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Fragments of Ephemera: Listings, Classified Ads, Bulletin Board Flyers, Blotter Reports, Coupons, etc...


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#1 denzquix

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Posted 18 May 2013 - 03:27 PM

(fictional & nonfictional welcome alike.)




Rough Draft, monthly listing of events & activities of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, 1986-2001 archive: PDF / archive.org viewer

 

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#2 denzquix

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Posted 18 May 2013 - 03:28 PM

Maniac Mansion's original "school bulletin board" hint poster: http://www.tentakelv...x/mm_poster.jpg

#3 denzquix

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Posted 18 May 2013 - 03:40 PM

Andrew "zarf" Plotkin's Left Foot Living Review (1995-2003): http://www.eblong.com/zarf/review/
 

Technology Spinoffs
Light Bugs are persistent tools which seek out dark areas and glow there. You have to define a space for them to move around it, and give them a power source. Then they even out the lighting. Closets, cupboards, crevices behind the sofa... all equally lit, once the light bugs have reached equilibrium.

You can decide how many to scatter about. Or you can tell them to divide as necessary. But be sure you specify a maximum population limit, and a minimum light intensity. You can easily wind up with swarms of microscopic bugs, none large enough to perceive on its own -- distributed to even the illumination of every shadow, surface, and angle. The room becomes a featureless haze; not a single object visible. Not what you want to accidentally happen to your home -- although you might arrange it deliberately in one room, just to see.

Barely Explicable
Two more streets in Eastside have developed "laminar ice" after last night's storm. Researchers now have a hypothesis about the formation. The streets in question use the snow-deflection tool which is commonly applied to rarely-used back roads. This tool may be interacting strangely with certain freezing-rain weather conditions.

The field can have a retarding effect on air currents. This creates a two-inch-thick layer of air, retained against the ground. The air becomes unusually cold due to ground conduction, which keeps it even more firmly contained.

When a water droplet falls into this layer, it cools rapidly -- it can in fact become supercooled. It is then shunted aside, off the road, where it can easily hit -- and thus freeze upon -- a curb, post, or building-edge. Over the course of an ice storm, this can produce a thin layer of ice, hovering two inches above the ground, which spreads out into the road until the entire surface is covered.

In most cases this layer cannot support its own weight, and "crashes out", leaving simply an icy road. But if the deflection field gets confused about the position of the road surface -- which this continuous icy sheet may do -- it can develop unstable spots. These melt the ice sheet at regular intervals (a hexagonal node grid), causing tiny stalactites, which descend to the roadway and thus support the sheet...

(The Ornae Street effect, in which up to five of these ice layers were seen stacked at two-inch intervals, was apparently caused by a very confused deflection field.)

Fads of the Home
Two-Sided Shelves -- you can put stuff on the top or the bottom. Trivial gravity adjustment.

But since a shelf is either above or below eye level, how do you see everything in your closet? Crouching down and standing up is tiring. Several options have become popular:

  • Rotating two-sided shelves -- they work, but even with the gravity control, things tend to fall over when you flip the shelf. Besides, you still can't see both sides at the same time.
  • Transparent two-sided shelves -- the most obvious trick.
  • Mobius one-sided shelves -- both sides are used, but are joined continuously at the ends. If you look along the shelf, you see twice as much length as you expect -- extending into the wall -- and that's the "bottom" space. (Slide the shelf left or right if stuff is out of reach.) Problem: trapdoor spatial distortion requires a hypermass manipulator the size of a building. Impractical for home use.
  • Vertical two-sided shelves -- you can put stuff on the left side or the right. Preferred solution.
Possible future expansion involves no shelves at all, just a space with zero gravity and a velocity damper, so things stay where you put them. This requires more development, however. Apparently, people really want shelves -- so they can line things up. Organizing free space is too hard to think about.

Product Development In Depth
One: "String that is intangible to itself -- it passes right through itself -- so it will never tangle!"

Two: Hacker creates untanglable string, implemented as field tool embedded in aglet.

Three: Impossible to tie knot in string. String is thus useless for all stringy tasks.

Four: Hacker adjusts tool so that intangibility does not apply to any segment of string which is kinked or curved (radius of curvature 1 cm or less). Knots now hold adequately.

Five: Now string can become tangled (since tangles tend to include kinks and bends). Give up on idea?

Five: Unsuspected advantage! Many knots are easier to tie, since straight lengths of string can be passed through each other, then hooked into (tangible) loops or bights.

Six: Change marketing from "untanglable" to "easy-knotting" string.

Seven: Mindshare!

City Features
The North Point Shopping Arcades have set up a tool that -- visually -- fills their pedestrian ways with knee-deep water. It rushes down stairs and along walkways, eternally, never slowing. (Yes, it rushes horizontally. The movement is clearly tweaked for dramatic effect, rather than being a strictly physical simulation. But it does swirl realistically around local obstacles. Such as your legs.)

The field is actually more transparent than water -- or rather, less obtrusive. It refracts light with an index of about 0.15, so the ripples distort much less than water would. You can see objects on the ground and walk down stairs without tripping. (Although the dissonance between the current you see, but can't feel, can itself be disorienting! The hackers who set up the effect are considering adding a very weak tangible pressure; it would probably help steady people, by supporting their expectations.)

Fads of the Home
A house in Sandline is attracting some attention in the foam, for having an architectural stuffed animal. Specifically, a giant plush snake -- two and a half feet wide through the body. It begins upstairs, with its tail curled around a bedpost and flopped over the bed; it runs down the upstairs hallway (up one wall, across the ceiling, down the other wall at the far end). It curves down the main stairs, nips around the inner corner of the dining room, and sprawls into the living room, where it loops back and forth a few times (forming floppable-upon pillow seats) and finally leans its (yard-long) head companionably against the sofa.

Several people have noted that they intend to reconfigure their living spaces with similar designs. One is planning a two-story-tall penguin.



#4 Neuropath

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Posted 18 May 2013 - 03:40 PM

It is hard to go wrong with best of Craigslist

 

edit: maybe not? I remember these generally being better in the past, oh well



#5 Warped655

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Posted 18 May 2013 - 09:32 PM

We've got this big unidentified book with a fuckload of advertisements from 1923. I unfortunately do not have a scanner I am free to use. I probably would not have had the motivation to look for the interesting ones because that book is fucking huge but who knows maybe those roadblocks will stop being an issue.


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#6 denzquix

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Posted 02 June 2013 - 01:01 PM

We've got this big unidentified book with a fuckload of advertisements from 1923. I unfortunately do not have a scanner I am free to use. I probably would not have had the motivation to look for the interesting ones because that book is fucking huge but who knows maybe those roadblocks will stop being an issue.

 

ohh amazing, if you do overcome those roadblocks i would love to see



#7 denzquix

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Posted 02 June 2013 - 01:06 PM

the framley examiner archive has several pages of absurdist classified/personal ads..
  

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#8 Ragnar

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Posted 02 June 2013 - 03:20 PM

http://www.craigslis...1578516400.html

 

lol



#9 denzquix

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Posted 30 June 2013 - 10:51 AM

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#10 denzquix

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Posted 19 July 2013 - 03:00 PM

City of Madison PD Incident Report #2013-212633

#11 Warped655

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Posted 11 August 2013 - 06:10 PM

I have a good camera on my phone now, so I took a couple of pictures. We technically have a scanner now, but I still can't use it for various reasons and probably wont for a good long while if ever.

 

It turns out the book is an Almanac and only the first 1/5 of the book is advertisements. I may have also exaggerated a bit on its overall size. *shrugs*

 

Here are a couple of the first ad pages:

 

Spoiler


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#12 denzquix

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Posted 12 August 2013 - 02:49 AM

wonderful stuff Warped, thank you! next holiday season my loved ones will all be receiving an Ivor Johnson bike & gun combo pack, the perfect gift....

#13 denzquix

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Posted 27 August 2013 - 06:44 PM

enjoying twitter account @MVPoliceBlotter

#14 denzquix

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Posted 28 August 2013 - 01:23 AM

early 90s phoneline games

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#15 Warped655

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Posted 28 August 2013 - 02:09 AM

haha, pretty great. :)


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#16 denzquix

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Posted 04 October 2013 - 10:03 PM

hidden message in a National Weather Service Area Forecast Discussion for Anchorage, AK:

PRESSURES AT THE CENTER OF THE WESTERN GULF SURFACE LOW CONTINUE TO
LEVEL AS DYNAMIC SUPPORT HAS ONCE AGAIN RUN OUT. THE UPPER TROUGH
EASES SLOWLY EASTWARD IN THE GULF WITH THE REMAINING SURFACE LOW
AMALGAMATING INTO A BROAD COMPLEX CENTER UNDER THE UPPER LOW. WIND
SPEEDS IN THE JET STREAK DOWNSTREAM OF THE LONG-WAVE APPROACH 140 KT.
ENTERING THE BACKSIDE OF THE TROUGH...A WEAKER JET STREAK CONTINUES
PUSHING THE PROGRESSIVE PATTERN. RAIN SHOWERS PERSIST IN THE GULF...
ALTHOUGH THE FRONT IS RAPIDLY WEAKENING EARLY THIS MORNING.
YESTERDAY`S COASTAL JET HAS WOUND DOWN WITH THE ENERGY SHIFTING
UNDERNEATH THE BACKSIDE JET BEHIND THE LOW BRINGING THE STRONGEST
SUSTAINED WINDS FROM BRISTOL BAY THROUGH THE SOUTHERN GULF.


Spoiler



#17 denzquix

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Posted 15 March 2014 - 06:16 PM

i've discovered the Google News archive of the Boston Evening Transcript circa 1900, lots of good stuff

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#18 denzquix

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Posted 15 March 2014 - 06:41 PM

why cant we go back to newspapers with seven dense columns a page




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