I have to concede that a nail clipper is somewhat more practical, especially for travel.
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Vending machines. Where are all the vending machines? There used to be a couple outside every grocery and convenience store. Every office building had some in the hallways outside of the offices- sometimes even a whole little lounge area with a food machine, drink machine and a couple couches with a coffee table. Theyāre almost all gone now. The only vending machines I can think of for miles and miles around are a handful at the local hospital. What happened?
The first thing that comes to mind is that people are drinking less soda- fewer people are going to just chug a full-sugar Pepsi or Sprite than a few decades ago. But thereās still a ton of people that do, and people still drink a plethora of other beverages that could go in a vending machine. So whereās the kombucha or bottled tea machines, or the Red Bull or iced coffee machines, or the yerba mate or flavored sparkling water machines, or ones that sell āhealthyā low-calorie probiotic sodas like Olipop or Poppi? Iāve literally never seen one, they appear not to exist. What gives?
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Michigan still has plenty. Gumball machines at Meijer and Kroger stores, the ice rink has water/gatorade/supplies (laces, tape, that sort of thing). They inexplicably have āenergyā drinks in one of the vending machines at the rink. 
Rest areas tend to have beverage and snack machines. Heck City Hall in Ann Arbor has a couple in the main lobby for beverages and snacks. Plus the narcan vending machine 
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Well, that brought up a lot of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, sad that itās necessary, on the other, good for them for making it available, on the third hand (help, Iām mutating), putting it in a vending machine is super dystopian- āSorry, canāt save your life, this $5 bill is too wrinkled for it to acceptā - on the fourth, if it were free to take people would immediately empty it just to make sure itās unavailable to people who need it, because this is America.
Unrelated, does that vending machine Gatorade come in cans or bottles? The blood center around here used to have it in cans and it was for some reason ten thousand times better than the bottled kind, but Iāve never seen it actually sold that way. And now the blood center doesnāt even have it any more. 
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The narcan is free, but I donāt think weāve had issues with it being stollen by assholes. A2 is still kind of a dirty hippy kind of town, the community largely supports this effort to save lives. I could ask park staff if theyāve had issues, thereās a newspaper sized box outside the municipal ice rink that might see a bit more action due to itās relative distance from City Hall/police central.
The gatorade at the private ice rink is the usual plastic bottles. Iāve never seen it in cans. 
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Weighing machines. These used to be on the sidewalk outside many stores. A penny for a service, not for anything material.
And I canāt resist this old one. (Apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
An Arab stood by a weighing machine
At the close of the desert day.
A counterfeit penny he slipped in the slot,
And silently stole a weigh.
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I see them in train stations, mostly out of order. Itās such a common scenario I wondered what made them so hard to maintain. Was it the upgrades to only use dollars and avoid heavy, messy coins? Maybe it was the addition of credit card paymentsā¦or crypto. Whatever the reason, the snacks and drinks are visible - but thereās no good way to get them out. 
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A loving tribute to a simple, engaging game.
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Itās been almost 10 years now, but somewhere around 2015 I saw a working cigarette vending machine. It was however inside one of those private club/bars where you had to be a member (or invited by one) to get in. But then drinks were dirt cheap, you could smoke if you wanted, and they had pool tables and darts.
Like a lot of those old clubs, it had a lot of older people, but kinda surprisingly the darts tournaments, free pool, and really cheap drinks were also drawing in younger members. In fact it was a millenial that invited us. So even though we didnāt have walkers, we didnāt feel too out of place.
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Damn i forgot about this game. I played the hell out of this back in the day.
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Hmmā¦ This could be what it would take to revive the portable one Iā've stashed awayā¦
Unless the CRT is shot.
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Liquid Glass and MacOS 26 Tahoe Are Coming, but Right Now Iām Engrossed by This Interactive History
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āLiquid Glass?ā That sounds a little Windows Vista-y.
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Yeah, thatās what microsoft thought too.
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Hereās the actual site:
This site is a thing of absolute beauty.
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I had some issues with some of the later emulators in Firefox, but the concept and execution is otherwise fantastic. I would love to see more things presented like this. Iāve long thought that a museum exhibit style program would be fantastic to show the history of video games, although I foolishly hadnāt thought of it being web-based since I donāt think about webAssembly and what it allows, even though archive.org is right there. I also think this would be a good medium for many other history related topics (films, music, books, etc.)
Does anyone know if thereās any kind of framework that helps streamline this kind of presentation? Iād be willing to take a stab at it for some of my family history/genealogy, but donāt want to start completely from scratch. Prezi/Impress.js go some way towards it, but Iām not sure if thatās the right way to go either.
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Not completely sure this is the right thread for this, since itās about how GenZ has nostalgia for the past that came before them, but itās pretty interesting and probably nostalgic for those of us who were around back then. (Even if the speaker does kinda seem like a GenZ Nicolas Cage.)
Some of the comments are interesting:
I was born in 1974. If 1980 me, walked into modern McDonaldās, or even Disneyland, Iād think I walked into a hellish, dead inversion of everything I enjoyed.
If 1994 me, was told about there being no more of the places I spent time, no more 24-hour anything, that places barely stayed open 'til 9PM, Iād also see that as a boring hellscape.
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