Leather burnishers have been pretty much unchanged for 50,000 years
Boomers.
Me
Me.
I mean, I’m not particularly old — only 29. But I’m super surprised I still exist. And it’s not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I’m pretty mediocre at living, I’m even worse at dying. Fortunately, I’m in a place now where that’s a thing I’m happy about, for the most part.
I’ve got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it’s almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn’t anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I’d swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I’m not a strong swimmer, so I didn’t get very far out, but still.
That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I’d seen that said it’s good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn’t try.
Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it’s not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn’t), but I’m glad I stuck around.
In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn’t feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I’m in a bonus level. It’s a bizarre feeling.
But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I’m still around. I’m proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I’m still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn’t what you meant when asking your question, but I’ve been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think
Sometimes it’s good to fail, even eight times, and I’m glad you did. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you continue to do so.
Credit card imprinters. Went to a car rental that required a card to be swiped with that thing. Needless to say the card got canceled the second it got in there lol
At this point, all but one of my cards would be completely incompatible with those things. They’re completely flat, with printed numbers on the back instead. I hadn’t even thought about that change in a while, but I am glad that my wallet is a little bit thinner.
Retails stores sometimes still have these in high-volume areas. Imagine your store loses power on Black Friday weekend. Some stores live or die by a few critical weekends a year. You might lose some merch through declines later but avoiding the loss in total sales will almost certainly make up for it.
Old fashioned record players
My grandpa. Hes in his 90s, ready to go, and not only still alive, his mind is still there and he’s still sharp.
Boomers
Trump.
The Amiga.
The latest update of AmigaOS was October 2025. MorphOS (which I’m using): January 2025.
The latest “complete” new hardware I’m aware of is Apollo Accelerator’s A6000 from September 2025.Horseshoe crab. These things existed before DINOS! AND ARE STILL AROUND!
Although they’re struggling at the moment, due to their blood being harvested for use in biomedical research.[1]. Although fortunately, there have been synthetic alternatives developed in the last few years, so hopefully their numbers should recover as that is phased in.
Edit: if this makes you feel overly sad, here is a palate cleanser(30 minute long, ideally listened to in one uninterrupted block). It’s one of my favourite things I stumbled across last year, and it makes me feel hopeful about the world. It made me cry, but in a good way.
[1]: Linked article has more info, but the TL;DR is that their blood clots in the presence of bacterial toxins, so it’s super useful in stuff like vaccine development and production. They capture the crabs, harvest the blood and return the crabs alive, and the stats that the system has on this says that only a small percentage of them end up dying as a result of this. However, given that we can’t see how many of them die or fail to reproduce in the weeks and months following their release, we can’t confirm that.
We do know that the numbers of a bird that feasts almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs have seen severe reductions over the last 40 or so years, so it seems likely that the impact of this harvesting on horseshoe crab populations is more severe than the official data suggests.
It’s unfortunate because they fall between the cracks when it comes to animal research ethics. For one, the research isn’t being done on them, so they probably wouldn’t be protected under most existing legislation anyway. But also, animal research legislation doesn’t tend to give much protection to invertebrates (with the exception of octopuses, which are smart enough that they get additional protections).
I think it’s a pretty interesting case study of a big gap in the legislation that protects the rights of animals — existing legislation focuses a lot on our duty to individual animals, but here, despite the harm to any one horseshoe crab seeming to be tolerably low, the vast scale at which we have been harvesting them has had an impact on the species as a whole.
My view is that an anthropocentric framework that puts humans above all other animals is probably harmful in general and something we should work to undermine, but that if we are taking that tack (which seems necessary for the utilitarian view of “harvesting these crabs’ blood has saved many human lives” that most people seem to take on this topic), then we must also accept that we have an ethical duty to be good stewards of the natural world. We can’t have it both ways and think of ourselves as so rational and smart, but not accept the responsibility that would come with that.
I find the legislative angle of it especially interesting, because most people I have told this to are shocked to learn of how they’re not protected, and they share at least some of my view that effective animal research ethics legislation should surely account for our duty to ecosystems as a whole. People far more learned than I in legal matters have struggled to think of ways we could effectively legislate this though. It’s possible that additional legislation isn’t the best way to handle this, and that we would be better served to aim to regulate in opposition to the economically extractivist ideology that seems to be the default setting nowadays (because horseshoe crabs are just an illustrative case study of the problem).
I apologise for info dumping in reply to your joyful comment with such downer info. I do feel hopeful about the progress of synthetic alternatives though. I also find it a fascinating topic to learn about, even if it is a bit depressing
1 ↩︎
I love them! Little cute babies with their scuttling legs and long spike!!
Shoe horns. My 86 year old father in law still uses one and swears by it. Doesn’t put shoes without the assistance of the horn. I’ve seen it in action, and it seems to work? Even on some tied shoes!
I don’t own a shoe horn, but I use my finger to the same effect on tied shoes. I have one pair that I only tie every few weeks.
I consider any home without a shoehorn to be uncivilized
I have one, I just don’t know where it is. Do I count as civilised?
What a weird take.
Teletext
Copper connections on a larger scale than inside a building. People still using POTS and dial up because we never rolled anything else out to their area.
Clocks split into 60 minute hours.
France tried decimalizing time around the revolution. People hated it.
60 is such a nice highly composite number though!
Oooh, I didn’t know this was the word for this. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with me
And how should it be done?
That’s rather unsurprising
That we still use Babylonian time notation?
there may be better alternatives, but migrating the WHOLE WORLD to a new system just because it’s slightly better is not gonna happen. hence - unsurprising.
the fact that imperial unit system still exists IS surprising though
