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.
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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
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
Playing Oregon Trail on Apple ll’s should objectively be the criteria for this group
Eyooo it’s me
I’m not quite 40, but I am definitely well over 40 in spirit lol
Yeah I thought about it before posting and the 40 y.o. line seems a bit high, but “Over 37 Years Old Club” or whatever doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Open membership anyway.
Old!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.
Are we gonna talk about MASH? I watch two hours of MASH every damn day!
I’m Hawkeye Pierce in a different outfit every year for Halloween.
Remember making a mix tape by pausing it on record and waiting for the radio station to play the song you wanted? Personalized mix tapes and even cds were totally rad.
Yes, I also enjoyed making my own radio shows by recording them on tape. Had I known about podcasts at that age, they would have blown my mind.
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.
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.
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
Is there like a membership fee?
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.
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.
I think you win
You’re my dad’s age. I’m 36.
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
I remember rotary phones.
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
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.
If you haven’t been through Checkpoint Charlie and shopped at GUM, you’re not really an oldhead.
One of the little pleasures of becoming commie is recalling how the GDR was portrayed in the US as some horrific nightmare state at least as awful as the DPRK is today; only to find out that, even though they had some problems, it was actually a pretty chill place to live (if anything complaints I’ve heard from former residents of the GDR was that life was a bit too boring).
An example of what I mean btw… our church had a missionary to West Germany that visited. He told us in the East, there was a bus of schoolchildren from the West driving through. The police boarded their bus and found a Bible, so they pulled all the kids out and shot them. Literally all the grown ups in my church uncritically believed this story.
An example of what I mean btw… our church had a missionary to West Germany that visited. He told us in the East, there was a bus of schoolchildren from the West driving through. The police boarded their bus and found a Bible, so they pulled all the kids out and shot them. Literally all the grown ups in my church uncritically believed this story.
Those slanderous things luckily can’t survive the internet. But the sentiment can. The lies evangelicals tell is absurd.
FWIW, it was grey as fuck, the time tax to get basic life done was pretty absurd—and typically fell on women, and the controls on movement were suffocating.
I wouldn’t wish the GDR or USSR back into being, nor would I wish this capitalist shit-show on anyone.
That’s fair, I mean I can perhaps be a bit overly optimistic about life in the GDR given what life is like here, and I’m an American so I’m not an expert. But keeping this post light-hearted so it’s all good.
the time tax to get basic life done was pretty absurd—and typically fell on women
The “time tax” in the FRG on women was higher with the demands for sole child care with relatively little external child caring services from the ages of 0-18 (and schools which weren’t open long).
Actually, re-reading your comment, did you grow up in the GDR? If so I would love to hear more about your experiences, even if they are critical or negative. I am fascinated by how socialism was implemented in the GDR, and what lessons we can learn from it going forward. It was the AES state that had the most developed form of capitalism when socialism was implemented, so I think there is a lot to learn from.
the time tax to get basic life done was pretty absurd
True, but it was much less than now for plenty of things in the USA right now. This includes healthcare, child care, universities, education, holidays, public transport, funnily even flats at this point if you are looking at SF or Berlin.
Pretty much everything you needed for everyday life or a substitute you could get fast. What was your experience living there?
Sure there was “Bückware”, but the standard of things you could get without large time expenditure was decent and much better than it is now for plenty of poor in the USA. With the advances in productivity and technological prospects since then what level of consumption could we create now? With near instant availability and stock information for consumers, retail, logistics and producers?
it was grey as fuck
With plenty of green areas in which trees had to grow (you see it now) and also a ton of Lauben/Datschas and regular holidays in greenery. Cities could’ve been much more colorful indeed.
