• 0 Posts
  • 171 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • kurmudgeon@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•People born in the 1900s, what was life like back then?English
    19·
    6 days ago

    I was born in 1979. Growing up, I remember laying on the floor in the summer, seeing the HBO title scene come on before watching Star Wars with my father on our little CRT TV. Then later, growing up in a trailer park, being raised by a single mom, me and my brother raised hell and had tons of friends. We’d ride our bikes, play in the woods, jump off the docks into ponds, sell golf balls we found in the creek back to the golf course to buy some superman ice cream.

    Some other things I remember from that time:

    • Doritos bags were clear with no foil and me and my brother would try to find the “flavor cube”
    • Crush Apple pop was my favorite
    • Listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller on a record player
    • Renting Pitfall and River Raid for our Atari 2600 for $1 for a weekend at Believe in Music
      • Atari games were like $15 for most games, $20 for some
    • Playing Smurf Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle on our Colecovision or Mindstorm on our Vectrex with our friends
    • Pizza Hut and the Book-it program
    • The dual-sided styrofoam container from McDonalds that was used for breakfast or the McDLT
    • Tato Skins chips
    • My first Cherry Coke
    • My first TV dinner that had to be baked in an oven - came in a foil tray
    • Hi-C Juice
    • Mr. T cereal
    • My first Cherry 7-Up
    • Jello Pudding Pops
    • Bannanna Frosted Flakes
    • Dialing phone numbers with a rotary dial
    • Cartoons before school, such as Thundercats, GI Joe, Voltron, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    • Pepsi A.M.
    • Keebler Pizzaria Chips
    • Getting my first Sony Walkman to listen to Micheal Jackson’s Bad album on casette
    • Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, D.A.R.Y.L. movies
    • Mtv music videos and seeing Michael Jackson Thriller Video for the first time
    • Seeing and playing Super Mario Bros. on our new Nintendo for the very first time was such an amazing experience
      • NES games were like $20-30 at the time
      • Our brand new NES was $250 - my mom and step-dad almost got a divorce over my step-dad buying one
    • Going to Muzzy’s or Ole Taco in West Michigan
      • Muzzy’s was a burger chain that had “drippy cheese” and firedogs, which were spicy chili dogs
      • Ole Taco was a fast food mexican restaurant before Taco Bell and had by far much better food. The rice there was amazing!
    • The first time I saw an Apple IIe computer and coding my very first line of code
    • Seeing the Karate Kid, Goonies, Ghostbusters II and Back to the Future movies in the theater
    • Seeing The Wizard in the theatre and then playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time
    • Saturday morning cartoons
      • ABC always had a marathon of cartoons from first thing in the morning until noon
    • Saving money up to purchase a Super Nintendo with Super Mario World and Final Fight
    • Satellite TV - having to change satellites for different channels
    • Trying to see porn on the distored/scrambled cable channels
    • Saving money up to purchase a Nintendo 64
    • My very first Commodore 64 computer
    • Clear Pepsi
    • Salsa Rio Doritos
    • Mr. Phipps Tater Crisps
    • Sharkleberry Fin Kool-Aid
    • Crunch Tators
    • Viennetta Ice Cream
    • Peanut Butter Boppers
    • Whatchamacallit candy bars
    • Shocktarts
    • Skittles Bubble Gum
    • Chips fried in Olean (olestra)
    • Our first phone with push button numbers to dial phone numbers
    • Party phone lines
      • Your entire neighborhood would share a “party line”
      • You would have your own unique phone number, but only one call in your neighborhood could occur at a time
        • So you could listen in on other people’s conversations and you had to wait for their call to complete before you could make or receive a call
    • Our first cordless phone
    • Drawing the Stüssy logo on everything
    • Sobe drinks
    • My very first CD player
    • Listening to and buying CDs from Musicland/Sam Goody
    • Porn on VHS tapes
    • Shopping/hanging out at the mall with friends
    • Getting online for the first time with our 56k modem
    • Renting games from Blockbuster
    • Encino Man, Clueless, Cruel Intentions, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead
    • Drinking and playing Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye with my friends all night long
    • Watching Beavis and Butthead with my friends
    • Playing Quake Arena on dial-up
    • Watching porn pictures online download one line at a time
    • Surge pop - so much sugar and caffiene - was practically the first energy drink
    • Installing a Sony DiscMan in my car
    • Black ganster movies became more popular: Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood, South Central, Dead Presidents
    • Napster and Limewire to download MP3s
    • AOL Online
    • ICQ messenger
    • MSN messenger
    • AOL messenger
    • Preparing for Y2K
      • I had a paranoid roommate who stocked up on bottled water, sterno, canned goods, toilet paper, etc.
      • Nothing ended up happening and we didn’t have to get groceries for the next 3 months
    • Burning my first music CD
    • Playing Ridge Racer, Siphon Filter and Final Fantasy on Playstation
    • Pagers and sending codes to my friends
    • Building my very first custom PC that ran Windows 98, then later Windows 98 SE and eventually Windows ME
    • Installing my Nvidia Riva TNT II graphics card
    • Getting our first cable internet connection with 1Mbps speed
    • Splitting up Warez rar file downloads for Windows 2000 between friends, meeting up to extract and burn the ISO, then being disappointed when the operating system didn’t even have support for sound cards or games
    • Using Netscape Navigator to browse the web
    • Installing a 50 CD disc changer in my car
    • My first Nokia cellphone
    • McDonald’s Arch Deluxe and Chicken Fajitas
    • DSL internet with speed up to 5Mbps
    • Using Yahoo search, then later Google for the first time
    • The very first time YouTube started up
    • My first Motorola flip phone
    • My first Vanilla Coke
    • Building my first computer that ran Windows XP
    • Building my first computer that ran Windows Vista with 2 GTX 260 on SLI
    • My first cable modem with speeds over 20Mbps
    • Downloading my very first torrent
    • My first Compaq iPaq smart phone
    • Burning my first DVD
    • My first HP iPaq smart phone
    • Subscribing to Netflix to get DVDs by mail
    • Redbox movie rentals
    • My first iPhone
    • Movie streaming through Netflix

    Bottom line, as a kid in the 80s and 90s we actually wanted to leave the house and do stuff all the time. Staying at home was boring. Even if it was just riding our bikes around with friends. Or riding a bike to a friends. Even as a teenager, staying at home was lame. There was the mall, arcade, pizza place, other friend’s houses.

    The Internet really had a huge impact on society in a way you cannot imagine. Life before the Internet was much less stressful. You had many more “real” connections with a lot more people. You may have had a computer, but you only really used it at home for homework or games and that’s it.

  • kurmudgeon@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Considering that it's inevitable for that to happen, What will happen when most people stop talking beyond necessary?English
    1·
    9 days ago

    I am single, live alone, no kids or pets. I work remote from home. I don’t even listen to music with lyrics any more. I use self checkouts, online ordering and tap to pay as much as possible. I wave to my neighbors and the mail man and that’s all the interaction we have with each other. I play video games solo or play solo video games now.

    As a result of all of this, I have gone full days in a row without using my voice at all and quite frequently. The only time I ever speak is if I place a food order over the phone or a drive thru window. None of this is intentional, it just happens and happens more and more frequently as I get older.

    Am I lonely? Not at all. I still communicate with coworkers, friends and family via text, Google Chat or MS Teams. This is all the communication I require with other people nowadays.

    I wasn’t always like this. I used to be outspoken and an extrovert. I was opionated, a conversationalist and a singer in a band. I had a bunch of friends from high school and college that I hung around with quite a lot. We’d party, converse, the usual. I played a large number of raids in various video games and had a lot of online friends. These activities required voice chat.

    However, over the years, people in general just started to piss me off, annoy or disgust me more and more. At some point in the past 10-15 years, Americans have lost humility - their ability to be embarrassed. There is no shame any more. There’s no emphasis on doing the right thing for the right reasons. Everyone and everything is just petty, self-serving, ignorant, egocentric, demeaning and hateful. It’s rare when I find someone in real life worth conversing with these days, so I don’t even bother trying. And it seems no one else is trying either.

    I just prefer to not participate in real conversations any more. It’s a peaceful existance being an observer and a remote participant in society. I often wonder how many others there are like me. Not that I’d want to meet them, just curious if they’re out there.

    To answer your question though, life would still go on just fine. We no longer need to talk to each other now that we have so many other alternative forms of communication available to us.

  • kurmudgeon@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•Tourists Boycott U.S. at Record Rates After Trump TakeoverEnglish
    20·
    11 days ago

    I’m boycotting vacations in the United States and I’m an American. I just got back from a 4-day weekend in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Other countries deserve our vacation dollars more than ours does. Until it stops being led by children making stupid fucking decisions.

    As a joke I asked a cashier at the NSLC where the bourbon was. She laughed. She knew I was fucking with her. For those not in the know, Canada boxed up all their bourbon and sent it back in retaliation to all of Trump’s bullshit with tariffs and what not.