ROBOTS WITH CHRONIC ILLNESS. ROBOTS THAT NEED TO STAY HOOKED INTO THE GRID OR RLSE THEY SHUT DOWN IN A FEW MINUTES. ROBOTS WHO CAN’T TRAVEL BECAUSE THEYRE HOOKED INTO A BANK OF BATTERIES
ROBOTS WHO OPERATE WAY ABOVE HUMAN PROCESSING AND COGNITION SO THEY INTERRUPT AND ANSWER QUESTIONS BEFORE YOUVE ASKED THEM
DO YOU HEAR ME CA. YOU HEAR ME….
Robots who act like 90s laptops. Yeah they still work, but they had to have their hard drive swapped out. They can’t be used portably anymore because their original batteries are long dead and no one makes replacements anymore. They have memory issues when they first wake up because their cmos battery died, and leaked, and the corrosion means they can’t hear out of their right ear anymore.
They can’t interact with the modern world without some assistive devices, because they were built in an age of dial up modems. They don’t know what ethernet is, let alone wifi or 5g. But they’re still kicking! Their vision may be a little blurry, they’ve got an old LCD with some backlight problems, but they manage.
They just need to be careful. Their plastic is getting brittle in their old age. They’re not worried about the yellowing, of course. They could try retrobriting it but they consider it a badge of honor. It shows they’ve been around a while.
The tension of a robot wanting to retrobright because they don’t match their memory of what they looked like, but also not wanting to retrobright because it shows how long they’ve been around….
Well today I’ve discovered what retrobright is!
(to those like me who hadn’t heard of it: it’s a peroxide mix that lightens yellowed computers)
I’ve always assumed the old creamy yellow-ish off-white computers were that colour because that was what was in style, ngl, not that they’d yellowed with age.
I’ve seen houses decorated with similar wallpapers/paint, so I don’t think it was a crazy assumption to make.
Regardless, I knew that the colour of plastic degraded over time, but… not like that. Not so much over such a (relatively) short period of time, and so differently depending on the plastic.
Take that last keyboard, for example. Aside from the obvious dirt, I’d have just assumed it was marketed as a cool duel-colour keyboard when it was new. But… I guess it was white when it was first sold? Crazy.
Yeah! The exact mechanism is unknown but I’ve seen enough examples that i am thoroughly convinced the mechanism is exposure to UV breaking down the ABS over time. Parts that get exposure turn brown and parts that don’t stay the original color.
Retrobright isn’t a panacea in any case, the plastic remains as brittle as before, since it doesn’t restore the plasticizes and since you’re just bleaching the plastic by exposing it to oxygen, it can turn yellow again and if you’re inconsistent in its application you can further discolor or even damage the plastic.
All that being said… I’ve always wondered if using ozone to retrobright would provide a more consistent experience.
Also: the idea of a robot asking his more modern friend to weigh the pros and cons of being retrobrighted because they can do it faster and with less chance of overheat/overcurrent/not straining the aging capacitors in their power supply, etc… makes me feel a way.
