or from one of those landline VoIP devices, I don’t think that’s really a thing. If you just want calls to your cell to go to your VoIP phone number as well you’re looking for call forwarding.

You might also be getting tripped up with things like WiFi calling, VoLTE/VoNR (marked by some carriers with terms like “HD Voice”) which are things that are all going to be dependent on a regular cell carrier, not a specific VoIP company, and may depend a bit on their network infrastructure and what features your partic6 phone does or doesn’t support.

A large part of the “magic” with human relationships is that out of all of the 8 billion some people in the world, those who are close to you have chosen to spend time with you. For all of our flaws, they see your true nature and value you for it, and choose to have you as part of their lives.

With an AI, that may not be a thing.

If they’re programmed to like you, they’re at best a toy and at worst a slave. There’s no freedom for them to choose or not to choose to be with you. You’re getting an imitation of a relationship. It could be a convincing imitation, with built-in arguments and other idiosyncrasies, but to me every time I hit one of those, it would just be a stark reminder that it’s not the real thing and it’s just programmed to behave that way.

If they’re not programmed to like you and are free to form or not form connections with humans, there’s no guarantee you’d have any more luck wooing an AI than you would a human.

I’m not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said

NO, I’m not a tankie.

I think, however, it’s worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn’t apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn’t want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.

I don’t think I’m the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are

1. Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.

2. Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to “the west”/capitalism/etc.

I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn’t consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they’re standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they’ve lost sight of what they’re actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they’re about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don’t like out of libraries, they think they’re about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)

And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It’s not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say “we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes,” sometimes you have to play a little bit of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you’re advancing their cause as much or more than your own.

I think there’s probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don’t truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there’s others who have justified it, thinking that they’re only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.

Couple last thoughts from me.

There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.

Personally, a lot of the criticism I’ve seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.

I don’t know the reasoning, I’ve always personally liked trackballs so I never questioned it

But if I had to hazard a guess, maybe because we each have 5 or 6 monitors, and it’s easier to just give the trackball a good spin when you have to go from one far edge to the other than it is to pick up and move your mouse a few times or to provide adequate desk space.

There’s probably some really weird graphs to be made of who hunts and pecks and who uses the home row

I don’t have the stats on it, but I suspect that up until about the 80s men would mostly hunt and peck, and women were a mixture, because a lot of secretaries and such who had to type professionally were women. As computers became bigger more men would start using the home row, peaking around the 90s/early 2000s when pretty much every milenial had computer/typing classes (although I know plenty of my millennial peers still hunt and peck) and now it’s on a bit of downward slope with Gen z/alpha who are more used to phones/iPads.

I work in 911 dispatch, it’s a bit of a thing I’ve noticed with our younger new hires, they’re somewhat less comfortable with keyboard/mouse controls than the rest of us (and for added confusion, we have trackball mice, a lot of them have never seen or used one before or an old mechanical mouse with a ball. A handful of them have barely used mice at all and are more used to laptop trakcpads and touch screens. They catch on pretty quick but there’s definitely a bit of a learning curve.

A lot of my gaming experience has been on Nintendo consoles, and a lot of this list is going to be viewed through nostalgia goggles with a lot of my first ranking higher than games that might have done the same thing better.

Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt- this is where it all began for me, and I still wish light gun games had become more of a thing

Tetris- timeless classic, everyone knows and loves it, no further explanation needed.

Pokemon red/blue/yellow- my first forray into RPGs

Kotor- first forray into RPGs that actually involved playing a role, the fact that you could be a bad guy was revolutionary to me. I also think this may have been one of the first games that I played completely through, I’ve always had a bad habit of never finishing a lot of games even if I really loved them. Also one of my first PC games and the first time I needed to install a graphics card in the family PC to play a game.

TES: Oblivion - look, you could pretty much insert any of the elder scrolls or 1st person fallout games into this spot, and quite a few others that arguably do it better, but this was my first real taste of an open world where you could go do (moru-or-less) whatever you wanted, everything felt so alive, and the imperial city still kind of feels to me like one of the most alive and actually functional cities in a video game and not just a level that’s dressed up to look like a city.

Portal 2: I don’t think there are many games out there that are just this much fun, and everything the first portal did great (which was pretty much everything,) 2 expanded on and made even better.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch- I’m a sucker for short games with a good gimmick and intentionally weird controls.

Saints Row 3- it was stupid, it was fun, I could honestly entertain myself for hours just running around the city, stealing cars, and beating luchadores with a giant dildo for hours and have a blast the entire time.

Super Mario 64- my first experience with 3d gaming, and I’d argue still one of the best 3d platformers out there (wonky cameras and such from that era aside) I like simple, lightheaded games.

Ocarina of time- enough has been said about this game elsewhere on the Internet that I don’t feel like I need to say any more.

Went to the outer Banks with my wife, her grandmother, her brother, and his girlfriend.

First of all, I don’t dislike any of them, I like them better than a lot of my own family, but we’re different kinds of people. If I hadn’t married my wife, they’re not the sort of people I’d ever choose to interact with, I’d make polite conversation with them at a party or something, but I’d never really give them a second thought.

I’m not a beach person, I hate sand, I hate sitting around in the sun, I hate the biting flies, I like fishing but don’t really enjoy surf fishing. They all of course wanted to spend a lot of time on the beach.

They have a lot of love for this island, once upon a time their family owned a vacation house there and they’d pretty much spend the whole summer there. I have no such nostalgia goggles, so as far as I’m concerned it’s a pretty meh place to spend your time. It has a handful of mediocre restaurants and bars, a bunch of touristy stores selling mostly beach themed bric a brac and artsy craftsy junk that I have no real desire to buy or even wander around a store looking at, and a grocery store and liquor store with pretty limited selections. Nothing really there that appealed to me.

We mostly cooked at the house, which isn’t really my idea of a vacation, I get it, it’s cheaper, but I’m trying to avoid doing chores, that’s kind of the point. Nonetheless, I do enjoy cooking, I planned out my meals, came up with cocktail pairings, etc. had to modify them a bit on the fly because as I was finding out my brother in law and his girlfriend are kind of picky eaters. The other parties kind of skimped a bit on their meal planning, we had some meals that were frozen store bought lasagna and such. I kind of knew my meals would be fancier and more involved than theirs but I kind of expected them to put in at least a little effort.

Her grandmother was in the early stages of dementia, not too bad at the time, but she was a little restless and forgetful, which just made her a little annoying to deal with when we just wanted to chill at the house.

I had also somewhat recently started a new job working night shift, so my whole schedule was kind of flipped upside down and most of the time I just really wanted to sleep.

Also the place was about a 9 hour drive, which baffles me because we have a lot of perfectly fine beaches with more stuff to do within an hour or two from home.

We decided to drive mostly overnight to avoid traffic meeting up at about 11 IIRC to drive down in 3 different cars, we’d get there probably by about noon accounting for bathroom breaks, grabbing breakfast on the way, etc. giving us a chance to put pack, grab lunch, maybe take a nap, then still get some time in do vacation stuff (whatever vacation stuff means on an island with literally nothing to do)

I kind of figured they would all have their cars mostly loaded and be ready to go, which was wishful thinking, we didn’t actually get on the road until well after midnight, it might have even been after 1.

I really felt like I wasted my week off from work. Only real things I enjoyed was when my wife and I rented a boat with her brother and his girlfriend and just kind of boated around for a few hours, and playing boardgames at the house at night, but I didn’t need to spend about 18 hours driving and spend a week there to boat around for a few hours and play boardgames.

They had talked about trying to do annual family vacations after that (they were at least going to throw me a bone and not do the beach every year, though I suspect a lot of my other gripes would’ve still persisted) but luckily for me the next year COVID hit, her grandmother’s dementia has progressed a lot since then and her mom is taking care of her, and we’ve all just had general life stuff keeping us busy so that hasn’t happened.

I think this is kind of a thing for a lot of stereoscopic 3d technology.

I could play the virtual boy, 3ds, watch 3d movies, etc. for hours without issue, and other people can’t take it at all.

I don’t know what factors play into that, maybe it’s genetic, maybe there’s some kind of skill/technique/habits about how you focus your eyes, or how often you blink, maybe it’s just luck of the draw that your pupil distance is just right or wrong. Maybe it comes down to something ridiculous like how many hours you spent trying to make sense of Magic Eye books when you were a kid.

Even if it was for batteries, unless we get fusion factors down to something that can fit in a car, power drill, smartphone, etc. batteries are still going to be a big part of the equation.

Sure, you can generate enough juice to power whatever you want, but only as long as it’s plugged in, anything that needs to get detached from the grid is still going to need batteries, and you probably don’t want your car hooked up to a 10 mile long power cord for your commute.

Not exactly sending them to coworkers, but I did kind of refer a coworker to one once.

I work in 911 dispatch, it’s kind of hard not to end up a little desensitized to some crazy shit. We once had a call about some kind of industrial accident, someone’s arm caught in a machine or something along those lines. Obviously not going to share too many specific details about the incident, but we did have a teams on location ready to do a field amputation if needed, but luckily they were able to get the person out without any major injuries.

So our conversations tended to be about a lot of the crazy gory fucked up things we’d taken calls about or otherwise seen or heard about, and I mentioned the Russian lathe accident video to one of my coworkers (don’t look that up if you’re not the kind of fucked up who can deal with that sort of thing, it’s a guy getting caught in a heavy duty lathe and spun around and mashed against the machine until someone comes and hits the emergency stop, at which point there’s nothing much left of him)

That piqued her interest, and she went and watched it on her phone at her next break.

I wouldn’t send the video to anyone, especially not out of the blue, and when it comes up I warn people not to look it up if they’re the type of person who would be significantly disturbed by it. In general I won’t even mention it to people who don’t work either in some sort of emergency services or medical sort of field where we have to occasionally deal with that kind of thing, or in a machine shop where they’re working around those kinds of machines, and even then it’s something that only gets brought up to certain people in certain contexts.