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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.

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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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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 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.

All is not lost, behold the Shrek Box;

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

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.

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.

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.

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