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If you are having nostalgia or anemoia for payphones, looking at those images brought back a memory of having to use a payphone in Manhattan in 1992. I picked it up and put it to my face and realized somehow, someone had managed to both pee on and in the transmitter AND receiver.
N.B. I just learned the term "anemoia" after asking ChatGPT if there was a word for nostalgia of things you have never personally experienced.
for the record, the "Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows" (in which anemoia appears) was an art project by John Koenig. every word defined in this dictionary was constructed/invented specifically for the book. afaik, none of them have entered "mainstream" dictionaries yet (although dictionary aggregators do tend to include them) but i think it's only a matter of time. there are a lot of great words in there -- i think 'sonder' in particular is an incredibly useful word.
The other day I looked myself up online and was happy to see a bunch of fake data that I enter into signups have made it to my public profile.
I wonder how much GPT and friends will distort our realities.
So it's pretty much Sniglets for goths.
Good to know, but it does seem to me that anemoia is perfectly cromulent.
Well, "anemoia" isn't a word for this, almost any more than "pseudothymia" is a word for this. Someone made a website and made up words for things, and "anemoia" was one of the words on that website.
It's a reminder how much of the public commons has been dismantled in recent history.
It's amazing/unsurprising/sad how much of society is inaccessible to you if you don't own a smartphone.
On the flip side, it’s also amazing how much advances in the technology have made cellphone ownership accessible to the public.
Is this any different to if you didn't own a car, or a phone, fifty years ago?
Payphones were ubiquitous 50 years ago and you could pay for a taxi in cash, instead of needing a bank account and identifying yourself like you must today.
By that logic, smartphones aren't required, as you can just use a laptop.
I don't own a cell phone at all, and I do indeed just use a laptop (a Libreboot-ed X200). I have home phone service through a VoIP provider. Works great, actually. But it would really be more convenient if there were payphones to use and taxis aplenty.
Any time I find a working payphone I love to call myself and leave a message with the date, time, my location, where I'm going, and why I'm going.
My experience is that even when you can pick up the handset and get a dial tone they're still broken more often than not. Some times it's a physically jammed-up coin slot, so I started carrying a calling card (most of the ones at I-5 rest areas are like this). Some times they give the appearance of working fine until you actually try to place a call, then the robot lady will read out some code like “Error Six” and hang up on you (the one at the westbound Donner Pass Rest Area did this to me just three-or-so weeks ago).
But on the very rare occasion that everything works it's a cool way to digitally-scrapbook my trips! I think the last one I ran into that fully worked was a TTY-enabled one at the Francis B. Mathews Rest Area on Route 299: https://cahighways.org/ROUTE299.html
...Don't ask!