I’m starting an “Over 40 Years Old” Hexbear club
I’m starting an “Over 40 Years Old” Hexbear club
Who wants in? We can talk about what is was like to write a letter to your grandma or having no other way to ask someone out other than by calling them on the phone. Or checking out movies at Blockbuster or whatever your national equivalent was (we usually checked out videos at the grocery store, actually).
We’re cool because we can actually remember the USSR and “East” Germany. Although not as cool, I can remember when homophobia and transphobia was so much more widely accepted and the “default” position for most Americans. Not as cool.
- i used to have like 6 or 7 phone numbers memorized, besides the house line.
- i remember when we got the caller ID box, i thought it was like being in the CIA to know who is calling.
- "Get off the computer, I need to use the phone!"
- blockbuster was a big deal movie night, but we also had impulse grocery store rental nights. i used to love looking at the VHS tape boxes, the artwork etc. especially horror/sci fi. i was the youngest, so nobody gave a shit what i wanted to watch and if they did, no one ever wanted to watch what i wanted to watch, which was entirely based on box cover art.
Going to the video store was a nice little weekly ritual. It's objectively more convenient to have streaming services pumping everything into our eyeballs instantly, but the extra friction of a trip out and the slight chance that something might not be available made the movies and games themselves seem more valuable. Oh god I just read back through that and spontaneously dislocated my hip
Yeah go ahead and add me to the list of leftists bound for the glue factory
Adding to the nostalgia pile BECAUSE memory unlocked: used to be obsessed with talking on the phone in middle school. The LANDLINE phone. 3 way calling the homies to watch old Van Damme movies and Iron Chef and prank call people. I'd be on the phone for like 4 hours at a time. 10pm was the cut off but you bet your ass I snuck the corded phone into my bedroom...then my dad would wake up to go to the bathroom and see the phone cable trailing into my bedroom. Never got grounded buy boy did I get a talkin' to.
I'm just glad there's a group of people older than me. I'll be there in a few years, but it's nice to know I'm not the oldest weirdo here.
i remeber the time when you would just show up at the door of your friends home unannounced and if he wasnt there you would just go to the next and when he was there you would just go with him picking up the next...
and then once one of these friends got a console , he became the homebase.
Y'all remember Yakov Smirnoff? I remember watching one of his specials as a kid and they went to his hometown or something with a camera crew and the place they showed could've been down the street from where I was living. They were treating it like a charity fundraising expedition. For just a dollar day type shit. It was very weird to me.
Here are few old guy memories from the 80s:
My first computer was a Commodore 64, in 1985. I had no interest in learning computing - I just wanted to play games.
The rich kid up the street had a BMX I was in awe of. It was a Haro. I had a Huffy from a discount store.
I think back about how shockingly everything was seemingly it's own component. Like phones or hi-fi stereos or TVs and VCRs. You had a device and it did one thing.
Sears reigned supreme for weekend trips to the mall. We didn't have money so it was a lot of window shopping. Related: I remember when department stores had full out restaurants inside of them. When my mom felt like being fancy she'd eat at one.
For a while in the 80s there was a push to buy American made shit. As if consumer spending could ward off the capitalists off-shoring literally everything.
In school they taught us Russia was bad but never explained why. Like, ever. Teachers would just espouse that the communists wanted to "kill our way of life."
Schools opened at sun up and latch key kids would come and go as they please, outside of core hours. Someone would open the ball shed and everyone would just play soccer or kickball.
Parents seemed to just have kids out of obligation. Some 'rents seemed happy to be involved. But most seemed to just being going through the motions.
Being poor, the next best thing to having something was having a magazine about something. I was a fan of Thrasher and Video Games & Computer Entertainment.
Old!My family's first computer had 4 colors, 32k of ram, floppy disks that actually flopped, and a 1 mb hard drive. And a dot matrix printer that did like half a page per minute. I was able to chain smoke cigarettes all night at Perkins legally.
I’m over 100 years old in rodent years
I will come and visit in a couple short years. But remember how bad blockbuster video was as opposed to every other small and big video rental place, grocery stores included? Edited movies, nothing unrated or NC-17 (unless edited down to R). This was a hindrance to many small distributors. I remember at a music festival Troma had a stand and they would give you a free DVD if you cut up your Blockbuster card. Blockbuster refused to carry Troma movies, of course
Blockbuster isn't that old yet, I'm not even 30 and have memories of getting Sailor Moon and Pokemon VHS there. Heck by some definitions I'm even a Gen Z so I guess it's super early Zoomer memories lmao
Is there like a membership fee?
i'm joining.
I remember that getting high paying short term jobs was kinda easy. If you luckily got in touch with someone the likelihood that they would contract stuff out to you was there, especially in terms of electronics, IT, or event organization.
I did fly around a bit and that was quite relaxed back then. The security was virtually non existence, the food was somehow nicer (except if you were vegan, vegetarian or had trouble with lactose or didn't eat pork for religious reasons). There was little on board entertainment though that would fit your interests, so talking with your random neighbours was more common (this was true for any location really).
When I was a kid we would re-purpose wire from construction sites to dig our own land lines between friends and used self constructed radios to stay in touch. Weekends at the scrap yard were quite common. During summer you would have some locations in parks, at the river or alike you would meet up and those were social meeting places, where you could expand your social circle or make out with persons during holidays you often wouldn't see again. A similar attitude I only found later on in live at cruising places (and some festivals with swinger/hippy vibes or left flat shares).
I fit this demographic, but I also lived in a really rural area, so we were even further behind than most on a lot of stuff. Definitely got our video rentals from the grocery store, the same one that also had a tank with live lobsters in it that endlessly fascinated me and my siblings.
But the cars owned by my aunts and uncles had 8-track decks in them and my grandparent's house had an Atari 2600, where I put in a lot of time on stuff like Berzerk and Defender.
If my dad wasn't a huge dork, for a farmer anyway, that loved Star Trek, I probably would have never gotten a computer until was out of college or something. I can remember accessing the internet with a 14.4 kbps modem that I was only allowed to use for like an hour late at night since we only had one phone line in the house.
Remember watching new episodes of signfeld? How does it make you feel to watch AI generated signfeld now? I remember when no one I knew had ever seen a computer
I'm not quite all the way to 40, but I do remember a time before anyone in my family owned a computer. And when asking a child in school "Have you ever used the internet?" had two correct answers: "Yes." and "No.", whereas today there is only one correct answer, which is a very concerned sounding "Are you OK? Do you need me to call someone?". I dropped my first cell phone - which I got when I turned 14 - from a third floor window unto pavement. It was fine. Or, well, it couldn't save any text messages since I already had like 60 of them that I hadn't manually deleted, so the hard drive was full, but actually damaging it physically would have required a commitment to total war by a major industrial state.
Bro, you know I'm in.
hell yeah i'm old hell yeah i post deal with it
I'll join but then I plan to start a splinter group.
I hated the long exhausting era of "present LGBTQIA+ person or concept, laughtrack" in entertainment.
Disabling call waiting so you can use dial-up. 5 1/4" floppy disks with Number Munchers and other Apple iie games in a lovely shades of green. All metal playgrounds. Rotary phones. TVs with knobs instead of buttons. Yep, I'm old enough for the club 🧓
I'll be 40 in a few months. Will I be ok?
How do you do, fellow Gen-Xers and X-ennials? Which Seattle grunge band's vinyl albums are you spinning on this lovely day while decked out in your finest flannels? I am partial to Stone Temple Pilots' Core, particularly side B track 4, "
man"