I was arrested at a G8 summit while I was helping block the road Putin's motorcade was about to use, but police had to let me go cause they didn't have the manpower to process all the protestors.
I still remember the Toronto g20. Police assigned a park as a free speech zone, surrounded it, put on masks, took off their name tags and went in to beat the shit out of everyone in sight. Men, women, children, the disabled. Hundreds of people tossed into coed massive cells with a shared bucket for a toilet, sexual assaults happened etc. That day Canadian police proved without a doubt that they're every bit as bad as American cops, and I've hated them ever since.
I actually just became a grandfather two days ago. I'm looking forward to, "Listen, things were different back in the nineteen hundreds..."
I had to walk 7 miles up hill in the snow...just to get my shoes!!!
Seriously, we had snow back then. Lots of. But the world has moved on
I could tell my kids about snow days, school bus sliding into the ditch, walking home when no one could get up our hill. I could talk how anything not cleared quickly, icier over and remained for the winter. My kids will be able to tell stories about me jokingly wishing to get enough snow to try out my new snow blower. They’ll tell about the arguments about clearing the driveway in case we need to go out, vs waiting a couple days for it to melt
I have a buddy in his late 30s who just became a grandpa. He had his kid in high school when he was like 17. His son is now like 19 and just had a kid of his own. That shit is crazy
Oh, the Boebert way of life.
I actually just became a grandfather two days ago
Have they asked you in advance if you even want that?
;-)
I was there when smart phones came out.
When Y2K didn't happen
When the internet was a useful tool and not monetized to shit
When the thread of sanity broke and society began to transition into some Lordranesque nightmare of tribes.
When Y2K didn't happen
*When tens of thousands of people spent years of their lives making sure Y2K wouldn't happen.
People
Programmers
Pick one. Signed, Management
Hey wait a minute, has that last one happened already or not? 🧐
Depends where you live.
Usa: yes
Country that is under Usa's influence: happens right now
Country that is free from that: might start soon
Y2K happened, just not how everyone thought.
Instead it was a huge marketing ploy. Everyone spent money to be protected and safe. We all listened to Prince as the ball dropped.
IT really wasn’t. Sure, it had way too much hype, but a lot of the saner predictions really could have happened, except for the huge amount of work so many of us went through.
I was working at an investment management company at the time, one of the first “quant shops”, and there was an unimaginably vast flood of money coming through that could have ground to a halt, with ear splitting squeals and shrieks. Our stuff wasn’t retail, but you bet people would have suffered with any disruption of business, retirement plans of millions in jeopardy, investments of the wealthy, corporate wealth of all types would have been hit hard. And there were so many companies in similar condition. I was on remediation projects for a couple of years, along with most of my team and consultants when we could, and we came through with no glitches!
And yes that was the first time I was tempted to be a consultant, to get a bigger share of the money being spent. And yes I did celebrate New Years with by far the most expensive trip I had gone on to that point - included tickets for three headliner concerts, expensive suites, and unlimited margaritas
Dunno, COVID maybe?
We were all there!
Not all of us. Source: am a 2yo infant browsing lemmy
I was waiting tables at the Eat N Park across the street from the bank where the "Pizza Bomber" exploded. We couldn't tell what was happening from where we were, but I was there.
Wow just read through the wiki of that, insane, also poor dude
I was there when Metallica tried to kill piracy by killing Napster and in turn, created a giant market of music piracy programs.
To counter Metallica, Nine Inch Nails at about the same time then went on and very publicly said to steal his music because the label was overcharging his fans and he would rather they listen to it than he get paid. He then started releasing his albums for free where you pay what you want on his website. And this is just one reason I am a life long NIN fan and stopped listening to Metallica after middle school.
I still remember that lame sketch that Metallica did on like the MTV awards to defend their stance
I remember watching that and thinking, they don't sound very rock-'n'-roll. I guess they lived long enough to become the corporate villain
Fire bad!
T shirts good!
I remember leaded gasoline (and prices under USD$1)
I saw (on TV) the Challenger explosion
On 9/11 I was staying at a friend's house, and that morning basically every news site was brought to its knees. Like serving static text only summaries. I remember going outside and seeing the newspaper on the porch and thinking "This is going to be the last normal one for a very long time". It was of course.
Some friends and I took a long road trip and in person we saw this fly the first of the two flights for the X prize (Note: that one actually had some decent reasons to use the name X)
I caught COVID-19. Twice. So far.
I remember leaded gas too, from 15 seconds ago when a propeller plane flew over my house dumping lead out it's exhaust. They inexplicably are still allowed to use leaded gas in small aircraft. Even new planes are designed to only accept leaded cause it's all they have at the airports.
I remember it well. I was in the right place at the right time to be solicited for a real donation t that X-prize, as if I had money. I got to goto one of the first presentations about their plan. I got to shake Burt Routan’s hand and wish him luck I did put in like $10 though
I was there for the shot heard 'round the world. The day a hero died and it's all been wrong ever since.
I was at the Cincinnati Zoo The day Harambee was murdered.
Dicks out.
The 2024 eclipse, even got the pics!
"Ehhh, I just watched from my house. 92% totality, sort of the same thing."
I live in the path of totality....it was cloudy here. Still was incredibly cool when it got dark, but now I want to see one for real.
Assuming there will be "next generations"..
Most optimistic lemmy user
I was there when Star Trek the next generation started and ended
I was on Lemmy just when this dude named Teegus hatched a plan to destroy the world.
The world before the Internet.
I was there. We had to go to the library if we wanted information. The magazine aisle at the grocery store is where you got your up to date info that you couldn't always get on TV. TV was like 5 channels. A few more local ones if you were lucky.
They're was nothing on TV after a certain hour. Just static, or colored bars and a buzzer. You had to wait till morning for TV broadcasts to start again.
No one had cell phones. You had to go to your friends house to see if they were home, and yell for them at their window.
Fun times.
Remember when there was the morning News, and then the 6pm and 11pm news. That's it. Now it's news channels running 24/7
And that's honestly a not-insignificant part of why everything is so fucked up and polarized now.
I remember borrowing CDs from friends and converting them to MP3s in the mid-late 90s. Admittedly I didn't really know what I was doing, so I couldn't really explain it to my friends, but ripping CDs with Windows CLI programs and amassing a huge (for the time) digital music collection was something I thought was super cool. Unlike wav files, I could actually (not always) fit a whole song on a floppy disc!
I was ripping CDs from the public library... Onto cassette tapes
My homies and I use to share cds, and then splitfile the mp3s onto multiple floppy disks. Still faster than 56k limewire.
If I put myself in the mindset of the time, this makes complete sense. Looking back though it sounds ridiculous.
I love it.
I was there for 9/11 like many others were growing up. Many born in 2001 and after would not understand the impact it has had on America.
I was there for the Boston Red Sox finally snapping a multi-decade streak of losing or not making it to a World Series in 2004. This is significant if you're a sports fan, especially baseball.
I was there to see the rise of social media sites that many use today.
I was there for 9/11 like many others were growing up.
This reminds of the hilarious time my dad asked my nephew if he was invited to the cockpit while flying transatlantic. To which he responded "grandpa, I was born 5 years after 9/11". neither of them appreciated how hard I laughed at that.
I watched the Challenger explode on live TV from my school classroom. The teachers were all ecstatic about the mission because NASA was sending a teacher into space. It took a minute for us to realize what happened, even though we literally watched it explode in front of our eyes.
Years later, I was a child waiting for Columbia to land when all of the adults started acting weird...then we found out. But i didn't quite understand at first. I remember wondering how they landed in Houston when they were planning on Florida. I was smart enough to know that that wasn't really an option but not enough to put it together until later.
My mom ran away from home to see Elvis in a high school auditorium, and was in Little Rock when it was being integrated, I always thought that was cool.
I saw Nirvana before they were famous, in a crowd of about 30 people in a club here, and barely missed being blown up over Lockerbie, but the moment that stands out most in my mind is: I was getting frisked (felt up ) by a cop on a US city street when, no shit, the English punk band GBH were walking by and they started shouting at the cops, oh my God I have never felt so cool.
I was there Gandalf, in the previous millennium.
Having been there for the recent solar eclipse.
I volunteered at the occupy wall street camp in New York. Fun times.
Even though I can't say I fully remember it, the beginning of yt, back when the Internet was a lot healthier than it's ever been due to the Wild West lifestyle (back before 3-4 webpages became the only place you go to).
Also, there for what I would consider the absolute best game console to come out since the beginning of the 2000s: xbox360. Also got to see what I consider the most aesthetically pleasing out of the box OS ever (W*ndows Vista)
I never understood the hate for vista. Ran great on my PC at the time. When 7 came out, I upgraded and was confused because it was practically identical to vista, yet people loved 7.
Same, I always liked Vista, never understood what people had against it.
I didn't realize anyone was capable of having fond memories of windows vista. Been using windows since 95 honestly I'd put windows vista at 2nd worst version ever, behind windows 8.
I was there for the beginning of the internet …
Al Gore was instrumental in passing legislation that set the foundation for commercialized internet … and all us old-timers hated it.
Nope, I was there as serial cables and token ring coalesced toward Ethernet, various telemetry and others built toward a common internet, individual well-known servers gave way to a vast directory of dozens.
Much later on, there was this minor invention of Tim Berners-Lee that brought everything together, and I was one of the coders for what may have been the first 401k management web site
I was there when the Scranton Strangler drove past my office.
Now you take these and go buy yourself a space ship.
I was still up for Portillo, back in 1997.
What an amazing night. I had never known anything but Conservative government, so to see those corrupt, selfish bastards swept away was absolutely joyous in a way that's hard to fully capture in words.
Obviously the Blair government eventually completely fucked things up with Iraq, but at the time it felt like genuine liberation after years and years of sleaze and hatred.
And IMO things genuinely did change for the better in the UK with the Blair government, whether or not you agreed with every policy they had. Then Sept 11 happened, and Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world started going inexorably to shit, and it's never really recovered.
I was there loading games from audiocassettes and using systems with 1,000 bytes of ram before the internet existed.
I was there when your windshield would have to get cleaned from bugs every couple days if you ever drove fast.
I was once personally responsible for making Red jump off the long ledge in front of the elite 4 in the very first Twitch Plays Pokémon. it happened a lot but I know I caused it once. sometimes it's so easy to be a villain.
I was there visiting the GDR when it still existed, and I even met several people who talked (somewhat) openly how life is there.
Since I was quite young at the millennium, but old enough to totally remember it, they'll come a day (hopefully) when I'm one of the few very old people in the world who "remembers the 20th century". Like how there were a small number of people kicking around in the 1980s who could remember the 1800's..
I remember 9/11, I am a Swede and we were in school when suddenly there was an announcement of a minute of silence for the victims of a horrible attack.
It was only that evening I found out the true scope.
I was in the UK when the London bombs popped, I was in Bristol and the group I was with started talking about bombs and how we couldn't take the train back to Chippenham, I didn't get it untill we got back home and I watched the news. My parents were vacationing in Canada at the time, so I called them, letting them know I was fine, they never had time to be worried as they didn't know about the attack before I called them.
I was working my first year on a new (and frankly fantastic) job in the center of Stockholm when the dickhead stole a lorry and drove down Drottninggatan, mowing down shoppers and tourists. We put on the live news broadcast and stayed over for an hour or so at the office before people started getting home. The metro was closed, as were the busses in the center of the city as well as the large commuter trains, people just walked home or if they couldn't strangers offered others a couch to sleep on as well as dinner. My normal commute was a bus from the center of the city out to the closest bus stop to my apartment in the suburbs, but that bus was obviously cancelled. So I walked up to Stockholm East station, the nothern most stations of the central station in Stockholm, it is the terminus of the local narrow gauge railroad Roslagsbanan, it had service so I could get home that way...
I was getting ready for morning class when I saw the first plane hitting the news. I didn't go to school that day. Just sat there watching, especially after the second plane that came out of nowhere and was perfectly framed by the news cameras.
I had to deal with this. It was not satisfying at all.
I was part of my city's biggest indoor crowd "WrestleMania 18" and was part of my city's largest outdoor crowd "Toronto rocks SARS benefit". There's really nothing like being front row while AC/DC belts out Thunderstruck, with over 600,000+ jumping and singing along. The crowd at Skydome when the Rock and Hulk Hogan wrestled was insane too, the whole building shook
I was there when a plane crashed on the airport where I live.
I was there when a car cought fire on the highway.
I was there when the fediverse "exploded".
Man, my life is boring.
I (well, supposedly) knew the guy who unleashed SQL Slammer and a small group of friends (into Ragnarok Online hacking/botting) sat around on IRC watching backbone router pings go apeshit until ISPs started blocking it. It was also amusing checking firewall logs to see whose servers were vulnerable.
I have piracy accounts older than my niece and nephew.
Had to call rackspace and get new credentials for a friend in Iraq after that massive raid.
I played Helldivers 2 when it was good. Before the dark times, before the nerfs.
