luna, friend of eggbugy’all ever buy a pre-owned game cartridge or mp3 player or something and the previous owner’s data is still on it, and for a brief moment you feel a sense of connection with that stranger through their lingering data, and a twinge of sadness at the idea of deleting it to use the device for yourself?
tangentially: I know it’s a video game and it’s a standard/expected feature to have, but it feels almost obscene that Nintendogs has a “delete save data” option
Adriano
"Musty Bits" McGee
void friend
DDR
azul@luna one time i bought a used game cartridge to replace one i had lost many many years ago. the used cartridge still had the previous owner's data. the previous owner was me. i accidentally bought back my lost game cartridge.
La mère tume@typeswitch @luna ... how???
@Nocta_Senestra @luna Small country, rare cartridge, I guess.
The full story is more unbelievable, since i lost the cartridge (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance), as well as the GBA SP it was in, when i was a teen in southern Portugal. Over a decade later, the person who bought it used was my husband (then boyfriend) as an xmas gift, off ebay, from a seller in Spain. I loaded it up and it had the data from my childhood (including the nickname I used around that time that I never told anyone about).
@typeswitch @luna that's an incredible story wtf x)
Organ Harvest Coordinator 
</IsmellaNEEEEEEEEEERD>Reminds me of when I bought a tamagotchi cartridge and there were all the old blorbos on it. Some of them had names, one named "mommy" and I thought it was so cute I didn't touch them and just picked a free slot to raise my own tamagotchi.
Irenes (many)
Hakan Bayındır@luna I'll keep a copy of the data if it's possible and not too large. If that's a music player, I'll tuck the music to a folder, and label it "previous owner's music taste", and be sure to include it in my backups.
GrayGooGlitch 
@luna
I have a CIB copy of Zelda 2 for the Famicom Disk System, when I booted it up for the first time I found two of the save slots had data on them. I wonder who that person was and where they are now. Given the nature of the FDS and the progress, it's very likely the saves were from its original use and the kid that played it is now in their late 30s or early 40s. If I use that disk, I use the 3rd slot.
I have a CIB copy of Zelda 2 for the Famicom Disk System, when I booted it up for the first time I found two of the save slots had data on them. I wonder who that person was and where they are now. Given the nature of the FDS and the progress, it's very likely the saves were from its original use and the kid that played it is now in their late 30s or early 40s. If I use that disk, I use the 3rd slot.
PoroCYon 🔜 
@luna sometimes yes (though tbf I rarely buy such things at all)
Mrs Beanbag@luna every time we get a rental car and it's got everybody else's satnav history and phone pairings in it
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@mrsbeanbag @luna I clear them every time. madness that the companies don't do it.
Ge0rG ➡️ Easter-H-Egg@gsuberland
My pervious car went through two dealerships, one leasing company and one import/export agent, and traveled from Germany to Charkiw before the new owner realized that I forgot to log it out from the connected app.
@mrsbeanbag @luna
My pervious car went through two dealerships, one leasing company and one import/export agent, and traveled from Germany to Charkiw before the new owner realized that I forgot to log it out from the connected app.
@mrsbeanbag @luna
Juli Jane @EH23 - ☎️ 5854@gsuberland @mrsbeanbag @luna Probably too much hassle. There should be special rental car editions of cars where they can just connect some device or something which resets everything.
@julijane @mrsbeanbag @luna if they can do a whole valet job and safety check between each customer using the vehicle I'm sure they can manage three or four menu buttons to factory reset the head unit. it's mostly just cos nobody tells them to.
Joel LeBlanc@luna Half the fun of renting games at the local video store was to pickup where mystery save file left off. Good times 🥰
🎼 Melody 🏳️⚧️@luna i always back up the save before i delete it because i feel too guilty
Greg@luna I picked up a second hand Pokémon crystal cart a while back and it took a while before I could bring myself to delete the previous owner‘s save
@luna
I once bought a camera, and the SD card came with photos of a tour that I had tickets for, but that was canceled before showing at my place. That was a weird mix of sadness, envy, but also connectedness and compassion.
I once bought a camera, and the SD card came with photos of a tour that I had tickets for, but that was canceled before showing at my place. That was a weird mix of sadness, envy, but also connectedness and compassion.
Misty@luna I think about those RPG Maker “book clubs" I've heard of for the cartridge-based ones, where people find used copies with games on them and then do group playthroughs. I think it's nice to get to appreciate them even if they might get wiped for reuse at some point.
@misty oh, that's really lovely!
jordan@luna I dug my old touch wheel iPod up and I was gonna give it away to someone who will love it better but the connection to the person I was back when I used that iPod keep staying my hand, it’s been plugged in in charger limbo for a couple months now
@luna it’s not like I don’t still have 99% of this music in my current library either, it’s more about it being a snapshot of me at that particular point in time, and I don’t really ever care to use this device again but also would feel loss if I wiped it. I don’t think I’d feel loss if the hard drive in it went and failed on its own tho, weirdly.
Greg@luna I bought a used e-reader and it had a couple Janet Evanovich mystery books on it and nothing else. guess that purchase didn't get you back into reading after all
@luna also one time I took the used 35mm film out of a camera at a thrift shop and had it developed, that was fun
kawazoe@luna ah! That sweet sweet feeling of noticing the previous owner forgot to wipe their data right before you get a permanent ban notification from the Nintendo store. >_>
Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™@luna I always back it up and/or just keep it on there. It deserves to live on, it has served the user well!
Ryan Finnie@luna I bought a house and they left a moderate-to-high amount of junk... including a stack of VHS tapes... including one which was labeled as their daughter's birth. And the weird part is I felt a bit of embarrassment in even finding it and knowing I had possession of it, like when you accidentally walk in on someone changing.
(I don't even have a VCR anymore, and ended up just throwing away the VHS tapes.)
voxel@luna I bought a 3ds for my son and the previous owner was a kid that recorded his parents screaming at each other while he hid in his room 😭
atsuko@luna this.. happened multiple time..
so far bae traced down owner of a laptop to return them the photos from ~25 years ago and relatives of person who wrote some programs stored on 5.25" floppies we bought on sale
so far bae traced down owner of a laptop to return them the photos from ~25 years ago and relatives of person who wrote some programs stored on 5.25" floppies we bought on sale
aSyd🪿@luna I liked to save their pokemon into my pokemon bank whenever I got a used game.
kinda sad the switch games don't store saves on cardridge anymore
kinda sad the switch games don't store saves on cardridge anymore
2something@luna I recall doing this with the first *Game & Watch Gallery*. I didn't delete the old data and just tried to see if I could beat the previous owner's high scores.