My electricity just got shut off. What do I do?

You could read a book. If you like sci-fi may I recommend Stephen Donaldson’s “The Gap” sequence.

Sing along with the cocaroaches in the back of your refrigerator. jk jk jk

If it’s still early where you live and the sun is out just to outside and play or something. If it’s dark then maybe go to sleep, or you know you can always just Fluther :)

Sit in your car and stay on fluther

Turn down the brightness on your screen. It will really help your battery life.

Get stoned. I hear there’s an app for that

Get some paint, canvas, brushes, and candles.

Sleep at night, get up at dawn.

Walk around the neighborhood at 3 AM.

I think Pete might be onto something. A fire and a good book might be good.

I’d start by lighting a candle so that you don’t injure yourself while walking around in the dark. If you were to get hurt, you wouldn’t be able to follow through with the activities recommended here and that would totally suck.

@dalepetrie Wait, why didyou link a page full of buttplugs on amazon?

@Thammuz – HOLY FUCKING SHIT! That’s the funniest damn thing I’ve ever seen. I copied a link (I’ve now replaced the link I DID post with the one I MEANT TO post, btw), but apparently I must not have copied the link into my clipboard, so it used the last link I had copied.

As to why that’s in there, look at this question I posted earlier today. Within the conversation, someone wondered how much they cost, so to be helpful, I looked it up on Amazon (because if you buy something through Amazon by linking from this site, the mods get a commission).

But holy mother of GOD that is funny. Thank you for bringing that to my attention…I thought the joke I was making was funny, but good goddamn, I can hardly BREATHE I’m laughing so hard!

But I suppose, that’s another way to pass time, now isn’t it?

Oh it had to be dalepetrie the one to take forever to finish a post.

ANYWAY, before I inadvertently posted a link to butt plugs I was thinking that this question makes me feel like an old man. I can just hear myself…

You kids and your technology are spoiled rotten. Back in my day, when I was growing up in the 1980s, we didn’t have iPhones or iPods, or laptop computers, XBoxes and Wiis. We had 19 inch TVs with rabbit ears, and we got 3 channels, all of which barely came in. Our phones had wires on them and you couldn’t walk more than 5 feet away from the wall. If you wanted to listen to music, you’d put on a tape, and if it wasn’t on the song you wanted to hear, you either had to fast forward and rewind for 5 minutes to try to find the beginning of the song you wanted, or you just had to listen to the whole damn tape. Our computers had 16k of RAM and no hard drives and they could display 8 colors. There was no internet to connect to and if you wanted to buy a butt plug, you had to go down to a sex shop and buy it in person. If you wanted to take a picture of something you couldn’t see it right away either, you had to wait to have the film developed, and you could only take up to 24 pictures. If you wanted to watch movie at home, you’d have to pay several hundred dollars just to buy a VCR then you’d have to wait for 2 or 3 years after it left the theater. And if we wanted to type something, we used a typewriter, and if you made a mistake, you couldn’t just backspace…you’d have to paint over the paper with something called white out and wait for it to dry. And if you could afford a VIDEO GAME, it was an ATARI, which looked like a bunch of squares put together to look like a picture of something. Back in my day, when you watched pornography, or looked at a dirty magazine, vaginas actually had hair on them. If you wanted a satellite dish you had to pay 3 grand and install something in your yard that was 6 feet in diameter! We didn’t have MICrowaves…we had to cook our food on the stove or in the oven. You kids don’t know how good you got it…in my day a power outage just meant we had to read by flashlight…..

Ya whippersnapper…

Go Christmas Caroling or Trick-or-Treating. :^> If there’s a lot of food in the fridge have a cookout before everything goes bad.

@dalepetrie: Come on now. You’re exaggerating just a little. We had a microwave oven in the early 80s (it might have been the late 70s), but it was big enough to cook a whole turkey in it. (Bad idea.) We had 36 exposure film in the 70s and beyond, but you had to set so many things on your camera manually that 36 exposures could last you a while. By the early 80s most people had cable and it was no longer some odd thing that only folks in the sticks had. And if you wanted to play a video game in the 70s you went to Sears to play Pong. If you wanted to play one in the 80s it was an excuse to get out of the house to go to an arcade or your local convenience store. And you didn’t listen to tapes unless someone made you a mix or you were in your car. You got LPs for listening at home and you had 2 or 4 speakers in one room -not all over the house with buds in their ears like these kids today. Sheesh. And the ice cream man made snow cones on the spot with shaved ice. None of this pre-packaged ice-rock thingie.

So, who’s going to tell the kids to stay off of their lawn first? :^>

Read.
Exercise.
Clean your house.
Learn how to cook a large meal (assuming you have a gas stove/oven, rather than electric)
Do some lawncare.
Find some friends and play some card games or board games.

@dalepetrie I loved my Atari 2600. I think I spent more hours playing Adventure and Pinball than I have playing Super Mario Galaxy on my Wii….

@dalepetrie – I don’t know how we swung it, but we had a microwave in our house, an Amana Radar Range. It was huge and didn’t cook very well.

No Atari or Commodore 64, though, as they were supposedly “a waste of time.”

@PrancingUrchin – Now you can learn how to yo-yo!

You wouldn’t happen to be in Tehran (6th paragraph from the bottom) at the moment would you?

I second @petethepothead on painting or creating art. (big surprise I would say that right?)

Also go to the library and check out books on something you always wanted to learn. It could be a hobby or a skill that would advance you at work.

Shake the dust off of your ole internet-saturated imagination. Let it come back to life again. It’s still in there… somewhere.

Go out for a hour-long walk. If there are woods in your area go for a hike, 2 to 3 hours, it’s great for your health and morale.

@MrItty – don’t get me wrong, I loved my Atari 2600. I KNOW I spent more time playing with that than I do with all my other games combined now. Of course, then I was a kid with zero responsibilities. My favorite was Missile Command….I had that game mastered. I wanted to see what would happen if you got to a million points so one night at 10pm I started playing. I hit a million and 60 points at 4:05am (I don’t think we had pause buttons then either, did we?) and the numbers rolled over. Of course my audience (cousins and friends who were staying over) had all fallen asleep by then…I woke them up to show them, but I always wonder if they believed me or if they thought I just reset it and let myself die at 60 points.

@aprilsimnel – we had a microwave by the mid-late 80s ourselves…I was actually more resistant to the idea than my parents…I was sure one of the mean neighbor kids was going to come over and cook my cat (I’d heard the horror stories, and I was kind of a morbid child).

and @cyndyh – your experience doesn’t mirror mine at all. I was actually serious….we didn’t get a microwave until at least the mid 80s. Cable TV, well, my parents lived 4 miles out of town in the township in a northern Minnesota town, which at a population of 5,000 might seem by other geographic standards to be decent sized, but which actually didn’t have a single chain store until McDonald’s came in 5 years ago. My parents STILL can not get cable at their place, nor high speed internet. And at least where I grew up, vinyl records were on a decline by the early to mid 1980s…everyone I knew had cassettes. It may have had something to do with the fact that the nearest proper music store was located about 80 miles away, and most people who bough music did so via BMG or Columbia House. Our only Sears was basically just an appliance shop in our mall 10 miles away which had all of 40 stores. There was one arcade in this mall, and a movie theater with 3 screens that showed pretty much just the blockbusters and nothing else. So yeah, a big city experience was I’m sure significantly different, but I’m willing to bet that my experience was probably mirrored by more of America, simply because at the time there were more people living in rural areas than in populous ones. Just a hunch. Though you’re right, we did have 36 exposure film, but that was generally only 35MM, and we had 110 or 126 cameras. We actually did have an instant camera, but it wasn’t a Polaroid, it was a Kodak, and they had to stop making film for those when Polaroid sued them for copyright infringement. Long story short…growing up was HELL.

I would go to the library. Computers there and even better, books!

Have a barbecue. Jump rope. Play cards. Read a book. Sleep. Tell jokes. Go talk to your neighbors. Build something. Make something. Clean something.

Do something.

@dalepetrie – If you wanna know how old I am, be aware that one of my first jobs out of college was demonstrating the new Kodak Handle, the competitor to Polaroid’s Land Camera.

@Darwin – for my money, Kodak offered the superior product, FWIW. My parents still HAVE that old camera, I wonder if it’s worth anything?

@dalepetrie : I hear you, and betamax was a better format, too. :^> A part of my growing up was in small towns and that’s still my experience in the early 80s in a small town. We moved every couple of years, and I lived in several places big and small. Your experience might be more specific to where you were, but small towns elsewhere were sometimes different than yours.

@dalepetrie – If you like to shop eBay, you can get the camera for anywhere from $5.00 to $39.95, plus shipping.

And yes, it was an excellent camera. But once again, the lawyers win.

@cyndyh – no doubt…I think the tundra may have frozen a few brains up from where I hail.

@dalepetrie : well, I was in a particularly cold part of Northern Arizona and there were some frozen brain cells there, too. :^> Not everyone, but certainly some.