Obtuse, rubber goose, green moose, guava juice Giant snake, birthday cake, large fries, chocolate shake

The picture quality is still shit though because the film was so small and the aperture was locked. The big advantage was the flash and not needing to use a focus.

110 film is some real wag-the-dog engineering. The cameras can be dirrrt cheap, because the film cartridge does all the heavy lifting.

Three weird comparisons: Google Cardboard, RCA CED, and the PPS 43 submachinegun.

Cardboard is obviously just barely a real product, being a flimsy structure for putting lenses between your face and a whole-ass smartphone. But a lot of plastic “VR headsets” fancied that up and pretended it was serious. So many that it probably helped suffocate the HMD revival that started with Oculus.

Capacitance Electronic Discs were a brilliant idea in 1964 that did not release until 1981. They put video on vinyl. They openly advertised that all the sci-fi wizardry happened at the factory. The player just drags a flake of metal through a groove and amplifies the signal, because the metallic disc encodes NTSC television frames as directly as possible. Unfortunately they spent decades trying to squeeze an entire hour onto each side. If they’d settled for twenty-plus minutes… like vinyl records… your dad could’ve bought Star Trek episodes during the Nixon administration.

The PPS-43 is a primitive bullet-thrower for illiterate peasants, manufactured by inebriated men with hammers, and my god is it sexy engineering. The Soviets had ripped off the MP40 magazine, as was the style at the time, and if you can push a bullet out of that into a tube and then poke it in the middle, that’s a whole-ass gun. If the blast knocks back your pushy thingy into a spring so it can push another bullet, that’s a submachinegun. The PPS-43 was so far iterated on that premise, the whole thing was bent together from sheet metal, and some of the parts didn’t even close. The barrel shroud is a perforated taco. The flash hider is a curled Erector piece. And yet, the whole thing elegantly flips open for trivial cleaning, revealing the one precisely-milled lump of metal that jumps back and forth to perform all gun-related activities. Which would not work at all if not for a fairly well-designed box with a spring in it, full of rigidly standardized cartridges.

So yeah, Kodak was trying to sex up glorified disposable cameras. This is Gillette bragging about the grip on their razor. The point is to sell the part you throw away.

Looking back, it’s funny, because that’s not a unique selling point - that’s literally how cameras work!

🎶 The ankles connected to the… Leg bone, the leg bones connected to the… Knee bone!.. The knee bone’s connected to the… Thigh bone… 🎶

Levi’s covers your entire lower body from your ankles to the small of your back

back when hardware was cool