The internet in it’s heyday, when it was a genuinely thrilling place to find information, and quite a lot of weirdness, and before it was swamped by corporate interests.
I remember starting out with gopher and a paper print out of ‘The big dummies guide to the internet’ which was a directory of almost every gopher and ftp site (pre web) along with a description of what you’d find there. Then the web came along and things got really good for a while. Once big corporations got involved it all went down hill.
I would limit it to the “web” in it’s heyday. The internet as a whole is more wild than ever. And there’s a chance that the fediverse could be just as thrilling in 10 years as the web was 20 years ago (and could be swamped by corporate interests).
I don’t think the internet is getting less thrilling and weird, if anything it’s downright scary at this point, it’s just really easy to enter a walled garden, never leave, and never find the interesting stuff.
If you like gopher, you’re gonna love Gemini: https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
I’ve been keeping half an eye on it for a while, I should probably give it a go again.
Not having all the silly teenager / young adult bits of their lives documented in videos for all to see.
Bugs hitting the front windshield in extraordinary numbers.
Fireflies/Lightning bugs. I remember there were so many in backyards in the summer, even in the suburbs.
Then they just kinda went away. Feel like I’m lucky if I even see a few a year.
Car design change? I’d assume that more aerodynamic cars airflow that sweeps more bugs away rather than smacking them into the glass. I can assure you that they still hit motorcycle visors.
I mean, I see way less bugs when outside even a decade ago.
Doing stuff with friends, undocumented.
It’s really a bad time to be young and stupid.
Not all, but most don’t seem to have adventures. When I was a kid I’d go off into the woods and build a den or climb a tree, we once spent a whole week trying to dam a stream, god knows why. None of my friends kids go anywhere by themselves, a lot of them do ‘forest school’ where they’ll be taken by adults to a sanitised woodland and taught how to build a teepee with pre cut wood, and it’s just not the same thing.
A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.
The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you’re in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren’t in a kid’s head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent’s. The safety risks are high. Always were, that’s not new. But the legal risks are new.
And yeah, it’s not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn’t happen back in, say, my dad’s childhood. But I’d wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they’re old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren’t.
Woods aren’t often ‘owned’ here.
I never see kids playing outside. There are parks, fields, forests around where I live.
Over time I learned there are actually kids living in my apartment building but I have no clue what they do all day. It’s kind of depressing.
The town I live in renovated a park to have a gigantic playground, and every nice weekend day I’ve been there there’s tons of kids and parents there. On Halloween there were tons of kids out despite it being around 0F out that night. But random weeknights? I don’t see kids playing in yards much. I don’t see kids riding their bikes to convenience stores to get snacks. I think the risk acceptance of parents has shifted a lot plus kids are more able to occupy themselves with fondleslabs so they have multiple reasons to not go outside
Playgrounds are fenced off and parents constantly stay within 2 steps of their helmet wearing kids here in Czech Republic. When those kids are older than toddler age, they disappear from public life.
It’s not like that in my home country where maybe they just sit around playing with their phones, but at least they’re outside with friends.
the world is much less welcoming to broke kids
“fondleslabs” nice.
A building down the street from where I live has like 3 families with kids renting and they are always outside in a big gaggle. Like is the weather close to halfway decent? They are out.
I think because their parents are never around supervising them. But that’s about the only place with obvious kids. There must be more, but I have no idea where.
That’s a good point, latch key kids is what we were
I read an article recently about kids not spending much time outdoors anymore. One of the main reasons not mentioned here seems to be that the majority has nice rooms for themselves at home, and they enjoy the time they spend there.
Kids rooms are a lot nicer nowadays, and often they don’t need to share it with a sibling as they might have 30 years ago. Also the amount of toys has risen, I suppose.
Not that this is entirely a good thing. Children need to spend more time outdoors. But let them enjoy their indoor time if they want to.
Same. There are a few kids in my road that will play directly outside their houses, but when I say ‘kids’, definitely 12+. One kid about 15 sets up skateboard ramps and does jumps which I love to see, but actual kids? Never see them without their parents. Kids are taken to school into their teens, I’d have been mortified if my parents came to school past like 9 or 10.
I’d be so scared to let a kid do that now. Barbed wire is everywhere, everyone wants to brandish a gun at strangers, and truck drivers can’t even see pedestrians anymore.
I don’t have kids though, because I couldn’t force a kid to hide indoors all day, either.
We used to scramble over barbed wire fences like it was nothing. My dad actually speared his leg on a fence spike as a kid, at least barbed wire just cuts you up a bit. None of our parents had any idea we were doing that though, we’d come home if we needed a plaster and say we fell off a bike or something.
Or more likely, they knew nut didn’t care, because they did all the same tbings.
Nah, we definitely got in trouble if they found out we were doing stupid shit.
If we were inside before dark the assumption was we were ill
Haha, yes. “What are you doing here?” the parents ask of the child in their own house where they live.
sometimes it was, “don’t knock on the bedroom door unless the house is afire”
Home ownership
Getting static shocked by the TV screen.
Adjusting the tracking on a VCR.
Getting your finger stuck in the VCR because the videotape would not eject. You had to stick your finger in and poke the tape while mashing the eject button. Worked everytime. Also pushing rewind on a tape and walking away because someone forgot to rewind and you don’t want to watch the video in reverse.
I think my family may have had a later generation VCR then yours, because I don’t remember ever getting my hand stuck, and if you pressed the rewind button while playback was stopped (not paused) it would rewind at like 10x the regular playback speed.
Winter
Livable planet :)
Careful, acknowledging reality makes you a “doomer.”
This, and playing Doom
I live in a country that spends half the year on fire, my doomerism is justified (and worsening with the constant lack of action on climate change).
Rushing to the boombox when you hear your new favorite song, to record it to cassette
And rage at the dj when they would talk over the song intro.
Which they did on purpose, so you can’t use the recorded song commercially.
The modern day equivalent of this is including sound effects or a break in the music in the official youtube music video to prevent people from using yt-dlp to rip the audio directly to their playlist.
Haha but I make music so I can just use my DAW to cut out the break! Checkmate YouTube!
Rushing to it? Nah, just sitting next to it for hours with finger on “Pause”.
Rushing? You mean you didn’t spend whole evenings with your finger in the record button, just in case it came up?
Cleaning out a ball mouse.
My 14 year old son recently picked one up out of this big pile of old computer treasure I was given by a client and said “What’s up with this mouse?”
Pfft, cleaning it out. Just hard boil an egg and take the yolk.
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Privacy
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Peace & Quiet
- Easy access to dark skies for stargazing.
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The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen, and mainstream multiplayer games without anticheat rootkits
Edit: mainstream
Blowing into cartridges before putting them into the console and optionally pushing them to the side or some other voodoo hoping the game would start.
Yes! Why can’t I play every game like I played Runscape?
The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen
To be fair, PS2’s are so damn rock-solid new generations can experience this for many years to come. They just gotta get one.
the feeling of not being spied on 24-7
Someone recently told me this anecdote:
I overheard on the train home two middle aged ladies talking about their kids mobilephones.
One was saying how they dragged their teen and their mobile phone to the iphone store so they could setup the location tracker and “quiet mode” (parent phone can completly disable the teens phone), and how their child was upset but they are glad it was done.
The other lady was asking how she to can do the same.
My question is: are 2020’s kids even gonna be upset?
They dont know any different
Regular police officers not wearing full body armor and tactical gear.
Just let some years pass, when the control of the water reserves come in full swing they will have their chance.
Maybe even before if trump do run for this next elections, i expect nothing less than another capitol riot.