I work in IT. I used to be a philatelist (can you stop?). How on earth did I never think of this.
It makes those bloody awful business card CDs (off of the 90s n noughties) look pretty naff.
Barking mad and quite beautiful. Love it!
With or without any chemical encouragement :)
When acid got popular and was not the least bit unlawful or anything, tons of people never imagined there could be life-changing legal issues someday.
These stamps however are very cool. And the prices are actually reasonable.
There are many things that different people places different value on. The things I don’t place value on aren’t inherently worthless.
Stamps are collectibles from all over the world, that keep/kept getting made with varied art, history, etc on it often having interesting factoids to know about em, etc And with some effort if you were writing letters and postcards anyway you got them for free (with some stamp lines on em from time to time)
Stamps used to be almost like money. I have payed for stuff with stamps.
EDIT: there are also first day covers using these stamps available (https://boingboing.net/2022/07/07/look-at-these-cool-1970s-p...), and the photo shows that it actually works, but not really well, especially with the black one...
I polled a couple of AIs real quicklike. They're telling me that the label dimensions for vinyl records range from 75-100mm.
That means that these stamps were no larger than the label on a typical record you'd put on a turntable. That would make them nigh-unplayable in modern systems.
In modern turntables, each tonearm has a limiter that prevents them from straying past the runout grooves. The runout grooves are designed to signal the end of media. Typically you'll have some wide spacing and then the spiral ends in a completely circular track.
Older turntables would just sit in the runout grooves and play silence. You could risk damage to the needle or mechanism if the needle accidentally hit paper or the arm hit the spindle. Better-designed turntables would sense this, usually based on distance, lift/return the tonearm mechanically, and stop the playback.
So the only turntables which can "play" these "stamps" would be ones which ignore that minimum size requirement. Perhaps some really high-end systems have a disabling switch, but consumer-grade ones sure didn't, in my recollection.
Just from eyeballing the video you linked, I would worry that the playing surface is so small, a normal turntable would refuse to play. An override may be required, because most tonearms would sense the runoff grooves or label boundary simply by distance from the center spindle.
The stamps look barely wider than a standard record’s label.
These Bhutan stamps are delightful, and inspire me to learn more about the country. I hope there might be the prospect of future new releases, this is a kind of thing I could really get into.
A fun thought-game is to construct a small player stamp, onto which you drop a content stamp, blow a little, and hear the results .. I once knew a guy whose business-card could be used to play a record, barely audible, but still ..
NaOH•8mo ago
The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896682 - April 2020 (30 comments)