A reservoir for funny memes and socialist propaganda! Woo hoo! (Formerly Bugloaf, Kraznoy, TARDIS tech support, Dakota South, Best of Omaha, and more! How exciting!)
for those wondering why they're free to take now, it's because the company that made those "chicken soup for the soul" books bought them a few years ago and then completely collapsed so bad they couldn't afford to dispose of or even take the blu rays and dvds out of their kiosks all over.
so any of them is free game because they're all located on other business' property and they usually don't want to have to pay to get rid of them either. so asking the store manager usually gets you the ok to pull it out and keep it.
there was a period of time right after their bankruptcy where you could put in any debit or credit card and it would spit out movies without charging you. you could even put in like an expired or deactivated card, or a visa gift card with a $0 balance, didnt matter, they'd just start spitting discs out. a lotta people raided redboxes for movies for a couple months, with some people doing what me and my brother and my dad did here, taking the whole box and signs and marquees as well. because managers sure as hell don't want a big abandoned piece of trash on their sidewalk disappointing customers. BUT they're also often too cheap to pay someone to remove it. so they just sit there.
luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).
the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.
there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.
if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.
remember: the rules are made up. act like you belong there and you can get away with anything. this applies to your own life
Alright! Just for you dear @triflesandtea !!!!!!!!!<3
Okay so....Coelacanths were thought to be extinct because their fossils disappear from the geological record around 66 million years ago-- right around the same mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Since nobody had ever seen a living one, scientists assumed they’d died out too.
Then in 1938, a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer examined a strange fish caught off the coast of South Africa and realized it matched those “extinct” fossils almost perfectly. It was one of the biggest zoological discoveries of the 20th century.
What makes them especially important is that they’re lobe-finned fish-- their fins are fleshy and supported by bone structures somewhat similar to the early limbs of vertebrates that eventually evolved to walk on land. Watching them swim is apparently eerie because the fins move in an alternating pattern that almost resembles walking.
They’re also ancient in a very literal evolutionary sense. The lineage is over 400 million years old, meaning coelacanth ancestors existed long before dinosaurs did. Modern coelacanths live deep in the ocean, usually hundreds of meters down near volcanic caves, which is probably part of why they escaped notice for so long. They’re nocturnal predators that eat smaller fish and squid, and they can grow over 6 feet long.
And somehow they only get stranger the more you learn about them.
There are actually two known living species--one found near the Comoros Islands and East Africa, and another discovered in Indonesia in the 1990s. Until that second species was identified, people thought the first was the only surviving coelacanth left on Earth.
They live incredibly slowly. They can apparently live for around 60 years or more, don’t reach maturity until their 40s or 50s, and have very low reproduction rates, which makes them especially vulnerable as a species.
Their reproduction is wild too-- they don’t lay eggs externally like many fish. The females keep the eggs inside their bodies, and the babies hatch internally, so the young are born live after an extremely long gestation period that may last over 3 years, which is one of the longest known pregnancies of any fish!!
They also have a unique organ called the rostral organ in their snout that can detect electrical signals in the water, helping them locate prey in dark deep-sea environments where visibility is poor.
And despite looking like they should be enormous apex predators from some primordial nightmare, they’re actually pretty calm and slow-moving most of the time. They conserve energy by drifting in ocean currents and hanging out in underwater lava caves during the day before hunting at night.
One of my favorite details is that they still have a tiny oil-filled structure where ancient lungfish relatives would’ve had a functional lung. It’s basically an evolutionary leftover from ancestors that lived in much shallower waters.
And despite seeming so “primitive,” they’re not unchanged fossils frozen in time, they’ve still been evolving all along. They’re just part of an incredibly old lineage that survived while most related groups disappeared.
Also, scientists were so stunned by the 1938 discovery because finding a living coelacanth was sort of equivalent to discovering a living dinosaur wandering around unnoticed. Entire textbooks had to be reconsidered because this animal had gone from “extinct for tens of millions of years” to “apparently just extremely private.”
This is our brand new science fiction adventure character, he's a scientist and an old man. He's in a TV show called Doctor Who. He's credited as Dr Who. All production documents call him Dr Who. All promotional material calls him Dr Who. The novel adaptations call him Dr Who. The movie adaptations call him Dr Who. The original tie-in fiction calls him Dr Who. And week one of his TV show he's going to meet a guy who's like "What's your name? What do we call you?" and our hero is going to be like "hohoho hehehe you dumb motherfucker. Never talk to me again." And then he's never ever going to give anyone his goddamn name.
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