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.
40-something here: I hope to live to see the day I am hanged for being cringe and not based.
Don’t we all
same bestie
I tell my friends regularly that my retirement plan is to be executed during the Climate Revolutions by their kids for being insufficiently radical
Not old enough to fit in with the oldheads, not young enough to fit in with the zoomers. This is my burden to bear
New club just dropped
Transitionary Period Club.
Lollll I hate it. Its perfect
Yeah same
XENNIALS RISE
- 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.
Idk if you’ve seen any of Panos Cosmatos’ movies (Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy), but he’s talked about he wants to make the movies he imagined when he looked at the box art in the videos store
I remember calling my friend and being bewildered that he knew it was me before I even said anything, that was my first encounter with caller ID
Yep. Caller ID changed the game.
i remember when we got the caller ID box, i thought it was like being in the CIA to know who is calling.
I definitely remember this feeling.
Walking into a hexbear meetup only to find out all these power posters are actually 20 years older than me
late 90s kids (youngest millennials/oldest zoomers) where u at
I’m an old millennial so I absorbed some of Gen X’s particular Hitler particles
Truly we are a transitional demographic
I watched the first moon landing live in college.
In your 70s? Dang elder cat here. Hexbear apparently has got people who were born in 2008 and people who born in 1950.
Which is a good point since the hostile part of the lemmyverse tries to tell us, who have quite a bit of diversity and lived experience that we are all 14 year olds. Some of us witnessed the births of countries which freed themselves from colonialism and USA’s influences life!
It is a try to reduce us to a caricature that can be easily dismissed.
You’re my dad’s age. I’m 36.I think you win
If you don’t mind me asking, roughly when and how did you become a commie? If it has been a while, would you say your political tendencies have changed or evolved much over that time?
Just curious.
not 40 yet but they taught us how to use the dewey decimal system and played oregon trail on apple IIe computers with floppy disks so waddup
Anyone remember Kid Pix on the old apple whatever. Remember loving it in middle school.
Adored it
Hell yeah. I had it on my first computer, with it’s massive 80 mb hard drive
Logo Writer with the little turtle that would draw
Playing Oregon Trail on Apple ll’s should objectively be the criteria for this group
Turns out Dewey was a massive bigot and the library association award given in his honor has been renamed
Dewey is an objectively good name for a milkshake duck
Eyooo it’s me
I remember rotary phones.
My folks have their old rotary phone in the basement. Showed it to my kids and they didn’t believe it was actually a phone.
I’ve found that at least the models from the late 70s also still work perfectly fine, they use the same plugs as modern phones in my country. Audio quality on them is excellent, too.
Well now I want to try this out.
the western electric 500 and 554 were so ubiquitous that even a mint condition one will sell for around $50 on ebay. they’re built so well that it’ll probably keep working for another 50-100 years with occasional maintenance
if only landlines were cheap.
What did they do, start swiping on it like in those awful comics, or just confused about how it could possibly work?
Well my kids are very little, they were just confused more than anything.
My parents used a rotary phone up until a couple years ago when it broke and it was more expensive to buy a rotary than a digital. They hated there was an up charge on phone bills in their area for “touchtone” dialing rather than rotary and so stuck with it until the wheels came off.
I was barely too young to be around for party lines even. My grandma and my FIL both had them until a few years before I was born
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”I love the idea of some 42 year old Fed who monitors this site and hates us all, but genuinely likes talking about 90s music and movies with us.
Nirvana’s In Utero was just that good
We can fix them
I mean, for real, let’s say you get paid a full time salary just to watch this site. It’s obvious just being here for 15 minutes, we aren’t a threat to anyone other than like, dispensing general communist ideals. And honestly I don’t think the feds really care that much about that.
You would have to realize your job is a joke and you’re getting paid to do nothing. I want think hypothetical fed would be like “ok look, I AM a fed. But let me just sit here and shitpost and grift the FBI’s money, and I won’t actually do anything”
I just want to give back to the community that has given me so much
some “the life of others” shit but with Hexbear … Plotline has potencial.
Pearl Jams Ten was pretty fundamental to my teenage developement
I lost my shit when I saw that Mudhoney was in the movie Black Sheep
RIP Chris Farley
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
I really hope I’m not being a boomer and remembering the past with rose-colored glasses, but there really was something to that weekend ritual of picking out movies at the video store versus just picking whatever from a streaming service. Of course, having all those options available now is incredible too, so not better just different.
I loved it so much! Hollywood Video and Blockbuster ruled. I think being able to pick up the box and look at the cover art and stuff is it’s own special dopamine hit
The social aspect of suggestions and such.
Man, I loved the video store so much I actually ended up working at one for a few years.
Had a boss that robbed the place blind, on inventory days while the rest of us were scanning everything in the store, he just sat at the counter up front and manually entered all the UPC numbers of stuff he’d stolen.
We randomly got a copy of Attack of the Clones that was dubbed in Italian, despite a near complete absence of ethnic Italians in the area, and we would play it all the time because it made the film into a literal “space opera.” The film was much better when you couldn’t understand the wooden dialog delivered in stilted performances.
They didn’t have enough keys for every shift leader to get one, so I was taught how to jimmy open a lock with a credit card instead for when I had to open the store.
But of course, the real benefit was the rentals, watched so many director commentaries on DVDs because that was just the coolest thing. I still miss commentaries with streaming stuff these days.
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.
The funny thing is, I’m not nostalgic AT ALL for phone conversations. I think being able to text people is so awesome, I really wish I was able to do that growing up instead of awkward phone conversations.
Oh my god I hated the phone as a kid, absolutely the worst
I was a very socially awkward kid, calling my friends’ houses and having to ask their parents if I could speak to them was awful. Say what you will about smart phones, but personal cell phones in general were a lifesaver for quiet nerds like myself.
lmao yeah I used to prank call people from the phonebook on my house’s landline phone. It’s not like they could ever find out who it was
We uses to use Arnold Schwarzenegger sounds boards. Danny DeVito too, I think lol. Any memorable pranks from your youth?
omg I completely forgot about the existence of soundboards but yes we did that too! Putting the phone up to the computer speaker hahaha
lolll loved that so much. Okay, now my moomer identity is intensifying, caught myself being like “man, that shit was so fun and definitely something zoomers are missing out on”. Oof. Although I guess they do hella prank tiktoks now so maybe the method has just sublimated lol
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.
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.
