I always recount the story of the Hovercraft Christmas.
There was one toy I wanted for Christmas. We were firmly middle class growing up, so it wasn’t like I had all the toys, but I was old enough to know that my parents were footing the bill and getting an RC hovercraft was going to mean I only get one present that year.
Iirc it was called the Typhoon, or maybe the Typhoon II.
The commecials showed it zipping across land and water, jumping off ramps, bouncing off a lake, etc. It was the coolest fucking thing ever. I begged my parents for it, and would not shut up for months about getting an RC hovercraft.
Christmas comes, and wonderous joy, I got the hovercraft! Life is good, but the battery needs to charge. Shit, OK, we plug it in and let it charge all day while we go do the normal Christmas family visits. Everyone I talked to that day got a lesson in how hovercrafts work, and how it can travel on a pocket of air to move across land AND water.
We got home late that night. It was probably after 10pm, way past everyone’s bedtime, including my parents who had been up all night making the Christmas magic happen for my younger siblings who still believed. But I put my fucking foot down. I had waited for months to get my hovercraft. I had waited all day for the battery to charge. I would not wait another god damned minute to go zipping around the backyard. So, my dad and I put coats on over our pajamas, went out to the driveway, and fired that bad boy up.
I can still perfectly remember the sound of the fans turning on, and the little rubber skirt inflating. Sure enough, the hovercraft was floating on a pocket of air! But the driveway was on a mild incline, so the hovercraft started to drift sideways. Then I hit the throttle and… nothing. Just the sound of the fans spinning, but no motion.
Bzzzzz. BZZZZZZ. Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz. The fans spun impotently against the inertia of the hovercraft. It wouldn’t move at all, except to sadly drift towards the gutter. My dad gave it a little nudge with his foot, and it got stuck on a tiny stone chip.
I learned a lot about physics from that one night, but I learned even more about advertising.
Thinking back on all the RC cars, planes, and yes, hovercraft, commercials that I saw as a kid, I think they ought to have been sued for false advertising. Realistically though they probably had some disclaimer read (at 8x speed) at the end of the commercial that absolved them of any false advertising by saying the commercial was merely depicting the fantasy of the toy and not the actual use of it.
Are there any old ads you can link to on YouTube for this thing? I wanna see!
All lies. The fans couldn’t push the thing without a polished smooth surface. You see it spinning? Think about where the fans are, because that’s the only steering it had.
I got burned by this too. I feel your pain.
Dad figured out that if we hosed the concrete driveway, it made a better seal, and handeled bumps and impetfections better.
It was a glorious 3 minutes before the water started to seep in to the concrete quickly. The Typhoon nosedived and tore its skirt.
0/10 would not hovercraft again.
Ginger the Segway was supposed to revolutionize the way we view cities!
TBF electric scooters are doing that now. Dude was just ahead of his time.
Also if you take “the way we view cities” literally, they definitely did since they became a popular way for tourists to view a city.
Ahead of his time? It is a different product working with a different (and far older) principle?
There’s a great episode of The Dollop about the Segway guy. 565 - Dean Kamen and It.
Dean Kamen is so cool to me, because he’s pretty unknown but has had such a positive impact on the world, especially with his STEM outreach to school kids. I got to meet him once briefly after the FRC national championship in 2014, he was going somewhere but still stopped to talk to us briefly and I thanked him and he signed my team hat.
CEO fell off a cliff with his Segway and died
Dating sites. Complete useless trash.
I’d have to agree. I met my wife on OKCupid in 2016 and almost immediately after that it changed several key features and became complete garbage.
I’ve had some great experiences, but I’m sure everyone’s mileage may vary
I think it got really bad the past few years. I think many people don’t even know that, but tinder used to be free. You got 5 free super swipes or something, unlimited swiping and so on. Now you can swipe a few times for free, and it is never ever the people who already liked you. It has a feature where you can limit your range and disable people from around the world. But half the women i see are from china or thailand. Women get flooded with likes and matches while as (an average?) guy, it’s like playing the lottery.
The problem that i see with that is that men generally don’t pick their “dream girl” they jest pick what they can get. Which is a weird dynamic for any sort of relationship. “Of all the likes, i picked you, because of your smile and we both like cycling.” “You were my only match in 3 month.”
When everyone around you is an asshole, it’s time to reevaluate who the real asshole is.
Not sure how this is relavent here considering most of them are owned by the same holding and their goal is to ensure engagement with their shite platform.
But sure let’s just start out by shitting on the user base
Kirby vacuums. I got one for free from a neighbor and she included the invoice by mistake. $2200 for a vacuum that smells like burning and can’t lift pet hair. Brush is working, bag is new, carpet is being lifted from the pad. But man, this thing fails at pet hair.
There was a brand that worked by filling the tank with water and applying a vacuum to use the water as a filter. They weren’t amazing but they cost like $2k in 2001 money. My ex had one that her father had bought and I finally convinced her to get rid of it once it started shocking her.
