this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Nostalgia
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nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia nä-ˈstal-jə nə-, also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- 1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia
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I dont know which cap you had but it was the worst idea because my caps were round and unsuitable for that. I used the pen itself.
The part that protruded down from the cap along the side of the pen to form the "pocket clip" fit between the gear teeth and made turning easier & more reliable - you slid the cassette down the body of the pen until that part engaged the teeth. Later I came to prefer the style of pen below due to the flatter protrusion, but both worked pretty well.
IIRC, using two yielded the best results, as one wound while the second stabilized the other spool. 🤓
I was never careful enough with them to even have thought of that. I'd get the cassette on the pen as described, then whirl it around & around in the air like a noise maker to wind the tape.
ohmygods. You absolute monster. 🤢😵💫😭😬
It was way faster.
The humanity. 🥹
fuckin' hell bro, that's some PhD shit
The Gordon Freeman of the taking up cassette slack world
(I'm taking the piss, but man this would have halved the time it took to spool back up my old Atari tapes)
You would've loved the gadget that pre-teen me epoxied together from a pen body+cap and a sibling's pullback racecar mechanism.
Wind up the bot, hold the 2nd pen & cassette, and let'er zip that tape back up to cherry new. Tubular. 🤘🏼
Good on you friend, yeeehaa!
I was five, maybe six when I started fucking about with my Atari 800 - I just played games while listening to Another One Bites The Dust on vinyl repeatedly. The fact that someone took on software owner's challenges at that time when I was struggling to write my own name brings me immense joy.
Good on you dude!
Ha! By that time, my parents had sent me to "computer summer camp" as punishment for garbling my dad's work computer (IIe? IIc?) somehow. By the end of the same summer, I was champing at the byte to go back and clunk in BASIC, Hex, and Pascal for that sweet sweet post-apoc green screen hit of dopamine. Literal magic, all of it, and I knew then I wanted to be a gawdamned wizard.
(FWIW, years later, it was apparent they hadn't learnt their lesson when they forced me to join the church's Bible Quiz team wherein us teens memorized entire Gospel books for later use in a jeopardy-ish team battle royale format against other churchs' teams of hormonal malcontents & blithely saccharine tryhards.)
Oh, and said sibling is apparently about your age. They weren't as excited that I'd turned their car into a tape-fixer, but then I showed them how to launch a bucket w/ an m80, so we were square. 🤣