• 2 Posts
  • 150 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle





  • I’ve spent quite a bit of time backpacking in Pennsylvania. One of my favorite places is a reservoir where they lower the water level drastically in the winter months. You can walk out to where it’s normally underwater, lie on your back and have a 360 degree unobstructed view of the night sky. There are so many stars that you can’t pick out constellations. I’ve seen what i assume were satellites, a continous red glare moving incredibly fast and silent. Unfortunately development is encroaching. First a new highway then a casino.


  • College radio. It can be a little more “work” because the format changes with the deejay. Their shows usually last a couple hours and come on once a week. You can’t just tune in and expect to hear a certain genre. It’s worth it though. If you have a station near you, they sometimes let anyone deejay even if they’re not a student. I live in NE Ohio, the stations I’ve grown up with are WCSB 89.3, WRUW 91.1, WOBC 91.5, WJCU 88.7, WBWC 88.3. Also they are noncommercial so that’s a bonus. You can listen through their websites and they sometimes archive shows. I’ve found them on the TuneIn app but the app plays commercials.




  • Like a lot of things from the past, it’s best to view this in context. The original B&B ran from '93 to '97, long before internet streaming was a thing. Commercial radio still controlled what music most people heard. This show broke the mold and exposed people to A: underground music that didn’t get airplay “ladies and gentlemen… the Butthole Surfers” and B: older music that didn’t get played on the radio anymore. FM radio was pretty freeform until the mid 80’s when deejays were required to stick to a strict playlist. The impact was obvious when CD sales spiked for old/underground music after being featured on the show. Same thing for songs used in video game soundtracks.










  • US here. I got my first “home computer” a TRS-80 CoCo (16k RAM) sometime around 1981 before PCs were a thing. The internet existed but cost around $7 US per hour plus it was a long distance call to Compuserve the only ISP which would have cost around 50 cents a minute (on a 1200 baud dial up modem). I still have an advertisement somewhere. Also i have a thin book of websites. You had to type in the IP address because domain names didn’t exist yet. I couldn’t afford any of this so I visited BBS’s though I did fumble around with the internet on public library computers. The Macintosh and PCs came out a few years later but few homes had one because they were expensive and you couldn’t do much with them besides play games. Businesses of course had them because they were useful. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s did everyone buy one after the internet got popular.