#ws4000

[nickyflowers]

my weather and climate talk show "WTFW?" has returned!

friend and artist Piper Wren joins me to discuss the fires in the West Coast, the flooding in the East Coast, and how to destroy any tornado in between.

share this episode with your dad! dads love this show

https://youtu.be/9a1cmV5wF4U

[stoppableforce]

Check out the Retro Weather Channel! This Twitch channel runs off a passion project to emulate the WeatherSTAR 4000 - which folks might recognize as the tech that ran the Weather Channel decades ago. It’s paired with mallsoft vaporwave music for the ultimate in chill experience.

The WS 4000 emulator is a super interesting project on its own. It’s a tiny portable C# program that recreates that TWC experience with amazing fidelity, not least of all because the original voice of TWC, Dan Chandler, re-recorded his old lines in new high fidelity versions.

This is been a huge nostalgia trip for me because TWC featured prominently in family vacations years and years ago. Back before you could just look up the week’s forecast in the locales you were going to, there was TWC. We’d drive overnight to get to Myrtle Beach (our yearly destination), then get to the room. Exhausted from the trip - and from being in a car that long! - all we wanted to do was eat dinner and chill, and we’d always have TWC on in the background on a loop to figure out what the upcoming week was gonna be like.

This is almost as good as that time someone digitized a bunch of old K-Mart store advertisement and muzak tapes and put them onto archive.org.