Don’t ever take investment advice from me
Pff. Yeah. I’m reblogging shit from FaceBook now. Like if you think I’m an idiot, share if you think I’m a maroon.
I’m sure I’ve told you this story before, but w/e. Berners-Lee’s white paper proposing the WWW was published in 1990. I’d been online some years by then, and I read his paper and I thought it was the stupidest, most unworkable, unlikeliest pie-in-the-sky hippie crap I’d ever heard.
This was a time when a simple word processing program was, like, five hundred bucks and this British ninny thinks major players are going to put premium content online for free and let anybody in the world link to it? Yah, riiiiiiight.
That wasn’t my biggest ever prophecy #FAIL, though. Oh, no.
My second year of art school, they had a recruiter from Hasbro come talk to the class. He was all excited about this new toy they were about to release. Hasbro had done a big survey of little girls and found the number one thing they all wanted was a pony, so they were going to sell these ugly pony sculptures in garish colors.
And I’m thinking, no, you idiot little girls want A PONY. A soft warm hairy beast she can feed apples to and dress up and ride around on, not some lumpy pink four-legged hard plastic booger-goblin.
Yep, that’s right. I predicted the complete failure of My Little Pony.
Posted: August 23rd, 2016 under personal.
Comments: 22
Comments
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 23, 2016, 5:14 pm
To be accurate, the one I saw was called My Pretty Pony. The original toy was about 10″ tall. It had a comb-able tail, ears that waggled and one eye that winked. It was ugly as shit.
A year or two later, they came out with the miniature collectable ones and those were branded My Little Pony.
Comment from David Gillies
Time: August 23, 2016, 9:00 pm
I cooked up a web interface to an email server while drunk one night so I could read my email if I wasn’t in the lab. Then I binned it. Then the sods who wrote Hotmail sold it to Microsoft for $400 million.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 23, 2016, 9:47 pm
Well. I can’t top that.
Comment from Skandia Recluse
Time: August 23, 2016, 10:21 pm
I invested in Iridium, the sattelite phone service before it went bankrupt. I was so sure it would reorganize that I held onto the stock even when everyone knew it was going bankrupt and the stock would be worthless.
I wrote a simple menu program (in ASM) that the user could run and select type fonts and sizes and the escape code would be sent to your printer. I posted the source on compuserve and a few days later someone had made it a ‘terminate and stay resident’ code block that you could popup with a hotkey, and someone after that wrote the wysiwyg editor where you could embed the escape codes in the text you were writing.
Then I got a job driving a truck, long haul after the industry was deregulated and wages and freight rates went down the sewer.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 23, 2016, 10:38 pm
TSRs. I’d forgotten them.
I had an uncle who owned a shitload of Xerox stock in (I’m guessing) something like 1960 and sold it off because it was not going anywhere.
I had a friend who played the same lottery number every week for five years, until her paycheck was delayed. That week, the number made five million bucks.
Fate is an asshole.
Comment from bikeboy
Time: August 23, 2016, 11:01 pm
So – which is more successful – the internet, or My Little Pony?
:-O
(I have two granddaughters, ages 9 and 3, in the house; thus I am so VERY familiar with My Little Ponies! Our monthly budget is about the same for MLPs and the WWW.)
Comment from Brother Cavil, Nie Mój Cyrk, Nie Moje Małpy
Time: August 23, 2016, 11:10 pm
Me in 1991: Hey, what’s this file on this FTP site?
Someone in the computer lab: That’s some new markup language someone came up with. Embeds images and other objects in text.
Me: What, to store stuff on disks?
Someone: Nah, you read it remotely on this program here.
Me: …have you seen download speeds? This will never catch on…
Comment from Uncle Al
Time: August 24, 2016, 12:07 am
I had been “communicating” at 300 baud and when I sprung for a 1200 baud modem that was unbelievably fast. For text. Then along came the Web. The Web came along verrrrrry sloooooly, it did. Thank goodness for DSL. All this was late 80s to early 90s.
Comment from AliceH
Time: August 24, 2016, 12:35 am
Just think – there are people finished with grad school today who never lived in the world before the WWW.
Comment from Ric Fan
Time: August 24, 2016, 12:51 am
That’s okay. In 1973, I predicted that computerized (synthesized?) music was garbage and would never catch on.
Comment from feynmangroupie
Time: August 24, 2016, 1:30 am
I can make you all feel better. My father sold his Amazon stock right before they went big.
Comment from bds
Time: August 24, 2016, 2:07 am
My father-in-law was asked by a local merchant to invest in expanding his store, but my father-in-law didn’t have the money at the time. That was Sam Walton.
Comment from LesterIII
Time: August 24, 2016, 4:48 am
An alternative to My Little Pony to check out:
http://shamansoulstudios.com/my-little-demon
My daughter bought the coloring book immediately upon seeing it at a sci-fi/fantasy/gaming convention.
Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: August 24, 2016, 11:30 am
We have one of those, Lester. he’s called Jack.
Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: August 24, 2016, 1:48 pm
Lester, I like the ferocious-looking unicorn. I’ve always thought, if you’ve got a switchblade on your forehead, you’re going to use it! (Finally got to see that in the Cabin in the Woods movie from Joss Whedon a few years ago.)
Comment from technochitlin
Time: August 24, 2016, 3:22 pm
Wait! Wait!!! I thought Al Gore invented the Internets…
Comment from Mr. Dave
Time: August 24, 2016, 3:49 pm
I intend to work “booger-goblin” into casual conversation sometime today.
Comment from feynmangroupie
Time: August 24, 2016, 5:20 pm
And now I will think of booger-goblins every time my nose is stuffed up or I have to sneeze.
Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: August 24, 2016, 8:25 pm
In 2000, I bought 100 shares of Apple for $22/share. It promptly dropped to $13, but I held on. I sold it in 2004 for $45, and congratulated myself on a profit of over 100%.
Apple closed today at $108, having split 2/1 and 7/1 in the meantime. If I had held the stock, it would now be worth over $150,000, and would also have paid $11,000 in dividends.
Comment from BJM
Time: August 24, 2016, 8:53 pm
Weasie, this is totes off topic, the Bros Miller released their latest game “Obduction” on Steam today. I dunno what they’re asking for it cuz I bought into the Kickstarter for extra goodies.
Mind you it’s an immersive exploration game, not an action oriented FPS…but nobody does atmospherics and environment quite like Cyan.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 24, 2016, 10:03 pm
Oh, wow — that looks really beautiful, BJM. I think I’ve heard of this one. They’re asking £23.99. Let me know how the gameplay is.
I’ve put it on my wishlist.
Comment from Steve Skubinna
Time: August 25, 2016, 9:21 pm
Here you go. Sadly out of stock now:
http://www.myplasticheart.com/pc/MLC01CTHULU/MYLITTLECH/My+Little+Cthulhu
Write a comment
Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.<< carry me back to ol' virginny