this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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Even less than a 150 years ago that would have been impossible. And prior to that communication among normal people could take months.

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[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Lol before smartphones became ubiquitious, my parents went to these stores to buy these weird pre-paid long-distance phone cards to relatives in China because in this era, minutes were still limited and data plans were expensive af.

Like you'd dial a local number in the US then you'd use the phone's numpad to enter your destination number they'd call your desired number for you then connect you...

Idk how that worked

I saw them being sold anywhere from $10 to $50 with varying minutes

It's kinda like a gift card. You scratch off a number in the back and that's your access code, then you just call the number corresponding to your region.

Some phone cards were so scummy and they deducted your minutes while its waiting before it even gets connected. Or just calling to check minutes, and they deduct your minutes for that call before you actually make the long distance call. So you'd have to shop around in different stores to hope their phone cards are less scummy.

Ever since 2014/2015 they got actual smartphones and then just started using WeChat. Free calls and video calls over the internet. And now mobile data is unlimited (and actually affordable compared to before).

But problem is... now CCP is listening in the livingroom... 👀 (cuz they use voice memo instead of typing... so WeChat gets permanent access to the microphone permission...)

[–] bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I used those to call back to the UK when I moved to the US, back around 2005.

When you entered the number you wanted to call, it would do a VOIP connection from the line you were on to that company to a line in the destination county. So it was an Internet call for the international part (which is how they did it cheaply).

I realized that because the cards I bought were from a company with "VOIP" in the name!

I had one of those Radio Shack tone dialler boxes so that I could pre-program the free US number and the card id number.