A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
I have an old Soviet mechanical wristwatch that cost 3β¬ on an Eastern German flea market.
Compared to other watches it sounds like a Diesel tractor, the bezel rotates freely and the wristband pulls my arm hair out.
When I wear it, it's too fast and when I don't wear it, it's too slow.
But I only wear it during the day and take it off at night, and that way it's been keeping perfect time for 15 years.
I love this old soviet stuff. Iβve got an old Hasselblad camera clone from the Soviet Union. That thing is heavy as fuck and the metal shutter looks and sounds like youβre slamming a garage door. Operating this camera feels like riding a rusty bike on a muddy road and yet the pictures it takes are very decent.
Edit: Hereβs a video of the shutter that I took ages ago. Also note how it jerks around the whole camera body despite me holding onto it.
I used to have an old Zenit ET. I loved that thing cause it had a small solar cell that powered the lightmeter (which was just an analog indicator moving over a scale).
So it needed no batteries.
When I moved to a new place I accidentally toppled an oak wood wardrobe which fell on the camera.
The wardrobe then had a hole in its back panel, the camera still worked fine.
Maybe it is actually cursed. The curse is that while you wear it your life goes by faster but if you remove it you slow down. Most people get too greedy and slow their life to a standstill but you are actually using it perfectly to enjoy your free time at night and less time during your work
When I was a kid, my grandmother bought me a Steve Urkel doll from a garage sale. It had a pull string and would repeat Urkelisms from the TV show. The thing severely creeped me out, and felt completely cursed. So I lit it on fire with gasoline, then buried it in a shoebox.
You did the right thing π
Did I do that?
Oh, definitely my vacuum cleaner. I have never changed the bag on that thing. And I dread the day that it will become necessary.
Can you clarify... when you say "changed" do you mean emptied or replaced?
You can empty the bag without throwing it away?? I always thought those bags were supposed to be tossed as they are when they're full :o
.. I've done neither haha
Well that's terrifying.
My old vacuum bags were meant to be tossed, but I just emptied it and put it back because $.
You can definitely empty them and put them back, you just have to replace them when they tear otherwise all it's going to do is suck the dust up off your floor and blow it around inside your vacuum, contaminate your vacuum fan and motor and eventually render the vacuum cleaner inoperable and possibly flammable.
Just to clarify something... having a full bag doesn't mean it'll explode in flames or anything like that (normally at least) - it just means your vacuum won't vacuum... there's no place for the dirt to go so the vacuum just lifts the dirt and spreads it across your floor.
You might as well just stop vacuuming.
There is very little to no suction when the bag is full. Have you ever checked if what youβre doing has any effect?
The house I grew up in.
I've told this story before but the house was built in like 1976. A freak tornado came down and tore it down when it was 3/4 completed. The builders got the insurance and built it again and when they finished it it caught fire and burned to the ground.
The builders got the insurance and built it again and another tornado came through and destroyed it a week before it was supposed to be completed.
In pythonian fashion the fourth time it stayed up, but one night I was down in the basement doing laundry on a dark and stormy night and I saw a movement to my right. A man in a full trench coat and wide brimmed hat was standing next to the water heater. I screamed as any preteen boy would and the man walked around the water heater and dis a fucking peared.
I ran upstairs screaming there's a man in the basement there's a man in the basement and everyone came down to look and there was no man in the basement. The doors were bolted locked from the inside.
A few years later my mom built a room into the basement and turned it into an extra bedroom. My sister woke up one night with a woman clad in all white with long black hair holding her feet down and crying and crying and crying.
She screamed and the woman disappeared.
My mom still lives in that house and will probably die there. That house is fucking haunted and was haunted before it was ever built.
I've told this story before and my friends have said maybe it was built on an ancient Indian ground or something and to me that is hilarious because I am native American so why the fuck would they bother me?
I mean, they didn't bother you guys.
The guy was just cold, and the gal had a personal moment. Not their fault, that you two little kids were scared of strangers.
Kidding aside, and assuming what you've written is neither internet-talk nor standard schizophrenia tendencies, it might be carbon monoxide poisoning. It was a phenomenon, with haunted houses very often just having faulty heaters of some kind, causing hallucinations in the right doses.
We lived in a house where the previous owners had it exorcised and Iβve never slept better. Iβd take living in a cursed/haunted house over a shitty roommate any day.
It sounds like your sister has sleep paralysis
Doesn't that instead affect the chest?!
We sure the bed had a slope of some kind?
Oh it's not always the chest sitting experience. Back before I understood what was going on, once I had an episode where I felt my body being stretched across the room.
Every place I live, there will be this incident when a torrential deluge of water breaks through the ceiling of my bedroom in the middle of the night.
So it's not the bedroom itself that is cursed, since it is a different room each time. And the causes have varied also. The cursed object, therefore, must either be me or something in my possession I have kept around since childhood? Hmmβ¦
I probably wouldn't do any overnight stays on a ship.
Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I'm having none of it.
One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.
So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It's now or never, curse!
When I was a kid, my mom either bought or was gifted a little plush snowman that would say "Happy holidays! Happy holidays!" When you squeezed it. It would maybe get squeezed a few times in December and then put in a bin until the following year. No one ever changed the batteries and it still worked each year for many years. Then it started to run out of juice. And slowly over each year it would sound more and more demonic, but it always played at least once before running out of power. It's now been more than 25 years and we still check it each year to see if the demonic snowman is still alive. I'm not sure it will ever die if it was never alive in the first place...
damn, be sure to take a footage once lol
Easy. It's a dried and shellacked squid that has been posed in an artful, somehow bipedal and menacing position. I call it the creeping horror and keep it in an old wooden box.
Not really my taste, but it was a gift.
That's exactly my taste! I'll take it if you ever wanna her rid of it!
I've become attached to this eldritch abomination.
Now you must propagate dark and horrible legends about it!
Printer
A SNES I have that is so old it has yellowed with age (The yellow color is due to oxidation of the plastic that was used). I don't even know if it still works... π The last game I played on it was Super Mario World and I experienced a corruption in which the screen went completely black and there was a rumbling sound in the background.
There is a treatment for that that involves like baking soda and aluminum foil and UV light. I think it's called retrobrite. Might be worth looking into but at the same time if you're going to do that you might have other repairs you would need to make on the machine.
imo it's not really worth it unless you really need to make it look new.. the chemicals are toxic and plastic will get weaker as well.
Peroxide, heat, and UV light makes for a good combination.
But it's not without risk, such as streaking or over-lightening. It also isn't a permanent solution, but should buy you a good additional handful of years if the console is stored under optimal conditions.
I have used retrobriting on a few consoles, with decent results. I restored the plastic on a model 2 Japanese Sega Saturn this way, and it turned out gorgeous.
The plastic on the SNES was some of the worst ever, when it came to UV discoloration. Though the SNES Jr. model specifically fairs pretty well, and has the additional benefit of being a 1CHIP model.
I have a rusted knife in a badly tanned hide sheath from the early 1900s that an explorer in the family got from a tribe over Africa way (not sure of real geographical location). The thing is primitive and small but could probably be cursed. I don't have many items that'd fit the description
My In-Laws house has some BAD juju for sure.
-Had an uncle pass away in it
-Multiple pets run over in the driveway
-Bad experiences living there when we moved back home and we looking for a place
-Bonus Room flooded MULTIPLE due to MIL not understanding how retaining walls work.
Just a cursed place in general and I'm glad I'm nowhere near that house.
My USB cables exist in a quantum superposition where the orientation of the male end is only determined after I fail to plug it in on the first try.
You mean on the second try
Myself.
My brain
Me.
I have a billiard break cue, it's hollow steel pipe with brass and galvanized fittings to screw it together. Based off the material, original colors, and general look it's probably from the early 70's.
Without fail, if a drunk person finds out it's hollow they get super weird about it. They hand it back like it's a writhing appendage, avoid using it when offered, even had a guy drop it like it was gonna bite him. Either way, I play better with it than I ever did before, and I gave it a gorgeous glossy crimson repaint.
I don't believe it's cursed at all, but my parents and older brother believe some small Japanese statue doll thing of a geisha (supposed to be holding a shamisen, but it's missing) that they ended up giving to me to store in my room is cursed. Since I don't think it's cursed, I have no issue holding onto it.
Showed up one day on the dinner table one day and I'm fairly certain my brother got it and was either too drunk or high on weed (or a combo of both) to remember picking it up while he was out. I don't believe him when he says he doesn't know where it came from.
cell phone
Edit for clarity: I believe this is a cursed object in general, not just mine.
Of course I know him, he's me
My blanket on a very cold winter night
My wallet