Renn Skye

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

many years ago, when my father was a young man, he was living in London, and he was not doing so in the strictly legal sense. plus he was squatting, and one of his roommates was a burglar. like, full on breaking into homes and stealing TVs kind of guy. not a group of people who wanted to attract the attention of police.

so one day, my dad dropped that roommate off at work (someone's house, I assume), and went to drive back to their squat on his roommate's motorcycle. let's assume the vehicle itself was of questionable legality, and my dad for sure didn't have a license to drive it. let alone anything that said that he was allowed to be in England in the first place. and my dad

gets caught

in a roundabout.

he cannot figure out how to get out. he hadn't been in the country too long, and was still figuring out how to navigate all of the weird things that for sure did not exist in Israel or Greece or anywhere else he had lived. and you know what? fair. I DID grow up in a country with those cursed circles, and I struggle with them sometimes myself.

now in this particular roundabout, there was a police car parked at the center, and those police officers watched him go around two times. and he figured that if he went around a third time, the police would pull him over and ask for documentation that he did not have.

now, another fact about my dad is that he has balls of steel. this man has made many choices that I would describe as....unwise. many of those choices involve brashly making illegal choices right in front of authority figures, and then talking himself out of them like a snake oil salesman.

so my dad. he drives that motorcycle right up to the cops at the center of that roundabout, and he says "excuse me. I'm a foreigner in your country, and I'm stuck in this roundabout. can you help me get out?"

and who would do that if they had anything to hide? that is a move made by someone who believes that police always act in his best interest. nothing suspicious going on here!