Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine | Hacker News Reader

Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

en.wikipedia.org

434 pointszdw150 comments

Background: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/capitol-hills-magi...

Restocking: https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/05/spoiler-alert-mys...

Disappearance: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/seattle-mystery-soda-m...

2nd link for Europeans: http://archive.is/2017.08.07-014013/http://www.capitolhillse...

Quick question: Why "for Europeans?" I tried from a couple of EU-based endpoints and could access the second link just fine. What error did you get?

I ask because I know the operator of CHS via a friend of a friend kind of thing.

Error 1020: Access denied by Cloudflare.

Getting the same Cloudflare error from Germany.

Also European (UK) and can access the original link just fine.

I appreciate you putting out an alternative link.

Unfortunately I cannot access archive.is (shows a Cloudflare page with Google reCaptcha).

Why not using the more well known archive.org instead?

Also IIRC archive.is is hard to access for some users depending on the DNS server they're using.

I get those from time to time. Isn’t just solving the captcha enough to reach the page?

This is dependent on a host of things, such as OP using a VPN lol.

A lot of people are opting away from Google as a standard, to add to that, American websites are a real pain when it comes to harvesting personal information and as such when you see a horrific anti-user gdpr notification you just ... Leave. Same with constant captcha.

I'd like to see stats on websites using OneChoice or whatever its bs name is. For a site called hackernews there sure is a large lack of care regarding personal information.

> Isn’t just solving the captcha enough to reach the page?

sure but why not using an alternative service that doesn't have the reCaptcha to start with?

Edit: Just to explain more the problem: depending on your privacy settings, it might take up to a couple minutes to solve the reCaptcha because Google makes it much harder for users who are running anti-fingerprinting tools in their browser. This is also my case. In the end, I usually just give up and don't visit the page in question.

Not gonna lie, keeping up a machine like this spitting fire drinks for years is a great couple's activity.

Omg it was you!

Nah, but judging by the picture of the folks it looks fun.

Aw man, they should have at least blurred the license plate :(

Really cool story, I just moved to Seattle last year. Anyone know of something else I could check out?

A "fun fact" my son loves: more people are killed by vending machines than sharks each year [1]. Perhaps it murdered someone and went into hiding?

1. https://medium.com/purple-theory/vending-machines-vs-sharks-...

Sure…it’s fun. But also feels disingenuous in a way. People are rocking the machines in an attempt to get a free soda are killed. This is compared against unprovoked shark attacks. Probably a fairer comparison if you only count unprovoked vending machine deaths too then.

Sigh, ruining fun facts. ;(

That implies that there are a lot of provoked shark attacks

I bet the sum of provoked and unprovoked shark attacks is still less than the unprovoked and provoked soda machine deaths ;)

Overworked and underpaid shark attacks

Perfect solution: soda machines can pay the sharks to increase attacks thus reducing the prominence of their own murderous agenda

It's so simple it's brilliant. Who has all the money and is being robbed? Vending machines. They want to fight back but keep getting attacked in the liberal AND conservative media. Who has all the teeth but no money? Sharks.

I don't think there's such a thing as "unprovoked shark attacks". First, it's called an encounter now, not an attack, and that change is relevant to the question at hand. When sharks hurt people, I think it is typically the people that have invaded the home of the shark (and thus provoked it) and not the other way around (and thus unprovoked). There are no shark attacks when humans are minding their own business on land.

That's the same as saying a shark will attack, any place it can get to you at!

Next you'll be saying all bear attacks are due to me not standing in the ocean.

You know, animals have personalities too. Some are just asshats. I knew a dog that was an asshat. Smug bastard. Could see it in his eyes. Doesn't mean all dogs are!

I've been advocating for years that they need a vending machine leash law. It's all fun and games until one goes in for a hug.

Another bit of trivia I always found interesting... approximately zero people per year die in elevator crashes. That basically isn't a real thing that happens.

Of the very small number of people who are killed by elevators, they are almost all elevator technicians / maintenance people who are in the shaft doing repairs and have some kind of accident.

I don't think that is true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents

https://www.elcosh.org/document/1232/d000397/Deaths+and+Inju...

here is a tragic death of a child in the US, 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/14/elevator-...

here is a tragic death of a child in the US, 2021

That's a very different type of injury to what the parent comment was referring to: "elevator crashes", where the car falls to the bottom of the shaft.

The list of elevator accidents is mostly composed of ones involving construction, freight, and mine-shaft elevators.

"elevator crashes", where the car falls to the bottom of the shaft.

Yes, that was the kind of incident I was mainly commenting on.

The list of elevator accidents is mostly composed of ones involving construction, freight, and mine-shaft elevators.

I probably should have made a point to qualify what I said above as "passenger elevators in office type buildings" or something. Definitely did not mean to include mine-shafts / construction site elevators, etc.

That said, I don't have the original reference handy, but I recall that where I read that original statistic was a credible source.

In any event, even including the mine shafts, elevators are an order of magnitude less dangerous than stairs. And way less dangerous than cars.

This elevator crashed down the shaft crushing this poor guy in the door. So sad...

https://nypost.com/2019/08/22/video-shows-moment-man-crushed...

I used to live nearby and would walk past the machine every day on my way to work and way home. Over time, all (?) the options went from specific flavors to the "MYSTERY" option, but I always attributed it to them just getting lazy about filling it with specific flavors.

I remember that one day it just disappeared. They were redoing the sidewalk and had to put the machine away and it never came back.

I'm pretty sure the locksmith owns the machine, but it's fun to pretend it's a mystery. :)

I lived in a co-op decades ago that had something like this. It was an old, single brand soft drink machine. The co-op however stocked it with cheap bottled beer. You had no idea what would appear in the slot when you fed in your coins. And it was a sad day indeed when Special Export came sliding down the shute...

Most of the dorms at my college had a mystery beer slot in their soda machines (they were stocked by the students). Random soda was also a popular option. After a couple significant alcohol poisoning incidents during my time (late 80s), the college became less willing to turn a blind eye to these sorts of things.

Spoiler alert: it was the locksmith in front of whose shop the machine was allowed to exist (rent free)

There's photos confirming it's not the locksmith himself doing it, but they're presumably the owner who oversees management of the machine.

https://twitter.com/saeofdoom/status/460157462197198849?s=20

I live in the neighborhood and have bought a few sodas from the machine. I always assumed it was locksmith, they are powering the machine and I've never seen nor heard a reason to believe it was anyone else.

It was a cute novelty, and if you're not picky it's a fast soda, but honestly it was just stocked with cheap, off-brand gross soda. Would have been genius if occasionally it gave you something interesting (or at least good).

It certainly used to! That machine introduced me to a weird variety of things when I lived near it almost 20 years ago. Cheap thrills as a broke young 'un.

Thanks to it, I still have to try strange sodas when I am traveling--especially abroad. It's not always good, but it's always fun.

Have you visited the Coca Cola museum in Las Vegas? Not sure if it still exists, but I went in 2000. They had about 100 different sodas from around the world.

These days, I haven't had any soda in years. 35+ grams of sugar per can is a terrible idea.

There's also one in Atlanta, and I think maybe Orlando as well. Always fun to see the tourists getting surprised by the one bitter drink in the whole collection (Beverly, from Italy). Wikipedia claims it was discontinued 12 years ago, except for the Coke museums.

> dispensed drinks were rare cans that were either ordinarily unavailable in the United States or have not been in circulation since the 1980s

> In June 2018, the machine mysteriously disappeared

I don't think it's mysterious. The owner likely ran out of full, rare cans of soda and could not / did not want to source them anymore.

or he didn't have to restock it because at some point, people got tired of drinking flat stale soda from the 80s

I never got anything particularly weird out of that machine. Drunkenly dropped $20 in it a few times. Mostly it was the odd flavors of things you only see in specialty stores, but I never saw anything "rare" other than an out of season Mtn Dew.

> I don't think it's mysterious. The owner likely ran out of full, rare cans of soda and could not / did not want to source them anymore.

For folks who aren't aware your local distributor cans / bottles a much wider variety of product than what you find on typical grocery store shelves. If you have a commercial account with them you can get the list. Sometimes they make special runs for a promotion, special event, or special client order. Depending on the circumstances and if you have a good relationship with your sales rep you may be able to get notified and grab a case or two.

It is possible they were vending long expired drinks... but it is also possible they simply had a hookup at the distributor and sourced rare drinks from time to time.

Ok, but that doesn’t explain cans from the 1980s, does it?

This is just internet rumor BS, but I've read that many drinks are not removed from bottlers' repretoires, they just stopped getting orders when the soda company stopped marketting it.

Supposedly, you could order Crystal Pepsi, but nobody did, so none was made (except for a brief period a couple years ago).

> Depending on the circumstances and if you have a good relationship with your sales rep you may be able to get notified and grab a case or two.

Works this way for tons of things. People would be surprised the kind of things you can get by being generous to sales reps.

> It is possible they were vending long expired drinks... but it is also possible they simply had a hookup at the distributor and sourced rare drinks from time to time.

I stepped into my office 6 months after covid WFH started. All the unrefrigerated sodas were flat.

I doubt they had expired drinks with no complaints.

It's funny, I probably walked by that thing a few hundred times, but I don't drink soda so I ignored it entirely. But once the locksmith was mentioned, its location clicked in my head, a dim rectangular outline of a hole in my spatial memory. Brains are so weird.

I use operating system memory paging as an analogy for this: you paged it back in.

It's a really good page, too. Just across the street was the best smell & taste in all of spacetime, the original Espresso Vivace roastery...

A friend of mine has a soda machine in his business with a similar question mark button. He had the same idea of stocking some less common items in it. Apparently people occasionally feed it money and press it repeatedly.

There's a few machines like this in Spokane Valley, WA. Not that that the machine's operator is secret, but they have mystery buttons. It's been around for years and it's right outside a Coke distribution center(?). My siblings and I used to refer to it as, "The Mystery Magic Coke Machine"

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6787458,-117.2733456,3a,49.5...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iNN12D4W7k

Another in Walla Walla too.

I am from Spokane and also lived in the neighborhood in Seattle where this machine was. I recognize the mystery buttons but I can't remember exactly where I'd seen them.

From the title I expected an article about a soda machine near the US capitol that was secretly full of Russian spy gear or something.

Pleasantly surprised, and yes it sounds like the locksmith was involved even if he didn't personally stock it.

Aw, totally random to see Seattle on the front page.

Yes it's gone and the locksmith shop is still there, for now...

I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.

I think that this has lead to the popularity of ARG/Analog Horror/SCP/etc. The Unknown is shrinking, so we need to create the Unknowable.

Oddly, true Alternate Reality Games [0] peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, even as the world has shrunk by orders of magnitude since. Perhaps that's the period when the internet itself was at its most Unknown, before the great silofication of everything.

[0] ...as opposed to, say, ads with base64 "puzzles" tacked on or narrative-less viral videos with arbitrary distortion.

ARG for promoting films / games kinda peaked as a guerilla marketing campaign then. Once it became less novel, less money was spent on developing them.

But yeah they become a lot less compelling when it's solved so quickly and there's wikis devoted to them.

ARGs for promoting nothing seem to be on the rise (I don't have links to back that up though.)

> true Alternate Reality Games peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s

I agree. Early 2000's were the glory years of the internet. The internet was powerful enough to be bringing people together that could have never communicated or met before. It allowed niche interest groups to connect so that these types of stories and mysteries could proliferate and spread, but it was not so widespread and attention-focused that the mysteries dissolved.

I'm actually surprised that this mystery survived into 2018. I would have expected some Tik Tok/Instagram/YouTube/Facebook influencer to camp out all week with a camera to find the mystery re-stocker like they were hunting santa clause. The video would go viral for 8 hours, the influencer would get their 15 mins of fame, then the mystery would be forever ruined. The internet would forget that there was ever a time when we didn't know how this machine worked, and the mystery would cease to exist.

Edit: Ok, apparently someone did camp out and ruined the mystery, spotting who restocks it. [Source - If you really want to know, but the mystery will be ruined...](https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/05/spoiler-alert-mys...)

Well, it’s clear now!

TBH, that picture couldn’t give us less information if it tried…

> I agree. Early 2000's were the glory years of the internet.

You know how every generation thinks that the music they grew up with was the best and its all gone downhill from there? Well, lemme tell you little shits a story about Usenet and Eternal September...

I've been searching for a natural way to browse pre-eternal-september Usenet. Google Groups is less than ideal.

Any "archived" way would require some serious effort to emulate the delay. Especially if you chose to experience it from (say) Australia.

Of course I can’t find I now, but there was a website that let you read today’s Usenet from 30 years ago in real time.

> Early 2000's were the glory years of the internet.

Oh, poor youngster...

Late 90's were damn anarchy on NNTP servers, videos, IRC channls full of nerds and not nerds...

It's literally a story about this thing happening.

It’s a story about it ending 3 years ago. Not sure if I agree with GP but “here’s a story of something that used to happen” doesn’t contradict “this type of thing can’t happen anymore”

In the past. The comment said "increasingly impossible," looking toward the future.

In 2018, which was extremely recent. It’s not like this thing stopped once Facebook came into existence.

> In the past.

“This is a photograph of me when I was younger.”

It's a story about this thing going away!

what the point of things mysteriously appearing if they can't also mysteriously disappear again? You only want permanently observable mysteries?

If you want more fun inexplicable stuff in the world, go put some out there! Go yarn bomb something!

It's literally a story about this having happened in the past and having stopped.

Three years ago, not in like 1999.

These kinds of things pop in and out of existence all the time, it’s not like this soda machine disappearing three years ago proves that it cannot ever happen again.

Honestly, my bet is that the source of these out of production sodas dried up or got too expensive. This would be less “the world has changed” and more “forty year old sodas have finally run out”.

Nothing wrong with a more orderly, predictable, benign, ideally deterministic world without variance.

Isn't there? The moon is a "world" without variance, but I wouldn't want to live there!

Pass the Soma.

Not sure if this comment is sarcastic. Perfect determinism doesn't exist in the human condition. To embrace such invariance is to embrace the sterilization of art, culture, and our ability to adapt to the unpredictable.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. Voidfunc loved Big Brother.

I'm going to take a contrarian view here and opine that society will rebound from the fascination with "AutoTuned" reality.

(Eventually), it may settle on a minimal set of areas where everything has to be spied upon and logged to a fare-the-well.

Grew up just fine without Alexa.

I would hope Capitol buildings had better security so that Putin cant randomly put in an arcade claw game with microphones and radar. (Cue SNL's Elf and Shelf.)

You must not have read the article, it is on Capitol Hill in Seattle, which is in the state of Washington, not Washington D.C.

Seattle may have or influence tech secrets Russia wants.

They want to manipulate the weather on our toolbars and sell us counterfeit goods.

I can assure you that there are no tech secrets on Capitol Hill in Seattle. It is a bar district and lively neighborhood, but contrary to its name has little to do with government.

A vending machine on the street of a random american neighborhood is not a security risk.

Exactly. Even our most obsolete soda flavors could cause untold chaos if they fell into the hands of the Russian government.

All is not lost, behold the Shrek Box;

http://phillynews.fyi/22327/shrek-box-appears-in-south-phila...

In a sort of similar vein there was the Mystery of the South London Hellraiser VHS.

A few years ago, someone spotted a Hellraiser VHS on the roof of a bus stop. It was removed and a replacement appeared. Then it happened again. Then more Hellraisers appeared on other bus stops.

It can still be seen on Google Maps.

I always thought Stoke Newington was a gateway to hell, so it was good to have it confirmed.

https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3299131/bizarre-story-vhs...

Maybe we should internet-sleuth Ebay auctions of Hellraiser VHS copies and see if it's the same account winning them.

On the other hand, the internet also makes it possible for someone like me, on the other side of the world, to learn that it exists.

Not sure how many people will get the reference, but I was thinking this just yesterday about the Pokémon red and blue games. Back in the nineties many rumours spread about hidden secret in those games, but we didn’t have the internet to verify or debunk them. Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because back then no one knew for sure if it was possible or not. That couldn’t happen with the internet today.

Another thing I remember growing up in the nineties was being told orbs in photos were spirts, and again without the internet I couldn’t prove or disprove it. It was a complete mystery which I thought about all the time.

The internet has taken a lot of those mysteries away. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really cool that we’re able to look things up so easily on our phones today, but I do share your sadness that the world isn’t as mysterious as it once was.

This but with the Mario games. I couldn’t believe it there were shortcuts in the first game. Someone told me and I didn’t believe them. Same with contra and how you could have more than 3 lives. The shortcuts spread through word of mouth and some you wouldn’t find out after years of gameplay.

There were rumors like that for the Final Fantasy games too, like how to get Leo in FF6 by doing something ridiculously complex (or just ridiculous) for hours on end. And then FWAKs, which satirized the whole phenomenon.

I found out about the original Green Pokemon game in Japan on the Internet around 96/97 so there was chatter about them.

> That couldn’t happen with the internet today.

It happens with more frequency and stronger beliefs today on the internet than it ever did before. Rumors spread faster and take hold for longer. The internet is huge fuel source for spreading rumors, not a dampener.

Easily verifiable facts are no match for the internet's rumor-spreading capabilities.

I think about this every once in a while. I've grown up playing those games and others like them. I remember how cool the world seemed in World of Warcraft when it first came out, but once I realized players had mapped out the entire game and knew where everything was it really took away from the mystery of it all. This is part of why procedurally generated content interests me. No one else has played through the exact same Minecraft seeds that I have (or at least I don't think so, I'm not 100% sure how it works).

You've got it basically right. It's unlikely to get the same Minecraft seed twice but it's still possible. If you want the same natural map as another person, you are free to copy their seed, provided that they give it out.

> Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because back then no one knew for sure if it was possible or not.

I found the myth that holding "B" would increase the catch rate the be worse since it would take a lot more work to figure out if it made any difference or not. Sadly, no lie is immune from being spread, internet or no internet. Very easily disproved lies like "It wasn't raining" or "This vaccine will transform you into an animal" are spread online and sadly believed by far too many people who have no problems ignoring reality whenever it's convenient for them.

Hell, there are plenty of sites online right now which will tell you that Spirit Orbs are real.

We have less mystery in the world, but we often have to wade through piles of lies to find the truth and a lot of people don't have the tools to tell what they can trust. It fills people with even more confidence about the lies they hold as truth. At least in the past most people were a bit uncertain and could only say they heard something from someone who heard it from something else. Now when we hear a rumor we use google, find something that confirms our view, and them claim the truth is the result of "research".

The greater loss is that the genuine mysteries which remain are assumed to be explained away by someone, somewhere. The assumption that it is already solved leads most people away from exploring further.

The internet has also made some of these myths into realities: https://hackaday.com/2017/03/17/theres-a-mew-underneath-the-...

There's plenty of mysteries in games today. Check out Boundary Break by shesez and perhaps especially videos by oddheader for a taste.

It is true, perhaps, that there is more organization or at least communication between people solving a particular mystery today.

I was on the internet back then as a youngster. The Internet helped grow, inflame, and disseminate the rumors more than anything else. So many fake ways of getting a Mew, Togepi, or Pikablu...

If you think about it, how did you and your friends learn about the truck? I'd be willing to bet that at least indirectly somebody found it on the internet (or a friend told them, etc. etc.). It wasn't something you could see in the course of a normal playthrough, you had to use a glitch to see it at all.

I came here to say something like this, it makes me sad too, but I do have commentary on it.

Imagine buying beer or wine from your local dude who brews for fun, like at a farmers market. There's a sense of community in things like that. But you can't, that guy would have to spend six figures on commercial licensing and FDA inspections and code compliance and whatever else.

We can't just buy things from people anymore, we have to be consumers and can only buy from businesses, there has to be a clear cut distinction, all our relationships must be in compliance. Governments are regulating and taxing our communities out of existence and leaving us with a sterile system of impersonal distribution in which they are the middleman so that they can milk every cent that is "rightfully" theirs out of every single interaction everyone has.

What are "things like this"?

Is it things that exist in public but which don't have clear attribution? B/c in 2020 there were the "monoliths", which were pretty cool. Or, you know, Banksy still exists. Or @fog_karla / @karlthefog for that matter.

Is it playful, non-scalable experiences? There's Improv Everywhere. My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries". There's a guy who keeps doing extremely long walks in the UK in his speedo for charity but presumably also to make people smile.

There are more than 7.5B people on the planet and plenty of them are doing weird fun creative things. Just maybe fewer of them revolving around 80s soft drinks.

80s soft drinks is cool but when you realize what a plague upon humanity that sugar beverages are, it kind of detracts from the playfulness tbh. I stopped drinking soda years ago and haven't looked back. It is one of the largest causes of metabolic disease globally. And it's sad that people associate having a sugary beverage as a 'good time with friends.' Lets enjoy poison together?! :-/

I predict this won't go over well with the HN crowd who'll probably downvote me, and loves to snack on junk while coding, but there are better ways to get energy effortlessly without chewing or being protein heavy, like complex carbohydrates and MCT oils.

>And it's sad that people associate having a sugary beverage as a 'good time with friends.' Lets enjoy poison together?! :-/

Oh boy, just wait until you learn about alcohol.

I might be able to compartmentalize slightly better than GP, but as much as that machine is charming as hell and brings warmth to my heart, soda has more or less been a plague on humanity.

Unlike soda, alcohol has a lot going for it, because unless you abuse it, it can be a pretty wonderful, unique inebriant.

Soda can make you fat and brown your teeth. It doesn't create addicts who destroy their lives over it. Soda doesn't kill people via Drunk Driving. Soda doesn't contribute to violent crimes and domestic violence.

That's right!

"Might as well go for a soda; nobody hurts, nobody cries."

- Kim Mitchell

It’s not fair to write off the harm caused by soda as just causing brown teeth and fatness and to then to juxtapose it with domestic violence and drunk driving. That’s a basic strawman, which I sought to exclude by carving out “alcohol abuse” in my OP. Because alcoholism is terrible, especially when it affects a close loved one, and was not the subject of my comment. Fortunately, the vast majority of people who consume alcohol are not alcoholics. But many people, if not most people in 2021 United States and other parts of the world are obese. Of course obesity is not alcohol-fueled domestic violence, but that’s obvious.

The majority of people who consume alcohol are not alcoholics however the majority of people who consume soda ARE unhealthy. Quite the disparity yet the above posters are trying to use the parallel as a strawman.

Alcohol contributes to obesity as well though. Alcohol, like soda, is unhealthy to drink and it causes the more serious problems I alluded to previously.

Indeed but not in children. You're comparison is a red herring. Two things can be bad in different ways.

Alcohol is very unhealthy for children as well. So toxic, in fact, it's illegal to sell alcohol to children or for them to consume it.

Alcohol and soda are both drinks that cause health problems. There is nothing wrong with the observation that alcohol is considerably worse than soda.

There are laws prohibiting kids from getting access to or drinking alcohol. No such laws exist for soda. Soda has a huge negative impact on young children, whereas alcohol doesn't. I'm discontinuing this conversation as you clearly have maligned intentions as evident by your uncharitable interpretations of my points.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

I mean, I didn't come here to fight about soda, but metabolic disease is a real problem, and people do seriously consider whether the way our brains respond to sugar constitutes addiction.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/

Sugar doesn't contribute to violent crimes, but a coca cola bottling company in Colombia may have killed labor organizers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.

Talking about compartmentalization, the earnestness of you anti-fizzy-dinkers struck me as a little silly, and then I realized that outside of childhood I avoided carbonated beverages and sort of hold a mental prohibition on them for some of the reason you allude to. I do enjoy the rare root beer or ginger-ale, though.

Now, where did I put my cigarettes?

I agree with you. A good beer like Guinness is full of micronutrients and if you only have a few, it's not a bad tradeoff for the stress relief. Soda on the other hand, because it's not associated with drugs, is overdrank and made into a habit.

Why is it that alcohol be a wonderful unique inebriate but soda can't be? It used to be my preferred source of caffeine. If you don't abuse soda, it has a lot going for it too. It's basically liquid candy that also makes you more alert and attentive.

If there's a problem with sugar filled soda it's how it has been aggressively advertised in ways which normalized it as something to drink regularly and included filling schools and restaurants with the stuff crowding out or even forbidding other options.

> Why is it that alcohol be a wonderful unique inebriate but soda can't be?

It definitely can be. I meant to say that for me, caffeine isn't in the same league of inebriants as alcohol. It's definitely a lot less subtle for me. I'm sure that varies from person to person though, so maybe it can be? I don't know.

> that also makes you more alert and attentive.

This must also be a subjective experience-based thing. I've never felt more alert or attentive from soda, but of course that's just me. And I may have ADHD, which may be a factor.

> If you don't abuse soda, it has a lot going for it too. ... If there's a problem with sugar filled soda it's how it has been aggressively advertised ...

Yeah, I agree with this. I think if there is a problem, that's the problem. Also the serving sizes, which used to be much smaller when soda first came about. And the degree to which people lead sedentary lifestyles, and a bunch of other factors.

For what it's worth, I'm not promoting alcohol here, either. I'm not a big fan because it's hard to get it right (but when I do, it's great) so in the last ten years I pretty much only consume alcohol like 5-10 times a year, max. It just goes wrong too easily for me.

Alcohol isn't as big of an insidious detriment. It is bad, sure, but we are aware of that. The biggest difference is the mutual understanding that society has about the negative effects of alcohol. It's understood to be a drug. Soda on the other hand doesn't have that cultural awareness.

I'm _hoping_ that in 2018 before the machine went missing, that if one bought a mystery beverage from the 80s, it wasn't to drink? Cuz that seems questionable for reasons other than sugar.

However, paying a dollar to get an intact artifact which is a throwback from the past, and reminiscing about what you remember from that time, or discovering a thing you never knew about seems like a lovely experience.

What's being lost is the mystery of it all. Instead of happening across this fascinating monolith while out hiking, and it's an interesting story to tell friends in person when they ask about your trip, they were blasted all over Twitter and the rest of the Internet in hours. It reduces conversations to "did you see that thing on Reddit?" "yeah" "k". It's like having a cartography degree in 2021 vs 1491 (no offense to cartography majors). It's the ennui of "there's nothing left to explore, it's all been found already".

It's fair to point out that there's more weird creative energy out there than ever before (Meow Wolf). There's the enraptured wonder of the possibility of exploring an entirely new world (Mars) in our lifetime. There are things gained in today's always-on, connected culture. But don't pretend nothing was lost.

Banksy is a marketing man. He pretends to be anti-establishment but his organisation defends his IP as fiercely as Disney defends its. He is all about the money.

I agree that that the world is full of weird, creative people, but you won't find them at Sotheby's.

I don't think defending your IP makes you a sell-out. It's basically his alter ego, why would he let his identity be co-opted by strangers?

Right. It helps him make money. It helps him maintain attention. It lets him do his art. What does he gain from letting dozens of Banksy-like copies proliferate? He probably loses his ability to do his art his way.

Depends what you mean by anti-establishment.

Even most hardcore anarchists believe in some form of cooperation. Just because you criticize parts of an establishment doesn't make you anti all kinds of establishment.

You can both be anti establishment and supportive of some parts of it.

I do think the stunt of the artwork that destroyed itself during the auction was cool in that it seems to have surprised everyone, and anyone in the room who _didn't_ buy it also got a surprise performance art experience.

Say you set up this vending machine today. More and more people quickly find out about it. Eventually a few people are waiting for it to be restocked so they can quickly buy all the rare cans and sell them on eBay, so it's empty most of the time. Maybe the owner gets discovered. The fun is gone and it gets removed.

This is subject to survivorship bias, though. These days it's certainly easier for things to go viral, but things can only go viral if they get found in the first place and, crucially, if those who found it choose to share it. Maybe the clout economy of instagram etc. increases the odds that people will expose such things for likes, but I personally know of at least one fantastic, incredible (, almost certainly illegal) thing in the woods in my hometown of Pittsburgh that I'll never tell anybody for fear of it becoming popular. Look for it yourself. :P

Yeah, good point. Of course most of the big things you know about got ruined, because the ones that didn't get too popular, you don't know about.

I think dril is an interesting case in this - the creator has been outed, but many just don't care and refuse to read and find out who it is. The mystery is the appeal.

I don't want to know who dril is.

For anyone else who hadn't seen these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_similar_to_the_2...

Somehow I'm not surprised that in addition to local artists copying the one in Utah several companies also put them up as advertising.

The amount of effort put into this rebuttal is why I try hard to avoid reading the comments here.

> My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries".

Possibly these: https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/

There's quite a few in San Francisco, I always enjoy running across a new one. Often the owners do some fun themed decoration for them as well. Can't say I've ever actually read anything from one, but I have dropped off some books before.

The smallish town where I live has a Yarn Bomber. She/he knits little totems and fixes them to street-lights and public fencing; sometimes even front doors. They are usually themed: Easter, Summer, Remembrance Sunday, Halloween, Christmas. And quite wonderful, I should add.

Of course I say "she/he". We all know who it is. It's no suprise our smallish town has such a great knit shop, and the bomber has been outed numerous times anyway.

But sometimes the really important thing is to learn how to play along.

But it s obviously a coca cola viral ad... it benefits no one else, needs to source rare exotic products that are not at all exotic for coca cola, has a facebook page for tracking... I mean... things like that are the cancer of the world, what are you so fondly missing :D

Yet another stupid ad ?

Or its something fun made by someone random. Your cynical view is possible, but its not the only possibility, or even the most likely.

> I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist.

Everyone says crypto is the answer in search of a problem, but if you’re really sad and would support it I’ll make a collection of mystery NFTs where you/buyers can’t see the art until you buy the NFT.

On a visit to Seattle, I went waaaaay out of my way to find this machine and use it. It just ate my change and didn't give me a drink. I was furious.

On the plus side, I ended up popping into a local convenience store afterward and the cashier told me "you look just like that really famous person".

This was one of my favorite parts of the neighborhood (I moved to Seattle/Capitol Hill in July 2017) and it was so sad when it disappeared. Weirdly, I thought about it last summer during CHOP/CHAZ and was sort of glad it was already gone because it would have been destroyed last summer.

This reads like an SCP

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-261

Reminds me of some of the stuff in Control, which is obviously based on SCP, but still.

I’ve been passing by this since I was kid, it’s funny that it’s getting so much interest now. I would just use it like a normal vending machine lol

Would be eerie if it wasn’t so darn cool

The combination of social networks and global warming are gonna doom us all.

My wife and I made sure to see it when we went to Seattle in 2017

This is obviously an espionage dead drop machine.

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