Kenna Conklin of GeekPortland.com knows nerdery. David Walker of BadAzzMofo is like a Godfather of PDX Geek. So when the proprietor of the social calendar that Portland Nerderati lives by meets the guy who spent his childhood writing an independent comics adaptation of “Escape from New York” at age 12? Prepare for a trip through a deep, nerdy rabbit hole: Phone Phreaking, the early 90′s nerd heirarchy that all comics-fans and D&D players had to live through, Adventures in Ventriloquism and cheap novelty store prop comedy, and other rampant silliness. Kenna talks about how she came to become a self-avowed geek after running with the punk kids at her high school, and David talks about the sort of phone etiquette people won’t ever know ever again: It involves stretching cords, hiding in closets, and these things called party lines. Other topics include: Cat shows, High School bullies, and Kenna’s GeekPortland party this weekend featuring the Doubleclicks and Kirby Krackle.
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
As much as we all love Courtney, why don’t you see if Leia Weathington would be available to do the Conan commentary?
Our cord phone was also in the kitchen when I was growing up, and our mother would stretch the cord straight to keep an eye on us in the other room. She eventually got a a 20 foot cord, but forever regretted it when she walked in on my brother and and I having a fart contest.
It’d be pretty crappy to tell Courtenay “nah, we take it back. We’re gonna ask someone else.”
Those 20 foot cords always ended up being the most hazardous thing in the house. I swear they gained sentience and existed solely to hug your ankles just enough to tip you over, cursing and screaming all the way to the carpet.
I remember renting phones from the phone company.
I call them neo-geeks. Yes, that drives me bonkers as well.
Harsh attitude for DnD. In ’79 all the DnD players also read comics. I never remember a rift between the two groups then. OTOH, Punk was still very young, and fuck rules~
Hey hey hey! Leave Wisconsin out of your yodeling fantasies! We have a lot of problems up here, but yodelers are not one of them. We’re more of a polka state. A quick google search of yodeling in wisconsin returns 290,000 results, while yodeling in kansas (a randomly picked state) returns 4,010,000 results.
That’s pretty impressive, actually.
Pfft! MY state has the home town of Myron Floren. Beat that!
I got my first cell phone from a radio contest. It had 100 prepaid minutes and I made them last 4 months. My first call was to my boss while I was pooping on the clock at work
Where’s the link to the kitteh video?
Good question!
Courtenay. Conan commentary. I WAS going to come to the actual movie, but I might have to stay home and watch JUST to hear Courtenay’s Commentary. It’s either going to be utterly legendary, or she’ll be bored as shit.
The Archery sport should also take place on the Wipeout TV Show set. That way, we can watch archers abuse each other while they’re abused by the set.
Quote of the Show: “That’s a nice butthole!”
We had a party line for our phone when I was growing up but not the kind of party line Bobby was talking about. In my day a party line was a single phone line shared between multiple houses. If the phone rang with one long ring it was for us, two short rings meant it was for the neighbor. If you picked up the phone and heard people talking you just had to wait until they finished before making your own call. Our line was shared with three other families but there were other party lines with eight houses sharing the line. We were cheapskates (A.K.A. poor) so we didn’t pay extra for a private line. We finally ended up with a de facto private line when everyone around us upgraded.
These days my wife and I share five phone numbers for only two people.
In terms of phone phreaking, this was something that my auntie did in the late 70′s/early 80′s, in order to manipulate coin operated machines. Soda/beer cans used to open differently where you had the snap tops, where you had to peel it. You could cut the tip of the part that bends/curls and if you cut it properly, it would be the exact size as the dime. Now, if you were able to mold it properly, and create a makeshift key with masking tape, one was able to make free phone calls, since the pay phone would believe it was a coin and trigger it as “valid”. One could also do the same with washing machines and dryers. When the phone company and vendors found out about this, they switched the way it would “interpret” a coin, including using the weight of the “input” as a means of validating the transaction. The only thing I ever attempted was trying to cut a section of a dollar or five dollar bill, so that if you placed it in a change machine (as in “place a dollar bill, get a dollar in quarters”), you would not only get your quarters but you’d get your dollar back. That was meant to be great if you were in a video game room or at a car wash. Sadly, that never worked for me.
The cat show thing was interesting. It’s a odd sense of pageantry, and maybe it’s how some view porn. “Is Asa Akira’s butthole bleached? Shaved? Does it have or can it contain ornaments? Can she yodel and if so, what can she sing? Can I Auto-Tune her yodel, or would it take away from the true depth of her voice?”
The cheat for change machines that I knew about involved tape and wax paper. It worked on the machines where you’d push in a tray with the bill, not the ones that pulled the bill in automatically. You’d tape the bill to the tray and lay the wax paper on top of the currency before pushing in the tray. Once the optical sensors would recognize the bill and the grabbing mechanism would recognize that it had paper, out popped the quarters.
Oh man, I almost want those old phones back, even though they were wrought with their own difficulties and kinks. I’m grateful cell phones caught on early in my corner of the world, and so in my teens I didn’t have to fight over phone time, but could happily text away with a friend after school.
Thanks for the nostalgia, guys.
The cereal in question with the whistle used for phreaking was Captain Crunch. One of the most prominent phreakers, John Draper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper), named himself “Captain Crunch” because of the whistle.
In our little town there was a payphone at the corner by the school. So to kill time while waiting for everyone to show up to a scout outting we would call those numbers too.
We also would call the operator and ask what time it was. We’d use accent and ask what time it was in that accents country or talk like a sargent and as for the time in millitary time. Ah the simple pleasures before smart phones and interwebs.