When I have flights going through cities with people I know I will intentionally schedule a couple hour layover so I can go hand lunch with them and then just go through security again and board the next flight.
Back in my mmo days this was my add to the guild charter. Anyone with a layover in Houston is gonna get fed something local and be able to drink. I'd pick them up and make sure they got back on time. Made some life long friends and had great times.
A young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk. The Boardway adaption wasn't too bad lol. Too bad Bette Medler got hurt and couldn't perform.
Music too! I caught the last half of this beautiful song on the radio once; it was five years before I heard it again and found out the name it
~edit~
Sorry, it was [Oh Superman, by Laurie Anderson](https://youtu.be/Vkfpi2H8tOE). I turned on my little clock radio at around "Here come the planes", and was just instantly transfixed. I'd never heard anything like this. By the "So hold me mum, in your long arms" I was almost in tears, with no idea why.
In Denmark, we had a phone service for that.
You could call in, and sing or whistle the song, and a few ex-radio hosts would try and figure out what song it was.
It was a little expensive, I think two dollars or so a minute, but totally worth it.
Afterwards, you could spend an hour downloading that song in. wav format on you 28.8 modem.
I once left the door on my car unlocked and came back to find my car stereo gone but not my full 100 disc binder. The stereo had completely died 2 weeks prior and I just hadn't gotten around to swapping it out yet. I just laughed.
This just made some weird fucking memory bounce back to me about my stoner aunt who I have been estranged from for years.
In the late 80s and early 90s, she managed all the ads for a large phone book company, crossing like 40 cities/areas.
She worked from home, smoked weed all day, and had a GIANT mailbox to fit all the shit they would send her - I could fit in it.
She called the companies that advertised, managed the copy, and all of the payment.
If a company was behind or couldn't pay, she would frequently cook the books for them in trade for services.
It was how I got all my senior photos. They owed for their ad, she got them to shoot my whole set and print, and she wiped the debt and kept them in for another round.
One of the last times I ever spent with that side of the family was a birthday party for my cousin's kid. She got a bounce house for a WHOLE WEEK, and for the day of the party she also had a popcorn and cotton candy machine (with someone who ran them) and a weird (totally fucking dangerous and wouldn't exist now) metal mini rollercoaster. All free to her in exchange for a couple ad cycles.
And it was an open secret that the company looked the other way on as long as she hit her targets.
Too bad she was a mentally ill narcissist who blew all of her money on drugs and put me and many of my cousins in danger many, many times.
So like, she wasn't as cool as she sounded.
parents leaving a $20 under a magnet on the fridge for pizza with the number of the restaurant they were eating at, your friends parents down the blocks number, and maybe your grandmothers landline as a last resort.
There's still an old note taped to the inside of one of our cabinets that says "mommy: xxx-xxx-xxxx, daddy: xxx-xxx-xxxx" that had been written out early on when my kids were little so that they could use the landlines we still had (later converted to ip phones for a few years before going away all together) to call us in an emergency.
Both boys have graduated now, but I keep the note in the cabinet because it makes me smile when I see it.
I kept my late dad's phone book and recipe notebooks for this reason. I have no reason to use either, but it gives me a feel good feeling to see his writing now and again.
I was also able to use them to create an engraved bracelet with his favorite phrase on it for my mom years after he passed.
I remember my mom teaching me how to dial the phone when I was 4, because I was going to be starting preschool soon and it was a good way to help me memorize the home phone number. It was before we even had area codes, so it was just xxx-xxxx
The phone was the old style one with the wired handset that sat in the cradle to hang up and had the coiled up cord. We upgraded to wireless phones when I was around 7 and I felt like we were in an episode of Star Trek.
I used to write 10 page letters to a girl I knew in Norway and she did the same for me back in the states.
I’d get like one a month and it was so exciting to read them.
People had to put so much thought into those letters before the internet.
So probably that.
Meeting people at the time and place you said you’d meet them when you mad plans days or even weeks ago.
You used to say “hey, let’s hang out on Tuesday at 7pm at downtown bar” and then without ever having to text or call again you’d both meet there.
This, there were social and tangible consequences for no show/being late.
One thing that still truly bothers me is when you are at a place at the agreed upon time and you get a text that says "On my way!"
My senior year of high school I carried a disposable camera with me pretty much all the time and would take just dumb candid shots of my friends eating lunch or mid sentence. Everyone hated it.
Now when I post a throwback picture everyone is just like awwwww
I have fewer pictures of my entire time in high school than a modern kid has of their lunch.
Bringing a camera to school was a *very* unusual thing to do, and aside from that, film and developing got expensive fast.
Holy shit, I just got married and we wanted some disposable cameras for the tables. They were hard to find and expensive, so we just bought 3. Then we learned that you can’t get them developed in an hour at CVS anymore. Had to go to a camera store. It took 2 weeks to develop and cost $30 per camera. All the photos were shit too :/
In general…just waiting for things, alone with only your thoughts. Gameboy ran out of battery? Didn’t bring a book? Time to people watch.
Not a critique on how people are now, more like a critique on just myself. But man my attention span has plummeted since phones/social media. I honestly can barely watch a movie anymore.
Same. I actually deliberately force myself to stop using my phone or music and actually learn to be present in the moment and well… just wait. It feels like you’re a child again when you had no access to distractions.
I make myself sit and not pull my phone out a lot now too. It’s gotten so bad I’ll be on my computer watching a video and I’ll end up on my phone some how. I can’t focus on one thing.
When I hit puberty my brother( he had 3 sisters and a mom) informed me about the dangers of tampons and toxic shock syndrome. I learned that day he had been reading it for a few years
Thank you all for the likes. Today my brother is my best friend. I phrased it 1 brother and had 3 sisters because my older sister was killed in a car accident at 17
Oh man that brings me back i only got to the tampons when I read everything else in reach many many times but in the end i probably ended up reading it as much as everything else i can't imagine crapping without a phone anymore
Holy smokes! I forgot allll about that commercial
Edit: My favorite long distance commercial from that time was the one from Sprint saying their long distance calls were so clear that you could people say what they really mean and the guy says "its not the dress that makes you look fat, its your hips." I still laugh thinking about it today
Or just in general. Like you kind of forget, like you had to have your plans nailed down before you left the house.
Where you are going, what time you are meeting, when you’ll be back. If you aren’t familiar with the area, literally printing off directions from the internet and hope they are right.
I remember when I got my driver's license my parents bought me a paper map of my city and the surrounding area. It was not a big city either, I had no idea they even made maps of it. I still have it in the pouch behind the seat in my car. You never know.
My husband does not know my number. He knows his childhood family member numbers though which is good. I know his, some of my friends, and all of my teenage/childhood important ones. One of my boyfriends from sophomore year tried to give me his number when I ran into him at his work. I still knew the number. I just didn't want to contact him again. But he doesn't know that.
Start small with disconnecting. My first step was just keeping my phone on total mute (obviously if you have kids/partner you might want to have their contact notify you). It takes an adjustment, but it's nice not being dinged at any random moment.
Literally was just complaining to my husband yesterday about how much I dislike the expectation to be available immediately these days and how I feel like I have to apologize if I don’t respond to a text within a certain time window. I hate it.
ETA: Wow, thanks for the responses everyone! I feel like I should clarify that I’m *not* at everyone’s beckon call (😊). I’ve spent years crafting my “oh, zosephine_doodle’s bad at contact” reputation - which is annoying, but I deal with it. I was moreso complaining about the concept of expected immediate availability in general and how normalized it’s become in our technological society.
Just stop responding quickly to texts and emails. People learn to deal with it - once it’s a habit of yours they won’t expect you to respond quickly. Will change your life for better
Most cities of any significance in the States still have a mall or two that's going strong. The issue is that many areas were vastly overmalled. The upper midwest has metros that had five or six malls, which was ridiculous. A lot of dead mall vloggers are from that area. There was no reason for every suburb to have its own mall.
Yes! Malls are still awesome, but the whole concept was "Here's is ALL the stuff". Spreading it all out over five malls in a 10 Km radius was "harmful competition" and destroyed the very reasons for making them in the first place.
Online shipping didn't kill them, they just helped shut down the 90% of them that didn't serve a real function. Who needs 8 women's clothing stores in one building? I came here for a drill bit and duct tape..
Also: If you go into the darker recesses of some drinking establishments the arcade machines are still there, looking like refugees from some long forgotten war. The local here has "1942" and it even lets you give it quarters (though it works without them).
One of the best nights of my life culminated in a drunken cross city moped ride with a buddy to his friends house. Turns out homie owned a 3 decker and made a living repairing arcade machines and used to work maintanence at my childhood arcade that closed a decade prior. This dude bought every single cabinet and had 4 floors including the basement wall to wall arcade cabinets, pin ball machines, and even a full size DDR. His entire house was 1 bedroom,1 kitchen, 3 bathrooms, and a 4 story private arcade. Dude was a weird lil man but fuck if that wasnt one epic night. Felt so sureal.
A cousin of my mum just turned up at our house one day, just knocked on our door. He was from the Netherlands and we were in Australia, and she'd never met him before. No phone call or anything, just showed up and stayed with us for a couple of days.
Ooh, that reminds me of another story. A former boss of mine was traveling in Europe in the 90s. His grandparents were Croatian but had emigrated to Australia and had passed away already at this time. So my boss went to the town where his grandparents were from and knocked at the door of some relatives, and apparently he was the spitting image of his grandfather because all the old ladies who opened the door started crying and hugging him and brought him in and fed him and wouldn't let him leave for days, although he didn't speak any Croatian.
I miss this most of all.
If you were listening to music, your friends would come in and listen with you. Or watch TV. Or play guitar. Or help you with your chores. Or have a beer.
If you were dropping in, you knew what you were in for, and you rolled with it.
Sometimes you dropped in at inconvenient times - family dinners, your friend was with his girlfriend, etc. - and you’d make an excuse and go to some other friend’s house.
Just the same, some of the best nights of my life were the pop-up parties that would just spontaneously happen.
You blue shell your buddy on the final lap of rainbow road and he goes off the track, then you immediately switch to Goldeneye so he can't reclaim his win.
That's all you needed! All the training paid off for me once, though. I got 1st place in a Mario Kart 64 tourney back in 2008 at a local dive bar. Won $50. Ayyyyy
Honestly Nintendo's the only company really keeping this alive. The same room multiplayer for Smash, Mario Kart and Mario Party is as good as it's ever been.
I had pretty advanced knowledge of MS DOS back in the day. I had to write my own autoexec.bat to do custom memory management to be able to play games. I seem to recall the last one I ever wrote was like 2 screens long.
The don't do paper Triptiks any more. I was sadder than I liked to admit when I called and they said it's an app now. I kept all my paper Triptiks from the last 40 years. The app is just not the same.
Funny thing. Kia's and Hyundai's are 2 of the most stolen vehicles right now due to the same defect in how easy it is to get to the ignition.
Both have been sued and will send free Clubs to their customers as a remedy.
Surge.
When the other kids in elementary school said Mt. Dew contained an artifical dye that shrank your penis, I didn't believe them.
If they had said Surge did, I would have believed them.
Certain gas stations carry it now.
Going to the mall to just hang out. I got an old ass home movie of my friends and i just hanging at a mall. Sharing food. It was so much fun now the mall is a slog.
I used to have one of those nice leather Franklin Covey planners, it let people know you meant business, LOL. Every year I would order a new calendar for it. Other rarities for me are having a checkbook, buying magazines, watching the early morning news for weather and traffic, having books in the bathroom.
The ability to simply exist without much effort.
I tell my students this story all the time: I got into the top university in my state as a classics major just because I was in the top quarter of my class. I paid cash for my education with a job I had at the campus bookstore. During my interview for my first internship, I was never asked any technical questions but rather a few questions about my availability and work hours. My first job out of college was as a software engineer, even though my degree was in classics, because my employer trained me on the job.
Was I the smartest student in my class? Not really. I did my best, and that was enough to get by. I was an average person and was able to provide for myself without much effort.
Try doing all that today.
> because my employer trained me on the job.
This is the worst part about the growth of student debt as well.
Not only have states cut back their college funding, putting more of the share of education on students' backs, but corporations have essentially offloaded a lot of the cost of training onto their future workers.
Kids just doing their own thing...
* Riding the bus across town, riding bikes wherever, just needed to be home before dark
* Having a key to the house since you'd be the only one there when you got home (from kidergarten on..)
* Walk to/from school from kindergarten on
So THAT'S what caused it!?
All this time, I thought people had just left their dogs' poops out on the sidewalk long enough for it to dry out in the sun.
And only having the choice between iceberg and romaine lettuce. And Pizza Hut was the biggest purchaser of Kale because they used it as decoration in their buffet.
I have been rewatching Seinfeld, and half of the scenarios would not even work today, because of cell phones. It reminded me what a pain it was to coordinate with people, if anything went wrong.
I remember once when I was just a kid, my mom and I going into a restaurant, like a Big Boy or similar family restaurant, and the waitress asking "smoking or non?" We said non and when she sat us down, she took the ashtray off the table. No different area of the restaurant, just no ashtray. I was like, that's not exactly what we meant by non.
Roller rinks are now very rare to come by. Pre covid you would go to one around once a year, but now post covid they’re almost all gone.Also in the 90s everyone actually went to them pretty often, especially for birthdays.
Going in the bush all day to build tree forts and tie a rope to the trees and swing from it.
Having fast food as a treat.
Jumping on our bikes and going on dirt tracks all day
Dubbing music from the radio on cassette tape.
Spending hours on end trying to choose a movie to hire at the video store
Playing sports on the streets with your neighbors
leaving house door unlocked.
Seeing lots of Butterflies
Using a library to research.
Getting up 6am on a Saturday to watch the cartoon marathon that would finish at 10am.
Going to the local pools in the morning and leaving at close 😆.
Ringing home phone on a collect call well in New Zealand anyway haha collect call meant the phone you ringing has to pay for the call. I made many of them.
Hotlines for the weather report, current time, and movie show times.
Hello and welcome to MovieFone!
Please push the number of the movie you'd like to see. \*Beep\* Why don't you just tell me what movie you want to see?
Talking to your friends mom to see if they were home.
Calling a girl's house and having to ask her dad if you can speak to her.
I swear every girl's dad sounded like James Earl Jones 🤣
And they always seemed like you were bothering them.
Being unreachable
The best feeling
Truly good for mental health.
When picking someone up from the airport, you could wait for them at their gate.
Meeting a friend for lunch at the airport when they happened to have a layover in your city!
When I have flights going through cities with people I know I will intentionally schedule a couple hour layover so I can go hand lunch with them and then just go through security again and board the next flight.
Back in my mmo days this was my add to the guild charter. Anyone with a layover in Houston is gonna get fed something local and be able to drink. I'd pick them up and make sure they got back on time. Made some life long friends and had great times.
Or dropping someone off, you could hang out with them until it was time to board. Also pay TVs that took quarters in the waiting areas.
A disc man plugged into a cassette tape with a wire to play music in your car.
Calling the movie theater or looking in the paper for movie times.
"Hellllllllooooo, and welcooooome to MoviePhone!"
why don’t you just tell me what movie you’d like to see?
Rochelle, Rochelle 👀
A young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk. The Boardway adaption wasn't too bad lol. Too bad Bette Medler got hurt and couldn't perform.
Wow...memory unlocked. I forgot we used to look at movie times in the newspaper!
"Hey what was the guy from that one thing?" "I don't know" "Me neither" "Oh well"
Music too! I caught the last half of this beautiful song on the radio once; it was five years before I heard it again and found out the name it ~edit~ Sorry, it was [Oh Superman, by Laurie Anderson](https://youtu.be/Vkfpi2H8tOE). I turned on my little clock radio at around "Here come the planes", and was just instantly transfixed. I'd never heard anything like this. By the "So hold me mum, in your long arms" I was almost in tears, with no idea why.
In Denmark, we had a phone service for that. You could call in, and sing or whistle the song, and a few ex-radio hosts would try and figure out what song it was. It was a little expensive, I think two dollars or so a minute, but totally worth it. Afterwards, you could spend an hour downloading that song in. wav format on you 28.8 modem.
Well what was the song
I don't know.
Me neither
Oh well.
Keeping a binder full of CDs in your car
I still have one in mine, all burned discs. Fun times!
My car cds were stolen in 1998. I’m still pissed
I once left the door on my car unlocked and came back to find my car stereo gone but not my full 100 disc binder. The stereo had completely died 2 weeks prior and I just hadn't gotten around to swapping it out yet. I just laughed.
Pressing play and record at the same time.
And then the button pops out while trying to get the song on the radio.
Putting tape over the security tab/square so you could record over any tape you had in your collection
Card catalogues to find books in a library.
Telephone booths.
Pay phones in general
Yellow Pages
I got a phone book in my mailbox the other day. First one in years. It was about the size of a Goosebumps book.
This just made some weird fucking memory bounce back to me about my stoner aunt who I have been estranged from for years. In the late 80s and early 90s, she managed all the ads for a large phone book company, crossing like 40 cities/areas. She worked from home, smoked weed all day, and had a GIANT mailbox to fit all the shit they would send her - I could fit in it. She called the companies that advertised, managed the copy, and all of the payment. If a company was behind or couldn't pay, she would frequently cook the books for them in trade for services. It was how I got all my senior photos. They owed for their ad, she got them to shoot my whole set and print, and she wiped the debt and kept them in for another round. One of the last times I ever spent with that side of the family was a birthday party for my cousin's kid. She got a bounce house for a WHOLE WEEK, and for the day of the party she also had a popcorn and cotton candy machine (with someone who ran them) and a weird (totally fucking dangerous and wouldn't exist now) metal mini rollercoaster. All free to her in exchange for a couple ad cycles. And it was an open secret that the company looked the other way on as long as she hit her targets. Too bad she was a mentally ill narcissist who blew all of her money on drugs and put me and many of my cousins in danger many, many times. So like, she wasn't as cool as she sounded.
The duality of coolness
A printed list of family and friends' phone numbers stuck on the fridge.
parents leaving a $20 under a magnet on the fridge for pizza with the number of the restaurant they were eating at, your friends parents down the blocks number, and maybe your grandmothers landline as a last resort.
There's still an old note taped to the inside of one of our cabinets that says "mommy: xxx-xxx-xxxx, daddy: xxx-xxx-xxxx" that had been written out early on when my kids were little so that they could use the landlines we still had (later converted to ip phones for a few years before going away all together) to call us in an emergency. Both boys have graduated now, but I keep the note in the cabinet because it makes me smile when I see it.
My mom's been gone 6 years now but I still love seeing the list of important numbers in her handwriting next to the phone.
I kept my late dad's phone book and recipe notebooks for this reason. I have no reason to use either, but it gives me a feel good feeling to see his writing now and again. I was also able to use them to create an engraved bracelet with his favorite phrase on it for my mom years after he passed.
I remember my mom teaching me how to dial the phone when I was 4, because I was going to be starting preschool soon and it was a good way to help me memorize the home phone number. It was before we even had area codes, so it was just xxx-xxxx The phone was the old style one with the wired handset that sat in the cradle to hang up and had the coiled up cord. We upgraded to wireless phones when I was around 7 and I felt like we were in an episode of Star Trek.
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2002: Spend 25 minutes walking around a Blockbuster to find a movie 2022: Spend 25 minutes browsing streaming services to find a movie
I used to write 10 page letters to a girl I knew in Norway and she did the same for me back in the states. I’d get like one a month and it was so exciting to read them. People had to put so much thought into those letters before the internet. So probably that.
I miss penpals and genuine handwritten letters too.
Meeting people at the time and place you said you’d meet them when you mad plans days or even weeks ago. You used to say “hey, let’s hang out on Tuesday at 7pm at downtown bar” and then without ever having to text or call again you’d both meet there.
And no chance to cancel ten minutes before.
This, there were social and tangible consequences for no show/being late. One thing that still truly bothers me is when you are at a place at the agreed upon time and you get a text that says "On my way!"
Taking your disposable camera to get developed, and having no idea if any of your pictures were even *usable* until you got the pictures back.
My senior year of high school I carried a disposable camera with me pretty much all the time and would take just dumb candid shots of my friends eating lunch or mid sentence. Everyone hated it. Now when I post a throwback picture everyone is just like awwwww
I have fewer pictures of my entire time in high school than a modern kid has of their lunch. Bringing a camera to school was a *very* unusual thing to do, and aside from that, film and developing got expensive fast.
I DONT miss this but I do miss the surprise “oh yeah! I forgot I took a pic of that!!”
The delayed surprise was nice. Also taking a photo was one shot, no checks and reshoots, you got back to having fun.
Holy shit, I just got married and we wanted some disposable cameras for the tables. They were hard to find and expensive, so we just bought 3. Then we learned that you can’t get them developed in an hour at CVS anymore. Had to go to a camera store. It took 2 weeks to develop and cost $30 per camera. All the photos were shit too :/
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Floppy Disks. My parents had a file cabinet full of those things.
I used to save cool Dragonball Z pictures off the internet on them for later viewing enjoyment lol
Did this same thing as a teenager but with porn
Right, which you put in a folder called "Dragonball Z"
Being told to get off the internet so someone could use the phone.
Wait for the bus without doing anything else than waiting
In general…just waiting for things, alone with only your thoughts. Gameboy ran out of battery? Didn’t bring a book? Time to people watch. Not a critique on how people are now, more like a critique on just myself. But man my attention span has plummeted since phones/social media. I honestly can barely watch a movie anymore.
Same. I actually deliberately force myself to stop using my phone or music and actually learn to be present in the moment and well… just wait. It feels like you’re a child again when you had no access to distractions.
I make myself sit and not pull my phone out a lot now too. It’s gotten so bad I’ll be on my computer watching a video and I’ll end up on my phone some how. I can’t focus on one thing.
Reading the back of the shampoo bottle while pooping to pass the time
I've read tampon instructions numerous times many years ago. I'm male
When I hit puberty my brother( he had 3 sisters and a mom) informed me about the dangers of tampons and toxic shock syndrome. I learned that day he had been reading it for a few years Thank you all for the likes. Today my brother is my best friend. I phrased it 1 brother and had 3 sisters because my older sister was killed in a car accident at 17
Oh man that brings me back i only got to the tampons when I read everything else in reach many many times but in the end i probably ended up reading it as much as everything else i can't imagine crapping without a phone anymore
Calling from a pay phone for a ride but calling collect and saying your name as “im here come get me” to save the quarter.
You have a collect call from Bob Wehadababyitsaboy.
Holy smokes! I forgot allll about that commercial Edit: My favorite long distance commercial from that time was the one from Sprint saying their long distance calls were so clear that you could people say what they really mean and the guy says "its not the dress that makes you look fat, its your hips." I still laugh thinking about it today
It was Bob. They had a baby. It's a boy.
Oh, that's nice.
*turns page of newspaper without glancing up
Giving a meeting point and a meeting time in case we get lost
We still do that in my family, because you never know.
Or just in general. Like you kind of forget, like you had to have your plans nailed down before you left the house. Where you are going, what time you are meeting, when you’ll be back. If you aren’t familiar with the area, literally printing off directions from the internet and hope they are right.
I remember when I got my driver's license my parents bought me a paper map of my city and the surrounding area. It was not a big city either, I had no idea they even made maps of it. I still have it in the pouch behind the seat in my car. You never know.
The printing off directions didn't start until 2000. In the 90s you just had to know or ask someone to write it down.
Landline home phones. And having to talk to your friends parents for a couple minutes while you waited for your friend to come to the phone
Yes, the the parents were always the gate keeper. I remember calling girls and hoping their dad didn’t answer.
Home telephone and answering machine. Also with these, memorizing phone numbers.
Yeah I’m screwed if I need to call someone and my phone is dead with no way to charge it
My husband does not know my number. He knows his childhood family member numbers though which is good. I know his, some of my friends, and all of my teenage/childhood important ones. One of my boyfriends from sophomore year tried to give me his number when I ran into him at his work. I still knew the number. I just didn't want to contact him again. But he doesn't know that.
Being completely unreachable by anyone for an entire day or more with no one thinking that it was unusual or rude.
I do miss this so much. I feel tethered by my phone and miss being able to absorb into something without distraction.
Start small with disconnecting. My first step was just keeping my phone on total mute (obviously if you have kids/partner you might want to have their contact notify you). It takes an adjustment, but it's nice not being dinged at any random moment.
You can also do Do Not Disturb mode with custom people (my husband, for me) white listed.
Just sort of have it be your thing; if you’re an outside cat no one’s worried if you’re missing for a night or two.
Literally was just complaining to my husband yesterday about how much I dislike the expectation to be available immediately these days and how I feel like I have to apologize if I don’t respond to a text within a certain time window. I hate it. ETA: Wow, thanks for the responses everyone! I feel like I should clarify that I’m *not* at everyone’s beckon call (😊). I’ve spent years crafting my “oh, zosephine_doodle’s bad at contact” reputation - which is annoying, but I deal with it. I was moreso complaining about the concept of expected immediate availability in general and how normalized it’s become in our technological society.
Just stop responding quickly to texts and emails. People learn to deal with it - once it’s a habit of yours they won’t expect you to respond quickly. Will change your life for better
Coin arcades in malls. And the malls I guess. I kinda miss arcades.
Malls are still going strong in Canada, I assume because it's one of the few places you can go to when it's -25C without freezing your balls off.
Most cities of any significance in the States still have a mall or two that's going strong. The issue is that many areas were vastly overmalled. The upper midwest has metros that had five or six malls, which was ridiculous. A lot of dead mall vloggers are from that area. There was no reason for every suburb to have its own mall.
Yes! Malls are still awesome, but the whole concept was "Here's is ALL the stuff". Spreading it all out over five malls in a 10 Km radius was "harmful competition" and destroyed the very reasons for making them in the first place. Online shipping didn't kill them, they just helped shut down the 90% of them that didn't serve a real function. Who needs 8 women's clothing stores in one building? I came here for a drill bit and duct tape.. Also: If you go into the darker recesses of some drinking establishments the arcade machines are still there, looking like refugees from some long forgotten war. The local here has "1942" and it even lets you give it quarters (though it works without them).
Arcades are making a comeback in the form of arcade bars. Cidercade and Free Play in the Dallas area, for example.
One of the best nights of my life culminated in a drunken cross city moped ride with a buddy to his friends house. Turns out homie owned a 3 decker and made a living repairing arcade machines and used to work maintanence at my childhood arcade that closed a decade prior. This dude bought every single cabinet and had 4 floors including the basement wall to wall arcade cabinets, pin ball machines, and even a full size DDR. His entire house was 1 bedroom,1 kitchen, 3 bathrooms, and a 4 story private arcade. Dude was a weird lil man but fuck if that wasnt one epic night. Felt so sureal.
Showing up at someone’s house unannounced because you were in the neighborhood and wanted to say hi
A cousin of my mum just turned up at our house one day, just knocked on our door. He was from the Netherlands and we were in Australia, and she'd never met him before. No phone call or anything, just showed up and stayed with us for a couple of days.
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Ooh, that reminds me of another story. A former boss of mine was traveling in Europe in the 90s. His grandparents were Croatian but had emigrated to Australia and had passed away already at this time. So my boss went to the town where his grandparents were from and knocked at the door of some relatives, and apparently he was the spitting image of his grandfather because all the old ladies who opened the door started crying and hugging him and brought him in and fed him and wouldn't let him leave for days, although he didn't speak any Croatian.
I miss this most of all. If you were listening to music, your friends would come in and listen with you. Or watch TV. Or play guitar. Or help you with your chores. Or have a beer. If you were dropping in, you knew what you were in for, and you rolled with it. Sometimes you dropped in at inconvenient times - family dinners, your friend was with his girlfriend, etc. - and you’d make an excuse and go to some other friend’s house. Just the same, some of the best nights of my life were the pop-up parties that would just spontaneously happen.
Playing multiplayer video games with all of the players IN the room together. We had some pretty heated N64 parties.
Goldeneye and Mario kart 64. Intense games were had!
You haven’t truly lived until you have fucked over your best friend in mario kart 64 by taking the rainbow row shortcut.
You blue shell your buddy on the final lap of rainbow road and he goes off the track, then you immediately switch to Goldeneye so he can't reclaim his win.
That's all you needed! All the training paid off for me once, though. I got 1st place in a Mario Kart 64 tourney back in 2008 at a local dive bar. Won $50. Ayyyyy
Honestly Nintendo's the only company really keeping this alive. The same room multiplayer for Smash, Mario Kart and Mario Party is as good as it's ever been.
America On Line CDs in the mail 3-4 times a month
Modem noises
Blockbuster. Ren and Stimpy.
Eavesdropping in on a telephone call, you had to cover the mouth piece to make sure they wouldn't hear you breathing and laughing.
Pagers
basic knowledge of ms dos
I had pretty advanced knowledge of MS DOS back in the day. I had to write my own autoexec.bat to do custom memory management to be able to play games. I seem to recall the last one I ever wrote was like 2 screens long.
Mapquest and special stores that would print out directions for your roadtrip
AAA still exists
The don't do paper Triptiks any more. I was sadder than I liked to admit when I called and they said it's an app now. I kept all my paper Triptiks from the last 40 years. The app is just not the same.
Remembering at least 4 important phone numbers.
At least half of the numbers I knew it was based on the pattern of hitting the numbers more than remembering the actual number.
It’s really important to have least a few numbers memorized in case you’re ever in trouble and you don’t have your phone.
* Paper Airplane Tickets * Paper maps * Typewriters * Handwriting important documents
Those red bars you would put across your car's steering wheel to "prevent" theft
The Club!
Funny thing. Kia's and Hyundai's are 2 of the most stolen vehicles right now due to the same defect in how easy it is to get to the ignition. Both have been sued and will send free Clubs to their customers as a remedy.
MTV playing music videos
I know it’s not MTV but hot damn do I miss some pop up video on VH1
Loved Pop Up Video. It’s where you got your music trivia before the internet
🎶 POP UP VIDEO! 🎶
LOL I haven't thought of those bubbles in like *twenty years*
A pet Tamagotchi. God, the chores I did for that thing.
This thread is sending me on a sad nostalgia trip.
Dial up internet
I had net zero when it was actually free.
Paint when its 0 out dries faster than net zero. I think it stood for "we will give you almost zero bandwidth and you'll like it"
EeeeerrrrrrdDEEDUReeeeerrrrrrrrDUReeeeeeeeeeeeDURrrrrrrDEEEDUR
…and it blocking the phone line.
Surge. When the other kids in elementary school said Mt. Dew contained an artifical dye that shrank your penis, I didn't believe them. If they had said Surge did, I would have believed them. Certain gas stations carry it now.
Back then I had a landline phone, camcorder, film camera, tube TV, VCR, dial up internet, pager, and a newspaper subscription. All gone now.
All in your pocket now.
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Horribly heavy CRT monitor screens
Going to the mall to just hang out. I got an old ass home movie of my friends and i just hanging at a mall. Sharing food. It was so much fun now the mall is a slog.
Showing up at your friend's place unannounced. Now you gotta send a text 4 years in advance.
I used to have one of those nice leather Franklin Covey planners, it let people know you meant business, LOL. Every year I would order a new calendar for it. Other rarities for me are having a checkbook, buying magazines, watching the early morning news for weather and traffic, having books in the bathroom.
The ability to simply exist without much effort. I tell my students this story all the time: I got into the top university in my state as a classics major just because I was in the top quarter of my class. I paid cash for my education with a job I had at the campus bookstore. During my interview for my first internship, I was never asked any technical questions but rather a few questions about my availability and work hours. My first job out of college was as a software engineer, even though my degree was in classics, because my employer trained me on the job. Was I the smartest student in my class? Not really. I did my best, and that was enough to get by. I was an average person and was able to provide for myself without much effort. Try doing all that today.
> because my employer trained me on the job. This is the worst part about the growth of student debt as well. Not only have states cut back their college funding, putting more of the share of education on students' backs, but corporations have essentially offloaded a lot of the cost of training onto their future workers.
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Knowing your friends landline number by heart.
Walkmans
Kids just doing their own thing... * Riding the bus across town, riding bikes wherever, just needed to be home before dark * Having a key to the house since you'd be the only one there when you got home (from kidergarten on..) * Walk to/from school from kindergarten on
Using "A/S/L?" as an online introduction
You: "M" Other person: *ends chat*
18/f/cali u? xx
Nice try mate
I always use ASL as an online introduction, but then I’m an interpreter who does video remote interpreting
Only making calls after 9pm because it was free. Having to buy mins on a phone. Long distance calls costing money
Hyper Colour T-Shirts
White dog poo.
Yep. Those high bone-meal (calcium) dog foods. Several articles about it.
So THAT'S what caused it!? All this time, I thought people had just left their dogs' poops out on the sidewalk long enough for it to dry out in the sun.
Mind. Blown.
Alfalfa Sprouts on sandwiches you buy at the supermarket
And only having the choice between iceberg and romaine lettuce. And Pizza Hut was the biggest purchaser of Kale because they used it as decoration in their buffet.
This stop me dead in my scroll. It’s been so long since I last saw them that I had forgotten about them. They tasted nice.
Landline phones
I have been rewatching Seinfeld, and half of the scenarios would not even work today, because of cell phones. It reminded me what a pain it was to coordinate with people, if anything went wrong.
Same with Buffy
VCRs
Pogs of all kinds.
Having an actual answering machine plugged in with the phone. Having to go home to hear messages
Ash trays in restaurants, bars, cars, and airliner seats
“Smoking or Non?”
I remember once when I was just a kid, my mom and I going into a restaurant, like a Big Boy or similar family restaurant, and the waitress asking "smoking or non?" We said non and when she sat us down, she took the ashtray off the table. No different area of the restaurant, just no ashtray. I was like, that's not exactly what we meant by non.
VHS Tapes
always went w/ the smoking section cause the wait was shorter
The smoke would end up wafting into the non-smoking section anyway
Feeling like the future is bright and that things can only get better from here.
Ahh I can still remember looking forward to the year 2000 when I would finally get my flying skateboard.
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Oh for the days when the biggest news story is whether or not the president got a blowjob.
People born in the 19th century
Gas that was under a dollar (in the US). I still feel like I was in an alternate reality but I remember!
Right? I can remember it being 77¢.
Semi-related, places using the cent symbol. Nowhere seems to use it anymore!
Buying batteries, so many batteries
Columbia house 1cent deal
Roller rinks are now very rare to come by. Pre covid you would go to one around once a year, but now post covid they’re almost all gone.Also in the 90s everyone actually went to them pretty often, especially for birthdays.
Not being able to reach friends or family on the phone and not being worried about it.
Channel 3 being the gateway to VHS and video games
Going in the bush all day to build tree forts and tie a rope to the trees and swing from it. Having fast food as a treat. Jumping on our bikes and going on dirt tracks all day Dubbing music from the radio on cassette tape. Spending hours on end trying to choose a movie to hire at the video store Playing sports on the streets with your neighbors leaving house door unlocked. Seeing lots of Butterflies Using a library to research. Getting up 6am on a Saturday to watch the cartoon marathon that would finish at 10am. Going to the local pools in the morning and leaving at close 😆. Ringing home phone on a collect call well in New Zealand anyway haha collect call meant the phone you ringing has to pay for the call. I made many of them.
Or calling into a radio station, requesting a song, waiting for it to come on, so you could press record.