I've seen maybe five big Meetup groups here that were pretty active pre-COVID get abandoned and looking for a new organizer. It's sad.
We had a big thriving Microsoft focused community here with multiple Meetup groups and multiple events every month but that died down as they laid off developer evangelists and then closed the local Microsoft office about 2 years ago.
There is a big, broad tech Meetup group here that's kind of thriving but their biggest draw events are "anything mentioning AI" meh. It's hard for them to find places to meet that can accommodate 50-100 visitors.
We did a "restart party" at our hackerspace a few years ago. Definitely could have used a good stock of capacitors. Probably power cords. Not sure what to do with all the very specific USB-C etc. ports that break.
I was just thinking today how I miss my DSL (Damn Small Linux) setup. A Pentium 2 Dell laptop, booted from mini-CD, usb drive for persistence. It ran a decent "dumb" terminal, X3270, and stripped down browser (dillo I believe). Was fine for a good chunk of my work day.
They're all but out of the launch business now but claim to be continuing research on it. There are a lot of skeptics that it would ever work (at actual orbital velocity).
My wife taught as a fine arts adjunct off and on at a large state university. Between gas, parking, and (relatively cheap) childcare we lost money every semester she taught.
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
The nice thing about picking up older laptops is that the upgraded models don't really hold as much extra value compared to what they cost new so if you keep looking you can get a pretty maxed out machine for not a lot more than the more common low-end ones.
My local one closed two months ago to move to a smaller location. Won't open again until at least spring. They still had an iOS 5 book on the shelves from 2011.
This wasn't super creative, but way back in time, I was on a local tinymud and a number of us starting writing bot NPCs for it. I built a bartender bot that eventually would remember drinks, tell jokes, and more. One day another bot came into the bar and got into an extended exchange of insults with the bartender bot. We were kind of dumbfounded watching these blocks of switch statements have a very real-looking conversation in front of us.
We had a big thriving Microsoft focused community here with multiple Meetup groups and multiple events every month but that died down as they laid off developer evangelists and then closed the local Microsoft office about 2 years ago.
There is a big, broad tech Meetup group here that's kind of thriving but their biggest draw events are "anything mentioning AI" meh. It's hard for them to find places to meet that can accommodate 50-100 visitors.