14 karma · joined October 26, 2022
Wow, kudos. Honestly.
The funny thing is, even though I'm just about old enough to have bought a few chart music cassettes when they were a contemporary medium, I don't own any cassettes and I only had the player because I bought it on eBay to experiment with tape degradation for music.
I contacted the seller and it turned out her husband was a stamp collector and gave her his low value cast-offs to use as postage. I found it amazing that 30+ year old stamps were still valid. It's only recently they've become invalid postage as now stamps require a barcode.
Also I used to get items delivered to my office, and the office manager's husband was a stamp collector, so she used to ask to keep the stamps I got (I used to order electronic components from all over the world) so this completed the philatelist cycle.
Another old currency anecdote. I used to work on the checkouts at a supermarket in Cambridge circa 2009 and at least two times we'd get visiting academics from the USA who had studied in the UK years before and they'd try to pay with currency they'd had from the time, except it was the awesome old pre-decimal money (We switched to decimal in 1971). I found it quaint that they thought it was still valid and thought to bring it with them.
Around the beginning of 2023 they did a couple of things that ruined it a bit for me. They completely changed the track system so now you have to follow one set path, and they got rid of the classes feature which was awesome because for around $5 I could have a zoom lesson with a native teacher and other people learning the language.
Also the sentences it teaches you are a bit less silly now and that was a cool gimmick.