Keanu found an even better way.

It creates a toroidal vortex, which can travel much further than a plain old blast or puff of air.

You can think of it a little bit like how a wheel works, except that it’s a torus (like a donut shape) instead of a round wheel as in a car. It’s the same basic idea though! Just like you can shove a wheeled cart a lot further than a cart sliding along its bottom, that is also true of a vortex where the air rotates around the minor axis.

Vortex ring:

But you don’t see the vortex since it’s just made of air. If you put smoke or something, it becomes visible, like a smoke ring.

I am intrigued by the ones that promise they are perfumed.

Did that just make dyed clothes smell good for a while? Did it fade totally away after a wash cycle or two?

Nice find!

after other, larger toy companies had turned the film down

I have to wonder what the marketing executives who made that call thought about it a year later. I suppose it was a reasonable guess that SW might end up on the same B movie heap as a bunch of other 50’s and 60’s sci-fi schlock that came and went.

Oh wow! That looks incredible.

Didn’t expect the thread would turn into a list of awesome places to visit if me & fam are ever in the area, but I’m here for it! That SF one is new to me so thanks for the rec.

I think there might be a similar place in … was it Portland, or Seattle? I’ll have to go dig for it.

Schweeeet! This place? That looks kind of awesome without even counting the mechanical arcade games.

I think it was. Wikipedia says,

Periscope became a surprise success for Sega. It performed well in larger locations such as malls and department stores, which normally did not host coin-operated arcade games

In March 1969, David Rosen said that Periscope “may well turn out to be the most profitable arcade game of the decade”. As a result of Periscope’s success, Sega created and exported between eight and ten games a year for the next two years

I only know what I skimmed on some vintage arcade sites, but I have the impression that this game is why Sega succeeded in the early days of the company. It was an expensive cabinet, but it was also advanced and attracted a lot of players.

Wikipedia also says the machines cost arcades $1,295 then, equivalent to around $12,000 in 2025 dollars, which was around twice the price of most machines. So they’d need let’s say 5K plays to recoup the machine cost, assuming 100% profit. Of course they had costs too, rent, salaries, repairs, so in practice it would be a lot more than that. Multiple 10K’s maybe?

tools for me to fully geek out and calculate trajectories by hand.

Oh! There was a 90s vintage PC sub sim that that had a mode where you could employ a remarkably good simulation of the WW-II era torpedo calculations, and mechanical firing computers they had back then. Good for geeking out.

But man, I forgot the name now! Was it Silent Hunter 2? That might be wrong! I’ll wrack my brain and if a memory jars loose, I’ll update here.

I was about to post a youtube link but Technotica beat me to it. Anyway, it had several fixed torpedo tracks with lights under the waves that would show the torpedo as it moved along. You’d have to time your shot on one of the tracks to hit a ship model in the distance. Which I guess is why the cabinet was so much deeper than most machines: it needed the depth for the torpedo track.

Wikipedia says they were made of redwood, but then went through a short period of being plastic (bah!), before reverting back to wood again. Redwood does have quite a distinctive smell!

Glorious graphics! /s

Inflation calculator says $2500 then is similar to $8000 today.

Funny thing, those floppy drives, 175K x 2. Both together are still a small fraction of a single web page, for many sites in 2026. Multi-megabyte web pages are very common.

Haha, yes. I almost never make that mistake with words, but I got into a bad habit with numbers and it’s hard to break. I guess I need to read Strunk and White again.

That’s cool info, thanks! I had no idea. I love those weird crossovers where someone shows up in a totally different context.

Beautiful

Yeah. The color palette is working for me.

That would be hilarious. I’m in. :)

Indeed. It has a little bit of early cell phone vibe, except before those were a thing.

If anyone wants more Bibendums…

Agreed with kahjtheundedicated@lemmy.world, their bike tires are still excellent.

YW!

I can never predict how interesting things will be to anyone else, since it seems like the subjects I find most fascinating or historically significant often get the least interest. So… glad to hear somebody liked this one!

Agreed! I’m teeing up a post for tomorrow that has even more incredible poster art from before any of us were alive.

It strikes me that classifieds like this were largely unchanged for 100’s of years. Never mind the content, the form of this example would not be out of place in a newspaper 150 years later or 150 years earlier. This is one from Boston in 1704, and in London they go back much earlier still.