What was normal in the 1990s but rare or non existent now?
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A disc man plugged into a cassette tape with a wire to play music in your car.

Hey I still do that with my phone. My car's a '02 so tape player, radio, or CD. So I bought 1 of those & a converter to plug in my phones charging port.

Edit: To add.... I do have a transmitter, but I like my music loud AF & with a transmitter, volume @100% on phone & stereo doesn't even come close to as loud as with the tape adapter. Using the transmitter, if I have my moonroof open & all windows down you can barely hear the music. However, with the tape adapter I can have the volume on my stereo & phone only half way, and it's loud AF!! Just the way I like it. 🙂

I had this up till a few years ago with my 98’ accord. I had to give a younger co-worker a ride once. It was an educational experience

Haha!!

Nice choice of car btw!! I love Hondas & Toyotas. That's all I've ever owned. 3 of each so far.

I've met many people in their late 20s who are little bit deaf and it's always the people who show up with music on full blast in their car.

I'm about to be 40 actually

Some people still use their old man music machines.

I had an ac power converter to a shelf stereo, that ran with the tape adapter in the car....it was also the boxy style dodge caravan. Total fuckin party wagon.

On top of that wobbly impact absorber thing?

Yo that was my car until 2019 when it finally died

Cutting out foam to sit under the discman so it wouldn't skip driving down the road.

oh man, the road trips I'd take. Eventually I upgraded to the iPod Nano + Cassette aux combo lmao

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?

I love George's awkward expositional line right before this. even great writers get in a bind sometimes

"You've selected... Brown Eyed Girl. If this is correct, press 1 now."

Don’t you see! You’re number is 555-FILK.

Kramer?

Who is this? Leo?

Why don’t you just tell me where you want to see the movie?

"The Last Mimzy"

​

"You've selected... 300"

Hello and welcome to your worst nightmare. I know you’re in their Cosmo Kramer. You’re in big trouble now. You have my stealing MY business. To do this the easy way open the door now. Or select the number of seconds you have before I break this door down.

Omg yes Thank you I forgot all about this, but heard the voice in my head reading it! 🤣

90s memory: Weed without possibility of other drugs sprayed on it 🤔

We certainly had a lot of rumors about that, though.

My wife says this Every Single Time we sit down to watch a movie.

I’m pretty sure I’m NOT your wife, but based on this comment I may be.

Why don’t you just tell me the movie you’d like to see?

you've chosen....

agent zero!

movie's about honest politicians not the second rate reality version Republicans we have now

This was always the trick to talking on the phone late at night without your parents knowing. Have a system where you told the person to call at like 10:00 or whatever, and a couple of minutes before you would call the weather and just stay on so when they called, it just beeped the call waiting and didn’t ring the phones in the house.

Damn, that was smart. I never thought of that one. We did have a very unethical method of making free phone calls from a pay phone, though, when out of change. Remember collect calls, where the phone company would bill the party you were calling? Well, if you called the operator and asked to bill the call to yourself, they wouldn't ask any questions, and just do that, and put the call through. But "yourself" could be any number in the phone book...I still feel bad about that one, and hope the victims weren't billed any more than the quarter we didn't have. Or that they got the charges reversed. Sorry, Mr. Joe Random for that weird third-party charge on your phone bill. :(

Operator assisted 3rd party billed call was like $5.00

Oops. Well. I know I was doing wrong at the time, but we were like 12 and everyone did it...no excuse, but. I'm surprised they didn't cut off that school pay phone from 3rd party billing after a short while. Maybe not enough people complained.

I made this reference the other day in the presence of my 18 yr old, her boyfriend, & my 62 yr old dad. Dad was the only one who had any idea what I was talking about. Many of my jokes/references are unappreciated in my house.

I used to just dial POP-CORN

Here it was 333-FILM

I say this at least once a week to keep it alive.

Thanks, Kramer!

Why don’t you just tell me where you want to see the movie???

I read that in his voice. Thanks again!

You just unlocked a memory for me lol

Oh, I miss Movie Phone!!! It was amazing to me, as a kid. Stil is!!

You have selected 300!

Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you have selected!!

The time and temperature phone number for my small hometown still exists to this day. Same Pre recorded voice and everything. It still advertises caller-id as an add on feature for land lines. Know who’s calling you. It’s easy and convenient with caller id. The time is x. Temperature y

My buddy bought a company that did the towns most well know time and tempeture phone number.

He left it on for many many years after they stopped advertising it. He was finally ok with shutting it down when the one number that would call once a day suddenly stopped and then no one called again.

That is the most poignant and sad thing I have heard in awhile. He kept it alive until the last person who needed it was (presumably) dead. That’s beautiful.

Poor Merideth just went on a 3-week Carnival cruise and when she came back, her one source of information had been shut down 😔

Ol’ Gram-Gram got on the ‘gram.

I need this short novel in my life

“Thank you for calling AFB&T. The time is: nine…twenty four. The current temperature: eighty…one. Goodbye.”

At the tone

Pacific daylight time will be

Nine

Oh

Two

And twenty seconds

BEEEEEEEEEEP

In the UK, we had a phone number for the "speaking clock", and was a lady speaking in proper "Queens English", basically a posh sounding voice and it'd go, The time sponsored by accurist will be 3.52 and seven seconds beep beep beep then it'd repeat until you hung up. I'd forgotten all about it until I read your comment 😂

We had the time and temperature number. "The current time is three twenty three the current temperature is seventy seven degrees - fahrenheit thank you for calling (name of bank)".

My dad used to make me call those before we went to the theater all the time. And if I spaced out and missed the showtimes for a particular movie, I had to listen to the whole thing all over again.

Used to love calling “time and temp” !

This made me dial the number and it apparently still exists in my hometown!!

853-1212 didn't work here. :(

I'm so sorry. I had a little bit of panic when I dialed and thought "what if it doesn't work anymore?" It's crazy how something seemingly so small at the time can represent so much decades later!

That was ours too!

I’m gonna have to try calling now just for the nostalgia. Won’t be the same as using the landline though.

I couldn't recall mine so I Googled it and as soon as I saw it, a memory unlocked. I called it and while it sounds different, it still does gives both PLUS the date now.

Ours does date, time, temp, and short blurb about the expected weather now!

I remember calling a hotline every time I wanted to set a clock or check if a watch was keeping time accurately.

I still remember the phone number for the weather line in Cleveland!

931-1212

One time my friend missed the 3 and dialed 911 by mistake, oops!

Our bank had a hotline # for the time/temperature... And even one for story time for kids to listen to for 5-10 minutes that changed every month.

That's not a hotline, a hotline is an automatic private ring down circuit. When you take the receiver off hook it dials a specific number automatically, that's a hotline. Sometimes folks had a dedicated line at the other end so they would never miss a call. Think control tower to fire station at airport.

Ex telco geek

Used to work at BK and we had a Fax Machine. The manager would dial a number that would fax back a surf report. Also at new years the thing would go crazy as phreakers would spam it with happy new years messages.

They Might Be Giants Dial-a-Song!

Indeed a brilliant concept. Still one of my favorite bands.

I used to call a hotline if I missed my soap opera that would tell me what happened

And daily horoscope! I remember in college my roommate and I would call in every day to some hotline the San Antonio newspaper had to hear our horoscopes.

The speaking clock! May be a UK thing? You rang, it told you the time...

Popcorn!

yes dialing POP-CORN to get the current time after a power outage.

At the tone, the time is…..

At the tone the time will be …

Fuck this gave me a flash back to when I used to call to find out what time it is to set clocks right lmao

Oh, god, I just remembered that I'd call the local National Weather Service office as a kid and listen to the forecast. Then there was another number you could call and actually talk to a meteorologist.

That was for pilots only though, did you makeup an N number and route?

Nope. Maybe the 80s/90s meteorologists were just indulgent of a kid who liked the weather.

Anything is possible, it would be the flight service station pilots call. Maybe NOAA had an office in your town.

I have been flying since 83, there used to be a manned weather station. At every airport that had an instrument approach. You went in the office and they would brief the weather along your route of flight. That program was cut and the last station closed around the turn of the century. Now you call and 800 number and get briefed, airborne live radar is sent for free from the NWS to inexpensive receivers in the cockpit and can even be displayed on an iPad.

Lots of changes in my 40 years dealing with weather products from the NWS.

I grew up near the beach, had the surf report hotline memorized as a teen. How good the waves were for a 645AM call also definitely determined whether or not I actually made it to school on more than one occasion.

The weather and time still exist! We called ours the other day to prove it existed to our younger coworkers and they were confused as to why that was a thing. They haven’t lived in a time before smart phones scarily enough.

I love tuning into NOAA radio for the weather

Deutsche Bahn (main German railway operator) offered a bike sharing service called: Call a Bike

In order to rent a bike you had to call and pay the rent using your credit card or transfer a sufficient amount to cover the rent a few days before arriving at the pick up spot as many Germans did not use credit cards back then.

It's still called Call a bike but most users will use the app

We never had those hotlines. So weather would just come unannounced.

I almost forgot about this !

We had the time and temp line brought to you by Gentle Dental

Whoa man blast from the past!

Current time is still there. We use the naval observatory number at my job to stay accurate

This just reminded me that when I had a paper route I would also have tv guides to deliver to the houses that paid extra for it so they would know what was showing later in the week. Wild

It's funny I used to be a human smartphone, 411, for every carrier nationally. Every carrier had different options, movies, restaurant reservations, even horoscopes and yes at times I even had to use a phone book and help give people directions in areas I've never been.

Woah I totally forgot about that! Lol man!

We still have a time hotline in Sweden, (+46 33) 90 510

WE6-1212 for the weather and TI6-1212 for the time. I'll be a senile old man drooling on my shoes and still remember those two numbers.

I have a friend who calls the local airport and asks for an accurate weather report

Crystal Pepsi

Oh wow, I'd forgotten about calling the time! Or power went out so frequently when i was a kid in rural Montana, i still remember the phone number.

"From Mountain Bell, the time is..."

Also, Mountain Bell no longer exists.

They still exist, ironically. Elementary schools still use them to teach kids to use a phone.

I used to give that number out to guys at the bar who pestered me for my number lol.

On a hot day we couldn’t wait until mid-afternoon to call “time and temperature” at the local bank and see what it said!

The movie show times one is giving me nostalgic memories. I forgot this used to be a thing.

I worked at a place like that in 2009. They survived all the way to 2014.

Being in my 50s. I miss this so much. Not knowing because all these things are at my fingers at all times. It's so different like a proverbial breezeway of sorts now. Back then there was the world with a structural construct of "expiration binder check" to the other world to re-entry.

There's this shit in my pocket at all times. https://taylorholmes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/interstellar-wormhole.jpg

Refusing to allow my away from everything world to fully exist.

I used to call the Time & Temperature number daily to check that my watch had the correct time, as it was inclined to drift a few minutes.

That's the watch I had to wind daily, in exactly the same way at exactly the same time. That would keep it accurate to within about 3 minutes a week.

You just reminded me of a service called TellMe where you could call up and play blackjack with Sean Connery.

"What's your favourite scary movie"

When you hear the signal, it will be 09, 24 and 30 seconds. Beep.

I used the movie hotline all the time, never heard of one for the weather report though.

There were a lot that just did the the time, some did time and temperature, and in some places there were hotlines that would give you a more comprehensive daily forecast with things like the the high and low temp, humidity, chance of precipitation, etc.

Dude, for some reason when I read your comment my brain immediately said 747-8900 which was the number for "The time is (slight pause) 7:31 (another slight pause) and ten seconds....BEEP.... CLICK.... The time is 7:31 (pause) and twenty seconds...

I haven't heard nor, obvi, called that number in around 40 years and my mind immediately brought it up instantly.... Yet I forget every new person's name that I meet, lose my keys and other random shit daily it seems. Oh, I am also able to have perfect recall with songs that I once had memorized when I was a kid. Even if it wasn't "my song" but rather was what I listened to because it was my Mom's music and at the age of 6, was forced into listening to while she drove us around. The other day Juice Newton's Queen of Hearts came on and I found myself singing along word for word. For good measure I pulled up Angel of the Morning and it was the same. When I got to my destination I couldn't find my debit card nor my license. Nor the backup...things which were in my hand just hours before... The brain is a damned odd anomaly

Newspapers were the best for that back then.

For TV shows you would have to buy that readers digest to get that weeks schedule.

Yeah, the newspaper stands we're a lot more prevalent back in the 90s as well. I lived in a suburban neighborhood and there was one just at the top of the street that we would walk to if we needed to look up movie times.

Or for making fake phone calls

Our little town still has this! I called it not long ago because I was curious if it was still around. I remember being so excited to call "Time and Temp" as a kid.

Timeandtemp. Usually a local bank provided that

Memphis had JAMJAM1. Not sure if it's still a thing.

My hometown still has time and temp! I’ve moved away but I still call it when I’m feeling homesick.

And bus arrival times

I still remember the old weather number as WE6-1212. I remember hurting my fingertip using a dial phone to dial that number on a heavy as hell old dial phone.

And sports scores

My local theater still has one usually

Now people call the library for that info instead.

Pretty sure most of that stuff still exists in a lot of places.

I remember calling "popcorn" for the time, but that was in the 2000s because we lived in the contry

Nothing like my mom coming in my brother and I's room with the newspaper and asking us what movie we wanted to see then looking at the showtimes and calling the number.

Yo, LPT: These still exist. I have the weather hotline phone number taped up by my office phone so I have a number to call when I need to pretend I'm on the phone with someone.

Anybody else remember Mona? Same as the current time, but she would moan instead of the beep

I barely remember my aunt calling a hotline for movie times. It was very early 2000s, and it was later talked about in my history class when I was a senior. Wow that really brought back a very core memory lol

I actually still use the NIST’s phone talking clock when testing phone systems. It answers immediately, and makes continuous sound of various kinds, and it doesn’t bother anyone when you phone it.

My wife and I have tried to explain this concept to our kids. Weather, sports, traffic, and even a 1 min. phone call on the payphone if you didn't have a quarter. Heck, they don't even know what a payphone is!

We still have a local time and temp which is sponsored by our local bowling alley

(jazz music)

CURRENTLY partly cloudy, winds: west-southwest at 10-15mph. High.. of 75°.

And surfing conditions! 976-SURF

Remember those automated phone systems had had choose your own adventure type games, horoscopes and DIY advice. I wonder if any are still in operation.

Surf report!!!

WWF wrestling hotline which cost like $3 a minute

This includes 1-900 lines. Sexy ladies helping you get off. $1.99 for the first minute!

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.

Because you were bothering them ;-)

we were, im a girl dad now.

Same, so maybe what goes around comes around.

Hopefully not 😂

Yeah the turntables…come to find out there is a very real chance I may say no to that request. 90s me had no idea.

SIMBA! u/SpacecadetShep is calling! Pick up the phone! I am your father!

Luke! ~~u /SpacecadetShep is calling! Pick up the phone!~~ I am your father!

I feel like this is meme'd a bit too much. I was scared shitless of meeting my first GFs dad in high school because of this but he barely gave a fuck and was a cool dude. Same thing in every other relationship.

My dad would legit judge guys based on how they asked for me over the phone. He hated, "Hey is Intellectual there?" They had to say, "Hello, Mr. Purpose, this is SoAndSo, may I please speak to Intellectual?" Of course only .001% of guys spoke this way in the late 90's-early 00's, lol.

Oh yeah. I grew up around the same time, and I think our parents' generation still had that strict "phone etiquette" programmed into them in the 60s-70s.

Honestly, it feels like our parents had strict everything etiquette programmed into them lol

Our generation is so much more relaxed in almost every way, really.

Idk there was a lot of drugs, unresticted sex, and overall craziness in the 60s, 70s, and 80s

Yea, but it was considered “counterculture.”

I feel like the newer generations are more in tune with reality and our own short existence.

I had phone etiquette drilled into me, and it was like a cheat code for getting a girl's parents to like you. Didn't help with the girls, but their parents loved it.

Maybe the girls liked the guys that would be a little dangerous by not using proper phone etiquette?

It took me a minute, but I figured out how to code switch.

Bunch of Eddie Haskells’. Don’t think the parents weren’t aware.🙄

Lol then theres me who answers the phone with “ay wassup, whose this?”

Coming from someone that has mild social anxiety.

Yeah, I don't miss that AT ALL!

My friends once advised a new kid I gave my number to on this: "now here's the deal, if you call her place ask for her, but then immediately take the phone away from your ear, because her mom will shout for her and you'll go deaf if you aren't careful."

Why

Who are you

Don't call again

Ahhh memories

Nothing is more courageous than making that first call to your crush after getting her number and then powering through the frontline defense of a doting, stern father.

"Kids these days" will never understand the cahones required to call up a crush and seek ask them if they want to go on [Friday/Saturday/etc]

It is a completely different world for teens nowadays! I had a flood of memories come back after reading your post.

At one point, Myself and a Girl, I was dating, if We wanted to talk later at night (Her parents were a bit stricter than mine) So, I’d call and let it ring barely once, The caller ID wouldn’t show up.

About 20-30 min later, She would sneak the cordless and call me back, lol .. Good ole day’s

Oh yeah, I did the same thing!

Or we would plan a late call at exactly a certain time so that she could be standing right next to the phone and answer it within half a second.

Oh god those were rough times

So true!! Reading these few posts brought back Soo many memories, hadn’t thought about stuff like that in FOREVER!!

My dad handing me the phone: “_____ wants to talk to you” and it’s always the wrong name.

I still have to do this 😩

This is why I never talked to my 6th grade "girlfriend". I was absolutely terrified of either one of her parents picking up the phone when I called her number.

You could always call and then chicken out and hang up if the wrong person answered. Lol

that's hilarious why did u have to do that ?

Because people didn't have personal phones back then. You just called the house phone, and some random person in the family would answer, meaning that sometimes an unlucky teenage boy would wind up awkwardly asking a girl's father if she could come to the phone.

oh that makes sense, I wonder if the fathers were cool with it or they were like never call again you bozo.

It really depended on the father. I distinctly remember one who used to quote scripture at me.

hahaha good times man

Under rated skill set

I really wonder if this has changed ways kids were forced to go through the pain of calling and talking to adults. It was the worst at the time, but I think I would have carried those nerves into adulthood if I hadn’t had to practice so much.

Wow I must have been an infuriating 9yo on a boring summer afternoon ringing on all the neighbour kid's doors. shudder

And then saying to your friend "Dude, your mom."

Also picking up other friends in a small group of friends, going from door to door to get the gang rolling. And always discussing who will talk to the parent(s).

Haha I remember going door to door to get the whole gang together but i totally forgot about beinh pushed to the front because i was the smallest and told to do the talking.

Alright, calm down over there, Zach Wilson.

I was going to say something sort of similar - going door-to-door to see what friends were available. Usually a parent answered the door first. “Can so-and-so come out to play?”

I actually used a special knock at my neighbors so theyd know who was knocking.

Now I just talk to her to see if She's home.

When you're on the other end of it and don't want to talk to/hangout with them: having your mom lie and say you're not home

The flip side is true, too. My high school girlfriend called to talk to me once, but my dad picked up the phone. My voice and my dad's are similar enough that she talked to him for ten minutes before she realized that it was him and not me... Based on my conversation with her afterward, she started the conversation with "Hey, do you want to come over?", to which he jokingly asked "Why?", and she replied "I'll make it worth your while". That's about the time I walked in and asked who he was talking to, since I was expecting a call from her.

Lmao 😂 Priceless!!

Damn, good one

I've always thought that having to go through the parents to talk to your friends made things more controlled and respectful. Now kids can just blast each other with every thought that pops in their heads 24/7, that must make things more toxic.

Or just call your friends mom to.. Know when she would be home alone.

I don't think it's completely eliminated now. It least for kids it's not. I was born in 2007, and I did that all the time from 2014-2018

I would call my friend back because I said I would, not because I wanted to. Then I'd talk to her mom and remember it was her mom I thought was cool and wished was my age. Good ol days.

talking to your friends mom. (wink)

Banging your friend’s mom

My son’s friend texts me when he’s not answering 😅

Woah. So right.

This one is so random but true lol

Still happens in Asia!

Dude !!! Waiting at your friend's house for them to comeback from where ever they were.

i still do this with my friends, one never charges his phone so

Haha holy shit I forgot about this.

"Hey Mrs [NAME], is [FRIEND] home?"

I’m a 2000s kid and I used to do this in the neigborhood

I wasn’t allowed to have a cellphone until I started college (2013) so anyone who wanted to reach me had to do this!! Makes me smile, thinking back to the simpler times lol

Bro that just means u grew up

my friend did this because i wasn't answering. i was swimming

I remember I used to do this when I was younger i’m not from the 90s though

Being unreachable

The best feeling

Truly good for mental health.

And better yet, being out camping or in the city with your best buds and also not being reachable by anyone outside the group, aside from people you'd happen to run into! It was dope just feeling like it's you and your friends out as a group in the wild.

I force it now and people get mad at me. I'm like fuck you I'm busy. I'm not glued to my phone

This is kinda what I hate because people still flip out on me about I need to have my phone and how come I’m not answering. And it’s always the ones that don’t have nothing to say or won’t just leave a message.

I had done a legal process and it got me thinking, if I didn't have a cell phone how frequently would the people I'm working with think they should call me? I am curious to how long legal processes took before when no one had immediate means of contact.

I force it too, I ignore my phone all the time. Everyone hates me for it.

I haven’t even set up my voicemail haha.. people are always yelling at me for it

I don't think I've been alone in years. I just want some peace and quiet for a bit.

I'm tempted to find an isolated spot in Death Valley and enjoy the silence without seeing a search party for three or four days.

There is a house with no door there. Do not enter

Hantavirus

Hantavirus? I am more shocked about the section regarding the dangers of illegal grow operations!

Right? Sounds terrifying. Run walk crawl or hide, just get away; make as little noise as possible; get to your vehicle if you can, drive away, IF YOU CAN.

I watch Wonderhussy on YouTube, and she's always going into cabins that have rodent feces. Volunteer cabins are rarely sealed.

I was surprised that single car accidents was at the top of the list. How can you mess up driving on a flat road where you can see for miles? But they have some impressive mountains too.

I've done it a couple of times, absolutely recommend it. Death Valley is like a dream world, especially when you start getting out into the back country.

That's why I deleted Outlook from my phone. Not checking work email outside work hours

When I started my last job, they asked for my phone so the IT guy could set it up so I could have emails come through to my phone. “Not a chance” I said.

They were a little taken aback as no one had ever said no. They employed nearly 1000 staff and all of them seemingly had company email landing straight into their personal phones!

I carried two phones for years.

Whilst I appreciate it's important for some people, my social life is not hectic enough and my job isn't important enough for my phone to be constantly ringing. I remember the days of not having mobile phones, and meeting up with friends could be the biggest pain in the arse. If someone was running late, or forgot the time/place, or went to the wrong place etc. everyone just had to hang around, unsure whether the missing friend is late or not coming.

I challenge you to turn your phone off for a day (or an hour)

Just don't answer the phone.

That's different though. When you see someone calling you and you don't answer, you start to think about what it could be that they need to talk to you about (instead of being completely oblivious that anyone wants/needs to reach you). It was very freeing.

You can always switch on Airplane Mode, which essentially isolates you from the world.

I went through my mid twenties up until this year (I'm 29) with a cell phone I just ignored almost all the time and it got super depressing having everyone ask me all the time "Why don't you ever have your cell phone on you." "You need to charge your phone." "I called you three times and then called your husband and then called your facebook messenger to reach you because I wanted to know if you want to come over right now."
I would be taking a nap, having sex, trying to read or game and that thing would go off constantly with people wanting to hang out etc and I just wanted some alone time...It's like people feel they own your time these days.
I was so close to just getting a landline and having people leave a message and I'd get back to them when I was ready but now that I'm single I don't like going places without a cell.

You just have to train people that you’re not going to be reachable. I have a flip phone that basically only ever gets carried if I’m traveling. 90% of the time it’s off or at home. I have an iPod that only works when I’m on WiFi. I have most people trained to just email/iMessage/FB message me and I’ll respond whenever I’m on WiFi.

I used to be like this, up until around 2014 I just never bothered carrying my phone and rang people back when I got home. I do kind of miss it to be honest, but I have kids now so spending the whole day reading down by the river is in the past for me.

Some of us have to be on call for work 24/7/365, with no exceptions for holidays and vacations

Sounds like a nightmare!

Also unreachable at home when AOL was hogging the land line

until your sibling hogged the AOL with the landline by picking up the phone. FML, gotta start that limewire download again. i only had 2 hours left until i could listen to Bob Marley - Red Red Wine.mp3

Still better than giving the RIAA $20 in 90's money for the CD.

Especially for albums that just had one or two good songs.

I still do this to this day. I'll go on vacation for a week and just turn the phone off, or be far enough out in the boonies that there is no cell signal whatsoever.

[deleted]

The simple solution to people getting angry is to tell them: I'm not handing out freebies here, if you want me to be available at home then pay me for that time. Some bosses will just be unreasonable though, nothing you can do about that but find a better job.

I'm 26 and I'm so jealous of this. I've been convinced I'm about to get a "someone in the family has died" phonecall for absolutely stupid stuff after seeing 5 missed calls from 4 different people my mom asked to call me, and look for me, to call her back.

You can still turn your phone/computer completely OFF. For however long you want.

If you do that, people will start worrying and evetually come to your place to check on you. Didn't happen before.

A lot of people’s jobs don’t let them. I know people who well…if they miss a call from work they’re in trouble

especially in the military. This does NOT exist. They’ll show up at your door🙃it’s happened to me before

When I was in the Navy, I went to the movies on my day off. I turned off my cell phone and forgot to then it back on. Fast forward to midnight when the sheriff’s department broke into my apartment because my command decided I must be lying dead in my apartment because I didn’t answer my phone.

it’s literally the worst thing ever. i can’t imagine the anger if i came home to the sheriffs department. Luckily i was home sleeping that day or else that probably would’ve been me too

Oh, I was home and asleep. My command said they sent someone to my house to knock on the door earlier that evening, but I never heard anybody knock. I was livid.

Eh, it’s still an option, just have to be planned in advance. I’ve taken trips where I wouldn’t have any signal for days and just told my supervisor the schedule. “Hey boss, I’ll be off grid starting Monday afternoon and won’t be back until Thursday morning. Literally no one can get in touch with me. here’s my wife’s number, but she can’t get in touch with me either.”

That happened before cell phones too. If you weren't home near a phone, someone in your family had better be with your location. My pops had calls Cone in where we had to tell his CO where he was so they could send someone yo get him.

I long for the day I am successful enough to completely unplug for hours or even days at a time without repercussion.

Every device I have is on silenced mode for this reason exactly. I'll answer you when I see it! If it's an emergency, you should be calling 911, not texting me!

I do this exact thing. It started because of an extremely abusive relationship 12 years ago. After that, hearing my phone notifications would throw me into a complete state of panic. The panic is mostly better now, but I cannot justify having to be available at any/all hours. I'll check my phone when I feel like it. Most people in my life have come to terms with this.

That's all well and good, but if a loved one has been in an accident getting to ii when you "see it" really sucks. Someone may have called emergency services, while another contacts you.

My mental health is worth more than the "what if someone you love gets into an accident" excuse. Even in that case, it doesn't really matter if I get the message now or in 2-3 hours. It's not much different than when I am unreachable for 8 hours at a time at work.

Seriously. When people use extremely rare circumstances to justify an inconvenience every single day it boggles my mind.

That's why I keep my phone on silent lol.

i miss that something awful

This. What I don't like with cellphones is that people can reach whenever they want. Stresses me a bit. So when I go on a walk to chill I just leave my Phone at home.

Amazing times lol

boy, do I fucking miss this.

I currently have 32 unread messages on my phone. I can be unreachable if I wanna be.

A relative was in an auto accident because her phone beeped while she was driving and she looked at it.

Now she locks it in the trunk when she drives. She can't reach it, see it, hear it - it can't distract her. She says driving is now the best part of her day: for just a little while, she gets to be alone and uninterrupted.

I've taken to unplugging at 8pm: phone in silent mode on charger, laptop closed, just read a book or watch a movie or something. Don't connect again until the next morning.

As someone who has been the "on call" person for a business for the last 20 years, I feel this in my BONES!

Everything always goes wrong the first day you go on vacation and I hate the sound of my phone going off with the power of a thousand suns.

God I sometimes miss this

This is such an odd thing. Some people had answering machines but that was really it. You could just go and enjoy the experience.

Now ... If I'm out with my wife and family people will call me, if I miss the call they call my wife... If she misses the call... They call my kid and complain we didn't answer the phone.

And staying private

I love putting do not disturb on, not logging into discord, and just checking my messages every now and then.

Also see: "Hmm, can't get them on the phone. Oh well, they won't mind if I just show up at their house."

Me and my friends used to do this thing in our early 20’s ca 2011-2012 where we would do 90’s week. Where we dropped our cell phones and lived like it was the early 90’s.

Still very attainable with will power and personal boundaries. Friends, family and employers aren't always pleased with your decision not to carry a smart/cellphone.

But at the end of the day it is your decision of what tracking/hailing/targeted advertising delivery devices you carry on your body.

This message sent from iphone- (jk)

I’m unreachable over lunch. Every day, when someone calls while I’m at lunch, even my boss, I let that shit go to voicemail.

I think I’ve totally forgotten that feeling by now. Sigh …

I was returning video tapes.

Last month we went camping in southern Ohio. It’s a rural area with a lot of hills. No cell service unless we went to the next town to look around and our tv in the rv didn’t get any signals. I slept fantastic for the first time in months. Driving back the phone calls started for both of us from my in-laws.

Hocking Hills? Maybe my favorite place on earth, and I’ve been all over.

We did that last year. This was Mohican Wilderness around Loudonville Ohio.

I make myself unavailable on a regular basis just by ignoring my phone and leaving people on read. Slowly they stop trying to talk to me altogether. It’s great 😂

Being unreachable and it being acceptable. Because you can be unreachable now a days but people will literally think you are ignoring them or dead

I miss this the most. I hate the presumption that I should be available at any time.

I just got out of federal prison and I already miss being inaccessible.

Turn off notifications. Problem solved

I miss this so much. I know that people have a lot of feelings about Law and Order, but season 1 of the original Law and Order makes me so freaking nostalgic! They do a lot more shots of the city at street level and they’re longer, so you can really feel it. They also do a lot of running around looking for pay phones to call people on.

Not exactly unreachable. Beepers were a thing in the 90s.

Yeah but they were a one-way device, so it was expected that a response would take some time for casual stuff. Nowadays if you don't pick up your phone or answer to a message asap people get frustrated, specially if they see that you read it but did not respond.

Cell phones were also a thing in the 90's, I got my first in '95.

You can still do this, just might a missing person's report filed on you. Lol.

Who knew that its a true luxury

After cell phones came out, we had a cabin by a creek. There was no cell service unless you drove a few miles and stood in an auto dealer's parking lot. It was the perfect place to go to be unavailable for a weekend.

Last summer spent a week up north and left my phone on airplane mode until the trip home, honestly super good experience

Being unreachable

Man, I miss this part of life....

Being unreachable *with no expectation of being able to be reached or explain why you were unreachable. Shit was cash.

If someone didn't show up to a meeting... well you kinda just dealt with that and assumed they were probably fine. Then you needed to look around if you were both there but just unable to find each other.

Damn, i dont know what thats like because im born in 2000 and pretty much by the time i was 13+ social media had started its thing. I dont even remember what thats like. I wish i could live in the 70’s 80’s 90’s for a week each.

People are kinda glorifying it and feeling nostalgic. But there were plenty of downsides too.

As a kid/young teenager, I had to carry quarters with me and hope wherever I went had a pay phone so I could call my mom to come pick me up.

When you called your friends, it was a gamble whether they’d be home and available to talk or not.

You’d get yelled at by parents or siblings to stop hogging the phone. Sometimes (many times) those siblings would listen in on your phone calls.

If you wanted to talk to your crush, you had to psych yourself up to have their parent answer the phone.

Plans always took a lot more effort to arrange.

You had to memorize what felt like a bajillion numbers. Or hope you remembered what random scrap of paper you wrote the phone number down on.

Telemarketers. Lots and lots of telemarketers.

You’d be unreachable, but so could everyone else (including parents). Definitely did my fair share of waiting around after school because I missed the activity bus, no one was home yet, and I couldn’t reach my parents.

And if something bad happened, like your friend hurt themselves while you were out building a tree fort in the woods? You’d have to go and try to find help.

And that’s just the phone side of things, I’m not even touching on the technology side. Have you ever had to balance a checkbook by hand? Or go into the actual bank every two weeks to cash your paycheck? Many things were so much more inconvenient.

When future generations are saying they wish they’d been born in a time without communication brain implants, don’t be surprised if you find yourself waxing poetic about the good ol’ days of smart phones and memes.

Ah man . Plane mode on mobile . No qocial media . I like it sometimes ...

My wife still does this. Her best friend knows it's easier to just call or text me because my wife constantly loses her phone.

I still get that, but because I spend a fair bit of time in the true wilderness.

A few years back my phone broke (a rarity for me). This was communicated to my family but I didn't waste time finding ways to notify everyone in my life. It was kinda nice so I just didn't replace my phone for like half a year until apparently one of my friends who didn't know where I was living visited my mother's house to ask if I was still alive. It's very possible that a small group of my friends discussed my disappearance and we're worried if I had died. So... I got a new phone. Still sort of regret having a cell phone at least once a week.

Disconnect your cell phone. I haven't had one active since 2019, and it's been amazing.

Underrated comment

Literally leave your phone at home. That’s all it takes.

One of my favorite things about going camping is the loss of signal.

I told my mom I was going camping. And it was on someone's property so not way out by myself. I wouldn't keep my phone on me. She tried calling a bunch because my sister went into labor 2 weeks early and because she couldn't contact me, she thought I died.

Still possible but definitely not as easy to pull off.

The mountains are calling

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.

You talking about hobby? It took me me an hour to get to IAH from the toll roads, longer on normal roads. I lived inner loop too, just on the south side. I would never do that for even family lmao

It was mainly Bush IAH, I lived in Katy back then. These were friends I'd known for years and had never met. It was a chance I wasn't going to miss(some of those layovers were more than drinks wink)

Sure they were.

I dunno, i wouldn't put it past him, all my mmo friends were pretty horny in a socially awkward kind of way. I went to a LAN party with some new friends once and it got really weird really fast. I found out later half the party were furries and the other half were poly. It was the first time in my life I felt very prude.

As an MMO player for a decade... I will back up his claims. Easy to believe and many stories myself.

Boy, that brings back memories. Early 2000s, I believe. I liked to play PC RPGs like Might and Magic and Baldur's Gate, and still played some text adventures every now and then, but the only online games I had played were things like Hearts and chess on AOL and Yahoo. I had been hearing about MOOs and MUDs for some time and decided to give one a whirl. Well, I went to some hub that had a list of them, and how avtive they were at the moment, etc, and selected a popular one. I chose.. unwisely. I went into it thinking it would be a text version of D and D, but instead of an elf wizard asking me to go on a quest for a dragon's hoard, or joining a bunch of bounty hunters scalping radscorpion stingers back at the bunker (I think the game's description sounded a bit like Fallout) I got verbally raped to death within about five minutes. Thinking I had just run into a big griefer (I didn't even have a word for that then lol), I tried a few more times, and it didn't get any better. So that was the end of that, for me. I think it was called HellMud or something like that.

Lol... yeah, some of them were... yeah. Sorry you had that experience. WoW back in the day was a total community of like minded awesome people 98% of the time and would have been very very different... but that was a few years later. Before then it was a struggle.

I will back it up as someone who's had a lot of online friends and ended up in a relationship by making out with one at a 3 person meetup.

My favorite instance was I had a job to do in Philly (live in south Georgia). We had estimated the job to take 4 days to complete so I flew out on a tuesday. This gave me wednesday - saturday to complete the work and return sunday. I have a gaming buddy who lives in philly so naturally I'm like "yo dude lets make some time to hang out." I get to philly and go to the job wednesday morning and notice that the issue with the engine on the machine I was there to work on has the wrong valve cover and injection pump installed. Tier 4 engine parts installed on a tier 3. In about 1.5 hrs it was determined that the issue was to be warrantied by the engine manufacturer. Long story short I spent 3 and a half days touring around Philly with my buddy eating and drinking at local spots, living it up in the streets at octoberfest, went to the basketball court from the fresh prince of bel air, had a beer and philly cheese steak at the oldest operating pub in the nation. It was a grand old time.

Lunch? Couple of hours layover?

Just how fast is your lunch?

Haha I was gonna say I’m getting second hand anxiety reading that. You need like 6 hrs, but im also a “be there 2 hrs early” person for domestic flights. I’ve missed a flight once for misjudging security and don’t intend on it again

Once I thought my boarding time was two hours later than it was. I don't know how I kept misreading my itinerary, but since I'm a 2 hours early to the airport person and I never check bags I didnt even know my flight was boarding until I got to the TSA lady and she looked at me like I was crazy and said "you need to run. Fast." I made my flight.

Once I thought my boarding time was two hours later than it was. I don't know how I kept misreading my itinerary

Boarding at 14:00, brain kept seeing 4:00. It can happen... or so I've heard.

Except I work in aviation and have been using the 24 hour clock since college 😅

Unexpected benefits of having military time on my phone. I just thought it looked cool but it's actually useful decently often to avoid things like error in setting alarms.

I think I had a 4 hour layover in Dubai and I left the airport on the train to where the Burj Khalifa was and walked around the mall for a couple hours then went back to the airport.

Im sure you can definitely get away with it at some airports or countries for sure. I usually fly out of major city airports in the US so I rarely have that option, given all the variables including traffic, how busy the airport is at the time and at the time you leave, etc.

If I flew through Bismarck ND(I have many times to visit family), I would be more comfortable leaving and coming back since it’s a low traffic airport, with lighter traffic in the surrounding area. Wouldnt do the same at Chicago O’Hare though

Yeah I did this when I saw there was basically zero line for customs or security going through at that time.

ehhh, I have had to fly probably 150-200 times in my life now for work or personal reasons. I used to be that way but have since got to the point where if i schedule like 2.75-3.25 hr layover I can reasonably land, get out of the airport and eat at a place next to it, and get back to my next gate before the flight. I normally travel with maybe a checked back, maybe not, and a carry on. Ive missed one flight in my history of flying and its because my original departure flight was delayed and my connecting flight left 10 minutes early to avoid weather. It was the last flight from Atlanta to Seattle and Delta ended up putting me in the suite of a nearby Atlanta Hotel for the night, provided me transportation to and from the hotel, gave me 3 free drink vouchers for the hotel bar, and moved me to first class on the ATL-SEATAC flight in the morning. It remains my favorite travel experience out of all of them. Best part was I was going for my brothers wedding which was 4 days later so I wasnt late for anything, just a fun adventure / experience all around. This was 2 years before covid though so I dont know if it would go the same way if it were to happen again.

But before 9/11 you didn't need to leave the airport. Your friend could just walk in and meet you at your gate, enjoy a decent meal at the airport cafeteria, then walk you back to your gate while smoking a cigarette.

right which is what spawned the conversation. It's not optimal but this is just the way to still meet people for lunch in other states on a layover.

Yeah im definitely overly cautious, my dad instilled it in me from all his years and millions of miles of travel he’s done(in the past 20 years he has probably spent a cumulative 3-4 years of time in china for work, and then a healthy doses of domestic travel as well). I think it was worse in the 2000s/early 2010s, it seems like TSA operates a lot more efficiently and less stringently.

Watch me now try to go get a bite outside on my next layover and fuck it up🫠

just dont let yourself be back to the airport with less than 1:15 to 1:30 til your flight. If you miss it id be willing to bet they dont work with you lol.

I’ll consider it when I have layovers next. I just have to remember not all airports are like LAX, which is my main hub

well yea and the only reason to do it is if you are meeting someone so you can always ask them how their local airport is as far as speed of entry. Like ive been in and out of the ATL airport so many fricken times its not even funny. Busiest airport in the world mind you. But I know the ins and outs of that airport pretty damn well. But you never know how its gonna be elsewhere. Like JFK in NY was an absolute travesty and if i never have to go through that hub again it will be too soon.

Jfk is gnarly for sure, have only flown through twice but it’s crazy

Its just so run down and disorganized lol

Considering how big and how important of an airport it is for international travel, its kinda crazy. LAX has been slow but has still been making attempts at updating the airport, even if it’s piece by piece.

Get TSA pre! It was a lifesaver for me. It's like $80? (Can't remember) but it lasts a few years, and it's sooo worth it. Keep your shoes on, electronics in your bag, whole thing is like done in 5 min.

We had to visit family in Tennessee during the music festival; I waited 30-40 minutes in the bag drop line while my husband (who didn't have TSA pre) went through regular security, and I STILL beat him through security by the time I got there. It was crazy

Shhhhh… don’t invite everybody to the party!

Ive actually considered it, My dad has it and always says it’s nice. I might be able to expense it given a majority of flying I do is for work

There wasn't security. You just walked into the airport and sat down at the gate and waited for your friend to arrive.

Oh no im talking about nowadays, the commenter was talking about how they will leave the airport and go back through security on a layover.

Yeah, no way. Anxiety for sure

There was no/less security, cheap/free parking, and decent restaurants in the airport. You'd be waiting at the gate for your friend when they flew in. Go grab a bite to eat, smoke a cigarette, and walk them to their gate and see them off

Yeah but the parent is talking present tense.

And even so, that's not enough time for lunch with a friend that presumably lives in another city. Don't you have catching up to do?

Imo anyway.

Have you been through security lately? I've been in Europe for a month. ust flew back from Kobenhaven via Doha. Going TO Europe was at least pre-verified, covid wise, but retirning was a security fest, I didn't even enter Duty free, or I would have had to go through security (hand luggagge scan, another COVID form to fill in, a few more health and other security checks etc). No way would I have even contemplated leaving the airport. Good for you.

I have actually once done a similar thing and bought a cheap oneway ticket to Riga (iirc) for about 20 usd and just went in through security, had dinner with my friend on her layover, talked for 2 hrs and I just walked out again.

Hah! I actually did this once. I don't remember where I was going but I deliberately switched planes in Cincinnati so I could catch up with someone I went to school with. They met me at my gate, we ate at a restaurant in the airport, and then they walked me to the gate for my next flight. I had nearly forgotten about that.

You can still do this but your friend has to go back through security after. It's annoying for them and requires a longer layover.

Not everywhere. Can’t go through security at my airport without a boarding pass.

Almost all airports will issue a gate pass for certain reasons, military spouse returning home is probably the most common. If you want to avoid asking for a gate pass just book an expensive refundable ticket and cancel it as soon as you’re through security.

Is this actually feasible? Won't it be too late to cancel?

Nope a fully refundable ticket can be cancelled up until boarding.

Wow ok

Here is a website describing all the options but the key is it's a gate pass not a boarding pass that you would have to go through TSA.

https://www.ifly.com/airport-info-and-tips/gate-pass

You misinterpreted me. You cannot go through security. The person you are meeting (the person who has the layover and has a valid boarding pass) exits the secure area and then re-enters through security.

New Orleans (MSY) allows a certain number of “guest passes” per day, so this is still a thing (at least in Nola)….

https://flymsy.com/msy-guest-pass/

That sounds really nice. Makes me think of all the friends who passed through over the years who I could have caught up with.

We really let the terrorists win lol

For real. I've been saying that for years. Before 9/11 nobody scanned my nude body or grabbed children's privates on the way to a flight.

Fuck - they did that?? That's infuriating.

Any recourse at all?

They do it every time. They can't body scan kids, so the "frisk" them which involves touching their no-no places. It's bull shit.

That's fucked up. I just assumed they'd steer clear of that with children, but there I go being naive.

Yea. The terrorists really won

Huh. Is this why airports have a bunch of moderately nice restaurants and you're like "why would you put that here if the only people who will go either had to come to the airport extra early or had to hang out here after their flight?"

I did that just before Covid. It was lovely.

This is blowing my mind. I wish it was this easy to just hang out at the airport during our time too 😭😭😭😭

We've still done this. Had friends come through for a layover, but they didn't want to risk going out of security and back in with their kids in tow... So we booked a cheap flight on Southwest with points, went in and had dinner, and cancelled our flight then went home. Worked great and had a great dinner all together in the airport, and no one had to rush or worry about security delays or missed flights.

You didn't used to need a ticket to go to the gate, there was no security, you could just hang out at the airport all day and people watch if you wanted.

You can still do this in some airports. There are bars and restaurants outside the security entrance. A friend met me at a bar at the Denver airport for lunch and a beer before my flight out.

A luxury only friends of airport employees can now enjoy...

My mum did that in Texas in 2018!

Huh, is this not a common thing? At the next airport I can just walk in and go eat somewhere... security is really only where you drop off your luggage and at the gate itself.

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.

An inflight movie that everyone watched

I saw the Cider House Rules 3 times over one trip thanks to this.

[deleted]

Passing on the legacy.

This made me laugh thank you!

My pleasure!

[deleted]

Haha, right? I was so pissed off having to watch it again, but I still did.

And leg room. At some point KLM put their seats too close together and they got fined by the aviation authority.

A criminal act for the national airline department the tallest people on the planet

[deleted]

Is your family really Scottish Nordic or are you American?

I remember having to rent headphones, and they used a nonstandard plug so my own didn't work.

If you flew a lot you could either sneak one if the flight crew wasn't paying attention or there were some you could buy so you had your own.

Yeah! It was like a mini cinema! Then they gave you mini tablets instead. Now I don't even know the point of that. Do they have chargers?

There are usually USB ports somewhere you can plug into.

Edit: As for the mini-tablets they would hand out, they probably had a small cabinet or box that the tablets would slide into for storage and charging. You see them for things like schools and Chromebooks. It would be something like a smaller version of this.

https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-Charging-Chromebooks-Tablets-Computers/dp/B01MYXANOF/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=laptop+charging+station&qid=1657887726&sr=8-4

I'm on those cheap flights. Last time I flew was maybe 2018ish but I've never been on a plane that had tv screens at all. I'd even take them only having one movie, but I've never seen these fancy tv's with multiple options that everyone talks about.

Now you can stream movies to your personal device, so I guess smaller planes won't ever get individual screens

Which is better, I think.

The headrest tvs don’t always work, you have to buy or remember to pack a whole differeny kind of headphones than the ones for your phone, etc.

I’ve recently been on flights with more expensive carriers that are adopting this method of in-flight entertainment as well.

The only time I've ever seen one was on a flight back to the US from Madrid. Even my flight to Madrid didn't actually have a screen, only the one back.

I remember watching about half of Jupiter Rising and then I killed my headphones by accident :(

Random thing, the Simpsons is full of little time capsule-y nuggets like this. That made me picture the episode where (I think) Bart and Lisa try and get Krusty reacquainted with his Dad after their estrangement and there's a bit where Krusty is sitting in some all night diner or something, which has some of these coin operated TVs.

Just jumped into my head when you said it.

One of my favorites, in Homerpalooza episode where Homer realizes he's out of touch (the famous 'I used to be with it, then they changed what it was' quote) and Homer is in the record store.

He tells the clerk the US festival was the best concert of all time, the clerk says the what festival? Homer says "you know, it was sponsored by that guy who made Apple computers" and the clerk says "What computer?".

Apple was about to fail around that time and the joke was that no young person would know what Apple was because it was so obscure. A joke that aged like milk lol

All the new hit bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails

Huh? In Australia we can still do both of these things (by which I mean going to departure gate, not the pay TV thing :P)

9/11 put an end to that in the United States.

Damn. My girl would be a wreck with her flying anxiety not having me hold her hand til we had to part at the gate. Doing so before screening would be different cos then there'd be added stress if the screening lines and timing and so on

You can get an escort pass from the airline. You go thru security and wait with them at the gate. Same for the person picking them up on the other side.

Emotional support human.

Good to know it's still an option, but sad that you can't all just do it by default, though of course I understand why airline security is stricter over there.

You can actually still do it if you’re escorting an elderly family member. I just did it last year.

True but nobody really does it. I occasionally have to work at the airport and although I have an ASIC it still blows my mind I could just walk through security without it and not actually getting a flight.

Everyone I know does it, at least re waiting at the departure gate with people before they leave. Arrivals people generally just wait at baggage or exit so you don't have to loop back, but going through to wait at departure with loved ones is defs normal, regardless of asic

Not in the US. A boarding pass is required to get through airport security.

Not true, you can get an escort pass

For an unaccompanied minor or for anyone?

I mean, there probably has to be a valid reason, but i just show my Veterans ID card from the VA and they let me, but it's been 3 or 4 years since i wanted to

Yeah i don't think that I as a civilian could get one if I was dropping my brother off at the airport. But i honestly didn't know escort passes were a thing, though I figured there was some provisions for sending a child or someone with special needs on a flight.

One could claim all kinds of reasons for having to help others, anxiety for example. I just use the veteran thing as a sympathy deal, lol.

Unaccompanied minor or special needs only I think but I don't know for sure as I've only done it for unaccompanied minor

Probably not for funsies, right?

Escorting minors or the elderly, sure.

But just bc you want to hang out with your boo?

Probably not, but if they allowed that we would complain about groups of family and friends holding up security line and crowding the airport even more than it is to see one kid off to college. Kind of glad you're not allowed except for a reason

I guess it's because parking costs a weeks wage, so they assume most people aren't staying long!

This alone would be enough to keep me from waiting at a gate even if there weren't hoops to jump through to get to a gate without a boarding pass.

You can go to a gate without going through security? Never seen that

No, we still have to go through security, but we can "hang out with them until [it's] time to board", as the comment put it. This is in Australia, at least

If you go through security you can do it in the US too. Nobody wants to go through security.

Cos of the queue, or cos they make you strip off your shoes and belts and weird things? For us it's just like Empty your pockets into a tray, put your laptop in a tray and chuck your bag in the conveyor belt. Walk through metal detector and done (well, and get randomly selected for drug testing which only takes a minute or so). Then in the other side are shops, food courts and the gates to hang out with loved ones pre flight, so a minor inconvenience for a huge gain

Only domestic though. International is passengers only through passport checks and security.

The last few times I’ve flown (but not every time) they don’t check my boarding pass anymore at security, just my ID. Does this mean it’s coming back unofficially?

They have advance passenger information data already. They are just checking it against that. If it can’t look it up by ID, then they will ask you to scan a ticket. Some airports are trialing a program where you can go in without flying.

They don’t check boarding passes at security in Australia, literally anyone can come wait with you. I had no idea this was a thing in other countries

My wife's family still tries to do this and it drives me nuts. I just want to get through security so I can relax on the other side and they always want to hang out and get some last minute chats in outside the security line.

We would sometimes have family come in from South America and then sometimes their flight was delayed. Hanging out with those pay TVs was great. The first time I saw "The day the Earth Stood Still" was on one of those idiotic things.

Can you not do this anymore? I just did both these things just 5 years ago

Not at a US airport (at least, if they've gone through security - only ticketed passengers are allowed through TSA checkpoints)...

One of my kids asked how did air travel change after 9/11 and I mentioned this specifically. Seems such a long time ago now where you could see someone off at an actual terminal gate or meet them there when their plane arrived

You can't hang out with people after dropping them off at airport?

Not at the gate, and it usually takes time to get through security so they can't really wait in the main lobby

I miss doing that so much! My grandmother and her sisters used to fly back to the Philippines once a year, and I loved hanging out in SFO while we waited to say goodbye.

dropping someone off, you could hang out with them until it was time to board.

Ah, the cause of so many unintentional trips to Yemen...

Also on the plane, you could sometimes be invited to look into the cockpit (mostly if you were a kid). I feel like 9/11 stopped that indefinitely.

They still sort of do that. A couple of years ago I went on a trip to Europe and they asked my 8 year old if he wanted to go see the cockpit. But this is during boarding before plane takes off. Still kind of neat. I went with him and took pictures of him on the pilot seat.

Ah that's good to hear! With it not in the air it does sound better for taking photos sitting in the pilot's seat, something that they didn't let you do in the air, haha.

I got to sit in the captain's seat on a flight from the UK to Malta in 1990. I'm so grateful to my dad for asking if we could go and see the flight deck. It's vivid and treasured childhood memory that couldn't be recreated now.

I was on a commuter flight in Norway, and they kept the cockpit door open in the tiny 36-seat propeller plane.

Was fun until my colleague noticed the captain was correcting the first officer a lot. Also, due to the winds, at some point I could see the runway through the cockpit windows.

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Hey! Cheap or not I still have mine thirty years later…

Aw man. I lost mine.

Delta just gave my daughter one two years ago!

They invited my son into the cockpit on his first ever flight, he was so excited to sit in the pilots seat. Every four year old boy’s dream. That was just two weeks ago.

You should probably go retrieve him.

He's having the time of his life, give him another week.

Maybe he will learn skydiving next.

“Joey, do you like movies about Gladiators?”

"Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?"

On a flight to Chicago a few years ago, they let me into the cockpit to take a photo. I was 27 at the time :)

I was going to say Ive seen grown ass men get excited and be invited to look at the cockpit lol

I was majorly scared of flying but travelled 2-3 times per week for work. I spent SO much time in the cabin jump seat.

Twist: you're a pilot.

I think this still happens. I took a flight last month and overheard a flight attendant ask a kid if he wanted to see the cockpit.

~~indefinitely~~ permanently

You can still do that in Australia (domestic flights).

And you can bring a beer to greet them with too.

My brother in law actually did it for us in the US recently when we flew in for his wedding, though he was cheating the system. He bought a flight, paid extra to be able to refund it, and then cancelled it once he was past security. He didn't tell us he was going to do this, so we were really confused to see him as soon as we got off the plane.

As someone who grew up in a post-9/11 world but has been on several planes, I still can't believe people used to just do shit without 2 fucking hours of pointless bureaucracy from the TSA.

It sounds almost fictional every time I hear it.

Must just be the US, still do this in Australia for domestic flights.

I love how Australia is so comically Australian about stuff at times. As a Brit flying from Broome to Melbourne via Perth I necked a load of beers I had left over from the trip up the West Coast, assuming I couldn't take it on board. Got to security, only for the most laid-back security guard in the world to tell me I couldn've taken a case of wine on the flight with me if I'd wanted. How can they be so chill about restrictions when everyone else is so uptight? It's like the inconsistency between airlines on whether you need to use flight mode on your phone.

That (and bringing people to the gate) was only an American thing, though. It was never possible in Europe.

Yeah I was always confused by it on American TV. They'd meet their friends and then go to baggage reclaim.

Are you no longer allowed to do this?

The only time I've seen it allowed is for unaccompanied minors and disabled passengers.

You can get a special ticket at the initial counter that can get you access to the interior for good cause, like to help take care of someone. I've never tried to do it for just "ah, I just want to be there to say hi!"

Jesus i wish i got to experience those days. Now i get a colonoscopy every time i fly

I waved to my grandma and cousin from the plane window when I was 16 (right before 9/11) and it was so nice. I miss that now. Saying bye to my husband from the car sucks.

I had my 5th birthday party in the flight control tower at Logan Airport in Boston in the late 80s.

You could literally watch them guide the planes in to land whenever you wanted. My dad traveled fairly often to work so my mom would take my sisters and I to the airport, and we always stopped at the flight control tower.

We also were allowed meet my dad at the gate, and then board the plane and see the cockpit after everyone else got off. No, we did not have tickets.

That was so nice, I used to love being greeted when I'd get off the plane.

Come to kc it's still a thing for now. The new terminal is being built so it's about to end.

That airport is a trip.

It makes me think the architects had this poorly designed bus station in their back pocket when this job came up and they just said, "Fuck it, make it an airport now."

It was amazing pre 9/11. They designed it to be about a 30 second walk from curb to gate, only about 75 feet wide.

It's good to know they had an actual plan and reasons for its design. Sounds like it was a pretty cool place to fly in and out of.

You can't do that in KC, once you're checked in you can't do all that wandering around. Lots of airports allow you to drive up and pick up passengers as soon as one lands.

Been in that airport several times. It's nice to get dropped off right in front of your gate.

And get shit faced at the bar

I miss this.

Australia you can do that. Don’t even have to show a boarding pass.

Omg or dropping them off and being able to sit with them until they boarded. that will forever be missed

May bin Laden rot in hell

You can still do this in the US you just ask for a gate pass. You go thru security theater an your good to go.

I googled it and it looks like not every airport or airline allows this. Some limit it to people accompanying minors or the disabled.

Oh thats good to know. I had done it in ATL i didnt know that it wasnt all airports. Thanks for the heads up.

Yeah, I watched a guy go through the JetBlue line yesterday in Fort Lauderdale asking for a gate pass to go through with his (non-minor) son. He said, "they guy over there said to 'ask nicely.'" lmao

Who do you ask? The airline you are meeting?

I got one for my gf the other day. Asked the airline counter agent and she gave us one no hassle. This was American

Yup. I did it with delta from ATL, see the above comment as it turns out not all locations do it.

Although in a lot of ways people being able to call you as they're walking towards the exit of the airport and being able to drive up and get them is better. But yeah... sometimes I still miss waiting for people.

At the airport in my town we used to wait on the grass in front of the run way for my dad to get back from business trips, I remember we all used to block our ears and try to scream louder than his plane when it taxied in. There was one of those white plastic chains keeping us on the grass, and a nice old Zulu guy who'd kick a ball around with us when the plane was late. I landed at that airport recently and my dad fetched me, he had to wait in the car in the parking lot.

Thanks 9/11. I don't even live anywhere close to the USA.

This should still be a thing.

At the time I lived near O'hare outside of Chicago - I'd go hang out in the mezzanine and dream of travelling around the world. It had some really great architecture too, if you've seen Home Alone.

Or go see them off at the gate. I really miss this.

You can’t do this now?..

America?

Was a frequent flyer since the age of 4 (bad divorce). This was a favorite memory when coming back from visiting my dads.

We used to do this with my uncle John. He would come to visit every other summer for a couple months. We would meet him at the airport. He and my dad would get a beer at the terminal. I'd ask for a burger, but no way would my dad spend $7 for a cheeseburger.

Two months later, we would walk him to the terminal to catch his flight home.

Still can in Australia, the land of the free

You can still do this domestically in Australia, as long as you're prepared to go through security.

When getting on a flight if you had your shirt tucked in and shoes tied you could just go from the airport’s entrance to the flight itself only being checked once

TSA precheck is the closest to this you can get anymore.

I used the love walking to the gate with my dad to see him off on a business trip when I was a kid. It seemed so special as I had never flown. You could also arrive like 20 minutes before your flight was due to leave, and walk straight to the gate to immediately board, because you didn't have to allow literal hours for possible TSA delays.

I remember getting on a flight mid-90's after arriving at the airport 20 mins before departure.... customer service actually brought me to the gate!

Only in the US I believe. That's not something I've ever seen anywhere else in the world (and travelled a lot in the 80-90's)

Ive always wondered why they did that in movies yet when i went it wasn't even possible

It was, then September 11......

You can still do this in Australia. You just need to go through security first. There is no security to leave.

That still seems lottery pretty normal to me.

I don't know if that was a domestic US thing but I don't ever remember that and I was 6 in 1990

Smoking sections in airports

I still do that, especially for my grandma!

Can still do that in Australia and wait with people at their gate for them to leave

Im sure if alot of those who weren’t around in the 90s are probably confused when they watch old romcoms where one character is about to board a plane to leave and their love interest comes rushing through to grab them for a kiss lol. Ya can’t do that anymore lol

We still do this in Australia!

I remember going to pick someone up and going to watch the planes up on the roof

In the 80's, you didn't even have to go through security to do it.

Now I can just kick them off at the drop off for departure and go about my day. Thanks Osama

They can still do this in Australia

Love is actually…nonexistent

My dad used to take us to the airport for lunch whenever he got a day off work, you could watch all the planes take off, deffo missing out on that these days

Is it only America where this is no longer a thing, or has it changed in Euro countries too? This is still possible in Australian airports, though done less.

This is how I met my partner.

I got to go to the gate to pick up my niblings who were traveling to see us by themselves. It was so surreal. I felt like I was doing something wrong and someone was about to come arrest me for sitting in a chair drinking a coffee and reading a book without any luggage and boarding pass.

i was listening to a podcast (black box down - avaition incidents/disasters) one guy was saying in the 90s he went to grab a buddy. Was walking through security, had a knife and the guy was like youre going to have to go put that in your car.

The host replied, "i am just picking up my buddy, not flying can i just keep it?" they let him lol. He went on with his day, just a different time.

I was talking to my daughter about this the other day. She just turned 18 & was planning a trip so we were chatting about airport security. When I told her about being able to just walk up to the gate, she looked at me in shock & said, "You mean the way they do in movies? You could do that in real life? That has the capacity to be so sketchy!"

Like one of the last times I saw a friend that died in war I was able to get him at the gate. Great memory. He didn't know I was coming and it was a welcomed surprise

This feels embarrassing but my god, I didn’t know this was a thing!!! 90s baby here!

I once answered an ad at the student union and bought some guys plane ticket from Tucson to Seattle for $35 the day before. No I.D.s were checked.

you could

more like they expected you to wait until they boarded the plane and you stood there like an asshole waving as the plane started driving down the runway. You could wait for them at a gate is more of a negative IMO fuck the airport get me outta there asap.

this is a out of NYC thing! When people come to visit they are on their own to make it you ,

I'm confused; is this no longer possible where you live? Because it is still standard in most European airports I've visited.

I miss the garunteed rows too myself

And why exactly can’t you do this anymore?

Wow. You just unlocked the memory of the last time I ever picked someone up from the gate at the airport. Must have been summer of 2001 based on where I was living. Crazy.

You might of been able to smoke while you waited!

What’s the deal here? I live in a relatively small city in Australia and so long as I go through the security gates, I can do that for any arrivals here.

Only in America

For domestic flights you can still do that where I live, just not international flights

Watch them come off the plane was cool. Now you have to subject yourself to molestation by the TSA.

Didn't even know this

I completely forgot about this

Gosh how I used to love going to the terminal and watch jets land and take off.

This is still very normal in Australia

I miss this so much

Oh man I miss this. As a kid my family used to fly me solo to visit my grandparents. They would be waiting for me with a big hug as soon as I got off the plane, and my mom or dad would do the same when I got home. It was one of my favorite things.

And I’m still not convinced the changes we made to airport security was worth it.

Yes as a military kid we were able to do this

I remember my dad pre-911 walking to the gate to pick someone up and security letting him keep his pocket knife.

I remember this as a kid! It's was nice

Living in Utah, that made flying better, missionaries would come back and a 100 people would block the exit .

Outdoor observation decks at the terminals where you could watch planes take off and land, and dream about being on them.

You could also walk them to the gate. But no, now you have to go to multiple checkpoints where you have to take everything out of your pockets, any accessories, even your shoes.

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.

r/tipofmytongue

Or /r/tipofmypenis
For nsfw

What a coincidence, I just saw that episode last weekend.

Seinfeld seems to be having a resurgence these days, considering how much way more I see it getting referenced lately. I mean, there's always been the occasional reference in internet culture, it's certainly always been very memeable, but lately I've been seeing a reference to it in every other large post.

Probably because it got added to Netflix recently I’d bet. My dad and i have been watching it through. Fun little activity to do together.

Not "probably". It's literally the reason.

I'd rather see Death Blow.

Chunnel FTW!

More of a Sack Lunch guy myself

Way better than the English Patient!

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HEY! HEY! I HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET!

It doesn’t have anything to do with the plot!

Still! I like to go in fresh!

IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT

Still wasn't as good as Prognosis Negative!

Ya know, sex in a tub...that doesn't work!

Death Blow! When someone wants to blow you up - not for who you are, but for different reasons altogether!

Think we can all agree that Death kinda blows.

Awww man, we're missing the Death Blow!

Prognosis Negative!

So, Death Blow. We meet again!

Prognosis Negative!!!

Lyin' and laughin'!!

r/unexpectedseinfeld

sings When the naysayers nay, ya pick up your pace. You say "Nothin's gonna stop me so get outta my face". We're having adventures all over the place. Rochelle Rocheeeelle!

I heard "Rocky and Elle" is that correct?

No, no. Prognosis Negative.

You've selected Agent Zero?

What? No!

You've selected Brown Eyed Girl?

Quote i was looking for. Hahaha

I would like to see Firestorm

Cosmo Kramer! You are in trouble now! To do this the easy way press one now!

You're in big trouble! To do this the easy way, open the door, now!

"Top Gun Maverick"

I heard Sonic The Hedgehog 2. Do you want to book tickets?

"No."

I heard yes-

I was just here to add this but my work is already done 😃

r/UnexpectedSeinfeld

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Like wanting to see a movie and not knowing when it’s playing, and don’t have a paper handy.

Oh well I guess I’ll just drive to the theatre and see what’s playing and at what times and then just grab a ticket and waste some time!

It all was so much more laid back. You leave your house, no cell phone, no one can get ahold of you, but that’s on you will check your answering machine when you get him in case you missed anything.

It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. Oh look, that new action movie is playing in 45 minutes! Perfect I’ll walk the plaza and then grab some popcorn and be good to go. Look at that.

Man, I miss those days. I know technology is awesome. But there really is a part of me that wishes we could un-invent smart phones.

The Other Side of Darkness

Prognosis Negative.

The last mimzy

You have selected, 300!!!

That reminds me of this ad use to play before the actual movie plays. It was some guy with massive lamb chop side burns chucking a rotary phone and skipping the movie queue

r/unexpectedseinfeld

Those movies that are not so romantic

You know what bothered me so much? The fact that the MF didn't think to become the first voice controlled answering machine thing but kept people pressing the numbers and guess lmao. He'd be a huge hit, first a fragrance millionaire and then a phone one!

I wish you'd edit this and put the word "tell" in caps. It was that delivery that made it so funny.

JFC one of the funniest bits on TV I've ever seen

"If you know the name of the movie you would like to SEE, press one..."

"Please enter the first 3 letters of the movie you want to see now"

Dude I can hear it like it was yesterday. Also when we went to see titanic my dad thought it was hilarious that we had to put in TIT for the movie. Giggled like a little girl. Good times

"You have selected 300!!!!!!"

No, this is Kramer.

“You have selected REGICIDE. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one now!”

I UNDERSTOOD THAT SIMPSON'S REFERENCE!

That's the first thing I thought of :D

For listings in "Ron Kon Koma" press 2

In watchmojo voice?

On that note, calling time and temp loooool

You have selected.... brown eyed girl

You have selected 300!

Then you gotta call to check POPCORN to check the actual current time.

I totally forgot about that lol

If this is the movie you selected press 6

Why you don't tell me what movie you wanna watch?

Wow...memory unlocked. I forgot we used to look at movie times in the newspaper!

There was moviefone too

Why don’t you just TELL me the movie you wanna see??

YOU'VE GOTTA GET ME OVER THAT MOUNTAIN

Just made me lol. Thanks, mate! 😂😂😂

Oh, damn, I just remembered, I also used to do that for cable TV!
Other than the paper on Wednesdays, there was literally no other way to know what would be on TV and when, beyond religiously watching it and hoping for the shows' self promotional ads.

Tv guide magazine

Fr, i remember everyday checking what the closest movie had just in case I was in the mood for it.

Oh damn, Moviephone! I doubt it still exists. Now that Seinfeld episode is so dated.

Moviefone still exists. They shut down the phone line in 2014, but they're still around ok their website.

Without the phone it's just the shell of its former self.

I used to use Fandango.

I used to check the showtimes in the newspaper before school while I ate breakfast and read comics.

Remember then going to the theater and seeing the move sold out and needing to watch a movie you didn't want to see?

I hated working at a cinema during that transition, woof. Old people were NOT happy that we stopped putting the times in the newspaper.

The last time I went to watch a movie was sometime around 2009, how has it changed since lol genuinely wondering.

I worked from 2008 until just before the pandemic, it’s changed a LOT. No more movie times recording, no more newspaper ads. A lot of theaters don’t even have a box office anymore. You either need to buy online or at a kiosk, or sometimes the concession stand. The amenities have gotten better though, with most places having better food and now alcohol, also some places have much nicer seats (mine didn’t). The biggest change might just be how few people actually go see movies these days though.

What’s a newspaper?

A printed out website but the links don’t work if you touch them.

As opposed to a normal printed out website where you simply touch the paper and a webpage pops up from the ether.

My aunt and her family would plan out a whole day of movies by showtimes, and only paying for the first.

I worked as a secretary for the distribution arm of a major studio in Atlanta for a year. I covered the Florida territory. Every day I received the major newspapers from a Florida and I had to cut out the movie listings so there was proof of contract compliance or noncompliance. I also had to check all the drive in theatre listings (there were still quite a few drive ins in Florida) to make sure they weren’t illegally using a brand new release in a double feature. On Mondays after I got the Sunday papers finished, I’d have to pack up the week’s clippings to be shipped to the home office in LA. My counterparts for the Georgia/Alabama and North and South Carolina branches had to do the same thing.

I had that memory unlocked just yesterday as I was watching the latest season of stranger things!

Yep, me too! Made me feel oddly defensive of the Police Academy movies when they dissed the one that was playing locally.

I remember the days when my mom would open the newspaper and shout "who wants to go see a movie!", then all of us brothers would hang onto her as we each scream a different movie.

A couple of years ago I walked into a movie theater to look around and decided that the next day I was going to take my wife there to watch a movie we had talked about seeing. I walked up to the counter and told the woman behind it that I wanted to buy tickets. Without looking up she pointed to the sign over her head and told me I could just go to the website and order them period I told her I knew that but I was standing in front of her with a debit card and I wanted to buy tickets then and there period she looked up at me a little confused and little angry but allowed me to buy my tickets period it took her a couple of minutes because I think she was trying to remember how to do something that she had only been shown once months ago

Did no one else use teletext for this?

Don't forget reviews!

I miss it. I also miss looking for the coupon that got you in for $.50. I miss everything above. Our kids can’t fathom the airport old days. Thanks Bush/Cheney Just part of the “big” plan

I also miss going to the bank and taking out as much money as I wanted out of my account without having to tell the teller why I needed THAT amount of money. It’s none of your damn business why I am taking MT money out of the bank. Just give it to me. All of it.

I worked at a theater in early 2000s. People that worked opening guest services in the morning had to look at the major newspapers and call moviefone that day to confirm all the times were listed correctly.

And for what was on TV

What's a newspaper?

But your annoying sister always talked RIGHT when the movie you wanted to see listed the times. Then you had to start all over again!!!

“Dammit! Shut up, Carol!”

Looking in the paper for a new job, too. Or a flat.

As someone else actively looking for a job right now.... online job hunting is such complete bullshit. It's a lot more convenient yes. There are more fucking scammers then Tinder though.

I think a bigger problem than scammers is whatever filters they're using to auto-filter people out don't seem to work too well. I have a very niche background and would apply to jobs online that required precisely that background, and would just rarely get a call back. The only way I've gotten jobs is either through connections or recruiters.

I'm in the middle of switching careers.

Here looking for a place to rent or buy in the newspaper is still a thing. Lots of older people are landlords/owners and only post there because they're not used to posting on the internet.

i work at a theater. calling the theater for showtimes despite them being on google is still a 5-6x a day thing

Same here. We actually held onto the newspaper times for a long time too and a lot of guests were upset when we stopped doing them.

God i got in trouble cause this old lady called and wanted me to list off every single movie with every single time (this was a 16 screen theater there were hundreds of times on any given day) so i said google it and hung up

Mr. Movie Phone!

Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie?

You’ve selected…Agent Zero?

You've selected Brown Eyed Girl?

Honestly hilarious, that's one excellent episode of Seinfeld.

I miss the TV guide

Until recently, the theater in the small town my dad grew up in still had to call to get showtimes. They only have two screens, so it usually wasn’t difficult to know what was showing.

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What time does Chow Fun start?

Thank you for calling moviefone brought to you by AOL and 101KLOL, for showtimes press 1

101KLOL

You must be from Houston.

They sponsored all the good shit!!

In some countries this still is normal. I have a French friend who'll deadass call the supermarket to ask if they have a certain item in stock.

Yeah, It’s the same in my country

Why would you not do that?

Damn I'm 25 and when I was a teenager I still looked for movie times in 2010

Just realised how behind my country is

Do movie theaters not have websites in your country?

They do. But it was not until like 5-6 years ago that that became a thing. Plus if you want your “good seats” you’d be better of calling “the guy” at your local cinema to get you sorted

That's interesting! Can I ask which country is this?

"Thank you for calling MoviePhone!"

Having to sit through all the other movie times to get to your movie. Ugh

And they were in alphabetical order, meaning of you were calling to get times for "Amadeus" the first movie you would hear was "Batman" so you knew you were in for a wait.

Holy fuck this one really hit home…

Lol looking at the paper, an incredibly ancient practice we had to do

Oh yes, and time and temperature numbers!

I forgot about that!!! I would have my sister call because I was afraid of calling people.

We’d have to call POPCORN for the movie times. Sigh, the good ol days.

Calling POP-CORN to set your clock to the correct time.

You probably called the theater on a land line too. Everyone had one of those in the early 90’s.

Or just reading the poster in front of the cinema.

The small one-screen cinema in my hometown als used to advertise on a lot of posters everywhere (especially in schools), and of course the free monthly local paper.

Used Ceefax for movie times back in the day.

Tf is a newspaper?

This unlocked w memory for me!

Old people still do this.

Source: worked at a movie theater

Calm down kramer

I totally forgot about getting the automated listings on the phone

Oh man I totally forgot about this!! Thanks for the nostalgia.

Hello and thank you for calling Moviefone…

I love watching old movie trailers on YouTube, especially when they say at the end "Check newspaper for showtimes."

Ours had a pre recorded message with the days viewings I used to love ringing that during the summer and planning my day

I used to do that until late 2000s and early 2010. Bring me back memories of just seeing newspaper for looking a movie.

Also checking the TV programmes schedule in newspaper.

Haha same. My country doesn't use 24-hr/military time but in the papers, all my favorite cartoons were listed with times like 2230, or 1700..

I had to ask a teacher how to read those lol

It confuse me every time when I see that some people buy papers for TV shows today.

You'd be surprised how many old people still do that.

I volunteer at a movie theater, and believe it or not, people still do this! I get calls all the time.

We still can check the paper here for movies and the time

I've called 777-F I L M so many times, even just to test out my phone

Brings back memories, I used to do this as late as 2012.

In this vein: being excited to see new movie trailers in theater for upcoming movies.

I remember as a kid in the early 2000 going through the Sunday paper for the showtimes and the comics. Simple times.

Also checking the manual for tv shows

This was literally the only reason I grabbed our town’s free weekly for 10 years.

Yup, taking your crush on a date to the movies, grabbing some grub after then hitting up the local pool hall or whatever chill spot

looking in the paper for movie times.

I did that half a year ago, I didn't even know that was still a thing. (found it coincidentally while reading a newspaper)

The cinema in my small hometown still has the call to find out service. Granted, they also have a website, but it's really funny to dial and listen to the slow ass computerized voice taking forever to read out the movie times

This is still the norm where I live.

Calling "time" so you can reset all your clocks after the power goes out.

I took it a step further. I remember dialing 411 to get the number for the movie theater!

Using teletext to get movie times!

My dad would take me to movies on Sundays and we’d get up early to buy a paper from the man on the corner, get breakfast and look at the movie times. Good memories.

And theyd describe each movie to you!

You just unlocked a memory I didn’t know I had… and now I’m crying like a maniac

As someone who works at a movie theatre, no it's not. I get 20+ people a day calling and asking for the movie times.

I remember doing that in the early 2000's when broadband wasn't everywhere, and not every theater had a website for each location

Called them the other day. No answer

Looking in the paper for anything now is useless, pretty useful in the 90s though

and concerts. :)

My local movie theater still lists what movies they're playing rn in the newspaper, they also have a website but they don't abandon the newspaper either.

I'm a huge movie buff and would clip it out of the paper and carry it around in my wallet.

We did this for the last time one day and had no idea.

Omg yes! You’d have to sit there listening to all the movies and all the times they were playing that day.

Or calling a number to get the correct time

Then, there's the urban legend type story of the woman that was pissed at her boyfriend, so on her way out the door, while had gone for work, called Time in Tokyo and left the phone off the hook. (Long distance charges were a serious thing.)

Omfg, core memory unlocked

Jesus Christ, I have a memory of riding my bike to my grandma's after school to borrow her paper because I wanted to see Harry Potter with my friend and needed to know their times for the next day after 5pm

Or even seeing a list of movies and playtimes on their outside headliner.

I remember calling the drive in every weekend!

I remember when Fandango came out with an automated directory. It was my first experience with AI. Back around 2006, I'd call Fandango and say my zip code and it would spit out theatres.

Then I'd pick the theater with my VOICE. Then it would list movies and show times and read it off to you. As a teenager, it blew my mind.

Welcome to moviephone!

This was common until I’d say about ten years ago. I called the movie number in high school and I graduated in 2012.

I use to do that un til 2016/17 :)

In the late 90s, I called ATT version of “information” I think it was *411 or whatever, to ask for the number for a local movie theater. The operator asked if I would instead like to know what’s playing, and she was able to read me the showtimes. This blew my mind.

Calling movie theater as in to make reservation for a movie/seats?

Because this still exists in switzerland in some cinemas

Trust me, as someone who worked at a movie theater within the last few years, calling in for times is still annoyingly common. Especially when they call to ask about showtimes at a completely different theater.

Slightly making a comeback for me but for restaurants. Because of covid so many places have weird hours now or they don't keep the hours updated on yelp/google/whatever.

Wow, this brings back memories! No movie trailers back then really, just a movie description over the phone lol.

Also - drive ins! They turned the last one we had into a Walmart. The whole family went to the drive in to see one last movie. Good times.

"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. 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.

That is awesome! I wish Brazil had that. We just kept a burner tape on the deck to record the song so we can play it back to friends in hope they knew who was singing it. It never occurred to me to bring that to the audio store though.

Wow, In .Wav format on a 28.8kbps !?! more like 3 hours if I remember right. If you had good phone lines, decently close to a hub, & using a good ISP instead of AOL or Compuserve etc. so you could get the full 28.8 a 10 megabyte file (1 min of wav file = 10mb unless you had an audiophile encode the track at full 44Khz 24 bit Stereo then it was closer to 16mb per min) a 3 min standard wav file would have been 30mb easily meaning best case you were looking at something close to 2.5 hours per song. Before MP3 compression wav files of a 3-5 min songs where massive comparatively to the data restraints of the day.

The phone service thing sounded cool for the time!

I do not miss those nights going to bed watching the Netscape download bar creeping along only to wake up 8 hrs later with it having stalled out at some point trashing the download.

Someone found a use for ex radio hosts

Here they’re put down like retired racehorses.

I would swear that they are all just sent to Kansas City

Growing up in late 90s in a country where internet arrived late.. used to listen to radio together at wee hours of the morning with a girl I liked and we used to sms each other the station number on our dumb phone when the station played one of our favorite songs.. one morning at around 4am they played a song that this girl claimed was her most favorite song from an obscure album and she had trouble finding it. Few days later I email her the mp3 file for the song with a story that I called the radio station, asked for help tracking the song and the RJ went back to the logs to give me the details.

She still believes this story 14 years, a wedding and 2 kids later. Really it was grand old Google and Limewire that came to rescue.

This is so cool

Haha like come on stop thinking so long DJs time is money

“Go with hiim.”

Beebeebop beeboop beebeebop bebpoop

Shazam initially started as a phone service in the UK.

Some of us still have the same internet speed!

just shazam it lol

Yes, because Shazam was available in the 90s of course

Lol, bro that wasn’t even thought of in the 90s.

Yes, because Shazam was available in the 90s of course

Well what was the song

I don't know.

Me neither

Oh well.

Whatever.

Nevermind.

Hello

Hello

Hello

It is either Lionel Richie or Adel

Nope. Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Five years David Bowie

Nope. Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Hello

I’m here! Here in the shadows

Is there anybody out there?

Great song!

This is why I like Reddit

By Fleetwood Mac?

You know the one that goes dunnn dunnn dundundundundun.

Final Countdown

Never let me down

Anna (Go to Him)

Fruit, just listen and you'll know.

I hope u/desolate_company responds to this comment in 5 years time

the real question

Darude sandstorm

You laugh but this literally happened to me. I heard the song on the radio and thought it was amazing. Emailed the radio station and they weren't sure what song was playing when. Later, heard it in an engineering class in school and I was like "WHAT IS THAT SONG" and the kid said "darudesandstorm". This is all true.

Same. I called the station to ask and "sang" it for them, then they played the clip of me singing Sandstorm on the radio.

DO-DO-DO-DO-DO

Man do you have a voice for radio!

La di daa di dum, La di daa di dum..

Only know this thru Elmo. 👏

Fist Fuck Family by Cock and Ball Torture, the outro is haunting.

Is that off the Rightwing Capitalist Scumfuck War-pig Death Machine album?

Opus(sy) VI

Graduation song

It was “Woodstock” but it wasn’t Joni or CSN doing it

So it was Ian Matthews?

It was and it was a glorious experience at 11pm on a rural highway.

Smashing Pumpkins - Bat in a Cage.mp3

Go with him. Al Bundy finally got a win

Nah, Joey from Friends broke the record

Haha, that freeze frame at the end

There's no song, he just needed a story for reddit

I’ve got a true story from the early 2000s! I heard part of this great song on the radio in Toronto one day and while Google was definitely around, I just couldn’t find it—I didn’t really understand the lyrics to be fair and was just guessing. A while later, I was on some douchebag classmate’s MySpace (ya know, middle school) and heard the song: the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Scar Tissue”! I sent some excited message about finally knowing the name of the song and probably got a response like “…k?” But maybe three or four years ago, I got a very sweet DM on a previous Reddit account from somebody that finally learned the name of “In the Mood” thanks to some random old comment of mine. (I responded to share this “Scar Tissue” story.) All in all, I’ll call it cosmically balanced.

Darude Sandstorm

Da ba dee da ba di?

Cotton Eyed Joe.

Hmmm hmmmm hiimmmmmmm

You trying to steal my information? Huh? Are ya?

For me it was Local H - Bound For The Floor. I heard it so much but they never said who it was.

Taking out the CD cover booklet to read the lyrics.

Cursing the band when there was no lyrics booklet.

There was a local college radio station that I would listen to on my way to high school every morning - they had a 30 minute punk rock block from 7-730 called 'Pick it up!' that I loved.

One morning they played the most epic song I had ever heard. I still vaguely remember the melody. Point being, it we the only time in my entire life I ever heard the song. Never found out the name, the band, or anything. For all I know it was a local band, but I guess the point is that the song has been lost in the ether, and I'm probably never going to find out what it was or hear it ever again.

To a certain extent it reminds me of an episode of Pete & Pete where little Pete stumbles across a garage band playing the 'best song ever', and then spends the rest of the episode trying to find and/or recreate it. The Episode was 'A Hard Day's Pete', and the song was Summerbaby by Polaris.

PETE AND PETE!

Pete and fucking Pete. I was obsessed with that show. Artie!!!

Six Underground -Sneaker Pimps

Loved that song. Saw them live once!

Lucky. That's my quintessential early 90s one hit wonder song that always gives me good vibes.

No way dude. They also did Spin Spin Sugar. And if you listen to the whole album it fucking rules.

Forgot about that jam. My bad. Never listened to the whole album.

I had literally like a 2 year running battle to figure out what “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World was called. Someone used it at a talent show when I was in I think grade 7 and I loved the song and for years I would catch it just as the song was ending or something praying they would say the name and they never did

Life before wide spread use of search engines was primitive and cruel

I had the same exact thing. The song was red hot chili peppers - pea and i heard it once somewhere but never knew what it was. After years i was walking home at night and saw a car parked and they listened it windows open. I had to go to and ask them what is this song, i thanked them so much and told that i had searched for it years.

I loved that song! Listening to it now for the first time in maybe twenty years, and it's still amazing. Thank you!

When I was a kid, if I wanted lyrics to a song I would have to play my tape and rewind it phrase by phrase as I wrote the lyrics down.

Those were the days you had to go into the record shop and sing / hum / beatbox the bit you heard on the radio and hope the salesperson knew what you were on about. This is exactly how I bought the cd single of Cantaloop. Went into the shop and said "biddy biddy bop" a few times to this guy's amused face. Those staff really knew their stuff.

Reply All did an incredible podcast about this situation exactly - Episode #158 The Case of the Missing Hit.

Do yourself a favor and give it a listen. They go to insane lengths to figure it out, and it's so entertaining. One of my favorite episodes they've done! Excuse me while I go relisten :)

Edit: it's a really catchy song they unearth, and now it's part of my rotation, so that's a bit of a bonus!

Married With Children did an episode based around that and... I knew the song! It was frustrating and cathartic yelling at Al through that one.

Hmm hmm him

"Anna". Covered by The Beatles. Probably the version Both Al Bundy and me knew. Don't know who did it first.

I'll give it a listen, cheers!

Let me know what you think!

Back in the 90’s we were at a graduation party with karaoke and “Love Shack” by the B52’s was on.

My wife and I waited for the big moment to finally understand what they say when the music stops, right then someone danced by, blocking our view of the subtitles.

We were devastated!

Years later we finally got it, Tin Roof Rusted!

Happened to me too, turns out it was Sunshine by Dario G.

this might have been early 2000s, but one day I was flipping through some of the AM stations when I heard what sounded like a bunch of random noises that were put together intentionally. It wasn't different stations cutting into each other, it was too clear for that. I ended up listening (while doing other things) for 40 minutes before it ended and the radio person spoke.

I had no idea people listened to ambient sound for the aesthetic until the internet exposed me to that kind of thing.

The first time I knew the world had changed was when I was able to find the name of a song just by using my phone. It was a song I hadn't heard for at least a decade, but I remembered I had liked it. Easy riff, catchy Chorus, very laid back track.

I had no idea what it was until I heard it played during a 90s throwback hour on my college radio station. As soon as I heard it, I opened up my little flip phone, searched the internet for the lyrics and immediately found it - Got You Where I Want You by the Flys.

This was in 04/05. Some details may be wrong. I don't know if flip phones were even a thing in 04/05, but that's the way I remember it.

I was in Ames in '93 when I heard this ethereal melody. I started asking "does anyone know this? What song is this??" and thankfully some old coot said "Santo and Johnny". That's how I learned who wrote Sleepwalk. It was a far less efficient system than we have in place these days!

This happened to me recently only because I misheard the lyrics and google couldn't kick up anything from what i thought was being said.

Was it moonlight sonata? It must’ve been!

Sorry, I should have said. It was Oh Superman, by Laurie Anderson. I can totally imagine being stopped in my tracks by Moonlight Sonata though...

Moonlight sonata makes me stop and gasp every time I hear it! Thanks for the edit. I’ll check out Oh Superman.

Well, which music was that?

That's my story with Foo Fighters - Everlong too.

When I was a kid I remember hearing the chorus of a pop song and it was until several years later it randomly came on the radio and it was just that memory rush where I was thinking, oh my God I've finally found it, thankfully they said the song on the radio too. It was No More by by 3LW.

That must be nice. I've been haunted for about 18 years by a song I heard on the radio but have never been able to successfully search for.

Have you tried the tip of my tongue subreddit?

I feel embarassed by how vague my recollection is at this point but might be worth a shot. Thanks for the tip!

Damn, I guess I got off lightly. Sincerely hope you find it one day!

Thanks mate, at this point I think it would be a miracle.

Same thing here. It was Andrea Bocelli’s “Time To Say Goodbye” in Italian. I didn’t know the lyrics or anything, was impossible to figure it out until I heard it again with someone who knew what it was.

You just reminded me there was some song I would only ever catch the end of on the radio and it seemed so odd and I would never figure out what it was.

I figured it out in like 5 min just now. It was "the memory remains" by Metallica. The outro has that weird da da dadada singing.

Well if it was any good they would have played 50 times a day. /s

I see your /s, but yeah, it was a few years after the song was first released.

my longest search was about 13 years , it was so satisfying, cant remember the song now

I remember hearing "All the Young Dudes" on the radio when I was about 10 , and we didn't have SoundHound or anything yet, but I did have one of those flip phones I could record shitty audio on, so I got the last 30 seconds of the song, and spent.over a week trying to look stuff up to pinpoint who it was by

Please tell me the name I’m curious now

This sure was a beautiful song

I heard joker and the theif by wolfmother on the radio. Took me years to hear that song again and find out who they were. Ended up catching them on Conan when he was still on NBC

In the early 2000s I had a device from Sony called the eMarker. When you heard a song on the radio that you needed to know the name of you'd push the single button on this USB device. Then insert the device into your home pc and it would sync up to a website that showed you what songs were playing at that exact time on the user specified radio stations. It was great when it worked!

I've called radio stations to ask "what was that song that went sings a bit of the tune"

My local alternative station was small and accessible to call, you could have a chat with whoever was doing a show at the time.

Hhm hmm him....

Strangely, I had this with 'Everywhere' by Fleetwood Mac for years...

Was the song Five years by David Bowie by any chance ha

What was the song?

Well. What was the name of this beautiful song?

What is the name of that song with the words “this is the Reebok or the Nike”

Yes this! Ppl don’t know how good we have it, ppl take music accessibility for granted!

Hmm hmm him

Oh no, everyone knew that one

I was referring to this: https://youtu.be/iuMazsXVRgQ but I definitely knew the Crash Test Dummies song.

Well I just listened to it and I was in tears by the end. Why? What a strange and beautiful song. Thank you for sharing.

I'm so glad you gave it a listen! It's... really something else isn't it?

There's nothing nicer than a shared song. Funny that it's between strangers possibly half a world away in this case, borne from turning on the radio at just the right and just the wrong moment nearly thirty years ago.

Had the same experience with Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence. 5 or 6 years after being haunted by the unknown song, it came on the radio at the grocery store, fortunately my friend knew it.

My brother used to have a blank tape in his ghetto blaster, and anytime a song on the radio came on he liked, he'd hit record. We had so many blank tapes with 1/2 to 3/4 lengths of songs on them. The good old days.

“In your automatic arms. In your electronic arms.”

I had to listen to it all the way through.

That's happened to me several times, and the longest gap was from 9 years old to 33 years old: The Bell Song from Lakme. I sang it to a friend in Volleyball who was into opera. Sort of f***ing amazing that I could remember that song fragment for over 20 years.

Try a little tenderness: the ending was so cool, that I forgot what the beginning was. A friend played that song at a party in his frat house band.

Aerosmith - Janie's Got A Gun. I liked the ending, but (again) wasn't paying attention at the beginning.

What Smashmouth song did it end up being?

Lol, I love that song but only play it when I'm mad at my kids as they hate it so much!

Remember Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry? I loved the song, did not find out who sang it for years. When I finally heard it on the radio and the DJ said the name of the song, my only option of course was to go buy his CD.

...Turns out the rest of the CD sucked. That song is still a bop though.

My dad had a huge movie reference book next to his armchair to look up actors and cross reference them. He died in 1998. I think he would have very much liked Google.

That reminds me of this game my friends and I used to play called "The Movie Game" where one person would challenge with two actors (as unrelated as possible) and the other person would have to get from one actor to the other via the movies they'd been in. So, if the challenge was "get from John Cazale to Amanda Peet" I'd say something like "John Cazale was in The Godfather with Robert De Niro, who was in Meet the Parents with Owen Wilson, who was in Armageddon with Bruce Willis, who was in The Whole Nine Yards with Amanda Peet".

The funniest part of the game was the meta-strategy where certain actors automatically equalled other actors, due to certain movies, and you'd never pick them if you wanted it to be challenging. For example, a movie like Ocean's Eleven (or rather the entire series) means that Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, etc. all equal each other. It's actually hilarious how often an Ocean's movie would come up in that game.

Damn. Did he at least get to see IMDb?

I don't miss people being confidently wrong all the time. The only reason we used to think older means wiser is because we didn't have the ability to fact check them on the spot.

Plenty of people are confidently wrong about established facts nowadays. In addition I think we now seem to have way more people that are zealots about ideology. The ease of connectedness with other like minded individuals cause of these things propagate. E.g. in the 90s there were like zero people who thought the earth was actually flat, nowadays not so much

I don't think the number of zealous people has really changed, you just hear about them more often and they get riled up more frequently. I blame that more on modern news outlets than the connectedness of people, they found that engagement increases when people are angry so they're constantly poking the bear.

You might not be able to convince everyone that they're wrong, but at least when your uncle starts talking about how the planet is just on a natural warming cycle, you can look it up and realise he's actually just a moron instead of believing him because he is older than you.

I guess it depends on what websites you go to though right?

I think more the point here is that wise people always consider the source of information when deciding to trust someone’s opinion. That really hasn’t changed in the last couple thousand years

Yeah, you can look it up and find the wrong thing, but it's still better than not being able to look it up at all and just taking everything your elders say on faith.

Word of mouth spread plenty of false information before the internet was ever conceptualised and some people would have been considered a valid source of information despite speaking entirely out of their ass.

You're not really wrong but it does depend on the internet source. The internet has everything, I swear The age of information. But if someone says something ridiculous and I find something that refutes it, they give me a link to their false source that supports their ridiculous. I feel like the internet is great yet still in in its teenage years. People still have to sort out the sources.

Of course the internet is great. But with the increases access to information, there is still the need to scrutinize the source. There comes a time in everyone’s life where they start to scrutinize things more. Now whether you are talking about TMZ, fox, CNN or uncle joe, whether or not you question the source has nothing to do with access to information, and everything to do with your own level of skepticism and maturity. That’s the point, access to knowledge, does not make one wise.

I miss being confidently wrong all the time.

Though me and my friends still sometimes refuse to look up things when we have a discussion about movies or whatever. We will literally all be sitting on our computers talking through Discord and just try to figure it out or argue, and then look things up after the discussion because it's more fun that way.

I still have conversations like that too, the only real difference is they don't end with "I guess we'll never know for sure."

Good thing everyone’s right now! /s

Seriously, I think the internet has made us worse at this. People weren’t ‘confidently wrong’ about things, we just admitted we didn’t know more often.

Now, everyone who reads a headline thinks they’re an expert and everyone else is wrong.

I don’t agree. I’d argue being wise is not so much about knowing facts as having life experience to share that can’t be just looked up in an encyclopedia or Wikipedia easily, but only learned through years of study and dedication, OR through hard-earned personal experience being put to good use.

At school. Did you see that movie on TV last night? No I missed it. Ah well. I'll wait until it's on TV again maybe next year.

I remember having an argument with a friend about an actor being in a movie. We ended up at a music/video store in the mall, grabbed the tape off the wall, skimmed down to the bottom of the box and pointed their name out proudly.

Or better yet, arguing about it, and the winner of the argument wasn't who was right but whoever had more conviction about their rightness.

I see you’ve met my Aunty.

Reminds me of that “the wicked witch of the EAST! Grow up, bro!” video lol. The pseudo-heated discussions about media franchise lore!

We still have that in spades. Just has moved to having that argument about basic science, govt, and basic human rights instead of trivia.

Did this last weekend with my wife after 5 minutes I was like why are we debating this when I can just Google it.

When Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett got married, I was talking about it with a friend. I was trying to remember the name of one of the actors she had been previously engaged to, and all I could remember was he was in Young Guns, and was in Flatliners with her. Neither of us could remember his name. I went to my parents movie collection. Got down Young Guns and proceeded to fast forward the entire movie to the credits. It was Kiefer Sutherland.

The whole conversation was on a corded landline phone. It was all very 90's.

Literally happened earlier this evening.

GF : "wasn't that from that one movie?" Me : "you're going to need to be more specific..."

Haha

Also any sort of proposition bets being placed as an outcome of this situation.

E.g.

“Hey remember when Charlie Sheen got high in The breakfast club and ran around the top of the library doing cartwheels and shit?”

“Charlie sheen wasn’t in breakfast club dumbass that was Emilio Estavez”

“Bullshit it was Charlie sheen the same guy from Young guns”

“I’ll bet you $50 buck it was Emilio Estavez”

“Bet! Let’s go to blockbuster and find out”

"No, that was his brother."

"They have different last names, they're not brothers."

"They look exactly alike."

"Emilio Estevez is Hispanic, Charlie Sheen is white."

"They both look like carbon copies of Martin Sheen".

Take me back 😭

Or debates about things that couldn't be resolved by just looking it up on a phone.

Shits nice. Sometimes I’ll stop myself from googling or tell whoever I’m talking to to not look idc

Literally. My mum used to refuse to stop until she remembered the answer to something like this, to the point where it would keep her up at night. We got so much fun from leaving a question hanging and watching her getting asked trying to remember the answer.

Now she just googles it and ruins our fun :(

“I’ll IMDb it when I get home.”

The correct answer is good music

Or even just the good natured arguments about things like who wrote what song, or what actor that was in that one movie.

I used to call 192 (Direct Enquiries UK) and ask them if they knew.

I have a very distinct memory circa 2002 of my best friend saying, “God I wish we had IMDb right here, this is gonna drive us crazy until we remember his name.” Now… we do!

My grandma does this and it annoys me so much. “You know that guy?” No. I don’t. “From the thing!” What Tf is the thing lol

Smartphones killed half the conversations with my brother in law. It took him a while to adjust and have conversations about life instead of arguing which engine was in which model year of ford mustang... Google made family gatherings much easier.

If you ever get a chance, watch marc maron's latest Netflix comedy special. He has a bit on this idea and it's some of thr best build ups you'll ever hear.

I'm in this picture and I don't like it. I wish I could have forgotten about that shit.

I still like playing the guessing/association game. Let's bullshit about it for like 5, 10 minutes, then we can look it up

It’s weird how many people have phones with Google on them, but one of these comes up and people look at me and tell me to Google it.

It’s like I’m a Google bot or something. Maybe they like how I summarize the search data? IDK it’s weird how often it happens. I guess that’s what I get for being a know it all!

I used to work at a blockbuster and we had a thick book that was basically a paper copy of IMDb. We got phonecalls daily asking us to settle different movie disputes.

This is what it'd be like to watch a movie in hell!

Looking in the paper for a new job, too. Or a flat.

My Mom used to buy these huge movie reference books and look up stuff like the actors running time and year. Now IMDB

Amazing how good Google is at sniffing through my bullshit.

"Who's that black guy with the weird eye?"

First result: "Forrest Whitaker"

Black magic.

Used to discuss, debate and argue. Now we just Google.

It took me like 10 years to figure out the song jack and Diane by John cougar Mellencamp. Even with google it was impossible to find. All I heard of it or could remember was the guitar riff which is really hard to search for.

Still happens all the time. But I solve this as much as I can.

Ahahahaha I miss that kinda. The mystery and wonder of literally everything has been ruined by easily researched information in our pockets 24/7.

Block buster used to have what was essentialy a book version of imdb she wanted to find a movie with a certain actor in it

Greg Henry.

In the 90'sm "that guy" was always Greg Henry.

My then-girlfriend (now wife) and I would always say "let's look it up when we get home" and always forgot to.

Do you know where Tom Petty is from?

Clocking on AOL icon, modem starts screeching

Bill was the best at this! He had such a memory! Actors, US presidents, golfers, baseball players, band members. He was also the last one of us to get a smartphone. He called them "dumbphones".

I can recall several long arguments in the 80's and 90's about what the actual lyrics were in a song. To this day I want to find this one guy I used to know and say "SEE, the lyric is "Money for nothin' and your chicks for free" not "checks for free".

“Was Axle Rose really a classical ballet dancer?”

“Yeah, I think I heard that too.”

“Confirmed”

*Both continue to bring up Axle Rose’s ballet skills as “fun fact trivia” for the next 20 years.

I remember in high school a teacher explaining the mental process of having to think through "They were in this movie, with that person, in that one year. If I could remember that other movie's name, then I can check if I still have the VHS copy". Now you just go to IMDB.

This is so interesting. Whenever I watch a movie with my parents (in their 60s now), this always comes up where they ask about the actor and what other big move he played in, and it's always this huge debate. Meanwhile it takes me 10 seconds to pull up their IMBb page...

🎵Back in the 90's I was in a very famous TV shoooow🎵

Actually, of all things, IMDB was around for basically all of the 90s. One of the first truly groundbreaking websites. Way ahead of its time.

lol. so true. miss these times.

F'n beautiful,

This is my favorite response I’ve ever read.

And thank god for that

Card catalogues to find books in a library.

On that note… Sears catalogues. The Wishbook was epic.

And now one has to carry around booster seats. Don't know how many times I was sat on a catalog or phone book at my grandparents.

This gave me flashbacks. When I was a kid, one of the tuba players was too short to see over the stand in band class, so we put two phone books under him. He's still half my height, 20+ years later.

I took my kids to an older library once that still had their card catalog as well as the computer system. I showed them how I had to look up books. They were in impressed. I thought it was cool 😢

I miss those! I always found lots of other interesting stuff while flipping through to what I was looking for. Falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole just isn't the same

My library filled the drawers with seed packets you can take and plant. I love pulling open the drawers and flipping through the flowers and vegetables.

What an AWESOME idea!

It was great. I tried to explain it to some kids once. I am awful speller with the old card catalogs I could find what I was looking for after a few flips adjusting my spelling. Now if you can't spell it, you won't find it.

I worked in a library. I hated them

I think most librarians did. I, as a borrower, LOVED them.

My Aunt worked at Princeton library, one of her jobs was to replace or place cards. We visited once and the catalog was huge. The idea of keeping up with all those cards, now as an adult, Wow. Having to create them much less file them. It was never ending.

The big green Guide to Periodical Literature.

And looking at records on microfiche. I had to use the microfiche machine at my college in the 2010s and it was a whole process to get access to it. Before that, I’d only ever seen them in movies.

(I went to libraries in the 90s, but as a child I had very little use for old newspapers, so I never used the microfiche machine then.)

does microfiche still exists? or all all scanned into computers now?

They definitely still exist. I work in a library department for local and state history we have so many cabinets of microfilm. I used to work in an academic library and it had just as much microfilm as well as microfiche. There are online sources like newspapers.com or newsbank but they can be expensive for people to subscribe to.

I would hope they finally got them all scanned in

Haha, my local community library is small and has many great resources, but they also still have a card catalogue. I'm afraid to open it and it won't have cards in it but maybe a bunch of USB flash drives instead.

This transports me to my hometown's old library smell- God, I love the must of Bibliosmia and vanillin...

Early 90s perhaps? I remember my library having computerized catalogs after that (started with dumb terminals)

Same. They had computer terminals at mine. It was still fun to browse the aisles.

I wish college students still had to do this for at least one class, and make hand notes of everything they read, hand construct a reference for each source, and write papers based only on their notes on an old school typewriter without a delete key, from a hand written draft. Then they’d understand just how good they have it.

Throw in the need to look at a range of dates on microfiche because you can't control-f, just to see if there is anything

I love card catalogs. But they were already on their way out in the 90s. I learned the card catalog in like K-1st grade (between 1988-1990), but by 1992 the local college and public libraries were installing the “computer card catalog.”

Exactly, they were being replaced in the late 80's.

I worked part time at my college library in the late 80s and I remember them doing the conversion over time. And the cards being used as scrap paper.

Rural Ohio is another country. They still had card catalogs until at least 2001. last time I visited they still used satellite or cell towers for the internet.

The Dewey Decimal System.

That's still around. There are people who still go to public libraries. The difference is you look it up on your library's website or app instead.

I had to take “library” class in elementary school where we learned the Dewey Decimal System. I believe this was 2nd - 5th grade or so, in the late 90’s. I also remember when they renovated that same library and replaced rows of bookshelves with rows of those colorful boxy Mac computers and made us learn how to use the “word processor”.

Hindsight’s 20/20, huh?

Man, what a scam that was.

Librarian here! Still used. But VERY outdated and problematic.

When I started uni in 2003 thé old index cards were piled as scrap paper beside the computers with the searchable catalogues. There were so many cards the supply lasted until about 2016.

Hah I work in the library where I went to college, I’m still using old catalog cards as scrap. We digitized in 2002, I graduated in 2011.

We had computer based catalogs in the late 80's early 90's or at least microfiche, unless you are talking a rural library or a school library.

TIL Auckland was a "rural library" in the 1990's

I can smell this memory.

Core memory! And the “I Spy” book pages being weirdly sticky from all the kids obsessing over them!

Or in college needing to submit a request for info and then you’d get a stack of abstracts and pull the actual journals! Some you had to find microfiche! Kids don’t understand how good they have it now lol

I gotta say, these I do NOT miss!! They were such a pain 😆

I was taught how to do this... even though our library already had a computer that told us where everything was haha.

Microfinch Baby!

Omg, I hated those. I became such a better student once online searches were a thing.

Yeah, I miss those!

Those are valuable now. I kick myself for not going to that city auction.

Who is masochistic enough to enjoy those? It is so much more convenient now than it was back then.

I'm in my 40s and I've never used a card catalog. They were dead before the 90s. They were still present but everyone used the database.

"Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?!" - Conan The Librarian

Dewey decimal system FTW

What a fun name for that system too, Dewey Decimal system!

Yeah, I know who Dewey Decimal was. He was Donald Duck’s nephew, dumbass!

I cannot tell you how many hours, days and weeks of my education was spent on learning the card catalog/Dewey decimal system. Could they not have foreseen it would be replaced by technology in the very near future? Time I will never get back…

I was a librarian in an elementary school. I was not trained to be a librarian. Most of the material for classes was learning the Dewey decimal system. It seemed dumb to me. The kids need to know how to find what they were looking for. Memorizing what the numbers were for was my job. I can still tell you Mammals start with 599. If my kids are looking up Elephants all they need is to find the number and know where to look for it on the shelves. There were signs that said Mammals, etc. I used the time more to discuss how to use the computers safely, how to research, etc.

I made up games with dewey numbers and authors names. They had to put them in order working in teams. Just to help them find things on the shelves but memorize, nope.

They taught us how to use the card catalogues when I was in elementary school and emphasized what an important skill it would be to have in middle school and high school. By the time I hit middle school Google was a thing and I pretty much only used the library for books that looked interesting, not for school work.

Dewey Decimal would be so happy to hear this

Don't you know the Dewey decimal system? - Conan the librarian

I can still smell the wood and the notecards!

"You had to go the the library where the knowledge was kept, and then use some decimal system by some fuck named Dewey" -Ron White (I think)

My college students look at me like I have 6 eyes when explain what a card catalog was. Now I see them in antique stores.

I was in college in the 90s, and they were really high tech and you could use microfiche to look up stuff!

Yeah. That sucked

Fuck the Dewey Decimal system. Never made any sense to me

And yet, it is still a thing.

Keeping a binder full of CDs in your car

I still have one in mine, all burned discs. Fun times!

Same! It’s so fun for road trips when there isn’t service.

Same! Burned discs. What was fun about those is friends could make them for each other and then basically gift them when you would hang out often. I got a good one from a friend who passed away just after HS. I need to find that and listen to that!!

my dad still to this day burns cds just for his amusement

I’m not sure how you would even do it nowadays. All my CD burning involved pirating the music first.

The beauty of only being able to afford a car that was built before iPhones were a thing

Same, I love going to old CD's I burned 10+ years ago and seeing what playlists I made.

This was early 2000s for me

Same for burned ones for me I should note. Had plain ol' regular cds produced for money before then. I could rip cds until 2001 when we got a computer capable of it.

My mom and burned cds also

Sadly I still have one too. Old cars still have CD players, turns out. 😂

They do, although some new ones do too. My car is older now, a 2014 mid year model, but not an old car, at least not to me.

Same, I’ve got a Car from 2014 as well, with a Cd 💿 player, Then of course All the new Tech.

Wait, weren't CD burners an early 2000's thing?

Yes, but cd players in cars were not, so same for cd binders. Those, at least from what I remember, were late 90s. My comment was more meant to be I still have said player in my car, and an old binder. It is now all burned discs. This was not always true.

Oh, right, gotcha. Lol, I was born in 1990, so I just have my old boombox and a small binder of CDs. I don't think my dad had a CD player in his car til early 2000's and we didn't have a computer until early 2000s either. 🤔

But oh man, I remember when going to my cousin's house who had Limewire and a CD burner on their computer and we downloaded all of the things. It was so magical. Lol

We also didn't have a car with cd player until 2001. Only rich people cars did, or you were like some classmates who had one added into their early 90s or late 80s first car, so tape deck and then fancy looking cd player mounted below that, with a removable face plate for security or something.

Nah. That’s when they picked up. Nerds were doing it back in the late/mid 90s

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.

That was your garage’s two-week removal service.

I'm just insecure enough that I would have felt like theybwere judging my taste in music if they left the binder behind.

Well I always kept Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer on the front page so maybe they took a look at that and that was all she wrote.

You joke, but I had someone get into mu car in college and steal my CDs. Instead of just taking the whole bunch, they took out the mix and burnt ones. Maybe in case they got caught?

My house was broken into when I was a teen. They broke into the basement where mine and my younger brothers bedrooms were. They stole both of our stereos, my lava lamp and all my cd's (mostly 90s alternative and classic rock). They left all of my younger brothers cd's, country music and 90s Christian rock.

Our car got broken into one night and they stole the cd player and all the cds except my sisters boy zone album.

My window broke and when I was younger and I saw that someone had tried to steal my subwoofers but I guess the box was too heavy so they gave up lol

A guy broke into my car, stole the petty change, rifled through all my CD's but didn't take any-- I felt so insulted.

I’ve heard of stories where the people who stole CDs left the binder and picked out which albums they wanted to take.

Accidently left my back passenger door unlocked, but they still broke the driver's side window, stole the radio/cd player...stealing the radio/cd player - stuff happens, breaking the window when the back door was unlocked - stupid, also stealing 1/2 a case of Tagalongs plus a case of Thin Mints - that was just WRONG!

This was in spring of '06 and yes I am still MAD over my girl scout cookies.

Same happened to me in 2009 but they left one CD, "Love Songs till Midnight".

Way way back in the day, a "friend" of mine broke I to a car to steal someone's cd book. Turned out the be a going-away-gift BIBLE.🤦

Bruh this happened to my dad, poor guy went to the mall with his truck only to come out and find it broken into with a shit ton of stuff stolen, was super sad by his CD collection being taken since he had tons of CDS from years of purchasing. My grandpa had to comfort him as he broke down when he got back home after bottling it up because out of everything taken that hurt him the most

The same thing happened to me about 25 years ago. Car broken into in front of my apartment. Took my head unit, 2 amps, subs - pretty expensive system. I was bummed about it but after a few minutes I realized that I had accidentally left my CD collection in the car the night before. All my CDs - gone. Took me so long to collect all of that music. I lost it and started crying right there. I have a decent vinyl collection now but it still stings when I think about it.

I had someone break in my house and stole my cd's. The only problem was they stole all the cases that were empty. I bet they were pissed when they realized they broke into a house just to steal 300 empty cd cases.

[removed]

I don’t hold out much hope for you getting them back.

Was hoping someone would make that reference

Mate came home from work, found the house cleared out, no furniture. Ran from room to room frantic until he saw this hated VHS cover whereupon he realised the wife had left.

Happened to me in about 2000. A whole book of awesome legit CD's and a ton of bootlegs, live stuff and other shit I'd collected off of usenet stolen out of my girlfriends car. After that happened I don't think I ever bought another legit CD after that.

It's funny that it was a thing at one point.

In the 90's my dad had like 2 CDs in his car (like the actual boxes, not a binder), a Dad Rock complilation album and a recording of Les Miserables. Someone broke his window and stole the Dad Rock compilation, left Les Miserables and everything else in the car, didn't even take the radio. They just wanted that album i guess, lol.

Must have been a rival Dad

Hang on I got you fam. Had a car bag that I used to keep my GBC and GBA and all my games in when we would go on long car rides.

This day in particular only my gba and almost all my games were in the bag. I'm talking, every pokemon from yellow to emerald. All gen1, 2 and 3 games. Warioland 4, Kirby tilt n tumble, Harry pottery 1st year to 3rd. Easily had 30+ games in that bag. Like all the cult classic very expensive games now.

Well that bag was stolen and I still am very pissed and very depressed to this day.

When I first moved to Seattle, in 2001, I had finally got my CDs all put into this awesome 50lb case that had like 500 or so CDs in it and about 3 months after I move there, my apartment was robbed and that was one of the things they took. They were at first looking in my closet and saw the empty cases and were mad they were not filled and threw them against the wall and all over the apartment, still chaps my hides, nearly 20 years later!

I had mine stolen around then too. But, I had mostly classical, movie soundtracks, and DC Talk albums. I found them in a neighbor’s side yard. The thief had obviously wanted to check out their haul and realized to their horror that I had horrible taste in music. Still took my CD player though.

No Stryper?

Must have been in the player.

I had a friend who got his car broken into and his cd book taken. The thieves opened the book, saw he had a Right Said Fred cd (I'm too sexy), and took it out and left it on his seat.

My catalytic converter was stolen 2 weeks ago! I might be more pissed about your CD's! All those songs and memories gone smh.

Mine were stolen in 2002ish. I don't think I've bought a single cd since then.

I've had my car broken into multiple times. I'm always slightly offended they never take my cd book.

That was another "normal" thing - when it was worthwhile stealing CDs from a car because you could get a decent amount selling them at a second-hand record store!

My wife left her car unlocked and they went through her binder (it was left open and on the seat) and they didn’t take a single cd.

Same in 1997

what albums did you have?

One of the biggest reasons I had to lock my doors.

That's alot of stolen music.

"You wouldn't download a car would you?"

2022: Challenge accepted.

If it was in the parking lot of a school in Tampa I know who it was.

The RIAA would like to thank you for your business.

Dude same - idk what year .. but same 😔

Same, and it was a binder full of obscure metal and punk band CDs which had zero value to anyone except me.

Everybody that’s had a book of cds has had them stolen. I wonder where they all are today?

My truck got broken into 2 years ago, they stole a bunch of tools but left the wallets of CDs and DVDs alone haha. I guess they can’t even sell them for cash at this point.

I kept my giant CD binders in the house because I was afraid of this happening. I had one of those holders that strapped to the visor and held about a dozen CDs and I just rotated what was in there every week or so.

same. except in 2011. What the fuck would someone do with a binder full of CDs in 2011? half of them weren't even cool, they were just my best 'stay awake while driving a lot' CDs that would have made sense to no one else

Ur not the only 1. They also took my system. Always that 1 damn time you forget to take off the faceplate.

Same, only 2001. 21 years later I’m still suffering.

Holy shit, me too! I had a huge binder I kept under the seat. Went into a restaurant to pick up food for 2 min and it was gone when I got back. Still pissed about it.

This happened to me when I was in college(2009). It was mainly burned mixes too, which makes it so much worse!! Especially because all those songs were downloaded from limewire!

So were mine. My awesome best friend had a stand alone cd copier/burner and we spent an entire day and night copying her entire collection so I could rebuild mine.

A couple of quality Nirvana albums I'll bet.

Woa that's the year I was born, maybe I took them but I don't remember because I was so young. Wee me must have been a nuisance.

Same here. I lost over 100 CDs. I’m still salty about it.

My wife's CD binder was stolen too. They took everything, except for The Carpenters Greatest Hits. That shit was too lame to be burgled.

Same. I even had some CDs from S Club 7 that I didn’t have time to burn. I still have the sleeves (?) (Sorry might not be the right word) and they were stolen circa 2003

I had 500 CD’s stolen in 2002 and I am also still upset about it

About 8 years ago a friend had his car broken into. They didn’t bother with the binder of CDs. In the 90s or early 2000s that would have been a huge win for a thief. They left the CDs though and just took the case of Snapple he had in the trunk.

Damn there was still a lot of use left in 1998! That hurts man. My car got broken into and they left behind my Dell Digital Jukebox. I at least has one thing to be thankful for!

I left mine on an airplane once in 8th grade. The airline never found them. I was truly DEVASTATED and it still bugs me to this day.

My sister borrowed my CD binder (without asking) and left it in some random dude's car in 2005. I'm still pissed too.

Bro you never keep the originals in your car. Always burn copies. That way you don't scratch the originals either.

I'm sure this advice is super helpful today lol

Only the rich had burners

You sure about that?

My dad was burning CDs at the time and we were a middle class suburbia family. Music was a hobby of his though, so he may have had different spending priorities. He had a lot of equipment over the years for keeping his vinyl records on modern media. I wouldn't be burning my own until 2006 or so, on a hand-me-down PC that barely ran Morrowind.

Man, I can't believe I'm getting nostalgic over inferior technology lol.

I was speaking more to my frame of mind than to actual fact.

Right? It was 2004 for me.

[deleted]

At least I got most of my CDs for one cent by signing each of our cats up for bmg.

My foster "brother" stole a giant collection of cds from a truck at church. I imagine that would be a huge loss. I discovered daft punk because of it and still feel guilty by association. So when the last album came out, I bought it. Only album I bought in the last 20 years.

Came here to post this 💿

Case Logic

Fuuuuuck after scrolling through all the expected responses in this thread, this is the one that got me.

Having a Discman on wire with a fake cassette that went into your cassette deck.

And having a passenger responsible for keeping it steady so it didn't skip during the drive

My dad had a vinyl player in his car where my mom made a bag for it so it wouldnt skip while driving

That's next level

I still think those things worked on magic. It just didn't make sense!

I actually still have this.

I know right, all these rich people in here not realizing that a lot of us don't have cars that you can directly plug into.

I did that until I got a new car in 2010

I still have a binder full of CDs in my closet, but it's all game CDs from the 90s. I just never got rid of it, because there's some real memories there.

Some of them might be worth something. I liked a lot of survival horror games back in the day and a few of them ended up being rare and valuable.

Interesting, I never considered the possibility that a bunch of old game CDs might be worth something. I'd rather keep them for the nostalgia tho.

I never would have, either. It was my son who told me. I didn't sell any of mine either. I actually ended up giving them to my son, but it was good to know that my weird taste in games ended up being worth something lol.

Then being pissed that the ONE cd you really wanted to listen to right now was loaned out and never returned so you had to track down who had it.

I took real good care of my cds. The discs and the cases and the booklets. I kept them all displayed in a cd case on my bookshelf like it was my pride and joy.

My friend asked to borrow one - sure! When I got it back, the disc was scratched and smudged (luckily it still played fine). And the front of the case had a big crack right in the middle. Like they probably just dropped the cd case in their backpack with all their textbooks and shit.

I never loaned out my cds after that.

Yea I eventually had a handful of copies I was willing to loan out and kept the pristine ones to myself. That saved me a bunch of drama.

I'm still rocking the cd binder!

My sisters were once stolen out of her car, then found in the vacant lot next door. Obviously she didn't have the same taste in music as the thief.

My sisters were once stolen out of her car

This is a case where an apostrophe is extremely important for clarity.

I never had the binder, but I hat that thing that stepped to the sun visor and held about ten of your top CDs. You’d have to rotate what was in there every once in a while.

I still have some in my car!

Just added another one today since I stopped by goodwill and found a copy of Them Crooked Vultures

Still have mine in the car, comes in handy when i drive somewhere with bad service.

My car is the only place I still listen to CDs.

CDs? Our car at that time only played cassettes.

Yeah CD players in cars in the 90s were a rarity. 00s, sure.

If you don't disturb them they eventually the evolve in to a Queen's Greatest Hits Album.

I still have one! My car is too old for Bluetooth or anything, and too new to have a cassette player, so I have a fuckton of CDs just for car music purposes

I have a fm Bluetooth tuner for long journeys, otherwise I have some cds I burned. I tried to buy some cds, but new cds are some kind of collectors thing now and are expensive, second hand stores had nothing but generic stuff I don't like. So I ended up using old MP3s and sailed the high seas for some others. I didn't want to put my real cds into my car, didn't want them to get damaged. Plus, I didn't want my angsty teenage music on all the time!

I still keep CDs in the car, just in case.

I just found old mix CD’s today and had A MOMENT in the car today. This is a reverse humble brag letting everyone know I have an old car.

So hot in the summer

... Or if you're Mitt Romney, Binders full of women...

Who'd have ever thought that that could be nostalgic for me, when small moves like that could make you less electable.

I have a cd player in my 04' truck

I still do this. Useful for long road trips. Recently had one where I had no phone service (and no Spotify) for two hours. Ended up listening to a bunch of old cds. For the most part, still awesome!

I DON’T miss having to cart around my giant CD case when I traveled though. It made up, like, 1/3 of my carry-on.

I still have mine. My car decided to have a tiff with Android auto so I can no longer listen to music on my phone. Never thought I'd use that binder again, it's got to be 18-ish years old now.

Keeping a binder full of CDs in your car

If you have a 3-5 year old car, they still have CD players, so maybe this is NOT that rare...

Personally I had a old Navi system in my car, I added a Android Auto/Apple car play kit to it... best thing I have ever done...

this may still be a thing still spotted in the trash wagons of some space cowboys....

Better than keeping a binder full of women in your car (and probably more legal).

I remember those, i have like 7 huge binders full of cds and dvds from those days, 4 of them are just music (probably some duplicates theres a shit ton), 2 of them just movies, and one that has a bit of both. I had some friends/connections and some lucky times i guess, now i have a horde of disks that are fading into irrelevancy :D

As a music junkie I still look back on this era with fondness

This was the first thing that came to mind!

Tell that to my grandma

Me and my boys still did this all the way up until about 6/7 years ago....when I accidently chucked our holy grail binder out the window trying to blow the tobacco & budd out.

My mum still has our collection. 2 christmases ago i got her the metallica black album and new kids on the block greatest hits, it was a great bet

Uhm... I still have mine. They're copies though, I keep the originals at home and some albums are originally digital downloads.

I still have one, eventually cars that cost around 500 will come with fancy new stereos but until then it's cd's for me.

I still have one. My car doesn't have bluetooth.

My bf car is so old the only way to listen to music is on CD so we still have this! It's lovely

Never had a binder but the slip for the visor. Still have mine from highschool. I'm pretty sure every CD is scratched though so I rarely use them.

Or the giant CD changer in the trunk. That was the really hot shit.

........... I must be old. I still have one

I still have my CD binder, tho it's not in my car anymore.

That was late nineties unless you were rich. For most of us it was cassettes.

Ha Ha - I still do that.

Or just that sleeve that velcroed on the visor and held 10-12 discs.

Then you painstakingly had to think about which 10-12 deserved to be in your car-listening rotation. Thigs got better when CD burners became ubiquitous though around 2000. I would just copy my favorites or make mix CDs for the car in case mine ever got broken into. I had friends lose binders with hundreds of dollars worth of music.

Yessss. I was a 2000s kid but this brought back memories. Not a single one of those CDs were the actual copy, all of them burned from borrowed copies by my dad

I still have CDs in the console of my 2014 Honda CRV. My daughter is driving my old 2002 Chevy Prizm and has claimed the CD changer for when she upgrades her vehicle. My brother bought her a CD player for Christmas because she is all about buying CDs vs. digital.

This was normal for me until last year. I bought a car so new that there is no CD player. I have to connect my phone to my car with Bluetooth for consistently good music or constantly change stations because local radio stations are shit. I miss my cds.

I do still have mine, I didn't have aux on my last car which was only sold about 3 years ago. It is now a real time capsule, even has mix CDs in there.

Hotshot over here had a cd player in their car in the 90s

I still keep my CD binder in my trunk. In case one day I'm driving through the wilderness and the 5G kicks out. Most of the CD-Rs are flaky and useless

I have an old car and that binder is very much alive (and filled with 90's cds of course)

Still do this. But my car is from 2004. 🤷🏻‍♂️

A friend of mine did this until his entire collection was stolen. Had some good shit in there too, lots of imports and such.

i still have mine :) used it till probably 2010... not a lot of better options, did use my mp3 player, but it was easier to find the music i wanted in the binder than the little stupid screen...

we still have those! pretty convenient incase you don't have radio signal or there's nothing good on the radio

About a year ago I found my shoe box with CD's I used to play in the car back in the early 00's. Started using it again, even burning new music CD's. I find it much easier than Spotify. Just kinda dig in the box, not to much to choose from. And I can do it while driving easy. Searching through Spotify on my phone is to dangerous while driving. Maybe in a new car with a good connected screen U can do it. But for me and my old car at this moment CD's are great.

Throw out mine yesterday

Ive actually still got this! In my 1999 suburban…

Still do. Nobody is taking my mix tapes from me.

I still do that because my parents' old car doesn't have Bluetooth capability but CDs work.

What the heck!?! Hahaha... I was thinking the 90s = VHS, hahaha. You guys have CDs in the 90s?!?! It's really weird that in my 90s childhood, we only had VHS and cassette tapes; we only experienced CDs in the 00s. Well, that's what you get living in a 3rd word country... 😅😭

Also burning CD’s

I still do! Great for when you don’t have service or bad radio reception.

This was normal even 10 years ago.

Look at Mr. Rockefeller over here! What did you do, get $5,000 selling your cable access show to Rob Lowe?

I was moving the bed in my guest room yesterday and found my wife's 500 disc binder. That's like $25 worth of CDs!

All the best ones in the front and the most random, barely-listened-to ones in the back.

I think you mean a mini suitcase full of cassette tapes...

I still do....

Definitely had them but I thought they were so annoying. They could take up a lot of space and were hard to access while driving.

Wait, you had a binder! I just had one of those plastic racks that held 90 cds. It took up a whole seat.

Or a trunk full of 8-tracks.

I still have my binders lol!!! But my car doesn’t have a CD port as it’s 2 years old.

Haha I still do this! Child of the 90s.

I still have a Windows 7 Recovery Disc in my car. I don't know why.

Still have! A lot of veeeery random mixes made back in the day. It’s like musical roulette every time I’m on a drive. Lots of quick mood changes haha

We still have one!

I still do that...

I just found mine a few weeks ago while cleaning. I had a lot of unlabeled mixes.

a binder full of women- Bill Clinton

Mitt Romney still keeps binders full of women

I still got some

Metalheads still do that

Pressing play and record at the same time.

And then the button pops out while trying to get the song on the radio.

I grew up in a small town but we had a junior college with their own college radio station. That radio station owned all the latest hits and would nightly take requests. So my siblings and I would call in to request a song and then record on our blank tapes. It’s literally how we’d make mixed tapas without the source music.

when you played your tapes so much that when you hear one of the songs from a different source your brain is still expecting the next one from your tape and knows the exact moment it's supposed to come in but when it doesn't its kinda wierd.

Or hearing a song years later without someone speaking over the last 20 seconds of it and thinking it sounds weird

This phenomenon actually lives on with playlists now

Agreed, my “liked” on Spotify has an order and I just know what’s next even if I’m way down in the older songs. It gets jarring when the same song is in multiple playlists lol

I think you should play it in shuffle 🔀 mode.

"Should"?

No, often there's a reason for a specific order.

They use Spotify, so they know of the shuffle button. It's that they just don't want to...

Your name suits you, for you to get this confrontational over a playful comment.

And here's the moment where you learn a pivotal life lesson...that my comment was playful, but it's not obvious to you because you lack awareness of social cues and context. Read it over several times, in silence, as it slowly dawns on you that these little "skirmishes" you've undoubtedly had your entire life (online or otherwise) were caused every single time by your lack of awareness. Today is when the seed gets planted for your eventual learning of, YOU'RE the problem.

And as far as your username, the "other" one must be your mother or father.

🖐️🎤

Not at all in the way it used to.. on a mixed tape recorded from the radio the songs used to get cut in the end and there was an abrupt start to the next song and with some radiotalk thrown in like somebody just said

Auto shuffle is activated lots of times though.

I had this but with CD's and the first MP3 players with 20 songs. These days I use shuffle

Oh man. That brings me back. I wanted the Aerosmith song "I don't want to miss a thing" so badly after watching that astronaut movie with bruce willis. And one day I heard from the grapevine that the radio station was gonna play that song at like 11pm or something. No other confirmation just that gossip. So I camped at my radio with an empty cassette just waiting for each song to end and finally... it happened. It played, I recorded it and it was glorious.

I would just sit there for hours and wait for my favorites to come on lol. I would call the station too but it was a massive station so sometimes I wouldn’t even get my song played…

Back then if we had autocorrect I bet it would have readily chosen mix tapes over mixed tapas without a second guess. That error really drives home how the mix tape is becoming a fading memory.

This is profound.

r/ImDeepAndThisSounds14

All fun and games until Lars Ulrich showed up with lawyers at your front door the next day.

It was Dr Dre who got me banned, though I still listen from time to time, I still chuckle about it.

Metallica got famous because everyone copied and passed around their tapes.

All of your radio-taped mix cassettes have that incomplete song at the end of Side B because you wanted it full, but there just wasn't quiiiite enough tape

And the one you have to cut early because the dumbass DJ started talking over the outro.

Or the DJ talks over the intro. Imagine being so self absorbed you think people want to hear your voice instead of the opening riff for Money for Nothing.

That wasn't an accident. They did that specifically to make it so you can't get clean copies of songs off the radio.

Then the chase was on. Searching for that damn little black button. On black carpet. In the dark. Whilst slightly high.

Ripping a music CD made you feel like a hacker even though the functionality was built right into the media player

or the FUCKING DJ STARTS TALKING DURING THE LAST 30 SECONDS!

Putting tape over the security tab/square so you could record over any tape you had in your collection

I learned something old today.

I remember doing this with a tape of the adventures of little Psalty or something like that. I had a religious aunt that would only give us Christian stuff for Christmas like bibles and stuff. In a pinch, this tape became my go to for recording awesome songs from the radio.

PSALTY lmaoooo you just unlocked a core memory of my conservative upbringing. Veggie Tales still slaps tho

I never actually figured out what psalty was. It was a funny name so it stuck in my memory.

oh, just an anthropomorphic, singing, dancing Bible

https://youtu.be/VAGQGi2xQEk

Lol that’s hilarious

And popping out the security tab after making a super special mix so you couldn’t accidentally record over any of it!

Wait you can do that?

This Def Leppard tape sounds a lot like Wu Tang…

How about using a hole punch to make both sides of the 5.25" floppy writeable?

Totally forgot about that!

That works with VHS also. I used to do that to record videos on MTV.

I don't know why but this one made me feel the saddest. I guess it just snapped me back to a moment when I was bored and had no where I had to be, no where I planned to go. My life's todo list completely empty. Just me and the weird 90's dust that seemed to float around in front of sunny windows.

Oh yeah! What the hell happened to that dust? Ain't seen that shit in forever.

Eyesight is just worse.

oh :(

Ouch that hit me too friend

Lol, perfect

Energy codes changed for construction materials.

Buildings aren't made of asbestos any more.

Kids today will never know the level of concentration required to listen to the radio so closely that you can press record at the split second you hear the first beat of your favourite song come on

Our usual system:

Pause then Play+Rec.

Depress Pause

Release on cue

This is true nostalgia - a word that, roughly translated etymologically, means "the pain of returning". And without meaning to get too wanky about it, it's distilled absolutely perfectly in just a few lines by Kafka.

​

It's the sheer possibility ahead of you that's now been stripped away. All the multitude of paths ahead of you that you could have taken, and where they could lead. But each time you take one, those not taken become closed off, as do all the paths they'd lead to. The older you get, the number of decisions behind you grows and those in front of you shrinks. It's a reminder that you've lost something you can never, ever get back. It's existential.

​

The good news is that in ten years time you'll look back on today and think the exact same thing. So carpe diem!

I don’t know if this will make you feel better, but as a child you also worried about things and felt you had stuff that stressed you - it was just issues that now feels so much smaller (unless you also had big issues of course). Things like presenting in front of the class, whether that girl or boy like you or your friend moving away.

The nostalgia makes us forget that and only remember the “not a care in the world” part, which isn’t really true.

I had a stressful childhood so I never relate to the "back when you were a child and had no problems!" Posts/memes.

That just sounds like being young. That's what you miss.

"Wait... that's how my voice really sounds??"

Pressing play and record then pause quickly when the mechanical sound stopped. Stopped you losing a couple seconds at the start of the song as releasing pause was quicker to start the recording. Sometimes you got a little blip of unwanted sound if you didnt hit pause quick enough.

Is that how you took a screenshot?

A screenshot of sound, yes.

It let you record a song from the radio onto a cassette tape. Truly a feature ahead of its time.

[deleted]

You must be rich

Two TVs???

He's teasing you. Nobody has two television sets.

What do you mean you've seen it?? It's brand new!

Lightening gigawatt Libyan mother fuck son

What’s a “rerun”?

I seem to remember having a hifi Aiwa tape deck 92 ish that was soft touch buttons. It instead had a slide lock to disable Record. This was probably to miss catching the mechanical sounds interference.

Everything else I remember from 70s up to that was mechanical. All in one turntable,radio,tape were generally mechanical until they stopped being made

...you know, until this moment I had never stopped to think about when the very last time I did that was.

Freaky! Legit had this exact conversation with people at work today. I'm 33, one is 22, the other is 19. 22yo was talking abut how she ordered the Stranger Things 4 soundtrack on vinyl and cassette when 19yo asked what they were. I felt so old when I told them how we used to have to sit in front of the radio waiting for our fave songs to come then quicky press record!

I didn't know radio's could take screenshots!

It was so hard to do... Lol

While hoping you've got the right song & the DJ doesn't talk over too much of it.

Not radio but similar for VHS; I used to keep a few tapes close by to record my favorite music videos off mtv…real crappy thing was if you liked a song that was 6+ months old, the video was almost never on again…you had to get extremely lucky or you had to pray it came on late night because mtv was shifting to shows around the mid-late 90s anyway.

Although I was definitely using the internet (aol lol) in the 90s, I could not have ever fathomed having practically every music video ever available to me at my finger tips. It’s so crazy bc the feeling in the 90s was if you didn’t see it again, that video would forever exist only in your memories.

Queue the mixtape

Cue

Thank cue. Guess I’ve been doing it wrong since the 90’s.

Alright, I put the mix tape at the end of the line, as requested.

Have the deck on record-pause. Its a lot easier, and you dont get the pop

„Press play on tape“

The forbidden combination

And you got the time just right, and then the radio host talks over the last five seconds of the song.

And the dj forever talking through the beginning or end of the song on your tape recording

So many mixtapes were made.

Fucking up your favorite movie cassette

Ah - radio fishing. My dad and I would do this a lot and create mix tapes for road trips. Spring '95 is now a winamp playlist that took me a while to remember, but it hits the nostalgia feels every time.

Hootie, Del Amitri, Blues Traveler, Fastball..

And putting a piece of tape over the breakaway tab on a cassette that prevents you from recording over the tape so you can re-use it.

So worth it for the radio version of who let the dogs out

Do it in my music studio every day :)

Love this one

[deleted]

It let you record song from the radio onto your cassette tape.

And then taking the notch out before gifting someone your mix tape

You absolute pirate

Be kind. Rewind!

Or else

If you know, you know.

Oh yeah! And taping over the little holes on cassettes that weren’t meant to be recorded over

And then the tape machine takes a selfie! /s

Yup, just sitting around the radio trying to wait for the one song to get rotated in and trying to record it on cue--followed by cutting out the DJ by rewinding and stopping at the exact moment to wait for the next song you want to record.

You can still do this

That’s just a screenshot

Telephone booths.

Pay phones in general

Every time I see a pay phone, which isn’t very often, I have to lift it and see if it works. It usually does not. :(

Was in downtown Nassau in the Bahamas last weekend and saw a couple of pay phones. I didn't try them though.

I bought a pay phone stand that lights up and actually works from eBay for $100, I can link it to my Bluetooth and make calls or i can link it to my landline. I love it!

There's a bank of working pay phones at John Wayne Airport...at least there were on my last business trip shortly pre-covid.

They keep them around to ward off crime.. never know when superman might pop out of one of those things

My wife took me to Scotland a couple years ago, and while out in the middle of nowhere one day we stopped to take a picture of a phone booth. I only just now realized I didn’t take the receiver off the hook. :(

Pay phones make me think of driving around, waiting for a group of boys to call the one girl’s beeper. Then we’d hurry off to find a pay phone so that we could then call them, in order to know where to meet. It was a whole ritual. Lol

Yea, in Australia we don't have to pay for phone booths anymore

do some of them still have the free telstra air? i remember that being a selling point of them staying around you could hotspot the free wifi from them haha.

Yeah they are mostly all wifi hotspots now

We still do :)

my partner services the lights on them, they’re all Telstra hotspots now but still make calls, local calls are free

Yeah we do, I see telstra pay phones mostly in sydney.

Payphones were outdated before maroon 5 ever wrote a song about em.

Land lines in general

Calling Collect on a pay phone to the pay phone your friend is on just across the hall. The high school I went to had pay phones in couple different spots near the cafeteria and a couple more scattered throughout the building, So yes this is a thing we all did just because we had nothing better to do.

1-800-CALL-ATT

There was one in a town I used to live in up until about 2 years ago.

Honestly makes me sad that it’s not there anymore.

In australia we have telstra payphones but for free. So like... freephones

Phone cards for the pay phones.

A lot of people like to romanticize pay phones but what nobody likes to point out is how absolutely filthy the vast majority of them were. Most of them were so nasty you didn't even want to touch them and you wouldn't, unless you really had to make a call.

Phones pay now.

There was a number my buddies dad told us that when dialed from a pay phone along with hanging up the receiver 9 times would ring back the phone , we would play this trick so much constantly at this bar where someone would have to come outside to answer, they never figured it out countless good times !

There's still a working payphone on my university campus

I have a payphone at my work (disconnected and unusable) and kids come in to take pictures like it's an ancient relic and ask if I've ever used it before.

Saw one at a restaurant the other day in the alcove by the bathrooms, and I had to do a double-take. This one still worked. I was shocked because it's been years since I've seen one in the wild, let alone a functioning one.

Im at a PAYYYPHONE trying to call home

Landlines in general.

We still have some around the city I live in.

The company that owns them understand that the phones are almost entirely obsolete, so they’re all free to use. They’re also free wifi hotspots, but really the only reason anyone uses them is to make a call if your phone is dead.

Spotted one last week at my local Lowes home improvement store! I was fucking shocked.

there used to be one by my house but after lockdown it had disappeared, later found out that it was the last pay phone standing in my city

Actually I feel like pay phones are starting to make a come back (they’re still kinda rare) but like 10 years ago when iPhones and droids started to become really popular, places were taking out their pay phones left and right.. 5 years ago, it was impossible to find a pay phone but now I’m seeing them more and more

Where? And why?

I do like the idea of keeping them around, because I hate that people are forced to buy smart phones.

I recently visited Berlin and saw some working pay phones on the streets. Not many and some of them were broke, but still.

I know I miss them. They were so spotless and hygienic.

I'm watching true detective and the wire. Man, things looks so old in both these shows like old computers, payphone, rusty cars and like teens/adults smoking is normal type

"Who the fuck uses a pay phone?"

Working at a pizza joint we got bored and started calling the pay phone outside the store and would say "I got the stuff, you got the money?". Then we started putting oregano on pizza so we put some in a Ziploc and put it in the payphone phone book. I am not sure how we didn't get arrested.

"Good times, good times"

This. I pulled over to show my teenage kids a payphone and asked them what they thought it was... When I told them it is a "payphone" they looked confused and asked where the video screen was? What?!?! You can't watch movies on a payphone? Can you at least play games?

Related, but how about asking a business to use their phone? That is unimaginably awkward now, but it wasn't crazy to ask a business if you could use their phone pre-cell phone. They might not say yes, but it wouldn't be totally weird to ask, and even if they didn't say yes they'd often have a suggestion about a phone they knew you could use (location of nearest pay phone, library down the street, whatever).

There's a chain of gas stations in my area that has a payphone and a road map posted to the wall of every location, even new construction that goes up. It's one of those, "Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it."

I still remember when local calls went from a quarter to $0.35. No one reliably had both a quarter and a dime at the same time!

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about those. They’re extinct now

Don't worry, we'll replace them with suicide booths by the year 3000!

Thank you for using Stop n Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008.

Well, I didn't have anything else planned for today. Let's go get drunk!

We were supposed to get them in 2008...

Thought id let you slip away with that futurama joke there?

Nucular protection on a budget!

Can ya speed it up a little bit please? Even just one and install it near me. I promise not to cheat you out of a quarter like Bender. And you'll get valuable data! Win-win!

why 3000? Lets get it going!

They have phones in booths now? Finally, I don't have to lug this cellphone around.

Puts 40lbs case down that holds the phone and battery unit.

They just got rid of the last one in New York City a few weeks ago

I had to check for the phone booth that I used the most as a teenager (not in NYC, in the beach town where I spent my summers) and it was still there in the most recent Street View! I'll have to see if it's there now when I go by tomorrow. This was where I checked in with my parents and friends circa 1990 to see what was going on. The arcade was just down the street.

They only kept them in NYC for so long because the City made buckets of money selling advertising on the sides.

They were useful as a plot device in movies.

Characters not being able to contact each other was a central plot point in SO many movies.

To the point where modern movies regularly write in reasons for characters to be isolated for some reason. ‘No signal’ is the new ‘no phone booth’

And in one instance, the entire premise.

In the UK people just piss in them now

They used to, but they still do.

I’m almost certain that’s not new

Edit: also, at least in my city, they’re actually putting in new phone booths with a wifi connection and lock boxes for phone charging. Nobody really uses them but I bet someone is really thankful they exist

You have a collect call from "comepickmeup"

We still have them everywhere in Australia

Are you sure? My town now has a sort of Telstra free WiFi booth near where the big set of phone booths used to be, but no coin operated phones.

In Brisbane they're still readily available, and free.

Pay phones here in Australia and now wifi hotspots

not in adelaide, they function the same but are free

do u guys even have wifi in adelaide?

They're being re-introduced in my city in Germany - well, their main purpose is to act as internet hotspots, but they put a payphone in them anyway. Never actually seen anyone use them but they're there again.

I bet someone is going to have their phone either die or break them randomly see one of those and just be confused and relieved. Only one person though.

We still need payphones. They need to bring those back. Sometimes cellphones aren't reliable. Or we have a dead battery.

Yeah, but don't forget you need coins to operate them.

I haven't had loose change in my pocket for a couple of years.

Just use the NFC on your smartphone lol.

The one with the flat battery, which is why I need to use the payphone in the first place?

Just have them take contactless.

The council near me blocked the payphone from being removed or disconnected. Its next to a harbour and they told the phone company they are obligated to keep it there in case of emergency.

See. Now that's smart and common sense.

Cell phone company having one hell of an outage.

where i live, the phone booths were made free just last year

In Australia we will still have these randomly around the place. And just recently, they've all been made free to use which is nice for those who may not have access to a mobile phone :)

in Australia they still exist, a few decades old, now with built-in wifi and free calls to all of Australia

Now that I think about it, can't help but feel that those things are kinda gross. Grabbing and putting a piece of plastic that's been touched by hundreds of people next to your ear that hasn't been cleaned in God knows how long doesn't scream sanitary.

In Australia public phones recently became free to use - they get so little use that it cost the company more to drive around and empty the coins than they ever made. The only ones left are in high traffic areas (outside train stations, shopping centres etc).

i don’t remember any of them ever being removed here in adelaide by telstra, except for when they were in demolished buildings..

I think over the years there's been less and less, maybe it's one of those "slow creep" things that you never really notice. TBH I've never paid too much attention as I (like everyone) have had a mobile phone for yonks...

My buddy scored a aluminum one, for years we've been trying to think of something to do with it, current idea is (he owns 60 acres of land) is to clear a trail in the bush straight from the road but far in the bush, put a really bright light both in it and above it to make it visible from the road and just put an Alexa in it for no reason.

A large part of our privacy law in the US that governs what the government can do to spy on people is based on the expectation of privacy one has in a phone booth.

I didn’t even think about that, but you’re right. You’d prob have more protection in a phone booth than using your cell.

In the UK, they're either being replaced by defibrillator booths or by poles with an Android tablet inside (for web browsing and emergency calling) and USB ports (for charging your phone), kept free by pulling double duty as billboards.

I live in a neighborhood in Portland and someone has a pay phone in front of their house…just in the middle of a neighborhood. I passed by it on a walk recently and was in total shock

You have a collect call from

MOM COME PICK ME UP!

Where does Superman/Clark Kent change now? This feels like an important question

Pagers, having to find a pay phone or use a friends house line

Most in the UK have been updated to hold defibs now

In my city there's still quite a lot of them. Not as many as back then sure, still around various parks and every 5-10 blocks on main Streets. Even two in the small park across the street from me.

Banks of phone booths in airports. Incoming passengers would flock to the phones. Also, reporters would rush to the phones when a big story would break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNTsbZCj7H4

As I was reading this comment I thought ‘that joke from airplane doesn’t make sense anymore, I wonder if there’s a clip of it — oh there it is’.

we still have them where i live, they all got removed last year or so

Aka public urinals

They still exist. You are them all over the place in the UK. What's disappeared is the public toilet booths. I remember the outcry when councils in Scotland said they were getting rid of them, even the ones you had to pay to use.

At least in Scotland it's against the law to refuse someone the use of your toilet 🤣

I remember a weird attempt to modernise them in the mid 00's where they had a screen, solid metal keyboard and rollerball mouse and you could pay to browse the internet. Kinda cool.

Colin Farrell represent

I saw a couple on my Dubai trip a couple weeks ago. They were nothing more than neglected rubble in a forest of skyscrapers, where curious kids peered to see how things used to be.

Roll of quarters in your pocket meant a different thing back then.

They're WiFi hotspots and charging stations now in some parts of Australia

Calling home collect when out with friends...

When I went up to New York to visit family, there was a little town that had a phone booth along the road. Inside was a mannequin that they would dress up for the holidays and seasons. It's been a couple years, I hope it is still there. It was a highlight of the trip

I watched Home Alone at Christmas, the original one, and almost laughed out loud when the mom got to the airport pay phones. There were tons of them and all were busy! Crazy nostalgia there!

Found superman's account!

Here in the UK phone booths are still quite common.

indoor telephone booths

I miss them! I found one in my city a few months back and got excited, had a used needle in the change drawer. Classic.

There's a town near me that still has a functional phone booth. They're super proud of it.

Last one in NYC was just removed

And the idea that phone calls are something one does in private

So in my home town two of the old fashioned red phone boxes have been turnt into a tiny takeaway coffee bar and its honestly the cutest yet smartest thing I've seen in a while.

I miss these and here’s why:

It kept public phone conversations private.

Now people will run their mouths for hours any and everywhere, regardless of who may be stuck within earshot.

It’s fine until the person on the phone has no inside voice, and/or they start using speakerphone, etc.

It’d be nice to have phone booths again to just encourage people to maintain discretion and courtesy, even if using a cell phone.

I think you mean public urinals with a telephone in them

Now they're just there to be vandalised by teenagers that only think of them selves.

Poor Superman has to get dressed in public now. 😢 🦸‍♂️

We still have telephone booths in London🤣

I know one that's free but both has to listen to ads during the call. :D

Just watched the Wire season 1. Pay phones, desks with no computers, lots of 90s

-on a hiiighway

Even when payphones were popular, I never saw many booths. Hostile architecture, you know

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!"

This really hits home. Modern technology makes being a flake so, so easy.

Great life pro tip: If you're meeting up with someone who has a history of being late to meetings and gatherings, tell them the meet up time is earlier than it actually is.

this, as someone who's usually late i'd love this because i always feel bad whenever i do end up being late.

Then stop being late

easier said than done

As someone who takes pride in being punctual. It really isn’t lol

it is for me, and i hate being late even though it happens alot

There are much, much kinder ways to communicate that

I’m notoriously late so my friends have accepted this tardy behavior from me.

A couple years back I made the mistake(?) of making plans this way and expecting it to work out.

We had agreed on Wednesday to link up at a Starbucks at noon on Friday. Well, I got there and waited, and my friend was late.

I called her after 20 minutes of waiting to see if she'd gotten caught up in something, and she didn't pick up.

Then she immediately texted me "sorry, we didn't confirm over text so I thought we weren't meeting up! You should have texted me!"

Like dafuq? We made the plan, stick to the plan! That's the whole point of a PLAN!

We linked up later that day but it was still annoying af and a waste of my time. I'm not a babysitter; I shouldn't have to send confirmations and reminders.

It's mind-boggling.

That shit drives me nuts

I'm one of those people who still go when we agree upon meeting at a place at a certain time. Only time I'll message is if I am running behind to whatever reason (e.g. traffic, staying at work a bit later, etc).

It’s probably because you call it “link up”

There are several ways to say "meet"

Just reading that pisses me off. If we make plans and you flake you get ONE pass and it better be a damn good reason. If it happens a second time I will never make plans with you again.

She was definitely in the middle of getting boned by some other dude

Some "chad" dude amiright

I don't think these people were dating lol

Welcome to Denmark where we plan everything 3 months in advance. And we don't question the initial plan.

Sounds like my kind of place! If something is important enough to change plans, it can always be communicated

I still do that, only I text them “let’s meet at 7pm on Tuesday at the bar” and then I text them if they are running late.

That's the thing. People were rarely late because they didn't have a way to contact you to tell you they were late and knew you'd piss somebody off or they'd leave before you got there

Yes the ability to do last minute reschedules or cancellations gives people the constant ability to weigh better options. I totally have friends that are down to hangout, until a better opportunity popups and then they cancel.

That's why parties were better then too. You committed early and then everyone went to the same place. There wasn't FOMO because everyone decided on one place way earlier instead of waiting until the last minute and having 20 shitty parties. Bar nights too. Monday's was were the MNF special was, then $2 Tuesdays, then $1.50 pitcher night on Wednesdays, then happy hour Thursday.

People are also less busy cause there’s no last minute plans or things people force you to do.. aka my parents

Not being able to rely on this bothers me so much. On the flip side, I’m a person who really likes spontaneous plans and mobile phones/texting has made that way more doable. Still a huge trade off for the flakiness on long term plans, but nice to hang when we both know that’s what we really want to do that night.

And the social consequences if you blew someone off. If you didn't show up without like a days notice all your friends would give you shit, less likely to invite you and you would have to live it down until someone else did it.

this is still a thing in the Netherlands but that is due to the fact that people plan everything here. but if something else comes along the way then that might get switched in

And if they didn’t showed up, you had no idea what happened. Did they forget/ditch or have an accident? Are they five minutes away or did someone die? Life was wild and free, and will never be that way again.

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

*The duality of man.

Good story 👏👏

Did you just refer to weed as drugs??

No, I didn't.

I just didn't tell the Internet every detail.

She sounds like she's right out of an 80s or 90s teen movie. The cool adult the gang could go to at any time, who, looking back, was utterly irresponsible and definitely dangerous.

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Wanted to do same, but for Animorphs

The entire series is available here for free, with the author's blessing.

woah, legend! thank you. Can anyone comment on whether it is worth reading still beyond nostalgia?

So worth reading. A lot of that content hits different as an adult.

My mom got me a bunch for Christmas 2 years ago. I am 37 and it made me very happy. Fucking scholastic book fair back in the day of elementary school. Was always hunting for Goosebumps.

I’ve been thinking about collecting the rest now that I have adult money!

Heck yeah, which ones?

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Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls and Ghost Beach were my favorites. I remember being genuinely terrified of Ghost Beach as a kid. I'm glad people are keeping this alive:)

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Christopher Pike and (“big kid”) R.L. Stine books carried me through long flights, car rides, bedtimes, etc.

Goosebumps books were for babies, lol.

Can only recommend Ghost Beach out of that lot

Ghost Beach was my favorite!

"Reader beware, you're in for a scare!" I had forgotten that line!! Blast from the past. Thanks for sharing!

I loved those books and the tech version of it. Cyber Zone. Ah the flashback

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It's awesome. I remember one with a virtual reality helmet. I want to re read now with the knowledge of today's tech. Must be funny. O I realise they are probably only in my language. So not from the same maker. But similar style and scary with tech. Aww :/ wish they were in English also. Found one Here with ugly graphics

Were they the size of phonebooks?

You gonna read them or just bought them as shelf decor?

Imma guess who has the ad on the back cover of the phonebook.

Personal Injury Lawyer.

Better call Cinnabon!

Ours just arrived a week ago and it's like a finger-width wide... So fucking tiny. And it's both the white pages and the yellow pages in one.

Goosebumps book.

EHRMAGERD!

You forgot this: Awesome face

Please tell me you yelled excitedly "The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!"

“I’m somebody!”

Same here. I do not understand why some corporation would waste their capital printing and shipping that book to me. How does that bring profits?

Companies still pay to have their listing enlarged/bolded, have an accompanying ad, or listed under several categories. I would guess companies that target super seniors still do this…and lawyers.

I bbq a lot. I keep the yellowpages and take the neighbors too.

Turns out they have a great purpose. They're a good fire starter for a charcoal chimney.

Lol, and what did you do with it?

Tossed it. Absolutely no use for it, and it can't be recycled.

Next time, see if a local elementary school would be interested in it, sometimes them take them to let the little ones cut for scissors practice or use them for art.

yup, we get one every couple years, and it's this pathetically thin little book that honestly, I completely forget exists. I haven't seen white pages in so many years.

I remember the days these things were ultra thick.

For some reason I completely missed Goosebumps, although I'd heard of it. I was addicted to Fear Street and Choose Your Own Adventure.

One showed up on my driveway a year ago. (Haven’t rec’d one in years.) Never even came in the house. Right into the recycle bin.

I approve of your unit of measurement

Lol, a twofer, since Goosebumps was a very 90s thing you don't really see any more either.

Whats a goosebumps book

Thin childrens horror book series from the 90s. About 80 pages in length, if that.

Also 90's, Goosebumps books.

Same, and there was no contact information for me to get a hold of them and ask them to stop sending it.

Newspapers are the same way. It used to be I’d buy a paper then get lunch, and not be entirely finished by the time you went back to work. Now, if you do, you can be finished with a newspaper before your lunch is ready.

I got the same one, its a yellow pages for the whole country. Want a plumber, well heres his number but hes 1000 miles away.

Shit me too, I had to check the date to see what year it was.

Omg! I did too! It honestly made me wish I had a home phone to put it under on my desk.

What's weirder is White Pages -- imagine just putting your number and home address out there publicly now.

It's still like that where I live, but just online instead. You can ask to have it removed, but the default option is that whenever you get a phone subscription your name, number and address is available in a searchable website (several in fact). Addresses aren't really considered private information apart from extraordinary circumstances (celebrities, abuse victims, etc)

I used to work at a place that did a yellow pages book to compete with the one from the phone company.

Just thinking that there was a time when there was market space for not just one phone book, but TWO is bizarre.

And then there was that awkward period where not quite everything was online and searching kinda sucked, but looking through the phone book was a chore.

Recently I had a vivid dream about the yellow pages. In my dream, I realized the yellow pages were so much better than tinder. I could call up various interesting people and ask them on dates. In my dream, I suddenly had a parade of eligible bachelors for dates, it was amazing. Then I woke up, still feeling like a genius who cracked the code, and remembered that they don’t even print the yellow pages anymore. Goodbye sweet dreams

You tapped into a different reality

And it was awesome hahaha. Wish I lived in phonebook-dating world. Literally woke up thinking I HAVE TO TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THIS

In the late 90s, my parents gifted me an internet connection for Christmas and they gave me a massive yellow pages type book filled with web addresses and website descriptions. The whole internet was in there. I would just open it randomly and pick websites off the page. I found so many weird and very cool things. I wish I still had that book. It would be fascinating to see now. What websites still exist? What existed but has now gone away?

I feel like the internet has shrunk immensely even as it has grown. Everything is under a small collection of umbrella websites. The weird stuff is still out there perhaps, but the term "weird" has become less innocent. There are undiscovered lands over the garden wall, but they are dangerous and putrid.

I could really use one right now! My toddler is a little too short for the table.

My wife gets mad at me when I throw away the telephone book the second it arrives at our house.

I ask her when she last used one, she says what if my phone dies and i need a plumber? This happens every time.

But if the phone is dead then how.....

People still have house phones

Some, yes, but it's getting rare. According to Statista, "In 2004, more than 90 percent of U.S. adults lived in households that had an operational landline phone - now it’s less than 40 percent." That post is from over a year ago, and the data is a year older than that. We're fairly confidently at less than 1/3 now, and still dropping, and the trend is happening worldwide, not just in the U.S.

They turned shitty, yell.com are scum. In the UK they had a deal with ActiveHotels.com (a Booking.com subsidiary) where they would replace all the hotel numbers with the ActiveHotels booking line. I used to take calls for them, it was annoying enough for me receiving calls from people for things like leaving their wallet behind after they'd stayed, I can only imagine what it was like for them looking a number up from a reputable service and getting a booking line from another company.

And nowadays, Google, Yelp, and several other search/review websites have been repeatedly caught doing that same thing, but mostly with restaurants. Very scummy.

Man, my first job out of college was working in a factory where they printed the yellow pages. Late 90s. Good thing I moved on before they became obsolete.

What'll they think of next? Blue pages? 

They have those. They're government listings.

I worked for Yellowpagrs in sales for 2 years back in 2015 (reps were easily making $100K if you are above average marginally) and they were trying to switch from being a phone book to a digital platform.

They still won't be able to turn their platform around and be a go to directory compared to Yelp for example.

Oh, man, I'm so glad that the Yellow Pages has become obsolete. I live in an area that is comprised of many small towns, and each of them had their own Yellow Pages, or at least a couple of towns merged into one area. I owned a business and to be listed for my customer base I had to advertise in three different books. 20 years ago it cost me $750 a month to advertise. And this was for a "band-aid ad" so called because it was the size of a band-aid.

I didn't make that much money back from the ads, but if you didn't have a presence in the Yellow Pages, it was as if you weren't there. The sales reps knew that they were the only game in town and didn't care if you were a struggling small business.

Then came the competing Yellow Pages knockoff, do you advertise there too?

Fuck them and now just Google and use SEO and a web site.

My first job as a Graphic Designer was for the Yellow Pages 😊

Yellow Pages ad from 1983: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCUN8eJancQ

And using them to hold up your CRT monitor

When my sister and I were kids, we used to deliver phone books during the summer with my dad; both yellow and white pages. He would cut the bundles and bag them while we would make the drop. You had to get a signature when delivering to businesses but those runs paid the most. Wasn't bad money for the minimal manual labor we did.

I read the title as 1900 and I was like there were yellow pages back then? Impressive

That's funny that's how we call a papers you got when you have diagnosed psychiatric illness.

Thank you for printing out a portion of the internet for me.

But great for the annual neighborhood phone book toss challenge: Who can toss a phone book the furthest?!?

Depends, now in Russia the toilet paper is yellow I think its count as a "yellow page" :)

Knew a guy who was a yellow pages salesman. Everyone envied him because the ads sold themselves. Wonder where he’s at now. Actually, he’s probably retired comfortably

I used to sell ads for the competitor of the yellow pages in my local market. Just aged myself.

Everyone naming their business stuff like ‘A1 cleaning service’ to get to the front page.

One of many temp college jobs - delivering phone books in Washington DC!

Is this still exists?

The Talking Phone Book. I think it was like 4 digit numbers and you’d get everything from weather to that velvety voiced man who would give you the latest recap on every single soap opera. Kept me entertained for hours while home alone in the mid 80s and it was free.

On the other hand are all pages in books from the 90's probably yellow by now 🤔

Go to a sleepover, look up funny names in the Yellow pages and prank call them.

Shit what year did phone books stop??

I FORGOT ABOUT YELLOW PAGES. Oh my god, we had to manually look up phone numbers for businesses. How did we survive!

I loved my Yellow Pages books. We moved around the states a lot, when we visited a place before buying a house, the yellow pages was a good indicator of local businesses importance, they color coded the different sections by trade. One town, BAIL BONDS were the thickest section... nope. Let me look for a house in the next city where restaurants, or grocers have more pages.

Still got'em in France! :)

I was so happy when my business decided to stop paying for yellowpages ads. That stupid shit cost like $600 A MONTH!

Encyclopedias! Phone Books! Blockbuster!

I cant believe they still publish these. We got one a few weeks back and my father was wondering why I would throw it immediately in recycling. I told him I could google any business way faster than I could find it in that thing.

I remember in the early 2000's I preferred phone book over internet because it was faster. I would argue with my manager and we would race. The phone book used to be faster than the google.

Growing up I would freak out whenever the Yellow Pages appeared on my mom's front porch as I thought it was going to blow up if I touched it. I was old enough to know about the Unibomber and had a sense of what he did but wasn't old enough to know how he picked his targets and that my mom and I were pretty safe.

"Let your fingers do the walking."

Back in 2014 I got laid off and told my mother. She said, "Well, time to break out the yellow pages."

I suppressed a laugh and said, "That's not how it works anymore." (she was born in '42)

Some things really should stay dead. Those were horrible for waste (and I really throw away more than I should)

In a similar vein, train timetable book

White Pages, and you had to pay to not be listed.

All pages are yellow when you find books in urinals.

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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

25 minutes? Rookie.

Yeah, this. Saturday night was "Argue with buddies for 2 hours over which hour-and-a-half movie we were going to rent" night.

Good times, good times.

And it wasn't an algorithm guiding you to movies.

It was some dude who had watched every single film in that rental place telling you which ones were good and which ones sucked.

God bless that dude

You're welcome.

Mostly the cover though.

Pretty much, that was 97% my decision.

My friends and I had a game where we’d each pick a few horror movies based on the cover and vote on which to rent. Sometimes we’d deliberately pick the most ridiculous campy looking crap and just have fun. Watched a lot of terrible movies but also found some hidden gems.

Randall Graves is his name.

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I remember seeing cool display boxes only to be disappointed when the VHS was missing behind it.

I actually find there are less "big" movies to watch now. So many major movies aren't on any streaming service, and so now I just can't watch them anymore. Try watching Dogma. It's like it never existed.

My brother has a gigantic DVD collection and I find myself going to his house to pick out a movie that I can't watch anywhere. So I guess his house is the new Blockbuster.

Don't know if you are still on the hunt but I literally just created an account to tell you that you can watch Dogma on YouTube

Oh man! That's awesome! Rufus! Here I come!

Good info! I just ended up buying the dvd lol. Thanks though.

Your'e a hero. Go get a cape.

I cant find Bring it on! to stream :(

By the end of the 2 hours half the group gives up and agreed to watch ANYTHING

Back in the day the only information we had was the VHS box cover. Look at the cover art. Read the description. Did it seem interesting? Rent the movie and find out.

It feels like today everything is over-analyzed. We have so much more choice and so much more information, and everyone is less satisfied.

Right? I spent 2.5 hours last Saturday night trying to find a movie to watch.

It takes me 25 minutes to find the movie I already know I want to watch

Netflix can never replace the atmosphere of a video rental store. Not that video rental smell

....or the late fees.

My father worked at blockbuster in 2002, I loved getting to see movies before they were officially released on DVD

I wanted to work at Blockbuster in 2002.

I miss blockbuster still. It used to be an event. My parents got that unlimited card you could rent 2 movies at a time and you could take them back and get new ones any time you wanted. They still had this when I was in high school and it was awesome. Friends would come over and we'd all get in my car go to blockbuster, we'd all walk around together joke, and look at cool movie boxes and read the descriptions. I watched a ton of movies back then. That was also enough to be cool lol. Girls loved to come over and I'd run us to blockbuster and get us 1 or 2 movies to watch. Now it's all netflix and chill culture and inviting a lady to your house is not the best move. Also I watch way less, netflix I just browse and it all looks like trash and I give up. Blockbuster? Hell no, I drove to the store damn it I'm getting something!

Its not the movie are trash now, you have been grown up dude.

Nah I still like movies. Not as exciting or necessary to try new stuff when so much is at your fingertips. I'd watch any movie through simply bc I knew I'd have to drive back to get something else. Cmon now we know netflix originals are not great. Even so id have watched more of I had to go to blockbuster. There's no regret or sadness or anything on netflix if it's really bad I just turn it off in 10 mins who cares right? I can just pick something else. Blockbuster made my choices more impactful and more likely to finish mediocre movies.

I miss that experience

Oh man this unlocked a sweet memory. (I don't live in the USA so no Blockbuster), but me and my mom used go every friday to our local movie rental firm and just browsed the movies together. I was always allowed to choose a childrens movie and my mom picked something from the new releases section. Then my mom always said how much loose candy I could take and so I took some candy then ran to the counter to weigh it then back to the candy and so on until I had the exact ammount in grams I was allowed.

This 25 minute timeframe you speak of means either you are not married or my marriage is ruined. Take me back to BlockBuster off Wade Green Rd.

That is how we all got FAT we don't walk around anymore.

Not the same.

Video rental stores allowed you to look at the back of the box, and you'd get a bit more context about what you were purchasing.

Plus, you'd generally be way less jaded, because you couldn't access 90,000 hot takes/false expectations and in-depth analysis on genre tropes.

Peeking behind the curtain of the “adult section”

I loved that the only store that had one of those near me was 'family video'

Those still exist right? With the orange logo?

Looks like they had some left but covid killed them off

The people who like in-depth analysis just got it from magazines, newspapers, vlogs, and friends.

It's always existed my friend.

And now to have access to way more, free and from a single device. It has always bugged me how quick people romanticize everything from “back in the day” even technology which without a doubt have and continue to improve exponentially.

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I said the back of the box gave you "a bit". I prefer that sense of mystery.

It's one of the few things I miss from the era.

Yeah, i get that too, there are several things I miss from that era, but you can't deny that having all that information available is objectively better, even if we romanticize not knowing much about the movie we were going to watch.

You think it's objectively better.

I think it's having a movie spoiled before I watch it.

Plus, I'm rather sick of defending movies from jaded idiots who confuse tropes and plot convenience with plot holes.

And confuse pointing out plot holes for thoughtful film criticism.

Having the information available is objectively better. You can still decide not to look anything up about a movie beforehand, but having the possibility and therefore the choice whether to use it or not is objectively better than having no choice at all.

You can decide not to look things up, if you already know better than to do a deep dive.

Having learned how the worst people in the world will watch a movie, and preparing myself for the inevitable flood of poison all over social media, is mentally draining.

You can ignore it. I can't.

Meanwhile, like I said, I enjoy a good mystery.

Stop insisting that you understand the word 'objective', if you can't even use the word properly in a sentence.

Man you're a bit of an asshole, aren't you?

You're a bit unaware of your own boorish behavior, aren't you?

At least I don't confuse my subjective opinions with objective facts.

Dude, I'm on your side with basically all that you're saying, I choose most of the movies I watch based on the cover, thumbnail or because I enjoy the actors that are in it. I also enjoy going in blind, because I love watching a story unfold without having seen what amounts to two thirds of the movie in trailers beforehand.

There is absolutely no reason to be so unnecessarily rude.

I've also said that I've had horrible experiences with the way movies are consumed today.

I didn't get into the part where hate groups weaponizing them to attack people I care about, because bringing that up never ends well. But you just don't seem to get the part where I simply used to enjoy watching movies more than I can now.

And I can't go back to not knowing things.

When you dismiss that as unimportant, because you're making an obvious point about all the choices available today? Do you realize how insulting that is?

Then consume them the way you used to. I do the same, I even turn my phone off when I'm home alone so I can focus easier.
It seems to me that what you're actually missing is the childlike innocence that you had when you were a kid, not really the availability (or non availability) of information, reviews and so on. I miss that too, but that is something that I can't get back and also can't control, I can just control whether I look up opinion pieces beforehand.

Having information available gives you the ability to be an informed consumer and chose what you spend your money on. Or you can chose to ignore all that and go in blind. As I said, that is a choice that is now available to you, and in general, being informed and having access to resources to form an opinion beforehand, or to find additional viewpoints that you might have not considered yourself after the fact, is objectively better, than not having a choice at all.

I don't dismiss it as unimportant, because, as I said, keeping that sense of mystery is important to me. I'm just saying that having that choice is objectively better, while prefering not to look anything up is a personal preference.

I thought that I could have a more pleasant conversation with you, because you seem to value the same general atmosphere when watching a movie as I do, but apparently not.

​

"Do you realize how insulting that is?" No, I actually don't realize how insulting that is, apparently. But maybe that's just because conversations about movies usually don't make me call someone boorish and question their ability to speak english (which isn't my first language btw).

t seems to me that what you're actually missing is the childlike innocence that you had when you were a kid

I was 27 before getting online.

I can just control whether I look up opinion pieces beforehand.

Like I said, I know how people think. And after watching some very popular social media influencers weaponize them (and countering their spin and lies), it's like watching every movie in an audience of those who want to hate it for all the wrong reasons/will love it for all the wrong reasons.

I have to think like a lawyer.

english (which isn't my first language btw).

Your English is great. Better than most people posting here could speak any other language. (Including me.)

No I meant the innocence when watching movies as a kid, compared to the state of mind you have when watching a movie now.

I can observe that with myself: When I was a kid, the movie I watched or the game I played got 100% of my attention in that moment, but nowadays my everyday worries, problems and so on are still in the back of my mind. And I really really miss just being totally immersed like that.

Social media and influencers are cancer, just disable and unfollow them as much as possible, and with time, you'll at least get that part of the experience back, because you'll just forget about them.

​

You seem really enthusiastic about movies, so you'd do yourself a disservice by not enjoying the experience as much as you possibly can.

​

A friend of mine and I have taken to giving ourselves 5 minutes to skim through Netflix/Disney +/Whatever and then, just based on the thumbnail and the description we chose the one that we want to watch. Like that, we can kinda emulate the feeling of standing in a Blockbuster (or our regional equivalent at least) which kinda brings that exploratory feeling back.

We have sat through some horrible movies like that, but horrible movies make for good laughs afterwards usually.

No I meant the innocence when watching movies as a kid, compared to the state of mind you have when watching a movie now.

I don't miss the experience I had when I was a kid. Fundamentalist parents, and my dad wasn't in touch with reality....

Anything higher than a PG rating was a horror movie.

I really really miss just being totally immersed like that.

I miss, just being able to take inspiration from it, and creating my own stories as I watched. I still have that talent, I just feel guilty when I'm doing it...

Social media and influencers are cancer,

I know.

But I can't look the other way when they're recruiting/harassing people who don't understand propaganda techniques.

I don't like bullies. In school, if you picked a fight with people smaller than you, you had a fight with me.

I don't know. I'm probably wired all kinds of wrong. But when I try to ignore online hate, I can't get anything else done.

I have to do at least a little bit, if I want any peace of mind.

We have sat through some horrible movies like that, but horrible movies make for good laughs afterwards usually.

Aye. Birdemic and Manos: Hands of Fate have brought more laughter to the world than many intentional comedies.

Don't feel guilty about it - getting inspired and having your imagination sparked by a movie, TV show, game or whatever comes to mind is one of the last purely good things on this earth, imo.

I know the feeling with ignoring online hate, that's why completely unsubscribed - I find it easier to ignore if I don't even see it. It tends to eat away at me once I've seen it.

Also, Manos is a masterclass in being so-bad-it's-good. The whole late 80s action genre also has quite few releases that fall under that umbrella.

​

Fingers crossed that you find more enjoyment in movies again, but really give it a try to just ignore everything about a movie you want to see, until you've seen it. I have found that, when I knew whether a movie was well received or not, i was so preocupied with thinking "this movie is supposed to be great, I should enjoy myself more" that my expecations overshadowed my ability to immerse myself and experience the movie moment by moment.

Yeah good point, you could see the front box, the description on the back, and a few additional screenshot squares on the back too I believe. Gave you a bit more context. And while Netflix does let you watch a trailer, I'm usually too lazy to invest in watching it.

2002: spend $4.25 on a Blockbuster movie rental and like it

2022: spend $3.99 on an Amazon movie rental and hate it

The experience walking around a blockbuster was so so much more fun and useful. I’d die for a streaming service with as good a browsing feature.

I see nothing has really changed.

Yeah but I'd actually watch it after I rented it from Blockbuster.

At least in the 90s we got exercise.

As much as I like having things available without living my house, browsing Blockbuster was a fun experience in itself, while scrolling through netflix is not at all.

We've managed to get lazier, but not more efficient.

Lol I spent nearly an hour last night debating what show I should watch next

2022: Spend 25 minutes browsing streaming services to find a movie

But finding nothing.

Don't forget - spend many more minutes discovering that not one of the 2 or 3 services you pay for carries the movie that just popped into your head!

When the store actually had a copy of the game you really wanted...such a rush. I wasn't even a kid in the 90s lol I was 23 and it still felt good 🤣

I remember feeling like that about No Mercy on N64 lol

If you have a specific one in mind, but don't know where it is. https://www.justwatch.com/

Decision paralysis is real

I miss the act of getting out of the house and going for the drive, the experience of the store- the movie theater style candy and huge display of popcorn at the check out. The rows and rows of movies and being soooooo bummed if they were out of what you wanted! The palpable feeling of “ok… next time! No one better tell me any spoilers!”

2002: Spend 25 minutes walking around a Blockbuster to find a movie

2022: Spend 25 minutes browsing streaming services to find a movie

2002: Spend further 30 minutes building up confidence to head to the "back room", finding "friends" and hooking up

2022: Fap at home alone

One of these is far healthier

And in both cases just choosing something in the end because you can't make a decision then usually don't enjoy it

You fill up your list with potential interesting movies beforehand.

Or spend 25 minutes browsing YouTube for a video to watch.

That after going in with a movie in mind and it was already checked out.

And then settling on a rewatch of something you already saw, because nothing new looks like something anyone else in the room would be interested in

Or like my husband spend an hour or two looking at games, save 3 or 4, and then never actually end up playing any.

Or never finding one and settling on IASIP again just to have something to enjoy while I eat my food

Spent a week at my grandma’s last year and I have to say, I enjoyed cable. Just pick whatever’s on and go. Was pretty refreshing.

I have an antenna attached to my TV and I really like switching to and watching local broadcast stations.

I miss blockbuster on a Friday night. Renting a movie was special.

Recreate that nostalgic memory with a trip to your local library. It's honestly a lot of fun

I can still smell the plastic + 1000 cigarette smell of the local video store Sega Genesis rental.

I still rent video games today actually, except they take a damn long time to get to my house.

I borrow video games at my local library.

Some libraries will lend you all kinds of stuff: game consoles, sewing machines, cameras, power tools, etc.

Ours even has a couple telescopes.

How do you do it?

It’s a service called gamefly.

That still exists?!

Also, check your local library. It's becoming more popular unfortunately the push to digital is making it more difficult.

Game Pass

Lmao so true like Road 96 that I've been obsessed with

Cute lil game but I would not ever buy it.game pass is amazing

Had a local video store still renting consoles in the mid 00s…was amazing to be able to play them until my mom was able to save up to get me a real PS2.

Feel like it could still be a thing…

The last Blockbuster Video rental store on the planet is in Bend, Oregon. Relic

Born in 82. The same year my mom opened her first video rental store. She sold it in 99 so this one hits home for me pretty hard 🙇

Renting a console was the most exciting thing ever.

Still remember the weekend I rented an N64, good times

Block buster! Going in and the family haggling over what to watch getting candy and popcorn. Good times

I feel like a boomer, but I do miss the buzz of the video store on weekend nights around 5:00-9:00.

Be Kind: Rewind

That was an underrated film in my opinion.

I'm waiting on the sweded version

Dude, every weekend I looked forward to going to the local Hollywood Video. It was huge and had all the vidge gaems and ridiculously over priced candy

There's still 1 blockbuster left in the world. Bend Oregon and I will go!

Yeah man! I remember renting a NES ocasionally until my sister won a competition and got one! Good times.

Yup. We used to rent several vhs movies and the VCR to watch them on for the weekend.

I miss the feeling of going into a movie rental store and CD stores.

Everyone always mentions Blockbuster but my memories are of the small mom and pop place that was our local after school hangout spot. Not just to rent movies but to play arcades.

My favourite form of escapism as a teen in the very early 2000’s was walking alone to my small town movie store and renting zombie/horror flicks. Walking down the middle of the street late at night and it was totally quiet.

The process was a ritual and family bonding time in and of itself.

In some ways we still do rent games and movies; subscription services.

This was always my reason i looked forward to a friday we would all pile into the car and go to the rental store i kinda miss that sometimes

By extension, buying video games and movies from rental places when they were clearing out old stock. I picked up more than a few great video games that were previously rentals. Back in the early 90's I remember going to the local shop with my grandma and picking up like ten NES games because they were selling them for a dollar. I picked up a few things I'd never have even known existed otherwise because the cover looked interesting and it was only a buck and found a few childhood favorites. When I was older I nabbed a few huge bargains on used PS2 games, and had more than a few "terrible movie nights" with my roomies where we'd hit the local Hollywood Video, raid the "3 for $5" table and each get three that caught our eye. Sometimes it got us stuff so bad it was hilarious and we laughed our asses off, and every now and then we nabbed a real diamond in the rough that was awesome but obscure. I'd never have known about the Henry Fool trilogy if I hadn't picked up the first one from a "please take this garbage out of our store" table and been utterly enthralled.

You just don't get chances like that anymore. It's either gamestop where everything is priced out using the internet and anything rare/desirable is snapped up before you have a chance to find it or thrift stores that are crapshoots at the best of time if you're after movies. If there's one thing I miss the most about rental places, it's the bargains.

I still rent videogames at my local videogame Shop you can rent movies there too its pretty cool.

Well this right here is the ultimate answer. I'd love just one last time to walk through a crowded Blockbuster on a Friday night.

I managed a family video until 2020! Was there to see the end of it all lol

This has unlocked a core childhood memory, finally finishing reading LOTR and my proud big sister walking me into a movie rental store to take out the full extended copies!! Cost us like £4 as well to rent for a week and 20p late fee

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Currently am re reading with my son so it will be his turn soon to watch the movies haha

I rented Jason X on Amazon last night. Quite possibly the worst movie I ever rented

You rented a vcr?!?

Blockbuster was the best and I also like the snacks too.

I miss this so much.

We had a blockbuster in our town square, mom and pop shops, restaurants and a beautiful landscape designed park in the middle with a pond and cool stones to hop around the river in.

The best feeling on a warm summer night was getting your movie, grabbing some ice cream and chilling with your friends around the park afterwards.

Man, i SO miss renting SNES and Mega Drive games when i was a kid..

Nostalgia is a bitch. Tbf, i do own over 20 retro consoles and a ton of games as an adult tho, so i don't need to rent anymore. That's one of the fun things about being an adult. You can spend your money on what you want (mostly. I mean, pay your bills and stuff first, then buy something that makes you happy)!

I still do the renting movies part, sort of.

I get DVDs from the library every now and then and return them within 2 weeks. I'm not a huge movie guy and I can't be arsed to pay for a subscription. So a few movies every now and then will do.

And I'm 23, mind you, so I wasn't doing much renting in the 90s. But I did do that in the 2000s when it was still very much a thing

Damn, I would LOVE to go to Blockbuster and rent a console. I don't actually want to own every wretched thing they ever invent, but I also want my kids to be able to play on them - just not 24/7.

I'm also well and truly over the steaming services.

Bring back rentals! And this time can we add tools to that? I'd love to rent a saw and an electric sander... Obviously from a separate section of the store lol

Getting « fined » for not rewinding the VHS tape

The big ass VHS tapes (Be kind, rewind!)

I have a movie rental place by my house. It’s awesome to be able to do that still.

You can still rent most of these at your local library! On top of books, they also have movies, tv series, video games, music cds, audiobooks, and sometimes even more stuff! My local library also has a desk for giving/taking plant cuttings, and a collection of board games you can rent, including the Dungeons&Dragons 5th edition starter pack. Some libraries have musical instruments and museum passes.

Funny enough I can still do that. My city has a store called Jumbo Video which is basically the Canadian version of Blockbuster. I still go there to rent movies on occasion or video games.

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Oh ok didn't know you were a fellow Canuck! I'm in London Ontario and we've had Jumbo for years. You might still have one open where you live then.

*Looks like I'm wrong, there's only one Jumbo Video location still open in Canada which is located in London, the other location used to be in Belleville but closed down.

Renting a top loading Beta machine.

Yes, going to blockbuster stores and searching the aisles!

I remember my mom letting me browse the rentals either a Video & Sound while she went to the tanning bed, or Iggle Video while she grocery shopped. I was allowed to rent one game and one movie. Then if I found a selection before she got back, getting a neck cramp from playing the game of the week on the trial consoles they had set up.
There was something special about reading the photocopied instruction manual on the way home, hoping that your save file was still on the cartridge, or hoping that the game you rented was actually good. Then, after memory cards, having to decide what save files to keep when your card was full.

my parents wouldn't get us a video game console because "we have a computer you don't need a nintendo", but one year I was allowed to rent a SNES for a weekend near my birthday. I got really decent at Donkey Kong Country.

Trueeee. Had so much fun also getting the candy near the checkout line.

I guess we still have that with subscription services now, but the pricing nowadays is scammy af.

Omg I used to love this, my family used to do this (immediate and extended) movie nights 😎😎

Wow I miss the 90s

A lot of cities still have these services! People are trying to keep it alive for the convenience. Alongside libraries stocking tools and items (like pressure cookers heat guns and similar) for rent and usage, and bicycle stores / organizations having repair and reair stations so that people don’t have to buy something to use it once, or use it infrequently.

I highly recommend reaching out to local organizations to see if any of these services are available for you if you’re interested and you live in a relatively big town, or city. ^^

Lol I worked for blockbuster online customer service for 6months until they did away with it, bcz of Netflix. Damn near every cust would bitch they didn't get their movie mailed to them & say they were switching to Netflix. I guess they really meant it haha

I must admit it was fun to go to Blockbuster on a Friday night at 7:00 PM and look for movies. Often the new hits were gone by then but occasionally you'd get lucky. And just being there provided a little human interaction and excitement that I never get online. So hunting for movies at Blockbuster was an inefficient and time consuming ritual. But it was almost always enjoyable.

Having to rewind movies before returning them

God I miss that ritual, heading to the video rental.store, chatting to the employees about what they recommend, meeting friends, loading up on candy & popcorn.

A few years ago we were at a family get together and something about VCRs comes up and then my nephew, who was probably 12 or 13 at the time, asked what at VCR was. It was devastating to me. I never felt older than in that moment.

Renting Super Bomberman for the super SNES, and paying extra for the multi-tap controller adapter so you could play it in battle mode all weekend long with four players.

gamefly says hello

They just opened one in KC in the basement of a theater. It was on the news.

A rental store?

VHS rentals and you can play SNES or similar games.

I remember renting The Village and jeepers kreepers on vcr as a kid. As well as renting pirated movies.

Oh god. I remember having VCR rewinder that models a sports car.

I still rent DVDs though the mail with Netflix... not the same as a trip to Blockbuster, though.

Redbox still exists. Best way to get new movies cheap

Redbox is still a thing

I'll never forget that weekend I rented Virtual Boy from Blockbuster. I think it got a had rap, I loved it.

I still remember my dad renting me a ps1 with crash bandicoot for like a week or weekend for some fucking reason when I was a kid.

It was like the coolest thing ever.

Two of my friends and I rode our bikes across the bridge to a nearby video store back in 2000 to try and rent a PlayStation (the first one, no 2, 3, 4, or 5 back then!) entirely because we were intrigued by the commercial for one game.

They wouldn't rent the console to us because we were 16. (They were perfectly happy to rent the game to us, but a PlayStation black disc with nothing to play it with... what's the point?)

Joke's on them; that video store closed a few years later and now it's a Mexican restaurant, and I can play Chrono Cross on my Switch any time I want.

now we have subscriptions

Renting the same movies over and over again and denying it when mom asks "haven't you seen that one before?"

Except that you can still rent those, it's just online.

My roommate still borrows video games from the library.

You can still borrow all of these at public libraries (probably not VCRs though)

Fun fact: you can still rent DVDs through Netflix.

I remember when Netflix first started their DVD service and I thought to myself, “This is so cool. Too bad it won’t last.”

Then they started their streaming service and the selection was absolute shit and I thought to myself, “Wow. This is going to ruin them.”

Red box is a thing

Ok, but like, why don't we rent games anymore?

My kids borrow games for their switch from our local library and I love it. Reminds me of my days renting NES/SNES games

Just moved to rural PA from NoVa and there are Redboxes here. I think the last disappeared a decade ago where I had been living.

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.

What was the phrase?

Love you more

Not "I love you" or "I love you more," just the incomplete phrase. He used to shout it inside the house as he closed the door as he was leaving.

You made my eyes all wet with that one - not crying, honest! Sounds like a good bloke.

Hey, recipes are good to have around! You should try making something from that notebook sometime.

I have my grandma's notebook filled with recipes also. That and the blankets she made for me are my favorite things I have from her.

My coworker's family had made a set of wooden cutting boards engraved on the back with her grandmother's cookie recipe, and each of the grandkids got one.

That is awesome! I bet that's something they will treasure forever.

Yes, it is! I should clarify that the engraving is in her grandmother's own handwriting. It's an exact reproduction take directly from her handwritten cookie recipe. They're beautiful.

Currently digging through my moms handwritten things to find the phrase "it is what it is" so I can tattoo it on myself. After long hard lost battles with cancer I found we said that to eachother a lot.

That was incredibly sweet of you to make that bracelet for your mom. I'm sure she cherishes it. I would.

I use my mother's hand written recipes all the time.

There was a period of time my dad kept a handwritten schedule of the shows he was watching in this compartment built into the arm rest of a recliner. Discovered it by accident and it was like this odd little window into his mind

Human sentimentality is such a lovely trait. I'm just as guilty. I have my grandmother's rolodex still

Human sentimentality is such a lovely trait. I'm just as guilty.

Me too. I miss grandma.

I shouldn't have killed her.

next to the phone.

have you considered having it framed or sealed to protect it from time and UV?

May they always be there

(i know how you feel. i just lost my mom. and every scrap she wrote on feels precious. her phonebook is a treasure and resource. she was the person to keep in contact with people and ugh.... My sincere condolences and sympathy in your loss)

My dad has been gone 8 years and I still have a voicemail from him wishing me a happy birthday. I listen to it once a year.

This made me tear up. Good tears. It's so sweet.

I will never delete my grandmas landline number from my contact list.

no matter how long she is dead.

This is why I keep my parents voicemails.

Oh my gosh! My grandmother! In her neat old fashioned cursive.

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.

Suddenly phone privacy for the first time when you could take the cordless phone out onto the front porch.

Unless someone was listening through another phone, in which case you had to tell them to fuck off.

Probably not before area codes, but you didn't need the area code on a local call on land lines. If you lived in a small to medium sized town (less than 100,000 or so) you wouldn't need to bother with an area code unless you were pretty far from home.

It was more than just 100,000. Where I grew up the area code extended well into the suburban and rural areas around the city, covering about 500,000 people.

Even today where I grew up, people will give out numbers without the area code, and look at you funny when you include yours.

My entire state (Maine) has one area code. Before cell phones really took off, you never needed the area code unless you were calling out of state.

Yup, and right next to you in New Brunswick, people still give out their numbers without the area code.

When I’d just graduated from high school I worked at a pizza place in a small town and people would just give you the last four numbers cause the first three of that town were all the same.

Yep. A seven-digit phone number, sans area code, has exactly ten million permutations so, in theory, one area code could serve up to ten million people. Actually, it's a bit less than that, since a phone number can't start with zero, plus there are a few other blacklisted combos, like certain 555- numbers which are reserved for fictional use.

Of course, they never want to push it all the way to that limit, otherwise new phone numbers wouldn't be available to give out to new customers without having to use a waiting list system. So, they keep the practical limit a ways under that, and split area codes as needed as areas grow.

Ah, that's probably it. Eventually the town got big enough to require area codes, probably.

I lived in a small town where you didn't even need the town code until about 1979, so for my first phone number I only had to dial 5458. I remember being so aggravated when I had to start dialing the prefix, and again with the area code much later.

Oh, wow! You got me beat, Old Timer. I thought my stories of rotary dialing and part line (shared phone lines with neighbors) was archaic!

I worked at a CVS in a small town for a couple of years. When I’d ask people their number to look up their phone number, a handful of older customers would just give me the last 4 digits. I eventually realized that every old landline in that town starts with the same 3 numbers.

My town finally went to 7-digit dialing in the late 80’s when the mechanical switches were replaced with an electronic one.

I just replied further up that I was in a small town and people just gave out the last four to the pizza place. You DID have to dial seven when you called but the first three were the same so no need to say them. This was in 1995.

They were going to add a second area code in my state, then discovered that they weren't really running out of numbers. The various phone companies had just bought all the possible numbers (in blocks of 10,000 or something ), and were sitting on them. There were hundreds of thousands of phone numbers that were not being used. I think the state, for some reason, had to buy a bunch back, and now it's not a problem again

Yeah the numbers used to only be purchasable like that. It only became a problem when people stopped using landlines and the companies had numbers no one was asking for. Now they can buy them in smaller units

Did you have an actual dial or push buttons?

Dials were great for angry dialing... so much physicality involved: rip that mofo around until you hit the back-stop, then wait for it to come back before ripping it again.

Unfortunately it was push buttons. Kid me was disappointed after seeing so much I Love Lucy. The dials looked so fun!

We still have a dial phone hooked up in the basement. It's very satisfying.

I never put together that “dial the phone” was a term because of rotary phones. Wow

I was trying to explain ‘untwisting the phone cord’ to my daughter the other day and she looked at me like I had lost my mind.

I ended up saying ‘You know the bracelets you get at Chuck E Cheese?’ to get the point across.

My dad made up a little song for me when I was about 4-5 as pneumonic device for learning it. I still remember it to this day even tho we moved out of state a year later (I’m 42).

I still remember my childhood home phone numbers. Both of them (we moved home once)

And i cant remember my wife's current phone number .. lol

when i was a kid, we lived in places that were so small you only had to dial x-xxxx. it was good, because that was during rotary dial days.

Omg I remember not having to dial the area code! Forgot about that. Wowsa Also: just the word ‘dial’

I still remember my great-grandmother's phone number & use variations of it for passwords.

I also remember listening in on the party lines of the old biddies gossiping.

Lol, I remember in like 1990 we had to start dialing ×××-×××× instead of ××××. But I also lived in a tiny village in Ky.

we just had to start using area codes where I live about 10 years ago, which is funny because its a HUGE geographical area, but up until the early 2000's my mom would continue to write phone numbers as just 5 digits, because the area code and first 2 numbers were always the same

It was before we even had area codes, so it was just xxx-xxxx

You probably always had area codes, smaller towns and smaller metro areas didn't usually require having to dial the area code before the number. In larger cities, 10 digit dialing (dialing the area code before the number) was/is required.

Our cradle/base had a rotary dial!

was it a rotary phone? those are one of the few totally useless things that were still kind of fun, even though I do prefer being able to dial faster

Already codes always exist. Just you never needed to add it for local same area code numbers

I seriously doubt it was before area codes, they were introduced in the 50's

I miss having landlines, my sisters and I would always have to call mom when we got home from school, we always had a way to reach out if we needed something. Now my son is getting to the age where he can stay home by himself, but we have to buy him a cell phone so he has a way to reach us...

We still have a list like that with my parents’ cell numbers, my dad’s old work phone number, and my grandparents’ landline. Which I never needed cause I memorized all those numbers before I could even read numbers (well except for the cell phones, I could read before my parents had cell phones). But my younger sister never memorized those numbers.

I keep my and my husband's numbers on the fridge - kids don't have phones and we don't have a landline but I guess it's just force of habit from growing up. Parents' phone numbers are meant to be handwritten and accessible to children in the kitchen.

You no longer have a landline phone? I still do. It's included in my internet access. But I must admit, I should have replaced that old phone years ago. It's not cordless, and a line or two in the display don't work. Still, why would I spend money on a cordless phone when I can just use the mobile instead? ... There are only two people who have my landline number, that's my mother and my landlady. I don't even know the number myself, but I've written it down somewhere.

If the phones were disconnected, and abandoned, why censor the number?

I'm sad now.

With how phones work now, I wonder if my kids (7 and 4) will ever actually learn my number.

you were supposed to keep the landline too as a matter of principle even as it has become useless except as a fount of spam phone calls

It's kinda fun to read about the transition. We also had a voip phone for a while just to call 911 incase my wife was home alone and her phone was dead for some reason when the kids were babies. Still always keep an old cell charged just for this now. But now that my kids are old enough it's just "Hop on discord if you need me." It's nice because depending on the level of need they can just text, voice call, or video chat as necessary, and they're extremely familiar with how to use it.

I have one of these too. In my handwriting it’s for the babysitter. It includes grandpa’s number, Auntie’s number, and the pediatrician’s number.

I wonder if it will stay there forever.

There's still a note like that on my fridge... But we have a landline :D

xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Back in the early 90's we were in a small enough town it was x-xxxx, then went to xxx-xxxx.

One time i found something with Mommy and Daddy xxx on it and let me tell you it was not a phone number

Still kept the "landline" here with magic jack (like 20 bucks a YEAR). Useful to call your cell phone if you misplace it at home.

Also I love it when the cable company says Get All Three as a bundle deal, when referring to the landline as one of the three services. As if that's a big deal!

The only one that matters is high speed internet.

There was a minister who told a similar cutesy story:

In the front of his Bible, his kids wrote in crayon, This is Daddy's book.

He said that he was vexed at what they had done, and now he can only look at it with love and nostalgia. (or "How could something that was so vexing at the time, be so beautiful now?")

Back when 20$ could get you two pizzas a random side and a 2 liter soft drink.

I miss the feeling of elation and freedom when you saw that twenty and knew you could buy whatever you wanted for dinner as a kid.

Look at you getting $20 for food. We were left to raid the pantry lol

Grandmas landline had 4 numbers. No need to put it on the fridge.

Reading this just instantly made me remember my grandma's landline number. She's been gone for quite a while I certainly put it in my cell phone long before that. Somehow still had it memorized, just wow

Idk why my brain decided to read it as "grandmother's landmine as a last resort" but i suppose that will also work.

Now you'd get in trouble for leaving kids like that, even if they're old enough to look after themselves.

When my kid was 8 or 9 I started leaving them for 20 minutes or so, they were a really sensible kid, and my mom friends were just horrified that I'd take that risk.

I absolutely hate that expectations have moved in this way. How is the next generation supposed to develop any independence, self confidence or common sense if they're babysat until adulthood?

At age 8 (24 years ago) I was walking 15 minutes home from school with my 9 year old brother. I honestly don't think that was a problem then, and it's much less of a problem now with ease of access to phones, CCTV cameras everywhere and crime lower than ever before.

By age 11, I was comfortable heading out after dinner to see friends - roaming the streets on bikes until getting home for bedtime. Now, I know parents who are reluctant to return to the office because they'll have to hire a childminder for their 16 and 14 year old kids.

at age ten i was 'babysitting' my fourteen year old brother cause he put a foil lined bag of safeway chicken tenders in the microwave once.

Uncle Terry's garage fridge still has you covered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laaWAg4W-28

I love this. Last resort landline.

I still remember my grandparents' landline number. It's been almost thirty years since I needed to know it.

I still do that.

If the petty cash dips below 40, tell me or mom, okay?

Man this is how I always imagined the ‘90s US. Too bad it was completely different where I grew up.

It’s still a good idea to keep some numbers on a card in your wallet in case you get arrested and need to get bailed out.

When I was a kid I kept a laminated card in my wallet with family and friend's numbers on it... probably still a good idea.

Genius, doing this now !

It's an even better idea to memorize those numbers.

Not really better. If you have a list of emergency contact numbers in your wallet and lose it whoever finds it will have an easier time getting it back to you.

Also, if you're ever in an accident or otherwise incapacitated you can wait for the cops to figure out who to contact, or you can tell them who to contact with a note in your wallet.

I still do this, but just in case my phone is damaged or runs out of power.

What about those flippy address book things? You had a list of everyone you know by their last name, addresses and phone numbers, and you'd press on the letter and it'd flip open to that section.

Are you referring to a phone book or a Rolodex?

Neither. It was something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Tallon-Flip-Open-Address-Book/dp/B008SAYXSY

Yes a phone book but a personal phone book you write yourself, not the white pages or yellow pages type phone book.

This is still a good idea actually

Rescue workers look at the fridge for numbers: you should really have something posted there.

I made sure to set up the emergency details on my phone, which anyone can see from the lock screen.

Back in ~2004 a friends grandfather had a list of important numbers on a cut-down index card taped to the back of his cell phone. It was hard enough getting him to learn to use the cell, they weren’t going to take away his phone list to teach him about saving numbers in the phone.

Why don't people still do this? It's always good to have physical copies of important info like that, especially ones you don't always have entered in your phone

My grandma still does this. It's taped to the inside of her cupboard for glasses and mugs. She probably has to update it semi-annually.

I also adore the fact that she will write all important birthdats etc. in a new calendar each year.

…so how do your kids know who to call lol

That's actually a good idea. Just in case some like peramedics are in your house you can get them to call help especially if they don't know your passcode and can't get your fighter print working.

Printed out Mapquest directions

Don't forget also the list of family and friends' birthdays and anniversaries

Edit: my parents had so many sticky notes and lists next to the wall-mounted phone. I think most of them are still there even though the phone is gone now

And parents’ work landlines. I used to have to call and ask to be transferred through as they didn’t have direct lines in their jobs.

Angry Luddite noises

Printed list of phone numbers names and addresses of everybody in the town, updated yearly available to see or even own by everybody in the town.

Or actually remembering numbers. I used to have all my friend's numbers memorized. Now I only know my mom, my grandparents and my aunt's numbers.

I straight up just remembered people's numbers. Like probably 30 different ones at least. Now the only one i remember is my dad's (and my own of course) because his hasn't changed in like 20 years.

Printed? Wow, ours was handwritten. It started as typed but retyping to add or change a phone number was way too cumbersome. Getting the giant suitcase that held the typewriter out of the hall closet was too much. (Didn't have a word processor until 1993.)

I love with my grandma and she still has that. Of course she has dementia, so it isn't like she could really learn to use the numbers stored on the phone.

My 86 year old mom still uses her list lol

If you are parent, you have it now. I have. had an endless succession of babysitters, that list is essential.

We still have the one my dad handwrote. Never getting rid of it.

My mom still needs this. I’ve had the same phone number for at least 15 years and she doesn’t know it.

Ours was taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet next to where the phone hung on the wall!

This still exists at grandma's house

Pictures in my wallet of friends and significant others

We didn't have that. You memorized numbers back then. I had to know 100+ numbers back then. Now all I remember is my grandmother's number and the number to the closest pizza hut when I was growing up.

Even having most of those phone numbers memorized.

My fiancés grandparents still have exactly that. I was honored to be added to the list

My parents still have the list! Just not stuck on the fridge, that was never where we kept it.

There’s a Seinfeld episode where Jerry is obsessed over his position on his girlfriend’s speed dial. So even the 90s technological answer to the phone list is dated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennium_(Seinfeld)

I forgot about this

Printing mapquest!

For that matter, a book filled with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of almost all the people who lived in your town, delivered to your doorstep.

Our only phone for years was located next to the cellar door, so we had a cup of pencils nearby and literally wrote the names and numbers on the inside wall of the cellar way.

My parents had a huge rolodex.

My mom's was handwritten

Or on the little handbook on the shelf near the phone.

I would add looking in the Yellow Pages for a business number.

Printed? Bro. Handwritten by your mom/grandma on paper

Trying to call people and getting the busy signal. So you wait a few minutes and call again. Repeat until someone at the other house you’re calling gets off the phone.

I know almost nobody's numbers by heart now, aside from my own, and a Grindr booty call I keep removing and re-adding to my contacts list because I can't quit that dick.

I refuse to save any phone number so if I ever get more friends(or maybe more family idk) I might need that.

pfffff, we'd just remember them back then.

Printed? Pff we had a handwritten Rolodex thank you

My family was weird - we had a whole cabinet where we wrote numbers on the inside of the door, right by the phone on the wall 😂 I wish we saved that cabinet door now! Thanks for the fun memory, I forgot all about that until just now.

We still keep MS-Excel spreadsheets of our contacts, a different spreadsheet for each location in our family personal and business.

I remember my mum having this absolute monster of an address book with at least a couple decades worth of numbers and addresses scribbled in there

I'm 2010 kid, this...

I still have a list of friends and fam on my fridge.

No cell. Only landline

On the phone!

My grandma still has this, every time someone changes their number she just scribbles it out and writes the new one. Bit chaotic

If someone had that now you'd assume it was a hit list or something.

Hand written please. We did have a printer in the 90s but it was a dot matrix printer and printed like a typewriter

Dial tone and busy signal

Man, I still remember peoples numbers from that time while almost none currently. Or well, I do still remember the mobile number from people who got a mobile like 20-25 years ago and never changed their number.

My grandma still has that lol

Printed? What kind of Sci-Fi-Magic did you have??

Printing anything like MapQuest or recipes

I used to carry around a piece of paper with all my numbers on it. It was a legendary list. Wish I could find it again.

Or actually remembering any phone numbers at all. I don’t even know my wife’s number and we’ve been married for 8 years and friends before that for another 4-5.

We had an old discarded envelope that somehow became the number card. It had numbers scribbled into every conceivable nook at all angles. We had that thing for years.

Printed! Weren't we fancy...

My mom had a whole printed spreadsheet on the fridge.

A printed list? That’s fancy! We had a good ole address book, with handwritten names, addresses, and phone numbers.

My grandparents still have that

Ha, we still use these! Helps when some of us (namely my mom) can’t work a smartphone to save her life.

I remember knowing phone numbers from memory!!!!

Your family didn't have one of these?

https://i.imgur.com/syeLHGU.png

We had a phone seat with drawers and this was always tucked into the top drawer.

We just had a contacts/address book. My mom still uses it for Christmas cards.

How about Phone books in general

I still do this lol

In the 90s ours was never printed, just hand written. Didn't have a PC or printer til like 98-99

We still have that.

Woah yeah! We had this list, along with peoples birthdays next to their names.

My parents still have one of those!

Or just memorizing phone numbers. I still know my home phone # from 1972 but couldn't tell you anyone's # I know today, and that includes my own cell#

We kept a whiteboard in our bachelor pad

This shouldn’t be rare or non existent. Get one written down and placed somewhere. Don’t let a dead cell phone battery or something else failing (outside of phone service) make it where you have no idea how to reach someone.

I used to write mine on the cover of the phone book.

This is a really good one. Quintessentially 90s, and it's like 50/50 that the magnet holding the paper will be for the local time/temperature line.

Totally forgot about this, thank you

In the early 2010's my parents wrote their phone numbers ON the fridge. In permanent ink. We had that fridge for a long time

A few of my friends house phone numbers are burned into my brain, even though I haven't called that number in 20+ years.

Memorizing at least 10 phone numbers. Lol I don't even have my SOs number memorized anymore. When I was a kid memorizing your crushes number was part of first base.

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.

Yep I went from that to an email penpal which was pretty cool when email was new....but I think the idea of penpals is kind of over now. or maybe not. Maybe some old souls are still doing it.

I actually met my email penpal sight unseen. She drove from Ohio and I drove from MInneapolis and we met at the Chicago institute of Art. We didn't even know what we looked like other than general descriptions. It was super awkward for a bit there but we eventually broke that down and had a nice day in Chicago with the help of a long island iced tea. haha.

There's community in Reddit who love to send postcard and snailmail. I still cherish this hobby of mine, it's very rare, I don't have any friends who like this hobby. Even my mom's friends keep wondering why her daughter (who's on different generation) still going to local post office to send a postcard :D

What's the name of the community? :)

r/RandomActsofCards and r/penpals I started last month r/RandomActsofCards and I have received 4 postcards with lovely messages from around the world (and of course, it's handwritten!)

Or one popular website, postcrossing.com You can send postcard to random users :D It's great!

I have just signed up for postcrossing! I like the randomness of it. I have taken 5 addresses and I have just bought a stack of blank cards!

I also mailed a letter just now to someone from r/penpalaover30

That's awesome! I love postcrossing, been there since 2014 :D

Anyway, I have bunch of postcards. I'll send you one if you want :)

OK! I'll reciprocate!

İ couldn't see the page even for the request. I would also like to join 30+ penpals if possible. How does it work?

I wrote the sub name wrong. r/penpalsover30

People post that they're looking for a pen pal!

Why does r/penpals feel like all of the requests are female? I just assume it’s catfishing? Is that cynical of me?

I'd say it's just the groupings stand out and we think of streaks as non-random. I was seeing a bundle of f and then m and itxs harder to notice the mixed f m f f m f m m sort of thing - but when you se f f f f f m f m m m m m f m m f etc... they really stand out.

R/fountainpens often has a collection of pen pals who swap letters, every so often they will match interested folks. People who use fountain pens love to practice their penmanship, use new ink colors, and break in pens. Sometimes I send multicolored letters with different ink/pen combos!

And there's a subcommunity of that community for penpals with fountain pens!

Oooo la de daaa

Not like those regular old ballpoint penpals

We stay away from them

I still handwrite thank you notes instead of texting. Same with holiday and birthday cards, Sometimes send real postcards.

When I lived \~ 4 hours away from my hometown for school, I used to write letters to my boyfriend back home, because I thought it would be a sweet, romantic gesture, and he would get excited to receive them. I had some cute stationary and I would add little doodles or whatever to my letters... but writing the letter was sooo slow compared to if I typed it out, so sometimes I would type them and print it on the fancy paper, then mail it. By the time he received the letter we had texted/skyped multiple times and nothing in the letter was new news.

Yep I went from that to an email penpal which was pretty cool when email was new....but I think the idea of penpals is kind of over now

yeah these days it's all long lost relatives trying to send me money

It’s still a thing. Check out lettermo, swapbot and postcrossing :)

There's this app called Slowly. You can send random postcard to someone and it takes time deliver like from some hours to days based on the distance. I've tried it few times 3-4 years back when it was a new app. It was fun tbh, making friends and all

did you guys not end up dating? sounds like a beginning of a romance movie

No I guess it just wasn't meant to be.

Things got a little different and strange after we met in person. I'm not sure we had chemistry in person like we did in text and verse.

I had two email penpals and I met both. The first was kinda awkward, but the second was great and we still keep in touch after more than 2 decades. We met up last month in Vegas cause we both happened to be there.

I cultivate penpals. Letters, good packages. It's hard to find anyone to reciprocate though. Mail is important and I suck at checking email.

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I have now! Thank you so much! I have just signed up, gotten 5 addresses and went out to buy a stack of blank cards.

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Frankly, I'm a bit intimidated by the cards I'm seeing. I don't have any proper postcards. I'm just decorating card stock and writing pretty things on them lol.

I'll be setting up my new printer and I'll be able to take photos of my little England town and then I can print some stuff that will be cool.

But the first match was a guy in Germany with very particular tastes and he specifically said that he doesn't like children, flowers or animals. Are we allowed to skip people we're not keen on? I was going to send him this card

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Well, I sent him a Japanese crane card, anyway. It really is a lovely 19c painting, so maybe he will enjoy it on the aesthetic level.

I actually have a lot of note cards that I can cut. Lovely ones. But they're all Japanese prints of cranes and flowers and other things he said he specifically doesn't like. I think I'm just annoyed with him.

He expressed a strong interest in trams. There's a tram by my flat. Maybe someday ill take a photo and send it to him.

They only sell greeting cards in my neighbourhood . I could cut them up and just send the front of it.

I'm enjoying making cards for the others. I'm using different patterned papers, washi tape, stencils and I'm writing inspirational quotes from my penmanship workbook in my best handwriting. This guy is just a bit intimidating. I think I'll skip him. At some point I'll have my printer set up and I will be printing out cards with my own photos. Maybe I'll come back to him later.

I'll be your penpal. I've got a massive box full of beautiful writing paper but not a lot of friends to write letters to.

Same, I have taken to writing handwritten letters for birthdays, Mother's Day, etc. I am told (I think honestly) that it means more than a store bought card.

I don't usually write letters for occasions like that but I do make the cards myself and write a bit more than just "Happy birthday" in it. Also, I usually send postcards from holidays and write as small as I can so that I can fit as much information on it as possible, telling people about everything we've done so far. And then there's my mother:

"Hello [...],

We are in [city], [country]. The weather is great.

See you soon,

[...]"

Even as a kid I took it upon myself to write the postcards during our trips because hers were just way too boring!

I had a friend in high school, we used to write each a letter every year for birthdays. We'd keep all the letters in the same envelope and pass it back and forth until we graduated, then we kept the respective letters. Still friends through and after college.

I write handwritten letters to a couple of online friends and so far they are no where near 10 pages (the longest one I've sent so far was 3 pages) but the one I'm working on rn might be longer than that since it's taking me forever to write it and stuff I've mentioned before in he letter changes so I'm updating it later on. So if you have online friends that you are close with ask if they want some snail mail! It's worth it.

You can still write letters. Its a fantastic thing to do when you leave an employer esp. i always write notes to old colleagues

Get a fountain pen and join r/FountainPenPals! They do matching every month, and you can say whether you're looking for a one time or something longer. I'm sure there's are other penpal subs, but I know this one is pretty active (and fountain pens are nice too)

I grew up thinking I would be writing letters as an adult like it's a normal thing,the internet was there,so where computers and these flip phones,but texting or emailing wasn't a thing people would mention often,now you will be ridiculed if you think about sending a letter to someone,well I should admit it wasn't going to happen anyways when SMS was around.

You could try out app called Slowly. It's like a digital letters that takes time to deliver.

There's a sub for that! I just mailed a letter to someone who connected with me via r/penpalaover30.

In op’s case, it was a pen gal…

Lol- handwriting is gone too now.

There's lots of good suggestions here but you could also sponsor a child through Compassion International. You help a kid in a tough situation but they also write you letters.

I deleted social media and started sending people letters and post cards like it is 1995.

I miss penpals too :( . We should bring them back.

there’s probably a local group who writes handwritten letters near you if you wanna join one

I don't, my handwriting is awful

Have you been ntroduced to the pénpal sub reddit.

But you gotta give some of this stuff credit. Nowadays it's so much easier. Just type what you want to into your cellphone or computer, and it reaches the recipient in a matter of seconds.

Had foot surgery in 2019 right after lock down ended. Found pen pal groups on Facebook and I love it still send cards to a few and love getting mail!

Back when word’s actually meant something…

I don't, sucked

I loved having penpals! One found me on Facebook when were in college. He turned out to be pretty weird.

Ha. I'm sorry to hear that. My penpal was good weird. But sounds like yours may have been the other kind...

Omg, this reminds me that the only dick pic I ever got was from what turned out to be a not so nice penpal from Italy.

Third or fourth letter he apparently thought our relationship had reached the level where I deserved a paper photography of what I presume was his dick, or what he wanted me to believe was his dick. I was 13. I have never binned anything so fast in my entire life.

Wait so he sent an unsolicited, hand drawn dick pic? That’s insanely cringe, even for a pen pal…

It was a photograph. A genuine old timey analog picture on photo paper. That he had to get developed in a shop somewhere.

I know I was 13 at the time so it had to be in 1978. Italian teenagers were apparently ahead of their time.

Not that I know he was actually a teenager. He could have been a 60 year old creep who had found a way to get nudes from teenage girls.

That he had to get developed in a shop somewhere.

Imagine working in that shop and seeing the pic

Probably not even an uncommon occurrence

...especially in Italy

I am Italian, that stuff is gross, wherever you live

No shade on Italians in general. I love you guys.

But that guy... Well, I wish I could pick him out in a crowd of people with pants on...

By law every American girl has to fuck an Italian guy at some point in their life and they all know it.

Go on, try to find an American girl who hasn’t spent a few months in Italy after college. They don’t exist.

https://www.theonion.com/european-men-are-so-much-more-romantic-than-american-me-1819594261

Well unfortunately they do. <\3

I wish...My family was originally from Siciliy and I've always wanted to visit

How horrifying!

I dated and lost my virginity to my first pen pal, he's a weirdo now but not the point 🤣

Shocking ending!!!

If you want to relieve the same, i can suggest the app called Slowly which essentially does the same.

You can match with random people in the world and the application simulates travel time of the mails based on location, eg it takes 2 days for a mail from Vietnam to arrive here

It is pretty fun, works both on phones or desktop

came here to suggest this! i write once every 3 4 weeks, and for my friend in Australia it takes more than 24 hrs to get the letter!

I'm in a long distance relationship and I write love letters to my partner pretty often, I think it's a very sweet amd intimate gesture :)

I, for some time, wrote daily postcards to my now-husband back when we were in a long distance relationship. Made it a bit more interesting by seeing how much I could change the address and the card was still delivered. So I ended up sending letters to places like "Little Britain" and "Not so united Kingdom" (and many other that I forgot over time). We were slightly salty because Brexit was about to make pur LDR even more complicated lol

I still have the love letters my SO sent to me when we first started dating, even though we only lived across town from each other. I mentioned in passing that I thought it was sad that they'd fallen out of favour so he decided to start writing to me. They mean the world to me! Love letters also provided him with an unexpected bonus - he went to the US for a training course and decided to sit down and write me a love letter while sat in the hotel bar and ended up getting lots of free drinks and praise from other guests (mainly ladies lol) for being so "cute". I guess there were a few husbands and boyfriends who got the "why don't you ever do that for me?" treatment afterwards lol.

Another throwaway comment he took to heart was a grump about how people only buy me cat themed stuff just because I have cats. He decided to turn it into a joke abd started bringing me an ornamental cat back from whatever country he's been to. I now have American cats, Dutch cats, Italian cats and some freaky winged feather boa and tiara wearing thing from Germany that's known as The Hideous Cat Monster.

People had to put so much thought into those letters before the internet.

You just described why I refuse to do 'chat' when getting to know someone online...

Now my kids have international friends via online games. I think it is pretty great actually. They get to hear their voices and make a different kind of connection from letter writing. Times are changing..

I've made friends over Discord, and have an online bookclub there that's been running for 2 years now. We have sent each other letters and holiday gifts, it's definitely a different feel to it when you know they'll will take a month to arrive. The letters get more thoughtful and intimate. On the other hand, pen pals can't respond to my midnight ramblings with I know it's 2am in your time zone pls get some sleep

Yeah thoughtful is a great aspect of letter writing. Intimacy is something a bit more ephemeral. I’d say deep thought intimacy is different than live talking intimacy.

My ex/now best friend does that. He has a few prison penpals and Russian penpals

why is everyone talking as if panpals are gone? This is still a thing, there are websites where they will match you up with another person in another country and you write eachother. A lot of people that actually want to do this and not just say they want to do this have figured this out a long time ago

I had a pen pal as a kid who told me her brother was possessed by a demon because he was listening to Korn

Thanks for the laugh

Penpals still exist ... I have 3 and write other friends fancy cards on holidays ... do agree though that texting is just the worst thing ever for communication lol. Hate having to be instantly available or I'm just not interesting. Who has the time??

I have a couple of friends who when I text them will respond anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of weeks later which is sometimes annoying but I know that's how they text and it makes every text you get quite nice

man i hope that's true, i always worry about making my friends feel terrible but honestly i just can't keep up with everything 😭

You can tell them that you won't text back as quickly because you are busy or taking a break from social media/being online all the time and will reply when you get to it. And I'm pretty sure your friends wouldn't feel terrible. Also I'm guessing you are reading the stuff so if it's important/urgent you can answer, if not just do it later no harm done. (Just make sure you don't forget to text them eventually but then again that may just be me and my ADHD)

I love that. I miss letters. They’re so much more personal being handwritten. And the excitement of waiting for them is nice. As a child I was jealous that my parents got letters so often and I didn’t. Until they told me they weren’t nice letters but bills and such. I was obsessed with letters as a child. The whole ritual of finding a nice envelope and licking it to close it is also super nostalgic.

Felt the bills part. When I was a kid, the mailbox was the most magical place

check out r/penpals and r/RandomActsofCards!

Felt the bills part. When I was a kid, the mailbox was the most magical place

Thank you for this...reminded me of my pen pal from the Netherlands when I was 14. Met on "isketch"... it wasnt just online pictionary. It was a secret gross chatroom based website... a/s/l ... that was always the first question. Luckily this guy was a nice guy. My mom was on top of it and approved...I am 30 now. Wonder how hes doing these days :-P

I had pen pals from 4th grade until I was in my 20’s. One was English, one from Belgium, one from Brooklyn (I lived in the South at the time, so that was very exotic!). So much fun. Of course my idiot mother threw out all my letters when I left home. She had plenty of room, but she was punishing me, I guess. I have all her letters, and my BFF since 2nd grade’s letters, though. No one will want them when I pass on, so guess they will be recycled or burned. Sad.

You can still do that in slowly

When my friend moved back to Sweden we wrote each other and I've kept everything. I also have letters from an exchange student I knew in France.

Same. I'm in Michigan and had a pen pal in California. We wrote all through middle and highschool. Sent each other photos. We lost touch in college. I tried to write, but the family had moved. Jamie from Hemet CA, I hope you're doing well.

A friend and I have started doing this again recently. She only lives in the next city over, and we keep in touch on social media anyway, but there is something so delightful about receiving a handwritten letter with each other’s news and thoughts. Which reminds me, it’s my turn to write back.

Big shout out to Timea from Hungary! Her main Christmas present was some little sweets, but she still sent me a handful ♥️

This was basically my wife and I's courtship.

Ironically, even though I used to want to be a writer, I never was much for writing letters. If I wanted to talk to someone that was far away, I just used the telephone. I remember back in the 80s having a $400 phone bill one time. (According to the inflation calculator, $400 in 1985 is equivalent to $989 today)

I grew up in Mexico and was a pen pal with someone in New Zealand. We wrote each other letters and sent pics of each other for maybe a year.

I contacted her through Facebook many years later telling her it was me, her pen pal and so on and I got 'ok' as a response. I never messaged her again.

That's sad. I think I might be Facebook friends with this girl but she is a distant contact now so there is really nothing there.

It's weird to have such an intimate relationship with a person and then just never talk to them again. I don't just mean a romantic relationship...but also friendships and other types of things. Life is a little bittersweet that way.

I remember back in the wild west days of the Internet it was the coolest shit to talk to someone from across the world.

I'd still want to do this with someone I care about. Potential marriage partner.

That's too long distance for me

Bring back penpals I miss mine I was like 9 when I had one

You know, I admire the old school English where you guys wrote so concisely and every word had profound meaning. Nowadays, people will have to write with 3 sentences to express what you guys wrote with one sentence.

I have a friend that writes a bunch of us a super long email once a year and I absolutely love reading about what she’s up to. It can still be done just through a different medium.

Used to write 1-2 page long "notes" for my GF in HS and her me. It was cool she'd just give it to me in the hallway and I'd have stuff to look forward to reading in my next class.

I recommend this app called Slowly. It encourages long form writing by delivering your letter over a period of days

My 13 yo has a pen pal she met while we were on vacation a few years ago. It's awesome how excited she gets when she gets a letter comes and the letters are so pure and innocent. Truly the words of children, instead of the facade she puts on with her friends at home.

I just remembered when I was around 8 to 10, me and my dad would write to each other (me being in the north island, him in the south island.. NZ) now its simmered down to a phone call every couple of years to say happy birthday. I think he's trying to better me at seeing who can hold off the longest before reaching out to the other again, he's bloody good though.. probably been 2 years.. honestly ill break and might call him this year.. since he missed my bday again. And my sons. Bastard.

When I was at uni (2016-20) my nan and I would write letters back and forth every week. We both have phones and she can text and call pretty well but it was so nice looking forward to those letters. I live closer to her now so we meet up once a week for coffee instead but I absolute treasure the ones I collected from her over those years.

There is an argument that our lack of writing long correspondence has contributed to our inability to communicate with people we don't agree with.

My mother writes handwritten letters to my kids once a month. She says it keeps her sharp and thinking and it helps my kids to read cursive since it is barely taught in school. She was an english teacher so it makes sense.

I had a penpal from Germany when I was a kid. Not long ago she reached out to me on Facebook and asked if it was me and gave a detailed history of what she remembered about me and told me who she was. I was like "Oh my gosh! It is me!" And then she was basically like "Hmmm, no, you can't be who I'm thinking of." And then she never messaged me again. It was so confusing.

This pulled up a long buried memory I had of finding a message in a bottle in Puget Sound that some kid around my age had sent out with their info on it to start writing to. We sent a couple messages back and forth! I forgot about pen pals!

Agree totally. In Australia, wrote to a girl in Germany for years. I wrote in my (bad) German and she replied in (her bad) English but in our native language for serious things. Over the years so much was communicated in these letters. Little things, big things: the frustrations of daily life to the cancer diagnosis and death of her mother. Nothing like these letters today.

Video games that didn’t have DLC or require an online connection.

Weren't expansion packs a thing in the 90s?

First expansion pack i ever had was for the original call of duty and that came out in 2003. Medal of honor came out in 1999 but didn’t have an expansion until 2002. Those are the oldest I can think of. Edit. Expansion packs are not DLC. They’re not downloadable contact they were disk based full expansions.

1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_II:_Beyond_the_Dark_Portal

Expansion packs are not DLC. It’s not downloadable content. It’s disk based

Completely orthogonal to my point. I was not comparing expansion packs to DLC. I was specifically answering the question:

Weren't expansion packs a thing in the 90s?

You answered "no" essentially... by giving examples you could think of from the 2000s. I answered "yes" because that is the answer.

Yes. 1 was listed. I see that.

I still have sexy letters from high school girlfriend.

I actually used to do this via email with a guy I met on YouTube. Once a month we'd exchange emails. It was fun but in the end it was too much of a commitment for me to continue with it. I think it lasted 2 years or so.

He was from Colombia (the country)

I used to trade band demos with a couple of guys in Norway and Sweden. Everything was hand-written, everything was done to the best we could do. I always got Type IV tapes as they did. Awesome times.

I think I know that girl

Does everyone in Norway know each other? She was an American exchange student living in Norway for a year.

To an extent yes. If she is not from Norway, then I dont know her

You got that person on Facebook now? Or social media

I had a penpal in like 2012-ish, I don’t think they’re that ancient.

Yep. Humanity’s downfall starts here with not worrying those thoughtful letters anymore. Not even kidding 😭

Did you marry her?

She moved back to the states and I hung out with her for awhile but I fell into what is now known as the friendzone. I don't think we had a word for it then.

To my credit, I eventually got the courage to tell her how I feel and she just wanted a friend so that was that and the friendship was over. I wasn't really able to be friends with her.

I still have those letters in a box somewhere and there's a part of me that wants to see if she has mine. It would be so interesting to see those and I'm sure she would be interested to see mine.

I remember a few years ago my niece sent me a letter for my birthday. I then texted her about it and we talked about the letter in real time, even though it took a week to write, post and get here. The feeling of... time dilation? or something? I had in that very moment in unreal. The contrast was like two universes colliding.

Length doesn't equal thought. Short concise sentences can be thoughtful. Likewise, you also get assholes like me that posts walls of text regularly. It happens still, no one likes it. No one likes it because there's an abundance of shit to read (much self confirming) and it takes effort to deal with anything of length.

Arguably, the internet having a stream of thought sort of process - it more... "organic" and closer to the reality at the very least. The internet, while it can and will be many things at the same time - opens up a new avenue of things between artifical lettera and real time discourse. Not quite letter, not quite a diacussion - somewhere in-between.

Man, I couldn't write a 10 page manifesto.

I remember having a few friends from all over the world on neopets I did this with back in the day, daily.

We’re supposed to be at the most globally interconnected point in history right now, but I somehow feel so isolated compared to then...

Everyone I knew on there went silent after a while and then after a short hiatus, my original account got stolen.

It hurts and I miss them all.

Charlie from NZ, I wish I got some other form of contact from you, sincerely, mew.

While it’s definitely not common anymore there is an international community of people who still have penpals and write letters. If you’re ever interested in checking it out search #snailmail on Instagram. There’s even a subreddit for people who want to write letters and have penpals.

I doubt I could write a ten page letter to myself once a year.

There’s an app for that! Called slowly. You can write random strangers and it takes longer for the message the further they are.

I do like the penpal friends I’ve made in foreign countries through Instagram, I admit. It’s easier to sustain those with social media. But yes, the letters you write back then involved more. Still, it’s harder to make it a conversation.

I have a good friend in Australia I met on social media and she is an artist. Though we have never met, I’ve commissioned several works from her and she did a portrait of my dog for me for my birthday. And I had the benefit of seeing her amazing work on social media. So I agree with you overall, I think firming these international bonds is easier now in the end.

I used to work in a bookstore. Loaned a book to a retired high school English teacher so he could get it copied at Kinkos. After the store closed, we wrote letters back and forth. I really miss regular letter mail. It’s nice getting email but I have letters from my grandmother, mother and other family members and they are so nice to have.

I found my old penpal letters the other day, but it was a kid in the States as well so not much culturally different. Tried looking him up on facebook a few times but never found him.

I had a penalty for about 3 letters then she wrote to me once I didn't write back straight away and then just didn't get round to it. Feel bad for ditching her like that, but in my defence, even now I'm shit at replying to messages

Basically just letters.

My gf and I that see each other almost every day write letters to each other all the time. I am a pretty good writer so it gives me a chance to show off a little while being really sweet to her. She loves them and we’ve been saving them. I look forward to reading them later on once we have a bigger collection of them.

you should download an App called Slowly

I did that for a bit! It is really nice but I lost motivation to write letters in the end.

My sister is still friends with her penpal in Wuhan, China. It was crazy hearing about what was going down in 2020. They've been writing to each other for about 2 decades now. :)

Ah, the pen pal crush letters.

You can still write pen pal letters. There's a club called International Pen Friends where you fill out a contact form, pick your countries and pay to join the club. 2 weeks or so later and you get an email with your pen friends list on it. Its a lot of fun.

I love the idea of pen pals.
I mean, sure, instant worldwide communication is neat and I wouldn't give it up for letters, but still.

Maybe try the App „Slowly“ :) it basically simulates the same thing. Messages you send Someone take longer to arrive the further they’re away from your location

Collecting the occasional odd stamp on some snail mail

You can still do that. There's websites/apps to help you find penpals.

I had MANY penpals back around 1995-2000: Italy, Norway, Japan, UK, many countries. I loved them all so much.

A guy I dated in high school used to write me letters, even though we saw each other every week. They were very cute, in an innocent, 15-year-old type of way. We were only together for like...4 months.

We hadn't seen each other in years but he actually passed away unexpectedly a year ago, and I kind of wish I had kept the letters.

My mom still has letters on airmail paper from her grade school pen pal in Japan international postage is just too expensive now and online messaging is faster

My Mum bought me some writing paper recently. I was like, thanks, I think.

I decided I would write to a couple of people I haven't seen in a while and sent them a notebook with a nice cover because it was small enough to fit into an A5 envelope. I got WhatsApp message replies, but they were over-the-moon to get an actual hand written letter and a surprise present. Even with my terrible hand writing.

I had so many penpals as a kid. It was amazing. I knew people all over the world. Got a ton of marriage proposals for some reason... my friends and I used to laugh about that so much. I learned about so many amazing cultures as a kid. Now you try to get a penpal and it's just some sex pest

Nowadays both the writing standard and people's speech patterns have dropped dramatically.

I miss pen pals, that was so fun

That girl was 300lb dude so not too different from today

Being told to get off the internet so someone could use the phone.

Having a download of a big file (which was like.. 50mb in those days) ruined because someone picked up the phone.

Even pirate games were split up into 10MB or so chunks due to dialup internet.

Or my mom accidentally picking up the phone after I had spent forty five minutes trying to get online

That was painful

listening to a full minute of dubstep every time you connected to dial-up internet

Exactly

Sorry, replying late. Mom was on the phone forever

The number one argument I had with my brother...

Oh, many people "thought I was rich" when I told them I had 2 phone lines...lol...a basic one for phone calls and one for my 4800 or 9600 baud modem...lol

You were certainly rich.

one time my mom and i got a flat tire, or the car broke down or something, i don’t remember exactly. we called my dad to pick us up, but he was on the internet. we called repeatedly for quite some time, still on the internet. when we finally got ahold of him, my mom angrily informed him we were officially getting a second phone line.

Going to call someone only to hear the dial up sounds

We never had the chance for that. We were just constantly kicked off because people kept calling the house.

This is the first reference to dial up I’ve found so far…like 40 comments down

Never knew that pain. Thankfully. We always had a modem. :) or at least a seperate line in the beginning if anything.

Calling someone for something important & getting a busy signal 🤯🔫

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.

Same. I had a few from various times we got to use digital cameras and what not but then our old computer crashed and I lost it all. At the time I didn't really care but now I wish I had them still.

Note that if the computer wasn't thrown away, recovering data off the dead hard drive is comparatively simple.

The computer got thrown away about 18 years ago I'm afraid.

A lot of people complain about selfie culture or people always taking photos of stuff but I really love that we're able to do that now.

Growing up in the 90 and early 00s there's relatively few photos of my life or that time for me. So many things I wanted to take pictures of and look back on and it just wasn't a feasible thing to do.

I love that photography has become so accessible that everyone can take pictures of the things they love or find beautiful, and I hope I live long enough that I can look back on all of these when I'm old and just melt away in pictures of a world I once lived in.

Agreed but I'm sad that candid pictures are almost taboo now. Everything has to be planned so everyone looks good or the photo is shopped if it doesn't.

You've put that beautifully.

My HS had this weird like booster sale at the end of the year where you could shuffle through random photos of kids and events and buy them. I assume they were from like the yearbook/journalism class? I totally bought some of my friends but also people I had crushes on like a weirdo.

Senior year (03-04) I carried my camera everywhere. Bonus because I worked at the One Hour Photo in our drugstore so I got to develop my own pics plus I got a 50% discount.

We just waited until the boss was away and developed the films.

Useful if you took 6 rolls of 36 on your vacation.

but it makes those pictures so precious because they are so rare!

I took camera to high school too, I still have those pictures!

No sending nudes back then unless you developed them yourself or had a good friend do it. Those were the days

I remember being told in the 1990’s to never take nude photos of yourself or let someone else take them, because you never know where they will wind up. And that was before it was even possible to post photos online!

I worked in a photo lab, and still didn't have nudes of my GF at the time!

Honestly, it didn't even cross your mind to do that sort of thing at the time. Now it's foreplay.

I took a camera to document our adventures when we would skip school. I still have some of the pics buried away somewhere.

I was the camera person in my group too! SO. MANY. PHOTOS. Then I got my hands on a cheap film camera and a ton of film and oh boy... I got really really good at getting the quick draw point and shoot and them being pretty decent haha.

I was cleaning out some childhood stuff a while ago and found a Rubbermaid bin filled with a ton of loose pictures and picture books with all those photos. I have no clue what I'm gonna do with them.

I would have them digitally archived

Get them digital, and put together a website of Life in the 90s.

People love that nostalgia stuff.

Post them on FB to accumulate awwwwws

Saying good/neutral things about Facebook, on Reddit? BAN

I'll just throw a "hellsite" in here for balance.

Me too! I had a Kodak camera I’d always have in my backpack.

I was and still am the photo person in my friend and f aily groups. I have so many photos.

Got my first digital camera in 2002 but alway carried a film camera and/or disposable camera.

I could look though those old photos for hours. Everyone loves when I pull out my photo boxes!

During the first lockdown, I posted hundreds of them on my Facebook for everyone to see as a distraction from the misery of lockdown.

Finding your old printed photos feels so wonderful. Nothing better.

No one likes their picture taken until 10 years later. And if you don't take the pictures, no one will.

This made me smile

You are the MVP now.

For senior beach week one of those dudes with a 110 camera took a picture / slide and put it in those little novelty viewers you could buy for like $2-3. I got one and saved it, then a decade later took the slide out and put it in a 35mm glass slide carrier and mailed it off to some print house to get an 11x14 enlargement (figuring it would be like 5x7 'cause the 110 slide was so small) and whoever got it knew what I wanted - send me back an 11x14 of all 12-13 of my best friends in HS who shared that beach house. I (eventually) posted it and everybody flipped out - best picture ever. (I probbaly should post it to oldschoolcool - we weren't, but it sure felt like it at the time)

At my middle school we called that Tabloid Photographer. So-and-so is going out with What's-his-face? Gotta be the first to snap a pic of them holding hands!

I never went anywhere without my Kodak Disk camera in high school. I remember showing someone pictures I took at a concert and they were like "How did you get that grainy effect? It's so cool!". And I said "I hold the camera above my head, hold down the button, and hope for the best."

I have so many photo albums full of fun times from back then. Including so many selfies. I don't know how they all turned out so well.

I would always grab one for the last day of the year

I use to keep one in my truck and backpack. Too bad I don’t know what happened to those photos. Too many apartment changes got lost in the shuffle.

I looooove candid photos. Better than the posed ones.

In high school I used to bring a disposable camera for the last week or day of the school year.

I like to call those "stolen pictures." Nothing planned, no poses....just in the moment, as it is.

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.

I miss that. I have grown to hate events / nights out being put repeatedly on hold for 14 photo shoots

You’ve inspired me to only use disposable cameras at events from now on because that sounds like so much fun

My housemate bought about 10 and left them around our house during one of his birthday parties.

I highly recommend it, so many random, funny photos from people just picking one up and snapping a few pics.

Be warned though, there was an ungodly amount of a dicks.

this does not come out like a ringing endorsement tbqh

I dig it! Get them developed at Walmart and they will censor out the dicks for you!

Those poor photo developers :'(

I used to work for a camera store in their minilab, I'd just moved stores and it was my first week in the new lab. It was a quiet morning, with only one customer who asked for their disposable cameras to be processed on the fast service with additional hand processing (for a little extra we'd colour correct and lighten/darken every photo, one by one). So I'd done my job - the entire roll of film was just photos of the inside of people's underwear. So I'd spent the morning making sure the nipple colours were spot on, and the veins on the various penises were clear and visible.

Anyway, a little later I get introduced to one of my new colleagues who says "oh hi! My friend brought in a roll of film from a party I was at least night, so you've already seen me". The colour drained from his face as he realised from my expression what kind of photos I'd seen.

Turns out his friends had another roll of film, which they brought in later, which did have his face in. He always swore blind he wasn't in the initial set of photos.

What would be a godly amount of dicks?

Film is a lot of fun, and is definitely a different experience than digital photography.

Just a head up though, film and developing are a lot more expensive than they used to be. Also, be prepared for many of your pictures to end up looking like crap, especially on a disposable camera.

But even crappy photos are nice mementos and make for fun memories.

If you want to, buy an old film SLR, it'll be a bit more expensive in the short run but you'll get a whole lot more versatility in the long run

Also recommend checking out r/ToyCameras and r/Analog

There’s an iPhone App called Dispo which tries to avoid this situation by not letting you see your photos until 9am the following morning.

The thought is that you will all focus on one good photo if you can’t scrutinise it right away and not do 13 reshoots.

But what is the top complaint for that App in the App store? “I don’t know if I’ve taken a good photo, so many of my photos come out where my friends have their eyes closed”

Can’t please all the people all the time.

Also, wouldn’t people just take the photo on Dispo, be unsure if it was a good photo, and open it their camera app or whatever else and take as many photos as they see fit? Does this app brick other photo apps?

The regular camera App is not affected, you are free to flip over to it.

I’ve never used Dispo, but there’s one feature which seems like it might have been interesting to try out if I was back in university going to a house party. Dispo has a group camera roll, where multiple people contribute photos through the night from the app on their own phones and then the next morning at 9am all the photos are “developed” in the group for all to see.

Nobody gets to preen over their best shots before posting them to FB/Insta/Whatever, and knowing that everyone will see all photos could (maybe?) restrain people to only take a few good pics.

Does the app stop people from taking 20 photos, instead of one? Cost was a factor in film photography. A roll of film has limited number of shots (12, 24, 36), and the cost of developing each photo adds up. You would tried your best to look your best, before the cameraman snap the pic. Or they snap at you.

I have no idea. I’m not really sure how having one disposable camera app on your smartphone could possibly simulate the experience of having a disposable camera and no smartphone.

And I for one cannot imagine wanting to simulate that anyway. Digital cameras have improved my photography a lot because I can retake bad photos. No nostalgia for film whatsoever

I was the opposite. Knowing I can’t repeat the photo made me more careful.

It's the same for many people. It's one of the appeals of getting into old school film photography. It's expensive and inconvenient, but it forces you to think about every shot carefully before you take it, instead of just snapping 20 slightly different pictures of the same thing, then later realising none of them were very good. Also saves you having 500 photos to scour through for the good ones when you get home.

Come to Canada where we have three effective telecoms and one outage can take out the whole country in terms of internet, finances, emergency services, cellphones, and all that jazz. So I mean we had a taste of the digital camera life pre smartphone era. We just had an outage so I'd say we are due for another one soon...

It sounds like the app is similar to everyone putting their phones in a pile during dinner. It's an intentional commitment but nothing is stopping you from breaking the "rules"

Oooohhhh! Held back for 6-12 hours! You clearly don’t remember actual delays. Developing film was not cheap, and no one took multiple pix to see how they looked. You took a few pix with your camera, and then waited for the next event a few weeks later unless it was something like an ongoing trip where you had a day or two in every place.

I once shot a whole camera full of weird pics of the fish bowl as a kid.

As a teenager a bunch of friends and I used an entire roll of film posing with a giant Tweety bird plushie that I won at circus circus in Reno. Another fun fact. When I was in Reno it was the anniversary of Elvis's death. And since I was like 12 my parents left me in the room. There was an Elvis movie marathon on TV. I took an entire roll of Tweety bird posing in front of various scenes in Blue Hawaii. My dad hated Tweety. He was so big that he took up like half the back seat of the car. Tweety was a great vacationer. He got to see the Grand Canyon, the salt flats, and was extremely bored in Texas. We also visited my Aunt who had a cat called Puddy. And since I was 12 I ran that joke into the ground and I'm surprised I'm still alive. Long story short I've got a box of Tweety Bird pictures somewhere taking up space that likely cost a fortune to develop.

Edit: That was also the trip that the song "Closing Time" was played on every radio station ever like twice an hour. My dad got so annoyed that he was willing to listen to the only tape we had in the car which was Billy Rae Cyrus. Driving from Ohio to California and back was a wild ride. My dad still talks about how I won the biggest stuffie possible just to annoy him. I mean...I didn't do it purposely. It was just a happy accident.

As a kid of the 80’s I had my fair share of Kodak single use camera’s.

I remember once the film ran out the flash’s battery would still be good (capicator charged, LED came on), but the shutter wouldn’t click and so the flash wouldn’t go off. Unless, you smacked the camera hard against your hand and a little reed switch connected and the flash went off.

Actually, I haven’t seen a xenon flash in years, it’s all just been cell phone LED flash’s.

Nah man. Back in the 90s film was piss cheap to develop. $3 and you get a roll of film for free. It’s only recently that prices went up.

I get what it's trying to do, but then you'll end up with "bad" photos and will never be able to get them back.

There is a camera developed as part of conceptual artwork, where the camera checks if a picture was already taken on the spot where you are now - and if so, you can not take a picture.

The only drawback was that you need internet access, so when you are really somewhere original you can probably not check - and then the cera refuses to take a picture

I feel like that's a social group thing more than anything else.

My group has always been more so about candid shots, the few group shots are always just snap like 5 in a row, and 1 of them will be good.

This, also for many events/social gathering those slightly weird/unfocused picture tell more of a story then a perfect one imo. With my friend group we usually just aim for "good enough" its mostly used to send to the people that cant be there or to look at in a couple of years when we are drunk and remenicing :p

The older I get the more I appreciate the bad photos.

I feel that. I love my girlfriend very much, *and*, the retaking of every picture she asks me to take of her 5 times gets a little old sometimes.

And when you're finally done taking the picture, there's always "oh now take one on my phone!" when their phone is 6 years old and the lens is covered in dirt.

Take all the photos you can... Print them out if you can... Sometimes that's all you have left

Could not agree more, my wife has a limit of how many photos she gets in one trip...but im the bad guy for getting pissed off after 7 failed photo attempts because "i dont like this or that" 🙄

We fixed that by bringing several disposable cameras. Pictures are either glorious, hilarious, brilliant, or just amazing. They never suck. Could be worth trying out? :)

My mum is really bad for this from time to time every birthday cake, Christmas etc you’re gritting your teeth while she’s checking if she is happy with the shot so we can get on with it.

Christmas 2007 was a shemozzle in particular lol - she dressed up as Santa before we opened the presents. 2. Fucking. Hours. Later before we actually got to opening the first present I shit you not, because she was having trouble getting the right setting on the digital camera, or shots she was happy with we got there in the end thankfully.

She’s gotten better at it over time but sheesh it can be frustrating sometimes. Similar to when you’re in a group and everyone wants the same photo on their device, just get somebody to send it to you jeez! Haha.

I also introduced her to Snapchat and she likes to put 7 different overlay filters/texts on the same photo at times and wonders later why it’s clogging up her storage space and having to go through it/ save it elsewhere for later review.

Years ago, I remember reading a story about a restaurant that suddenly started getting a wave of bad online reviews for no explicable reason. After a bit of investigating, they discovered what was going on. This was around the time when smartphones became very common. Guests would wait for their food to arrive, then spend 10-15 minutes posing for photos, repositioning the food, and getting every possible angle for sharing on social media. By the time they got around to actually eating their food, it would be stone cold. They likely had no idea how long they had spent taking photos and would assume the food came out already cold.

I still think about that story today whenever I see people posing for photos at a restaurant.

People like this don't go out because they enjoy it.

They go out to take pictures to try to present the false impression that they are "fun" to their peers on social media. But the truth is, they are not fun. They are glued to their phones and don't acknowledge the outside world unless it's through a smartphone camera.

yea I don't do that. I'm a guy though so me and my friends never really want pictures. My sister is a fiend though. I'll cut her off after 1 or 2. Say sorry I'm over it just enjoy the night I'm not taking more pictures for you.

I have always loved photography, so pre-cellphone I would take my actual camera with me to special events, and made people pose for ages since I only had 1 shot.

You can still buy disposable cameras, my friends use them for fun sometimes and we're gen z

Unless it's my grandmother then you were still taking 6 shots for "safety"

Even then is was click click click click done. None of this take one picture and have everyone huddle around and scrutinize it for 2 minutes between each photo.

I wish we could go back to that. It's annoying having to take the same picture 5 times because someone doesn't like the way they look in a photo.

“Oh let’s take one more - just in case” - my mother several times over

Anyone else slap the camera on your wrist to make it flash over and over?

Turning the camera into the photo developing area, then getting the package you got to tear open to see the photos in the envelope was so exciting.

At the time, when I was younger I used to hate getting photos back. You'd never know what was coming, you always - without fail - looked dorky, messy and awful.

Old me loves having those awful photos now. They were great, none of this click......, check......delete, click again...... check it...... delete...... click again.......3 of us look great but Sandra looks like shit....... delete...... click again etc.,etc.

I have so many photos that I begged my mum to get rid of but I'm soooo grateful she didn't because they're hilarious

I took a 10 year old disposable to Walmart one time, had all kinds of photos of people smoking weed and stuff. Great times. The clerk was trying not to laugh.

It was expensive in the 80s-90s to take multiple shots to see if you got one good one.

We've got so many photos of us looking up as a group photo because we were told the "trick" to reduce red eyes was to look up at the light then back down to the camera. Never really worked anyway. 😂

It has been replaced with the "An Amazon delivery? Time to find out what I ordered the other day!"

Every concert now has people recording on their phone rather than enjoy the moment.

2 was the maximum

I miss this, the constant check the screen, try again , check the screen one more shot check the screen nope change angles, my wife does this and it makes me not even want to take a photo, because a quick selfie feels like an eternity. Like for real we use to gather 30 family members, take the photo, then disperse quicker than my wife takes one selfie.

Yeah, but on the other hand: depending on who was holding the camera, they might make you freeze, pose, rearrange yourselves, move, wait, go back, stop pulling a face, you ARE, you don't normally do that, smile, look NICE, I only have three shots left on the film, Jakey leave your brother alone, hold it, HOLD IT... Oh, everyone was looking much happier before, why are you all so grumpy now? YOU'VE ALL SPOILED MY PHOTOGRAPH.

Just people, enjoying the moment, whilst someone furiously thumbs a clicking plastic wheel before they can take another photo.

And no fucking Filters. Jesus I hate filters

So you either learned to take a decent photograph or you never let that one person who always put their finger in the pic take the important pics.

I'd say two or three if you really wanted the photo. "Hold on, one more, just in case..."

Yeah, and so my dad would make us stand there for 6 minutes while he walked around to find the perfect angle or whatever. He only got the one shot, so he was going to make us stand there and wait for it to be right.

No filters, no photo editing, everyone actually looked like themselves in a photo

Well now you have the CHOICE of taking 1 shot or 100. You can literally still choose to just take 1 shot and then get back to fun. Having 2 options is always better than 1 option

At music festivals people will still handout disposable cameras and pass em off to other people to pass of to other people so whoever ends up with it has some cool and weird shit to check out.

I would imagine you end up with numerous dick pics.

I ended up with (AT LEAST) one of those after having one at a party with just friends. Not embarrassed to say I did some Matlock underwear detective work to figure out the culprits.

It was Kyle wasn't it?

Sometimes, but people at music festivals are usually a bit more creative than that.

Or the opposite end of the spectrum, theyre stuck in a khole and take blurry pics.

Go back through your gallery. I guarantee there's still something you forgot about in there.

I do. Just not half as fun 😂. Or as spread apart no take way more photos now.

You should look at a papershoot camera. I got one a few weeks ago and really love it. I take it everywhere, take a ton of photos, forget about em until I look at the memory card the next week. Really a lot of fun. Like having a film camera in my pocket without the hassle of getting anything developed

Now that sounds like a little more delayed gratification I can get behind!

As someone who has a film camera and enjoys using it mainly on vacations, the delay to see how the photos came out is by far my favorite part. The moment the email comes in with the scans is pure childlike excitement. Similar to the whole vinyl thing with music, to me it's less about "oh this older format looks/sounds better!" and more about the experience being fun and different.

A few months ago I developed a roll that I found in a box and yeah, the surprise was worth it!... I found pictures a loved one had talen of me and my kids when they were babies, and they're big now so It was just as you say!!!

Aw now that’s a sweet find!

Also once you got your pics developed you realize how horrible a photographer you are.

I bought a little camera with my pocket money back in middle school and took a shit ton of pictures. When they're developed, that kinda cemented the fact that I'm no artist.

This for sure. I am much better now that I have instant feedback AND a delete button 😂

It was also so fun to have a bunch of disposable cameras at each table at an event (wedding, sweet 16, bar mitzvah) for the guests to take photos at the event, and then the host gets them developed to see what their guests captured. I miss this. Honestly might bring it back if I have a wedding.

We would take a bunch of crotch shots whenever a friend left a camera around. We would hang them up on our quote wall. Later I noticed a gallery featuring a photographer’s crotch shots, so I guess we were ahead of the curve?

I was JUST trying to explain this to my kids lol

I was hanging out with my brother last weekend and he said he hadn’t dumped his memory card in a few months. I still have film i shot in the freezer/fridge from 5-10 years ago but it kinda feels similar to me. You forget the things you took photos of after a while and it’s fun to go back and find them again.

I worked in a photo lab for a few years after college and it was an interesting job to bring people’s memories from film to print.

My mom was once showing me pictures she just developed and caught herself before she showed me a "special" one. It turns out, as a joke, she had snapped a photo of my dad buck naked in their hotel room at the vacation. I was understandably glad to miss this one. She chuckled to herself and put it back.

Then I casually mentioned, to her horror, that the camera shop guy almost certainly checked the pictures manually, and it was not some automated machine that ingests a disposable camera and prints the photos. I'm not sure if she ever went back to that shop.

you can kind of still get that experience now: alcohol! or rohypnol, depending on how much you want to forget

Should be top post!!! 🥇 🪙 🥇

My brother was going on school camp to the snow once, so my mother gave him a disposable camera to take with him. None of us had ever seen snow before so it was like “get heaps of photos of the snow for us”. That dumb fucker came home with one single photo of everyone getting on the bus, and then 31 photos of a fucking goat he saw in a paddock next to a service station they stopped at on the way.

Mum was fucking pissed when she got that one developed.

Or when someone snuck in a photo of themselves without you realizing haha

I was in Walmart today and say disposable camera! Didn't have time to check if they were film, but totally took me back. I worked in photo departments at a few store and loved looking at strangers pictures!

Look for an old hard drive and you'll get that missed feeling back right away.

My husband is a bit of a tech nerd. I’m sure that falls into the “not secure” category and got destroyed

My friends and I found a disposable camera with 15 shots remaining in Galveston one year. We took the rest of the roll and had it developed. The original owners appeared to be a family on vacation.

Plus pictures felt more special. Now it’s like I can take a picture any time so I hardly ever feel like it

I remember being an obnoxious teenager and taking a photo of myself if someone left one lying around at an event.

I used someone's family camera to take a photo of a friend who had passed out at a party someone threw while their parents were away. It always gives me a chuckle to imagine them developing it and flipping through snaps of their holiday to Fiji when suddenly there is a pic of some drooling boozehound, then back to pics of grandma's 90th.

I usually took NO pictures because I always was thinking "I only have X number of pictures left!

Like when you save every goddamn consumable in a game because you "might need it later*

But never use it at the right time. I feel this deeply. Digital has freed this for me lol

I have 17 years of digital photos and occasionally get that feeling.

Me too. When my kids took it lol

I still have those surprises sometimes but there's usually alcohol involved.

My parents favorite story is they when to a house party back in the day and the host passed out early so they took apart his bedroom, set it back up in his garage, took a picture, disassembled it all again and put it back, and waited for him to develop the film.

Rofl. Pics of his face would have been epic

Analog photography is rising these days

There is direct talent related to this that I do not have but can fully appreciate- ansel adams entered the chat

Especially those cameras that sat around for a year or more before you finished the roll.

I found some old ones we never got developed. My wife loved them. Some baby pictures of my 18 year old and 16 year old. Priceless and still 5 more to develop.

Now that’s. Fun find!!

Never got my dick pics back

There's a Walgreens in my town I used to be not allowed at because of that.

I still have that when I'm taking photos drunk when I look at them the next day.

And pictures meant more. You had 27 per film roll you'd better not waste them. With digital cameras with expandable memory was the first time you could take 4000 pictures so you could take 300 on vacation and never look at them again.

It is SO much harder to sort them but I don’t NOT take them bc I may waste them. A valley of indecision!

With the random end-roll stuff, after you've got back from holidays & haven't used it all up "I paid for 24 photos, I'm taking 24 before sending it in"

Lol of my dog!

I do miss the surprise “oh yeah! I forgot I took a pic of that!!”

If you actually bother to go through all the picture you have on your phone.

I do frequently but then also have that app that’s like “hey look at these pics!!” I also have five kids who remind me when I forget lol

6 pictures of the dog and 2 pictures of the fireplace to fill up the roll

Kids. This happens to my digital all the time!!!

Like the time I was high and took a dick pic and then forgot about it. That made for an interesting moment at the photo shop.

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 :/

They were hard to find and expensive, so we just bought 3

It took 2 weeks to develop and cost $30 per camera.

I feel like you could have bought actual digital cameras for less.

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Film is crazy expensive. I still shoot a lot of it, and by the time I shoot a roll of color 35mm and get it developed, it’s around $1/frame. Same for 120 film when I get 10 pics on a roll. It’s a labor of love and I’ve just accepted it, but it would totally be just as practical to buy a couple shitty point and shoot digitals and let people pass them around

Film is crazy expensive.

This is what happens when something falls out of the graces of mass production.

A lot of movies are still shot on film so there’s still plenty being produced, but the few people making it haven’t reacted quickly to the demand of the market as film got more popular the last 6-8 years. It steadily rose a little in those years but covid has really fucked everything up and prices have just about doubled since 2020. The demand is now crazy high and there’s a ton of supply chain issues that keep cropping up. Add to that that a ton of the marketplace is online on sites like eBay or Amazon where people can just about name their price, and it’s a perfect storm of terrible shit for idiots like me who keep buying it

My daughter took a high school photography class last year and I pulled out my dad's 1982 Minolta SLR for her to use that my dad let me use in high school. Not gonna lie, I was very tempted to get on eBay and pick up another one and start shooting again, the film was so expensive, though. I was like, "there's no way it was this pricey for me 20 years ago." I shot so many rolls back then.

I'm not sure how much Kodak would have to charge to bring back Kodachrome, but I really wish they would. Old professional color photography looks so good (the Rosie the Riveter posters and 50s ad work). I think it's the red saturation that gets me, but the whole feel is awesome.

Lmogtaphy buy Kodak film and rebrand it, maybe what you want is still out there

You and everyone else man! I love going through and looking at old advertisements from that era. And then of course the giants of color like Eggleston, Parr and Webb were using it almost exclusively back then and their pictures just ooze with saturation and bright color.

They actually issued a new slide film called Ektachrome a few years ago. It’s not exactly like Kodachrome but it’s real similar. Ektar is a color negative film that also kinda mimics the original Kodachrome and renders pretty great saturation for color negative.

Horseshoes are crazy expensive these days

/s

B&W film is significantly cheaper and can be developed easily at home, and whilst it has it's own character it's not the same as shooting in colour.

I think I still have 4 rolls of B&W film left over from when I used to shoot more.... There's still a roll in each of my film cameras too......

Hell yeah I still shoot a lot of black and white and scan and develop it at home. It’s definitely easier on the wallet but for some reason I just keep coming back to color film

scan? SCAN?!? What you mean you haven't converted your bathroom into a darkroom!?! Tut!

Developing photos in a darkroom is a PITA tbf.... Though I didn't do too bad, usually onto 12"x16" which is a little easier than 4"X5"

There's something cool about the tactility, seeing how your light colour affects contrast/etc, and how you can do layering and analogue manipulation/fixes (real dodges and burns!) I've got some really cool double/triple exposures somewhere, including a couple where I managed to get my range finder to do that in camera, and then I double exposed the paper as well

I suppose these days you can just do that in Photoshop though lol

I really should start doing some more again...

Walgreens still does it, they send the film out though and it's about $18

They don't give you the negatives back, though!

That's no good.

You can remove the film yourself, it's a normal cartridge... But be very careful, the capacitator bites ;-) (high voltage for the flash)

I learned that the hard way when I was a kid. I decided to disassemble a disposable camera for fun and shocked the hell out of my thumb.

I think we all did

Or, if you were a kid like me, you'd make baby tasers in middle school with them.

What kind of monster tases a baby?

I already said I was in middle school.

There are no greater monsters than middle school students.

A hungry one.

My camera went flying and I ripped it while being shocked...and at this time, I wasn't able to repair it...

The last time we had some was at our wedding, but the pics were mainly crap, as the cams were the main attraction for the children, so a lot of blurry feetpics ;-)

Oh, but digital cameras would also have been worth it. You could even decorate them, idk, glue some rhinestones to them or something ;-)

Yeah, I was surprised to discover they now make disposable digital cameras for weddings etc. They run about $20-$25 each:

http://www.ecamerafilms.com/product-p/dsfs1000.htm

Yeah or a few of those Instax and use them forever

Or just ask that people take photos on their phones and send them to the couple? I know it's not as cool as the disposable cameras but you'd have a lot of interesting memories

I know it's not as cool as the disposable cameras but

No but. That's the whole thing. It's cool.

We had a unique hashtag people could use for phone photos they took at our wedding. We got a sign that told people about it. It was really fun to scroll through Instagram and see them all the morning after our wedding over breakfast. ☺️

Main difference about disposable camera or film in general is you get much more honest photos. It's one take and people don't think you're posting them online.

I once officiated a wedding where they did that and they had a hashtag so you could post it on social media with that hashtag and people could find it.

I would be surprised to go to a wedding without a hashtag lol

I am old, thus this was new to me!

I am sort of old ish kinda too but maybe you are older. I admit I have not actually gone to a wedding with a hashtag (all my ppl got married like 10+ years ago) but people love to flex these days

Android phone is like 50$ lmao

Polaroid might have been the better retro option.

Haha hard disagree - sort of. Fujifilm makes something called an Instax mini which the film is expensive but like half the size of a regular Polaroid. You can get 60 photos for around $40.

Real, classic Polaroid film (the square kind) is $20 for 8 shots right now. It’s kind of insane. Not including cost of the camera.

Instax is absolutely the play right now for stuff like this. Might as well just set up a 4x5 camera if you’re gonna pay Polaroid prices rn

Yup I actually wanted to buy one and when I saw the prices now adays I was like Nah I’ll pass. Used to be like $15 for like 40 shots

If you want to really cheat they make a printer that prints digital photos from your phone onto three Instax mini film. Perfect polaroids every time

Instax wide is a good alternative, cheaper and bigger than Polaroid square frames, still talking ~$1 per shot though.

Not even, most Walmarts have Android smartphones for $30

Or one of those instax ones that spit out pictures like the old polaroids.

Most thrift stores I go to tend to have 4-5 nice digital cameras, usually less than $5, like a 12 megapixel Sony Cybershot or equivalent that cost about $150 new but came out right before smartphones with nice cameras built in became a thing and now collect dust.

A friend had people send in their favorite pictures and they printed them out!

No digital cameras in the 90’s

Uh yes there were.

Those first ones with floppy disk drives and batteries that lasted for 15 shots or so? Horrible quality as well of course.

Our first one had like a 4 meg CF card.

That is an advanced sort of feeling, I have never ever felt anything close to that. All I feel is joy, frustration, anger, disappointment, horny etc etc.

Probably would’ve been even better to leave your email on the tables and have people email photos they take at your wedding on their phones.

Cousin did same Thing but with one camera in every table, let’s just say he got a lot of anonymous dickpicks, not a good idea when you have a group of friends like that

Doug Heffernan going crazy out there

"It's wearing a little hat!"

Bro, just showing up to say sick King of Queens reference

A wedding is hardly anonymous.

Unless they wrote their names on their penises or the couple is intimately aware of what their genitals look like, it would be pretty hard to figure out whose it was.

The dicks are though.

Drunk male friends and disposable cameras always lead to dick pics.

We had 8, one on each open table at my wedding. They had little notes on them saying we wanted people to take photos we and the photographer wouldn't think to take, and instructions to give them to the wedding party to get them to us when they filled up.

We got two back.

I did this, but we bought a box of 20 online for like $100 USD. Yeah it takes a couple weeks to develop and it costs like $20 a roll, but I've been developing a couple rolls a year for the last 4 and it makes every anniversary so much more fun. Some shots are shit, but a surprising amount of them are great! Flash is key with a disposable camera.

If you use them with some regularity, it’s worth investing in a film scanner. My gf likes film photography, and getting film developed is a whole lot cheaper than getting it developed and scanned.

Do you mean to have a digital copy? I use a great app for that and it's worked really well. I still put the printed photos in an album for fun, and that way I know I'll always have a physical copy.

Yup, exactly. My approach is to have a well organised (and backed up) digital collection, and to print the photos I especially like.

$30 per camera?! That's insane!

If there is ever a next time, try The Dark Room. It's $15 plus prints if you want them, otherwise you get scans for free.

It's even less if you just send in the film yourself, but not everyone wants to do that.

When I got married 10 years ago we wanted disposable cameras. We wound up giving the groomsmen and bridesmaids tiny cheap digital camcorders. They used them, but I don’t think I ever got any of the video back from any of them.

When I worked at a photo lab from 03-05 we got a ton of those things. The all used 800-1600 speed film and had massively underpowered flashes and you would be lucky to get 3-5 passable shots out of a roll. Between the two major brands Fuji has the superior high speed color films but more people bought Kodak disposable cameras which didn’t help matters.

Also, you had to be very careful when taking those cameras apart to get the film out. The capacitor for the flash was usually left charged and would give you a hell of a shock if you opened the camera the wrong way and touched both contacts with your finger. It was immediately inside the left side right where the plastic separated and a very easy mistake to make.

The camera store near me that was there since Moses was a boy, just went out of business! It's a dog grooming salon now.

Remember when legit Polaroids were expensive in 2010 and a friend had one at his birthday. Some tag along at the party was rapid firing it and buddy got passed saying "that guy just burnt through $40 of photos".

That seems like a lot of money. I can get disposable cameras for 20$-25$ a pop at Walmart. I took six cameras for for my 5 person family last vacation(2019) and we got a lot of great pics from the kids' cameras. Most were garbage but we have about 20 amazing candid pics of everyone having fun, laughing and smiling.

When in the military I took disposables everywhere with me and have a few hundred pictures from my time in. An unfortunate byproduct of using disposables in the military, is that if you left it sitting around, people would take pictures of their dicks. I once mailed my mom about 30 cameras. After she got them developed, she sent me a letter about about how she was very Very...VERY concerned about me and the behaviors I was participating in. It was confusing, because she didn't say why whe was so concerned for me. I assumed it was cause I was in Iraq, fighting a "war," nope. When I was finally able to make a call to her, she started crying as soon as she answered and then whispered "why do you have ALL these pictures of mens' dicks?" I laughed so hard I couldn't talk. I then explained why all the dicks. She said her greatest fear in life was that one of her four sons would be gay. I tried to explain why it would be okay if that were the case, but she would always answer but god...and hell..and stuff. lol When I got the pictures from her in the mail, there was at least one dick pic on each disposable camera.

Oh man, good times lol!

In case you want to have a corrective experience, buy Ilford ones or the Kodak Tri-X ones. They are professional level film with really good flashes and lenses. Great vibe.

I have been getting into taking photos on film, and luckily for me, a local camera store has remained open with very knowledgeable staff and quick and fairly inexpensive film development. It seems like this type of thing is very location based :(

I had a second cousin (my grandmas cousins daughter) who did this (funnily enough I was just talking about this today). This was probably like 20 years ago so it probably wasn’t a hassle. My cousin (first cousin) and I kept making monkey faces we were both fairly young. I was 14-15 and he was a few years young. We weren’t super close but my mom was closer but I kinda wonder what she thought of the pictures.

Our theater company did a production of Wedding Songer and it was hard getting disposable cameras for props.

That’s my favourite Adam Sondler movie.

they always were shit pics, tbh.better than nothing, still fun.

This is where the instant film camera comes in. They still sell those around and you get instant pictures!

this is why polaroids have made a comeback

Polaroids are expensive as fuck too. Price per photo is pretty much the same as the price per shot when buying a normal 35mm roll + development.

35mm is a hell cheaper, polaroid are 2 bucks a single photo, you can get 36 photos for less than 20 bucks with a 35mm, plus the quality is better.

Do you mean shitty in terms of photo composition or shitty in terms of color or exposure? If the latter, you can often get better quality images by scanning the negatives with a dedicated scanner. I recently developed a disposable camera from 2009 from one of those online developers, and then scanned the negatives and fixed up the exposure and other aesthetics of the photos. Like there was one photo of my mom in front of the Mary Tyler Moore statue in Minneapolis but it was so dark behind her with the flash, you couldn’t see the statue in the prints the developer sent. But in scanning the negative, and balancing the exposure, you can see everything.

Just get some disposable Polaroids when one of your friends gets married. You already know they’re going to look like crap so you’re never disappointed

Yep. There's a reason they're obsolete.

Should have rented Polaroids or something

Two weeks is lees time than it took to develop 35mm film rolls in the before times.

Get a Polaroid next time! They still make them. It prints it out for you right there after taking it.

We did the same thing, but my cousin's kids got hold of almost all of them and the pictures were for shit, though they were funny.

I think they just took you for what they could.

I can get like 5 or 6 rolls of film developed for 30 bucks. 120 or 135 formats.

Were there no other camera stores in your area?

That sucks to hear. Theres some online places that will do it for less. Im getting ready to test one of them out with a disposable camera I have. Id be glad to relay if its worth shipping it out if youre interested.

Well try some Polaroids the next time you get married. They're pretty expensive these days too though.

the intax polaroids are way more fun

Lol, you just should have bought a cheap digital camera for each table. :-D

Poloroids might have been a better option. I beleive you can still get those?

I got married in 2004 and my mom did this exact idea for every table. 30 rolls of FunFoto film and not a single decent shot out of the 1 batch of 5 we began developing. After those 5 rolls, I just didn't care to continue. Divorced shortly after too and had even less desire to know what was taken on those rolls. Part of me wishes I developed em all, just to see, but I also don't miss that I hadn't.

it could be just your area cause $30 to develop some film is OUTRAGEOUS. i regularly shoot film and i pay $8 per roll at my local print shop, get them back in about an hour or 2 if they’re not crazy busy, end of day for sure though

Back in the pre-digital age we did this at our wedding. What a freakin' waste. Blurred pics, dick pics, bad selfies, pics of nothing, none of them usable.

I just got married last October and we used our Polaroid and were lucky to know a few people who lent us theirs as well. It worked out great.

My friend instead bought a little Polaroid camera and films for people to document their wedding. I had fun getting some little Polaroid pics

I feel like leaving digital cameras will be the new wedding normal. Or be like “take your pics and send them to x email address!!!”

I think a lot of people do the new polaroid style cameras for that type of thing now, probably because of the costs you just found out about.

My sister had them at her wedding (early 2000's) and I made a point (being the oldest brother) of making sure they had at least one good (framable really) picture of my shiny cheeks.

Lol. Married in 1990, and provided film and disposable cameras to everyone. Didn’t hire a photographer (and don’t regret it,) but I have sooooooo many’s pictures of my 85 lb dog/bridesmaid eating sausage. Miss her still, and she died in 2000.

Because everyone was drunk. While taking them.

"Don't you people have phones?" -some douchebag from blizzard

Gotta stick with the Polaroids

We bought a nice photo printer and loaded it with paper. People took pictures and printed them off themselves. They left some behind for us to make a scrapbook, and then took some for themselves.

It was nice.

I just got married couple weeks ago and wanted something similar. Ended up buying a instant polaroid camera and using that to take pictures of guests for the guestbook. Worked very nicely but god damn that instax mini film is expensive, its like 21€ for 20 shots. Worth it tho

I'm sure there's a way you can develop them old fashioned way...

Why not use your phone?

Ah that's a bummer. We did that for our wedding in 2011 and I don't remember it being too tough to find, but no one really used them, except my 5 yr old neice went on a rampage of photos way too close to everyone's face, LOL

We had them at our wedding, early 2000’s. When going through the developed pictures with my in-laws my MIL was absolutely confused by one she was looking at. My FIL smirked and quickly went onto the next picture. It was Balls. Apparently my groomsmen all took scrotum shots on different cameras over the course of the night.

Worth it for the nostalgia factor if most of your attendees are in their late 30's or older :)

8 years ago we took 10 disposeable cameras to vegas. We snuck them in everywhere and there were 3 cameras that had the night of our lives on them. 6 months ago we found one camera the rest were thrown away. i spend 40 bucks getting it developed and it was mostly night photos of us smoking cigarettes maybe 3 pictures in focus. Ill never forgive him for losing the rest

That's wild. It's $6/roll for me to develop locally. There are cheap places online as well, like Mpix.

Recent wedding I attended had those instant cameras - worked pretty good ‘cause you could see the pics right away. Not sure cost of cameras & film

This was very popular at weddings in the UK in the early noughties.

I'm not proud to say that a number of newly weds will have ended up with pictures of my cock and bollocks

At my sister's wedding the guests all used an app to take photos. Everyone's photos got sorted into an online gallery and they got sent a curated book. Was kinda cool.

This made me laugh. Drunk at the reception and using a disposable camera. What could go wrong?

dang wonder how that was a few years ago. I went to a wedding that had like 30 of them one on each table for people to take good photos. It wasn't my wedding so no clue how most of them came out.

That blows my mind. I used to get them for free at multiple events back in the day. Weird how time and new tech changes those things on their head.

They do develop at CVS just not one hour. I can’t believe a disposable camera is more than $15. Wow!

My cousin’s girlfriend did this at her birthday party, except she used Polaroid cameras. It was a really fun idea but very expensive in practice.

Bummer. Here in Germany you can still get and develop disposable cameras at very low cost. I use them frequently for parties and vacation.

It took 2 weeks to develop and cost $30 per camera. All the photos were shit too :/

People today don't have the same skill level as back in the 1990's for using a disposable camera, it is a lost art, that's why they were so shit

Next time, or whever reads this, get a go pro and just pass it arround, let people film pov and whatever

I used to work in the photo lab at Walgreens back in 2007. I usually enjoyed it, and I saw quite interesting pics. I remember one that was a woman with a sort of lingerie type dress, with a denim jacket. She was outside a car, leaning almost all the way into it, from the driver's window. The dress was coming up, and she didn't have underwear on. It was taken by someone standing in front of the car. I felt very uncomfortable seeing this, and realizing I would have to look that photographer in the eyes. I asked my manager if he was ok with me to finish making the pic and give it to the customer. He was fine with it. Really the most annoying part of the job was when the film would get stuck in the machine, and the chemicals would need to be changed. That shut things down for a while. We also refilled ink cartridges. The first day we started this, everyone got one free cartridge refill. I probably did about a hundred. It was absolutely chaos, with long lines, and impatient assholes.

Damn. That was still popular when I got married because smart phones weren't really a thing yet. We didn't do that, mainly because I knew that 90-95% of the pictures would be shit as people got more sloshed.

I went to a wedding that had polarid cameras; take a picture, shake it and check it out, drop it in a box for the married couple.

What?!! Omg!!! I had no idea of the changes.

With everyone being able to instantly review and reshoot, I feel that lots of folks never learned how to be careful with taking a one-shot photo, and so you end up with a disposable camera full of crappy pics.

Should of did Polaroid cameras

So what you're telling me is that there's a market coming back....

Damn that might actually be more expensive than Polaroids at this point.

Don't remember how many pictures come on a disposable camera but Polaroids can range from $1.50-$3.00 a picture but at least you have it ready in a few minutes lol

Also don't shake the polaroid, that's a myth

CVS still does it. All major drugstores do.

But yeah, not in an hour, maybe.

If you were really committed to that 90s shit you would’ve been willing to wait 2-3 days 😉

That's shame, we had disposables on every table at ours. I appreciate those more than the professional photos.

Honestly i think getting an old 600 type polaroid for $30 from ebay and buying 5 film packs in bulk from polaroid's website for another $85 dollars would've come out better

We had them on all the tables in 1995. Waste of money. People took the stupidest pictures most were unusable.

my ex had one of those cameras that instantly develops the photos, you actually just reminded me i want to buy one.

This was me when the iPhone first came out when I was in college. Now my college friends love looking at all the old photos from back then. There’s one in particular that one of friends was extremely pissed about me taking at the time, but he finds it fucking hilarious now.

We wanted Polaroids for our wedding tables. Ended up buying iPhone-compatible photo printers that are Polaroid sized.

Although my wife never lost the Polaroid obsession and now we have some that work quite similar to the originals and film is only (??) $0.50-$1.00/pic. For the real old school Polaroids it was like $5+/picture

That’s craziness.

My family used to get our photos developed at Costco but they've also gotten rid of their Photo Center as well; used to be that we would drop off our film roll, walk around Costco for about an hour, and then come back and pick up our developed photos.

Man you got scammed, 30$ per camera is way too much, average price for a kodak is 15$ too.

Funny story. My brother is ten and I am 24. We watched a home video of me (2 at the time) meeting my sister when she was born. I asked my mom if she had pictures of my sister yet and my mom said we need to take them to CVS to get developed. My brother said what does that mean? And we told him you took your film and it got developed and you picked it up. He said oh so you took your SD card to CVS? We had to explain film to him. It was really funny. He also calls commercials “ads”. He’s not wrong but it’s neat to see the differences

I'm 36 and it's the same thing with the internet. You're probably used to being always connected, you just turn on your computer and open the web browser. Back in the mid 90s I had to dial into AOL like millions of other people. We didn't get broadband (what we all use now) until around 2005.

I think the disposable camera is making a come back. I saw them in the retail store a few days ago. They had the regular cameras, the ones you would wind up to take the next picture and a water proof one too.

Yeah lots of gen z are going to early 2000-core which includes disposable cameras

I think it's not only that, I genuinely think that, the more we go to digital and intangible, the more we want that again. Spotify for everything? Vinyl makes a comeback. High quality digital photography in your pocket? Film making a comeback.

Absolutely. There is joy in analogue things. I’m super into film photography and seriously nothing on this earth brings me more joy. Even the shitty photos I take being me more joy than a like average digital photo. There’s just something about it. Super big amongst people my age. I have no idea why but it just tickles my brain in nice ways. I guess maybe it’s the film loading and unloading that is the major thing, like with vinyl records it is that extra level of interaction that connects you so much more to what you’re doing. I could ramble about it for ages it my biggest joy in life.

It’s a couple of things for me, but one of them is I’m more deliberate with the photos I take and end up with more quality photos. Also I shoot with fully mechanical cameras, the SLRs from the 70s and 80s feel really nice to use

Actually here in Finland for example they never really went away. Usually have to go to a photo store if you want something fancier, like Ilford ones.

Even before that at sleepaway camps people would bring disposable cameras

r/analog is an amazing subreddit and got me back into film. It’s really helped me slow down a bit.

One hour photo technician was a fun job. AMA

Did the developing machine ever have a catastrophic failure? I always imagined that those would be particularly bad because of all the chemicals involved.

It was pretty robust. No issues. Paper jammed a lot, but that's normal for any paper feeding machine.

I just had 400$ in film from the 90's developed. We didn't have the money back then, I wanted my parents to see them before they pass. Unless they were kept climate controlled don't waste your money. Maybe 40 pictures out of 56 rolls of film weren't heat or age damaged.

That said the owner said it's making a resurgence. And in the short time i was in the shop about 6 college kids came in to buy the disposable cameras.

Yeah. Film is great, even for its flaws. There are some things where digital is much better image-wise (shadows and dark areas), but also some things where film is really great (negatives and whites/highlights).

Also great that if you have a 35mm camera, be it from the 70’s or 2000’s, you’ll get the same image resolution.

Also, speaking of resolution, went deep in some years agp and got a view camera that shoots 4x5 inch-sized film. Basically the same ”DPI” as your regular film but way bigger. It’s amazong.

That sucks.

They will probably really appreciate those 40 pictures that actually turned out though.

They will probably really appreciate those 40 pictures that actually turned out though.

Sadly my dad just passed, so you were very right. Glad I got it done.

Back in the mid-2000s, my cousin got married and put a disposable camera on every table at the reception. It seemed like a great idea to get candid shots of the party. However, a friend of the groom brought a guest who was a young woman in a red dress. After spending $200 developing film of their wedding reception, 80% of the photos were of some hot chick that no one knew.

And praying that you didn't take any sexual pics on the same roll as the family vacation roll

Or what my father did. He borrowed my camera to go to a family funeral. I was expecting photos of my cousins and family. My alive cousins and family.

Nope. I developed my pictures and found most were of dead cousin Gregory in the photos. Thanks dad. Nobody alive unless they were next to Gregory in his coffin.

I can't even count the number of times I paid to develop an entire roll of (unexpectedly) near-black pictures...

I remember going to a friends birthday party, and one of the parents left shortly after the cake to go get the photos done at a 1hr lab so everyone could look at them later in the party. It felt like the height of stupidity. Why would anyone want to look at photos of an event WHILE IT WAS STILL HAPPENING?!?

I guess they were ahead of the curve on that…

Waiting to see how many of the pictures were just grandmas finger instead of the intended subject XD

I actually found a pack of developed pictures from the late 90s today in a junk drawer. I was showing them to my teenagers tonight and they were dumbfounded by the negatives!

Used to develop part time. It was fun seeing what everyone would bring in. I remember getting up to 15 cameras at a time

I worked in a photo lab in the early 2000s. I loved developing film. There were a few times an older person would come in with like 20+ rolls and ask to get them done, and I got to spend the entirety of my shift working on it. Those were my favorite days. More and more people started coming in with digital cameras. It was a push one button process to get that done, not as much fun.

I miss the days of film. I took a couple semesters of photography and also loved working in a dark room. Not the actual taking pictures part (I’m terrible at that) but the dark room stuff is so much fun.

My BIL sent me an old family photo they found and we laughed at how this 20 year old pic wouldn't have been kept for 30 seconds now. Nobody looked good!

And if you had a disposable cam w/ flash, you could take off the cardboard cover and button and shock the shizz out of somebody

You can use the Gudak app for the same effect. You can't see your photos without waiting for 3 days. And you have to complete the whole roll (24 frames) before having your photos developed.

Pictures that came out blurry. Pictures that had part of your finger covering a quarter of the image, and pictures that came out completely black for some reason.

And the good ones were gold!

Being a wedding photographer must have been stressful

My grandma was still doing this 5 or so years ago

Went to seaworld to see jumping dolphins. camera clicks “Well l hope we get that!”

My mom would give me disposable cameras and develope them for me when I was a kid. One year we went to Niagara Falls. Almost every single picture I got back was just a blue blur from all the mist. I still have them and always laugh when I rediscover them.

I found a used disposable camera probably circa 2001 in my garage not too long ago and had no idea what to do with it

Those are still made today and they are more popular than you’d expect

Was at a wedding around 1998-99. Three of us went into bathroom and my buddy had grabbed one of the disposable cameras from a pile in the hall. He convinced our other friend to tuck his penis so that he could take a closeup pic of his mangina. Third guy agrees and pulls pants down and tucks. Months later the bride pulls the pic out at her apartment asking “which of you took this?” It is revealed in the pic that photographer friend had at the last second panned as far back as possible in order to get the guy posing’s full face. We still have multiple physical and digital copies circulating to this day of this guy’s shit eating grin with his penis tucked between his legs.

and having sexy or nude pictures not only seen by the guy developing the film but possibly even making duplicates for himself

This is actually alive and well! There's alot of photography stores all over that still develop in house. The film photography world is also still very alive!

I still use disposable cameras all the time. Great fun

I went to school for photography in 1997. I did an bunch of gigs, weddings, events, world travels, and shot it all on film. It's so crazy for me to think that I shot all of that shit having no idea if it was looking good or not. I obviously shoot digitally now and am so used to seeing every shot I take immediately after. Just nuts to think back to those days. Don't even get me started on darkrooms lol.

Haha I did photography at uni, and still dabble for fun. I can still smell the darkroom!

I still do this. Analog > digital

I do gig photography and shoot digitally. I still take at least one shot on my Polaroid every time!

I still shoot analog film with my grandma's camera from time to time. It's a really great feeling to go through the pictures for the first time after getting them developed.

Just to unpack that a little more

Back in the old days, every photo you took cost money.

That's why we had professional photographers, they knew how to take photos, not just take hundreds and delete 99%

I’m surprised this isn’t a skit. Instastar and her gma (or artsy 35mm bf) take a pic together, she requires film to be developed asap in order to make sure it’s a “good” photo.

Hey there’s grandma, but her eyes are red like the devil!

When I developed film we had to look at the developing rolls before they could be printed, you know, because of child porn.

The shit I saw at 7 am made me skip breakfast but I’d work out a deal with people. If they weren’t sure about how good the photos were when I was looking at them I’d do color correction and skip blurry photos. Plus an index of all photos were printed and I could print some more if they wanted. Told them to wait until a sale to get double prints AND I wouldn’t cut the negatives and put them in a film canister if they wanted. I made bank in extra sales and people didn’t waste money on bad photos. Win-win for everyone.

You’re a good egg :)

my mom just recently passed and I was gifted the opportunity to go thru the 100's of photos she kept. A time capsule of memories. Grateful for film. 🙏

Disposable cameras are fun although it does seem wasteful and you don't ever get to see your pictures

About 20 years ago I was at a Christmas gathering with my fiancée’s family… her mom, dad, older sister, and younger brother. Her sister brought out like 3 or 4 packs of pictures that she had just had developed from a trip to the Bahamas she and a female friend had gone on together. (Long enough to forget everything they took pictures of on those disposable cameras)…

Interspersed between the typical tourist pictures were pictures of the different guys they took back to their room to fuck… including sex pics of all of them, and evidently, swapping guys was a thing too.

The first sex pic her parents ran across, they commented about it’s existence, put the pictures back in the envelope, and didn’t look at any more vacation pics in any of the other envelopes. Instead of the “OH SHIT” response (followed by gathering up the envelopes that you would expect), she just laughed, said “oops”, took the envelope back, and passed it on to her sister (my fiancée) without separating the sex pictures out. My fiancée went through every envelope… and told me what they contained after we went to bed. I was seated at the kitchen counter, and everyone else was seated on the living room couches (still all one room). So I hadn’t been in the immediate circle when the pictures were handed out… and I wasn’t about to ask for an envelope to peruse after being informed they contained sex pictures of my future sister-in-law… especially not in front of her parents.

You might think it odd, but my fiancée was bisexual, and confessed, some years earlier, that she often fantasized about having sex with her sister when they were teens (they shared a room together).

This is alive and well according to dumbass 90 year old Karen’s coming into CVS

Yes! It made good photos so much more special

And you still had to pay for them.

So weird that my kids like disposable cameras. They have phones too

At a friend's wedding a whole table went into the bathroom and took butt photos on the disposal cameras that were placed on each table for the guests. I'm assuming (pun intended?) that the bride and groom were amused.

My brother was on a year long trip and brought film and mailers. Shoot a roll of film, put it in the mailer with international air mail postage, and it would get sent to Kodak for processing, and they would mail the results to the address you provided.

He rarely had access to anything other than a general post address that he would be arriving at in a month, so we couldn’t contact him except for those few times he would go to a town along his route and see if anything had been sent to him.

The first dozen rolls looked good. Then, midway through a roll, he did something and the camera wasn’t working well. I think it was under exposed. No way to tell him that his once in a lifetime pictures were dark blobs. Just…. Damn.

My wife picked up a small digital camera with no screen on it that gives a similar experience. We don’t see what we took until we get back home and plug the SD card in a laptop.

last time i did that was 2006, just discharged from the navy (didn't complete recruit training). bought a disposable camera for the hell of it. photographed the journey home, the train station i rode to the greyhound station on, me and another recruit waiting for the train to arrive, and whatever else. some of the best pictures ever. the highlight was one that another passenger took of me on the train, and i didn't realize until they were developed, that there was a reflection of my face in the window looking back at me. a very stone sour "through glass" moment.

There’s an app I use called PicPrint. The surprise element is removed. But it’s sooo cheap to print your pictures. I’m slowly filling up a photo album of times when I hang with friends and family. Makes for a nice thing to set on your coffee table. You and your friends can look at it and reminisce. Really. It’s like 10 Pennies a photo and five bucks shipping. Select and print.

I LOVED the smell inside the wrapper.

I was in Australia recently and somebody had me take a picture with a disposable camera. I have no idea why. I wanted to ask, but didn't. They were around late 20s. That was a first.

Omg and the damned "big stores " that wouldn't develop anything NSFW/L.

I remember I used to be so afraid I'd run out of film and not have any left for something I REALLY wanted to take a picture of to the point of where I was OVERLY cautious and still had film when I got home. Ended up wasting pictures just photoing stuff around my house just so I could go develop it.

You'd be amazed at the things on film people would drop off to a photo lab in, for example, a mall. Completely gobsmacked. Anyone who has worked in a photo lab in the 80s or 90s will have horror stories...

But, man, the ones that were usable can end up being absolute treasures!

Not too long ago, I actually found a stash of photos that I took with a disposable camera at one of my first concerts, and specifically they were the only ones from that particular set that actually came out.

Exactly 20 years later (this week!), I'm taking pictures at a local concert festival - only this time, with far better cameras and far better accuracy. Not to mention, the band in my first photos became my favourite band very soon after I saw them that day - and I've since seen that band over 30 times and have taken thousands of far better photos of them over the years.

Grainy as all hell, but I'll be guarding those OG photos forever. 😁

I still use analog and even though there’s the chance I might get some unfocused or grainy pics, nothing beats the feeling of capturing the moment on film. :)

I worked at Eckerd’s phot lab during college. One summer and one winter break 3rd shift. Use to see some crazy shit come through the line. That would have been around 86/87 I think.

miss the surprise for sure!

I got one to take every year to summer camp. Best part ever.

Then a kid gets a hold of the camera, opens it up, pulls the film out, says “hey what’s all this?”

That kid was me.

I once went to Chicago in 7th grade for an art class trip and took two disposable camera photos worth only for all but two-three pictures come out completely grey. :(

How bout finding out someone stole your camera and took a pic of their butt, or whatever!

Your phone does that now with much better quality

Entire film of smudges on lens

I have a friend who always brought a disposable camera out to clubs and bars, even as late as 2016. I've moved away and haven't seen her for a few years. As far as I know she's still taking those disposable pictures. It was always nice to hang out at her place and look through the photos and even get a copy or two for myself.

I found a disposable camera in a file cabinet at work recently. I had to go to three different places (Wal-Mart, Walgreen's and CVS) until I found a photo department that would take it. They said it will take 2-3 weeks. I'm currently on week 2.

i’ve been shooting a lot on film lately because of this reason. i get to be a lot more intentional with my pictures and they feel a lot more memorable than photos taken on my phone that will just get lost somewhere in my gallery. taking pictures and forgetting about them for days or weeks at a time until they’re developed

I was just thinking about this today... I took load of film photography classes in high school and college (about 15 years ago now). The thrill of developing that great shot you got and it actually turning out was amazing. Conversely, taking random shots of pets or friends to run out the last few on a roll of film and getting them back was such a great surprise... That delayed satisfaction is something I think might be lost to time.

I just took a roll yesterday I won't see for weeks.

When I started at Brinks in 2012 we had single use cameras on all the trucks. One day after someone was in an accident we tried to get the film developed and no one was able to do it except specialty shops. We switched to camera phones after that.

Ah the good ol’ “damn my finger is in every photo ugh”

Taking pictures of stupid stuff to burn off the last 2-3 shots in a roll

Back in 07 I still remember developing tons of disposable film cameras. There were some black and white Kodak films that absolutely blew me away, many modern cameras would struggle to provide the same quality and beauty.

I recently found like 12 disposable cameras from when I was little. I couldn't afford to get them developed. The film is probably destroyed. Some photos on there are of me and my best friend that recently passed away from breast cancer at 31. Sorry to word vomit on you. You just mentioned disposable cameras and I thought of this.

The amazing thing about those few pics is that we cherish those pics for generations. These days you can take hundreds of pics a day only to forget about them forever.

Honestly, I just miss winding that thing up. Ziiipzipzipzerpzipzerp

I enjoyed it so much more

My father visited from out of state and brought a DSLR camera, and when returning asked if the x-ray machine will mess up the pictures on his memory card XD

Any the extreme embarrassment of weird pictures. I remember one of my younger siblings taking a picture of a deuce in a toilet as a joke on my camera unbeknownst to me until I got them developed. That poor person who had to develop them...

I just got an analog camera this week because I think this entire phenomenum is exciting! I wanted to be more mindful about taking photos (hint: I was born in the end of the 90s, I knew disposables but never used one before)

…and then having to scan them if you wanted to send ‘em to anybody

Awww I actually miss this so much

Analog film photography is on the rise but so are the prices too 🫠 You can still get disposable cameras at Walmart and Target!

Back somewhere around 2000 a friend had a birthday party and we did a scavenger hunt with disposable cameras. During the party a family member went and got them developed and one of us was the winner (I don't remember what we got, probably something like a blockbuster gift card). But man it was fun! But something of the times.

Until this year, we used to buy our daughter a disposable camera to take on school trips or trips with the Guides. The pictures were uniformly awful, but she wasn't able to have a phone. Think it does kids good too do stuff old school too, sometimes🤣

was in a CVS the other day using the ATM and the film processing is near there-the cost to develop a roll of film is INSANE now

Useless information - they're almost 100 percent recycled, so not disposed.

It’s not non-existent, but perhaps you’re just not in the circles where it’s very prevalent. I’ve been a film photographer for almost 2 decades and film photography saw a big resurgence 10 years ago, and just in the last 3-4 year it’s gained a big resurgence amongst Gen Z. Probably not aware but some of the biggest celebrity weddings lately have been photographed by film photographers. New film labs keep popping up all the time too. If you live in a decent sized city there’s likely a local film lab you can take your rolls of unexposed film. It’s all there and never really went away even though Kodak/Fuji consistently discontinued film stock all the time. Disposable cameras in particular have made a pretty big come back lately. Part of Gen Z taking all the 90s trends and making it their own.

I used to buy these in a 2-pack at the dollar store. Always threw one on the dashboard & one in my purse.

I got a disposable developed a few weeks ago and most of the pictures came out so much better than I expected. They really give the photos that classic nostalgic touch. Highly recommend

i still remember when i need a photo, i have to travel 1 hour to a photo studio take the photo and wait for 1 week. its 2005 i think

That's a thing now..

Telephone booth.

Lol wife bought a dozen disposable film cameras to put on tables at our wedding reception (2012). We're millennials, so most of our friends were a little rusty on film cameras

Anyway, we spent like $80 and got 3 good pictures because almost nobody remembered to turn on the flash

This still exists.

I actually still have one at my room in my parents house, no idea what's on it. It's probably like 15-20 years old at this point.

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"

... which was in turn a subfolder of "pr0n", which also contained subfolders entitled "Pokemon" and "Sailor moon".

This gave me flashbacks. In highschool a friend had hidden his porn stash deep in the game files of counterstrike and somebody made a copy of it to play on their computer, and it ended up being copied again and again to most of our computer class before somebody found the porn. By then everybody had the porn, and everybody quickly found out.

There was a pokemon folder, and it was great.

I still vaguely remember a nice Jessie+Ekans comic.

Ha, reminds me how at my Catholic primary school in the 90s the computers in some of the classrooms all had...Wolfenstein 3d installed, of all things.

Was wild, kids could just install software on them because I'm guessing no one on staff knew how to set up any sort of credential requirements.

Yup, the students knew more about computers than the teachers, this was mid-late 2000's for me.

Basically no internet filters either, the in thing to do was to put shock porn on whenever somebody left their computer unlocked.

It was not safe to go to the printer.

I named mine hentai, which I don't think my parents know what it is.

they know. they just don't care

Or they liked it

well, there's a solid chance of that, yeah. but let's not traumatize the poor person. too much

I do remember reading something about a study that said you likely have similar fetishes as your parents.

But I had no interest in following that up or confirming if it was true. There are somethings that a child should just not know about their parents.

Dragonmoon x

Oh god I forgot that was a thing

You just unlocked some childhood memories I forgot I had

Oh no... I'm a 90's kid, and I don't know what this is... Should I dare Google for it? 😂

Only if you want to be horny

You just gave me flashbacks. That was my first exposure to porn.

You just unlocked some memories I forgot I had lol

Hell, a good chunk of it was Dragonball Z porn, so it only seemed proper

I was a bit too young for porn floppies though, but I did have burned CDs

Porn floppies

When the Viagra wears off

Why a porn star would need special flip flops is beyond me.

Ones that don't get stuck to the floor and come off, leaving you barefoot in the goo.

"Dragonballz"

naw. biology homework.

should been titled dragon z balls.

I remember when I was like 6 or 7 years old and the Pokemania took hold, I was at a friends place during school break and we wanted to view some Pokemon websites (it was maybe ‘97/‘98). My friends father supposedly wrote down some Pokémon websites for us. We visited them one by one, but it turned out they weren’t Pokémon websites. Let’s say it involved a lot Nidokings and Nidoqueens.

This guy gets it

Folder? I think you mean subdirectory

DrgnbalZ

Gotta remember DOS 8.3 formatting for names and folders

Now we use reddit rule 34 to look up dragon ballz

Oh, fuck I'd forgot that (obvious) trick gosh damn!! Oh my, memories

X'D So not 90s, but late 2000's, I had a flash drive with photos on it, including my selfies (before the word "selfie") labeled "cam whore".... Well, I left my flash drive in my PC class one day, and the teacher gave it back to me and was like, "I found your flash drive. Figured it was yours after seeing the 'came whore' folder."

But, just so he knew what that folder was, quick change turned it into a much more poignantly titled "Dragonballz".

🤦🏻‍♂️ I'll see myself out... 🤣

Ballz of fury

Pretty ball z.

Tenshai. Anagram of Hentais that couldn't be searched with meaningful result.

DragonballZ Deep

I used to print porn pics and hide them

Nope. By then you learned to have hidden files and folders.

When I was in college in the 90s, there was one guy on my floor who had MULTIPLE file boxes filled with 3.5” floppies with nothing but porn on them. We were all eager to see it at first, but once he started showing us some of the weirder hentai stuff, a lot of us just slowly walked away.

Prob get a little nostalgic and/or horny hearing the floppy disk reader sound don't you

Loo dee da da Mr fancy technology man. We just cut pictures out of magazines/newspapers and put them into books

Yeah, this was absolutely more common at the time than saving Dragon Ball pictures.

Porn turns floppy disks in to hard drives

I used to put titty pics on floppy drives and sell them in middle school. Graduated to cd’s worth of loot in high school when my friend’s dad got a cd burner. A pack of cds made me a lot of money

Lmao same. Just a montage of different sized pictures I copy and pasted from the web to a word document.

can't hide it outside in winter thought, learn it the hard way, well hard it wasn't anymore, in every sense

that's what he said.

Not those dirty images!

I just printed the images and stuck them in a folder that hid under my mattress.

Dragon moon X 😁

Did the same thing as a teenager, but would rent them to my friends.

I had a yellow floppy disc with "Homework" written on it... That was where I saved my porn

Two types of people

you saved cool dragon ball z pictures off porn? might need a source there for research purposes

Those id call solid state drives….

I grew up with four siblings so I had to share everything, having my own floppy disk when I was 9 years old, loaded with random pictures of cartoon characters, made me feel so mature and grown up.

What's so funny is that floppy disks held ~2mb which probably couldn't store a single photo today but we had floppy disks with like 50 photos on them.

because of image compression and how bad the quality was back then haha

And they were relatively small images on monitors that were much lower in resolution.

Still can’t fathom how 2MB was all y’all got away with back then. I was alive for like 100MB HDDs, but my family didn’t really start using computers until I was about 8-9 and by that time, 100GB+ HDDs were common.

Still can’t fathom how 2MB was all y’all got away with back then.

It wasn't. 5¼" disks held 1.2 MiB, and 3½" disks held 1.44 MiB, but those were the double-sided, high density disks. Microsoft figured out that on high quality disks you could write out a bit past the spec and get to 1.78 MiB, but those were for install disks that you purchased only. (I'm sure you could make them yourself, but that was not common at all.)

But before that a floppy disk held 360 KiB and eventually 720 KiB...

Anyway, there wasn't a good way to generate a ton of data for the average user. Phone lines were incredibly slow, and programs were designed to minimize how data was represented on account of low disk sizes, slow disk speeds, low memory availability, and slow CPU performance.

Basically, developers had to really think about efficiency. Today, they don't really need to. Unfortunately, now they don't.

Same.

And then I had a floppy disk of those, uh, cool, Android 18, Bulma, Chi-Chi photos too…

The ones that would give Master Roshi a nose bleed in sure.

Oh you mean Dragonball X?

Then making a crappy geocities website with just those pictures

I made a Gundam Wing geocities site in high school lol. It was gifs of the Gundams and I had a midi of White Reflection playing haha. Why I did this is beyond me. God haha

As someone who most likely visited your site and got an absolute kick out of how awesome it was at the time, I want to thank you lol

Haha imagine if you had actually seen it, that would be wild. It was just rows of tiny animated gifs of the Gundams doing battle animations. Like super small. It was basic as hell, but I was practicing HTML so it was fun. Thanks for the kind words tho, it's funny to think people could have actually seen my site lol

I used to get a kick out of those gifs and used to think they’re the coolest.

I found my Gundam pilot figures the other day and totally went down a nostalgia trip. Now remembering this I just wanna rewatch the show and build Gundams haha

Why I did this is beyond me.

Because it was amazing?

Content creators during the 90s, whether Geocities, YTMND (2001, but I count it either way), or other crappy websites, were cool. It was new and everyone was still figuring it out.

Aww thanks. Yeah I was learning HTML and that’s how I practiced it. Making goofy websites. I kinda miss them and the somewhat wildness of the internet back then.

I still look at mine from time to time. It’s been 20 years since I made that thing!

There's no way I could find it now

Holy shit it's like you guys are reading my mind hahaha.

The gifs of pixelated DBZ characters throughout the page is what excited me the most.

I recently pulled up my old angel fire dbz page. Old me is pleased young me was having fun but old me cringes pretty hard at that website.

I first looked at it while hanging with my wife and she noticed my cringing face and asked what’s up…that’s one thing I’ll never share w a loved one (anymore since I used to make everyone I know go to the page and I would insist on having them tell me how much better mine was than my friends)

my first time using the internet was entirely predicated on finding dbz images and info. I read the timeline of the story and was like holy shit, so much more happens -- this was during the ocean dub era, '96-'97.

I had a very cool neighbor and he printed a ton of dbz pics for me and my brother. we still have them in a binder and in a frame.

Same, in 5th grade I was finding clips of Dragonball GT straight from Japan without understanding what I was seeing because Toonami had only just reached the Cell saga 😂

Then you get older and find out GT wasn't canon

I bought Japanese cdrom low rez rips of GT off eBay lol. I was a fiend

I too bought 27 burned cds from eBay containing every single db, dbz, gt episode and all the movies in formats ranging from pretty decent .rmv and .wmv to nearly unwatchable .asf. I think I paid $75 which was an obscene amount of money for a 12 year old. I still have all those CDs in a binder in my attic somewhere

That sounds so awesome tho, stuff like that felt like I was cheating by seeing what's ahead lol

Shitting your pants after seeing “Super Saiyan 100” on YouTube with the old montage music>>>

I used to put loads of tiny DBZ pictures onto one page and print out a really bad pixilated collage.

Always googling 'super saiyan 5, 6, 7' and 'what does SSJ mean'

That's cool! We did something similar. My cousins and I would go to the library and print out dbz fan art and try to draw them. We would trade the prints with each other.

The library used to be full of kids printing out color images of DBZ and Sailor Moon characters on Saturday afternoons.

Followed about 6 months later by the discovery of the suffix hentai after every single anime you’d ever heard of.

Then the Cold War level spy craft employed to keep your activities clandestine.

Nest things like 10 folders deep and then create a hidden folder

You too? Geocities and planet named were the best.

Stop step-Bulma what are you doing?

Literally my first thought lmao

Same but it was pictures of boobies. Big ol bolt ons, which now do nothing for me.

I completely forgot i did this until i read this comment

Lol, this was me with Starcraft and Pokemon pictures. Weird thing to do, but that was life as a kid in the 90s.

Omg this reminds me. Printing out memes/comics and hanging them on the fridge.

I did the same, but with Star Wars lol

Lmao me too! I made a DBZ geocities website with them lol.

I used to collect DBZ 8 bit gifs and compare with my friends in the school library!

Reminds me of the early 90s geo city sites. I remember finding so many images/gifs/dbz lore

The old school DragonBall Z site that had an index of all the episodes as they aired with screen shots brings back memories.

Yeah sure “dragonball” pictures ;)

Omg did you go to the library to print them out?

My friends and I did the same thing. Then we'd print them off and try to draw them.

I used to download Simpsons audio clips from the "fast" internet at school. I could fit maybe a dozen on a disk. When I got home I would swap out the sound files for the various functions of the computer. My error message was "D'oh!" for a long time.

Ah yep. I had downloaded most of the gifs that were pulled from the animations in the SNES fighting games.

Super Saiyan 5 and Super Saiyan 100 😎

Like 5 pictures per floppy disk

Floppies was my access to the Internet. I'd get stuff from my friend on Floppies because I didn't have Internet, but he had a lightning fast 56.6kbit connection on a separate line.

Speaking of DBZ and the past, VHS tapes and DVDs with 3 episodes each. And if you wanted to collect more rare anime, being willing to shell out $30+ for one unit.

Sure... "Dragonball".

XD I used to copy and paste anime pictures from the internet into a word document, then save it onto the floppy disk. You could save more photos onto one floppy that way.

I wonder if Windows Office will ever change the save icon. I’d imagine that if you’ve never seen a floppy disc you’d have no idea why that’s the icon for save

That's not a floppy disc though, it's a floppy diskette! The disc was 5-1/4" and flexible, the diskette was 3-1/2" and rigid.

The 5 1/4 disks were also called diskettes though (as were 8"). The only difference between disc and diskette is that a diskette was removable and a disc wasn't (hard drive, winchester).

Floppy disc and diskette are interchangeable as names. The word floppy refers to the acetate medium inside the disk and not how soft its covering was. Even the 5 1/4 floppies while slightly bendy were fairly rigid compared to disc drives that used disks with no cover at all such as the Olivetti Accounting machines that just used naked acetate disks.

It’s been a whole hour and nobody has said “this guy discs”?! Guess I’m that guy today.

Having actually held an 8" floppy disk in my hands, I feel like I'm part of a shrinking minority.

"Mommy, why is there a 3d printed save icon on your desk?"

3.5 inch or the actual 5" floppy ones. Either way I remember Zip disks being a godsend before you could burn cd's easily

I had a whole bunch of files and shareware games of the era on my three Zip disks, and remember thinking how spacious having a whopping 300 megs to myself was.

Still have one. It’s a shelf ornament now. Fwiw, it has only one bitmap image on it- a ‘saucy’ CHRONO Trigger screenshot of a Naga-ette that was fantasy fuel for my 12yo mind at the time.

Cursed floppy 💾

Damn. I forgot we called those floppy.

OP’s comment took me back to the actually floppy ones. Kinda like giant Polaroids.

My father had an entire bookcase full of these. After he died, I read them all onto one single micro SD card

That must have been a super slow/tedious process.. Thoughtful idea though. Did he have much good shit in there worth keeping?

If I eternalized the contents of all my old floppies into a single card, 95% of it would probably be ancient drivers and other random junk that wouldn't even be readable without a Win95 machine handy. I do wish I hung onto a few though cause there were definitely some gems in there that I'd really get a kick out of now.

Address lists and financial documents were the most useful. It took way too long

I remember using a file fragmenter program for floppy disks. Where I can fit a MP3 song file on to 5 floppy disks since MP3 file are too big to fit on one floppy disk.

Omg that is super ghetto. It wasn't as common to move big files back when those were still regularly used haha.

My mom’s master thesis is on 25 floppys from a rainbow pack (I went to staples with her and she let me pick out the package).

I hope you have that backed up somewhere a bit more reliable.

Honestly, I don't think my mom even knows where those floppy disks are

The university library should have it if nothing else.

Yeah who cares about their thesis after it's done. It's a bookshelf decoration.

I guess. My Master's thesis was a load of crap. I just changed some parameters and made a calculation that was more efficient to evaluate how wrong some garbage published in Physica that we were looking at was just trash by people who couldn't do basic linear algebra.

What the hell did I even do in grad school other than drink?

Edit: Smoke. The answer was smoke.

Aww hell yeah! Remember the nice jewel multicolor ones with the black plastic covers? Aww shit. Ooh! And the storage container that could hold like 25 of those things.

Why were they called floppy anyways? They were hard…

not the big B drive floppy ones. They actually flopped around

The modern ones were... big old ones flopped like fuck 💾

the disk inside the square plastic is floppy.

I recommend the 8-Bit Guy's video on floppy disk history. He does a pretty good job of laying out a lot of the info here: https://youtu.be/EHRc-QMoUE4

They were named after the magnetic disk inside them.

I read this too fast…. O ya floppy dicks my parents have drawers of them too

I remember when floppy disks were on my school supply list. The school supplies switched to USB my junior year.

I remember when I was young and we were robbed, one of the things they grabbed were all of my games on floppies. I was distraught.

Much more recently someone broke into my car, they took the change in the center console but left the CDs. It feels like this sums up the changes in my life, but also the things that remain the same.

You mean the save icon? ^^/j

Are you sure about that? https://imgur.com/a/nz9rMY4

Threw in a Ditto tape and some ZIP disks for good measure. I've got some more floppies as well :)

I still have some. 5.25" and 3.5". I have no idea if they're still good or not, but they're game disks for some of my favorite childhood games, and I don't want to toss them for some reason.

They're still around when it comes launching Nuclear weapons. As they can't be hacked.

Jewel cases for CDs and floppy discs.

First IT job I had, the “mainframes” required an 8” (yes, eight inches. a little smaller than an LP) floppy to boot from. I think the capacity of that thing was like 400kb.

They were on my school supply list, but they only ever said we needed one in middle school. Which was ridiculous because they also taught us powerpoint and if you put a single picture in your powerpoint that was it, the whole floppy was full, where you gonna put your book reports now??

So, when I was growing up there were 5.25 floppy disks. You could fan them like a Polaroid photo. Truly floppy. Then 3.5 inch floppy disks came out. They were hard. Plastic and hard. Yet, all my friends called them 3.5 floppy disks. 30+ years later I still don't understand why they were called floppy. Enlightenment?

My dad had a set with some awesome PC games. Commander Keen, Cosmo, Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem and a bunch of others. Grew up playing those for hours.

My brother took a "Computer technology" class in high school as an elective in 2011 and you could tell the lesson plans hadn't been updated in a long time because they still had a bit about floppy disks. None of the computers we had at home or in the library even had a way to use a floppy disk, and the teacher still taught him "This is a floppy disk. This is how you transport files and documents."

8 inch. 5 1/4 inch. 3.5 inch. iOmega ZIP. Jaz. CD+/-R/RW. DVD-R. BD-R. I've used them all.

God zip was mind-blowing.

I wonder how many people know the traditional save icon is a floppy disk

I used to sell them with emulators and roms of games.. kk, total theft or whatever but I was nine.

I saved so many game shark codes via saving a webpage onto floppy disks so I didn’t use the 200mb storage on my pc

I have one in my car

I still have a disk drive that connects to USB at my parents' place. Figured I'd keep it, just in case, rather than sell it for a trifle.

I just found a floppy disk from 2002, but I don’t have anything to see what pictures are on it😭

Nowadays external USB floppy disk drives are pretty cheap, if the floppy is in a legible format \^\^

Hopefully it’s been sitting on my fridge probably since 2002 so I’ll try to find one

maybe you can thrift one too! good luck!

I used to have a 6' tall cabinet full of them back in the day, but then I pirated a lot of games off of IRC at the time and there was never enough hard drive space.

One time dad gave me some extra floppies from work that someone forgot to format, they had some image files on them that gave me a hard disk....

they make great coasters, I brought a bunch to work and now everyone has one

I have a pack of them from elementary school that I just use as coasters now.

I used one of those no later than this morning.

I work in a physics lab and my professor's motto is, if it's not broken don't fix it.

3.5" or 5.25" floppy?

Remember in 90s cartoons where floppy discs would save the world?

I still have boxes of these and many devices that use them! Considering a new project involving them as well (I like old stuff though, so I imagine I don't count)

The 3.5 inch or 5.25 inch ones?

In my maths classroom we found a bunch of floppy discs, this shows how little things get organised in my school lol

My first computers os was on a floppy

What about beta max or vhs tapes.

I still have a 5" with part of original DooM as a memento.

DON’T COPY THAT FLOPPY

Floppy dicks, of course Viagra has changed a lot for older men.

It was hard to let them go. Originals and hard to trust the new kids on the block.

I like the way they flop like a fish

Im just old enough to remember using floppy disks but young enough to where it wasnt a thing any more for most of my internet using life

Still have a box full of them and a usb floppy drive

Don't copy that floppy!

They were floppy dicks.

I loaded games from cassette to my Commodore 64. It would take at least 30 minutes

I was raised on Atari computers with 5¼" floppies, then worked in an environment where 3½" discs proliferated. I continued to use them well into this century because my favorite synthesizer had a 3½" drive on board.

Don't copy that floppy

Found a couple floppy disks in my dad's office room yesterday. Really curious as to what's on them and might get an external floppy disk drive to see what's on them

I remember a younger cousin of mine go through some of my old stuff. “Hey that’s the Save icon!” Was her reaction when she saw my old stack of floppy disks

Floppy Diks

One of the craziest things for me was seeing a video where teenagers didn't know what the floppy disk save icon on Windows actually was.

Yeah, wanna copy Duke Nukem 3D u gonna need 7 disks. And an afternoon to prep(RAR)e it, plus 7 extra floppys cause, u know, they tend to break. Miss the sexyness of floppys, not the tech.

I really want to install a floppy drive in my computer, just for shits n' giggles.

In 2003 I was at a friends place when it knocked on the door. It was the neighbor whom we'd never met before asking if we had a Windows start disc. Like it was just assumed that everyone had a Windows start (floppy) disc around the house just like any other common tool.

I think my dad still has a bunch of those lying around somewhere. I know that there are these things that can read floppy disks and send them to be opened by USB

That's where I had all of my Diablo 2 hacks. Saved on floppy disks

My mom still saved all her excel files to a floppy disk up until like 5 years ago. She had a system that worked for her and refused to change till she couldn't get a computer with a built in drive anymore. She wasn't keen on an external drive so it forced her to adapt.

The stupid amount of disks to install Windows

I’ve got news for you… we still use them for critical systems here at the FAA

We had so many, and we never used any of them. We even had them on our school list one year and didn't use them.

Also, file cabinets.

I’m a machinist and a bunch of our old haas cnc still use floppy disk to load programs.

and having full games on it, like Doom

You can still buy USB floppy drives cheaply! I found a floppy from the 90s and was able to read it.

My dad had a digital camera that used floppies and, since he had a horde of floppies just like your parents, he basically could take pictures forever.

It could store 40 images per floppy at a glorious 0.3megapixels.

about 8 years ago a woman called the retail store i worked in at the time and asked if we could pull data off "one of those square black things."

i said, "oh, you mean a floppy disc?"

"um, no. it's hard plastic."

(it was indeed a floppy disc.)

I still use them daily :)

Parents? I was born in the 90s and I used floppy disks well into the mid 2000s. When people switched over to USBs & computers stopped having floppy disk slots, we bought and carried around a portable floppy disk drive with a USB connection (that was cheaper than USB drives).

Fun fact: did you know the United States Air Force kept all records of vehicles and their repairs on a literal fuck ton of floppy disks all the way until 2016 when they decided to move it to a completely online system?

Yes! And those cool plastic box organisers you kept on your desk, locked with a key at the front and you could flip through them, making that fun sound.

So many electronic and computer things - I was part of the analog to digital generation though. I remember the really crappy dial up we once had!

We still use it for our weaving machines at work for back-ups or installing mods. Yes they are oldies.

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.

Oh, this so much. I can't concentrate on ANYTHING anymore. Can always think of something I need to check/look up/order/pay on my phone.

Yeah it's gotten bad for me. I'll get a notification on my phone and I'll just get so sidetracked and I always end up on damn Reddit haha Like now. I'm watching YouTube but here I am.

The frequency that I'll pause a movie or show to hit up Reddit for a few minutes just to go back is insane. Even the thing that's supposed to be a distraction to our lives needs a distraction in the middle.

This is so true it hurts

And then when you don't have your phone, you realize how often you look at your phone because every 5 minutes you reach for your phone to look something up and don't have it.

I heard that some internet provider crashed for a few days in canada and so millions of people were left with no Wi-Fi or data. That sucks but just existing in space where people are phone free would be so refreshing.

I was nice back then. Going out and not worrying about a phone. I’m 38 so I had a mostly cell free childhood. I got one at 18 but it was basic as hell. Now I’m tied to this thing as an adult. It’s so weird.

I’m not sure if I wish I was born earlier, I’m 21 now and I’m able to keep in contact with my childhood friends because of social media. I suppose there’s caveat to everything, I wouldn’t mind if the world decided to go social media free for a while tho.

Yeah I see the appeal of easy connections. I lost track of all my old friends. It sucks. I guess there are ups and downs to each generation and our technology.

It lasted about 22 hours. Only Eastern Canada was affected. I had service, because I was with the other company. As for short attention span…so me now. So bad.

Try using public transport without a smartphone. Yoiu know, you are not required to bring one. Even the connections can be looked up without a phone. But you'll definitely feel like the odd one out.

You should look into OG (Therevada) Buddhism. 90% of it is a slightly more structured approach to what you just described, and the other 10% is "don't be a dick."

I watched a butterfly yesterday. I left my phone in the house on purpose.

I love the Jeep commercial I think it was, they show the back of the phone in the passenger seat while the person says not yet, a minute later "not yet" and again, then finally as the camera comes around and the phone shows "no signal"

​

I actually am a tech geek of sorts, plus work in finance now, but I really actually love when I get out camping and there is no signal for the phone. That is what I look forward to when I go camping as far away as possible :)

At my inlaws' house there's basically no cell signal. It's mildly annoying at times, but for the most part it's so freeing. The kids actually go out and play instead of being stuck to electronics or YouTube and you actually spend time talking to family instead of turning your mind off scrolling through feeds.

Oh my gawd, you made me think of the commercial, maybe a PSA where the driver goes to grab his phone, and the passenger reaches over and holds the driver's hand. X'D

Its one of the reasons me and the GF camp during the summers and always pick a place with no cell reception.

its frustrating for the first couple days as you get used to the idea that, when you have a question or are wondering something, you can't just grab your phone and check it out.

but after the first few days of acclimation its a great little "reset" to get back to living with just whats in front of you. It really helps your mind relax.

Dude - when you are a kid, everything is a distraction.

A few years ago I was waiting for a friend and I made a deliberate, conscious decision to just sit on a bench without reading or looking at my phone. As I was sitting there, a guy who I'd gone on a couple dates with a few months before—who ghosted me—walked by. We made awkward eye contact. He kept walking.

I laughed *really* hard later realizing it must have looked so bizarre to see me just sitting there doing nothing. Like maybe I was still waiting for his call. Whatever

And then just imagine that for the last 10 years or so, most children have had immediate access to distractions their whole life.

I put my phone in airplane mode when I get in my car. I rarely turn on the radio. I almost never look at it when I'm in a waiting room. I leave it in the house when I go outside to work unless I'm on the roof or something. Yet, I still spend way too much time on distractions.

When my mom was alive and I was helping her, eventually caregiver, I was glad to have my phone on me all the time.

I remember being a kid with nothing to do and just sitting on the floor bored out of my mind for what felt like hours. I haven’t felt true boredom in a long, long time.

Recess in school was always a nightmare because of this. Just leaning on the walls or walking circles in the corner of the playground alone while the other kids played.

Recess was only about 10min but it felt like half an hour.

I was worried my attention span was decreasing. I think though what's happening is that there is a LOT of stuff coming at us all the time. We like to get the headlines, so to speak. And we like to flip through lots of incoming info because it's fun.

But when I'm really interested in something, I can focus on it just like I could before things were the way they are now.

This is crazy.

Our attention span/ tolerance for boredom is becoming so damn low.

I traveled to another country yesterday and my SIM card wouldn't connect. I had a 1.5h train ride and the wifi wouldn't work.

I had no idea the countryside of the Netherlands could be interesting.

I literally felt like I had been unplugged.

I use my phone a lot when I'm indoors, but for some reason I've always enjoyed looking out of the window more when I'm traveling. It's very calming.

When I’m having to wait for something like being called back to the doctor’s office I intentionally avoid my cellphone so it looks like I’m waiting and not zoning out in front of my phone. I’m not rude about it, I just don’t want it to seem like I’m happily entertained because I have a screen in front of my face. Of course I spend plenty of time on my phone during other parts of the day but for some reason I just won’t do it when I’m waiting in public unless it’s to complete a task like write an email.

Not sure why we should avoid critiquing it. I'd say it's horrendous if people can't even sit down to watch a movie anymore, which I definitely notice all around me. That also says a lot about their capability to read articles or watch in-depth reports. And this increases the likelihood of people getting their news/worldview from memes, headlines and skits.

I can read books for hours but it takes a special kind of mood for me to be able to sit through a movie, very different kinds of attention span.

I cannot handle those moments without a phone. That's really when I'm most "in need" if my phone. But then again I hated those boring moments before smartphone. However, phones haven't dampened my ability to enjoy a walk and be immersed in my thoughts. Just not standing still waiting for something

I honestly think it's an acceptable critique of people now. It's not a generational thing, it's everyone. I've gotten take out a few times this year and been a few minutes early, and people of all ages can't just sit patiently,they have to have their phone out and be connected to something

Get a flip phone, its been great.

That’s kinda why I took up smoking. Something to occupy myself while waiting for a bus that only came once an hour

I work in a pediatric hospital. It’s straight up scary to hold a convo with these kids now. They are so socially awkward and closed off. Way too much screen time imo.

… kids are awkward. Kids have always been awkward. Especially when talking to strange adults, and especially when they’re in a scary / new situation, like… y’know… a pediatric hospital.

Kids get plenty of interaction with other people. Peers, teachers, parents, for 6-8 hours a day. More than many adults do in their office jobs.People have been saying the generation after them is somehow worse than the previous generation for thousands of years. They’re not, they’re just kids.

Plato and Socrates thought that writing was rotting people’s minds. People argued against the invention of the printing press, saying it distributed too much knowledge. Landline phones, mobile phones, smart phones, tablets - this too shall pass, and make society immeasurably better over time.

Maybe the big difference is that the same thing is 'rotting' adult minds too though.

I think that social media can have just as bad, if not worse, effect on older people (over 60) than it does on younger people (under 30). Some of the political posts I've seen from older people on facebook make you realize that they'll believe just about anything on the internet. It's ironic because they were they ones saying that it'd rot their kids' brains.

I understand the effort to express that these sorts of worries are perennial, but I always found it to be a bit of a thought-terminating statement.

Every generation over-exaggerates the direction of the current generation and views the past through rose colored glasses, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t cultural trends worth critically examining.

Yeah they aren’t entirely wrong but there is a 100% a problem with adults being present because of phones. I can’t even count the times I see a parent taking their child for a walk in a stroller/with the kid walking and they’re just on their phones. Never mind the fact you should be aware of your surroundings and ready for anything when with your child near busy roads, it just feels so disconnected, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone while your 4 year old walks ahead of you.

I saw a mother on a stoop the other day with her child in a carseat next to her and she was just on her phone looking so bored. Im like holy fucking shit interact and speak with your children. Look at them and stimulate their brains. Instead kids are just looking at their parents who are attached to these devices.

I 1,000,000% promise you that these parents are no less connected to their kids than they were to the average 1950s parent.

This is a study on active time spent - i.e. playing, washing, putting to bed. It’s more than doubled in the US, and tripled elsewhere, since the 1960s.

New media delivery methods are always theorised to be the cause of the decline of society, and to date theyve only ever significantly improved it. Phones are fine. I’d agree that social media specifically could be detrimental… but there are studies that show that.

Even with this, it’s still very likely to be better for society to have phones with social media, than no phones and no social media. Just like printing press+trashy novels, or TV and Jerry Springer, or the internet and cat videos - they’re inextricably linked, and you have to take the rough to get the endless benefits of the smooth.

There have always been bad TV shows, bad books, bad newspapers etc. Society will swing away from the bad parts of phones, or adapt to them - and overall, expanded access to all historical and contemporary human knowledge will continue to benefit us.

Y'all should read Stolen Focus by Johan Hari. He talks a lot about the detrimental aspects of smartphone usage and how they are unique to our time insofar as our brains/critical thinking skills/attention spans are becoming worn down & depleted from the overuse of screens and smartphones.

This negative side effect of screens and smartphones is both somewhat intentional by the manufacturers of the things that make phone usage so addicting (not because they want us to be dumb but because they get more money the longer we are staring at our screens).

And the cognitive decline associated with phone usage is actually unique, that is to say, different from how our minds were affected by the printing press/writing/whatever other significant inventions. With smartphones, we are inclined to multi-task in a way that is unique from our relationship to other inventions (like printing press, books, writing, even tv). Try cooking while reading a book, it's pretty impossible. You can watch tv while cooking, but that's about it, I mean you can flick through the channels and stuff but the tv is still just a tv and you're watching tv and cooking and nothing else. But with smartphones, you can look at the recipe, text your friend, email your boss, and burn your dinner all at the same time! Our brains aren't actually formed to be capable of multi-tasking. And the more we try, the more it actually wears down our brain, because it takes more time then for our brain to go back and refocus on any task. This is called the “switch-cost effect”. And a study shows that switching tasks has a quantifiable negative effect on our brain--we lose about 20% of focus. And we're doing this all the time (most of us). That's why when we try later to actually focus on one task we find it so damn hard. How many people do you know who can't finish a book anymore? Or focus on things they used to be able to focus on? It's because our brains are actually struggling to keep up and the wear and tear is causing us not to be able to focus, not just when we're on our phones, but all the time!

Cognitive decline isn't the only unique negative side effect of phone and screen usage--it's actually a potentially dangerous habit to be on apps and screens and not just because you're not paying attention to your surroundings (like when walking or driving). For example, youtube is actually a huge contributing factor to the rise of the right wing sociopaths because of this impulse to keep folks staring at the screen. There are studies that suggest that people are more likely to continue staring at something if it's shocking or horrendous rather than calming or peaceful, and with that being the case, the youtube algorithm will begin showing recommended videos that are more and more shocking until in a relatively short time you end up with holocaust denying conspiracies, only tangentially related to the original video and a lot more dangerous.

Another unique factor that we are facing in modern times that folks didn't face when writing or the printing press was invented is that we are in the midst of the catastrophic effects of climate crisis. The world as we know it, the entire damn thing is being violently destroyed in a very unique and new way. We are rapidly approaching a world without trees, like holy shit. I could go on and on about this because I got my masters in environmental studies but I think most people understand how fucked we are with climate crisis. In a time when the world is facing one of the most horrible things it has ever faced (and we actually could do something about it, unlike the dinosaur meteor) our brains are suffering in a brand new and messed up way because of screens and smartphones...and, at the same time, in those screens and smartphones, algorithms are driving us further and further to the right, away from caring about this devastating apocalyptic future we are all currently facing.

Anyway, I could go on but I think I've got my point across. One more thing, though. After reading this book, I have changed my phone habits. My phone screen time has dropped from around 3 hours a day to 35 minutes a day on average and my partner and I enjoy no-screen Saturdays every week. It's been an absolute life-changing decision to not use a screen all day and we can already feel the effects of minimizing screen time seeping into other parts of our life--how we eat, how we sleep, how we interact with one another, and ourselves, how we remember, how we read, how we think! And it was actually not that hard to not use the screen one day a week, really not that hard at all. We often leave our phones at home when walking or going to the store or running errands, and when we're waiting or bored, we try just being bored instead of reaching for our phones. I'm daydreaming again, which I haven't done since I was in high school! Anyway, I really highly recommend it and am happy to give advice to any one who wants to minimize their time on these uniquely detrimental devices (computers and smartphones).

Sent from your iPhone 😉

No this was actually sent from my computer.

I never said I don't use these devices (we've been forced into a society where they are almost required in order to live at this point) but rather have been speaking to how they are extremely (and uniquely) detrimental to our well-being on individual and collective and global levels. I personally wish for a world without smartphones and the internet but I don't think that's realistic at this point and so am instead interested in spreading awareness of the detrimental effects so that folks are emboldened to minimize usage of these tools except when necessary, ideally.

I do appreciate the irony you're pointing out, though, in the condemnation of these devices while using these devices. However, as I said, I never suggested that I or anyone should not ever use these devices ever at all. Just that we recognize what they are doing to us and that we work towards minimizing the negative effects, in order to save the world! Or at least reclaim some more brain capacity, get back into more frequent flow states, and experience more joy by participating in a more meaningful life.

Im not saying phones are evil incarnate and that parents are more disconnected from their children than ever before, all Im saying is they’re just another tool that I see keeping parents from being engaged and attentive to their children. Lol like I love phones and having all these resources at our finger tips! But I think its bizarre to insist people don’t have phone addictions that distract them from their kids. But I appreciate the thoughtful comment and studies. You clearly care about this subject.

this is comforting because i feel so similar.

I think a lot of people feel this way, but people, especially the 30+ millennials like myself don’t like to admit it because “we’re not like those kids on tik tok” but we totally are. Always were tbh.

Sometimes I want to people watch while waiting for something but feel like I look a little out of place not looking down at my phone

Yeah that’s whats nuts. Sometimes I actually don’t want to be on my phone but I look around and I’m the only one not on my phone. So I think I’m being creepy and get on my phone. “Acting natural” now involves looking down at your phone and sometimes I do it just to blend in.

This! I literally cannot watch a movie anymore, only YouTube and TikTok.

Or sitting at a bar and just talking to the people around you. It still happens some places but most people sitting alone are on their phones the whole time

As far as sitting down and watching movies, that's why I use theaters. Instead of watching a new movie online/streaming, I instead take the time to go see it at the local AMC. Plus, they could use the business. Would hate to see movie theaters go away.

I remember going to get my covid vaccination and I didn't bring my phone with me. Sat down for 15 minutes afterwards and looked around and pretty much everyone had their eyes glued to their phones. I probably would have too if I had mine with me, but it was very weird to be in a room of so many people who were very silent apart from the tapping of screens.

Forgetting your phone or actually taking the time to look around you at what everyone is doing is pretty dystopian shit lol. Literally a whole crowd of the most social animal on the planet, actively ignore each other completely to focus on their little media screen.

But we’re all well aware of it. We just can’t/won’t do anything about it. We all know something is wrong about this but…it’s just how it is now?

It was very surreal. Just a whole group of people blocking out the real world and focusing on the digital.

I say typing away on reddit...

I sometimes miss being bored. It helped me be more creative. Now, it’s so distracting I’m considering on selling the tv and go back to prepaid cellphone minutes.

That's what books are for. I made sure to never look at people when waiting for things, even in the '90s. haha.

I only just got a smartphone recently for the first time in my life. Waiting rooms, airports, lines, even stopped traffic are buried in their phones but it was still intriguing to people watch. I felt like a weirdo without one tbh, like who is that creeper over there just sitting?

and people watching is watching them watch their phones....

The shortening of your attention span is probably intended by the people owning the social media apps so you use them more, it’s pretty fucked up in my opinion

I became a huge chain smoker in my early college days because of this! There were only dumbphones, legit hobbies, or bad habits to distract while waiting for the bus.

My "my attention span is fucked" realization came when i was watching a movie, got slightly bored during some slow scene and started browsing reddit on my other monitor while i waited.

The only time I feel like i don't want to be on a screen of some sort is when I'm smoking a joint. The ritual of packing/rolling at my desk while looking out the window people watching is one of my favorite parts of getting high lol.

Hahaha I don’t smoke weed anymore but you’re so right. The grinding, rolling, and smoking time is sacred.

This is why i watch anime subbed.

Too easy for me to get distracted when I can understand from just voice.

If I have to go more than 15 seconds without doing something I go crazy

Isn't this a critique of how people are now though? don't you think it's mentally unhealthy to never have freely roaming thoughts and have such a low attention span that you can barely watch a movie?

I mean yes just didn’t want to sound like I was making a “get off my lawn” argument because I’m also guilty of this.

yes we are all guilty of it and we all need to control our addiction rather than just accepting it.

Honestly I don’t miss that at all. If I can pull out my phone I feel like I am reclaiming time that is just wasted otherwise.

I've never been able to watch a movie because I'm always lost in thoughts... which is also part of the reason I don't bother with phones (I feel I don't need 'em).

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

I too have 3 older sisters … I’ve read all about Tss. Used to know the ingredients in shampoos too

sodium lauryl sulfate

And for some reason they write down water as aqua.

Oddly wholesome, this

Same in Germany.

The strange thing is that it’s included as water in food products but as aqua in beauty and cleaning products. Is it also like that in Germany?

Yep, same situation. Food has water, beatury has aqua.
And scientiest have Di-Hydrogen Monoxide

It's that way in Spain, I think it's the same in all the EU.

[deleted]

Yes, it has the same meaning but you don’t see people using akvo or any other language.

INCI. It's a mix of Latin/English. It's a requirement in EU for cosmetic products.

I’m a woman and know all about TSS, but I love translating the ingredients and instructions in other languages and then checking the English ones to see if I got it right!

Lol. What a good boy

I’m sure he’ll make a great husband one day

I hope so he deserves it

Even so, he probably shouldn't marry someone who finds that information timely as they hit puberty.

So sad about your sister. So sorry.

It’s no joke though. I knew a girl in college that went into toxic shock from a tampon and was in a coma for months.

That's very sweet!

my brother( he had 3 sisters and a mom)

Why did you phrase that as if you're not related? (unless he's a step/half brother)

Because one sister is deceased

Sorry to hear that, but was she your sister too? Wouldn't it be "we" instead?

We would imply she is still alive and I have one brother and two sisters so I can count myself in when I say "he had"

They have to be something like that otherwise it's odd.

Unfortunately, I learned the dangers of toxic shock through the jolly rancher story...

No, no, no, no no no

Jolly rancher story? Do I want to know?

No dude. You don't wanna know..

Good brother

TSS is scary and kills women. Good brother to share that news with his sisters, who were less likely to read the box!

I never read the box till he told me

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

To avoid the shampoo hell I ended up with a magazine rack in my bathroom. It especially used to be entertaining as a placeholder for any weird pamphlets I got in the street.

The magazine rack instantly froze in time the day I got my first smartphone. I was still hesitant to get rid of it. It was probably 2 years later that I realised I had to get rid of the dusty mags and pamphlets no one has touched since that day. And with a sombre heart I bid it farewell, fully aware it's the end of an era.

I take Reader's Digest specifically for this.

My mom used to make go to the corner store to buy tampons. Only tampons.

I'm old enough to have been sent to buy cigarettes before I was 10

Grandfather had a hardware store in the 70’s, when we were going through his barn is stuff, we found the cash register and there were notes in the bottom of the drawer from mothers saying so and so had permission to buy ammo & cigs

The 80s were wild enough the 70s seemed to be straight up insane

Oh, I forgot about that. She would also send me to the corner store to buy cigarettes. Only cigarettes.

I think I was 14 or 15 before I ran into a cashier who refused

I used to take my gameboy or a book in with me. The issue, mum thought I had severe stomach issues because I'd get so distracted I wouldn't budge after I'd finished. She laughed her head off when she saw me appearing, head buried in a game or a book. No stomach issues, just a brain that got distracted easily.

i can't imagine crapping without a phone anymore

Stay away from jobs that require a security clearance. The good news is most places that do have magazines and books right outside of the bathroom.

What was the most Engaging/Interesting/ Memorable Read amongst the labeled items in your bathroom?

My cousin left his porno mags in the bathroom and I’d look at those. 6 year old me learned things young. Luckily it was just pictures of naked ladies and not “acts” so mostly all I learned was “that’s what I’m going to look like when I grow up.” 27 now, still waiting for those titties to come in, any day now.

Love the tits you wit'.

Haha, me too. That how I knew what toxic shock syndrome was as 10 year old boy.

Tampon boxes are like the cardboard version of smart phones.

I think that makes you more well-informed about female anatomy than most Republican congressmen.

Tue and relevant

That’s how I first learned of toxic shock

I always thought Toxic Shock Syndrome would make a great band name

I've masturbated to tampon instructions because it was the best material I had.

Made me laugh out loud

That is a case of being certifiably bored.

We all gotta learn somehow.

I used to wank over the pictures

TSS is no joke. Ladies need to be changing their products regularly. Also make who grew up reading every label in the bathroom while a kid in the 90s

Damn, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only young male weirdo who did this!

It was still good for you to learn the basics!

Real talk tho I think everyone should know how tampons work.

Same but there is still some uncertainty…

So, did you insert the tampon correctly?

Wait. 64. That was the final Boomer year. Soo…if it’s Your Year, it is awful to be stuck in the dust cloud BEHIND all those Boomers hitting the Gravy Train. I get it.

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I work with an adolescent trans boy. He has shared his horrifying experience with his menstrual cycle with me.

Occasionally if I’m high, I still reach for the Dr. Bronner’s bottle

That bottle is too good though.

Read it to the end yet? I haven't managed but then I'm just a little over 50...

18-in-1 HEMP PEPPERMINT PURE-CASTILLE SOAP CERTIFIED FAIR TRADE. ABC's of morality... cleanliness is next to godliness... in 1879 rabbi hilel...something something...all natural ingredients.

Best shower bottle hands down.

For those that it takes a bit to get going, that bottle is a god send.

And it's genuinely great soap too. It's one of the few premium brands I'll always buy when I can.

Lol Rabbi Hillel is from like the 500s AD but close enough

The Necronomicon of soap. Roll for SAN loss!

LOL. Those long, wild-ass, spiritual messages.

I read this comment as dr. Boner’s bottle.

No regrets

At the bus stop?

I remember Herbal Essences used to print riddles on the back of their shampoo bottles, presumably because they knew people would read them.

METHYLCHLOROISOTHIAZOLINONE (always had fun trying to say that)

Yay I was going to say this too!

Lol yall rather read shampoo bottle over the news paper?

Sometimes you forgot a newspaper/magazine

Which was the point of the Uncle Johns Bathroom Reader books. Something you can leave in there and not have to remember something

I used to LOVE those. My shitter room had a full blown library

I still have copies of those and get the new ones. I don't read them in the bathroom tho

Same! I’ve been collecting them since I was a teenager but I’ve found them to be especially good for general reading as I get older and my post-work, post-adulting attention span gets shorter.

Also getting older. Had the complete works of Walter Wick I Spy books in the bathroom. Will be replacing them in a couple of years for the grandkids. I had some friends over for a bbq today and they actually noted them missing.

I love those books!

Hardly ever a cold toilet seat. I can appreciate they were/are big ol clunky books. Hardcover too. They're like the dr seuss of picture books. My kids couldn't get enough of them. Adults too.

I am not surprised by this since you call a bathroom a shitter room lmao.

My late father had one of these in our bathroom that he got as a gift. One of his most prized possessions, kept it in his bathroom until the day he died. His name was John and so he thought it was hilarious - the gift was from my cousin lol.

Your comment reminded me of him because he talked like this too.

"full brown library."

We had all the MAD magazine bathroom companions, the Guinness book of world records, and Ripleys Believe It Or Not books.

We had a bathroom library.

This is what’s wrong w this generation. Libraries are no longer existent in bathrooms. It’s all Candy Crush and TikTok.

I was absolutely obsessed with Ripley's believe it or not books when I was younger. Check out the Mysteries of the Unexplained book, my grandparents had it and I recently got a copy for myself. I've read it so many times starting around age 10, all that weird info living rent free in my head lol

"Why are you soo good at trivia?"

"I'm a slow shitter"

Ahhh....our version of hitting random on wikipedia. Open up to a random page and by the time you were done you knew something new!

I have two in my bathroom right now, my family is always confused why I know random facts about almost anything and my answer is always the bathroom reader

Cecil Adams Straight Dope reader here

We had a basket of Readers Digests on the back of the toilet.

Classic literature for the bathroom.

There were stories for every sort of poop you might have.

My grandparents in New Hampshire US had Yankee magazine

We had a stack of National Geographics from the 60s. I know all about the Amish from loo time.

Did you guys have that white trash combination toilet paper holder / magazine rack in the bathroom? Or was that just me?

It's not white trash if it was a staple of an entire generation. Especially if it was brass.

toilet paper holder / magazine rack

I had no idea they existed, but I googled them and there are lots of styles to choose from.

I have one of those now. It’s probably 30 years old and is tollpainted with hearts and ribbons. But it holds two rolls of toilet paper and several issues of Game Informer, so I’m keeping it around.

My parents still have this in one of their bathrooms

Those things fetch good money if you have one to sell. Google "Hall Mack Relaxation Unit". I'd love one for my mid-century modest teeny bathroom.

Mine had a slot to stow the poop knife

Good point

Sometimes you forget the toilet paper so you cant read the newspaper

Poor Garfield 🙏

I hate mondays

Why can’t you read it, then traumatize Garfield?

Expanding on this. You don't see magazine racks in bathrooms any more either.

The magazine rack was located in the bathroom, they went there straight from the mailbox

The *classy* families had magazine racks in the bathroom.

I installed a wall-mounted magazine rack in our half-bathroom in order to prevent this problem.

Playboy magazine

It has poo in the name. It's equivalent to syrup and pancakes

Ngl, I even went as far as pretending I was the spokesperson promoting the shampoo in a commercial while sitting on the toilet. Reading all the benefits off the bottle and shit

Trying to sell it to the toilet rolls

Couldn't afford to buy the paper

Read the toilet paper....

Yep, check out the quited pattern on the paper.

There is only so many labradors you can count

I'm sorry to hear

The old Sears & Robuck method.

Newspaper takes up too much space while pooping, I ain't got time to hold out a full newspaper while I'm doing my business

Why don't you fold it?

I remember in a COLLEGE business class, being shown how men folded The Wall Street Journal to read it on their commute.

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I don’t know if I should be proud of this or not, but I once read an entire book on the shitter. Not all at once mind you, but I had a “dookie book” that I only read when dropping the kids off at the pool. I don’t know how I got started, but I designated that book as only to be read when dumping. I even took it to the office with me.

I know a guy who took a book of French Impressionist paintings into the bathroom with him at a bookstore, then tried to put it back on the shelf when he was done. The cashier made him buy it, and then wouldn't let him return it later because it was "flagged"

I do the same but with a audiobook while I cook

Yes

Any shampoos you recommend?

Personally I find that organic ones are great, they have fewer ingredients and so tend to fill up the back with other stuff instead, which can make for a less predictable read; at least initially.

Thanks you, organic ones it is

Newspaper flaps about too much for toilet time. Magazines all the way.

I read the instructions to my girlfriends tampons and learned about TSS!

I just had a flashback to my dad reading entire books per poop

I mean, I use the toilet to piss and shit. In and out in five minutes. No time for reading, I got shit to do

One of my house's bathrooms has a built-in magazine slot across from the toilet.

Or there were the normal people with a functional diet who sat on the toilet, shit in seconds, wiped, and were done within 2 minutes.

This whole meme about having to read something on the shitter is just an admission of having a dud diet.

We didn’t get the paper ☹️

What about shampoo?

Sodium laureth sulfate

I’ll read anything

YOU READ WHAT YOU GOTS.

They are for wiping

And that is another thing we don't have anymore, news papers.

Lol true the last time I saw one was around 2016

Yes! I remember the last magazine I read on the pooper…

“Who the FUCK is Renae ZellWhittwah?!”

If ya live with anyone else, taking the paper to sit on the shitter may be considered uncouth.

aphetylene capotassium sorbate the most interesting thing

My ex girlfriends dad bought the Sunday Sport and left it in the bathroom. I spent a lot of time in there. (U.K. completely inappropriate newspaper with underage girls with their tits out)

I’d practice reading all the stuff written in French on the back of a shampoo bottles and tampon boxes 💅

Uncle Johns and Readers Digests. They’re still good reads!

I do that today. I’m 24

Toilet reading has changed for sure!!!

You poop in the shower?

I done this in the early 2000s.. then I was packing a laptop to sh*t.. now it’s a phone 😅🤣 also my dad used to have a handheld scrabble game in the bathroom lmao

How long do you people take to poop? I'm in n out in less than 5 minutes.

When I was a kid, we had a shower curtain that had a world map on it with every country labeled. For years I'd stare at it every time I took a shit. I am now very good at geography

I dunno what ammonium laureth sulfate is and I really don't care. I just know it's always in there regardless of brand.

Because child of the 90's.

I read the inside of my saline solution box this morning. Important stuff.

“new and improved? I’ve read this already!”

We always kept magazines in our bathrooms

At my first job I used to grab the phone book when I didn't bring my book from home. Could never sit there without reading material

I literally did this today because my phone was dead

Stop. Wait. Did I just meet… other me?

Bro I've done this so many times lmao, yet I remember nothing about the ingredients

Had a friend who learned bridges and routers reading the manuals one trip at a time. I'm not sure there are any bridges these days so definitely the 90s.

We just call them switches now

This came in clutch the other day when I forgot my phone.

What was that movie where the guy is selecting a shampoo bottle to read like it's a magazine?

"Head and shoulders? Already read it. Oooh Ultra volume perm plus"

Edit: just remembered 'Kingpin'

I'm reading this as I poop.

There's a bit of a joke in Sweden that the only Finnish Swedes know is "Ei Saa Peittää", because radiators used to have warning labels on them saying not to cover them with anything, written in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish, and people would read it over and over while on the toilet.

One of the very first things I remember reading as a kid was “Kills household germs, mold, and mildew” on the Lysol can in the bathroom!

Gotta go further back than the 90s for that. Source: I clearly recall in the early 90s, sitting on the shitter at work, HP 100LX palmtop in my hands, playing Battletech.

HP 100LX

That cost about $750 if you could find one back then.

Sounds about right. Helps if you can make a case to your boss that it's a work related tool.

Had to buy that 20MB compact flash card extra, though.

I had no idea compact flash cards went back that far…!

I remember my teacher at school had that digital camera that took pictures to a floppy, and it was the coolest shit ever.

You were very much an outlier.

I didn’t get my first cell phone until 2008 didn’t get a smart phone until 2011-12. None of my friends had one either, we just never saw the point. Ending up getting one because I needed it for work.

To add to this, having a magazine rack/holder in the bathroom.

There was this weird middle period when ChaCha was around. Basically you texted that number, asked any question, and someone would get back to you.

You'd be like "What time does the 3rd avenue bus get to 50th street southbound?" or whatever. And a real person would look it up and answer. They got paid like 10 cents per question, I believe. You, the user, just got sent an advertisement text to read.

You could ask them anything, and they'd google it at home for you! Was only around for like 2-3 years because smartphones took over. But it was pretty cool. If you asked a niche question, it might take a few minutes to answer of course

It might still be around for all I know!

Kgb was like this too and it’s still around

Law enforcement in big cities actually did something very much like this all the way back in the 50s (maybe 40s even). There were those blue (Police) and red (Fire) telephone boxes at the base of some telephone poles every so many city blocks.

It was like a hotline back to the station to check on persons of interest, locations, directions, and connections to local businesses. (This is actually portrayed pretty accurately in the game 'L.A. Noire')

Pretty crazy to think there was "form" of googling almost 80 years back.

.. why not just look it up yourself? Or was it for people that didn’t have the technology for it?

They said it was pre-smart phones. The phones we had back then could text and make phone calls, but some didn't even have internet capability and those that did you got charged through the nose for accessing the internet - I remember when it was $1 per minute which started the moment you left your cell phone providers website, so it had to be something really important you needed to look up.

Why don't you look up the answer to your question yourself?

People complain about how everyone reads their phones now, but I was that person in the 90s (and other decades), who ALWAYS had a book or magazine on hand, to be read in the post office line, bus stop, subway, etc. Never in nature, but always in urban settings.

I always had a book with me. Didn't matter where I was going or who I was with I always had a book so if there were times I had nothing to do or someone to talk with out came the book. I just substituted reading books with scrolling through social media really.

At least a book was singular-focus. Instant access to the library of the planet, social media, and infinite porn is a different story! Lol

Sometimes it was just nice to not bring anything with you except your keys and wallet, and literally go out into the wild world with only the information you have stored in your head, and people around to ask. At just 34, I can say that it wasn't that long ago either!

I always had a library book and my Walkman. It wasn’t the dark ages, dude.

I read so many books on the bus before the internet.

Right? Smartphones killed my reading habit. I read about 1/10 the books I read before them.

I just read books on a smartphone, hah.

I do too but then I start playing games or looking at Reddit or otherwise distracting myself.

If the book can't hold my attention, or I can't force myslelf to slog through dry parts because the good parts don't make up for that, then it's not really that good anyway IMHO. No shame in doing something else with your time then.

I had a brain injury also. It’s not the book’s fault, it’s that my brain is now like an old car and overheats if expected to do too much!

Damn, that sucks. I'm sorry to hear that.

Seems like smartphones have made us less smart XD

Yeah, riding home from school on the bus was prime book reading time.

That was a family rule. We never went anywhere without a book. Subway screeched to a halt and we’d all pull out our books.

With these two things, people from the 90s literally had access to the exact same things I use when in these situations. Of course, I've swapped the walkman out for something more modern, but I use it in the same way.

People acting like the ‘90s were the 1290s. Like we had books, magazines, newspapers, portable music devices! People didn’t just stare at a wall; we planned for our commute ffs.

I remember in the 1290s when my work commute was always SO boring!

Of course, but I do feel like back then there was not the feeling that I need to occupy myself now because I'll be waiting for 5 or 10 minutes... you'd just, you know, wait. And think about life.

For me, depends on the day. Some days it’s just nice to sit and stare blankly at the hellscape that is North American suburbia.

had the opportunity to actually talk to interesting people. Use to think through my “casual conversation” skills for all settings. Recall prepping for sitting at grease monkey or tire store…crazy.

People are no longer capable of just... doing nothing. Of being bored and just dealing with it.

Sometimes we couldn't afford batteries.

Or we didn't have any spare ones with us.

Using a pencil to rewind or forward cassettes to save on battery power.

Books don’t need batteries.

How dare you disrespect my walkman like that?!

You young whipper snappers.

I was telling this story to my wife and it blew her mind, so maybe we were weird.

When I was a kid, we went to the bus stop and dropped our backpacks to “save our place” in line. Then we’d play or wander, and when the bus came we’d pick up our backpacks and that was the order we got on the bus.

My first day, my brother told me to respect the backpack line. Don’t cut. Just put your bag down at the end of the line when you get there.

I thought this was normal bus stop behavior until I told my wife and she looked at me like I was nuts.

My kid still does this at her bus stop if that makes you feel better

Except pretending like you were smoking when it was cold enough for your breath to show

No one dreams in the blank spaces anymore-- it's really sad

I mean newspapers did exist and so did the news paper boxes right next to bus stops

Wait that’s rare?

That's why I always carried around a book. You never had nothing to do if you had a book and even waiting for the bus wasn't boring... Damn I wish I had the attention span to read like I used to.

And then riding the bus just looking out the window.

I just carried a book everywhere.

I had a walkman and books on me all the time back then, now I have a cellphone...

We had books back then...

I managed to fuck that up for everyone with a Walkman on fucking max and smoking cigarettes like I was gonna be a dad and waiting in the hospital room.

Sorry everyone back then. Sorry ears. Sorry lungs too, but I was smart enough to stop at 20yo.

Yeah sorry this sucked. I have a vivid imagination and inner life and this was just straight up wasted time.

You never owned a book??

I can’t read books, my ADHD forgets the name of the characters by the second page. Makes reading so dumb, I’m constantly confused.

That's why I tend to read nonfiction books, or news articles. I guess I would have been a newspaper reader back then

Especially waiting for the bus in the rain

Walkman people always knew there was a better way.

You didn't play tag and stuff with the other kids while waiting?

Or talking to the other kids there and almost becoming friends...until the bus shows up and you have to find a seat.

Throwing acorns at oncoming traffic while waiting for the elementary bus.

I was a shit kid

You can still have that anywhere north of Edinburgh in winters.. it's way to cold to take your hands out your pockets. And if its raining, as it always is, you're fucked..

We'd play hide n seek our capture the flag. We even started showing up 20 minutes earlier just to get more game time in.

I don't know about you but I was playing Pokemon or yes-anding with friends until shit got so ridiculous you were all dying laughing.

Then having a person drive by and stop To let us know we have a snow day because the assholes canceled School so late we already left for the bus stop and so we waited out in the cold for 20-30min.(doing nothing, like you said cause no phones) Thank god for that Good Samaritan. Bus stop was a good 3 min walk too

Ppl still do this. I’m also shocked. I work across the street from a bus/train station and rarely I’ll take a bus and I’ll be shocked that there are some ppl not glued to their phones. In some ways, I’m jealous of them lol

Yo-yo gang what up

See that's something I definitely definitely don't miss. All those dead moments of waiting with absolutely nothing to do. Oh how I hated those. So boring. I still to this day feel so lucky when I have to wait somewhere and I can just whip out my mobile connected to the internet with infinite possibilities to fill a few minutes without boredom.

Thank fuck that's over. I spent a lot of time in the bush as a kid with nothing to do other than wait and think (Grew up in rural South Africa). I didn't realise it until I eventually got a walkman that most of my thoughts would quickly become super destructive or intrusive. I am not meant to be alone with my mind. I think I probably would have gone mad if I'd been born a hundred years earlier. These days I constantly have music, audiobooks, or podcasts going. PM me for recommendations for fantasy audiobooks and podcasts.

And then have to - gasp - actually interact with people on the bus, rather than mess around on my phone the whole ride. Made some lifelong friends from people I met on the bus.

Nah, newspapers were the antisocial reading 'device' since before the advent of public transport. Books too, so there were no more reasons than now to be social unless you wanted to

Yeah this dude is full of shit I rode buses and trains my whole adult life until fairly recently, worked in the heart of a major city for most of that time. And hung out there before I was old enough to work so I was taking the train even then. I never spoke to another goddamn soul on the train and I never witnessed another soul speak to anybody else, the bus was even worse.

Everybody on a train or a boss is in a shit situation they don't want to be in and it's better to leave everybody the fuck alone, we all know that when we're on the bus together.

I read a book to avoid this exact scenario lol

I sat in the front and got lost in my own imagination

Funny how you say that when i interact with people on the bus all the time... hmm

me on my phone in the bus while reading this looks around

I do not want to interact with people, it releases so much anxiety. And don’t tell people it’s just about “practice” I’ve lived 22 years and still don’t know the difference between normal silence and awkward silence.

That's a good point. Almost nobody talks to strangers anymore in public. They are always on their phone. I once met a friend years ago on the bus before phones, but now I don't talk to anybody.

That’s not because of my phone or anything, it’s cause I simply don’t want to talk to random people.

No phones and everyone doesn’t have earbuds in. Just chatting about hanging out the night before or your new backpack. Maybe your new clothes. Good times.

Waiting like that felt like torture... I remember wanting to claw my eyes out just to have some kind of stimulation.

Also, possibly related, going undiagnosed as a girl with ADHD.

I still did that in mid 2000s.

It’s sucked too. Especially in winter.

We would smoke.

doing calf raises rapidly to warm up in the winter while you wait

I did that when I still took the bus half a decade ago. I'd be too distracted otherwise and I didn't want to miss it because there weren't many buses for the route

Well, if u are in a dangerous zone (or a zone where u know that u can be robbed) I think u won't have your phone in your hand all the time...

Waiting for the bus in the rain in the rain

I remember in elementary school, learning that the magnifier glass burn scene from Toy Story was real and actually works because I watched a neighbor burn leaves and ants at the bus stop while we waited for the bus lol. The good ole days no cell phones

I met my best friend at a bus stop in 2003. I miss those simpler days

Smoking, because there was no better way to kill 3 minutes.

I still do that even though I feel awkward doing it. Sometimes I’ll go on my phone but I never really have anything to do on there.

We get bored and start exploring the bushes around our bus stop, swear to his we’d always find some nudie mags. Kids don’t know what they’re missing out…then again all that porn is accessible on their phone. But where’s the fun in that?

I hated buses in the 90s. Now I love buses. I can fuck around on my phone and not drive? Yes. Give me that.

Jokes on you, I had my discman and the beach boys loaded up.

What do you mean you didn't always have a book on you?

Books have existed for a long time

How is this such a simple thing but that was mostly me after school waiting for the bus home having nothing to do in the time it takes for it to come.🥲

Don't tell me y'all didn't have books or mags to read during waits

There were always books, but I guess now phones are more convenient

When I was in uni I’d take a day to head into town to do my laundry at the coin-op. What would take at most three hours could turn into a whole afternoon as friends would inevitably be strolling by to do their own laundry, or on their way somewhere else. We’d just sit in the chairs outside and catch up, people watch, and sneak around back to smoke an occasional bowl. We had nowhere else to be and we’re completely in the moment.

I had a ton of great experiences in university, but those Saturday afternoons are my fondest memories.

Didn't you have a Gameboy and/or a WalkMan?

I did this when I was in school, even when I had an iPod. I preferred waving to the people who daily drive past my bus stop.

People had books and walkmen. It wasn't unusual to see people staring off into space but it was also common to see people reading newspapers or listening to music.

And having a plesant conversation with a random stranger, because thats what you did.

They still had books.

Huh? That’s not so rare now, or am I just weird?

I still do this much to everyones annoyance. I commute to work and never look at my phone. It's my time to do nothing and zone out from all social media and messages. My phone once broke and I went 3 months with out getting it fixed. It was a great time but I unfortunately got pressured into sorting it out.

You didn't take a book or something to read? I read a lot on the bus. I also listened to the radio or tapes/CDs. Maybe you were like the one guy in this photo pulling the David Puddy.

Not really, many people read books or newspapers, or listened to their portable CD players.

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

Ever see the one for 101-6789? That was my fav but I can never find it.

I don't remember that one but I definitely remember 10-10-321 commercials with John Lithgow

here it is

😆Yeah, 10-10-321 was the big one!

No. What was it?

An over the top rap commercial. Something like…

101-6789 Long distance dialing is oh so fine. Dial it, try (trial?) it, Write. It. On. The. Wall.

And I can’t remember the rest!

You've sent me down a rabbit hole looking for this, lol, and oh the nostalgia I'm having along the way! I'm only 1/4 of the way through it and haven't found that exact one yet. I'm a "funny commercial afficianado" and don't recall the one you are describing, so I'm on a mission... (link is to the full commercial history of Sprint. 1-800-pin-drop and all that I'd forgotten about)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne8ZKvvAqNA

If I remember correctly he’s a black man talking to his mom over the phone. There’s other people in the commercial too. I just remember what their parts are. It was mid-to-late 90’s. It was definitely part of their pin drop era

Edit: a word

Not Bula Vinaka, Beachside? I don’t think there’s ever going to be a better commercial for anything telephony-related, unless you include the classic SNL commercial where the child is being held for ransom.

Another one I completely forgot about. Another classic

"It's your truuuuue voooooice"

It was Bob.

They had a baby.

It's a boy.

Oh, that's nice.

*turns page of newspaper without glancing up

It's funny... I've not even watched actual TV in like a decade but I can picture everything about that commercial quite clearly. I guess it was played a huge amount though

What commercial is it? I don’t actually remember if it was a specific one or what

It was one for geico. Don't really recall how "hacking" collect calling applies to insurance but their commercials often didn't make sense

I am a total nerd who lives for funny commercials and constantly quote them! (and half the time no one knows wth I'm talking about...)

I always wondered who those people were. Not Bob's parents or in-laws obviously. Who would be close enough to get a call from the hospital but not be excited in any way?

Grandparents on their 14th grandchild. At a certain point it becomes routine, I would imagine.

It was a collect call. Most likely it was to his parents because hers would be more likely to be with them.

To make a collect call, you would typically call the operator (or a toll-free service) and say, "I would like to make a collect call to (212) 555-0149." The operator (usually she) would then ask your name and dial the number you asked for. When answered, she would say to the person who answered, "I have a collect call from . Do you accept the charges?" If the answering party said yes, then the operator would connect your two lines to each other so you could speak. The charge, which was usually paid by the phone number that placed the call, would be paid by the recipient.

The automated system (like 1-800-COLLECT) would use touch tone phones and recordings to accomplish this. Since there wasn't a human listening, you could get away with saying your name was "Bob Weyaddababyitzaboy" to pass your message along.

Sometimes, the lines would be connected before you said yes, and that saved my bacon once. My mom called collect once, and I didn't understand what was happening. She told me to say yes, and I did.

I remember collect calls and definitely remember this commercial (my husband and I still randomly say "weottababyeetsaboy"), I was just thinking that if it was their son who just had a baby they wouldn't be so uninterested. They'd probably be a little more excited about the birth of their grandson. Even a coworker would be more excited than that.

The joke I always hit my wife with when she's asking for me to read off a phone number, is that I'll either start it or end it with 10-10-220, and we have a laugh.

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you suck. hope you get well soon

As a kid, when the commercial was current, I thought he said "Bob the Auto-Baby Pizza Boy".

Don’t rip off the phone company.

I vividly see this response in my mind.

I have absolutely no idea what that ad was trying to sell, but I have the scene in my head perfectly. lol

It was a Geico ad

Cingular wireless service I think

It was Geico insurance. 😁

They had that orange, goopy, nickelodeon-looking image, and I only remember them existing for a few years.

I'd have never even thought to do it if I hadn't seen that commercial in the first place.

https://youtu.be/V04bh-G4-qU

Jerry, it’s Frank Costanza. Mr. Steinbrenner is here, George is dead, call me back.

There is a very fine line to be found, somewhere between the ages (current) from around 20 to 25 where you’ll ask someone in that age range if they know what collect calling is (was) and you get this face: 🤨

I will never forget this commercial. In fact I remembered it after reading u/mister_e_mahn comment and was gonna say something about it but see you already did. Such a good commercial

I'm thinking about calling my parents collect and doing this when my kid is born

Cure memory unlocked. Thanks!

HO HO HOLLYY SHIT THAT COMMERCIAL

Ah yes. I remember this.

These calls hit different when you're doing it from jail. "Babe it's Yawzheek in jail bail me out!"

Okay this got me thinking. There was another commercial, beer maybe, and it's baseball and the announcers are talking and the third base coach is giving signals and one of the announcers says ' good news I am having your baby' as the third base coach circles his stomach with his hand.

I just can't seem to find it.

Oh man, I’d call collect every time to get my parents to pick me up from cross country practice in high school.

I just looked up if 1-800-COLLECT was a thing still… and it is…

For a 5 minute phone call, it is 30 DOLLARS!!! 😱

They make money by overcharging prisoners who have no other choice but to use them nowadays.

Huh? Explain pls? I was born in 03.

In the olden days, if you wanted to call someone when you are out and about, you needed to use a pay phone. So you had to keep a quarter on your person to make a call on said payphone. Well often people wouldn't have a quarter or they didn't want to pay so they'd call 1-800-COLLECT no quarter needed. A computer operator would answer and you would dial the number that you actually wanted to call. You would then leave your name (back to this shortly). The person you called would pick up and hear something along the lines of "You've received a collect call from NAME. Do you accept the charges?" If the person accepted then they would be charged the cost on their phone bill later.

Kids figured out that you could just say your quick message as the name and the parent receiving the call would not accept the charge for a free "paging" service essentially. Famous "names" include "Movie isDone", "Practice Done", etc.

Did pay phone companies ever do anything to stop people from abusing it or just let it be?

I never heard of them stopping it or trying to crack down on it.

I used to do this all the time as well.

Heck; I think you used to be able to punch in something like *69 on your phone and dial back the most recent missed call to your landline. :s discovered that the hard way after some prank calls

You can still use the * codes on your cellphone, for free. 67 makes your number private, 69 calls last number. There is also multiple other codes

*69 calls last number

Here they give you the number, then give you the option to dial

True. That's likely it.

I imagine attempts were made since it was quite well known but I don't know of anything specifically.

This made me laugh because I did this all the time.

Dial down the center!

That was 1-800-CALL-ATT - freaking Carrot Top…

"You have a collect call from "MOMPRACTICEDONEPLEASECOMEGE-" Do you accept the charges?"

We still need payphones. They need to bring those back. Sometimes cellphones aren't reliable. Or we have a dead battery.

And not everyone can afford a phone or a new one if theirs breaks. Payphones can be pretty important for homeless people

They've brought them back in my city for that exact reason.

There is talk of bringing them back in Canada after we had a full day outage from one of our three major providers on Friday

Damn you Rogers!!!

I think a lot of people won’t answer if they don’t recognize the number tho

Specifically phone booths. Where else are superheroes going to change?

Youth here. Can you explain?

Calling collect was when the person you called paid for the call instead of you at the payphone. You had to call an 800 number and say your name and the person would either accept your call or not.

It's still occasionally relevant today. For example on the back of most credit cards you'll see two customer service phone numbers: one for the US and another for International Collect. The second one is for if you need help with your card overseas. It's calling collect, so your bank pays the international roaming fees on your call instead of you being forced to pay it.

My mom called the house collect once when i was little, and I said no to the charges. I thought it was a test. I got an ass whooping that night lol

Obsolete LPT. Nice.

I thought I was the only one that gamed the system ;)

Or prepaid phone cards on a pay phone. I remember typing so many numbers and praying I didn't screw up somewhere and have to start over.

I've done that from airports outside the US, lol. You have a collect call from 'IThinkI'mStuckInCanadaBye!'

I remember making arrangements in advance like "If you receive a collect call from me, hang up and meet me at the usual place." It never worked out. They'd just dumbly accept the charges and I'd say "What are you doing? Remember the arrangement we made?"

People used to do that when they backpacked abroad. My cousin backpacked in Asia for 6 months and called home every other day by calling collect, their parents denied the call but knew they were alive and well.

The payphones in my high school had the number on them under the receiver, I'd just rattle that off lightning quick and my dad would call back.

That ties into the sudden and intense “collect call carrier wars”. Probably 30-40% of all commercials in 1996-2000 were 1-800-COLLECT or the competitors.

"This is a phone call from PICK-ME-UP-AT-THE-POOL!, do you accept the charges?"

Ratchet and Clank 2 had a bit where a telephone operator says "Collect call from 'U. R. Gonnadie, do you accept the charges?"and I never realized this was the bit until today

Not just a pay phone. Any landline as long distance charges where expensive .

When I arrived at my destination I’d call home collect and ask for myself to let them I had arrived. No one had to lie as I wasn’t there to accept the charges.

I used to prank call random numbers with collect while waiting for the bus

A dime in the early 90’s.

Ok I’m mad I never thought of that lol

A bag of chips at school costing 30 cents, those quarters were useful!

Ahhh yes. I remember this.

“I’m not giving my name to a machine!”

Even cheaper system my parents had: If they'd dropped me off & knew the end time was flexible but knew where to meet. Phone them, let it ring 3 times & hangup.

Payphones could receive incoming calls for free. In those cases we would read out the number of the payphone quickly, then get a call back.

Yeah I used to call people like this when I ran out of mobile credit (back when there was limited texts) it went something like this "yoitsnickcallmymobilequick"

My parents had the number for the payphone outside my college apartment. If I used my first name they'd call me back there. If I used my middle name they'd take it because I was somewhere else

Still happening in jails and prisons all over the US in 2022

Phone cards lol

That's ridiculous!

Giving a meeting point and a meeting time in case we get lost

We still do that in my family, because you never know.

Yep, standard practice with kids. Also, the rolling meeting point when walking through large crowds / festivals. Every couple hundred meters we’ll define a new meeting point in case of separation. Works really well.

We started sticking airtags on the kids when we are going out somewhere busy in public.

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this is the way. "As soon as you realize you don't see me go to the last place you saw me and wait. I will find you."

That’s a great idea. We’ve written our phone numbers on the younger kids’ wristbands so that someone can reach us if they get lost.

I used to just sharpie it on their stomachs in airports when they were little.

My parents just used to tattoo it on my forehead. Still can’t forget that number.

why not in the neck? You could even add a bar code so it's easy to scan in

Yeah we would write it on their arm. Came in handy at least once

I like the rolling meeting point idea. Will have to give that a try.

Nowadays, just shove an airtag up their ass. Or... Or... just sew it into their shorts! Should have probably led with that.

And usually the phone reception acts up around those crowded festivals, so it's always a good idea to set up a meeting point when you get there.

Works really well.

Yeah, how do you know that? Something happen you want to share?

I’ve lost kids in crowds on a few occasions. So far I’ve managed to get 100% back

I definitely still do this with my mom. If she gets out of sight (even if she has her phone) you won't find her.

Yeah, when you go outside some people put their phone in their bag and never check it again

We do this at water parks and amusement parks because it is easier, especially if you can’t have your phone on you at all times.

Nice. We just use the classic “psspsspssss” sound, and generally we can immediately find eachother

thanks, will start using it to get included in your family events !

Sure, come hither! psspsspsspsspss

Good practice for earthquake, tornado, nuclear attack…

we do that again now because of Rogers Telecommunications

Same. Especially at large events like a music festival when cell and GPS service (like location sharing each other) will be crap because of the mass of devices.

Last time I went somewhere with the in-laws I asked if we should agree on the address we were driving to. “Nah we just search for the place on maps”.

They went to the wrong place and we waiting for them for like ten minutes. It was sweet.

I do that with some of my friends, and they still manage to get lost. We're not even 21 yet and he's already got Alzheimer's or something lmao.

My mother is no good at checking WhatsApp etc so this is still standard daily practice in our family.

Same. A meeting place THAT MY WIFE IGNORED!

I sat there for 45 minutes waiting until my wife finally called. "Where are you?" "I'm where we said we'd meet if we got separated." "Oh. Be there soon."

Ffffffffffffffuuuuuuuucccccccccckkkkkkkkkkk!

Echoing that sentiment, there’s been times where I was made fun of for memorizing the directions for a road trip ahead of time. “Just plug it into GPS and let it take us there.”

Well, there was one trip with my family and my brother’s, driving from essentially the same starting point but at different times. With my method, we had interstate most of the way. But they showed up with everybody about carsick from having to take very curvy roads during the last hour.

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.

Those pouches were called map pouches! You'd always have a dozen or so maps. You could often get local ones free at those roadside information kiosks, or buy them for cheap from a gas station.

You can still get maps at some roadside welcome centers and rest stops.

[deleted]

That sounds neat as hell! If I lived in any of those states, I'd send you the map to help ya out. Mostly because I want to see the finished product. But also because it's neat to help out someone else on a mission.

Right on. I appreciate the sentiment, but I like getting them myself. I'm a big fan of road trips. I'm sure I'll get there someday.

Guys...should we tell him about Hawaii? Lol

Tell me what? It's in a box right next to Alaska, right? Just under Arizona and New Mexico? I thought that's the wall they were working on.

That will be cool!

Yep. I'll never forget the first time my friend and I drove to Toronto together from our very small town 4 hours away, after we got our licences. She was driving and I had a big map of southwestern Ontario on my lap, and when we got near the city, I opened my big Toronto map to navigate us to our hotel. We definitely missed a few exits but got there in the end. It was a great adventure.

Back in my pizza delivery days, I'd bring maps of the city with when I was delivering to hotels. I knew where everything was, and marking down locations for people visiting got me some very generous tips

I have GPS on my phone and GPS in my car and I still have paper maps in the glovebox of certain areas just in case. No idea why, google maps hasn't let me down too badly yet.

I've known people who have had GPS let them down. A friend was driving through Indiana and it kept saying 'You are not on a road' for like 30 miles.

That's why I added the "yet". Usually any errors I get are due to me inputting something wrong. I'm still waiting for something to go hilariously wrong like others, like your friend, seem to get.

Driving through the Adirondacks without gps a few summers ago. I had a map of New York roads and it was more than enough to get me from Utica to Crown point. But apparently map navigation it's a dying skill.....

I just bought a street map of my area. It was like $6 on Amazon shipped

Keep them up to date. Within reason. My favorite thing is to stop in the local AAA for maps and tourbooks of areas that I’m planning for my next road trip.

Last week, my wife made me get rid of a US road Atlas we bought in 2008 that we used when I was in college and traveling across the country for internships and summer jobs. Now I can't even get across town without my gps on.

I still keep a paper map of NYC from the mid 90s in my glovebox. It’s come with me with every new vehicle I’ve gotten.

Maps are SO much better than your phone. You can see everything and figure things out in less time with a map. Almost threw my phone out the car window I was so frustrated with the Maps shit!

Haha same, my dad put a bunch of these in my car when I started driving.

We have one on the wall at work.

its faster to plan a route on it and then lay the route out in Maps and send it to someones phone.

My dad used to drive for work back in the day and he had this huge map book (I think it was called a Key Map?) of the entire city he kept in the passenger's seat at all times. It was divided up into grid sections and there was a big list at the end of every street in the city and what grid section it's on. This was in Oklahoma City which at the time was one of the largest cities by land area in the US (it's still #10 even today.)

You never know lmao. Ya we do

The printing off directions didn't start until 2000. In the 90s you just had to know or ask someone to write it down.

Throughout the 90's I used maps. If I was asked to go somewhere, I used a map. Asking for directions is asking to be lost.

Gotta clarify for the kids that maps used to be on paper

Gotta clarify for the kids that what we mean is that you’d buy a generic map (roughly wall-poster sized) that had all of the roads of a region appropriate to the zoom-level of the map. You’d then be responsible for figuring out where you are on it by street intersections, where you want to be on it, and plotting your own route to it. It was common to bring someone along with you to an unfamiliar area for the sole purpose of being a navigator. They’d sit in the passenger seat and track where you are, how to get where you want to be, and reroute if mistakes or closed roads happen.

I had a road atlas in my car. I would look at the map and get a rough idea where I was going (city to city) and just make a list of highways and then have to figure out the exits and turns based on reading road signs. And a lot of driving in circles once I got to the city. Those atlas maps aren’t the most detailed.

And if you had someone’s address in suburbia, you would look up the street name on a long list on the back of the map, write down the coordinates (G5,H5,H4,I4) then flip the map over, look up the coordinates and try to find the street in that area of the map. Having done that, you hoped beyond hope that the map company gave some vague clues as to what the address range was so you could guess how far along the road was the house.

And you could draw your path on the map in yellow highlighter. Had to be yellow tho. Pink was too dark and could blur or obscure the street names.

There are kids reading this that can't believe we actually did any of this!

My family had a textbook size thing, spiral bound, with half the state in it.

Actually finding your destination on the map was a challenge.

Thomas Guide, lol

Yes that's it I was thinking it was some guys name in the title lol

Thomas Guide FTW. Installed security systems in San Bernardino for a summer, and that's how I got to know the place.

Yea I think that's it! XD

I could never fold those back correctly---navigator here

When I turned 16 (2003) my dad got me a job delivering for a wholesale florist for the summers. We lived in MA but the place was in CT 30 minutes away and my delivery route circled the entire state of Connecticut. Every morning I’d load my van and then pour over the map to find the most efficient route for the florists I had to hit that day.

Only a year or two later GPS devices became common and a few more years for cell phones with navigation capabilities.

That's why we have little lights up front, on or near the visors in a vehicle, so maps could be checked in the dark.

One time when I was a teenager I caused a traffic accident because I was looking down at my paper map for too long.

Back in the day when I was a student and still unable to drive. My brother work as pizza delivery. I am basically a copilot with map to look for direction and guide him. When he picked up pizzas from the store I would hide in the car because the owner won't allow passenger for delivery

Did he tip you out?

I didn't need the tip. Just free pizza

Or for a large metro area, it was a book with hundreds of pages of maps. Same if you wanted some level of detail for the whole of the USA.

I worked for TruGreen Chemlawn in a Kansas City suburb the summer of 2000, and every morning started with being given a list of addresses I had to look up in a giant KC road atlas and then navigate to. I was not a KC native either.

In Australia we used to have something called a Refidex which was basically a big book of maps for your city. It always sat in the back of the car and sometimes my brother and I would pull it out for fun and find our own address, grandparent's addresses, etc.

I just googled it and they still exist! They update them every year apparently.

Those were called Thomas Guides in the US. My family always had one in the car.

I mean I'm nearly 30 and only had to use MapQuest until I got a smart phone at the end of high school. Maps are definitely still a thing too.

They still are! They are about 3 bucks and really good to keep in your car in case you go somewhere with a dead zone or have phone issues. It's one of those under-the-seat emergency things that are handy for preparedness.

Well remember how everyone, even kids knew how to tell someone how to get to their house? It's the first left after Stapley Street, 2nd right & then the 3rd house on the left with the big red truck in the driveway.

Yes! I don't even know the street names in my neighborhood to get to my house now.

Me either. I don't even know if I could figure out a Thomas guide today. It would take me a while.

My parents always had one of those big US road map books in the car. It amazes me now that we always found our way with just signs and that map, especially on long road trips.

Clearly you didn’t know The Trick. If you were going to a place you didn’t know and got in the general area, you just needed to look for a Pizza Hut or Domino’s, or any pizza delivery place. They had huge maps on the walls and every driver knew every road, and were proud of that shit, too. Just go in and ask. Easy directions, clear, every single time.

I delivered pizzas at 19, which is when I learned to read maps!

In the 80s we didn't even have maps. Had to trust the locals for directions. Of course there were fewer roads back then. And they only went North, East, South, or West.

Yes, but could you FOLD them back up?

I still have an atlas in my car. Batteries die, service isn't perfect everywhere. May as well

If it was a really obscure place in a city I would pull out the key map binder that had an index and lots of smaller maps. 🤣

Still have one of those huge map books under the seat of my car.

Memories of the venerated Thomas Bros. map book in Southern California. Trying to flip pages and read it while driving on the freeway. With the ripped paged taped together.

My trusty city map book never left my car!

Especially with a California license plate in another state. Good luck finding any reliable directions

Yea I thought it was wild my dad would just look at an atlas the night before and plan out the trip on a big map. He'd bring a road map with him but I only ever saw him use it a few times. It's wild he could navigate states away like that. I do like GPS so nice.

I always carried a Thomas guide in my car.

Turn left at the red Barn

yeah the amount of times someone's asked me for directions and I've later realised I missed something important or sent them wrong

My parents still used those map books from the '90s up til like 2005.

Mapquest! I think that was mud/late 90s.

MapQuest was 1996!

I was lucky, Phoenix was a very easy to navigate grid. You had to memorize the major east/west streets, the north/south were all numbered, and then finding somebody’s house was pretty trivial. They’d give an address and what major street they’re north/south of, and you could get there in most cases without a map.

If you did want to check a map before leaving, there was one in the phone book (pages and pages of maps). You could look up street names and it’d tell you where to flip to.

This is why dad was always so angry driving places back in the 80s and 90s. Big ass paper maps and trying to read road signs whilel us asshole kids are yelling and complaining in the back. Hahaha

"Exit 880 at Hillsdale. Left turn on Gemini, right turn at the 7/11, we're the 4th green house on the left side...oh, you'll be on 580, hold on a sec while I get my mom to tell you. I never go that way."

Thomas Guide

Yup, when I started driving my Dad bought me a Thomas Guide. Those things were amazing.

This is the way.

Thomas Guide was how we navigated anywhere back then. No idea where you were unless you had a cross street to reference, had to find the little square on the page where a street was, etc. Driving anywhere new was so much more of an adventure back then, lol.

Or, if you were really balling you had a super-brand-new-high-tech-GPS system.

In the 1990's my dad had several Thomas Guidebooks in his car and sometimes I'd see him right down directions on the back of a receipt or napkin while he warmed up the car. For longer road trips he'd consult the guidebook and right the directions on a blank sheet of paper.

For those in LA… Thomas guide

Mom had a map in the car.

I still keep a US Atlas in the car. Just in case a zombie apocalypse or an idiocracy revolution happens.

In the 90s you just had to know or ask someone to write it down.

This thought comes to me periodically, and it's just weird to think that people are essentially done giving directions basically forever (at least on Earth, and barring any sort of huge disaster/war). Younger people and every future generation would probably have a hard time understanding what it was like to have to think of how to get to your house or wherever from some other location without having GPS or even a map half the time.

Yeah, I wonder a lot how our dependency on tech is effecting brain development. I've noticed how much I don't even know how to spell things anymore like I used to because there is just spell check. Hopefully our brains aren't just turning to mush.

If I recall correctly, people tend to forget things more often when they can write them down initially, so even something as primitive and foundational as writing has apparently dumbed us down a bit.

Wow, that's creepy to think about.

Every time there is a new technology people freak out that we will lose something we once had.

And they're not wrong, but the advent of the written word has a been a net positive probably. That's why i try not to get mad at TikTok.

Yeah, progress is always necessary despite the bad that comes along with it.

There's a scene in the Russell Crowe movie "Master and Commander" where one of his crew comes to him with a model of the enemy ship and he's like, "where did you get this?" And the crewman is like, "well sir, so-and-so here saw her in dry dock when she was being built." "Is this framing accurate?" The captain asks. "Exactly." The crewman says.

(For reference: https://youtu.be/vqAs4P0M0Vo)

That dude just busted that sucker out by memory. When I saw that I thought it was just a hokey plot device, but the more I think about it (and the older I get), the more I feel like that was a commentary on what people were actually able to do back then. I mean, think about what your best friend's home phone number was in the 80's or 90's. You may even still know it. You memorized it because you had to. What's your best friend's phone number now? Could you rattle that off? What if you had to memorize the numbers of all your friends? Could you do it now? I'll bet few can. If we as a society lost the ability in 20-30 years to hold in our memories a slough of 7 to 10 digit numbers, what other skills have we lost in 200-300 years by relying on technology.

Plus, he's a sailor, and it was an interesting innovative ship. He might've even made a special trip to go and see it. Still impressive that he'd remember it months later though.

The thing with the boat is a change for the film. In the book they're fighting the War of 1812 and the British were actually fighting America in those waters at the time and the Acheron is a stand-in for the USS Norfolk (and was modelled on USS Constitution). America would not have been building ships for France, but also they couldn't have America be the villains of the film, could they?

Wow, that's horrible to think about. I remember seeing an article where a group of experts studies how humans have changed since smart phones and they theorized that inthe future we will branch out into 2 species. One will be over weight, shorter and much lower IQ. And the second species will be higher IQ and fit. The difference being the first group was solely reliable on tech and the second group produces/designs the tech. Who knows if that will be accurate but I can definitely see it.

And I searched and searched for the article but couldn't find it, sorry!

Wrong. I was printing directions off Mapquest in 1998. 👍🏻

Really? You were way ahead of me. I didn't start until like 2001-2002.

Ripping the street maps out the front of the yellow pages...

My dad would be so pissed when he needed a map and someone had already ripped it out and left it who knows where … lol

I got really good at reading the road atlas. My mom was terrible with directions, so I always played navigator.

Yup, on road trips I was the one who would hold the map and tell my Dad where to turn. As a really young kid too. In hindsight I'm surprised he trusted me lol.

I remember getting verbal directions from people and listening intently, sometimes writing it down, because that was the only way I was going to know how to get there. I remember getting lost sometimes. I remember giving up when I couldn’t find a place.

None of that has happened to me in about 15-20 years, but they used to happen somewhat regularly.

So true. I remember not being able to find the place so I'd drive to a payphone and call my friend again and get directions. It's crazy how convenient our life is now.

Thomas Guides!! I had the one for my city and a few maps of other places I went to in the side pockets of my car.

I worked for the cable company and in the morning I would get all my work orders and I had a big book of maps so I'd have to go address by address and route my day by time frame and area. Then we would drive and navigate and be talking on the radio all at the same time without incident lol

I grew up in Hawaii and it was common to have map booklets of our entire island in your car. One of the first times driving solo, to meet friends to see a movie, I got completely lost in the worst neighborhood in Honolulu. I had to dig out the map book and try to figure out how to escape while people were rapping on my windows, lmao. Eventually I just booked it, called my mom on my flip phone, and got directions from her by reading out the intersections to her.

Wow, that's terrifying. That's one great thing about GPS is safety.

It built character!

My wife moved to my city in the early 90’s. She learned to pay attention very quick. I would take her somewhere. On the way there I would drive. When we left I would hand her the keys to drive home. She found her way many times

I always write down directions to where I'm going. It's easier than using my phone and less distracting while driving.

As someone who was born in the early 90s this is absolutely crazy to me. I simply couldn’t not fathom navigating LA without my iPhone. I remember my mom printing out Mapquest directions on a fairly normal basis and using those to get us around. Absolutely crazy.

Definitely crazy to think about. It would be hell having to go back to that.

Going to AAA for a trip tick when you were going on vacation.

My parents were too cheap for a AAA lol. Road trips required a paper map for us.

An atlas or a paper map was the way.

Maps have been around for a long, long time.

Well yeah but if you were just going to your friends house for a sleepover, you'd call her and she'd say "first left after you pass Main St., then take your 2nd right and were the house in the center of the culdisac with the yellow jeep parked outfront". At least where I lived, in the burbs, we didn't break out a huge map for trips like that but we would for road trips. I'd be the navigator telling my Dad where to turn.

yep same am 32 here and remember walking to friends houses with the directions theyd give me prior and memorising landmarks theyd point out like "turn right at the corner of the school then cross over to where that big park is and turn into that culdesac" etc..was a great little map buddy for my dad on long drives as a kid i always found the correct routes and could navigate him quickly and be like "ok next set of lights turn right dad.." nowadays i plug on my iphone and it does it all for me.

I know. Discussing this in the comment section is making me really miss those days when life was simpler.

There was a thing called a map.

For short jaunts withing a city/neighborhood, I never once saw someone break out a map. It was oral directions and maps were mostly used for road trips. But I lived in the burbs.

Mapsco in all our family cars

Mapquest came out in 96, the year i graduated high school. I definitely remember printing out directions to places during college from 96 to 00.

I didn't start until like 2001 so you guys were way ahead of me. And I remember even then it wasn't as accurate as current GPS.

You are very correct about the accuracy. I remember going to a wedding where the chapel was in the mountains and getting sent 30 miles in the wrong direction. Took me an hour to figure out the error and get myself back on track.

Not quite the era of printing yet.

Invitations contained directions. Most of the time, there was a direction like "If you've seen a red goose statue, you've gone too far!"

And with the printed directions there was no re-routing if you missed a turn.

You backtracked all the way to the last turn and then started over again.

I had almost forgotten about this. If you told your friends you would meet them after school you had to specify WHERE. On the side of the school by the playground, or the flagpole?

God, I'm 40 years old and I forgot it used to be like this. I think I've seen more change in my life than any other human being before me.

Pre-driving age:

"I'm leaving my house now, meet me halfway. "

I go lots of places that cell service isn't reliable like national forests, and still have to do all this regularly.

I did so many road trips with a friend via printed off directions from Mapquest. Since I couldn't drive my job was navigator which usually meant being woken up and asked 'I think our exit is coming up, can you verify?' and trying to flip through pages groggy as hell to figure out where we are. It's hard for me not to sleep in cars, so live GPS when it came about was the best thing ever. :)

From the internet? In the 90's I used to go to the library to make copies of their city guide maps to take with me.

My parents used to do a 'practice drive' a few days before going somewhere new in town just to work out any kinks with directions.

Printing off directions from the internet!! This is the 90s, there were no directions in the internet. You had to write down instructions from someone who knew how to get there.

Mapquest started in ‘96

Fair enough. But the average person who grew up in the 90s didn't have access to the internet. Unless we're talking exclusively about the USA.

I really only stopped printing directions off in the last 5 years or so.

I seriously think that not having this be the case anymore for outings with friends is contributing seriously to strain and burnout in society. I think the popularity of texting and general attachment of people to their phones has actually made things more stressful even compared to the early days when cell phones were primarily used to call.

Before cell phones were ubiquitous, you had two decision points: a soft one when you said “yes” (or “no” or “maybe”) and that escalated to a hard-edged one when you did (or did not) leave the house. You could say “yes” and not show up, but that was a dick move for a number of reasons, so there was considerable social pressure against it. So saying “yes” to something wasn’t 100% final, but it put you solidly on the path (changing your mind might involve calling the household and trying to leave a message, for instance), and therefore made for less mental strain and anxiety overall.

Now, with events organized via group chat via text, and live updates/reachability at all times, there’s essentially infinite decision points to constantly sap mental energy. Sincere “Maybes” are much more common of an answer at that first decision point, meaning it’s weighing on one’s mind the whole time, and with the ability to text location updates there’s no “now or never” moment.

In the case of most friend outings, but especially “let’s meet at a location in town and see where the night takes us” outings, a socially anxious/introverted person in the ‘90s who wanted to spend time with their friends but always had some baseline trepidation would say “yes,” and then the worry about it would be more like the trepidation of going up the first hill on a roller coaster…not much to do about it. Then there was a set time to need to leave and meet up, after which the only decision to be made was when to go back home.

Now, a socially anxious/introverted person who has the natural human desire to socialize would say “maybe,” try to work themselves up to it over the course of the next few days, and this comes to a head not as a “time to leave or not” moment that comes and goes quickly, but as a few hours of “I’m comfortable at home, but I really want to be with other people, but I’m comfortable and it’s scary out there, I could still meet them, but just one more episode of the show I’m watching…” That’s a lot of strain, and I think it only exacerbates any underlying social anxiety, in fact I think it might be the primary cause of the low-grade social anxiety so common to the millennialish cohort.

Obviously, I’m mostly talking about myself, but I’m hardly the only person I’ve seen this basic thought process play out in, and I really think the old way was less stressful.

Or if it was in your town (pre-internet) you might bring the phone book and use the map inside.

No internet in the 90s. Road maps were a thing. Or you called someone who knew the area and they described while you drew a map. No way That could go wrong!

I had no idea folks don't do this anymore. In my mind, this is a thing of both physical and emotional safety.

Last time I took my nieces to the zoo the first thing we did was sorted out a meetup place in case we got separated because neither of them had cell phones yet. That was in 2017.

Bro you just text. Not even that, groupchat in the discord.

I still do that whenever I go to a concert with friends. The phone signal collapses when everyone is leaving the venue (stadium most of the times), so it is almost impossible to call or send messages. If you you got seat tickets, this doesn't happen.

I'm from Chile BTW. Here the mosh pits oblige you to get lost with your mates.

Yup. 100% do this at raves as well where cellphones just do not work. Or add timestap to your text haha

Definitely still do this one, especially at waterparks where we don't have phones on us.

Or when you have a teenager who's phone is flat from watching bloody tiktok for 4 hours straight and then when you need to contact them, their phone doesn't work.

I only ever do this when skiing nowadays. Reception on the mountain is spotty at best, and there's a high chance of getting separated.

I do this at festivals where we have no cell service.

I still do this as I'm 90s hardwired and an absolute nightmare to get in touch with.

Survival skills need to be mandatory in every public school curriculum.

Going to a Grateful Dead concert and immediately losing all your friends and going on a wild adventure. And meeting at the car at the end of the night and hearing everyone’s wild stories.

Walt and Mickey statue at Disneyland.

Music festivals be like

And learning a special whistle in case we lost each other in a crowd.

So you just don't meet up with people anymore?

Relatable

I still do that. Safety

Had to do it recently, when I left my phone in an Uber, and had to meet the driver.

I was at 6 flags yesterday with my daughters and nephew. They went on a water ride, which I hate, so I chilled on a bench.

They took long enough to get me worried, so I started texting them. Then I realized they had left all three phones in the bag they left with me.

They came strolling out a few minutes later, before I truly freaked, but man.

I’ve done this several times recently and no one understands they need to be there??

Definitely do that skiing because a lot of mountains have really bad cell signal

I tried that with my gf at a music fest recently, I was gonna be coming in from a different state. She was coming from home. I set a meet point and a time. I didn’t take into consideration a torrential down pour of freezing rain. I stressed “I WILL BE AT MAIN SATGE FROMT OF HOUSE AT EXACTLY THIS TIME”, once I got checked in and got my credentials. I saw the knee deep mud and I as not prepared. I waited a bit at the artist compound and got handed a drink. Then another drink. Then a few hours later my gf comes running up and was furious, I still don’t hear the end of it.

And then everyone actually doing their best to make it there on time so they don't get left behind. Nowadays people just send a text that they're "running late" and think that's good enough justification to roll up 20 minutes after the agreed upon time.

This is still viable.

I went to Rockville last year, and there was 0 cell service with the 200,000 people there in the bowl of a nascar stadium, so my wife and I agreed to meet at the Churro stand if we got separated.

Waterslide parcs

This is still VERY necessary in certain situations like hiking, camping, or river/water trips, where there can be bad or no cell service and people don't want to be on their phones in nature. Always tell someone your plans for where you are going and when you will return. This goes for some more urban settings and situations too.

I still do this when I go to music festivals where people tend to be a bit distracted, it’s a sea of humans and noise and lights, and the cell signal is spotty at best. Good to have a universal “meet here at this time” spot in case we get separated.

People don't do that anymore? I always say something along the lines of "meet at the xxxxx at 7 if you get lost"

Still useful on vacations!!! And while at the beach, we use buildings as landmarks to prevent the drift. Nothing worse than cooling off in the water, tide slowly carries you down the beach, and then forget where your towel is. Umbrellas change, buildings do not.

you should still do that

Your username in itself is so 90s!!! Love it!!

A few years ago I met a girl in a bar in Germany and she wanted to go on a date. I didnt even know where I was sleeping that night, and I had no phone because I was in a foreign country. I said if you want to go on a date, meet me at the train station front door tomorrow at 3pm.... and she showed up. Crazy.

People still do that nowadays. It's harder to get lost tho

Still do that at festivals. Cell service is usually shit for most of the fam.

We still do that in big groups. It's so hard to keep track of each other.

I still do that; in case batteries die or signal goes out

You should still do that.

How do you meet with people? Just go to a place, text then and wait an hour until they get ready?

Or is this about, like, splitting up during vacation or something?

You could always take up caving, we still do that

And people actually showing up at the agreed time and place.

Still do that at festivals where you might not have reception or the cell tower is regularly overloaded.

Still gotta do this at music festivals.

"Ok let's meet at the red windmill after sts9's set and we'll go to griz together"

Usually worked. If you didn't show, you were on your own and we'd all meet back there after griz's set

Music festival behavior at the mall.

Meet at Tower Records, 3:30PM on the first floor near the Pop/Rock section.

I leave my phone in a locker during concerts so I just tell me friends I'll meet them at the bar after the concert. I always lose them because moshpits are very inviting.

I get a lot of nostalgia from this kind of stuff when my friends/family go to the Renaissance faire in our state because the service is so bad it's impossible to get a hold of anyone there.

Or arranging to meet your friend at 11am somewhere in town and at 11.08 he hasn't shown up, so just.....go home. Then get a call at 6pm saying he arrived at 11.10 and I wasn't there so he went home.

I had to do this at a music festival a few years ago cause I lost my phone the first day. I couldn’t find my friends for like 2 hours so we made a meeting point the next day

Still do that at new or super crowded places.

My family still does this, especially if we’re going to be splitting up.

I remember we used walkie talkies back when we visited Disney in case we got separated. We labeled them with tags that my cousin picked. My dad was Boogeyman, he was Red Dog Leader, and I was Red Dog 1.

I find it unbelievable that people can't be on time nowadays even though they have phones to keep them right, like you can check how long the journey will take, set alarms and literally do anything else to help you get to a meeting point on time, I am (22m) the only one of my friends that can manage to be there on time, normally early, I barely use my phone as well

The worst as a kid was getting lost, going to the meeting point, and then waiting a damn eternity for someone else to realize you had gotten lost and come get you.

we still do that at festivals and concerts because often the network just crashes when 60 000 people are at one point

And then being willing/ have the ability to wait like a half hour if they were late. Maybe an hour if you liked them.

I still do that when I go to a big concert with friends. Service can still be shitty when 300+ people are on their phones simultaneously

Deciding on the way into a concert where to meet up at the end if we got separated.

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.

I was in 9th grade when it came out…and the first time I had it, a friend and I snuck into the teachers’ lounge because it had the first Coke machine we knew of to get Surge!

That Mt. Dew rumor! That was some major intelligence on the playground.

Yellow No. 5

To the tune of Mambo No. 5. Y'all are welcome.

I saved up enough bar codes from Surge, mailed them in and they mailed me a free alarm clock.

It was bright green and the alarm was a man yelling, "Suuuuurge, Suuuuuuurge, Suuuuuuurge" over and over again.

Best alarm clock I ever had. I think my mom might disagree 🤣🤣🤣

I took that alarm clock to college with me....what a trip

I was in high school when Surge came out. As what I assume was part of their marketing push, they mailed me a CD of totally random music they must have thought suited their image. I didn't ask for it, but somehow they had my name and address. Not a bad listen, either! It had a David Bowie song, one from Moby... I wonder if I still have it....

one from Moby

Extreme Ways intensifies as you chug a Surge while jumping into a harbor to escape the CIA

Burger King has it as a go-to fountain drink from like 2000 to 2010. And they didn’t have Mountain Dew, so you know...

I remember hearing a rumor that Surge had weasel pee in it. Even as a kid I thought, "Pretty sure that's not true...but it just might be."

Tab is the producer reducer tbh

I loved this when I was in elementary school!

I'm pretty sure surge changed its flavor/ingredients on the re-release

We had a surge machine in our local marketplace. If you put in a quarter and bang on it, 4 cans would pop out. We were kid rich with Surge.

Only Harry Potter likes that horse piss

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.

That anxiety just came flooding back

Or the little sister would answer and yell "Suzie your boyfriends on the phone!"

Then when you're talking, you hear a click, meaning someone picked up on the other line.

yep my friends still clown their older brother for this. He was 16 or so and was on the phone and was just like "do you think I'm a good boyfriend?" Little brothers were listening and even 17+ years later they will sometimes look over at him and in a mocking tone go "do you think I'm a good boyfriend?" He's getting shit for that for life lol.

I came here to write this. Phone privacy was non existent!

A few other tactics come to mind: - sending an SMS before calling the landline, so the house phone wouldn't call the attention of the parents - mimicking the voice of another friend, so you could go through the "parent gatekeeper"

lol why were people so sketched out about you being friends with their kids?

Because u/kombuchailatte was in their 40s in the 90s

I died laughing at this.

Asian here, and well, Asian parents are kinda protective when it comes to their daughters.

Last time this came up on Reddit, someone said that small towns in the US used to share lines between two households. So you had to pray your neighbour wasn't listening in. That blew my mind haha

A Party Line!

Ah didn't know the name for it, thanks. Reading up on em now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_%28telephony%29?wprov=sfla1

Now that line from Die Hard finally makes sense!

And after talking for hours, one of our parents would pick up the phone to say they had to make a call.

my FBI-guy still do this to me

Screaming “HANG UP THE PHONE!” Or… trying to pick it up quietly so you could listen!

More like: "SUZZZZZZZZ-ZIIIIEEE!!! Your BOYYY-FRIENDSSS on the PH- HOOONNNNNEEEE!"

I’m a little sister and I can hear myself saying this

Or big sister answers when your crush calls and hits them with, “you know she’s in love with you right?”

Rite of passage

Fortunately, my girlfriend when I was that age didn't have a dad.

Test tube girls are the hawtest

This is why I got so great at talking to parents as a kid and teenager. Id just prattle on about school and assignments. All of my friends parents thought I was such a good influence because I never had a problem talking to them. When in reality, I was the friend who covered for all of them when they lied and said they were hanging at my house.

A good influencer means something different now.

Dads in general were scary bastards back then

When you did call, you knocked out the 20 free hours of AOL session because you forgot to *71.

Woah, what was that?

Cancels call waiting. The beep of an incoming call would disconnect your modem, which you were using to connect to AOL, a dial-… edit to remove age question and say: stop me if any of this is familiar XD

As a guy, I remember calling boys and being happy that their parents would never suspect, lol.

My friends from wealthier families had a "children's line" that was listed in the phone book. Was nice you didn't have to go through their Dad to reach them.

Another random thought about this is that one of said friends father owned a MLB team at the time, yet their phone number was listed in the phone book! Can't imagine that today at all!

I still feel this way but it's only because I'm 63

God that anxiety, of anyone answering

That's one of the reasons why I rarely dated girls who had a father in the home. That, and moreso because when I got a little older and was driving, it was even more awkward dealing with fathers when you were trying to take their daughters out on a date.

You guys got girls' phone numbers?!

Lol my friend's dad whenever I called: Your husband's on the line.

And if you were elite and had a phone upstairs you could grab it.

And hope they hung up when you picked up the receiver.

Deepens voice oops wrong number.

And you had to be polite, so you had zero control over how long this awkward conversation might drone on.

My parents were super strict on phone etiquette. I could call my friends whenever I wanted, but I had to say “Hi Mrs. Smith, may I please speak to John?” Whenever someone called our house and said “Hey is Sally there?”, my parents instantly categorized that caller as a rude kid.

... and if you wanted privacy you had to sneak out and use a pay phone.

My older sisters used to take the phone into the closet so they could talk with their boyfriends in private. Not the most fool-proof plan since there was a cord leading under the door, but it at least bought a few minutes before our mother would see it.

That's when I'd pick up the other phone (on the same line) quietly and start making kissing/making out noises to embarrass my sisters.

Yes, I was THAT brother...

Username checks out

Getting a land line and a separate phone for your room felt like such a level up.

I just tried to get a landline in my house and it is basically impossible to get an old school POTS line anymore. It's all through cable/internet companies and that kind of blows my mind.

My favorite thing about landlines, if you were sneaky enough and you had multiple phones you could totally eavesdrop on a whole conversation, the adrenal RUSH!

We had a power outage on a day someone from the cable company was supposed to come by. This was early 2000's, and we didn't have cellphones yet, just a pair of cordless phones. I dug out an old rotary phone from our basement and was able to plug it in and use it to call and cancel. I had to wait for an operator, because I had no buttons to push to connect me to someone, lol. Even that long ago, I felt so quaint, haha

I forgot all about the silent spying. You should post it in r/nostalgia

I still got an old copper line @ my crib, my installer commented I'm the last one in the neighborhood.

You can still use VOIP

Or worse, the embarrassment of thinking it’s your friend’s parents who answered and doing the “hey, is Sarah there?” “It’s me” awkwardness because you can’t recognize your friend vs her mom on the phone.

The only reason my parents still pay for their traditional landline (they also have voip lines because cell reception at their place is ass), is that it'll stay working even in a big emergency that shuts off the power.

We have those, only because they came with our Fiber internet. And when the internet goes down, so do the phones.

Yeah, dudes.

If you think it's hard calling a girl whose number you just got, trying to keep things moving

Imagine you call her up and her dad answers:

Daddy: "[last name] residence...?"

Your mid-puberty ass: "Hi, is [first name] home?"

Or worse, her older brother or something. Fuck, man.

Hi it's X, is Y home?

Every phone call was like that ^^

Or just like, showing up at their house and asking "can my friend come play" and they say "only after they do the dishes"

If one of my sister, brother or my friends called and didn't have any manners, it didnt matter if they were 6 or 16, my dad would literally tell them "oh hello (blank), who? Ohhh hang on, ill put them on, but first, let me tell you about telephone etiquette. Now when you call, you say things like, hello, please, thank you, kindly greet the person who answers, ask how their day's going and why you're calling. Things like that, you know? Now, here is how it's supposed to go. I'm going to pretend you call again and I pick up and say hello. You respond and say hello Mr. , may I please speak with ? Thank you. And then I say hellooo how are you? Yes, she's right here. Hang on a moment. That's when you say, thanks Mr. . Have a good day, bye. Ok, ready?...ring ring" and our friends would have to go through the whole dialogue before they could talk to us, while we stood there, waiting and mortified. I mean, it sucked, but it worked. But, I'll never have that satisfaction of doing that to my kid's friends on a landline, it's bs!

Yes exactly. I was the only one of my friends who had to say “may I please speak to…” and I was super embarrassed about it. I’m glad I had those manners taught to me though.

School group projects was a pain. Having to call 1to1 and coordinate information, often with no ride. And the inevitable 1 in 4 group members that did nothing. Even just me taking care of the whole thing solo. Kids are so lucky with their group chat rooms and zoom meetings now

I went back to school 2014 -2018 and professor put us into groups to do projects, another for us all to write one paper.. ughh, it was excruciating.

And phone cards and 1-800-collect

Or long distance charges. 10 cents a minute, my friend. Then there was 10-10-321 the only reason I remember that was a thing was because it's in an Aquabats song, though I don't remember what that was for.

So landlines still exist and the only reason ive been hearing lately that people still have is as an emergency line if your phone' s connected satellite goes kaput

And making sure to listen for any clicks of people in either household trying to sneak in on the convo while both people yell for their households to hang up.

I still talk to my dad on a landline

Kids will never understand the feeling of slamming the phone down.

This is why we have better social skills than the younger generations, because we were forced to talk to everyone, from parents to friends.

As an Indian, I was not allowed to make outbound calls because of the heavy call charges. Typical asian middle class fam.

I still have one, sort of. It's actually a Google Voice number tied to an Obihai voip box. That just connects to the phone wiring in my house and I can plug any regular phone in and it works. I set this up years ago mainly because our older cell plans didn't have unlimited minutes. My wife loves to talk on the phone for hours at a time, so this was a great solution. Best of all it's free other than the $45 for the obihai.

i have one in my house and when friends come over and see it they’re like tf

And when home phones weren't cordless and you were always at risk of pulling the phone off the wall.

Is Jaimie home?

My family still has one that I end up using regularly for crank calls as it shows up in directories as restricted

GET OFF THE DAMN INTERNET I'M TRYING TO MAKE A CALL!!!!

I was a teenager in the '70s and it was typical then to have an extension in your room and since you or you siblings got a lot more calls than your parents, you'd usually answer when it rang. No less typical in the '90s, I'm sure, though families were getting smaller.

Always hoping your friend would pick up even though you know they weren't.

In the late 90s and early 2000s I thought someone was edgy for not having a home phone and only a mobile. Now I'm the one with no home phone. It just doesn't make sense to have one now, when the actual phone plan is so cheap now. Back then it was actually understandable because we were still charged by the sms. Now it's like 10 or 15 dollars and you can call and text as much as you want.

Public phone booths as well.

The absolute HORROR of calling a girl to ask her to the dance and having to go though her dad first.

Was staying in a hotel recently with my kids before travelling and they thought the landline was a walkie talkie to order room service.

Were they wrong?

i still have and use one.

They didn't just put the phone down and get on with their lives?

Man, Seppo Adults are weird as fuck!

I think it's just some parents regardless of where you are. We're Aussie and my other half had one friend whose parents were very strict about what they deemed good manners.

If you didn't make small talk before even asking if the friend was home, things would not go well, ie, "Good afternoon Mrs X, this is Y. How are you today? .... Oh, yes, my parents are well, thank you for asking. May I speak to Z please? Thank you. Yes, it has been very wet, hasn't it?" and so on.

Also Aussie, I suppose because my parents wouldn't have tolerated stuffed shirts like that, so even as kids we didn't associate with kids whose parent were like that.

"Hi Muuuuuumy! (She was like a 2nd mum) is Tonza home?" "Yeah I'll just get him. TONY, PHONE!" and then she'd put the receiver down and go do mum things. Unless she had something that she wanted to tell/ask me like "We're goin away this weekend, can you feed the cats?"

Only time friends parents would try to make small talk is if they were intentionally trying to be awkward for their own amusement.

"I hear Tom has a new Girlfriend. Maybe now he can screw more than just a jar lid! "

Even in primary school I can only remember one friendship being influenced by what my parents thought of theirs - we weren't allowed to visit their house because of the dad's notorious drinking and anger issues (in hindsight likely due to untreated mental health issues including PTSD).

At high school and uni, it was rare for friends to meet parents until we were already good friends, and even longer for parents to meet each other beyond a quick hello when playing taxi driver. Some parents were very similar to mine and others were quite different but that didn't matter.

With these parents in particular, their concept of manners and approach to parenting was also heavily influenced by their age (they'd had the friend when they were in their 50s so were the age of most of our grandparents) and their devout catholicism.

Still surprises me how this is still required when filling out forms.

I remember getting rid of my landline somewhere around '98 and people thought it weird that I only had a cell phone.

Now the inverse is true, where it is equally weird to hear someone have a landline but not a mobile phone.

These still exist.

The dreaded sound of dial up internet when you picked up your land line and wanted to make a call! Having to beg a family member on the pc to disconnect from the internet

Or flip phones

ah this still happens in my country so I guess we’re 20 years backwards

i think this depends on the country/area you live in. i don't know anyone who doesn't have a landline. landlines are included with the home internet.

Best fuckboy selection tool. You just knew they were shitty if they just asked: is she home? Without introducing themselves and asking if they could please talk to me.

Idk I think everyone I know has home phones. They’re still quite normal.

One of my mates mate's sisters had a crush on me. And my bastard family would royally take the piss every time the poor girl called. I always tried to be nice as her brother had a mega drive. Ha!

Still got one. I would be otherwise unreachable despite living just beside a major city, I’m in a kind of electromagnetic blah hole with no coverage

Hey bdjcjev, how's school going?

I’m confused by this comment

It’s what friends parents say

You're looking lovely today, Mrs. Cleaver.

I have a landline because my Internet comes with one. Scares the shit out of me everytime it goes off

That whole experience just served so many roles and lessons. You learned about your friends family, maybe what their parents did, if they were nice or cursing them and others in the home, how to speak to adults properly etc. I’m a mom now and I have to find all these weird intentional ways to teach my kids these things, where before they were just part of our lives. I miss learning by osmosis or learning things from watching television also.

Getting tangled in the kitchen phone's wire and talking to your girlfriend while everyone else made dinner.

“Hi this is CatDragon, can I speak to bdjcjev please?”

I'd say a lot of people still have them here in the US. Probably any house older than 10-15 years has a landline, and that's a lot of houses.

What's really cool, is that my parents got our home phone number in 1981, so that was our phone number growing up. About 10 years back when they were ready to get rid of the landline, my Mom had that number transferred to her cell phone. So she has had the same phone number for over 40 years (and still occasionally gets calls from one of our childhood friends trying to track us down)

That really developed phone social skills and etiquette that is so hard to find nowadays!

Eavesdropping in on a telephone call, you had to cover the mouth piece to make sure they wouldn't hear you breathing and laughing.

Too late now, but you could unscrew the bottom part of the handset and remove the carbon mic to mute the phone.

I just turned it upside down so the microphone was up above my head.

I had a crazy phone, I think it was Small Soldiers themed (there's a blast from the past lol), which was an ear piece phone and had some weird sound effects, and most importantly, a voice changer, which made it the coolest motherfucking thing under the sun and the absolute best tool for prank calls.

On the back, there was a very small speaker, and if you held the phone to your ear, you could listen in on conversations without connecting the phone.

Did it give you that weird voice effect that you hear like when a person in witness protection gets interviewed on TV?

Yes! It could go high or low, and various levels in between.

That sounds freakin awesome! My family was poor so I missed out on all of the best 80/90s toys 🤷🏽‍♂️ . We did have Nintendo products, pogs, marbles and outdoors lol

I had a genesis (technically, it was my dad's) and bought my n64 when they dropped in price enough for a kid to buy one.

This would've been in the later 90s, and my friend had gotten it as a bday present while I didn't have a phone in my room, so he was kind enough to give it to me.

I was born in 2000 and I still did that as a kid back when we had a landline

When both ur friend & you each call someone on 3 way & the ppl can't figure out who called who,

Or calling ur bf & suspected chick he's cheating with, then having that confirmed.

Wow! The cheating boyfriend thing 😫😂 I must see this play out in a movie or TV show before I die. That's juicy!

It was my smartest idea as a teen!!

My son's POS "dad" we'll refer to as the sperm donor, didn't know that I knew the code to his answering machine. So 1 day checking it n there's some chick that left a message & she left her pager number. So I paged & when she called I said oh this isn't Todd sorry wrong number, but now I had her number on my caller ID. So I called my BFF told her the 411 & said you call SD, and I'll call her. We both dialed ☆67 before to block our numbers & each called 1. (Which still works btw 😉)

The phone call started awkward, bcz they couldn't figure out who called who, but then the girl asked him if he was gonna ditch his sister & her son (talking about me not realizing he was lying) that night, bcz she was horny. He said how he couldn't wait to see her sexy ass naked & blah, blah, blah. I let it go on for a min or 2 & then unmuted my phone. I let him have it!! My BFF too. Then the girl too!! She ended up dumping him too, bcz he was a cheating, lying scumbag. After he hung up, she thanked me, I thanked her & that was that. My son was 2. He hasn't seen him since & he'll be 22 the end of September.

A real POS!! Hence why referring to him as SD.

3-way got me out of an abusive, toxic relationship & my son's so much better off without him!! We both are.

You could use toy walkie talkies to tap into the cordless phone calls back in the 90s

What?? I totally would've tried this! But without the internet I have no idea where I would've heard about this or obtained the steps to do it 🤔

That's another thing that people did in the 90s. We figured shit out on our own.

I liked to take things apart just to see how they work, then try to make them better. I used to do this with my walkie talkies by fixing a way bigger antenna to them, or attaching the antenna to something big and metal like the slide pole at the playground. Started flipping through the channels and realized I was picking up all the portable phone convos in my area.

This is kind of creepy to think about. It was THAT easy? 😲 Wow

Yeah. I guess back then cordless phone signals were just radio frequency, so something that would be easy to pick up on radio.

Kinda funny and embarrassing, at the time i was 12 or 13 and the very first call I picked up was my mom talking to my aunt, and she was telling her that my dad had discovered the porno mag I had hid above the electrical panel in the basement. They never said anything about it to me, but it was hard to not be awkward with them after knowing that they knew lol.

Ouch 😆😂 I only kept pages which were easy to fold and hide. I could easily sneak a page folded in my pocket into the bathroom without anyone noticing. Kids these days have no idea how lucky they are in that regard.

I held the receiver upside-down so the earpiece was where it should be but the mouthpiece was over my head.

Older phones were constructed in such a way that you could unscrew the ear and mouthpieces.

The mic piece simply sat in the cradle and could be removed. The speaker/earpiece was almost always wired.in.

This, of course, was impossible on later, mass market phones of various styles and designs.

But then there was the "mute" feature on phones as well...

When 3 way calling was introduced, you could see if someone else was listening in by trying to initiate a 3 way call, if you got no dial tone, you had an eavesdropper.

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.

That’s crazy to not know his wife’s number. What if he needs to call you and doesn’t have his phone?

I've been thinking he needs a medical bracelet lately. I may have one made. He has bipolar disorder and I wonder if he gets committed involuntary how will they contact me if not with his phone. I think I'll start looking for one.

Or at least put the contact info in his wallet or medical bracelet as you said.

Yeah. I'll need to see if he can tolerate a bracelet. I'm just concerned if he doesn't have his phone, he also likely is missing his wallet. Maybe an engraved wedding band. 🤔

I have bipolar disorder, is this a thing? Are we supposed to get medical bracelets?

No but it's something we have been considering with potential episodes, and the heavy medication he's already on. Giving him certain pain meds could kill his filtering organs easily were he in an accident. His organ function is monitored quarterly with his dosage as it is.

The med thing is a good point. Lithium knocks out the thyroid and kidneys, very true. It'd be good to have a list of meds in his wallet if possible. Our meds have ALOT of interactions.

He had to have surgery and his regular stuff needed to be adjusted to accommodate. And if anything happened to both of us but i was unable to convey his meds it could be very bad if they skipped them, or administered something that had an adverse effect.

That’s a good idea. He won’t just memorize it?

His medication and mental condition is not great for memory or cognitive function. :/

Oh okay. Then yeah the bracelet is a good idea

Is it crazy though? No clue what my husband’s number is not our landline number.

Yeah it’s crazy! Her husband has an excuse because he has memory problems. But you gotta learn it! What happens if you don’t have your phone with you (it dies or falls in the toilet or you get arrested) and you need to call him?

Of course it's crazy. It's the person you are most likely to need to call in an emergency. In an emergency you might not have your cell phone. You should be able to use someone else's phone and be able to call your most important people.

I know my mum’s number and she always picks up every number, so even if I knew both I would phone her. Husband never answers, especially unknown numbers. I also know my sister, my dad, my aunt, a few friends. So I personally would be fine. Just saying it’s not crazy to not know your partners number. It’s not really ingrained into us, as per the actual question.

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Yup. My dad's cell phone number has always been the same. And my husband's grandparents (who raised him) have had the same numbers since cell phones were invented.

The last phone number I remember was my first “real” girlfriend from college in 2005.

It’s so strange. She has two kids now, and I am a proud doge-father; yet there is some part of my brain that would find that comforting to dial a number by positively associated memory.

I always hand dial my dad's number when i call him, it makes me happy. He lives a few hundred feet from me lol.

I don't know my wife's number either, but I know mine and my parents. But mostly we had these number forever and they consist of only like 3-4 different numbers so it is very easy to remember.

I still know my friends’ home numbers from grade school but I know none of my current friends’ numbers.

Basically if i didn't learn it in the 90s, i don't know it.

Early 2000s in my case.

I don’t know my wife’s, but I know my ex-wife’s lol. I hope I never get arrested.

i don't know my own number. i have to look in the controlpanel every time.

But he doesn't know that.

It's never too late to tell him!

It's a little bit more of a story than this, but I found a coworker of his and gave the boy the number and informed him who had given it to me and that I didn't need it. He looked very pleased with that information. 😄

It took me YEARS to remember my wife's number. Not because of her, but because my brain was full of other numbers. My childhood number XXX-245-7X7X. I just checked, the Xs are numbers which still are a real number and I don't know the person so I don't want reddit drunk dialing them.

My brother has probably one of the best numbers ever. It's XXX-YYZ-MMMM

Like 2 digits, 1 down, and the exact same four last numbers. *not a riddle, not doxxing. But ladies, he's a very attractive 50 year old, with a good job- so I wouldn't mind if you wanted to lure him away from the nightmare he's involved with. Seriously, she sucks.

Lol I get you completely. My childhood number is abc-nbb-bnbb and my old garage code as a kid was a fun pattern to type.

My husband doesn’t know my phone number either. As someone who went to jail numerous times in her 20s, I keep telling him he should probably learn it since he drinks a lot. I can’t bail him out if he doesn’t call me… and while many cops will let you pull some numbers from your cell to make your phone call… they are under no obligation to do so. So if you’re being an ass (which drunk people tend to be), they’ll point you to the jail phone after confiscating your cell phone and tell you “make your phone call”

You have a good memory. I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast.

No I don't. Neither can I. I only retain garbage things it seems. 🤷 I don't need my home phone number in fourth grade to the house the burned down. But I have it. My security questions are the ones people look at though and wonder why they are there I'm sure.

I know my wife's my mom's and my dad's. That's it. Everyone else is gone with my phone.

I used to be really good at remembering phone numbers, but now I only really know my own, and only then because I've had the same one for like 11 years. I do however have my contacts all saved to google so if I really had to I could look them up.

lmfao. "Thanks, but I already knew your number just fine. I just didn't want to contact you."

Definitely would have been good but I really wanted to get away from him before I blew the act I was pulling. I'm an awful liar and bad at sticking up for myself. The little bit I did do during our interaction was tenuous as is.

My mother used to sew small cloth bits with our name and contact number "printed" on them. Really useful for kids who may lose clothing on the laundry, but maybe the contact number thing is useful too

I know people write info on kids arms sometimes in case they misplace the kid in a crowd too. Luckily I don't have to worry about this but I get the reasoning and the cloth sounds like a good idea!

Same here. I don't know my wife's phone number, but i know my home number from childhood, my best buddy's number from the 90s, and both grandmas'. Other than 911 and my cell phone number, that's all I've got.

When I was first married, I struggled to have my wife's number memorized, and not for lack of effort. I still have my childhood landline number memorized, the neighbor's land line, my dad's fax number, siblings' phone numbers, etc. But I really struggled with my wife's number.

One day at work, we had a hazmat training exercise, and me being the new guy, I was the one who had to suit up. I'd never done that before, and it lead to a full blown panic attack. Half way through the procedure of donning the gear, we had to wait for the resident paramedic to take my vitals and fill out paperwork (which includes next of kin information). I could not access my phone to recall my wife's number, and in my panicked state, I had no hope of remembering it. Thankfully my supervisor had all of our emergency contacts in his phone and was able to provide that information. My wife's number has since been burned into my brain, hearing my supervisor read it out while I'm in a full panic

Interesting. I'm glad you are ok!

My husband has a TBI and cannot remember phone numbers learned after the accident that caused it. He keeps a copy of my number in his wallet in case of emergency.

See the only two numbers I have remembered are my husband's and my best friend's.

I worked at a vet clinic and accidentally locked myself out with a special needs dog. Left phone inside. Had to make sure the dog was super secure in the gated yard area- then went across the street, asked to call my husband who was friends with another tech's husband to call him, to notify his wife, so she could call my boss to come let me in.

It ended up working shockingly.

That's a pretty successful game of telephone, I'd be proud.

Yeah I had to turn some gears in my head to think that up, but to be honest it was getting dark and I was starting to get anxious cause unsavory people come out after dark in that area. Also other pets still needed to be taken care of.

Thank you for caring for the fur babies. ❤️

Suddenly, I feel like a bad ass because I actually know my wife's number by heart. And a few others, too.

How is your husband getting along with your boyfriend? Are they having naked thursdays?

And you should call him once in a while, afterall he is your bf.

I am as disappointed as wan shi tong accepting a knot. 🦉

How does he get discounts for the loyalty program at the local store if he can't give your phone number???

The 2 stores he might go to I made his number. The other stores are all mine. But right now I do all the shopping anyway.

That's some good memory you got there.

It mostly retains useless info, don't be too impressed.

If Android, back up your phone's contact to gmail. Access from any computer.

Lose phone, log into Gmail on a computer, send mfa prompt to phone?

Google offers other means of 2FA besides SMS.

Yeah I'm talking about push notifications.

I know my dads cell phone number by heart. A friend drove off with my phone in her car by accident one time and I had to use the movie theater phone to call my dad, who called her dad and he called her. We were 26 😅

I know my parent’s #s & NOBODY else. Not my siblings or stepparents or friends, just my parents lmao

I've been thinking about it and I know 7 numbers. Not a single one is helpful to me - my old childhood number, ex-best friends childhood number, my old work number which shut down 3 years ago, my parents old landline number which got shut off a year ago. And Pizza Hutt.

Or if you end up in jail...There is no mother or Wife or Friend button to push and ring someone. You are going to actually need to know those phone numbers.

Yeah, if I get arrested I'd have to decide between my ex husband, my crazy recent ex, (who might not have that phine anymore), or my oldest kid. None of which are good choices.

Phone numbers I have memorized: husband, mom, childhood home we moved out of 20 years ago.

About 5 years ago, my husband had a heart attack (VERY scary but he’s fine now!) and didn’t have his phone with him in the ambulance (it was left on his desk at work). He wanted the paramedics to call me but didn’t know my number, and the only number he had memorized was his mom’s. So he had the paramedic call his mom, tell her what happened, ask for my cell number (since it’s programmed on her cell), and then finally call me. It was all very round-about, and if he hadn’t had his mom’s number memorized I would have found out about what happened even later! (I’m sure his work would have called me eventually but even they didn’t know what had happened yet — he went to a quick care place on his lunch break to get checked out because he “felt funny” and it all went downhill from there)

The whole thing was very much a wake up call (no pun intended). We have had each other’s numbers memorized ever since!

I once was going to sleep at a friend's place overnight after doing a blind date with a rando I met on OKCupid. Friend's place was a 50 min train ride out of the city.

During the blind date, my phone somehow turned itself on and had its camera on the entire time, draining my battery.

I was panicking hard cause I didnt write down my friend's phone number anywhere, but I remember what her email address was. I was begging folks on the train to let me use their phone somehow (this happened like 10 years ago so I barely remember what happened) and finally this guy took my details and my friends details and said he'll try to contact her, and got off at his station.

Arriving at my friend's trainstation, she was no where to be found and it was like 10pm at night and this station was one of those places where you could get robbed or killed (Hello Belgrave Station). Luckily enough there were some policemen there that were checking out the station and making sure theres no hoodlums there and I explained my situation.

They took me back to the police station (my first police car ride woo),where I was trying to connect to the wifi on my laptop (it wasnt working) to try and contact my friend to let her know I was safe.

SOMEHOW THOUGH she found her way to the station and she was in tears with worry, cause the guy did email her telling her of the situation and SOMEHOW while she rarely checked her emails she did this night and saw his message.

I was fucking lucky lmao

This happened to me the other day, my dad (73) dropped me off at the airport and I left my phone in his car. I asked to borrow the phone and thought I knew his number, after 5-10 calls in a row and no answer I moved onto my mom 5-10 calls, no answer. Back to my dad same amount back to my mom, who finally answered after I sent multiple texts. When I talked to her and him about it the next day they said they didn’t recognize the number, I responded “but the number called you 20 times? Didn’t you think that warranted picking up?” “No” I was dumbfounded.

Oh god. That happened to me once. I was babysitting my cousin’s kids. We went out her sliding glass door and I didn’t know that her door automatically locks when you pull it closed. I’m out of state, my cousin isn’t coming home from work for hours, her estranged husband is about an hr away, and my phone is locked inside. We sit on the common area stairs and I’m in tears but trying to hold it together as much as I can for the kids. The downstairs neighbor eventually comes home and we talk. She lets us in and I use her phone to call the only number I can reliably remember—my husband. He doesn’t have my cousin’s or her husband’s number, but he gives me my dads cell number. My dad gives me the numbers I need. My cousin can’t get to the phone at work so I eventually give up and call her estranged husband. It was such a clusterfuck.

The only reason I memorized my wife's phone number is because that's how I get my discounts at the grocery store.

When I married my second husband, he had kept his Michigan number after moving to Las Vegas since his family and friend knew it. I still worked full-time and had his number saved in my phone. One day, after a few months, I got to thinking, if I have a problem, break down, lose my phone, phone's dead, etc., I would have no way of calling him. I memorized that number pretty quickly, just in case.

I carry my fiance's number written on little pieces of paper in my bag, my key case and in some coats. I don't know why, but I always have at least one of those notes with me. It's not the best way to backup, but somehow it makes me feel safer because I just can't learn that number no matter what I do...

Literally the only numbers I remember are the ones I learned before cell phones. So... my parents home number is the only one that's still relevant. I could call my best friend from fifth's grade landline if I needed to I guess?

I keep a Post-It in my wallet with all of the important phone numbers on it because I'm terrified this will happen to me.

Funny thing is that at my job we portable chargers for our members and guests. You'd be surprised that the Android chargers don't get used much and iPhone chargers are overused and broken now

By heart I know my parents landline number, and one of my closest friends/former roommate number only because when we were living together I got a pre-paid phone plan and he wanted to switch companies so he went and bought the same phone I did, then he activated his phone shortly after mine so our phone numbers are the same except for 1 digit

back them up on google, so that way you only need to access your google account.

I keep a slip of paper with important numbers written on it in the case behind my phone. Still screwed if I lose my phone, but fine if it just has to charge.

I went to Walgreens the other day to pick up a prescription for my wife. They ask you for the last 4 digits of the patients phone number, and the pharmacist looked at me like I was a total idiot when I told him I don’t know my wife’s phone number.

But I do remember the number to the pizza place I grew up by almost 1500 miles away.

Ah, I was in a similar situation a few years ago. Locked out of home with no keys, no phone, and wearing flip flops, shorts and a t-shirt.

I now have all my contacts backed up on Google (i know big bad internet colossus yaddayadda). The account I have them on has a password I always remember. So technically I would need only a computer with an internet access to make a phonecall, if needed.

I have my mom's cell phone number memorized but not my dad's, because my mom's number dates back to when you had to remember phone numbers but my dad got his much later.

I know my childhood best friend's parents phone number still by heart. I could only tell you my husband's current cell phone number with 60% confidence I'd get it right 🤦‍♀️😅

learn a couple numbers. I got my mom, dad, and sister in the memory bank. I don't bother with others. I'm bad though and I fail to save numbers in my phone until much later than I should. I might date or hangout with a lady for 3 or 4 months before I decide to save her number as a contact. Instead, I just keep the text convo going and it will just show the number at the top lol.

I keep the numbers of my husband, dad, best friend written on a piece of paper in my wallet at all times. That paper proved itself useful a couple of times.

My god we all walked around with a whole bunch of phone numbers lodged permanently in our poor memories.

The day mobile phones entered my life that skill left me for good. I wouldn't even recognise my own number in a police lineup.

I keep a list of numbers in my wallet. Worst case you can hop on a public computer and access your contacts.

That person who you know that hasn’t changed their number in 15 years is the only one you know too.

I usually keep a scrap of paper with top three numbers I need, tucked inside the phone case. Doesn't interfere with the wireless charging/payments functionality, but the paper has helped out twice.

Ironically the only phone number I know off by heart is my own

I wrote my wife's number on a piece of paper and stuck in my wallet so I have it for emergencies.

It's the opposite for me. Having grown up in the 90s I'm just used to memorizing numbers. So I at least have all my family's and very close friends' numbers memorized. Same with my credit card and social security, etc.

Thankfully my mom has had the same cell number since before I had a cellphone (she’s the only person in my family who has never switched providers or numbers because she’s always had AT&T/Cingular/AT&T again with educator discount, while my dad, sisters and I have switched between AT&T/Cingular, Verizon and back to AT&T on our family plan).

Haha, I work in a hospital. I could call a number of different departments at work, but nobody meaningful to me in my life.

Just to let you know if you go to https://accounts.google.com for Android (or iCloud.com for iPhones) you can view your contacts there.

I left my phone at home once whilst at work, so I used this to get a contact number and used a friend's phone to contact my family.

Right. Greedy landlords use popular restaurants for this reason—they want to push up the rent. The thing is, people going to particular restaurants, especially the non-franchised local ones, would also walk through the mall on their way to the mall movie theaters. So list revenue for quick interval shopping between other mall activities.

There was a Village Inn in an outlying space of a suburban mall in my vicinity that opened in 1990, and that mall is now on life support. Our favorite server said that the Village Inn was closing because the mall owner wanted a 25 year lease, lol! Corporate said: No, Thank You. And 5 or 6 years later, there it sits, abandoned.

And all those wacky recordings you could get to play on your answering machine

Haha, makes me think of George Costanza.

Edit: For anyone who's wondering: https://youtu.be/yg-TqEFYcfM

Believe it or not, George isn't at home Please leave a message at the beep I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone Where could I be? Believe it or not, I'm not home

fun bit of trivia about that is Jason Alexander is actually a talented Broadway singer, so it was difficult for him to pretend to sing badly

They kept having to re-record it because it sounded too good

This sounds like exactly the type of lie that Costanza would concoct.

Yes, he is , and he probably looked like that episode when he was wearing a toupee. He looked totally different with hair.

I always found him rather handsome even sans toupee 😁

Edit: I think it's his eyes!

See also: Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles. She doesn't hit a single note in her song. Everything is either a little sharp or flat. You have to be genuinely talented to sing that badly in such a precise way.

Thats very true. Watched a interview with him about his transfer from the stage singing and dancing to a tv sitcom series

it was difficult for him to pretend to sing badly

You sure about that?

Wow, how did this not become the norm for burgers?

2 90s universes converge here. I had that sound clip of George’s machine as my startup sound on windows. Fun the first 3 times. Then annoying af to wait.

Mine on my mobile used to be: I can't answer the phone right now. If you wish to leave a message, please hang up and send a text. I will not listen to anything recorded after the beep.

It cost about 50p to listen to each voicemail at the time, and they were basically ask just someone hanging up or saying they'd call you later.

I remember looking so hard for a digital version of this to play for my dad. Finally found one on Limewire and was able to save it to a 3.5” disk. I was surprised it fit on one disk.

His shoulder shrug during "where could I be?" is always hilarious.

Also funny later in the ep, Jerry is singing it to himself when unloading his trunk

Over the years I've found myself singing those lyrics whwnever I hear the original song :)

I have a similar problem with My Sharona

hey who doesn't want some mixed up bologna? lol

Awesome american hero. When I saw that episode, I had to go back and watch all of that show's episodes. BTW, they are available through the company that bought the rights and put them on YT.

It's so catchy! I love it 😁

Was that when he had a recliner with a mini-fridge?

I think that's a different episode.

SUMMER OF GEORGE!

I made mine that when I was in college. Changed it after I got a real job and my boss left me a vm that started with “that was quite the voicemail message…”

Lmao. That's gold.

Ha, that was my family's answering machine message in high school.

Memories

Really? That's awesome! I love it.

That's a sweet Specialized mountain bike and matching helmet in the background.

This was my answering machine for my first phone!

I still hum that to this day.

There was a whole business around selling people pre-recorded funny answering machine recordings. I remember one commercial singing “Nobody’s home! Nobody’s home! “ set to Beethoven’s 5th.

I would always just take whatever CD I was listening on repeat to at the time and use a track from that as my background music.

Hello mother, hello father...

Marge. Is Lisa at Camp Granada?

I went though a phase of having weird outgoing messages. This Alice Cooper one is still my favourite. Friends and family would think they'd got the wrong number and hang up, hahahaha

Same energy as "Mulatto buuuutttttts"

Wait for the beep!

You gotta leave your name,

you gotta leave your number.

Wait for the beep!

BEEEEEEP

My dad sang a song and played a little guitar ditty on his answerIng machine message. He had it for years and I miss it. I should get him to record a new one for his cell

Do it while you can. There will come a day you'll regret not having it.

I liked the lists of random ways to ANSWER the phone - which really only worked on a landline. Had to roll the dice on who was calling and who was picking up.

Like "City Morgue - you kill 'em, we chill 'em!" - I used to love all the variations of that ("you stab 'em, we slab 'em!") and it drive my mother crazy bahaha.

This brings back memories of nobody’s home so fuck off recording

Love the Grinch outgoing Message https://youtu.be/89kw0e72wsQ

Wait for the beep. You gotta leave your name, you gotta leave your number. Wait for the beep - - BEEEEP.

My cousin had this one from Corey Taylor of Slipknot for almost a month before her parents figured it out! I fucking love it. "Hey, this is Corey from Slipknot, whoever you're tryin' to get ahold of is not here BECAUSE I KILLED THEM! Leave a message or die you fuckin' GRARGHHH!"

Remember making your voicemail some song you thought was cool?

I'm glad ya called, but I'm not home. I'll be back before too long. Ya gotta wait for the beep. Ya gotta leave ya name, ya gotta leave ya number.

"Hi, you're reached Wonder Woman! I wonder who you are, why you're calling, and when and where I can get back to you!"

"Might as well ~~jump~~ leave a message!

Go ahead and ~~jump~~ leave a message!"

My favorite was this Monty Python one.

I had a keychain with a small phone book inside that I kept my important phone numbers.

We had a piece of paper on the fridge with all the important phone numbers. Usually held up by pizza delivery magnets that had their phone numbers on them. Mom had her address and phone number book and then there were the white pages and yellow pages.

Know my best friend from elementary school’s number by heart… don’t know my wife’s.

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Why are they so short?

Local German numbers, ofc without area code.

Haha, not just me then.

I know a total of 3 phone numbers from memory. A friend from primary school I last saw in about 1999, a friend from primary school I last saw in about 2006 and my old home phone number. Don't even know my own mobile number, I just look it up when i need to give it to someone.

Yep. If my phone died, and I was borrowing a stranger's phone, I would probably have to call my mom to ask her what my wife's number is!

Memorizing phone numbers, man. I remember when I was a kid and had a good dozen phone numbers memorized. Now, the only number I have memorized is my own.

The different sounds of the numbers helped me memorize them too. That's not a thing anymore

Okay I'm glad I'm not the only one. It's a real shame they did away with that because it definitely added an extra layer of certainty that I dialed the right number.

For me it was the position of the buttons. There were numbers I couldn’t remember by heart, but once I started dialing them, they would come back to me from sense memory just from the position of my finger on the keypad.

Answering the phone without knowing who was calling. 😬 I don't even answer the phone now that I do know who's calling.

I had a li'l stalker in the early 90's so I was one of the first people to have CallerID (it was a separate box).

I'll never forget this guy I hadn't met yet (but wound up dating) called me something like 15 times but no messages, boy was he surprised when I called him back. Before that you had no idea how many times someone had called.

Or missing the call and dialing *69.

And seven digit dialing.

We didn't know how good we had it.

The two-cassette answering machines were great. Then we upgraded to a fancy one with a teeny-tiny little cassette tape in it.

I can still spout off the landline number we had until I was 8 and the one that replaced it. I couldn't tell you my best friend's current cell number or my parent's.

I can recall the dialing pattern of 3 of my elementary school friends but I have no idea what my wife’s cell phone number is.

Bro. We still had a rotary phone in our house in the 90s.

I remember my childhood phone number, my number now, and my partner’s number. Everything else is completely gone.

So true about the memorization of numbers. I told my Gen Z son to memorize one number just in case he gets arrested. Lol

I still remember my house phone number from my first house. We moved out of it when I was 9.

I don't remember any numbers since like 2005 outside of my now-wife's cell number.

My dad got a new cell number in like 2009. I still don't remember it right away.

We still have a home phone. It's VoIP though, so it only kinda counts. Also, cell coverage sucks at my house so we have an excuse.

I was telling one of my millennial coworkers what it was like to have a little black book and how cool it was to carry around.

I’m a millennial. I made this comment. I grew up with a (dated at the time) rotary phone. I got my first cel in 12th grade. You sure you don’t mean gen z?

He’s 32. Maybe a little bit sheltered. I like your username🤘🏼 It makes me want to go listen to Conan.

I'm a millennial and I also used to do this. Well, it was more like a tiny post-it note sized book that I kept inside my wallet. Until PDAs hit the market - that's when my coolness levels went off the charts. I'll never forget how baller it felt having a digital notebook + calculator in my back pocket at all times.

Yup, I still remember my childhood best friends home phone number. No idea of the phone number of my best friend today.

And the tiny phone/address books that you could fit in your purse or pocket.

I had a pocket book of phone numbers lol

I remember agonizing over the perfect intro music cue for my answering machine message.

You guys didn’t have pen and paper before, you couldn’t write them down

We for sure had pens and papers and notebooks full of peoples numbers hand written. We didn’t memorize every number, just close friends, family etc. I’m married now and I don’t know my wife’s number off the top of my head.

I legally can’t updoot you

The only phone numbers that I remember these days is my own and my mum's old number. Anyone else's number is saved in my phone including my wife's. Back in the day I had a little notebook that I put people's numbers in. It was small enough that I could keep it in my wallet too.

Lol, my mom still has a home phone and an answering machine. In fact, it was almost 2000 before she caved to the answering machine.

Heh, I remember being a kid and thinking it was so clever to change our home answering machine to "Hello? Hellllooo? Is this a joke? Hello?" Then my mom got pissed when my grandma called and her message was, "Hello? Hello? What in the hell?" Lmao.

Then I was never allowed to touch it again when I copied some caller at some radio station who said their answering machine was this: "sorry, I can't come to the phone right now because I'm out avoiding people I hate. And if I don't get back to you, it's probably you." My christian neighbor was fucking pissed about that one.

I only have one other phone number memorized. My mom's. It's all I need

I still have that tech in my home

yeah I thought we were top shit with our cordless phone back in the day. it could reach well into our backyard

If we are talking 90s, caller ID becoming a thing.

Those long ass phone cables.

Still use all three on a daily basis on Long Island

I grew up in a really small town, and we all had the same phone prefix. So when we gave out our number, it was just the last four digits. "My number is 4567"

The yellow pages. I just want to look up a restaurant that delivers in a strange town and have them bring food to me at the hotel. I want to go to the appliance repair section and find the one that sounds kinda familiar and call them. That stuff takes 3 minutes, tops, if you don’t have to search the whole internet for something relevant.

You just reminded me of “the PENNYSAVER” although that might be regional.

We had that too, but I don’t remember where. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic

Trying to ring someone and constantly getting 'busy' tone because their older sister was talking to someone else.

I met a guy once who never stored a name with the number so that he would memorize the phone number. It’s a great idea so that you know this in an emergency. I tried it for a day and it drove me nuts.

I had a business card with the phone numbers I wanted to remember written in tiny print on the back.

Lol I still remember my best friends house phone number that I haven't called in at least 15 years.

I still have my driver's license (got mid 90's) memorized because we were told that was important to do.

The dreaded calling the new girlfriends house and getting the dad answering the phone... then the dad proceeding to ask you questions like who are you and why you want to talk to her... and getting long frosty silences on the other end.. till he eventually says I'll go get her, then the paranoia of dad being on another line listening in... some things I don't miss lol.

Phones connected to a card sucked lol.

Domestic long-distance phone bills.

I still remember my childhood home phone number

So I'm apparently a rare breed being able to remember phone numbers.

Okay, so no one's answering

Well, can't you just let it ring a little longer,longer, longer

Oh, I'll just sit tight

In shadows of the night

Let it ring forevermore, oh-woh

Yeah, yeah, yeah

I have a land line with a machine, but then I remember the 1990s.

Yes. Calling someone and having to talk to their parents for a few minutes before getting them on the line.

Phone list taped on the wall next to the kitchen phone with the super long handset cord.

Fun answering machine messages were...fun. Also, the short period of digital answering machines/voice mail. They were so much better than any cell phone voice mail I've ever had.

My problem is that people seem to have a new number every couple years. I only know 1 person that's had the same number for the last 15 years.

I don't save/rename the important contacts on my phone so I can memorize their numbers when I don't have it.

Memorizing? Let me introduce you to the ROLODEX!

Home phones are still pretty common in rural areas where cell signal is spotty or non-existent. You could use wifi calling (assuming you have reliable internet) but not everyone's phone/carrier supports that, and a landline is more reliable in an emergency.

No b* but the only reason I learned my wife's number is because I was trying to pick up a pizza from Costco one time and I was kind of in a tough spot. I learned it after that

Lol my parents still have theirs

We still have a home phone. It’s the default number we use for websites and stuff. That way, all the scam calls go to that phone and not out cells.

Also saying, or hearing the phrase "I'll get it! " that, and actually wanting to answer the phone.

I was a teen in the early 2000s and I remember that used to know my parents' numbers, my own number, and my home number as well as a few assorted others. Now I only know my own.

Its funny how the only numbers I remember now are people I knew before about 2010.

With a tiny little cassette tape. Thanks to those, we have a message saved from my Uncle Chris, who died decades ago.

Still got one of those here because out in the middle of nowhere land cell service sucks.

If I end up in jail I have no fucking clue how I'm making my one phone call.

I have a home phone with an answering machine. That's the number I give to businesses and people I don't want to talk to.

I don't even have a home telephone anymore. I just use my cell phone.

I still know my moms, dads, and sisters from this time period. And my home phone number growing up that is long gone by now lmao

This was in the mid-80s but I remember when my best friend's family got an answering machine. She told me that I had to call her on Sunday afternoon at a certain time. She bugged me about it all week and I had no clue why that time was so special. Until the other end quit ringing and I heard "You have reached the....." Mind. Blown 💥

A VM recorder that used tape.

I don't even remeber half my own numbers half the time anymore (work phone #).

with 5 cell phones in our family, we still have a home phone with an answering machine.

Having an address book to go with it, for all your friends and acquaintances.

I know both of my parents phone numbers by heart, my husband, my best friend, and closest cousins as well. Work? Couldn't even guess the first three numbers outside of 414-...

I still memorize peoples phone numbers. Certain people, like my brother, change phone numbers every few months because they don't pay bills. I don't bother trying to remember his number.

I still teach my students the importance of knowing at least their mom and dads phone number as well as their parents name. You'd be surprised how many kids know their parents as just mom and dad

I still have so many numbers memorized, and literally zero of them will still connect me to the right people

Actually, now that I think about it, my childhood best friend's parents might still live in the same home with a landline. I'm gonna give it a shot.

Sometimes I think aboot how it's possible to just completely lose contact with a family or friend if phone numbers are lost.

And phones with cords so you either had to stay close to the phone or get a long cord so you could move around a little while you talked.

At that time I remembered many phone numbers. But now even for my dad's and mom's number I'll have to look in my phone

I have both of these and I still remember numbers

When you think about it, common landline phones is going to be such a tiny footnote in human history, it only passes 50% of homes somewhere in the 70s I think and then they start to die out by the end of the century.

I've made a point to still have memorized most of my immediate family's numbers, just in case! I dial them instead of going to contacts to keep the memory fresh. Probably will never need it but hey.

Also.. looking up someone’s phone number in the phone book. Maybe having to try a few before getting the correct Ms Higginbottom for that suburb

I only remember mine and my dad's. His has remained unchanged since I was a kid and mom unfortunately changed hers

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.

This is what I do. My wife and my son Can still get through, but I regularly put my phone into dnd while I am ironically working on D&D stuff.

Y'all are so fancy. I go about it the easy way by just having no friends

Aww. I mean I’ll be your friend. I mean that sincerely.

Me too! We can learn DND, I've always wanted to try it.

I’ve been a DM for almost 20 years. My greys are showing but I’m always looking to collect more vagabonds, to be part of my family.

Seriously. If you need someone to talk to, do some dnd with, hang out with, just vent…i wish I had someone do this for me, so here I am! To do it for anyone who wants it.

I realize how weird that sounds though. :/

I really want to become a DM especially as a way to make some friends in the new town I live in. I’ve found people here interested in learning DND and I’m a total beginner too. Can I ask you questions about being a DM?

Of course you can ask me questions. Always happy to help if I can :)

I don't take in street urchins, only folkheroes.

I hear that :(

I always forget to turn off do not disturb but found out recently I can just set it to certain times.

Anyone else just visualised a bunch of hipsters playing "ironic D&D"?

Dungeons and Dragons is so passé. We play Houses and Humans now.

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It’s actually a Skyrim mod

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They said "while I am ironically working on D&D stuff", which can be interpreted as "while I am, ironically, working on D&D stuff" (presumably their intention), or it can be interpreted as "while I am [ironically working on D&D stuff]", which would mean that they're working on D&D stuff in an ironic way.

Just like rain on your wedding day

Is this why Seattle is hipster capital

The problem is your wife and kids are probably the biggest source of distraction in your life. My girlfriend texts and calls nonstop whenever we’re apart, and putting my phone on silent usually leads to an argument…any time I don’t respond for more than a few hours she thinks I’m either upset, dead in a ditch, or up to no good.

That sounds unhealthy bro

My wife and son aren’t a distraction, they’re the love and joy of my life, hence why they get the white list from my phones silence.

There really should be some balance if your girlfriend thinks you need to be accessible at all times or something is wrong mate. Everyone should be afforded some peace and alone time. That’s healthy for one’s soul and mind.

Yep! I love that my phone has been on permanent silent mode, except for a select few.

Unless I'm working my phone is on total silent. I am not reachable for an emergency and I'm ok with that.

FYI at least on androids, if they keep calling you it shuts off do not disturb. Had to call my work buddy who was sleeping for an emergency and it shut off his DND and rang through.

Edit: I meant to go one comment lower than yours but anyway yeah.

Yup, that's a setting you can enable or not. On my phone, I leave it set so that if someone calls twice in 15 minutes it rings through the second call.

I have my real number for family and friends. I have a Google Voice number for forms and registration purpose. I very seldom answer that one.

This is what I do. I basically tell my wife to text or call if it's an emergency because she and like a few other people will still ring/notify for those two things only.

Every other app I turn notifications completely off for sound and even visuals. I leave messenger and discord to only visually notify in the status bar. That way I can get around to them even I have time to check my phone and want to, as God intended.

Also, literally putting phone screen down on the desk. That screen that turns on is enough to make me go into ”ooh shiny” mode and get distracted.

That feature was available since at least siemens A50. I remember not being able to mute just one contact.

I had this on for weeks without knowing. Important calls would come through anyhow. The rest was silent bliss. Finally figured it out when I kept missing a callback from a tech support line.

Oh my god, thank you! I didn't know this was a thing

What if there’s an emergency and someone is dying and you don’t get the call beczuse it’s from a hospital or something?

You can set it so that if the same number calls twice in a row then it will ring the second time. You can also manually check missed calls and messages.

My phone is perpetually on do not disturb with only notifications from my parents and a couple of close friends allowed to break through. It's nice to not feel tethered to it. Not so nice for my friends when I don't respond for 6 hours because I headed to town and forgot to grab my phone.

Jesus 6 hours is considered too long for a response time?

We don't text constantly. And they're the ones who break through do not disturb, so I typically respond within an hour or so. So it's unusual to not respond to them for that long without letting them know I might be unreachable.

My ex is in the white list (because my son lives with her most of the week and I want her to be able to reach me in case of emergency), and she's also the person who calls/texts me the most, like several times a day every day, up to two dozens texts and a few calls sometimes. So yeah it doesn't work for me.

That doesn’t sound healthy…

Nah she just texts and speaks a lot on the phone, she got that from her mother, and she calls me as a good friend, that we are.

When my wife has DND on her phone won't even allow a voicemail. I think that's kind of weird.

Meh. Very few people except salespeople leave voicemails nowadays anyway. If you don’t pick up, a friend will send you a text. I like your wife’s logic…she might be onto something.

I have mine set to only favorite texts and contact calls. Alarms still go off, and that's it. If im expecting a phone call from a random number I'll just set it to all calls. Now I don't get notified everytime a game notification pops up, or Instagram post changes.

The only things on my phone that feels important enough to grab my attention when I'm not already looking at my phone is calls as messages. Everything else can wait until I have time to check it. So everything that's not messages or calls has notifications either completely turned off or set to silent notifications if it's something I actually want to know about.

Games for example are completely turned off. They're not important enough to warrant disturbing me from real life, and I check them whenever I feel like playing them. Being disturbed from what I am doing because of a "your lives are refilled!" notification or similar annoys me so much.

Other things like email is set to silent notifications so that whenever I decide to check my phone I can see that I've gotten an email and decide if I want to read it now, but it is still not disturbing me when I'm not actively on my phone.

Apple also has focus modes now so you can tailor it to your needs.

I have this for when I sleep. Mainly just family who can access me while I'm asleep. The hardest thing was realizing I had started it because of my parents, and having to be contacted for emergencies. No need for that anymore. So... It's comforting knowing I can just ditch my phone, but sad at the same time.

I read carefully to see if you were saying you explicitly put your husband on a do not disturb list or excluded him from the list.

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I know. That's what I was referring to.

Yeessssss. I'm 35. I just started doing this and anyone who feels annoyed by their phone should try this.

Been doing this for years. No vibrate, no notification sounds. It's weird at first but INCREDIBLY freeing.

People now know when they contact me, I'm not always there to answer or see their texts right away. The expectations that mobile phones have created is very harmful and this is one way to disconnect while keeping your phone and your attention under YOUR control and not the other way around.

I did this, but then I started looking at my phone nonstop just incase I had a message. Had to leave my phone on a counter and buy an analog watch. It’s lovely.

I just bought an analog watch so I’d stop getting distracted just checking my phone. My first attempt to distance a tiny bit

I’m the same.

On silent and no vibrate.

Part of the reason was initially battery saving.

Now, I look at my phone when I want / need.

My phone has perpetually been on vibrate since about 2005.

When I’m at home, it’s on complete DnD, I might swipe at it and check every so often, but I’m not worried about it. I have the Apple Watch and set a very select few to notify me, even then, I have it very non-intrusive.

It’s a nice feeling to really not be bothered by any of it.

The device is for YOUR (the owner) convenience, not everybody else on the planet. We lost that a long time ago, and it’s a very negative part of this whole thing.

Yeah, and next step is flight mode or disconnecting from the network

Absolutely.. I turned off all notifications, except for phone calls, on my phone about a year ago... Game changer

What I do is keep my phone on vibrate. That way I at least have the excuse that I didn't hear it or I didn't feel it.

I'll admit this. My problem is that I too am addicted. I'm not sitting here thinking "man, I wish I could just disappear for a day." I'm sitting here having bouts of anxiety if I went downstairs without my phone.

Granted, I've been in some psychologically abusive relationships, but I think my scenario is just an exaggerated version of one many people have.

Leave it on mute in another room while you are engaged in something engrossing. I do this when I start a new book.

My phone went mute at least five years ago, It won't ever make a noise again.

It's not the same tho. It used to be 100% of people had no expectation of being able to contact you. Now it's closer to zero whether you're disconnected or not. It is nice to be able to instantly locate someone when you're waiting to meet up, but it was better when you didn't have social media showing you what you're missing out on.

I have my phone on mute for 4 years now. I also turned off my app notifications like messenger etc so I can only read people's messages whenever I open my app. Just because we have apps that you can reach me 24/7 doesn't mean I'm available for 24/7.

I went on a trip to Cuba with 3 friends a few years ago and we could not get mobile data plans of course, so I almost never looked at my phone the whole time I was there. There was no internet in our homestay either. Public parks had wifi, so I would go there once a day to text my husband and parents that things were going well, and then that would be it for the whole day.

I actually uninstalled a lot of apps when I got home, because I realized during my trip how much of my day they sucked up. Especially twitter.

This reminds me of the horrific feeling I have every time I see someone's smart watch go off... they're literally being summoned by the tech on their wrist. It's a strange thing to watch. I've been muted and bad at texting back/answering my phone for my entire adult life (10ish years) and until I have a kid and figure out the settings to make my phone loud for specific callers, I don't think I ever will have sound or vibration on. I'd love to start leaving my phone at home when I go out for walks and stuff as well... maybe soon I'll start to do that more often.

I have a smart/fitness watch but the flow of data only goes watch->phone with call notifications being the only exception. My friends only call when it's something time sensitive, so if I got a call every couple of weeks that would be about it. Otherwise everything is on silent and doesn't vibrate

I usually text back pretty regularly because I enjoy chatting with my friends that way, but I don't constantly get distracted by it and if I don't want to text back for a day or two (or at all) then that's fine too

It also starts with the understanding that there even is such a thing as me-time. Like, I'm totally allowed to do this. I have that right. I claim it.

My method of disconnection was to not take my phone when walking the dog.

Main reason being that walking my dog was not (he died) a chore to be gotten out of the way for his benefit. It was an activity, spending time with him, all by itself, that I did for my benefit. When I was with him I wanted to be with him, there and then, not on my phone, or listening to music, or thinking "Gee this would make a good photo."

Phone stays in car. You want to talk to me, I'd be very happy for you to come to the dog park and talk to me. If I want music, I'll hum. If I want a photo, I'll look with my eyeballs instead. If I want to be entertained, I'll see if I can get him to play catch with me.

I do this and get talked down from my family.

"You never answer your phone".

Well I dont fucking want to.

I disabled all notifications. It's just overwhelming. If you have to talk to me right now you can call, that's it. The numbers of notifications from work, friends, family, apps is not healthy at all.

Learned a lesson a while ago: start your day with your calendar, not with your mail. Makes a huge difference. Plan the time you spent on mail.

I disconnected workmail from the phone and a small internet-package.

Now, i've everything on mute, 2 phones (1 work, 1 private), no work mail on the phone. I can access all my workdocuments though.

Same, I also refuse to take it out of my purse if out with friends. Anything that’s happening can wait a couple hours

I setup do not disturb (DND) mode on my phone to only allow calls from my contact list or repeat callers and no other alerts or calls.

DND mode is on except for M-F 8-6.

I have to do this. The problem I have is that I get overwhelmed by the thought of what I may miss and have to catch up on later. I guess I can start with putting my phone on mute outside of work hours and not worrying about it while I’m not on the clock.

When going to lunch, I leave phone on the desk.

I disconnected too much and now I feel like I don't have any friends

The only things that make my phone alert me is calls and texts and I’ve got a further dnd for driving and sleeping. Apps like Reddit or instagram or fb messages still have a badge so I can see something is waiting for me but nothing pops on my screen otherwise to inform me of the notifications. I love it. I don’t know how people love their lives with every app dinging every 5 seconds fuck me that sounds awful.

Wait, some people don't do this? Tf?

My phone is always on mute, I call people back when it suits me.

with no one thinking that it was unusual or rude.

ignoring that part. I get so many spam calls that I have the default ringtone on my phone. I've had it on silent since day one, carried over from a previous phone. That said I never answer and people do get pissy with me over it. It gets old trying to even answer or explain to people like that. They just don't get it. I'm not obligated to be at anyone's beck and call thank you!

Obviously it's that part that is the hard part for me. Disconnecting is easy and great, the shit I get afterward is annoying as all hell.

I would love too, but since moving across the ocean, group chats with my friends back home are the only way I stay in touch besides occasional games... I miss them.

I don't even remember the last time I had my phone on anything more invasive than vibrate. My last three phones at the least have had all the default ringtones and notification sounds because I don't bother customising something I will literally never hear.

I use an app called DayWise that gives me all notifications at times I set, it's been so nice to have quiet times of the day.

I only get notified for calls. Everything else can wait. It's so nice to not constantly be distracted, especially when group chats are going off

I check my phone like once a day when I'm not at work. Its on silent and sits in a spot where I can't directly see it most of the time. Never even worried about it.

I “accidentally forget” to turn mine off of silent mode sometimes, and it makes my day so much nicer 😂. I literally sat on a seawall last Saturday night watching the sunset, and only picked up my phone to take pictures that was such a peaceful about 30+ minutes.

I can attest that this works. I stopped immediately responding to texts a few years ago with everyone except my wife and my best friend. You get some backlash at first but after a few months of people not immediately getting responses from you via text they start calling you. If you don’t feel like answering, don’t. If it’s important they’ll leave a voicemail. Listen to the voicemail and decide if it needs an immediate response. If not, reply at your leisure.

Life is so much less stressful now.

In my social environment mute is completely normal as default.

yep, we don't have to let smartphones take over every aspect of our lives. we're in the very early stages of having these omnipresent devices, and most people's method of adopting them has been to use them like 20x per hour. that can't be a good thing.

I did that and it’s great.

Also a HUGE relief was uninstalling Facebook and other social media apps from my phone. I still have them on a PC, but I have to ‘actively’ choose to go there and look at social media. It’s more difficult to ‘mindlessly scroll’.

Well, sometimes I won't charge my phone on purpose just to see if I run out of battery in the middle of the day, and then I'm forced to disconnect

You still come across as rude in this modern age

So? I'm not going to actively work against my mental health so phone addicts don't think I'm rude

Isn't it crazy that we occupy only a small window of time that can remember both life with and without communication in your pocket?

Yup. One of the best moments of my life was when I was about 20. I remember being grown, independent, had a very cool truck, sun shining, nothing tethering me anywhere. I was pulled up at a stop sign at an intersection with complete and utter freedom and could go anywhere. I wish that feeling can be bottled.

Ask your doctor about drugs

My doctor and I are VERY well acquainted.

turn off your phone and if people ask just say you forgot to charge it and were wondering why it was so quiet

Or, if people ask, just say you turned off your phone. Be honest but not rude and anyone worth your time will respect you for it. And since you've set a clear boundry they'll have realistic expectations of you around times when you won't be accessible.

Or be nonresponsive in general and no one wonders where you are. If I lived alone, my cat or work would be the only ones who notice I'm dead.

I’m a father with six kids. Three grown and three teenagers. Emergencies happen frequently. There’s no way I can unplug.

That sucks.

It’s got it’s perks. More pros than cons. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. But it does come with responsibility.

Sure there is, when they're all at home.

That never happens.

Oh...? What did fathers do in the 90's?

they sent us outside and told us not to come back for a few hours.

I mean your dad wasn't always reachable. You survived. You can turn off your phone when out of the house if you want.

Not everyone survived. That’s the point. Survivors bias is strong.

Lol yes someone's dad being reachable by cellphone has saved a statistically relevant number of people...

BEEP! "Hi, Greg, Sandra here at the community pool. Little Kevin is down here, looks like he's drowning. I was gonna ask if you want us to pull him out, but since you're not picking up and you don't have a cellphone, well, I'll just have to let him be."

BEEP! "Hi Dad, it's Stacy. I was hoping to reach you here at home to get some advice. I'm about to OD on some drugs here, unless you think that's not a good idea. But since you're not home I'll assume it's fine to go ahead. See ya later!"

Can you prove it hasn’t? Lol.

Mine stays on silent. I answer for basically no one. I'm only prompt with my mom. She doesn't want to annoy me so she keeps it light just once in a while. If she calls more than once though I'm a bit scared my parents are slowly getting old and all the fun that comes with it.

Methods of communication have changed. Kids have changed. We were a lot more independent back then. I do have kids with anxiety issues and medical problems. It wouldn’t be worth closing an avenue of communication they most commonly use and there be a major problem. Two hours of freedom could cause a lot of issues.

How? How could being out of communication for 2 hours cause "issues"? Are you ever more than 2 hours from your kids? Wtf is going on here? Maybe it is just this kind of thinking that causes these problems in the first place.

Wtf are you doing spilling that many defective people into the world?

Tell me you don’t have kids of your own without telling me you don’t have kids of your own.

Tell me you define yourself by something 100 billion people have done without telling me you're super basic. Sad stuff.

Better get back on the smartphone to text your defective offspring, lest they self destruct in 2 hours or less.

Could be worse. I could be an angsty internet troll that shits all over random people on Reddit for self validation. My original comment got over 6,500 upvotes. So apparently I’m not alone. Unlike you.

bwahahha. They aren't even all by the same woman. I thought at least you had your shit together. Ah well, the stupid really will inherit the earth.

Perhaps they should could start calling each other for help! Glad you're there for them when they need you, though. :) Many people aren't so lucky!

And your cat wouldn't care

How do you feel about that?

Why lie? I turn it off and tell people because I wanted it off. The phone is for my convenience, not theirs. I want it off, it's off. (Which is much of the time).

Or, you know.... Learn to set boundaries and teach people to respect them

Or better yet turn off the phone and if any one asks say you didn’t want to be distracted by it so you turned it off

Or tell them it's off, nothing to be ashamed of. Plus there is wonder rather than perceived irresponsibility.

I think it might be liberating to just say "I had my phone switched off because I didn't want to be disturbed." Most of us don't really have any real social imperative to be contactable at any time of the day; while some might be a little surprised by the idea that they couldn't contact you because you didn't want to be contacted, even by them, I think it's probably pretty healthy.

I don’t think unnecessary lying all the time is very healthy

I don't even bother turning it off. I just put it down and don't look at it again until I need it. Just because it rings doesn't mean I need to drop what I'm doing. I'm not a slave to my phone.

If you call me on the weekend, I probably won't see it till Monday morning.

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.703692394.7592/flat,750x,075,f-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.u5.jpg

Or how about don't unnecessarily lie to people?

The issue here is people who are gonna nag you for daring to go offline

but yeah, I'd question my relationship with them at that point

Or just tell the truth.

I’m a father with six kids. Three grown and three teenagers. Unplugging completely isn’t exactly an option.

You keep posting this, but I think many of us are having trouble fully getting it. What kinds of life-or-death emergencies happen often where your reachability over a given, say, 4-hour period would change the outcome?

The only thing I can think of is dire scenarios like someone was in a car accident and I can see wanting to be there for them as soon as possible. But I guess I don't usually include those in my planning.

Hopefully the technological solutions like selective dnd modes that phones have now can help you to block out all but the most important. Perhaps a focus mode with JUST your spouse able to get through. Only one of you needs to be "on call" for emergencies at once, and that one can notify the other.

You never know and that’s why I don’t. I’ve ran into a lot of random emergency situations as a parent and husband. It’d be a shame not to be available when one occurs.

Stop giving away my secrets! They will know now!

I kept my phone on mute for weeks. No vibration either. It was glorious.

People and work got annoyed and I put sound back on. I hate it, my phone is always making noises at me. I'm going back to mute.

Lmaoo my phone been on mute/no vibrations for the past 3-4 years 😂 ppl close to me knows if they're gonna call me, it's for something urgent

I'm in my 30s working in IT and I maintain a pretty phone-disconnected life. I make it known that I don't have a social media presence at all and I don't engage in text conversations with people, always keep things business and immediate matters only, so people just know I'm like that, you can't expect me to respond on my phone immediately and it doesn't really bother anyone. If you've got a fb and insta and Whatsapp and you just stop all your regular group messaging and stuff then people are going to think something is up.

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I left my phone at home not long ago on accident and drove around running errands and no one could bother me. It was awesome

I had to put my phone on DND last night at 8:45. Woke up to 34 texts and 17 WhatsApps, including international clients needing me to get them answers to shit they fucked up & have been warned about “ASAP in the Morning”.

I miss being able to take the phone Completely off the hook/unplugging the fax machine.

I’ve been there. I’ve had people email me at two in the morning, then again at four in the morning demanding to know why I have an answered, and then emailing my boss at six in the morning demanding that I be punished for not answering emails in a timely manner.

Also the sheer amount of people who won’t take “I will get back to you Monday morning” for an answer when emailing you on the weekend.

They treat people like we are machines

When you take holidays, make your out of office message "I am gone blah dates, and will be unreachable and away from electricity"

I saw that at work and asked, it was BS but wow does it discourage calling them

Get a flip phone. Its been great.

I sure do miss my old Razr

Do flip phones not have the ability to be contacted or something?

They have to call you and texting is a PITA

Its way less distracting when you can only talk or text.

By "Flip phone" do you mean "non-smart phone"?

Cos there are flip smart phones now.

You can totally still do this. Step one, quit social media, it's a disease.

You’re not wrong.

I keep my phone in the kitchen. A room that’s central in the house and one I’ll probably walk through more than others. If so hear a ding I’ll go check it out, but it’s mostly to avoid the urge to get lost in scrolling. Treat it like a House Phone.

That’s pretty good advice. Thanks man.

My phone fell in the toilet when I was on vacation last summer and we couldn’t immediately get a new one, and it was kind of nice to not be able to worry about it

The fact that the nyc subway system still loses service between stations is an unexpected blessing

I've always loved shitty service on bart as then I can read a book and fuck all the slack messages they can wait

Turn it off then and send a text to people that might try to contact you letting them know you’re going to be unavailable for a while and then get lost in whatever you’d like. It’s a great feeling for real. You can even put your phone in do not disturb if you’re afraid of an emergency happening and you not knowing and set it to only ring if someone calls twice in a row. It’s what I did when Elden Ring came out and it was great

This is totally on you. Just turn it off.

It’s called being a husband and father. Shit happens and I have responsibilities I can’t just put down and ditch. It comes with the territory.

That's still on you. Life is completely livable without cell phones.

Yeah my dad was a terrible husband and father because cell phones hadn't been invented yet at the time

Times have changed and so have methods of communication. Kids are more reliant on technology, so while I’m still very much responsible for them, that means I have to be as well.

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I think that'll be a deal breaker for me in a relationship. Like cmon, we're not doing this. If you don't trust me to live my life without you while we're not in eachother's company, we cannot be together

Assuming you don't like it, tell her you don't like that shit and she needs to stop, lol. That would bug the hell out of me. Or give her fake updates: "There's an ostrich in the parking lot!"

Don't let your significant others do things that make you dislike them.

You got it. Add in six kids in their double digits and it never stops.

I set do not disturb hours on my iPhone. It’s been amazing & if the other person has an iPhone they can see you’re not accepting notifications.

They can also choose to “notify anyway” which gets through anything that is super important.

You know… that’s pretty useful information. Thank you so much.

I keep it on me just in case I need it, but it's muted otherwise. It's helped a lot.

Amen. I can be 5 miles offshore fishing and my phone is still receiving texts and calls from the wife asking when I'm coming home.

“Did you do the thing I asked you to do last week that I asked you to do a million times? I only asked because you should totally think about that while you’re five miles offshore and you should be thinking about that.”

Last time I went to the beach, I turned off my phone and either read the book I brought along, swam, or watched the ocean. It was so nice. It reminded me of how we used to live before cell phones and social media.

I would take the tram and buses and just go about town on a weekend. It was quaint.

Some good camping, far away enough for the reception to suck, works great for this.

I do miss this so much.

- have ya tried clinical anxiety?

When my wife and I went on our honeymoon we didn't get an international plan, just turned our phones off...... for an entire week. It was bliss.

“I know you see me calling you!”

Just be like me and have no friends, I’m never getting inconvenient notifications :)

I'm on a week-long vacation with my family at the beach and have been leaving my phone at the house every day instead of taking it with me to the beach or on the boat. Only check it in the evenings. It is so liberating

Vacations are fantastic because I only use it as a camera, navigation and music. I stay off social media, everyone I contact is with me, and work leaves me the hell alone.

Treat yourself to a distraction-free session of, say, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. every Saturday, with phone muted and in a drawer somewhere while you really get into the hobby/reading/creative project you're doing. Start with that and see how it goes.

You should give The Murderer by Ray Bradbury a read. Written in 1953 and oddly predictive like SciFi has a tendency to be.

I have read that actually! College was good for something.

It’s very freeing when you find you phone’s off button. Just let people know that’s what you’re doing and your not dead somewhere.

Eat some mushrooms and you’ll be phone free for at least 6 hours 😂

Hell I got some edibles that’ll deliver the same results 😂

The very first step for me was to remove the blue ticks from WhatsApp and telegram.

Then remove myself from Facebook.

Then start using Instagram as a place to share photos instead of a social network.

My work phone stops ringing from 5.30pm until 8am.

My personal phone goes in do not disturb mode from 11.30pm until 7am.

The thing I love most about cell phones is the off button. ;) But then I'm older and life has slowed down so I'm not constantly doing stuff with people so it's no big deal if I turn it off for a day or so.

If you want a day to yourself, record a new “answering machine” message in the morning to that effect.

Yea we had a nationwide shutdown of phones here in Canada the other day and it was fucking glorious (aside from people needing emergency services.)

do not disturb with exceptions is a godsend 😩

Wanna change places? Recently had a week off from work and I think I could be laying dead in my apartment for a week and no one would notice.

I have my phone with me, but I don't turn it on. I'll get the notices later and decide if they're important or not.

My man, DND mode. Set up high priority contacts like family etc so they can still get through if need be, and just leave it on DND. BEST DAYS OFF EVER

I started looking into it last night. I’m definitely gonna go with this

Turn off notifications so you don’t get sucked into random apps that you weren’t intending on using. Saves a ton of screen time and puts you in control of following your actual interests.

Just moderate. Notifications are insane nowadays... I turn off any app notifications for things that I don't literally need to take care of NOW. If it's something I care about, I'll check the app during free time. If it's not something I care about, why do I have the app?

Just dont do it, you are not obliged to just because instant messaging exists.

Solve this by the frog-slowly-warming-up-in-the-kettle approach. Be less and less promptly available and get your environment slowly used to this. If someone asks: you are trying some „digital detox“

I'm only reachable at home, via email or landline.

And, honestly? I rarely check messages.

Just do what I do: Have no friends.

Some days I’ll leave my phone at home and treat it like an answering machine. Fun to mix it up. Who knows what the day will bring without it and will always get back to it later.

As a species, we made it through the last 50,000 years without being chained to our electronic collars. You can go a little further.

If it is an "Emergency", you will find out soon enough.

Why do you feel compelled to live on everyone else's schedule? I have a thriving social life, but I'm completely asynchronous with my digital communications. If I'm busy doing something else, I don't even bother looking at my calls/texts until I have time. Sometimes I don't get around to replying to someone until days later. I build and maintain social relationships, but I don't do it at the beck and call of other people.

It’s called being a husband and father. I also have six kids all in double digits. It’s a busy life.

turn off your phone?

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.

Same. People know not to expect a response from me right away unless it's an emergency or they call me (and calls are only for immediate family only and/or real-time coordination e.g. trying to meet up).

Most notifications are either off or always-silent unless it's stuff that could actually be time-sensitive. Android makes this a lot easier since it has notification icons that mean I always know if there's something I haven't seen even if it was silent (iOS's approach is way more clunky, and doesn't have fine-grained controls for notifications).

Yeah, same, but.... People still consider me rude. Like folks are all, "You gotta answer in an hour, or immediately for a phone call. What if it's an emergency?!" People have been getting along fine since the dawn of time without that ability.

Also I just wish Android would allow you to turn off phone calls. I just want a notification, I don't want you to stop everything I'm doing.

Just stick to your guns. Either you shed some dead weight, or you teach people what your boundaries are. That's how I approached it, and it's worked out pretty well for the last 10 or so years.

I buy technology to be entertained/make my life easier, not be ruled by it.

It's only rarely a real emergency, and if it is you'll figure it out from the message. This isn't 1950 where if you missed the call, you missed the call.

Yeah this is not a concern at all with messages...

People still consider me rude

That's a them problem. It might be rude since manners are dictated by society at large, but it's a lot healthier to not obsess over your phone so I certainly don't care

Also I just wish Android would allow you to turn off phone calls. I just want a notification, I don't want you to stop everything I'm doing.

right? Half the time my friends call it's just because they are bored and they want to talk because they are bored. Well I was listening to a podcast sooo if the ringing could not interrupt my podcast even though it's on silent that'd be greaaat.

Coming from someone in Gen Z, that's very strange, as is the "respond immediately" thing you're discussing. I expect a response the same day/when the person is next awake and available if I'm talking about something important or that needs to get done, but outside of my significant other social texts can be left for days, sometimes weeks in the case of my best friend who is known to not respond quickly to anything. Calls are discussed ahead of time (even if as simple as "want to call?") unless there's something urgent or someone is in distress.

Nah people call me out of the blue just to chat. I argues with one friend for a while over spam calling and texting. Then I was like, well anyway you didn't hit me up to argue what'd u want. I swear he goes "did covid give you nasty shits?" This man is just shy of 30 and started a fight bc I didn't answer his 5 phone calls and all he wanted to ask was something dumb about my bowel movements. He calls a lot but never texts or leaves a vm after so u never call back. If people want me to call back they'll leave a quick message. He never does bc he just calls several times a week to bullshit on the phone. That's not me, I don't do that.

Android has do not disturb mode, and in it, calls get sent to the background.

False, at least for any flavor of Android I have seen.

Exactly. It takes a while at the start. But eventually people will get trained and lean that it could be a few hours before you respond. And maybe I won't respond at all if it's something that doesn't really need a reply. The people that need to know that if it's really important they should call and I'll probably answer. A lot of people just get sent to voicemail and I'll call them back when it's convenient.

people will get trained

damn so many people say this, but I just know different people I guess. I didn't answer a phone call, text, FB message, or goto hangout with anyone for like 2 years and they still just hit me up. As soon as I came back and spent a little time with them the phone calls flood in again. Like I still don't answer and I never said this was okay. stop it. I still never answer and it's been years, that doesn't stop the calls. Sometimes they'll call 3 or 4 times in a row just to try and annoy me into answering (idky they do this. I just give them shit for it whenever I do talk to them, and I still don't answer).

I get it, but at the same time I like being the person that always answers their phone. I've been told by a few friends that if they had one phone call it would be to me (not their parents, brothers, other friends) because they know I'll always pick up.

Everyone needs that one person that will always answer, no matter what.

I think it's fine to be this person if everyone else understands that you might also be busy sometimes and doesn't feel entitled to your immediate attention.

I’m sorry that a couple of people are shitting on you for this comment. I think the sentiment is really nice and your friends/family are lucky. You’re not saying that everyone needs to be that person for someone, but it’s something that you like to do and it makes you and the people in your life feel good. Thanks for being a nice person!

Thanks for that. I think the thing the other commenters aren't taking into account is that the vast majority of my communication with friends/family is done through texting. So when my phone rings I just automatically assume it's something a little more important or something that couldn't be addressed in a text and needs immediate attention.

If you text me, I'll get to it eventually. If you call me, I'll get to it right now.

Everyone needs that one person that will always answer, no matter what.

no, they don't. Lots of people don't have that anyway, myself included. Also if a person feels or thinks they need that, it is not my responsibility to be that person. You do you. Idc if you answer on the first ring everytime it doesn't hurt me, but that's not how I'm going to do things. The 90's we had house phones, how about way back in the day when it took months to send a hand written letter to your lover? They'll be fine.

The 90's we had house phones

And when that house phone rang, I guarantee you that you or your parents answered it every single time.

There's a serious flaw in that idea that you're the person who is completely reliable and available: Who is returning that favor? All too often, the responsible one is surrounded by people who will NOT be there to answer the phone when the situation is reversed.

Great analogy!

Absolutely this.

I need my no contact time, and everyone in my life knows and understands it so they don't think twice if I'm not responding immediately.

I feel like I have seen more and more cats posting on reddit recently

Love 💕 your handle and emoji! The Ambivalence is Exceptional. Bravo!

It's all fun and games until you actually get murdered

Outside cats are goals

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

Bingo! Fuck people who don't understand boundaries. I'm not free at the drop of a hat to be at your beck and call. Let that shit ring out and get back to them whenever.

I had a friend who would get irritated and hurt if I didn't respond to her texts within a minute or two. She didn't understand the concept of my not being able to have a text conversation in the middle of a work day, especially since I was taking care of elderly people for a living. She finally made a dramatic speech over text before blocking me, thank god.

These people are not friends. They are actually very needy and use the phone to manipulate friendships. Often people who expect to text constantly don't use their time wisely and are lonely.

I just told a so called friend that I have real life responsibilities and texting or returning your call at 9am to talk about something frivolous is not one of my responsibilities. He basically wants reassurance that someone cares about him via the phone and I don't think that is my problem.

Hell yeah! I've been doing this for about a decade, and people adjusted to it pretty quickly. Don't be sending me Discord messages and shit, either....I have those notifications turned off too!

I'm out here living my best 1990s-esque existence, and it's fucking glorious.

Same. My time window for responding to texts is 1-2 days and my close friends and family are completely used to it now. When I try texting a new friend this way it never goes well though 🥺

If people want to be friends, then they will just have to learn! Hopefully, they will learn that you don't do it to be rude, it's just how things are.

I have my Discord notifications turned off. I’ll check it when I check it!

Damn straight! I have everything but call and text notifications turned off on my phone (mostly because of my wife). I don't care about Discord or anything else. That's for checking when I am on my PC at home....whenever that might be.

Adding to this, I have strong phone boundaries. I'm not answering a text until I feel like it. Sometimes my phone dies before bed and I don't charge it until the next evening.

As it should be! Keep those walls up, and control your own life. You don't owe anyone a thing.

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I'd have to agree with this. I've heard a TON of people complain about feeling like they have to respond quickly to things, I've heard almost nobody ever complain about people not responding immediately

If you work any type of job providing services, like an Architect for example, you will definitely and without repercussion experience the instant-expectant. An instant expectant is the clients who call you immediately after sending a fucking email. Those who will gripe if sent to voicemail and call back again in an hour when you’re still not available, and then proceed to start sending nasty messages. The hoe asses who’ll send you an text, and if you’re not responding in 5, they’ll call, text, send emails, and if you don’t respond back in 15 they’ll start an SOS bonfire, track down your wife, send you a court order for an appearance, and use every mutual contact available to get your attention. After they’ve got your immediate, urgent, and tentative attention, they’ll tell you some irreverent bullshit about their project that doesn’t even concern you.

The instant expectants know nothing of personal boundaries. There is a special place in hell for people who conduct business in such a manner.

I think the conversation is more about personal communication rather than professional. While instant expectants aren't ok in a professional setting either, it's a very different scenario

IT guys when someone breaks their computer and are unable to Google the fucking solution on the phone used to complain.

It's also that its not something people can complain about without looking like assholes.

"I sent a message to Tim and he took a day to answer, on weekends he may not even take the phone"

"Maybe he was out doing something that weekend?"

This is more related to social capital

By complaining that you need to respond to people you are indicating you are in demand

In contrast, complaining about other people not responding immediately indicates lack of value or insecurity regarding it

You know what, this is probably the best explanation there is of this phenomenon

I disagree—I’m one of those people who doesn’t respond quickly, and my friends and family are always giving me grief over it. Usually it’s just gentle ribbing, but I still sense this expectation that I’ll become more “available” for them. “No [friend name], I’ll answer your text when I feel like it, and that could be a day or two”

Dude I just realized it's beck and call, not beckon call. I always assumed it was beckon because the definition of the word is " to make a gesture with the hand, arm, or head to encourage someone to come nearer or follow". Neat.

Never take things for granite, i always say.

You might enjoy r/BoneAppleTea

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The article I read called it an "eggcorn" - a slightly misheard (yet still kind of sensical) version of a common phrase. In my mind, beckon makes more sense even knowing the correct version.

For 50 years I thought it was "For all intensive Purpose" not "For all intents and purpose"

Yep, my phone is for my convenience, not anyone else's

exactly lol, its not my problem they waited until the last minute for their critical thing.

if they really care about it they cant contact me 3 days before via email.

I'm not going to deal with your shit while I'm driving to my next appointment with people who can schedule in advance.

Ok but what if it’s family. I’m 33 with a husband and 9 month daughter.. ya know a family. Well my mom & gma have been overstepping my boundaries since forever and I’ve spoken up A LOT. Yet still I’m expected to answer texts and calls literally almost every single day. And if I don’t I get blown up and they are always under the assumption that something is wrong. It’s like I can’t live my life bc they don’t even support my likes and wants. It’s just theirs. Oh and everything i do is either wrong or not enough. Sick of their projection, sick of their toxicity, sick of their expectations that really don’t mean a damn thing, sick of the disrespect. Thanks for letting me vent- looking for any advice.

Tell them that if you see a missed call you'll call back.

If they expect you to be available at all times they should be available too.

If they waste too much of your time, tell them you have 5-10 min brackets to talk (during TV commercials or whatever as an excuse), and ask them to summarize their day in 2/3 of that time.

Keep enforcing those boundaries. It’s hard, but eventually they’ll realize you mean it. And take some space from them. Distance yourself.

You need r/raisedbynarcissists because the answer to your question is that yo ushould have nothing to do with people who treat you like that but it's going to take you a long time to get there and that subreddit can help.

chill out.. Imagine what will technology will be like in 10-20 years.. responding to text will be the least of things to get upset about. For now just ignore them and when you have time to respond just say you answers when you have time.

For now just ignore them and when you have time to respond just say you answers when you have time.

I literally said that exact thing in my comment

Ya .. were on the same page..

I've just changed jobs. In my previous job I had my email on my phone and would check it and respond into the evening and at the weekend, often fixing issues etc. They 'let me go' after eleven years. New job, better pay and no one in the company has their email on their phone! I think previous organisations did me a favour! 😳

I work for a huge company that does not expect you to have email on your phone.

The functionality is available, but you have to sign an agreement saying that your phone could become company property in the event of a lawsuit.

Basically, they discourage you from having any kind of company information, including email, on your phone.

this comment is hell for ESL speakers lol

Yup that’s me I screen calls all the time!

YES! I swear, the way people analyze text patterns through memes, just makes me feel so misunderstood. (Example: when she leaves you on delivered...bla bla bla)

If I can't leave you on delivered for 2 hours, or 20 hours while I'm busy, I don't want what you're selling.

In my personal life, they don’t. They just complain. Believe me, I’ve been the one who’s “bad at contact” for years.

In my work life I’ve recently been better at setting boundaries and that absolutely has changed my life for the better for sure.

This is me and my roommate.

She will send me messages on all sorts of media then 5 minutes later "ARE YOU ALIVE" like I've died because I didn't have notifications on. She's cohabitated with me for years. She knows. She just doesn't care!

My strategy for this is to let them know that they're behaving like a spammer, and that I block all spam senders. If they continue, I block them. I'll unblock them if they agree to stop. If it starts again, they get blocked for good

I thought the whole point of texting was being able to contact someone without needing them to actually answer the phone or respond immediately. just when they're available.

Good answer. I turned off notifications, and I feel a lot better! I check those apps and emails when I can and not when THEY want me to. It made a huge impact on my life and my time.

And turn off read receipts on your text messages.

I've left mine on since it's sometimes useful to know when a message has been seen (e.g. meet you at x place in 5 mins). But I also don't feel compelled to respond quickly just because I've read it

Never done that

unless they know you are someone who is always on your phone lol

100%. Stop responding and allow yourself to gain the reputation of slow responder. I am this person in my friend group and at work, and it has improved my mental health so much. I also don't ignore texts or emails, I just set aside time to respond, generally three times a day. People now know when it's my response time.

Exactly what I do. Do Not Disturb permanently on and the only person whitelisted is my husband. Also deleted Facebook, Snapchat, etc. because they were such a drain on my mental health and people would just message or even try calling me on them if I wasn't answering my phone trying to get through that way.

No one needs an immediate response as far as I'm concerned and my husband only gets them because he asked me to and gave me good reasons why it was important to him.

The false sense of urgency has people feeling entitled to other people's time.

This. I've been living like this and nobody messages me anymore cause they know I'll respond within a week, month, or never. Idc how rude it is either. I'm just done with the expectations and people only messaging me when they needed something from me. I'm so much happier now.

I done this to with much success.

This is the way. Just set expectations that it may be a day or so before your respond. Once it becomes "your thing" nobody will care

So much this. I set aside Mondays and Fridays for responding to a lot of various communications so I don't feel like I'm constantly having to monitor shit.

This. What I do for the most part.

Yeah exactly. It's not that difficult and if they think it's impolite, fuck em. If it's important they'll call back or send a text. On Sundays I don't even turn on my phone.

I have reached this level. People hate me and it makes dating almost impossible but I'm officially super bad at answering texts and people who know me just expect it of me.

This is the way. Can relate.

Exactly, I’m known to everyone I know as the guy that never picks up their phones, and once they accept it, it’s great

Yep, people now thank me when I do call them back the same day. They used to complain, but now they're used to it.

I simply cannot be at my phone's beck and call. I don't respond to single buzzes. My wife needs to blow up my phone with like 4 or 5 consecutive messages to get my attention.

If you don’t want anyone to message you and distance yourself socially from your friends this is indeed the way.

If this results in that then you needed a better social circle anyway. Your friendships shouldn't be dependant on always being tethered to your phone, that's super unhealthy

Nah that's not true. You don't have to be tethered to your phone, but sending a few messages here and there would be common sense... not replying to any messages is just inconsiderate and selfish. You don't have to answer within minutes or even hours but not answering for a while indicates that the message is unwanted to the other person and they will probably stop messaging you soon enough for good reason.

After further thought, if you explicitly tell them you're not a "text guy" sure. But you would have to treat everyone messaging you equally then imo.

As much as I dislike saying just "this"...

This.

I get guilt trips from my mom who can tell I’ve read a message but that I haven’t responded. I hate that feature on iPhone. And there may well be an easy fix for that. But that would just make my mom more butthurt to see that I made that adjustment.

Agreed! I'm a quick responder, but I have friends who aren't and that is totally okay with me, and should be okay with everyone. A few of them will apologize for not responding faster, and I definitely reassure them that it doesn't bother me at all, it's why texting is awesome. If it's something super urgent I'll call them, otherwise the text will still be there tomorrow, nbd

Works for me as well

I wish, my family always gives me shit for not responding.

My grandma said I'm so bad that she'll be dead and buried before I respond to the text she was in the hospital.

It's already been said, but I purposely wait at least a couple of hours to respond to a text unless it is important. I like everyone I correspond with, but I don't like the immediate response precedent, so I've been weaning my response time for a few years. Some friends question my responsiveness, but I've found that showing how I handle phone calls/texts when they are there explains why I am not responsive. I purposely don't pick up calls when I'm spending time with my friends and say "whatever that person is calling about can wait unless they send me a text telling me it's an emergency." By doing that, I'm telling my friend I am currently with that I value their time/presence, I don't pick up for people if I'm busy, and if it's a very serious matter that I need to address immediately, they can tell me what's going on in a text. It is a very liberating feeling when people know you don't answer your phone all the time and realize you value your friends or whatever you are doing more than an electronic device that has turned into a doorbell attached to you since you got your first one.

It's also important to never get impatient with anyone else that doesn't respond immediately. If they don't respond for a couple of days, follow up. After that, maybe wait for a week to follow up again if you really want to talk. If that doesn't work, either that person has too much shit going on or they don't want to respond. Either way, let the person be and if they care about you, they'll hit you up when they can.

You don't understand the people like the person you responded to. They complain and want magical solutions but refuse to solve it by putting in effort from their side. It's just easier to complain.

They don’t understand me, but good thing you do!

Are you implying I'm wrong?

Not at all! I think you totally have me pegged!!

I remember my Latin teacher in high school, twenty something years ago now, wonderful man, excellent teacher, beautiful voice. One day someone knocked at the door in the middle of him reading some poem or passage, I don’t remember what. And he just keeps on going. Person knocks again, one guy jumps up to open it - SIT BACK DOWN - and right back into his recitation. I can still hear him.

When he’s done, like thirty seconds and three knocks later, he says, as he walks to the door, “Do you answer your phone just because it rings?”

And the kid goes, “Yeah, I do.”

And my teacher says, “Well stop it. The phone belongs to you. You don’t belong to the phone.”

And it’s so weird, because at the time, the most advanced thing we had on our phones were answering machines and caller ID. But as time goes on it seems to fit more and more. And four years learning from him, and more than a few trips and fun times, it’s that off the cuff remark, that bit of personal philosophy, that has stayed with me the most.

I get this and also hate it. I have recently had a cancer diagnosis, treatment and then the post treatment side affects. People have been so beautifully kind and thoughtful and checking in by messaging me- which I completely appreciate of course! However, it really can be draining messaging people back all the time with updates or feeling bad for not doing so. I'm only 28 so people know I use my phone and I'm online quite a bit or whatever, especially with not working at the moment, but I just feel so rude not having the strength to message people back. I keep having to remind myself (and have my close friends and family remind me) that I need try to be selfish at the moment. If I want to go online but only to watch videos about serial killers or cute and funny animals and switch off from actually communicating with people, then that is OK! Right? But society just has that pressure on to communicate all the time which is super frustrating and kicks off a lot of social anxiety and awkwardness for me personally.

The first step is realizing that it is not selfish in the slightest and you’ve set those expectations on yourself.

I hate it when work expects it of me and it's my day off or I am not oncall. You do have to set boundaries. After all, we made it these last 100,000 years without tech driving us all nuts with bells, clicks and beeps.

Totally! I learned this the hard way and one day I was like “why the fuck do I have my work email on my phone?” (It’s not a company phone, I had it on my personal cell phone like a total schmuck). Taking it off felt so damn good.

We discussed this in class. Technology does have a Dark Side. Remember to set boundaries.

I didn't respond to a friend's text for two days and it was like I committed a crime against humanity. It wasn't even a text like "hey how's it going?" but rather a picture sent with some comments. I was honestly just kind of busy plus I didn't feel like responding to the lame picture and comments. This happened a couple months ago and things are just starting to normalize believe it or not.

Beck and call*

It was a joke. There’s a string of responses to my comment where a few people are shook because they’re just now realizing it’s beck and call and not beckon call.

oh. I had to check to make sure i was right lol

No one ever shows up to give you permission to stop living that way. It's some thing you just choose to decide is not offensive, and that offense is the beholders problem.

I have started using the following statement at the end of my emails.

My working hours may not reflect yours. Please do not feel obligated to reply outside of your normal work schedule

This also hints that I certainly do not feel obligated to reply outside of my working hours.

I got over it quick, what spurred that on was not charging my phone since I lost the charger. Yeah I can go a full day on a dead phone and only bother to charge it late when I need to make a call now and if I miss calls I miss them

As I tell people. The my phone is for my convenience. Not yours.

My wife always does the opposite to me, like it's some sacrilege to be uncontactable for a few hours or half a day. She doesn't even pester me or anything, she's explained it as "if something bad happens".

Thinking back though she did find out her best friend died whilst in a cinema watching Wolf of Wall Street, so maybe that's her "if my phone was off..." moment.

I get this panic sometimes if my SO is out somewhere. Like what if he got into an accident or something...

You don't have to.

Sure I don’t, but it’s not that black-and-white when you’re trying to maintain relationships with others in a society that has largely shifted toward an expectation of constant availability.

Just tell people your cell phone is for YOUR convenience. Not theirs. Hell half the time my ringer is turned off. Plus I'm going deaf, so I can't hear it most of the time anyway

"Our workplace just introduced work-life balance rules about being contacted after hours...that we're totally gonna ignore in practice!"

I’ve explained to more than one person that one owns my time. I’ll decide whether to respond to a text or phone call at a time of my choosing.

the ones that give you 5 minutes to respond kill me, I'm in mid fucking sentence

I like what my old professor said. "I do not being readily accessible at all hours of the day."

No one has sny expectation of me being immediately available. I legit disappear from peoples entire lives for months at a time because I'm so introverted and no one bats an eye when I come back

same. I take heat all the time because my phone stays on silent and I never answer. Most of they time it's a friend just bored calling me to chat. I hate that shit, call me if you need something important or if you want to make plans. If I don't answer and it's not an emergency, send a text I try to always respond when I get the chance. Might be a few hours, but I'll respond. Fuck your phone call I'm not here to entertain you just because you're bored, and I'm not an asshole for not answering. I'm at work, or sleeping or literally anything. Entertain yourself I do it constantly.

I sent you a DM 9 hrs ago, why haven't you msged back??

I can easily leave a WhatsApp message unanswered for a week if I don't feel like it. I talk when I feel like it. And I'm not worried that anyone will expect differently. Having said that, phones still intrude and distract.

I can't remember where I saw it, maybe Reddit, but it was someone who put at the bottom of their email signature a note which basically read, "I reject the modern expectation of instantaneous reply to email, and consequently check my email once per day. If you do not hear from me right away, just wait."

It was written better than that, but that was the gist of it.

I also hate this expectation that I should be responding immediately to everything just because messages can reach me instantaneously.

I deliberately wait a certain amount of time before responding to texts so no one ever gets the idea that I read them right away.

Or to be told by my husband why u don’t have your phone by u when I call? Like my phone isn’t attached to me!

Don't apologize...just respond when you can. Or just say, "Thanks for your patience..." if you have to.

So irritating when somebody from work messages you at like, 10:00pm. Certain people even expect you to take some sort of action immediately. Fuck that. I won't even read those messages

I was telling my SO this a few weeks ago. His stepmom called and I was in the shower. I didn't jump out to answer bc, y'know, showering. Said to myself "I'll call her back". 8 mins later my SO calls me - "stepmom just called me and said she'd called you. IT'S NOT IMPORTANT BUT SHE SAID CALL HER BACK".

I told him it hadn't even been 10mins yet, I literally had my phone in hand to call her when he called me. After I spoke to her ab something totally inconsequential, I told him that I need Me Time sometimes and I'm not gonna be at everyone beck and call for everything constantly. Me Time is important for everyone!

I don’t expect anyone or everyone too but I do want to have atleast one friend who messages daily but ofc I never expect them to b quick if they’re busy or tired and all

damn i would have loved the 90s lol

I haven't been "bored" since 2003. So much distraction now.

My dad used to just lock us outside and we couldn't come home until it got dark. The 90s really were a special time.

Seriously, I remember being miffed by the limited selection of entertainment I had as a kid. The total options were limited, and then it was up to your parents to decide what was allowed at any given time. If you were a little shit yesterday, you probably weren't going to be playing Super Mario World today as punishment. Go play outside.

Now as an adult, I have limited time to play games, read, or watch TV, but I have so goddamn many options that I sometimes get paralyzed by the sheer volume of choices I have. and I wish I could go play outside without people thinking I'm weird or have something wrong with me.

I regularly have to stop myself from saying shit like, “when I was a kid, we had one tv that only got 4 good channels, only one Nintendo with about 12 games, and ipads didn’t even exist!” to my kids. But like, they really can’t even begin to understand what that must have been like.

I honestly have to say that I think it was objectively better that way. If I ever have kids, I'll probably artificially recreate that sort of childhood for them. Give them the chance to properly appreciate their stuff, and their childhood, before flinging them headlong into our hyperspeed modern world.

I've been trying to do that to a point with mine but it is super hard.

I can see why. They go to school and every other kid has a cell phone, they learn on computers and the teachers use e-boards instead of chalk or dry erase boards. You take them grocery shopping, and everyone around them is using computers, cell phones, and other devices for shopping lists and checkout. You take them to the zoo and half the kid-friendly educational material is locked behind a little plastic key you have to buy and then insert into electronic devices that talk to the kids because who needs reading?

Then they want to know why they have LEGO bricks and books at home to play with while every other kid has an iPad and a gaming console.

It's surprising though that when my daughter is with her friends at a playground they can indeed play all day long without any electronic gizmos or what not. Then I look at my sister's kids who won't eat dinner without their own tablets with their own shows on.

I think it’s important, somewhere deep down. Like, I don’t wanna sound like a weirdo but we were born in nature you know? We’re all still just animals, our bodies and brains aren’t ready for having ipads and delivery food and internet every day since birth.

I think as a child, being forced to walk around in grass and trees and rocks and realize what the world looks like, what lives in it, and how to navigate it was super important for me developmentally. Not just that I like, appreciate the world around me, but I think I have a better subconscious understanding of a lot of important stuff like sense of direction, awareness of my surroundings, attention to detail. I think the fabricated construction world most kids live in these days is very sterile.

I have to agree. Children are extremely curious about the world outside their lives. When parents distract them with ipads and other electronics, it creates a disconnect. I think that could be a contributing factor to social anxiety, not to mention society is damn intimidating today.

I can remember my mom telling me that the first time she and my dad took me to the zoo, when I was about 2 years old, they realized I was much more fascinated by the other people walking around. I think it makes sense. I was too young at that point to really be ready for other species, but I was fascinated by my own because learning human society was much more important at that stage.

It's wild for me thinking back to our only tv we had access to (parents had a color one we couldn't touch in the living room) being black and white with rabbit ears and a turn dial that only had 13/14 channels it could access and 3 sometimes 4 actually would get a signal. I also remember begging for a 64 and my parents ending up buying me a Gameboy pocket thinking it was the same thing. Which was great....but the Gameboy color was out! We did always get our parents old work computers when they had to upgrade, even if they were just chugging along at that point by being bogged down with hundred of files they would let us delete. My dad would buy us cd's with demo games or just smaller quick games, most required using ddos commands to play while almost never giving you the exact command so you had to guess (some games on the lists we never did figure out how to access) and half of them never working that we did access.

The playing outside is why I got into gardening. It hits some creative/imaginative itch and also gets sunshine and fresh air in, plus then I get food at the end which is neat.

This is the most important and overlooked change. I used to get "bored" very often as a child and my mom would say "go find something interesting to do". That lead me to create super intricate and magical stories in my head with whatever toys or (not even necessarily a toy) I could get my hands on. I haven't heard a kid say "I'm bored" in years. I wonder what smartphones are doing to our creative thinking and our tolerance for frustration.

This is extremely valid. My sons have so many choices now that they’re “bored” after 3 minutes. They constantly switch shows or movies, board games or toys don’t hold their attention long enough, and doing art is a matter of rushing to finish. My oldest has ADHD as do I. But I’m trying to nurture the idea that being bored sometimes is a good thing. It’s something you have to learn to live with. The age of instant gratification has done them no favors to the point where waiting for anything is a massive inconvenience. When my son complained about food having to be cooked, I knew that I was fucking up somewhere. So we’re trying to do better. It’s just very hard to parent in a way that seems counterintuitive to everything about society now.

My young children's grandparents still have cable, and when watching the Disney Channel they told me they didn't like this episode and I should skip it for them. It was a commercial.

This makes me sad. And I fully agree. The smartphones are such a distraction that it seems to get harder to actually feel your moods and emotions like sadness and boredom. So many times have I wanted to throw away all my technology and live in the woods. 90’s is never coming back.

My parents did the same so we’d make friends instead of playing GameCube all day. It worked and I love the memories I made.

My brother's game cube was set up in the garage in the summers with the garage door open....it attracted all sorts of neighborhood kids who became friends.

That's amazing.

Sounds like a great time

I've never lived in a neighborhood with kids, I grew up in a very secluded home in the woods. I know what this feeling can feel like, I've felt it several times before, but I never had the opportunity to look forward to it or excitedly prepare for it. It sounds very nice.

Damn , I know that pain

Moved to the suburbs to have kids and got lucky to find a neighborhood with a decent population density of kids. Highly recommend for the kids because you're right, this is so good for them

Time to venture out, my friend. The world is your oyster.

Me and some friends did something like this. We'd setup either his Playstation ory N64 on one of our front porches under one of those big umbrellas and played them outside all day. Met some interesting people doing this. Our parents couldn't tell at us for not playing outside.

Our parents couldn't tell at us for not playing outside.

I've heard of this with Gameboys but wow, with stationary consoles it's amazing!

we ran an extension cord from a house to a tent and camped in the backyard while playing 007 late at night. Of course we also left the tent at night and ran around getting into minor mischief.

I still play Golden Eye from time to time. And once it got dark outside, all the neighborhood kids would meet up and we played spotlight.

We were little smart-asses back then. Don't get me wrong, the time spent was also spent doing other things

My nephew does this, neighborhood kids are constantly filtering in and out of their garage. Kind of fun. Would be super cool as a kid

Love your username

this is a galaxy brain idea

Yeah, annoying thing now though is that parents are worried about what happens to their kids. I tried to go on a walk by myself(I was 15 at the time) and my mom said “no, I don’t want to worry about you,” so I just played games on my computer…

Same thing happened to me. Funny thing is my parents always kicked my older siblings out until dark but when I was older all of a sudden they were worried about me being kidnapped or ran over by a car.

We can blame modern news media (especially Fox and other right-wing fearmongering outlets) for this growing sentiment amongst boomers that the world is more dangerous

My favorite 90s memories was riding my bike with several binders of basketball cards to a friends house, where we would sort through them together and make trades.

so we’d make friends instead of playing GameCube all day

The real ticket was to make friends with someone who also had the game console of your choice and whose parents didn't care if you were inside all day.

Fixing to do that to our kids. It’s just as safe if not safer out there now as it was then. The only change is the 24 hour news cycle.

One day in the early 90s my friends and I decided to go around the parks and find any recyclables we could in the trash. We had like 4 bags each on our bikes after scavenging all day and used our money to buy a used copy of smash bros for the 64 from a store called game crazy. Even had change left over to get blizzards from QD across the street. My friends dad built him a dope tree house that was insulated and even had power running to it where we had an old tube and a 64. When my mom asked what we did when I got home she made me go straight to the shower after finding out we spent our day dumpster diving and it's still one of my best memories as a kid

00s are just the 90s, but progressively more depressing because of the aftershocks of 9/11.

I disagree, the rise of cell phone culture happened in the ‘00’s and made them distinctly different from the ‘90’s when only rich douchebag businessmen had cell phones

You put some respect on Derek Morris's name!

Yea but just texting wasn’t nearly as bad.

You can’t take away my early 2000’s roller blade weed sessions with the boys.

Those that grew up during that time learned a skillet that died with touchscreen phones. Texting on a keypad with limited characters per text. We made so much shorthand and could text quickly without looking at the phone.

Shorthand probably works better for you than autocorrect... ;-)

Agree with you on the texting. And you got me in the feels with roller blade weed sessions w the boys! Take my upvote, I’m not crying

And all the weed contraptions we made to smoke weed outta. Whats better that one bubbler? Lets make an 8 duel bubbler with duel hoses and 4 bowls.

Early 2000’s internet highschool was awesome.

We were outside and inside.

To even expand on it. It was nice to know you had that group of boys. I was the queit nerd jock who was good. Picked on and shunned by both worlds lol.

Man people can be dicks lol even i am one now at 35 but more outta necessity to be left alone at bars n in public.

Ehh, in Canada nobody under 18 had a cell until maybe the 2010s. I remember a Rogers plan for $20 was basically 10 texts, and maybe 30 minutes call time for the month. Not nearly enough to get anything done.

I don't think I had a proper plan where my parents felt free to contact me until I was in university.

This is incorrect. I was in a Canadian high school in the mid aughts, cell phones were very common among students my age. So much so the school had rules about it.

Bro not sure what part of Canada you are from but that is the most blatantly wrong statement I have read in a long time. People have had cell phones in Canada just as long as anywhere else. Nokias, Motorola Razrs, Blackberries and Iphones just to name the obvious ones were popular throughout the 00's with kids in middle school and high school.

Toronto, Ontario.

Yes, we had cell phone plans as long as everyone else. Never said we didn't.

But our cell phone plans were stupid expensive, and continue to be.

Like... Dude... Did you even read my comment?

“In Canada, nobody under 18 had a cell phone until maybe the 2010s” seems like he did read your comment

Yeah, and I distinctly remember the only people with cell phones being well off folks. Everyone else had little burner phones that had pay-per-use plans.

My point was more so about the cost of using a phone. Hell, you couldn't go a week without a news story about some kid blowing several grand on their phone because they were texting too much.

Thanks for the downvote. Maybe that’s what you meant, but it’s not what you said.

Didn't down vote you. Not everyone on the internet is a petty grade schooler.

I was in college in the US in the 2010s with a tracphone. They wanted money just to have it and then money for minutes and texts with the kicker being checking your messages being considered part of your minutes. I threw the thing away cause I had a Nascar telemarketer spamming the crap out of my number and eating all my minutes in a heartbeat.

My first cell phone had something like 350 and 500 receive text limit. The worst was a text was very few characters which I can't remember anymore. Also I don't think I get receive any media like pictures or music/sound without separate fees each time. Most my friends had way more or even unlimited (when that meant something) and didn't understand when I told them to stop texting me all the damn time and please never any pictures. I had to pay for any overcharges. I also had a limited amount of talking minutes so I generally only made calls on my "free nights and weekends."

Between 1995 and maybe 2002 in France, Tatoo was the thing.

It was a pager, a small text message receptor limited to 15 numbers at first. You received 55555555551020 and you call back the 5555555555 at 10:20, or 5555555555911 and you knowed that there was an emergency and you have to call the 5555555555 as soon as possible.

Later they added text and extended the messages to 80 characters.

https://www.coup-de-vieux.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/tatoo.jpg

I was one of the last to get one in my class at age 17 my senior year. Most people back then were getting them around 14/15 when they started driving (rural area). My sister got hers at 15. No idea why they trusted my driving skills as I often broke the law driving more than I should have at 14. This was mid oughts. Edit: spelling....never was good at texting on a phone from touchpad to screen, autocorrect is a pain too lol

That’s true, but not really before like 2005 from my memory

It was my first couple years in college ‘00-‘02 when I really noticed cell phone use exploding among the affluent/young/business demographics. It was also apparent by advertising that was now geared towards portraying cell phone use as a part of our everyday lives. There was NOTHING like that in the ‘90’s. It was like 911 and mass cell phone use happening within a year of each other and the new millennium had dawned!

Think there must be more to it then that, because that attitude effected basically most western countries as far as I can tell, and 9/11 only occurred in one...

That's why I say aftershocks.

9/11 affected American media, which is by far one of the most influential media sources in the world. Tack on airport security, and general unease of "are we next?!" and people are bound to be more depressed.

Think how we moved from American media being boybands and female sex symbols to the primary music being alternative and nu-metal soon after. Media reflects the population, which is in turn reflected in the media.

There's a great doc about this on Disney+ about the 90s and the "end of positivity." Can't remember the name.

That’s the truth

Lol aftershocks only happen in future time, my friend. My 1998 self is immune to 9/11 cuz shit don’t back travel, biatch!

90's basically ended on 9/11. 2002-2007 were 90s lite I'd say

By the time I graduated high school I stated in 10 different neighborhoods.

Every neighborhood I moved into I made it a point of emphasis to walk outside and find friends and it was a blast.

We didn't have a GameCube, but I also had a lot of trouble making friends because I had no idea what anyone was into besides sports, and I have never liked sports (either as a player or an observer).

But my parents also didn't lock us out of the house either. Probably for the best; I would have had no idea what to do.

But my parents also didn't lock us out of the house either. Probably for the best; I would have had no idea what to do.

You would have figured something out I’m sure.

That’s the whole point, you find something to do! Explore is the key

There was literally nothing to explore near our house. Not a good damn thing.

Breakdance

Where are you from, out of curiosity

The most boring part of central North Carolina, with no sidewalks to anywhere.

Got it. Never been out there so I don't know what it's like

I live in BFE. We would ride our bike on gravel roads aimlessly, half the time needing to push them because the tires would sink in. Trespass....all day long. Going into pastures. Swimming in ponds...we found out later were cow ponds. "Why are they so shallow" we would wonder. We find little water holes by culverts and catch tadpoles and frogs/toads. We'd find little streams (or ditches with water in them) and make dams with broken concrete, rocks and sticks. We'd steal hammers and nails from someone's parents and find scraps of wood and make our way up trees to find a.good perch. We'd steal newspapers from recycling or the post office and starts small fires. We'd walk down old abandoned railway tracks, for miles sometimes, and find little copses of trees to make forts in. All that and other basic stuff like play at the park and play basketball on the outdoor courts via the park or school.

And guess what? We didn't even have any of those near where I live.

Did you live in a desert or just tightly packed urban area? I wasn't trying to be a dick just that there is things kids can find to do in the most boring and empty of places.

Nope, outskirt suburbs! Everything is high-fenced or farmland and it's too far to walk anywhere. The suburbs near downtown might have had more stuff to do (being in a very old part of town) but again, our parents didn't lock us out of the house to begin with.

I was never locked out myself. Though I was often told to go outside. Maybe it's just the gremlin in me but I would've ran through the fields and probably eventually found some pastures. My brother, friends and I were little hellions.

The Pikmin are the only friends I need.

My parents took it a step further and wouldn't let us own a game system, so I had to learn negotiation techniques to get my friends to play when they were bored of it by then, haha.

As frustrating as it was as a kid, I'm so glad they did that. I did SO much more outdoors than I would have otherwise, and spent a lot more time making friends.

Except you couldn't actually play on any GameCube in the 90s since it didn't come out till 2001.

What does that have to do with my comment? I just said my parents locked me outside too lmaoo

Same thing happened to my my older brothers and their friends they ended up making a club house in middle of a bunch of trees with stuff they found and all their friends would hang out and play games until it was time for dinner.

It really was. The tech was not too far off from today but you weren't bound by it. Internet was rare. You weren't weird for not having it. You could make a ridiculous claim without someone pulling out a phone and calling you a liar. Tv was really wild. The censors didnt know what to do. Stereotypes ran rampant and you never heard who was offended by it. Not that that is a good thing. It was just the way things were.

All these distractions are somehow worse than being bored. At least when you're bored, you can go stare out a window and clear your brain for a bit.

Being bored sucks but it's when you learn new skills or start being creative. I like to draw and that started by me doodling as a bored kid.

In the 70s no one gave a crap where we were on weekends. It was an awesome time to be a middle schooler.

How my friends and I survived is beyond me.

The '90s?? Imagine how we lived in the 50s, I remember!

I wish I could do that

In my teens my parents would give me $5 and send me out to play at like 8am and tell me to come home when the street lights came on.

My buddy Ray and I would go ride our bikes all over the place, our longest trip was like 30 miles to the next town over with our RC10's and gear in our backpacks for a day at the race track.

I remember having babysitters who did that. My mom would drop us off at like 7am, I'd try to go curl up on the couch and go back to sleep but the babysitter would come kick us kids outside for the day (including hers). Go in and eat at lunchtime, then back out to roam the neighborhood and find stuff to do/climb/explore until time to go home.

I mostly like how my life has turned out now that I'm in my forties but I sure do miss not caring about due dates and copays and where I set my phone down.

My mom encouraged me to talk to the boy around the corner playing basketball in his driveway (I went to a different district for elementary school). Then she's getting mad at me for not coming home directly after school, because I'm at my new friend's house.

She slowly adjusted to it. I was a laychkey kid anyway. I think me asking what she wanted me to cook for dinner, in high school, helped.

I bet they said the same about the 70’s in the 90’s

90s life as a kid was way different to now. We go home stinky and smiling. I still rock all the scars I have gotten doing stupid but fun stuff as a kid.

90's lol... You should have been there in the 80's. Got caught with homemade pipebombs? Parents got called. Driving your dirtbike on the road? Parent's got called. STICKING HUGE PIECE OF STEEL ON THE TRAINTRACK TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? Parents. called.

*Oddly what seemed like a giant piece of metal turns out was gnat in the mouth. Trains don't give a fuck. But the Engineer seeing some kids playing on train tracks? Yeah, he cared (Thank you engineer man for probably keeping us from getting splatted).

I haven’t been “bored” since 2003. So much distraction now

I tried explaining this to someone a few months ago. I haven’t been bored for a second since early college days (2004). It’s not a good feeling. Phone is definitely a reason why but obviously smartphones weren’t super interesting until 2010 ish.

Watching my eldest sibling play a bad video game because I had fuck all else to do and there was only one computer AND only one tv.

There was so much to do in the 90s inside as well though, so many new and exciting games/consoles.

Im Older Gen Z, and i dont feel like I can go more than 20 or so minutes without getting bored. There are some exceptions like movies and when i game with people, but its very easy to become disinterested. My attention span and my sense of focus are so fucked by the constant scrolling and dopamine buffett of our current times. Right now im commenting while listening to a podcast on my laptop and listening to music on my speaker. ADHD is a factor but I feel like almost everyone I’ve met my age or around it has a similar problem. Its an overstimulation thing I think 🤷

Something I’ve begun to wonder is if we’re evolving in a way that is making ADHD the default. I wasn’t diagnosed until I as an adult, and I think I managed to get by because there wasn’t as many aggravating factors for ADHD like electronics so integrated our daily lives. My problems worsened the older I got, mostly when having a laptop in class became required. I often wonder if this is causing us to evolve in a way that leads to our progeny being all the more likely to be neurodivergent.

I’d never considered it before. I just figured that a) we know better now; b) since there are more distractions, it’s more apparent and the signs more noticeable; and c) medicine has evolved so that we have a better understanding of how it manifests. But I am beginning to wonder if there are biological factors that are resulting from a rapidly scaling technological era.

My mom did that in the 1960a, she'd frisk me so I didn't have a book, shove me out the door and tell me to knock myself out bike riding or whatever.

"You've gotten on my last nerve! Get out! Outside, and don't come home till supper!"

Love you too mom, lol

The 90s wasn’t special… that was all of human existence before cell phones. I think we all just collectively know that technology has not improved the quality of our lives the way they always tried to convince us it would…

Maybe its all just been a big long mistake…

This is true. No more boring poops. No more long boring appts in a waiting room with a vogue magazine or readers digest. you always have something to distract you until your real mission begins

Just don't bring your phone to the toilet with you... Not getting fecal bacteria all over it would be reason enough, lol.

So, I understand where you're coming from here, but by this logic, every part of you is covered in fecal matter if you enter a bathroom or use the bathroom during the day. Your hair, shoes, clothes, watch, glasses, purse, etc. All of it. Covered in shit.

At least it's easier to wipe down a phone.

Growing up as a 90s kid the universal rule was to check in at home when the street lights come on.

That's a good trade-off worth mentioning here. The 90's was nice in that your life was just yours. No phonecalls or messages or updates or whatever. But without smartphones so many situations are just so boring. Growing up in the 90's and 00's I remember the long car trips, doctor's office waits, parties mostly filled with grown-ups and even just long pooping sessions where I had fuck all to do but stare around the room, especially in situations where I wasn't allowed to make any noise or leave the immediate area. I now get mad when I forget to bring it when I go to the bathroom. That's a type of nostalgia I don't want to indulge in.

not to mention that the disconnection is only fun when you want to be disconnected. When you needed to get in contact with people it could be crazy difficult, if you called someone on their landline you just had to hope someone would answer.

Meeting people in public was way harder to organise as well, you could arrange a time and a place but if you turned up and no-one was there all you could do was wait until they arrived or until you gave up

I remember watching the first SpongeBob movie alone in the cinema because I thought my friends bailed on me after they still hadn't shown up like we agreed before everyone started walking into the cinema. Kinda ruined the experience for me since I was mad about it. Afterwards I found out they did show up, just a bit later (probably when the trailers were playing or during the first 5-10 minutes of the film) and assumed I wasn't there because they didn't see me. So we saw the movie but didn't get to experience it together which would have made it a lot more enjoyable. I'm glad I don't have to worry about shit like that happening anymore.

I used to sit and stare at something til it stopped existing, just lost in my own head. I have forgotten how to do that and it’s fuckin stressful. I’ll open Reddit/imgur/etc upwards of 100 times a day. If I have time to look at my phone, I do, and I god damn hate that.

Recently went to the beach and didn’t want to ruin my phone in the sun or get it wet so I left it in the car. I spent probably half and hour to an hour with sheer anxiety over whether I should go get it in case it made a stupid noise. Once I got over that holy fuck what a nice day it was. Hours and hours without knowing what time it was, no calls/email/text, no apps, no dings and whistles, no apps calling my name. It was so nice I’m considering changing my job to something that doesn’t communicate with me outside of 9-5 type hours, or even at all preferably.

Once all my older family members are gone I’m strongly considering going without a phone. It’s so nice not having a gps tracking device on you at all times, and seeing 37 ads every time you touch it as well.

Just delete reddit and imgur

I have to have my phone for work. Emails come in literally constantly and thought I don’t need to respond to 99.99% of them they each have information I may need. So I’m unlocking my phone probably 20-30x a day for that. Then there’s the text messages, phone calls, time sheets are through an app, and I have to compose 3-5 emails a day at specific times. It’s near impossible to stay off of a site that has a webpage and app.

If I didn’t need my phone it would be different. My orther comment should have honestly been worded quite different - Reddit and imgur aren’t my problem, reliance on this “new” tech is the problem. It didn’t exist when I was growing up, now I carry a GPS tracking device that anyone can get ahold of me on everywhere I go. As an optional piece of tech it’s astounding! It’s easily 100-200x more powerful than the computers I grew up playing games on, it has a dedicated internet connection almost everywhere I go, and apps themselves are an incredible thing.

Now life requires that you have the son of a bitch on you at all times and it has lost a lot of its shine.

Yeah it sounds like it's your job that's the source of your stress. There's really not much stopping you from disengaging with your phone unless you're gonna get fired for it

Oh yeah I’d be unemployed pretty quick if I disengaged.

That's just your father being a shitty in attentive parent, it wasn't a wonderful gift or anything.

My father did the same thing... So he could do drugs.

Seems like you're projecting your experience on others

No there is this bullshit nostalgia about old parenting where they didn't give a shit about their kids. It might have been more interesting for the kids but the motives weren't some sort of brilliant parenting and I don't really let that fantasy play out.

There's nothing "good parenting" about wanting to not see your kid all day.

I think there's this mid-ground you're missing. It's not necessarily an 'either or' situation. Like, my parents were.. ok. Not good, just ok. And I'm a parent now and a pretty attentive one. In this increasingly 'high stakes' society, where 'helicopter parenting' and 'tigermums' are things, there's almost this expectation/standard that if you're not attentive enough, you'll fuck-up your kids' lives. And I agree that sometimes there's a bullshit nostalgia for what in some instances probably did amount to neglect, but... there really is something to be said for letting kids be bored, letting them figure some shit out themselves. For example, went on holiday recently with fam, out in country, no mobile phone internet reception. Kids were pretty antsy first day, without screens etc. But when they realised whatever fun was to be had they had to make for themselves, they got out amongst it, played in nature, in the dirt, around the campfire pit, etc. And yeah, what you say is true: not wanting to see them all day isn't good parenting. I think in most instances though, in the 90s, it wasn't that they didn't want to, more that there wasn't an expectation in society that you had to, so they, just, didn't.

You know what? That's pretty fair assessment. I'm definitely being black and white about it. My parents are in the same boat, even though my father fought addiction my whole life he still tried to be a dad, it wasn't like those lifetime movies or whatever else where you envision this abusive maniac. He was just... Kind of shitty. Like slept through taking me to function so friends a few times shitty. Didn't really go beyond that.

I think you're right about kids figuring stuff out themselves. A big part of why we spend so much time outside as kids is basically because there was nothing to fucking do inside, except watch the goddamn idiot box all day. So you kind of had to make your own entertainment. Kids still do those same things now though, they're just using Minecraft and Roblox instead of frisbees and hockey sticks.

It's a sore subject for me because I was severely bullied by the neighborhood kids for trying to play games with them, and it wasn't until the NES showed up and saved me from that being the only avenue of entertainment that I started to have any self worth. Before that, I just basically was like... Well I want to play, so I guess I'll just let them be mean to me since this is all I've got.

Kids today are really lucky they don't have to worry about this sort of thing, they can choose and they don't have to engage with toxic people if they don't want to.

I hope you’re doing better now. You sound like a good person who just struggled with things growing up. I hope you have a good life now.

I'm one of the lucky ones. Everything turned out a lot better than it started. Lucky Dad of a really sweet boy, got a wife that is everything I ever dreamed about him more, got a good job now too.

Where you come from doesn't have to be where you stay. I'm happy to say that the positive changes in my life have also led to my family making some positive changes too.

Which is honestly why I feel so passionate about this stuff. The same people lecturing me for letting my son watch a video on my phone are the people who sat me in front of a cathode ray spewing idol in their living room for 20+ years; it's not about outside or inside, screens or face to face, sports vs video games. It's all about what you choose to do with them. In my world, playing outside was the most toxic place you could be.

I too am breaking the cycle. All the best to you stranger.

That’s a really good point. Do kids even say “damn I’m bored” anymore? They have so much access to entertainment now.

Same here. In the morning it was get outside and play just be home before dark

Yea, that is so true. I still remember we would sit and just stare at shit. Go read a book for excitement.

Weird to miss being bored. But I honestly think there is a level of contemplation people often had back then that is just gone mostly now.

Oh, my stepdad just locked us out so he could shoot up privately.

same. Go outside stay out there for a few hours. We'd do all kinds of shit. Went to the bike path, venture off into the woods and play in a creek or some shit. Just any random stuff. Sometimes if we found nothing we'd just sit on the swings at the neighborhood little playground and just chill and talk for a bit then ride our bikes home lol.

My parents did this too. I couldn’t even come in for water. Had to drink from the hose. I remember the absolute peak of my childhood because either I went outside with friends, or I stayed home and played RuneScape. There was no loosing for me at the time

The early 2000's were still like that, we still had to log on the family computer to chat on msn.

i was born in the early 2000's but i wasn't old enough to remember most of it. i do remember some things from late 2000's and god do i miss it

Haha, good times! I feel the same way about the 90's, born in it and remembers some things.

You would have talked on the phone a lot more. I did. Now I hate talking on the phone unless absolutely necessary.

i prefer that over text tbh. i hate texting

Or they just assumed you were dead.

………….

The 90’s were a special time

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Wait until you hit 40 😂

Wait until you hit 49!

Hahahahahah touché

i wish i could have :( feel like i was born in the wrong generation. everybody cares about stupid shit now

Take up camping, hiking, canoeing. You can be off the grid for days and take a breather. 99% chance that the world didn't burn down while you were gone.

As an 80s kid, I went outside a lot and made tree forts and had rock wars.

People would also just randomly show up to your house, though.

that happened a bit in the 00's too. ah i miss that

I have a job that is shift work and our schedules vary so I might be working mornings or afternoons or overnights on any given day.

Everyone in my life knows they can text me whenever because I put my phone on sleep mode when I’m asleep, but I’ve slowly trained them to expect that there’s a good chance I’m working or sleeping so I won’t get back quickly.

I can now just leave my phone on silent all day and no one takes or personal.

It was a glorious time to be a kid. My dad would give me $3-5, I would ride my bike into town 5+ miles away at 6 years old, go to the town park all day to play/watch baseball, buy a hot dog and an All-Sport at the concession stand and then come home at dinner time. No cell phone or anything, it was wild. Then I would fire up OoT on the N64 or play RCT at night.

Best era for us introvert. Worse time for my mom tho lolll Still since im a guy she was les afraid for me then my sister and at some point she just accept the fact that i wont call and im safe.

I just ran and biked around all day during summers with my cousins and friends. We'd climb trees, swim in rivers or go to the beach.

Litter was much worse, there was dogshit all over the streets in the UK, absolutely EVERYONE smoked.

The clothes you wore to a pub or bar had to be put straight in the wash the day after because they'd reek of tar. I remember after the indoor smoking ban came in there was about six months when pubs smelled utterly revolting because the constant cloud of smoke had been covering up this nasty fug of sweat, piss and, well, stale tobacco that now came to the fore and all the pubs had to be deep-cleaned to get rid of it.

On the subject of clothes, for some reason none of them fit very well; I think it was just that good fabric wasn't as affordable then. Football tops and track suit bottoms were the go-to casual wear and tube socks were often actual tubes with square toe and no heel.

Cars belched fumes because catalytic converters weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. If you wanted to pay by card, you had to put your card in a silly plastic frame with a slider that pressed it against carbon paper and then sign it; everyone's wallets were stuffed with the "customer copy" sheet from these purchases.

In the UK at least, it was a novelty for there to be a movie on TV so everyone watched Flight of the Navigator more times than it deserved. If you wanted porn you had to rent it, find it in a bush or watch shit French b-movies on late-night channel 4. Renting videos was expensive, and you'd have to take them back afterwards. The internet was "bulletin boards" - actually literally phoning into someone else's computer; you paid by the minute for the phone call, and they might be engaged.

Music was inconvenient, too. You'd likely have two dozen albums if you were a music enthusiast and "piracy" was recording an album onto a cassette tape, which were shit; they'd distort over time and every so often unravel in your player. If you wanted to replay a track, you had to carefully wind it back first. You'd know your walkman batteries were getting low because the tape would start to pitch-shift down. If you sing Bryan Adams in a Droopy voice to 90s kids, they'll reflexively wonder if they have any AAs that they can cannibalize. Youth: stop trying to bring cassettes back. They belong dead.

It was awesome! Simpler times but in a good way.

Of you actually thnik the 90s were simpler tmes I don't what to tell you

It was simpler compared to current times in many ways.

It was great

It's entirely possible to do that today. You just have to be willing to get rid of your cellphone and get a landline phone.

well yeah it is possible but people would still find it unusual

Or just leave you cell phone at home. It's like... super easy to do. People do it accidentally sometimes.

Good times…

you can still live like the 90’s. Nobody is forcing you to have your cell phone at the ready.

When I was ten, I left the house in the morning, walked through the woods with my buddy, came out by a creek, followed that, ended up downtown somehow, then went to the candy store and walked back home. Didn’t get home until 6 or 7 at night.

When my parents asked what I did that day, I just said “eh, nothing special,” and they moved on.

Now, if I don’t stand with my kids at the bus stop, I get side eyed like I’m some shitty dad.

Exactly. Also not knowing about everyone’s vacations or any other FOMO type of activity. Blissfully ignorant.

Bro I wish if there’s no social media , I swear it’s ruined too many things … 😢

Just don't participate. My only social media account is Reddit.

I'm 36, so as an adult, I don't know what that feels like, but damn, up until maybe senior year of high school, having no cell phone and dial-up internet was awesome for that lol. It would be nothing to just be unavailable for days at a time. Something really relaxing about that.

God that’d be nice to get back.

Just turn off the device for today and turn it back on tomorrow. Nothing will happen, just do it.

Hopping on the bike to go meet up with friends and your folks having to do a call to each possible house to see if you were there/ are there now if they needed you… I know it’s cliche but really, much simpler times.

I still accomplish this pretty often I just shut my phone off the whole day.

Or calling in a missing persons report/welfare check.

Also not being constantly under surveillance sure security cameras existed but you didn’t have to worry about everyone having their own personal camera/video recorder recording your every embarrassing moment.

Man, just yesterday I got off work, logged off, go to do stuff, and suddenly get an email at like 7pm that I needed to get some files in cause stuff happened.

Was thinking how I would be unreachable if I worked at another point in time.

In the 90s, it would have been your pager going off instead of an email coming through, lol.

Ha. I still do it and don’t give a flying shit. I’ll check my email Sunday night. I go camping. Only my SO and parents know where I’ll be. 😂

The real question is why do you hang out with people who think you're rude for not immediately responding to them? Sounds like your friends are kind of just dicks.

Yeah, I understand that work related things might have this problem. But all of my friends (and even people you would call acquaintances) understand that I have other stuff to do. They also have other stuff to do. The only problem that happens if I don't respond quickly is that then I wouldn't get a quick reply from them if I wanted one.

Or without anyone thinking you're dead.

I hate today’s culture around this. I have friends who get genuinely bothered if I’m offline for a day. This generation is obsessed with instant gratification.

I think generally people who already are always offline or unreachable their friends and such get used to it.

Although i do like having atleast a friend or two who will talk to me daily (doesn’t matter if respond fast tho) but it’s usually someone who also uses their phone a lot

I still do that pretty frequently myself and even though all my friends and family know, they still freak out about it.

Whenever I'm at home and not at work in the home office my phone is on my bedside table. So if someone calls or texts I don't typically hear it right away.

I broke up with a high school boyfriend because I was just tired of trying to find him at the various teenage hangouts. Trying to explain life before phones just sounds wild sometimes.

So many people now have the expectation that you are able to respond at any time. I’ve had times where I’d wake up to find things like a client emailed me at 2 am, again at 4 am demanding to know why I wasn’t responding to the first email, and then a 6 am email cc’ing my boss admonishing me for not answering emails and demanding action.

It’s insane.

Rememberg being 11 or 12, after lunch me and friends grabbed our bikes and going out without a destination, just out, we use to return near sunset, of course mom didn't had a clue where we were and it was ok.

When I think about that as a dad of two girls today, man parenting in the 80's was so less demading than now.

Our house does what we call blackout 1-2 weekends a month. We shut off all the phones and only do movies or video games that are for the whole family. If someone needs us we’ve been at the same house almost 20 yrs.

I just continue to pretend this is the case. I'll answer within a day or so. The people who have a problem with this do in fact, weed themselves out, lol. I'm left with way more mellow buddies that way at least!

You can still do that today. I don't have any social media other than WhatsApp. I just leave my phone in the other room and just do my thing.

It was so nice to be out with friends or whatever and just be out. Also in college if you weren't home, that was it. Your parents, your job, whoever just had to leave a message. It was great. Everyone out paying attention to each other instead of trying to get the perfect pic or checking their feed or whatever.

Wish my boss would understand that. If he calls me when I get into an elevator, I’ll have like 7 missed called from him when I reach the top floor

I joined a golf club primarily because I didn't get reception there and could spend the entire day without feeling tethered to my phone. It was a nice and fun course to play, but the seclusion really put it over the top for me.

I've turned off all of my notifications so I don't look at my phone til I want to. I'm tired of ads and shit and constantly feeling my phone vibrate.

I had a beeper for years when I was working for shit wages but needed something to give to people, and people keep getting pissed off that they'd send me a random page and I'd not respond within minutes. I'd be out in the middle of the sticks fishing the mouth of a creek on my day off and out of the blue I'd get some random text from some number I don't recongnize. No, I'm not walking the 5 miles back to to my truck, and then drive another 5 miles to a payphone, and then using my limited supply of pocket change to call you back.

I held out on getting a cellphone till like 2004 so that I'd not have to actually answer those calls, but I had a road trip and needed to be able to make a phone call in the desert if I broke down. After that I still didn't carry it with me 24/7 for years, and made sure people knew that I rarely had my cellphone on me. People were like "How do you live like that?" and I'm like "How do YOU live like that?" Honestly I didn't start really carrying my cellphone everywhere until I got a smart phone with a camera, and then my friends and family would get upset when I'd simply reply by texting them a picture of me at the lake, a fish I caught that day, or on a discgolf course after not picking their calls.

Oh I miss that quite a bit.

This should be the top comment.

I have that. I don't carry a cellphone.

I wonder if this contributed to less stress as an employer/business owner, or even employee. You left work, you left your land line. You went home and enjoyed your family until the next morning when you got your messages from the secretary. Sounds lovely.

If you were a fancy employer or boss, you had an ‘answering service’ that people could call to leave you messages at any time. It was like a human answering machine. People would call a number and leave messages with a person and, if it was important/urgent, that person would call around and try to find you. If not, you would check in periodically to get your messages.

This is why, in old movies, people get phone calls in restaurants and the waiter lugs s telephone to the table. It was often their answering service with an important message or someone who’d called the service and been told where to find you.

Sometimes I go out and just don't bring my phone. It's really nice. You can totally do it. I promise the world won't end.

This is why we take cruises. We have an excuse to be unplugged without needing to be miles from civilization.

I was going to say, in the same vein, going to your friends homes, knocking on their door, and asking if they wanted to hang out without texting or calling first.

I have a manager at work who will send “hey!” And if I don’t reply within 60 seconds “you there?” “Nina?” “Got a sec?”

I’m taking a shit, ffs

I just, for the first time in my life, got a real phone this year at 26. I had been coasting for years using a free texting app, and like whatever free wifi I could find, but I finally decided to get a real phone and data. Everyone knew this so it was never a thing if I didn't respond for 12 hours or even a day or two. My last 8 years of general unreachability was really nice though and a big reason for not doing the upgrade (mostly though I'm just cheap). I've just flat out told everyone though that like even though I have a real phone now I still might not respond immediately sometimes

That was so nice. I used to leave the house at 8am at 10 years old and be gone ALL day.

My 9.5 year old can’t do that.

Same town but the population has doubled and traffic is terrible. I could walk down some of the roads here and not see a car for 5-10 minutes. Now it’s rare to go 5-10 seconds without seeing a car.

Plus everyone is distracted. The world isn’t safe for kids to wander like we did.

The other day, I forgot I left my phone on mute. It was a busy work day, so I never even looked at my phone.

I got a worried call from my mom and sister, they were concerned that I hadn't responded to anyone all day.

Which, was kinda heartwarming actually, but on the flipside - I guess I AM always readily available all the time. It's exhausting.

I'm doing this right now. Going cross country for 5 weeks and unplugging as much as possible.
Of course, I felt compelled to inform a number of people ahead of time. But I'm sure there are still people trying to get a hold of me and I don't give a shit.

I feel like I just barely got to experience this in my life.. from 96 to ~05-06 after the iPhone it was over for sure🫤

If you never answer your phone for anyone, no one thinks it's unusual.

PSA: It's totally okay to work this back into your life today!

Fair to say a full day is harder to swing these days, but it's totally possible to get back into the habit of not having your phone on you all the time or everywhere you go.

Cheating in the 90s must have been wild. Calling the house and praying the husband/wife/bf/gf of the person doesn’t pick up and if they do just hang up. “Why do people keep calling and hanging up! as they lose their mind.” lol

I mean honestly I still do this. If I’m working or not working, I usually put my phone on Do Not Disturb and no one makes a big deal out of it. They just assume I’m busy.

Yeah if anyone thinks it's rude that's their problem.

This attitude bothers me so much. Because it *is* usual or rude nowadays. Now if I'm just sending you something trivial I don't care if I don't get an immediate response. Although I might feel very slightly slighted if I don't hear back after a day, since it nobody likes feeling ignored. But if I'm calling you it's because there's something urgent that I need to talk to you about. I've been locked out of my apartment for an hour knowing full well my roommate was inside because he never looks at his phone. Talk about frustrating.

Then there's the matter of my father. He is impossible to pin down, just does whatever he wants without consulting anyone. Leaving his phone behind or dead for days. He's like an outdoor dog that just returns home to sleep. Imagine trying to plan anything with a person like that in your life. You an never make adjustments, never confirm dates or times. I was home visiting for the first time in years and when I woke up he was gone and nobody knew where he went. Turns out he went out fishing on the lake to catch some fresh fish for dinner.

I still don't have a cel phone ... it's awesome !!

That really sets a perspective

I miss this. My phone crapped out on me a few weeks ago and it was so nice not having a phone for a couple of days and being able to say to my coworkers/boss "oh sorry I didn't get your after hours call/email. My phone is broken."

I just spent 9 days out of country, I told everyone, work, family, friends that I wouldn't have cell service there and wasn't sure if my air BNB had wifi.

Had perfect cell service already included in my plan with plenty of free mobile data, air BNB had faster internet than I do at home, but it felt so fucking good to just not be "on demand" for a few days.

I do this when I go camping… “sorry, no service”

This is why beepers existed. People could reach you, if both of you were by a phone during the same window of time.

I'm completely reachable for the entire day, no one just reaches out to me though.

I just tell people in no uncertain terms that I may not respond for a day. Nobody I’ve wanted in my life has ever failed to understand that. It used to be that we could assume certain boundaries, now we need to enforce them

I stepped away from my computer for 2 hours to take a nap when I got home today. I wake up to an absolute shit storm in my email box. No rest for the weary lol.

A good first step is to not walk around staring at your phone or eating while using your phone.....if you do either.

Being completely unreachable in an arcade where games cost a quarter!

Or that you were dead.

Like dude, where the fuck is Matt? I haven't seen him in a week. His truck has been parked down on Bridge St for two days. I hope he is around this weekend, he is a trip.

Actual conversation from 1991.

I want to know what gyms were like before cellphones

Unless you were a kid "Call me once an hour" "But what if I'm not at a friend's house" "Then you shouldn't be where you are"

I "forget" and leave my phone at home sometimes.

Passing notes in class because there was texting lol.

yeah Tbf this is mostly only true in first world countries

Liked and disliked it. I like not being obligated to others' sense of entitlement to my time, but hate not being able to reach out to anyone if I had a problem. There is only so much I can do on my own.

I recently flew to NYC and my wife accidentally left her phone at home. Every time we went someplace we agreed on a meetup place if we got lost and it completely reminded me of life before cell phones. It was honestly comforting to make a plan and stick to it.

Just tell people you need some alone time and are going off grid for a while.

Oh I miss this so much!! Now n days you got the boss calling or texting you while your off of work like your available to them 24/7! Hello I'm off I do not want to be texting you nor talking with you on my own time!

I discussed this with my older coworkers, I’m 26, in our call today. They told me about a thing called a “party call” that was common in neighborhoods and apartments. 90% of the humor in Seinfeld would be ruined by cellphones.

Piggybacking on that: payphones.

I was going to say pagers made up for that and now non-existent

Nowadays if you can't reach someone for 6 hours you start thinking about calling the cops. Can't believe I'd be gone for a solid 10 hours as a 12 year old and my parents wouldn't worry.

The few times I've fully broken my phone, I liked to say "I'm pretending it's the 90s"

That's what I love about the trips I have with family up north. The only time I have my phone on me is when we leave the property and that's mostly for GPS. It feels really good.

With the internet out in Canada last week, it felt like the good old days. No one could reach you all day but now people care and get stressed. I miss that feeling of just starting your day and see you sometime and that was normal

Yeah... Fuck im at work and my spouse calls me about the most asinine shit. I wish I was unreachable sometimes.

I remember this but still replicate it constantly

I know this may sound kind of "back in my day-esque" but I remember being like 8-9 in the 90s and literally just going to fuck around in the woods barefoot all day and come back for dinner.

Like full on "just don't get lost" from my mom or dad and popping off to do whatever.

You didn’t have a beeper? Around 1994 I worked retail and the little kiosk out front sold pagers….that place was a constant madhouse.

That is the main reason I don't have a cell phone. Totally worth the minor inconveniences, IMO.

Especially work. I feel like employers expect people to respond right away, even if it's off hours and not an emergency.

Sorry, boss, I'm not gonna respond to that right now, I'm too busy enjoying my life.

Born in 83 so spent my formative years in the 90s. I remember begging and pleading with my parents to get me a beeper(which they eventually did, only to be confiscated by my highschool). I'm now nearly 40 and miss being uncontactble

So I still respond to most people a day later. Just because my phone can receive messages doesn't mean I want to read and reply the moment they come in.

People have started to call me out on it. Still dgaf

I was confused for a second because I still live like this. People will hit me up but I'm just not attached to my phone anymore.

I had a phone with a shitty battery that wouldn't last 5 hours on a full charge. It was kinda nice just leaving it on the charger most of the time and not always having it on me. Had to finally get a new phone for work tho : /

I can still do this and it's amazing. The only caveat is having no friends though.

I still do this when I go to the spa. No phones allowed obviously due to cameras and such plus there's no place to hold a camera when you're nude

It's fantastic to be unplugged for the day.

I miss this one so much.

I took a 2 hour bike ride the other day with my phone on vibrate (but entirely ignored), my wife was freaking out when I got home since I had been out of contact for "so long."

Don't tell her but I'll be putting my phone completely on silent next time.

I work hazmat clean up and went on a spill yesterday at 11:15am. Got to the hotel at midnight and went back to work from 10am-10pm. I've sent 6 or 7 texts and called only my fiance for like 20 minutes over the last 36 hours or so. Have to agree it was pretty great even with having to work those hours.

Now it's like "Man reported missing after 5 hours is finally found hanging out at a bar"

I've finally muted my phone. I love my solitude and just don't want it interrupted any more. This decision was precipitated by a truly awful customer from my small business who kept calling me with passive-aggressive BS. The only bad customer I've had in 5 years, but it was enough to say, fuck it. I'm just not available to people like you. Phone's been off ever since (I usually contact people via email/text when necessary).

At some point over the pandemic, I accidentally changed my phone from vibrate to full silent. Haven't liked back. Best accidental decision in my life. Lol

The phone is there for my convenience not anyone else's. I don't answer any calls I'm not expecting and I respond to texts when I'm ready to.

America On Line CDs in the mail 3-4 times a month

Calling every month to say you aren't pleased with the service, and getting comped full months for retention purposes. Now ISPs are just like, "lolok" because they know there are no other players in the game.

"Son, there is no bottom of the barrel from here, we are the bottom of the barrel. You ain't trading up."

If you just loaded the disk so it connected to the net and opened the sign up window… you didn’t have to finish the sign up. You could use it with ever signing in. Just get a hotmail account. ;)

Never got that to work with AOL. That worked with NetZero and Excite when they had an ISP.

Your game was on another level man, lol, I would have never even thought of that

I could've built a fort with all those damn CD's if I had saved them...

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Lol, amazed someone else used to do that. My first memory when i saw them mentioned.

We would either use them as shitty frisbees or throw them at each other and block/smack them out of the air with toy lightsabers.

The first time someone shattered one with the lightsaber is a core memory for me.

Wow, I put one in a vice once and I think it bent over in half without snapping. I was expecting it to explode. Nothing. Worst day of my life

We got so many of those CD's that my sister took them and basically had entire wall in her bedroom covered with them. The shiny side with none of the wording was the side you seen so it actually looked pretty cool.

Put those suckers in the microwave for about 4 seconds. When mom and dad weren’t home of course.

When I turned 16 I got my first checking account and immediately set up my own AOL account because my parents didn’t want me to have internet on the computer in my room. Just grabbed one of the random AOL cds hanging out in the junk drawer. Somehow they never questioned the bill delivered to me every month.

I remember an older guy I knew once thinking he was the shit because he thought he had enough AOL CDs for like 2000 hours of free service. The look on his face when I had to break it to him that that's not how it worked was priceless.

They sent out 3.5" floppies (which you could also get free in some stores) before that. My friends and I would reformat them and use them for our pirated games.

I would go to the big computer store, and grab a pile of them from the bin by the front door on my way out. A few times, I was able to grab whole shrink-wrapped bundles. I was working in the computer biz at the time, and we were used to handing over re-labeled AOL disks to each other all the time. Beware of the red disks from Network Associate's employees.

Everytime I see an .aol email I'm like "woah".

"Hey guys, we just got some more free discs. Now we can finish wallpapering the computer room!"

Blockbuster having their CDs at checkout too.

Microwave ‘em for a few seconds and get a cheap lightning show

Great coasters

Not a great frisbee though. It goes forward for about 8 feet and then straight into the air…then straight into the ground, shattering. The worst part was getting yelled at by your dad for not cleaning them up good enough.

No the worst part was finding that tiny shard that you missed and pulling it out of your foot.

I still have a stack of those thin metal tins they used to send the cd's out in, somewhere in a storage closet.

I think i was getting free internet for 2-3 years in early 2000's

At that point there were 3-4 companies that were sending CDs with 1-3 free months. Aol, Net (Zero or something), Kmart bluelight and some other company. Basically cycled through them every few months.

This was my gateway drug into piracy as well. Now I'm downloading electric cars and more RAM like a rebel.

I worked with a guy who was apart of that original AOL CD push. He apologizes.

That was a weird marketing strategy. I don't know a single soul who paid them any money.

They capitalized the money spent on AOL CDs (put it on the books as an asset) making the company look more valuable than it was. It worked out great for AOL stock and terrible for whatever cable company was dumb enough to buy them.

Time Warner

lmao isn’t this one of the worst if not the worst acquisitions of all time

wasn’t just an acquisition if I remember correctly either aol got a lot of time warner stock

Our artsy neighbors made windchimes with those CDs hanging off of them as pendulum weights.

*3-4 times per week, corrected...lol...at least for me in SoCal and SLC

Those were always fun to put in the microwave as a kid.

Oh yeah. Forgot about the free frisbees!

The only spam mail I ever got any use out of

Oops, look like a hyphen snuck in there

I keep getting fake job offers from Indian dudes with AOL email addresses.
Makes me laugh every time that they think those aren't the biggest red flag.

“Hey look! They sent us more free frisbees!”

I hated when they switched to CDs. I used to repurpose every floppy they sent me.

Please do not try this at home but I remember taking those CDs and propping them up with a fork in the microwave and then turning on the microwave for 3 seconds. There would be a loud pop and then when you opened the microwave the disc would have a really cool, almost lightning strike in nature, pattern burned into the disc.

Again, I must iterate that I do not want others to try this at home as I'm not sure what could have changed in microwave technology or if different strength microwaves could cause different results. Also, putting metal in the microwave is just plain dumb.

They were lying around in electronics stores when I was a young teenager. My dad and I would take a dozen each time. They weren't of much use in terms of free internet, but you could make cool sculptures of them by heating areas up with a lighter, then shaping them with a pen. Made great UFOs, for example.

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.

Yep, my whole family came from Croatia to Hungary in 1510 (I have the entire family tree since, it’s wild to look at) and most are still there with a few coming to the States, myself included, but they will absolutely bring strangers into their homes if there’s any sort of connection to family and will make incredible food for you. And if you’re not hungry…yes you are!

I love this! Wish all people were that welcoming.

That’s a beautiful story

I know some Croatians, yeah I believe that story.

That totally reminds me of Perfect Strangers.

The fact that his name was Oreste makes this like ten times funnier. Hope he didn't murder your mother's stepfather.

It was my mom's dad lol. And he's become a big part of the family, even back in Italy where they didn't know about him either. He even took the family last name a few years later

Omg that just reminded me of the guy my aunt met in Switzerland to whom she said something like "hey, if you're ever in x area, look me up" when she was headed home... and a few weeks later he turned up on our doorstep. Good grief, he was so weird.

European vacation.

This would make an interesting twist on the "Wedding Crashers" idea for a movie, if it hasn't already been done. Guy shows up and claims to be related to you and ends up mooching of you and becoming a sentimentally non-related family member. Could be your real cousin has a friend that wants to visit your country. Your cousin says, "I have an aunt and uncle in ??America??. Gives his friend your names and address and says they've never met me and here's a few things you should know. I'm thinking it's probably happened somewhere, sometime. "Oooh, your mom never called me to say you were coming." "Well, that's the thing you see. She wanted it to be a surprise!" Would be farfetched today, but not back in the day with long distance calls, party lines, and emigration.

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.

One day when I was a kid, pretty much every friend from my neighborhood showed up at my house. It must’ve been a situation where they went to someone’s house and were told they were at my house, because they all showed up. That was kind of stressful keeping everyone entertained.

And people could speak with each other. With meaning, or humor, or just passing time.

Everyone had an opinion on everyone else's voice. Each voice was nice, or raspy, or shrill, or whatever it was -- it was part of who they were. Now we don't even hear them.

Nowadays it seems some people have lost the ability to look at another human being and speak with them directly.

In my hometown, people still do this. And it’s the thing I miss most of all

The kids in my neighborhood do this with my daughter. They all just rotate between the houses. It’ll be all calm and quiet and suddenly 6 and 7-year olds will be there wanting snacks and jumping on the furniture. I’ll give them popsicles and corral them outside, reminding myself that this will be the best part of their childhoods…before they all get cellphones.

This made me extremely sad.

I so miss this. Just go for a drive, end up in town, and pop by a friend's house to see what they're up to or if they wanna play some Playstation or get something to eat.

My parents once took me to Hamburg to buy a ship at a junkyard. My dad asked the owner, if he had a telephone book. His best friend from childhood had been a sailor and my grandmother knew from the friend's mother that he lived in Hamburg since he retired. There were three people with the same name in the phone book. My father called them all (I clearly remember sitting in this junkyard office). His friend was at home, told us to come over. We spent the whole weekend there. They just picked up their friendship where they had stopped 35 years ago. Unfortunately the friend died a few years ago, but my parents are still in contact with his wife.

I’m from a country in Europe and up until now I thought this was something typical of the US because I only knew it from movies.

I would have expected this to still be a thing 😂

My kids and their friends still do it.

They just ride their bikes and knock on the door. Nothing strange about it.

The late 80s and mid 90s in America saw a rash of crimes against children and disappearances/kidnappings that were heavily sensationalized in the media. Slowly over the course of the 90s and 2000s this led to a shift in how comfortable a lot of Americans were with letting young people just sort of bum around and do whatever. Where I grew up was in a small country town of less than a thousand people and it was totally common to just drop in places because everyone knew everyone. It was common for gangs of kids to just bike or walk around rounding up their friends to play games and such and usually once you left the house your instructions would be to call if you ended up somewhere else for dinner. Once I moved to the city in the early 2000s parents there were much stricter about where you were going and at what times you did it. By the time I was a teenager and phones were common many of my friends moms were basically in constant contact with them all day long.

That had nothing to do with media or kids being kidnapped. That's just a suburb vs city thing. All of my friends & I could just pop in whenever when I was a kid (graduated HS in 2015) because we lived in the same neighborhood or it was like a 10-20 minute bike ride away. But people I know from cities wouldn't do that because of the crime in certain areas that might be between them and their friends house. Or they couldn't play in specific parks because of the drug dealers/users who were there

Might depend on where you live, when my parents were teens this was the case, nowadays even spontaneous plans still typically involve a bit of foresight in my area

Aaaah ... the pop-in.

We're in our 30 with kids and we were at the other end of town and thought we'd knock on our friend's door and see if they and their kids were free for us to pop in for a quick catch up and they were mortified when they answered the door 😂 "did we make plans? Why are you here? Our house is a mess"

"why are you here" hahahaha

Yup! I'd ride my bike over to my buddy's house to see if he was home. If it wasn't going to be long, his folks would invite me in. His mom would usually make me a sandwich and I could watch TV while I was waiting. Good times! Then we'd take off on our bikes - no phones, just home by the time the streetlights came on.

I still do that

Same, and it usually has a very positive response.

Do they view you as creepy?

My actual nightmare now!

Where I'm from, that's actually frowned upon unless you're really close. Because when you have a guest, you're expected to show a certain level of hospitality. Like there should be a meal, some time is put aside to entertainment them. The guest gets undivided attention. Showing up unannounced gives us no time to prepare and makes it seem like we're bad hosts

Growing up, my mother has always taught me this was rude.

My then-gf-now-ex and I did this to a couple friends a few years back. We had a pretty awkward conversation for about a half hour on their porch. Didn't try again after that.

If you can’t show up at your friends house unannounced you don’t have friends.

This made me really sad. I think I’m too young to have ever experienced this. And it sounds like it was fun :(

We did it because we were bored out of our minds and hoped they would be too. I am never bored anymore w pocket internet

The pop in 😠

I hate when people do that nowadays. I hate people nowadays.

Still do this 🤷‍♀️

Until it's that ONE "friend" shows up and you havnt seen them in almost a decade for good reason and you just want them to leave.

And you were welcomed, sometimes even offered food. Now you would be considered rude and an intruder. I know I don’t open my door to “the unannounced” !

My dad still does this, going unannounced to friends or family. Drink coffee and have a chat when they’re home or just tour through the countryside when they’re not home.

OMG WHY TF ARE YOU HERE????

I don’t miss this at all lol

Showing up at someone’s house unannounced because you were in the neighborhood and wanted to say hi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CznoAW2k1I

And people being happy to see you and giving you a cookie they just made.

Those 'visits' were wonderful, even if was just for 20 minutes while someone was cleaning or doing other things, but talking to you.

People knew what was going on with each other's whole family in those days.

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.

Yeah you just have to target the right audience. The kids who played in arcades have families now. I’m sure serving alcohol will help.

Today’s kids can just play games on their phones so why would they want to be around sweaty strangers?

I think that's why Dave & Busters has been able to survive and succeed. Passable chain-sports-bar food on one side, arcade games and prizes on the other. It's not a coin op hole where kids loiter after school, it's a cheap evening out with the kids.

“cheap evening out” wait til you need to buy the play cards

Or, do like I did and build your own machine at home.

that’s a bit more expensive than play cards

Not really. Like $800 or less, which is about 8 nights out at Dave and busters. But I guess that would require willpower and saving up for something instead of instant gratification, obvious not in your wheelhouse.

They literally make arcade versions of phone games now.

Arcades still exist but they're 90% shitty ticket games

Ugh, don't remind me. I recently went to a Dave and Busters and they had a huge (over 6 feet tall, and nearly as wide) Spider-Man arcade game. The only controls were a single button to shoot your web stingers at the right time. The whole game looked like a basic Quick-Time-Event. I'm so disappointed in current arcade games. :(

Nah out here in Pittsburgh they're like adult-oriented hip places opening up for that. They have bowling and stuff but its def targeting an older clientele.

Same in NC. They only allow people under 21 before 9pm. I personally love it.

Similarly, there's a nostalgia arcade called 1984 in Springfield, Missouri. It's got a ton of classic titles like Rampage, Super Mario, a ton of pinball machines, and even had Rampart (one of my all time favorite arcade games). Arcade machines might not be everywhere but they aren't completely extinct.

I was just there a couple of weeks ago. Where I live we have 2 big arcades and 4 places dedicated to pinball. Two hours North of Boston in New Hampshire is a place I've been a couple of times that is the 70s/80s arcade games mecca called Funspot. They have literally every arcade game ever made. The place is awesome. If I lived closer I would go all the time.

I’m in NY on the border of Mass. I might need to take a road trip.

I edited my comment, it is actually called Funspot.

https://www.funspotnh.com/attractions.php

They seriously have every game made, I love the place. If you have to sell your wife on a trip to an arcade the Lake Winnapausakee area is beautiful. The White Mountains are nearby and you can take the cog rail up Mt. Washington.

Covid killed off Denver's best arcade Hyperspace. But there's still a few 1Ups for the barcade experience. Hard to find anything but the traditional meme "classic" games. Seems like pinball is having a nice resurgence though.

They have one in western MA, too! South Hadley area, near Amherst. I think it’s in an old boxcar or has something to do with trains.

Funspot is where the king of Kong was filmed fwiw

There's a kill screen coming up

Thanks. Still nothing like putting a quarter on the line. I'll try to make my way there from Toronto.

And of course, if you're taking the time to travel to Funspot, don't forget to take some time to watch the Documentary King Of Kong and learn about Billy Mitchell!

ETA: link to the movie on YouTube https://youtu.be/lXLQqcHcJDQ

Rampart - highly underrated.

I've been to about half a dozen barcade style places in the past few years (precovid and some in the past year) I still have yet to find one with my all time favorite arcade game.. Revolution X (the Aerosmith haptic gun game)

Start Bar in St. Louis has Revolution X!

I believe that they had it at 1984, but I could be wrong. There were a lot of games out of commission because of technical difficulties. I talked to the owner a couple times and he said that most of the technical issues they have come from trying to override the quarter mechanisms on the machines or from people being really harsh on the controls.

As a Gen X computer programmer, I welcome the return of our 8-bit overlords.

As an early millennial who grew up playing the arcades at my local Pizza Hut, I am also eager for the 8-bit overlords return. I keep hoping an arcade bar pops up in my town.

Ahh… a girl can dream.

Get yourself a raspberry pi, install RetroPie, download all the emulators and games you could ever desire. Bonus points if you build a cool cabinet to house said system.

As a computer engineer, I welcome our 8 bit overlords because it's the most advanced technology where I can still understand all hardware AND software in the system from top to bottom.

Went to a bar in Vegas that had coin ops all around the outside, VIP had flat screens and all the game systems below, you could play whatever you wanted. Bar had flat screens all above it for tekken and fifa, and got damn dj jazzy Jeff had a concert on the stage. I think it was called insert coin.

Watch when THC lounges open up, the gaming industry will see an uptick

There are 3 "bar-cades" within a 15 minute drive of my house (I live just outside a metro area).

They're great. I love the nostalgia trip.

Wait… cidercade? As in an arcade bar that specializing in cider??? If this is true I’m booking a weekend trip to Dallas

Haha yes, quite a few varieties of hard cider.

There's a couple great ones in Portland Oregon, like Ground Kontrol

UpDown in Minneapolis is another one!

Cobra Arcade Bar here in PHX.

Freeplay for Sure! Cold Beer and classic games!!

Something else they're doing here on the south east...BNB's that are set up very RETRO...I mean every game system... every arcade and every tech from back in the day also lasts 80's and 90's decor! They are freaking amazing and WE NEED MORE OF THEM!

Cidercade is my happy place. Can you imagine being a kid, and being told you can play all of the games in the arcade as many times as you want, all day long, for 10 bucks? My mind is blowing just typing it.

There's a full on pinball arcade in my city with a massive section devoted to arcade cabinets, both older cabinets like pac-man and centipede and newer stuff from the 90s and 2000s

Heres a couple of pictures of when I took my nieces. The second one is a Polaroid picture :)

Picture 1

Picture 2

Asheville?

Victoria BC. It's called quazars.

Oh nice. Asheville, NC has a pinball museum very similar to what you described.

I have been looking for a fully working Atari Hard Drivin' for years. Best I can find is mame cabinets.

*Oh, I have a Sega Space Harrier in my basement if anyone wants it. In great shape, but I think it needs a new video board. If nobody wants it, I'm gonna saw it in half and dispose of it.

Game works in Seattle, lived there from 2012 to 2015 and used to live going to game works. 3 story arcade with 2 bars. Had every game you could ever think of.

Boxcar in Raleigh and Durham

And Greensboro!

It’s called Yestercades here in Jersey, and it’s awesome as a Dad bc many kids have birthday parties there and I get to go play unlimited pinball and retro arcades games. There’s an adult version that serves food/beer too that sounds similar to what the “Cidercades” might be that you’re talking about, but the difference is it’s not unlimited play.

Barcades peaked pre-Covid and are on the downswing now, the novelty wears off quick and you’re beginning to see a lot of them close now.

I don’t think it’s that. It’s that they peaked right before lockdowns and it’s taken forever to be able to reopen normal operations. By that point, how many months have you gone I go the red? Without that steady income, it’s not possible to survive. Now that inflation has kicked in, the ability to splurge on a night out to the bar is a luxury that many are forgoing while we get through this. I think it’s an excellent concept, just a matter of terrible circumstances with timing.

And those retro machines aren’t cheap to fix.

What do you mean the novelty? Going to arcades is great, and these serve alcohol.

To each their own I guess? Sometimes nostalgia is best left in the past

You... Don't like arcades?

What was fun when we were kids 30 years ago just doesn’t hit the same as adults when the experience has since been eclipsed many times over. Arcades were great because the technology was superior to what (most) home consoles offered at the time, that’s no longer the case. Once you get past that all that’s left is a large number of mostly mediocre games that were designed not to be fun so much as to take your money as quickly as possible.

Yep, there's a local Bar/Arcade that has all the classics I grew up playing when I would go to the mall. It's a fun date for my wife and game it up. The machines aren't price gouged either, so 5 or 10 bucks and you can play for hours.

Bit Bar in Killeen and Kung Fu Saloon in The Domain

Both of those places are what gote back into arcades. These retro arcade are usually a lot of fun.

If you're into pinball, and live near IAD, the bar mustang Sally has like 12 pinball machines

We have The Rec Room and Beercade where I live in Canada. Both arcade bars, and The Rec Room has good food too.

Unfortunately they both lack fighting games

Free Play has one of my favorite games and it is super rare called Crossbow. Unfortunately I'm 8 hours away.

Excited for this as a returning Dallas resident

There’s one in Sacramento called Coin-Op. I definitely feel like it’s more of an arcade with a bar in it, as opposed to a bar with some arcade cabinets.

Love arcade bars!

We got MiniBoss here in San Jose

I went to an arcade bar in Columbus Ohio once. I didn't really care for it.

Dave and busters?

Cidercade is great! However, sometimes Ive gone and its so crowded that you have to wait to play some games. Its still a fun time. Especially if foodtrucks are around!

full of 50 year olds reviving their childhood

Sorry, some of us aren't as close to our childhood years as you are.

This sounds really cool. Great way to reconnect with childhood games over some drinks with friends.

I'm thinking VR arcades will become a big thing because even as VR becomes cheap and accessible not everyone will have the room to dedicate to a VR setup

there's one called house of targ in ottawa. (capital of canada) they have old school pinball machines and arcade games, and they serve handmade perogies and have punk bands. lol it's awesome.

You have cider in the states?

Not the most common but yes.

I just wish arcade bars had good arcade games. They all have the same sad assortment of Pacman, Rampage and one random fighting game. Where's House of the Dead, Virtual On, Time Crisis, Afterburner, Star Wars Arcade?

There's also starship arcade out of Haltom city.

Four Quarters in London, Barcade in NYC

We got beercade in Omaha, two of them. LOvE it!

There is one in Minneapolis called updown and it is so bad ass

I remember there being a handful of video game bars in the Minneapolis area like 15-20 years ago, where they had TVs with Nintendos hooked up to them in the dining room so you could order a couple of beers and play a round of tecmo bowl or TMNT while waiting for your burger.

Chatterbox Pub was the name of one of them, I can't remember the other ones. I think there was 3 or 4 in the twin cities under the same ownership.

Cidercade is the national standard for me. That place is great

Online shipping didn't kill them, they just helped shut down the 90% of them that didn't serve a real function.

Hahaha, my midwestern hometown killed their own mall by banning teenagers in the late 1990s.

Yup, that's right. They declared that no one under the age of 18 could be in the mall at any time unless they were accompanied by a parent or guardian. That included employees. No teenagers were allowed to work at the mall.

10 years later the town was up in arms because the mall was closing down entirely because all the stores like Spencers, Hot Topic, ETC and Claires had few employees or customers and had to shut down, all the minor ubiquitous food court type places had closed because there was next to no business or employees, and all the major anchor stores closed down due to lack of customers and employees. The movie theater closed as a matter of course because the mall had banned 80% of its customers and 70% of its employees.

I remember walking through the dying mall in like 2002 and seeing a cheap looking military recruiting place with plastic banners, a bunch of shuttered storefronts, some kiosks where people were selling off-brand sunglasses and cheap toys, a Halloween store, and a Target that you could no longer even get to from inside the mall because they'd closed off those doors and only kept the external doors.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds... Malls were the natural biome of the 80's teenager.

Who needs 8 women's clothing stores in one building?

women?

Thank you! Really miss the days of being able to go one place and know I could buy a whole outfit by the time I left the building. Now I drive from Kohls across town to Target, across town to Goodwill, and on and on without being able to cobble a single outfit together.

yeah its like a major feature of the mall concept

Balderdash!! Women don't need choices.

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he used a terrible example. 8 stores for womens clothing is a perfectly good amount for a mall to have.

I hate not being able to try on clothes before buying. I'll take the 8 stores.

In downtown Buffalo there's a mall (Main Place) that was supposed to entice people to shop before they went home after they got out of work.

It closes at 5:30. Near as I can tell (I moved here around 2009) it always has.

I don't know what they were smoking when they made THAT executive decision. They need to bite the bullet, tear down Main Place and turn it into a park or something, except for the food court (people who're working still use THAT). The building is ugly and getting decrepit.

And yes, there's absolutely some mall oversaturation in my neck of the woods too. I think in both Buffalo/Roc there's one thriving mall and two dying/dead ones.

I feel like the megamart with a bit of everything has also done a lot to kill that concept. I'm not in the states any more but when I go back to visit, for 80% of the stuff I really want to buy that's tough to find in the country I live in, I don't need to go anywhere other than the local Fred Meyer or target. The stuff that's harder to find won't be at a mall either.

Walmart is basically a mall. Only with a much smaller variety.

Walmart is basically Sears but with food. And if you go far enough back, a lot of major department stores had restaurants or diners inside them, too! (JCPenney and Emporium did, at least.)

Yeah but Wal-Mart will never compare to the might out sears. You can't buy a house or a machine gun at Wal-Mart

Tbf people weren't going to malls for drill bits and duct tape. They were going to Ace, Home Depot, or local hardware stores.

Sears used to handle those sorts of products, once upon a time. Which I think speaks to another problem with malls: shrinking product diversity.

Canadian Tire was an "anchor" store at my local mall growing up. They had all the drill bits.

Had to look it up since I don't live in Canada, close since I'm in MN. But that's more like Canada lite.

They used to be better.

Another issue for malls is that people don't like it when teenagers hang out there anymore. Karen's come through and call the fucking cops on teens just trying to hang out because they're "loitering" or "acting suspicious", the teens get kicked out and then the mall loses a big chunk of their business.

The majority of malls in every metro area were suffering by the time the internet showed up. People hated being hazed by teens and judged by salespeople. Those were the bad malls.

the whole concept was "Here's is ALL the stuff".

If I remember correctly, the concept was to abuse an incentive in tax law/construction funding by the government that rewarded new commercial building. So they built huge commercial megaplexes that would then rent the area out.

The problem is, that means the construction is the big incentive. And over operating time, that incentive loses its value. They actually become more costly to run and maintain than they do to build. And I don't think that same government incentive (in the US) is still around.

What killed the mall was its own expected expiration date. Not online shopping, not a change in the market, not because they were a bad idea, but because they were an idea specifically to make use of an opportunity in a time and place where it was possible, and the inventor of the indoor mall figured they'd last about 20 years. Instead, they lasted about 30, and the stragglers are going on 40.

That makes sense. Ultimately, I don't think amazon or walmart killed malls either. If I were to put my finger on anything I'd say it was the real estate prices. The cost to rent one of those store spaces kept going up and up and up until nobody could afford to run a business out of them. It's the same reason why in a lot of downtowns all of the commercial spaces are empty lol.

and the best businesses that were great community spaces close down, and it destroys the liveliness of a town.

Borders closed down. But it was a de facto community space.

Due to internet shopping, towns, if they want to stay lively, must adapt. They must incentivize these types of stores and favor them.

That would work if the towns owned the buildings, but they let them go to real estate firms. I had pondered what would happen if a town subsidized the rent and I think the real estate firms would just try to jack the rent even higher. The real estate firms are usually very large and I doubt they have any vested interest in the town succeeding. I mean, obviously they want their property to stay safe, but.. eh? lol

I’ll note that this is how American outer suburbs in general work too

Could you explain what’s “awesome” about a mall? This is a legitimate question. I’ve been to the mall a handful of times growing up and have honestly never found it to be a particularly cool place to be. Is it more for the folks that enjoy window shopping? Cause I don’t do that.

I think a well stocked mall has nearly endless variety of clothing to pick up, feel it, try it on, etc. Like when I buy a t-shirt in the mall I know exactly what the material feels like because I touched it. When I buy one off the internet it's very hit or miss! Even if it's.. from a store that exists in the mall. :(

The pricing varies. Sometimes it's more expensive. Sometimes it's cheaper. Often if you're buying one or two pieces of clothing, it's cheaper to get it in store.

Out here I find shopping at the mall frustrating because the size range of pants and jeans seems to get smaller every year. If you go in looking for a size in the upper 30s they act like you're some kinda gorilla. If you ask for a size in the 40s, haha forget it.

I suppose that makes sense. My clothing purchases are very simple so I can’t say clothing shops interested much. Don’t really need to get a feel for a simple cotton t shirt and a pair of cargo shorts. Only thing I used to go to the mall for was the bookstore. But now that ebooks are a thing I don’t even do that.

Yea I wear tshirts and cargo shorts plenty too, and for me the fabric and fit are hugely important on those! Same with shoes, if I stick with the same basic design it'll usually be fine, but if I want to try something new I need to try them out.

I can buy them online, and often do! But it's riskier and has a good 50% chance of returns.

For jeans it's a real pain because I have a big butt and most mens jeans are made for Hank Hill types lol.

People mention online shopping helping to kill malls, but the biggest culprit is actually Walmart. Americans don’t have as much money as they once did, so when they shop they would rather go to a cheaper place than a mall to shop.

Also, people are not as brand conscious as they used to be.

"Drill bit and duct tape" - found the murderer.

Officer I swear, its innocent. I build robots. Honestly. And they're not even sex robots, they're almost completely useless! My latest one can't even pass butter.

I was thinking “trepanning”. The duct tape is to wrap around the bit so you don’t go too far.

You brought me back to my childhood w 1942

I played it in the mall w my grandpa who was in the air force

This too shall pass.

There's some great coin arcade bars in a lot of college towns in the western US still. Super fun concept that makes for great times with friends or dates.

In 2004 I worked in a store in a mall that was pretty close to dead. We got few customers, and most of the time the only people you'd see walking around was older folks getting their exercise in.

In the same token who needs multiple hardware appliances stores? There is a reason some stores specialize in certain clothing

Five in a 10 km radius? I can count five in ~2.5 km radius, lol.

Visiting family in Australia. Every little suburban area has its own mall. Seems like never more than 15 minutes to a mall. All are thriving. Have noticed that there is a good mix of high end and budget shops that I don’t see in the states. Plus…grocery store attached to every mall.

Personally feel malls in the US overpriced themselves into irrelevance. Really don’t go into malls in the us anymore outside of the one with the apple store. Family goes twice a week right now during school holidays.

Malls are our Walmart equivalent. There are some big stores, but nothing like Walmart which does everything. Instead of being one store, it's 20 different outlets/department stores that cover roughly the same range of goods as a single mega retailer.

They're also a social hub if you're bored and have nothing to do, especially teenagers trying to get out of the Summer heat.

I watch a few urban exploration channels and it seems like every time they go to an abandoned mall if you look into the history of it there was always another mall or two close by in a city that really wasn't that big. It's clear that developers saw an area with 1 or 2 successful malls and figured their mall would be successful too without realizing the market was already tapped by the existing retail in the area. Then when 3 or 4 malls are trying to split the business that's only enough to support one or two malls naturally some of them go bankrupt, sometimes it seems like fighting over the scraps just brought them all down.

There *was* a reason for every suburb to have its own mall ... because other than LL Bean, there was almost no such thing as shopping from home. Young'ns today don't appreciate how much the internet changed *everything*.

Once upon a time there was catalog shopping by mail. That's what made Sears into the behemoth that it once was. But then malls brought the goods to the people and catalog shopping really died out by the 80s. LL Bean, J Crew, those were some of the very few strong ones that survived.

But that meant that you'd have malls every few miles because think about it ... 100K people would be going to that mall, and a different 100K to the next one, and the next one, etc.

There was a reason for every suburb to have its own mall

There was a massive tax write-off created in the 1950s in creating malls, so big that it was immensely profitable creating one. You could charge stores little money to occupy a space and get a huge windfall from the government. The windfall went away in the 80s when they changed the tax laws and ever since then malls have been dying away.

Even the article you post acknowledges that this argument is putting it a little too strongly. [See "Hanchett's argument is a strong one ..." toward the bottom]

Accelerated depreciation was available to lots of investment strategies, not just malls. When people (i.e., young married couples who were about to be parents) moved 20 miles outside the old city limits, they needed somewhere to shop. A lack of old grid neighborhoods necessitated something different - and the mall was the solution. Climate controlled, security patrolled, filled with all the nicest stuff, and far away from ... riots and tear gas and crime and social dysfunction that had taken over the city centers from the 60s to the 90s.

I'm from the late 80s - early 90s. My teachers in school (students in the 60s and 70s) could regale us with stories of the tear gas flying on Main Street. Some cities were still all messed up from the fires and the riots. Our parents grew up in neighborhoods that since then became quite broken-down. My own first home was in a neighborhood that my peers would go to in order to buy drugs. There were streets, entire neighborhoods, where you simply did not go, for your own safety.

Suburban malls didn't spring up only because of an accounting rule.

So true. Especially at Christmas time getting gifts for everyone meant several different stores so the mall was it. Now I just order everything in 5 mins from my phone 🤷

A lot of dead mall vloggers are from that area.

A lot of "Dead Mall" vloggers, vs. A lot of dead "Mall Vloggers" had me concerned for a brief moment.

The other issue is Malls were built with several anchor store locations. Those stores for the most part dont exist any more. and they have no one to rent these huge chunks of the building.

Theres a mall near me that if you go in it, its busy and has lots of stores. but if you look from the outside it looks nearly abandoned because it has like 5 anchor store spots and maybe 1 remaining.

This is my understanding as well. The mall owner earns the majority of revenue through the anchors - Sears, JC Pennys, Macy’s, etc. My local mall, the smaller inside stores are heavily shopped. But it’s crickets in the big box stores.

Turning those big spaces into attractions (go-karts, arcades, skate rinks / parks, gyms, vr experiences) has had some successes.

My teensy tiny tourist town in the East Tn appalachian mtns. has the WEIRDEST little mall lol And i know that sounds weird af- tourist town? in rural appalachia?

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But basically, we sit on this really gorgeous lake (Norris Lake) that was formed by the building of Norris Dam back in the 30s; the area was very isolated and insular up till then, when it saw an influx of workers and Conservation Corps members for the dam building in the 30's, who all moved into the community of Norris which was built just for them ( and is still the tiniest most ideal little community ever); and then, during WW2, the nearby town of Oak Ridge (its about 30 mins from Norris) saw a huge influx of scientists, govt and civilian workers, and etc to work on the atom bomb project in Oak Ridge (the area chosen for its remoteness and unimportance). After the war i guess word spread about the natural beauty of the mountains and the gorgeous lake, and my town (actually a very small county of 3 towns, LaFollette, Jacksboro, and Caryville, which all run into each other and are treated as one large town, which are located about 30 mins north of Norris and about 45mins-1hr from Oak Ridge, and about 1 hour north of Knoxville) became a small tourist hub, for families who wanted an affordable and fun vacay- we had lots of those adorable 50s/60s motels, pools, lakeside cabins, even a small waterpark, a roller rink, an arcade, and a tiny mall.

​

The mall is laid out so weirdly though- its one looooong straight hall, with smaller halls branching off that one towards the back of the mall like this:_________|_______|_________|________|. It is the UGLIEST mall ive ever seen, its all in shades of brown and tans, looks more like a cell block than a mall; its also 100% enclosed with little natural light, its just overall very depressing lol And idk what USED to be in there (my mom says never much of note, there was a big "Woodsons Supermarket" which is a local tiny chain from the 70s, that used to be the main store bc Mr. Woodson built it; and a "Rose's Discount Clothing Store" but that is all she recalls) but now it is home to a Little Ceasers, a cell phone repair store that is never open, a nail salon, 2 thrift stores, a pregnancy center, a pet groomer, a bar, a DHS office, a food city, and a couple other insignificant stores.

​

It is BY FAR the weirdest and most depressing mall ive ever seen in my life lol

You hit the nail on the head. In the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul), we had/have:

  • Brookdale
  • Ridgedale
  • Southdale
  • Rosedale
  • Woodbury
  • Eden Prairie
  • Mall of America
  • Northtown
  • Burnsville
  • Galleria
  • Gaviidae Common

Those are the big indoor ones. They are all still going as far as I know - except Brookdale was torn down. And I’m probably still forgetting one or two.

its funny, growing up, the mall I would have chosen as most likely to die is still going strong, and our go-to mall as teens is now one of the most well known abandoned malls ever, and is now gone.

It’s always the big one and the fancy one, ofc there’s that one mall that’s barely hanging on but you visit sometimes cause it has that one store

Most cities of any significance in the States still have a mall or two that's going strong.

Hmmm. I live near the 4th largest city in the USA and malls are empty/shut down for the most part. Many have been bulldozed and many more will follow

Born, raised, and still stuck in the Midwest. Can confirm, lots of abandoned malls. There’s one in my city. The town over has a fine and functioning mall.

I don't know if they were over-malled. I think they had the right amount for the time. Since the internet hit, shopping is mostly for fun now or because you want to try things on. You used to go to the mall because "I need to get XYZ" and that was your only choice. Like for a bruthfay gift for someone. Now that stuff is largely done online.

I think they had the right amount for the time

They were created because of a useful tax law that made it immensely profitable to have a mall. They were massive tax write-offs that were available until the tax laws changed in the 80s; at that point malls started dying.

I feel like I didn't see them start to go down till the 2000s. Even the 2010s

Yeah. The suburb where I grew up had five or six malls within thirty minutes (even in SoCal traffic). Overmalling is a good term that explains why they died out.

Im from Bangkok and malls are the thing here , so many and so grand and fancy , the city is always too hot for outdoor anything so people do most every day stuff in the mall , grocery shopping, doctor office , dentist, dinner & lunch

I love the malls in Bangkok!!! Especially MBK for everyday stuff and the Galleria for the “food court”. I still have my ceramic hair straightener from MBK from like 10 years ago.

My friend asked me to go to the mall on Sunday. There's 2 malls by me and both are packed he says. I haven't been to a mall since before covid, but figured, might as well.

Just moved to Ohio and malls and strip malls are definitely dead these days. Even ikea has barely any shoppers. In Canada the furniture places are packed with customers as there’s less options.

I was once in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for a work trip. It was snowy, and I didn't have a car, but I didn't want to spend one of my only days off sitting in a hotel room with my co-worker. I decided to trek through the snow to the mall that was pretty near by. I got inside and it was a barren waste land. There was 1 clothing store with a bunch of knock off LaCoste and Polo clothes, a calender store, and a GameStop. Other than that, everything was closed or unoccupied

What, have malls been replaced with? Does everywhere have a nearby Walmart, Bestbuy, or similar?

I:m in Melbourne, Australia. We here are fine with the cold half the year, and it's only too hot for shopping occasionally in summer. So we don't need climate controlled malls (we call them shopping centres, or Shopos). When I've been further north, where it's very hot for much more of the year, I've definitely valued the air conditioned shops.

I'm really glad to live just off a "main street" style shopping district. I've got everything I need on my local street. When I need them I have the big stores (Bunnings, Good Guys, Ikea), and a shopo with a cinema 5-10 mins away. I hope we avoid getting stuff like Walmart, and keep out local streets and the few shopos.

Malls in the United States exploded in the 50s and 60s because of a tax law that the builders write off their cost. Builders across the USA built malls ... two or three even in a small town! The tax law changed in the late 80s and malls immediately started to die away.

Some towns can still support a single mall of the owners are creative - I've seen cities remove the roofs from the walkways and turn the mall into a foot-traffic mall with open air exposure and they're really cool. The malls spammed across the USA in the 50s and 60s though are mostly dead.

Yes exactly. The Midwest is especially fascinating to watch decay. My fav dead malls are all in the Midwest. Rolling (Rotting) Acres anyone?

Most of the ones in my state have constant shooting, stabbing, robberies etc. No way I'm going. Even the ones in the most expensive parts are not immune.

4 malls within 25mins of me. Last time I went was to get my AirPods swapped out for new ones.

seattle, wa doesn't have a good sized mall. I gotta go either south or east on the bus a good period of time to read a decent sized mall.

I live in Canada and my city is relatively small, it's no Vancouver or Toronto. I have 6 indoor malls and a few outdoor/outlet malls in my city. There are a couple that are smaller, for sure, but they've all been around for decades.

Based Mall of America

It survives because it's like a "stunt mall" where they have all kinds of unique features like an indoor rollercoaster or mini-seaworld. They also have unique attractions ... but otherwise it's just a big mall with more stores.

It might not have been so bad if they’d have been used for their original purpose—a ground floor market that affordable apartments would be built on top of.

Yeah Minneapolis/St Paul metro areas had at least 20-30 malls. Since the first mall was built in a Minneapolis suburb. And actually, I think most if not all our malls are still open. I can’t think of any that have been closed/abandoned. A lot of our are dead, but that’s different from being abandoned. Dead malls are just malls that don’t get a lot of business. But we have a select few malls that are absolutely booming - like the Mall of America

Down here we have still have malls. But they are now huge shopping centers instead. Like you’ll have Kohls, Dillards, Best Buy, Target, and a whole bunch of small stores. Including restaurants that are basically what ppl used to see at a mall. So it’s like malls are still around. But they’ve been converted to shopping centers.

Here, around Sacramento, we have a few dead malls and those that are still rocking are not what they uses to be.

Yes. One of the Many Evils of Suburban Sprawl. And then of course the rise of low cost to internet retailers to provide internet shopping platforms to consumers eclipsed the high cost of overhead involved for storefront retailers maintaining a physical presence. Market competition is efficient…so most malls are dying.

Well there actually was if you think of the intended use of malls and not what they ended up being.

That and lack of public transport in most states. I was in Seoul, SK awhile ago before the pandemic and the malls were packed and also usually right above a subway line.

Same on Long Island NY. We had so many malls it was ridiculous. Almost every other town had its own mall. Now there are one or two big ones left and the others were like turned into various stores or demolished for a target or something.

For a while at least in New York there was like a little mall in every town.. a lot of them became different things, but the one in Johnstown still stands.. they actually had a mall in Ilion as well

Pyramid property was a weird company

There was a very good reason for every suburb to have a mall, and that was the change to the tax code in 1954 from straight line depreciation to accelerated depreciation, which was then changed back in the 80s.

Arizona grew rapidly and had probably 8 malls at one point. We're down to two, but the one I've visited recently was still very busy.

Yeah there’s 4-5 malls in Maine. They all have the same stores(outside of a couple cool ones) and are mostly barren.

Mall of Maine is pretty hip/crunk though

I think there were atleast 10 malls that were within a 30 minute drive growing up, and there are still atleast 6, and Im pretty sure I'm missing a few....

Omaha for example

Omaha, Ne was like that. They even added a gigantic outdoor mall in a place with shit weather. I never understood that.

Minneapolis/St. Paul metro has SouthDale, Rosedale, Ridge Dale, Northtown, Brookdale (rip), Outlets at Albertville, Mall of America, EP Mall.. not to mention the big "outdoor" shopping districts in Woodbury, Maple Grove, etc.. must be our cold Winters helping them stay busy

The city I grew up in had four or five malls, but they were pretty spread out. like in the four corners of the city.

We had two malls with only 200,000 people for a long time, and they were across the street from each other. One had the original location of two stores that are now national chains, and the mall died in a hurry when those moved out. The theater got upgraded, and that's really the only reason to go there anymore.

The other was slowly dying with traffic falling off when Sears closed, and JC Penney's and Dillard's still clinging to life, but got a boost when a giant arcade opened and actually started driving traffic.

We got closer to 300,000 people and a third mall opened in the newer and much more expensive area, so the richer people don't have to drive across town and go to the old malls.

I'm noticing malls located next to major highways are still holding on. If they're more than a few minutes aff the highway they start to suffer. But my sample size is very small.

Malls are actually making a comeback. At this point most mall store space costs less than a nice website

There's a new dead "mall" (we call them shopping centres) here in Australia but not because they are dying, because it was totalled in our floods this year. They were originally just going to clean and reopen but I think the feasibility and risk of future floods made them give up on it.

Otherwise shopping centres are still doing well. They are shifting towards including large eating and entertainment spaces rather than just focusing on retail which seems to be working well for them.

Man I'm still stuck in 90s Americana culture and thought malls were still a thing! Here in Spain they are still a thing. So what replaced malls then? Where do average Americans do that kind of shopping?

Twin cities is exactly like this. On top of having the largest mall in America, there's at least 5 more fairly large malls spread around the suburbs

I understood the arcades, but malls still going strong and will until everyone orders everything in Amazon.

Malls are great - concentrated, multi-service, mixed use, walkable public spaces with public amenities.

It’s the suburbs that are the problem.

For real, my city has/had like...5 malls? Basically one that's north of the city, northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. Atleast one of them is all closed up and empty (and has been since before I moved here). Two of them are pretty nice, and the other ones are meh and constantly have signs up about various stores closing/going out of business.

I grew up in new jersey and I use to go to the mall on Friday's and would see everyone from school there, or huge lines at the movies. I went to visit 2 years ago or so to the Menlo park mall where i use to go to all the time and it was completely dead on the Friday and it was pre-covid.

Twin cities metro checking in. We have a lot of malls. A lot of dead ones, and a lot of still active ones.

We obviously have the Mall of America, but we've also got the OG Southdale mall, which is still active.

Milwaukee here. We had so many malls in the 90s.

  • Northridge (see also: Dawn of the Dead reboot)
  • Southridge
  • Bayshore
  • Mayfair
  • Grand Avenue (being redesigned as 3rd St Market)
  • Milwaukee Mall (being rebuilt as affordable housing and supplanted with the much cooler Sherman Phoenix)
  • Midtown Crossing
  • Prospect Mall (now just called North & Farwell)

I'm sure there are a few others, not to mention countless strip malls and business improvement districts, but those are the big ones.

The Albany NY area was oversaturated with malls. Now there are the two big ones left and all the smaller ones have died off or have become something else.

Yea there's a decent amount of malls in Edmonton.... Including an extremely obsolete and small mall known as West Edmonton Mall lol.

Yeah, we also have some pretty decent arcades too!

Have you found any with a decent selection of fighting games? The only one I've seen is a Street Fighter 4 cabinet in one of the Rec Rooms

Ugh... I kinda hate the Rec Room. So pricey.

Their drinks and food yeah. Their game pricing is pretty good though I think. I rarely eat there and if I'm drinking I'll pre-game so it's not that bad. I've been going semi regularly and haven't put points on my wristband since sometime last year.

I went there when my family drove from AK to OK. We took a whole day off. I've still got pictures to this day. Kicking myself I never took a picture of the sub.

My cousin got a job there just so he could put "Submarine Captain" on his resume. Sadly they got rid of the subs (which was a bigger submarine fleet than the Canadian Navy btw).

which was a bigger submarine fleet than the Canadian Navy btw

I miss telling that joke

you just tell it in past tense now, although it's more of a funny fact now

I remembered them mentioning that when we went on it.

Am I reading this right? Alaska to Oklahoma?

Probably. Theres a highway that goes from Alaska strait to Edmonton. Well I guess it's officially like 2 or 3 different ones but it's basically just one road.

Yep. Joys of a military family.

Damn that's one helluva drive.

I'm from OK so I was like dayum lol

Yeah, when I was seven,we did OK to VA (3 days), when I was 10, VA to AK (10 days, 1 day off for Mt Rushmore), and when I was 15, AK to OK (14 days, one off at the Edmonton Mall, and 3 days in Billings, Montana b/c my dad's truck broke down lol.)

I'm good on all of that driving lol

Totally small mall. Never heard of it other than a DownieLive video I watched last week. Nothing to see there, though.

You just reminded me that I haven’t seen a DownieLive video on my feed for months. I watch him because I miss Vancouver.

My dad was in charge of the contract for all the sound wiring in the West Edmonton Mall. Big ass job, that.

The saddest place I've ever been in my life was a mall in Elkhart Indiana. I've been to happier funerals

Walking through that mall and passing by the same store 3 times while walking in a straight line was very confusing when I visited a while back lol

I know people talk about Wem all the time, but they haven’t checked out our cool public library! It’s nice to have an indoor public space without having consumerism shoved in your face.

When I was in NFLD with my gf at the time we were talking about West Ed and her family down there was amazed we had been there. I was like umm we've been there like 3 times in the last 2 weeks. They were in aww, just hoping to come to Alberta to go to West Ed lol. Same goes for Jasper and Banff, were amazed we'd went there a few times a year.

The things we take for granted are sometimes other people's dreams.

That place gets so old. Its all jewelry stores, women's cloths stores, and shoe stores. Over and over. For hours.

I went to Edmonton Mall in the 90’s. Played a VR game for the first time there.

In the 90s, my coworker honeymooned there.

Same here in Minnesota with the Mall of America lol.

Makes sense the 2 largest and most successful falls malls in the US and Canada are from areas with similar climates. Nothing to do for 7 months a year haha.

Pretty much! I think both Mall of America and WEM are owned by the same conglomerate

Grew up in Michigan, and the local mall there is nearly dead, but the open plan outdoor strips of stores are thriving...one of them even used to be enclosed, but they took out the covered walkways. I do not understand why this model makes sense in cold environments.

Yeah I just commented about that. Seems like malls are still here. They are just outdoor strip malls. Or shopping centers. But it doesn’t give you the same “feel” as being in the mall in the 90s. Even if the stores are the same.

What's also frustrating is the old model meant you'd drive to the mall, park and then spend all day walking from one store to the next. Now the strip malls are spread out everywhere, no climate control, no places to just chill and relax etc.

I remember as a kid I once bought a book at a Waldenbooks, sat down in the food court to grab some lunch and got several chapters through my new book. You can't really have that same experience now.

Yeah, especially the West Edmonton Mall, which is basically the Canadian equivalent to the Mall of America except way cooler. That place is huge I hear. I’m not a Canadian nor have I ever been there but from what I’ve gathered it’s really cool

West Edmonton Mall and the Mall of America are owned by the same family, the Ghermezians. They're an Iranian family that actually immigrated to Canada in the 50s, making the name of the Mall of America somewhat weird.

The Mall of America is a little bigger in terms of area (5.6 million square feet versus 5.3 million square feet), but West Edmonton Mall has far more stores - 800 occupants versus 520 occupants.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that before.

It’s got more attractions. It even has an underground go-kart track added recently.

Oh cool! I know where I want to go on my next vacation

It is huge and has a ton of cool stuff. A dinner theatre, movie theatre, comedy club, fine dining and bars, a barcade, water park, go karts and a small amusement park.

There used to be a dueling piano bar and bistro, wish that was still around.

There's a decent amount of mall death going on in my part of Canada. They're being replaced by supercenters where you mostly show up for one big store, or drive from one store parking lot to the next.

I think it's because a certain teen pop star made a hit song that has made malls unforgettable in canada.

I got a summer job at a DVD store in a mall, and it opened my eyes to the huge community of elderly or semi-retired people who do their socializing there. It’s also a place where group homes will bring their intellectually disabled people to roam around and it’s incredibly stimulating for them but also mostly safe.

I used to work near a local mall and to get away from the office I would spend my lunch hour at the mall (sometimes buying lunch, sometimes eating my bagged lunch.) It was amazing how many elderly people would use that mall as their community center. It was climate controlled, safe, plenty of places to sit down etc.

Back in the early days of online dating, I met several dates for the first time at malls because that was a safe neutral spot to socialize.

Yep, that’s what I was thinking

Wait other countries dont do malls???

They do. It's just that the US has seen the most notable decline in indoor shopping malls due to them being switched for outdoor plazas or strip malls

ah I see, that makes sense. Outside of canada I've only ever been to bahamas and like 2 inches of florida so I was confused for a second lol

I would also like to point out that arcade games are still available in BC Ferries. About the only thing they do right.

Do mall rats even exist anymore?

Yeah, they do, I live not far from West Edmonton Mall and they exist still.

Damn didn’t realize that’s still a thing lol

Yeah people literally go to the mall to get exercise when its cold. Mistly older people but still. Also underground parking to un freeze all the ice on your car is key if you dont have a garage.

I wouldn't say they're "going strong." The Cadillac Fairview properties (Eaton Centre, etc.) seem to be doing well enough, but...

Even before the pandemic, malls were struggling, and a Deloitte report released in June of 2020 showed that foot traffic in Canada’s 10 biggest malls was down 42 per cent from just a year earlier.

[Source]

Here in Australia malls are outdoors. There's a courtyard, and the shops are all around it. Usually a few buskers in the courtyard area. Sometimes events. It's pretty neat, speaking as a Canadian. Tho, when I took the husband home to Canada he was super excited to go check out an "indoor mall".

Where in Australia are you living currently? Australia's largest malls are all indoors. Pretty much all the shopping centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are all indoors.

West edmonton mall is packed all the time, but I think it's less as a shopping hub and more because there's some fairly good restaurants, a few decent bars, and then all kinds of entertainment options from a movie theatre, to a dinner theatre, that has different plays come through throughout the year. Then there's a waterpark, go-karts, a small amusement park, an arcade bar that is unfortunately lacking in fighting games, a stand up comedy venue.

Malls can be dope.

From what I’ve read the mall originally took off the way it did in the U.S. because it was air-conditioned in a time when air-conditioning in homes wasn’t almost ubiquitous. So it was a place to go when it was 30+C and you didn’t want to sit at home just trying to think cool thoughts.

Went to Montreal for xmas one year. Spent a lot more time in the mall there than I expected...

Malls are still popular in Australia too, probably for the opposite reason. It is air conned in Summer when its 40 Celcius ( I guess that's about 100F )

Ohh walking into a shopping centre during summer is pure bliss. It's like the sweat and humidity instantly evaporate

Canadian malls are very much in decline. In 2017—2019 the top 10 shopping malls in the country had a 22% drop in traffic. Small community/regional shopping malls are dying all over the place since their major anchor tenants have folded or moved out.

Malls will never die completely, there's lots of products that are still more convenient to buy in person, but there will be far fewer of them in the not to distant future.

I know that because of that song from Canadian sweetheart Robin Sparkles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY_bhVSGKEg

Robin Sparkles would be proud.

Also Robin Sparkles is Canadian and really encourages mall use.

Or in TX in the summer with AC.

Not so much in my experience, really. Lots of the small malls are owned by the same groups as nearby larger ones, and they're converting into strip-malls mostly from what I've seen.

Minnesota invented the mall, I assume for this very reason!

Malls are still a thing in Canada? I thought malls were dying everywhere in the world.

Malls are thriving everywhere else. Asia is home to pretty much all the largest shopping centres in the world, and shopping centre chains are common in Australia, the UK and NZ.

Arizona’s got a few great ones, and a couple stellar ones

Not really. A lot of our malls are dying too, we just have fewer. The big ones survive, but so do the big ones in the US.

You find them still going strong in the 11th Province. That's because we share a somewhat similar climate.

Yukon? 😆🥶

No, Minnesota.

I do enjoy not freezing my balls off

Same.. other side of the world but 30c+ or very heavy rain for hours or both... Wet sauna.

We have giant malls every few km.. it's literally the only place to go out for food on day to day.

Places that are just a restaurant are rare, Same goes to shops. Everything is in malls here.

Robin Sparkles is keeping Canadian malls alive.

They're thriving in Australia too. Probably because unless you live in one of the few major CBD's here (expensive) or a nice beachy area (also expensive) there's fuck all else to do unless you like drinking and gambling. My town has three shopping centres, only two can really be called malls and they're still going strong. One is now more than twice the size it was when I was a kid back in the 90's.

It’s the Same for Malls in the Middle East. People think they are just tourist attractions, which they are to the extent. They are mostly built so the local population has something to do with your family/friends when it is 42C in the summer or 25C+ in the Winter to get out of the house.

There are some really great pinball places in Minneapolis and Omaha.

Robin Sparkles y’all!!

https://youtu.be/rtMR524m0BM

Which is why malls kind of started in the first place. It gave people an air conditioned space to go when air conditioning in homes wasn't the norm.

I totally agree, they’re doing fine here but the more run down ones got turned into condos over time, while the rest became more “upscale” and tend to focus more on clothes and luxury items that most people want to see in person. Still great to have them when it’s freezing or hot out, really. And the food courts and in-mall restaurants have gotten insanely good in some places…

Let’s go to the Mall… today!

Only bc of robin sparkles though

Same with hot Asian countries, escape the heat in an AC cooled malls

Or, in other times of the year, only place to cool yourself down in legitimate AC because you live in a Canadian city that never thought it'd see a heatwave of 35C (before humidity).

My hometown of under 200k has 3 for some reason.

It's all thanks to Robin Sparkles.

I was in Sudbury and the Mall there was dead. A sportscheck, a Chinese food court shop. Maybe a hair cut place. Out of maybe 18 spots, 5 were occupied.

My parents ran a shop in a small mall downtown Toronto. It's a condo now. Yes, the big malls are still doing well. Even "Cedarbrae" in Scarborough. But plenty of smaller malls with that old brown brick for flooring, very square like windows, alot of those are gone.

ayyy im at cedarbrae rn. they’re actually renovating the mall to incorporate more stores after the walmart closed

They are indeed, in fact there are two within a 10 mile radius of me, and one of them just had a hundred something million dollar addition constructed on it.

They get an impressive amount of customers, and the food courts slap.

Let’s go to the mall…today!

They stayed alive cause of that Robin Sparkles song

Imagine Edmonton without malls :|

Works exactly the same way in Russia

Dude, Are you from the Toronto area by any chance? I lived there in... 1995-97? That underground mall/tunnel was AMAZING. I forgot what they called it, but it was so surreal. It would be like... really cold in Fahrenheit because American... You literally couldn't breath outside. It was like your lungs just stopped working and your extremities were ice cubes (not the rapper, the condiment, so not a selling point).

I lived there for a minute, in Missassauggua (It's like Mississippi- I add letters just to make sure I've covered it), and there was a speak easy in the industrial district (no idea where that was) where somebody would knock on the door (not me) and you'd be let in, then you'd give some guy in the corner money and he'd give you booze.

I don't particularly recall this night, but there was an ex-model, ex-wife of a rock star who wanted me to go home with her. I did not. Dumbest mistake I ever made. That night would have been epic and my memoir would have obliterated anything by John Mayer, and I would have been a hero in many people's minds- mine included.

Edmonton - my home town - is a polar paradise for ~10 months a year. For that reason, when I lived there at least, it had the highest (in Canada, if not also North America) per capita number of : - shopping malls (including the World's Largest at one point) - movie theatres - stage theatres - video rental shops - stand alone restaurants (Earls, Maxwell Taylor's, Cheesecake Factory, etc) - cable TV penetration (into homes) - about 95%.

It also has one of the longer "pedway" systems around (called a "Plus-15" in Calgary, whose is even longer by the way)...

"The Edmonton Pedway system is a network connecting office buildings, shopping centres, and parkades in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It consists of approximately 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) of year-round climate-controlled tunnels, and walkways between the second floors of buildings, approximately 15 feet (4.6 m) above ground. The main network connects more than 40 buildings and parkades, and three of the five Edmonton Light Rail Transit (LRT) stations in the downtown area."

do they still have an Orange Julius? lol

malls suck unless you’ve got money to spend

I live in Arizona and at some point mall builders decided to have outdoor malls even though we know the air gets up to 51.1C here. (124°F)

So hot you can cook eggs on the ground

Perfect time for ski ball

Interesting to hear, but it's not the same in the us (at least where I'm at). I took my daughter to hot topic, which apparently only exist in malls, and to the one I used to go to when I hug out at the mall when I was a teen(early to mid 2000s). It was like seeing an animal slowly dying that was unaware it was already dead. Kinda sad in a way because I had a lot of good memories being a mall rat.

Malls are terrible. Well, actually, parking lots are terrible. There are malls that are human-scale, easily accessible by transit, and lovely.

But the way they tend to manifest in North America is terrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XscydK-3LI&t=744s

If you google 'Mall aerial photo', all you get is photos of endless seas of cars and parking.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mall+aerial+photo&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiGq-eFv_r4AhUX_hoKHSrZA7cQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=mall+aerial+photo&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoECCMQJzoGCAAQHhAHOgYIABAeEAg6BQgAEIAEOgYIABAeEAU6BAgAEB5QuhpYyydgpyloAHAAeACAAViIAeYGkgECMTOYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=eyfRYsaBNZf8a6qyj7gL&bih=937&biw=1620&hl=en#imgrc=HE_Xr8qopmWmLM

Let’s go to THE MALL! -Robin Sparkles

The last time I was in the Eaton Centre (Toronto) was in the before times. I was surprised at just how busy it was.

Glad to see Robin Sparkles biggest hit is still going strong up there.

They work well in the hottest days of the summer too for anyone who doesn't have air conditioning. They serve as a really good getaway from weather extremes.

I'm canadian and my regional mall is a 5m walk away. It's deader then a doornail.

I used to renovate and refresh malls in the early 2000's. That business has really dried up, been 15 years since our last one.

I'm pretty sure it's because of Robin Sparkles

I would assume it’s because some things in Canada are just 10 to 20 years behind the current trend in the US, almost like someone forgot to tell you guys and you just hadn’t heard about it yet.

Only premium malls. There's plenty of run down small malls going out of business.

Is it not because of the runaway success of Robin Sparkles?

Lol, maybe in winter when the Arctic winds blow in.

But the reality is malls in Canada are centered all around the small shops. In the US, malls are built around a few big brand stores. Once they pickup and go, the rest of the mall dies. In Canada, some big name brands have left their mall locations and their absence wasn't noticeable.

Sure. But my local mall has around 120 stores. Last time I was there, 10 of them were cellphone related.

Robin Sparkles would be happy to know this. lets go to the mall everybody!

that and our economy and social democracy is sound

Are they though? I haven’t seen a new mall built in a very long time. Just strip malls.

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.

homie owned a 3 decker

Boston?

That was my immediate thought as well, followed by a “fuuuuuuck that sounds cool”

To think i was half worried id have to explain the concept lol

Close, worcester

Makes sense, where a triple decker costs less than a million, although Worcester will probably be there soon... and when that happens, look to Fitchburg or Lawrence.

A friend follows a Facebook group called "for the love of old houses" or something that pulls picture sets from listings of cool old houses and they show up in my feed when she comments. The houses are scattered around the country and so the prices generally reflect "average" US real estate costs and a lot of times the houses need work so that's a factor too.

There was one that was a condo in a renovated triple decker in Jamaica Plain that was listed in the $550-600k range.

The comments were hilarious because people saw the picture of the outside of the house and didn't realize until looking through more pictures that the listing was actually just for a 900 square foot 2 BR unit on one floor.

Come again? Worcester, MA? You’re just joking right?

Was his name Dave, or maybe Buster?

Ya know for the life of me i couldnt remember

Edit: u wooshed me 🤦🏻‍♂️

I'm hoping his name was Round. And then his son was named Round Jr. If he has a grandchild, then his name would be Round III.

This story reminds me of one day, many years ago. I met a local, drinking at a bar in Massachusetts, who wanted to show me his toy collection. Went to his house, a crazy 3 story arrangement with open stairs up the center and rooms all around each balcony. Reminded me a bit of a run down Adam’s Family House. His grandfather was seated at a desk, facing out into the hall, behind what looked to be a jailhouse steel barred door, reading a book by desklamp. Creep factor 11, admittedly… questioning my judgement at this point. We continued up the stairs without a word to him. Were there cats everywhere? Of course there were. Then came the amazing part. The top two floors were packed solid with totes full of still packaged toys from the previous 3 decades, an entire room of star wars figures, endless totes of sports cards, memorabilia of every kind. This was back in maybe ‘04! Never saw the dude again, didn’t get murdered. His collection must be worth a fortune by now.

Ya know whats odd, my story happened in Mass too!!

Damn universe, always messing with me like this.

Funny is the action figure and collectible market kind of tanked and they probably are not worth much more than they were worth back then or worth less in many cases.

Sure certain ones are still worth decent money like the original star wars stuff but they were worth a bunch back then too.

Interesting, didn’t know about this! I did know my 70’s and 80’s baseball card collection isn’t worth all that much as I had it appraised a few years back.

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No, it was in Franklin. As a side note, I love spending time in Northampton, one of my favorite towns.

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Oh yeah, interesting stuff about the prototypes. I wonder who they were? I just go to Northampton for tacos and music so I’ve never really run into the local culture.

That dude could make a killing doing events.

Yeah or AirBnB. I would pay a grand to have a bachelor party there with some cots or bunkbeds.

Thats actually not a bad idea

You had me at moped

Thats what i said that night lol

I love that word. Surreal.

Rarely as fitting as in this case. Great oppurtunity for proper usage lol

Not nearly as impressive, but my friends dad had like 4-5 pinball machines, pac man, Galaga, a bowling pin game and a couple juke boxes. Going over there as a kid all the time was fun as fuck. Oh and the walls in the basement were covered in model trains and he had a giant table/model in the middle with all this dope scenery and shit. The train stuff alone had to be close to $1mill, idk train prices but Holy fuck that was the most I've every seen, with a bunch of different collecter ones.

My uncle repairs arcade machines and has a warehouse out the back of his house absolutely rammed full of cool ones he’s picked up over the years.

Kid me loved it and so does adult me.

I so want to own a DDR cabinet… I found some for $12,000 or so and jokingly suggested to my wife we buy it and to my surprise she said yes. I don’t know if she was bluffing because I’m frugal but I can’t justify it. Plus it’ll break eventually and I don’t have the skill to fix. If anything I’ll buy a PS2 and some pads, but the pads are also hard to come by today.

Maybe a cheap PC/emulator would be easier but even then I don’t think the pads are common anymore. Preferably I’d get nice metal ones with bars.

If anybody has a source, send it please!! Lots of places claim to have them but are out of stock.

The folks over at r/dancedancerevolution may be able to help you. It's a small community, but it makes me happy that people still care about DDR.

Not from the US, so fill me in. What happened to the malls? In my country they’re relatively new and people visit malls

There used to be indoor malls. They've significantly transitioned to outdoor malls/plazas. Online shopping has helped speed up the decline of malls. There are still plenty around, though.

In my city, downtown used to be the go-to for shopping, entertainment, restaurants, movies, and so on. Then the suburban malls killed the downtown core. Then the plazas killed the malls. Then the big box stores killed the plazas. Then they tried to revive downtown with boutique stores. Then COVID killed the boutiques downtown.

Fuck, I’m tired.

Edit: I forgot to add that after COVID killed the new boutiquey places downtown, the city’s core became a wasteland of ‘for rent’ signs tacked onto boarded up windows, desperate addicts, and mentally ill homeless people. It’s sad, it’s dismal, and it was caused by decades of laissez-faire corpocracy and municipal mismanagement.

For those who are also sad reading this, remember this next time you're going out. Use maps to find a new restaurant, avoid the chains, go to a new area. Applebee's, olive garden, they all have enough money. Try the new bakery, or the small teriyaki joint. You'll probably get better food anyway.

Buy local wherever possible.

This all the way. I’m fortunate enough to now live in an actual neighborhood with a 2 or 3 block strip of independently owned shops, pubs, and so on. It costs a few bucks more to frequent them versus chains and franchises, but for real, fuck the big business outlets. Most of the economy is comprised of small businesses anyway, and they have better quality stuff in general.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BUSINESSES WHENEVER POSSIBLE

Oh hell yes! Some of the best pizza I've ever had was from this little hole-in-the-wall in Florida ran by 2 dudes called Butterface!

The fucking pizza was so big dude had to tilt it to get it through the condo door.

Hahaha that’s so awesome! Exact thing happened in my area. Couple of guys opened small pizza joint and truly became masters of the craft. The pizza comes in only one size (fucking massive) and yep, i have to tilt the box at an angle to get through my front door with it. It’s soooo goddamn good I have restrain myself from getting it even once a week. Because then it stops being this awesome once-in-a-blue-moon thing that I actually look forward to. Support your local small businesses!!

Definitely support your local small businesses. Most of the time you won't be disappointed!

Applebee's, olive garden, they all have enough money.

and even if they don't, you're better off supporting something local.

Anytime I need to run an errand somewhere new I look up the address on Google maps to see what food is around.

avoid the chains, go to a new area. Applebee's, olive garden, they all have enough money.

And the same damn menu

100% this. In fact, I hadn’t been to an Applebee’s in so long (probably over 15 years if not more) that one day my husband and I went just for fun. I got a caesar salad and he got a steak or something. Awful experience. Table and floors were sticky, my salad was some wilted romaine swimming in a deep bowl of lousy dressing. So much dressing you couldn’t even see the lettuce. And with the chicken it was almost $20!! The little place by me has an AMAZING salad and it’s actually only a dollar or two more.

Mom and Pop joints also seem to better cater to dietary needs. So many chains don't mark gluten free. Whereas the new local Asian place made their entire menu gluten free just because.

Some chain places (like Red Robin in my experience) will bend over backwards for an allergy. Some local places will tell you "order something else." It really is a YMMV.

The reason chains do well, and why people go to them is they know what they are going to get, and that it will agree with them, and it will meet standards. Even I use chains when traveling. Because of the current zeitgeist, the localled owned watever has weird offerings that command a 'premium.' I want rasty diner coffee and freakin' pancake breakfast, not an arugla heirloom tomato and morel omelet.

And try those that actually aren’t at the mall.

Nah, SYSCO crap is SYSCO crap no matter where you get it.

He's explicitly telling you to avoid the SYSCO junk.

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Many of my friends own restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Most of them buy food from Costco and restaurant depot. Both are cheaper and better quality, but don’t deliver. The only ones I know that use Sysco are the larger restaurants.

Same here. I have worked in many small businesses, mostly restaurants and can confirm most use restaurants depot or websturant sometimes gfs not Sysco. Some even try to source locally for specialty items.

This. The only time I shop corporate is grocery shopping but even then I try to go to the local shop when I can afford it

Yes, local or family owned restaurants are way better anyways specially if you can see how much the owners work hard for their business.

anything with over 100 reviews or over 10 years probably deserves a visit

Always this. Those other places are a last resort. I'd rather get. Pub sub.

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Well aren't you just a bag of sunshine and lollipops

The way things are already going, small business is on the way out

Huh, that's crazy, you've just described pretty much every small-mid sized city in....North America lol What is happening.

Car dependant infrastructure is what happened. It killed thriving city centers. In Europe, "downtowns" never really died and after we stopped going all in on cars, they quickly healed.

Right. Particularly in small towns and cities. Once WalMart moved in the malls were hurting and K-Mart bit the dust. Goodbye competition and consumer market choices within the same retail sector. K-Mart had a different merchandise mix. Martha Stewart designed product lines, once upon a time. And now WalMart has The Pioneer Woman. Different “celebrities” for different generations. And WalMart was much more effective in controlling profit margins.

It seems like the new religion is Consumerism and one of the denominations is Walmart.

I wonder what would have happened if Martha Stewart actually bought Kmart

Probably managed better. The worst thing to happen to Sears and Kmart was getting bought by ESL Investments, headed by Eddie Lampert, who had zero clue how either store system, or even retail in general, worked. All he saw was that both were sitting on prime real estate, and used that to leverage the fuck out of both stores.

In the case of Sears, he essentially set up each area of the retail side to compete with each other for funding, like a weird corporate death match, so that parts of the business, like men's wear, had to compete sales-wise against durable goods that were what drew people into stores. It would be as if GM made their Geo brand compete directly against Chevy, and then gut one or the other if they "lost", instead of comparing them against each brand's direct competitor (Geo vs. Kia, or Chevy vs. Dodge or Ford).

Then he opened up durable goods brands that were built up as store exclusives, like Kenmore and Craftsman, to other retailers, initially Kmart. These brands were built to bring people into Sears, and the stores were laid out specifically to make you go through other areas of the store to get there, possibly showcasing other sales or products you'd be interested in. These brands had also built up a reputation for dependability and quality, and warranty programs that went with them (Craftsman's socket sets were famous for having a lifetime guarantee; if you broke a socket and took it back to Sears, they would replace it on the spot, no receipt, regardless of if the tool was 7 days or 70 years old). When Kmart started to sell Craftsman stuff, this tarnished the brand; Kmart wasn't considered to be a retailer in par with Sears, so this made Craftsman tools appear lower quality. When they started allowing big box hardware stores like Lowe's to sell Craftsman and Kenmore, the warranty programs changed, and most of those customers stopped coming to Sears. Fewer people went into the stores, so fewer sales, not only of the bigger money purchases like refrigerators and lawn mowers, but also the other areas of the store that lost out on potential customers. This also affected Sears' finance department, since a lot of revenue came from stuff bought on credit, using Sears cards; fewer customers buying big ticket items means less revenue from credit accounts, which also means less to carry losses on the books.

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If you want to have your mind blown even more, they really should've been Amazon almost twenty years before modern Amazon (Amazon wasn't really all that useful until the early 2000s). Sears actually partnered with IBM and CBS to create Prodigy, one of the first online services in the country, even predating public access to the internet, in 1984. While CompuServe came out on 1979, Prodigy was the first to have a graphical use interface over dialup. The fact that you could have graphics over a 2400-baud modern, and snappy for the time, was highly impressive. Prodigy was also one of the first online content providers; it would deliver news, sports pages, message boards, and even connect you to different sites and vendors.

I was in elementary school when my parents got their first PC (we had a Commodore64 prior to that), and we had Prodigy in the late 80s. I sent my first email at 11, in reply to my uncle. I used to play Where In the World Is Carmen San Diego? on Prodigy; they would put out new episodes every week. I also used to play a first-person maze game on there, too. For the time and the technology, Prodigy was amazing.

Lol. It would have survived.

Low interest rate mean that a lot of rich people kept buying real estate as investment, by the time they start repaying they already sold it for far more then the interest rate, aka they leverage real estate, in fact they leverage pretty much everything in the last 15 years.

“Progress”

Economic Forum- “You’ll own nothing and like it” (or else.)

Slowly sliding down the ladder, that's what.

What is weird is when you go someplace and they have those outdoor malls that are supposed to look like a downtown but it's not a real downtown? In California they even have fake historical signs and everything. It's super weird and tripped me out when I first came across one.

Then video killed the radio star, will the tyranny ever end??

This is the inevitable reality in North America because of the awful car-centric city design that has a stranglehold over the people here. Cars good, walking bad. If people need to drive somewhere to walk around, they'll be less likely to do it. Whereas in places where people don't need a car to hit local spots in town, they don't even think about it.

I think a part of it is also that there are places you can get to by driving everywhere, but the walkable places are fewer and farther between. So a lot of people end up in a situation where getting to a walkable place takes more driving than just driving to one or two places in an unwalkable strip mall.

I'm saying the fact that you can't just walk out of your home and go to where you'd like by foot is the problem

LOL,you and me both.

Fuck, I’m tired.

Sounds like the boutiques are taking you with them

No, I’m just tired of seeing the progression of urban decay play out. I always knew my town wasn’t the only one suffering from it, and judging by many of the comments here, it’s pretty widespread. That also makes me tired because proper city planning - that actually benefits citizens with a livable locale - is 100% achievable…as long as local politicians have the will and the grit for it. But that only seems to happen if incompetent / corrupt elected officials are actually held accountable for their fuckups. And I’m equally tired of many of these cunts getting away with it, time and again.

Then Amazon killed online shops, while Facebook marketplace made the coup de grace on ebay.

In my town one new mall that opened in the 70s with a special arcade area designed to appeal to teens and young adults has been torn down and replaced by an Amazon fulfillment center. The other mall that was situated in the center of some wealthy areas is thriving as a shopping center.

You think you’re tired?

Imagine being the stores.

Video killed the radio star

This awful car-centric suburban sprawl is absolutely killing me.

Username checks out

So much death, but hey bezos flew his phallic rocket into low orbit so its all worth it /s

Now it’s like a place closes down and they build a food place where it was, what we only leave the house for work and food? Boring

Eat, shit, work, sleep

Rinse and repeat ad infinitum

And pay taxes lol gotta support the dumbest of us in Washington 👍🏼

That's wild, same thing happened in Miami

You must not live in a newly legal weed state.

It’s like you live in my hometown, except you probably don’t because this is most cities in North America.

Damn, you're really calling Fresno,CA out like that?

Boy howdy does this ever sound like Chinatown in Vancouver.

It's an establishment-kill-establishment world out there...

Sad to see downtowns like that, but empty buildings eventually means affordable retail rent, which brings entrepreneurs and cool new businesses. Not just the type of shops which used to be there, but some crazy new concepts, too.

Please. Unless we find a way to fuck that up, too.

My city turned many of the old buildings into overpriced apartments with HOA’s. Now the core is becoming gentrified. Correction: it IS gentrified, and trending that way each neighborhood westward away from the Missouri River.

I understand your words, but not what you are saying. Sounds like a very american experience.

It describes a lot of cities in North America. I don’t know if other countries outside it suffer the same problem, but somehow I doubt Prague or Paris do, for example.

It was caused by the rich people

By me some downtowns are making a comeback. More for restaurants and bars or microbrews. Even some small distillers making some pretty exotic concoctions. And some of those old retail spots are now kickboxing or yoga studios.

The same for some of the indoor malls they’re trying to anchor around entertainment and dining and less of a concentration on retail which is unable to pay those high rents.

If the town and landlords want to make a comeback they need to come together to market the downtowns. And also eliminate some metered parking. That’s really what killed downtowns excessive parking tickets. The mall parking is free so people bypassed the hassle of downtown shopping.

Downtown Minneapolis used to have a 12 story Macy's store.

Not a 12 story mall with a Macy's as the main store, just a goddamn 12 story Macy's.

Let's not forget the amazing riots replete with smashed out windows, looting, and fires. A lot of those places in my city said 'to hell with that' and never reopened, at least in those spaces.

And I would bet that some mayors would be unwilling to invest revitalization dollars into some of those areas affected.

We still have indoor malls in Canada. Makes sense considering the weather.

And that Underground mall in Toronto too.

Indoor malls also going strong in California, for the opposite weather but same reason

Do any of them have indoor ice skating rinks?

I see you've never been to West Edmonton mall! Swimming, skating, mini golf, bowling and a lot more

https://www.wem.ca/play

they have a roller coaster in there too! well a whole amusement park tbh. its amazing

And a pirate ship

Don't forget the submarines

Tell that to the person who thought doing outdoor malls in Texas was a good idea. Sure, 108 degrees outside, let’s go to the mall!

We don't have AC here in Vancouver in our homes so if it gets real hot everyone goes to the mall or the movies for AC.

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I had to go pick up something at guilford town centre it was crazy buzyon a friday night. Teens nwver get tired of hanging out at the mall man.

We still have them in America too lol. Went to one last weekend.

Malls have definitely changed. Worked for a medical company and we opened a full blown clinic in one. There was also a guy selling caskets upstairs.... we had a working relationship.

Hilarious! I’ll bet that guy wasn’t into the biodegradable casket trend…cardboard, and my personal favorite: wool.

Outdoor malls are silly. You went to the mall to escape summer heat, or go Xmas shopping in winter. Why would you wan that outdoors?

Its all the anchor stores like Sears, JC penny going out of business. So much of the smaller shops inside got secondary traffic from those stores. Macys is next, you can see it by the changes inside like the perfume desk disappearing.

Amazon is killing them all.

When Sears left the local mall last year, its like every month another small location winds up empty.

Walmart and Kohls will be the last left standing. And Kohls only because they brokered a deal to be a physical Amazon return point.

Bloomingdales and Nordstorms, etc will last a little while longer catering to higher priced affluent neighborhoods.

Actually it’s not Amazon so much as Walmart killing them. Read an interesting (and rather grim) article about how Walmart is actually the one that helped kill a lot of these anchor stores and malls (particularly Sears). The reason why the article was a bit depressing was that the reason given for Walmart’s takeover is due to the fact that Americans just don’t have the spending power that they once did. So they tend to go to cheaper places like Walmart rather than more expensive places like mall anchor stores. In the area that I live in the most popular stores are places like Walmart, Target, Dollar General, etc. I do think there’s a lot of truth to this. Online shopping hasn’t helped, but I can definitely see an economic reason for this as well.

I wish they stuck with indoor malls. It’s been in the 100s for a month now. I used to like to walk around and suck up the free ac.

The mall in my metro area that I spent the most time in during the '90s and early '00s was opened in '57 as an outdoor mall (it was very long, not too dissimilar from today's strip malls), but was enclosed in '84. This forced most foot traffic to be funneled through one of 4 main entrances, plus some auxiliary entrances on the anchor stores.

I remember it being quite busy through most of the '90s, but by '05 it was struggling to keep tenants. It somehow hung on for a few more years but was closed permanently in '13 and demolished in '16-17.

So it basically had a ≈15 year run as an enclosed mall (that was popular, at any rate) before it was killed off by people wanting the convenience of being able to park right in front of the store they needed.

You forgot oversaturation plus key mall occupants like Sears dying out.

Yes. Death of anchor stores.

I think the online shopping bit plays the bigger part. Outdoor malls/plazas sound cool but in my state we don't have those, we just have a bunch of empty, shuttered regular malls.

And back in their heyday from the 70s through the 90s, indoor malls were basically THE place to hang out as a kid. Watching stuff like the mall scenes in Fast Times At Ridgemont High just feels so weird now.

I remember reading an interesting article where they stated that it was actually Walmart that killed malls, rather than online shopping. Americans just don’t have the spending power that they once did which is why cheaper box stores like Walmart and Target replaced malls.

Walmart has killed a lot of businesses, and it sounds pretty reasonable that a lot of those businesses were in malls. Which would mean killing malls too.

Yeah, but many are half empty.

I'm just waiting for the "wait, what if we put these stores together INDOORS!" moment.

Yeah Clifton Park Mall was partially demolished to make it an outside plaza

I live in SoCal and we have like 3 of the largest malls in the country, Cerritos, Lakewood, and Stonewood so to hear theyre dying out elsewhere is kinda shocking. but also kinda not since i havent bought anything at either of those malls since like high school back in the 2010s…

I only go to malls to return the stuff that I bought online

Huh, there's a mall in every city here in Australia

What is an outdoor mall? Like a mall without rooftop? I'm from India and shopping malls are appreciated here, since besides the things you can buy online, they have cinemas, restaurants, & supermarket in them

What is the difference between an outdoor mall and just a highstreet with stores? ^^

everything is now these live/work/play places. outdoor shopping and dining with apartments/condos above.

There also used to be an abundance of malls - so the decline I feel was inevitable.

Walmart was the first torpedo for the malls.

Why go to a giant building and have to go through three or four stores to get what you need, when Walmart has all of those things in a slightly smaller area, for a lower price?

Most Bigger cities still have malls, but it’s pretty clear when you visit they they aren’t as thriving as they were in the 90s.

Malls in smaller / medium size cities are pretty much gone.

Well in most places, malls have been seen as obsolete since the introduction of Amazon and other online stores. Malls still exist in the cities but in rural and suburban areas, they're slowly dying out.

I have noticed the smart ones are adapting a little. Bowling Alleys where Sears used to be, airsoft ranges, entertainment centers (pool, laser tag, darts, etc...). The ones who don't have active management are just dying.

In the experience of the local malls I have seen, the problem is they are all owned by a non local corporation that charge too much for the area businesses to support and for the shops to enter into.

That is exactly what happend to my local mall... we used to have like 20 stores in it. And a food court. But the people who owned it live 7 hours away. And charge so much. The only thing left in it is staples, a pizza hut, and a furnature store... the rest is closed off and empty. Theyre soon to be turning it into a low income housing unit. It even had an underground parking lot because it got so busy... now its full of homless lol

That's how one of the two in my town went. The mall was having trouble keeping tenants in the early 2000s. It ends up getting bought up by a developer who made huge promises about building this community area with apartments and hotels around the edge of the property, an amphitheater, and a niche restaurant food court. We got an amphitheater and a food court, we also lost all of the previous local businesses. They couldn't rent out any space to retail clients, so now it's full of government offices, a school, and amphitheater they aren't allowed to do large events at because of the school and offices.....oh and most of those niche restaurants closed too without the promised events to profit on.

Right. Greedy landlords use popular restaurants for this reason—they want to push up the rent. The thing is, people going to particular restaurants, especially the non-franchised local ones, would also walk through the mall on their way to the mall movie theaters.

There was a Village Inn in an outlying space of a suburban mall that opened in 1990, and is now on life support. Our favorite server said that the Village Inn was closing because the mall owner wanted a 25 year lease, lol! Corporate said: No Thank You. And 5 or 6 years later, there it sits, abandoned.

1000% this. All malls that don't follow this model will fail.

I started a VR arcade at a mall because I knew that entertainment like that would be perfect for a mall. The organization worked against me at every turn. Apparently their marketing manager didn't want my business there and instead wanted more high end stores like Apple.

Absolute missed opportunity for themselves and the communities they're in. Could have had some fun stuff going on. Maybe even a music scene in the malls would be great during winter months. Just can't see outside Apple, and high end clothing stores. Shame.

Malls should be set up more as community spaces. There's an outdoor mall in my city that's been around since before the internet and while they have shops, most people either go to restaurants or magic and music shows.

Exactly. Embrace the mall walkers.

Turn them into senior centers and apartments, with inside spaces.

Everyone says this, but I think malls would also make great music venue / clubs/ bars.

Imagine an indoor area where every corner anchor store was a music venue/stage (each of a different genre) with all the small shops in between being bars or restaurants.

That would be the spot on the weekends. Could only work in bigger cities though.

This is exactly what I'm talking about! I would be there all the time. They would have to have "adult only" hours after, say, 9pm. And then actually stay open until 12pm or maybe later.

In the midwest it would be THE place on rainy, boiling hot, and fall/winter.

I heard about a mall that turned into apartments. I can't remember where tho.

A lot of these malls aren’t up to code to be residential units. also the utilities have to be completely gutted and redone. It’s a lot more expensive to do that rather than for a developer to just buy an empty parcel.

Ahh, that makes sense I guess.

There's a two-story strip mall in my neighborhood that has been at about 3% capacity since I moved to the area in 1990. Their one major occupant changed from a supermarket to a church. Other than that there's a single Subway restaurant and a tax help place and maybe one or two other things and probably 80 empty places.

I'm so tempted to call up the owner and offer $20/month for a place for my friends and I to play board games. It's like, why not, it's 20 bucks more than they're making now. (I bet the utility bill would make it not worth it for me but still)

That would likely be $20/month more than they would ever make from it, but they will most likely reject it because they are still holding out hope someone will eventually come in and pay like $3500/month for the space instead.

Mortgage backed securities.. if they allow any tenants it devalues their property

Could you explain that concept to me? I don't get how not having tenants could possibly be better than having them.

They can claim any unused space as lost income on taxes.

3500/month in lost income deductions is worth more to them than a 20 spot

How you figure?

That's crazy because in 30 years no one has, and more modern, nicer looking strips are being built literally all around it and are full while it is abandoned.

IMO they should build on top of malls and add apartments. I think people would like being able to just take an elevator or the stairs down to the mall area and walk around to see and visit the stores, restaurants, and entertainment areas without having to leave their “neighborhood” or especially take any kind of transportation. And it would be beneficial for the stores too, because they have some people who will come shop at them just because they literally live on top of them. Might see some malls add grocery stores, so then some people might be able to completely give up their cars if they can get everything they need right below them.

When I was in my mid-20s I would have loved to live above a mall. Go down and drink and not have to worry about how to get home, hit up the food court without having to drive anywhere, hang out at the arcade our mall has, or just walk around with all the people shopping… I definitely would have rented that kind of place for 2-3 years.

Ugh I've been saying they should put a huge complex built over the Sears in this one mall.. the place has a movie theater, and the mall is pretty much dead outside of an aquarium it would be awesome if they could shift it with an active food court, a chain grocery shop etc..

The place is dead as a mall the last survivors of all dead malls left.. no more bath and body works, no GNC

building on top would mean adding a ton of internal structural columns to the existing mall to support the weight, it wouldnt be easy as malls have a lot of open space, adding support for new floors would close up a ton of floor plan. It might be easier and cheaper, to start from scratch

I just did the same thing to a 4 story open floor plan office building they converted, had to add so many columns

They are doing this. I lived in WA and FL, and there's multiple developments in both areas with these, and building more. It's more in the direction of European cities, but still totally different like it's own thing. I have not lived in one.

I saw a documentary about the rise and fall of malls and originally, malls were conceived of as community spaces to rival European town squares. There were supposed to be restaurants and hair salons and childcare, a place to spend time. Unfortunately they were more profitable as a place to spend money- until they weren’t.

The big mall in San Francisco used to have a grocery store in the basement that was right next to a transit hub. It was a bougie store but they had a hot food bar and the best chocolate milk I’ve ever had. You could go window shopping after work and then grab something for dinner on your way home. When it closed it felt like a loss of a public amenity, and I went to the mall less.

There's a great community mall where I used to live. It's small, and centered around its amazing food court. Has a core of independently owned businesses with a few traditional restaurant spaces on the edge. Had a mini-library, used book store, community stage, giant chess set, grocery store on the end. A lot of people would go just for the food court.

Are magic shows still a thing outside vegas?

I saw one in Boston a few months ago. He was an escape artist (stuff like straight jackets upside down) so it technically wasn't a magic show, but it was in the same vein.

Our local one charged 1k+ a month in addition to 10% of monthly profits. Wtf?

I was at $3.8k flat for a roped off 20x30 space in the open.

There's a struggling one near me that recently added a dinner theater.

There was also a very key factor that a lot of younger people are missing.

Teen Mall Culture. Bored on a midday Saturday? Grab your twenty bucks in allowance and catch the bus (bully your parents into driving you) down to the mall. You don’t know who might be there, but you knew there was a very high chance someone you knew would be there. First stop, the corn dog place for a lemonade and a corn dog, then it’s a bee line down to the arcade, or Sam Goody’s. Oh look there’s that cute boy from third period….

Lol, core memories unlocked

The mall near me has had so many issues they don’t allow anyone under 18 without an adult.

Mall I worked at in the 90's was already dying and all but a dead carcass by 2015. They did a major overhaul in 2016 and replaced the closed Sears with a major discount grocer, added a VR shop like yours, built a movie theater, and some great looking eating places. There are other shops too (the ubiquitous Sunglass Hut lol). Still a lot of empty places and the Weinstocks that was empty when I was there in the 90's is *still* empty (totally want to make a multilevel indoor paintball arena but...)

They are seriously successful now given the average income area they are in.

Winter months - completely agree. I live in west MI and while there's plenty to do outside when we finally get the snow, there's plenty of grey, wet, cold days where there's not much to do anywhere. Older malls would be a great place for community events or for them to encourage gathering. Ours has several elderly folks who go just to walk.

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This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. There's all this space in there that could be used for so many interesting community events. Also, have adult-only hours, and having sections of the mall open later at night could add a night scene as well.

Plenty of ideas for the space that I think people would love. But leadership at the malls are all stuck in the 80s or 90s.

Malls as primarily retail is horribly outdated. The vast majority of the stuff that anybody would go to a mall for now is done mostly online. They gotta shift to ‘experienced’ and entertainment as the focus or die like you said

Yes, this. They prioritize high end companies no one can afford.. and wonder why people aren’t coming? I’m a woman so what pops in my head at the local mall is Lucky’s, Nordstrom, and a bunch of other shit places. Nahh, find me at the thrift store or Amazon.

As VR becomes more mainstream and readily available for households over the next 3-5 years - I.E Meta pushes the technology and cheapens the market - You’ll need to adapt. Start planning now!

I always figured they should have art shows there. Like you know how cities have a "First Friday" or "First Thursday"? Have it at the old mall. Have a local band playing in the center, have some art exhibits set up in the old stores.

Doing that once a month would be really cool. It wouldn't save the mall, but it'd definitely help it some

I think little festivals inside the malls would do a lot. Especially in colder months

I live close to Mall of America and actually went last weekend. It seems alive and well but its change a ton from even 10 years ago. There is way more to do there now than just shop. There is now a decent food court and maybe every 20th tenant is an activity-based attraction such as lazer tag like you said. Many of the stores that had 2 or 3 in the mall are now down to 1. Not sure why they ever thought 3 abercrombies was a good idea to begin with...

Isn't the third or fourth floor (I don't remember how many floors it has...) basically the food court?

They recently added a whole new wing with a fancy food court when they added the Radisson onto it. The third floor still has the food court and the 4th floor I think is still there, but it was just a few places (margaritaville maybe?)

Funny you say that. The local mall when I was growing up had a bowling alley that closed late 90s. And the cinema across the street closed down too about then.

My 'local' (an hour away, but still the closest) mall has a Dicks, a Home of Economy, and a TJ Maxx, and that might be it for stores. Otherwise, they sold a good chunk of former storefronts to the movie theater (the only one in town), so now there's a nice movie theater and fewer empty storefronts. They also turned one into a coin arcade.

Another mall just a touch farther in the opposite direction has ax throwing, a movie theater, RC car racing, a dojo, a gymnastics place, a wrestling club, an art gallery, a coin arcade, and a giant play area for kids in the ghost of a food court. It has a few regular mall stores, too, but there's also the only occult store for a few hundred miles and some other cool stuff that's only there because jewelry stores and shoe stores and clothing stores and the like have mostly moved into their own buildings.

If that's what the comeback of malls looks like, I'm all the way on board.

My local mall rented maybe 1/3rd of its total space to the local community college that wanted a second campus. They actually took over the old movie theater in the mall, so they have a few large auditoriums / classrooms. They also took over a few smaller stores that became labs and smaller rooms. They got a wing too so they have a large open area that's basically an indoor quad. I guess their students get free parking and far better access too. Plus food options are far closer than most colleges.

It makes the mall seem more alive as there are actually people there during weekdays. I guess the students also frequent the mall more than normal folks as they don't have much else to do between classes.

Just got a job to survey the sears at the local mall, lets see if it goes bowling alley!

Our local malls have converted the former anchor stores into fulfillment centres. I assume they get a decent discount on the lease because that's a lot of sqft to sit empty otherwise.

The free market, uh, finds a way...

Yeah, that does seem to be the trend. Same thing is happening in the UK with our shopping centres, once upon a time there'd be one in every a few in each Borough, now there's way less as many have been knocked down to replace with apartments.

The one I work in has a cinema, casino, batting cages, sports bars, 2 gaming arenas, bowling, 2 covid test centres, a covid vaccination centre, a blood donation clinic, and a blood test clinic.

Before the pandemic I saw an article about malls. The gist of it was that the ones that were doing well were doing very well, but that was a relatively small percentage of them and the majority were dying. I don't remember it well enough to recall what the primary factors were for the good ones though.

Yeah that’s how it is around here. Our biggest newest mall is doing fine and still somehow has all the anchors occupied. I think it was one of the last indoor malls built in the US before they became uncool. Ironically, it’s the second newest mall here that’s doing the worst because it’s too close to the newest one.

Not just online stuff, but they were already being replaced by sprawling lots full of big box stores.

Yeah, this confuses me. Right across from the empty mall is a strip with 5 below, Walmart, Hobby lobby, Best Buy, etc. etc. Which are bustling...I don't understand why those sorts of stores didn't just become the new mall stores.

...this is also a place where it gets to -10F in the winters, so you think a large enclosed space would be better...but nope.

People don’t actually browse at multiple stores in the strip mall. They’d rather park as close to the store they went there for and then hit a drive thru instead of a food court.

One of my local malls built facades/entrances to most of the stores on the side facing the parking lot. Actually worked pretty well for them. The interior of the mall is still doing okay but people who just want to go to Ross don’t have to walk half a mile.

We have a mall, in Ohio, but all the anchor stores left and there are few places to go now in the mall. Jewelry and shoe stores left.

Even in cities they're dying. Tulsa had 3 malls, 2 of which are gone now (I think one of the two still opens but is entirely nail salons) and the third isn't doing so great.

Check out Singapore. It has a very strong mall scene.

Malls still exist in tourist spots if they have local shops and destination eateries.

Not what I've seen. Suburban Mall I go to tends to be on the crowded side.

Plus Amazon and stuff takes days to deliver

My mall started construction on an attached Kidzania in 2018 and opened right before the pandemic hit.That place is like 5 stories tall and basically its own kid-city/society with layers of stuff for kids to do. But since covid, I've never seen it open or active in the few times I've been back to that mall.

Malls used to be a great investment for real estate developers due a tax statute.

The malls used take a lot of business from local stores. However since the 90s brick and mortar stores have to compete with online sales, so malls have been dying off in big numbers. This and some other channels explore abandoned buildings, with many of them being old malls.

This response should really be higher as it's the real reason malls were created and are now gone.

The malls in the US were basically big centers for buying... clothes and gifts, mostly. The stores always seemed to be a little more expensive and few had stores for everyday items. They often had some entertainment and some eating places. Of course, this also meant that if you needed one little thing from a small store in the mall, you had to find a parking space, which was often outside and far from the doors, then walk all the way to the one store with your stuff. And on top of this, some big stores that were common to malls started doing poorly and going out of business. Over time, malls kind of became emptier and emptier. The strip malls - you know, without a common indoor area - are still doing well, but I think this is because they are actually more convenient.

Some of this, though, is kind of specific to areas that rely a lot on cars, too: The shared common area is more useful if you have a lot of folks walking or using public transportation.

I've since moved to Norway, and a lot of the malls here are actually used (mostly - I've been in some that rivaled the emptiness of US malls). They are more likely to contain practical stores here than they were in the US. For example I fully expect every mall in Norway to have a grocery store (they do in my area) but this was rare in the US.

Amazon, Target and Walmart replaced malls in much of the US. Essentials at Target and Walmart, niche stuff on Amazon. Arcades are in the basement and people watching is at a low.

Another thing that at least in the area I used to live, in central Maryland, malls had a youth problem, in that the teenagers generally had few places to hang out other than the malls. Some malls as a result started pushing policies that were aimed at preventing teens from stopping for any amount of time for any reason (you had to constantly be showing you were "shopping" and not "hanging out" and they banned any teenagers from simply being at the mall in groups larger than 3.)

Marley Station mall in Glen Burnie. Other malls such as Laurel Mall, Harundale Mall (which was the first indoor mall on the east coast of the US) and others as commenters have said were demolished and turned into outdoor shopping centers.

Hi fellow Central Marylander!

It's not anything new for teens to hang at the mall. I remember when I was a 90s teen my local mall had various curfews and rules to keep us moving.

However, maybe it's gotten worse? Towson Town Center in particular. Teens were getting in fights pretty regularly.

I haven't been to that mall in YEARS. There were some decent shops, but going there was just so unpleasant. Aside from the screaming, roughhousing teens, parking was annoying and there were loads of aggressive salespeople at kiosks trying to bully me into buying face creams.

Lol no thanks.

Hi fellow Central Marylander!

Hey!

It's not anything new for teens to hang at the mall.

Oh definitely not, but Marley Station in particular had a "goth kid" problem (I was one of them) and while most of us caused little to no trouble, a lot of yuppies were getting worried that the "undesirables" would do bad things to them and felt "unsafe" as we would tend to gather at the entrances. We were also the single largest demographic spending money at the mall, went regularly every weekend and this was just after Arundel Mills was being built so it wasnt really the best time to actively push away some of your biggest sources of revenue.

Edit: and the demolitions of Laurel and Harundale malls definitely pushed any of those malls' goth kid crowds to Marley Station for sure

LMAO I can't imagine caring if goth kids are lurking by the entrance.

Maybe the mall should have had a Lender Goth program. You can pick up a goth at the entrance, bring them shopping with you, get gothy second opinions on any outfit you try on.

Having visited SE Asia, A big draw there was the free air conditioning! If it's hot at home, of course I'll hang out at the public mall.

In the US, the malls are both old (1980s was the heydey) and no longer serve a purpose. We have AC at home, we have television at home, we have shopping online... what's the raison d'etre left?

For some night and day contrast, look up youtube, "bill and Ted's big adventure " the mall scene.

That's what the mall WAS in the 80s/90s.

That exact mall is an abandoned ruin, today.

Now, others have hit the nail on the head. You need a new draw. An experience that can't be replicated or substituted at home. Community activities.

Gaming stores that host tournaments. Restaurants. Other organized events to get people to drive out from the house.

A lot of malls got built in the USA starting in the 50's and were anchored by department stores. Department stores went into decline as they couldn't compete against big box retailers. Malls in general went into decline because there were too many built and a lot of the smaller stores couldn't compete with online retail.

The main entrainment option for malls were movie theaters, and they have also seen a decline in general.

A lot of malls got built in the USA starting in the 50's and were anchored by department stores.

There was a tax law created in the 50s that made malls a huge tax shelter; when it happened malls rapidly became spammed across the USA. The tax law updated in the 80s and immediately malls started dying out.

Decline in people shopping in person and more people going to discount stores. Malls are really expensive real estate and most stores can’t pull that kind of sales. The big stores that used to anchor the malls are almost all bankrupt and gone.

One mall I lived near added a local community college, who now takes up 50% of the mall space.

Another mall I live near has decided to turn much of the space into condos and add a nightlife section with bars and restaurants.

Check out /r/deadmalls to get an idea of how things were vs how they are now.

It sucks because growing up in the 80's and 90's the mall was the spot to be? You would always ask your parents to drop you off there to meet up with friends, go see a movie, and just hang out.

Nowadays it's not the same since Amazon and other online retailers took over so they are pretty empty except for the big holidays in the US like Thanksgiving and Christmas time.

I went back to the mall I grew up near last year. When I was young, it was THE place to hang out, and now fully 90% of the stores are boarded up, and on a Thursday afternoon, there was MAYBE 10 shoppers in there...in a quarter mile long building.

Many of the stores had no visible staff, or a couple of lost-looking people at the counter looking out at you walking by like they were in some weird purgatory. Another bunch of the stores had their lights on, but the security gates were down.

It felt like a post-apocalypse movie or something. Seriously creepy.

They built too many malls in the 80s and 90s.

Yeah we have heaps of them around here in australia. Still extremely popular.

Amazon happened. Mall stores are more expensive to run than normal stores, and they're making less money now that everyone can buy everything online.

They're still around but we just built too many in the 90s, and then online shopping and big box stores killed them. Every town near a highway had one, it seemed like. They also relied on large department store chains as anchors to attract people who would then shop at the smaller stores -- but those mostly went out of business or are shutting down.

We still have malls, but they're only doing well in larger cities or wealthier towns. They're also getting more creative in what they have to attract shoppers. They just built a new massive one outside of New York City that has an indoor water park and theme park. And there's a casino in Connecticut that basically has one attached.

Malls were built to make use of tax laws to make a lot of money in the short term. When the tax feature ends the malls stop getting maintained and fall apart. That’s not the only reason for their decline but it is a big one.

Amazon. Amazon is what happened to malls.

My local mall is mostly empty and hasn't had ac in 4+ years. Joann, the last anchor store, is moving and will be out of the mall completely this fall. There is a post office, but for how long?

Some malls are still doing extremely well. The ones that have been updated, still have a "this is a destination" feel to them, etc are doing fine. It's the smaller, older ones out in the relative middle of nowhere, with only Macys as an anchor store, that are dying out.

They are still popular in the us, we just had way too many of them. I live in a medium-sized metro area, we have about 2 and 1/2 million people in the whole metro area. We have a full six indoor or indoor outdoor hybrid malls. Plus a further five medium large strip malls and two extremely large strip malls and within an hour of us there is a huge outlet center and two more indoor malls. It's just way more malls than the population warrants and can support. Half of the indoor malls are less than 50% occupied it seems. Only two of them are actually the thriving indoor shopping centers I remember from my childhood. And that's honestly probably the number of indoor malls my area can support in addition to the larger outdoor shopping centers we have.

I live in a pretty seismically active area though and I think that that probably has a lot to do with the shift. Making sure that multiple small buildings are seismically sound is exponentially cheaper than ensuring one extremely large building is seismically sound.

The US has a drastically more advanced online shopping infrastructure compared to a lot of other countries. Amazon feeds the need to consume with free returns for any reason whatsoever, even past the return dates.

They tended to be anchored by department stores, a lot of which went out of business over the last 15 years. The box stores don't like being attached to malls. Every developer and their brother wanted to build more malls, so the convenience went away and a lot of areas had a good mall and some shitty ones but they would change over the years as shitty ones got renovated.

In the town I grew up in we used to have a mall that was full of shops, a movie theater, an arcade, a bar, etc. It was probably 80% full at any given time, now there's only 2 businesses left in that mall (a bar and a sporting goods store). The parking lot is still torn up from a storm from 3 years ago and there's a sign on one of the front doors that reminds people "Yes, we're still open!" because if you just look at the place from the outside it looks completely dead.

I would imagine with how popular online shopping is that a lot of shopping malls experienced something similar over the last 10-20 years.

Malls here were huge in the 90s. People tend to avoid them now because of how inconvenient they are and the violence that happens here. Online shopping has a lot to do with it also. People in the US are becoming more introverted as a whole. Our politicians would have you believe otherwise.

Everyone I have been in the last 10 years is 90% closed.

No one makes any money anymore. Cheaper to stay home.

Exactly what i was thinking. There's so many malls here. And they're packed with people constantly.

There's a lot of stuff, but the death-knell was Amazon and Walmart.

I've lived in several countries. Malls in the US are utilized incorrectly. What I mean is that American malls are pretty much limited to overpriced clothing and non necessities, like games and jewelry. Even the restaurants, excluding fast food in the food court, tend to be expensive and overpriced. So shopping at a mall is expensive. The second problem is that malls tend to be very far away from population centers and people are expected to drive there. The third problem is that American malls are huge, they aren't a place you can go to do some quick shopping, if you want to visit two different stores it might take several minutes to walk between them. Malls are really inconvenient in the US. So only major cities can support them.

In other countries the malls will also have cheaper stores, and even grocery stores. And the malls are within walking distance of population centers. Making them convenient.

Mall design had been the same for decades.

You get two HUGE companies, maybe even three or four depending on the size of the mall, and those are you "anchor stores". The idea is they are huge stores that help increase foot traffic because people go to those stores to get all their shit.

Then you have the smaller stores fill in in between those anchor stores.

So on one end you would have Sears, the other side a K Mart or something, maybe like a Macys? In Canada it was The Bay, Sears (back in the day), Zellers (back in the day), Woodwards (back in the day), Eatons (back in the day). Maybe a grocery store in one of the ends.

And that is kind of the problem, all those back in the day huge department stores went out of business.

A big problem for huge malls with 500+ stores, but a complete disaster for smaller malls that have like sub 100 stores in poorer neighborhoods. Because if you lose your huge anchor store you can't fill it, no one uses that amount of square footage, not the shitty dollar store, not the tiny hobby shop, not that as seen on tv store, and not that random ass trinket store.

Then it's kind of a feedback loop cause once foot traffic is down, sales down, tenants down, and then you end up with these ghost town malls with like 20 stores open half the day that makes you wonder how they could stay open when the mall is completely empty.

Locally those anchor spots are getting filled with Walmarts, Home Depot, random car dealership spillover?

Also yeah, online shopping, covid, and other factors that contributes to it.

I think the very successful malls try to make it about the experience, trying to have unique store (fancy/designer, or one off stores, or outlets), and renovating to make it look good, seasonal decorations, having events take place inside, vs just dingy hallways with stores on either side.

Theres still malls everywhere. I go to one all time time when I go to the movies in Riverside California. Just went to a huge mall last weekend in Scottsdale Arizona. Malls are definitely a thing

They're expensive to run, and people don't go as much as they did before. Walmart, Target, and Amazon hurt the big department stores, and without the big anchors to bring foot traffic, a smaller boutique might find it better and cheaper to rent their own storefront that people can park and walk right up to.

Amazon happened.

Consider a country where driving is the norm, sidewalks are sparse, shops are only downtown, and then think of a place where you can meet up with everyone while doing your shopping/eating/gaming/socialising.

The 'inventor' or designer of malls is an Austrian fellow, Victor Gruen, who wanted to emulate the hustle and bustle of European cities. Picture smaller streets with cafes and shops in walking distance from their residence and/or church.
He missed this in North America and wanted to design a place where you could do the same.

Hence: Malls.

It took America by storm. Malls everywhere, too many to the point of some becoming obsolete or run down. But they're still there.

There's an interesting 99PI episode about this here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/meet-us-by-the-fountain/

Here's a concise read on the rise and fall of the american mall.

25% of malls likely to close within 5 years.

There were about 25,000 malls around 2000 with 2000 mega malls. New malls would poach the anchor stores of older mall, crippling them.

Iirc there was a huge tax break for urban development centers in the mid 1950s. They didn't develop that type of community and became pavement islands and competition for downtown.

My US city, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, still has a bunch of malls that are open. But in the last 20 years some closed due to internet shopping and the rise of outdoor malls . One local mall that we used to go to in the 80s and 90s sits abandoned and falling apart. One is gone, being torn down over a decade ago. And a newer mall the built in the mid 00s is largely abandoned with a few stores still in it.

My favorite, century 3.

https://youtu.be/_RuAVg-VgHo

Essentially, whats happened to alot of malls is like im sure others have said online shopping.

The other end of it is that they built to many of them. With the same stores in each of them.

On top of that, they built to many of the shops that exist elsewhere in strip malls etc.

Oversaturation led to less people coming from further away to spend a day at the mall. It became less of a trip and more of a stop on the way home.

They are stupid and online shopping is faster, less expensive, and doesn't involve being around annoying people, so they disappeared. Thankfully.

It's all a bit tired.

Bookstores and arcades were fun.

Otherwise, it's looking at overpriced merch that you are paying extra to have it sold to you in a mall rather than online.

Anecdote: Once upon a time, I went to a shop that sold blue jeans at the local mall. As I'm buying the jeans, the clerk says "I know a shirt that will go really well with those. Do you wanna see it?"

A shirt that goes well with blue jeans? Are you shitting me? You'd have to go out of your way to find a shirt that doesn't go well with blue jeans.

Mall culture. Blech.

i miss this too

I too choose this guys dead mall

I've never been to one but i also miss them

Arcades are around, but they've all gone the shitty dave and busters route. Oh you want to play a game on a arcade? Sure, that'll be 2 credits...which is $2.99! HAHAHA YOU FOOL!

Videogame arcades are still present in Japan (especially near Akihabara), though still in decline there too. They have held on longer because they provide a social space for young adults and teens to hang out without trying to crowd everyone into a small home.

END COMMUNICATION

In my city we have a ton of like bar/arcade places! Usually they just have a flat fee to get in and it’s free to play. You should see if your city has any 😊

We call em barcades.

I have one of these in my town. It’s awesome!

Damn. COVID wiped out all of the up-and-coming retrocades in town except for this shitty one where the games are poorly maintained.

My small town had a little arcade open up in an old SubWay building. I think it had a few arcade games and a couple gambling type games. It was there maybe a month and burnt down.

Cidercade in Houston!

Cobra Arcade Bar here in PHX.

Freeplay in DFW!

Arcades still exist. There is a bar arcade in Montréal, arcade MTL that is fire, even have the Turtles in time three player machine. NES, SNES with all the classics. And the classic arcade machines too.

Bar-cades are a thing in several cities. They have a lot of the classics, plus new stuff and VR.

My local mall still has not one, but two separate arcades.

Arcades are kinda alive and well in Asia, definitely Japan & Korea

They are slowly dying, but I doubt they will ever completely die out. During COVID, a few of the well-known arcade centres in Japan was shut down

Arcades still going strong in Southeast Asia with many regulars. Me included.

Rhythm games just feel different at arcades when compared to tablets or pcs

In the UK we have arcades at the seaside.

In Austin TX we turned one of our dying malls into the main campus of our community college. https://www.kut.org/education/2014-07-24/how-austin-turned-a-dead-department-store-into-a-community-college

I wish I were around to see actual arcades with actual games in them. No rewards for winning, just going there for the sake of playing the games and spending time with friends. The arcades that exist now are just kid-friendly casinos.

With higher odds than most casinos at that.

join us /r/arcade1up

Recently went to Funspot in Laconia, NH. All those machines are there. It was very nostalgic.

We have a bar/arcade near me. Has pinball and old games,. Donkey Kong, street fighter 2, mortal kombat

An arcade somewhat recently opened in my local mall! Granted it isn't a coin-op arcade, but it is an arcade nonetheless

Arcades are still a thing in Chile. Though it's way more niche I suppose

We've had a small arcade in the mall near us forever, and recently a Round 1 moved in and is packed with all kinds of games, and a roller rink. Though none of them really use coins anymore and you instead buy a little plastic card that saves all your "tokens" and any "tickets" you earn from games it's still pretty much the same feel.

Our mall also happens to be one of those lucky ones that remain busy all the time and is considered a popular place to hangout all around the county so it's got a lot of local businesses in it alongside the national brands

I remember hanging out at the arcade, in the mall, with my cousins, all day, whenever I would go visit them. That was their pass time back in the day.

Every word is rarer:

Coin - used to carry coins with cash, don't even carry cash in bills anymore

Arcades - as you said, those are disappearing

Malls - the ones near us are shutting down

"In" - people go in things anymore? I don't shop in a store or go in to work.

Heck even digital information isn't stored and accessed inside directories...and application functionality can be delivered via containerless microservices now!

I still carry bills. I was rushing to work the other day and my local Wendy's card reader was down that morning. Luckily I had cash.

Did arcades peak in the eighties or nineties? I love the ‘carnie’ feel of arcades.

Peaked in 80s, then started dying out until street fighter revived them and then they had a brief comeback in the mid to late 90s for fighting games. Then they died in the west, but in the east rhythm games are holding strong.

Man, I still saw them around untill like 2013, at least outside of the US. Now almost all of them have the cards or the weird tokens. It kind of makes me sad.

Barcades are becoming more and more popular. Found one the other day with NFL Blitz and it brought back so much nostalgia.

There has been an increase of nostalgia arcade bars in my area. Overpriced cocktails, but games are 0.25 per play.

there's still plenty of malls here in minnesota , one in duluth , one in minneapolis and of course the mall of america . i know of some in colorado aswell . malls are just as fun and common as they where 20 30 years ago

Was assistant mgr of Silverball Game room at our mall, I got fired for leaving Samurai Showdown on free play after a night of friends hanging out after hours!

The malls being an essential safe/cool hangout…😂

I played Killer instinct one time and remembered them all. For weekend it showed up.

Use to get 20$ in quarters for laundry. Ten for the laundry and ten for the bomberman arcade

theres a new one opening at the mall my gf works at

And coins for that matter.

Dave and Busters is still alive

I know a lot of malls are shutdown or not as much traffic but their are still popular ones.

I was bored a few months ago and decided to go to Dave & Buster's because I wanted to play some arcades. Closest thing near me. It was alright. Not the greatest but not terrible. I played Pac-Man, some variation of Frogger that I can't remember the name of, and some first person shooter where you shoot zombies. That was it

Shredding on the DDR machine

We have a retro arcade that is really awesome. For a $15 you have unlimited play all day on all games except pinball!

Marvel vs Capcom 2

Edit: it came out in 2000.

One of my favorite things about going to the beach is they still have arcades on the boardwalk.

I too choose this man's arcades

Same.... I just wanna be a mall rat

Wizard of Wor was my favorite and the only one at which I was ever any good.

One time I think I killed seven Wizards.

That was a glorious day!

Evey arcade I used to visit in the late 90's early 00's is now a casino.

Finding a quarter on the floor as a broke kid was the most amazing feeling. Straight to the arcade.

Come to Denver we have bar arcades.

Coins in slot machines

I have plenty of arcades where I’m at…

In the 80's there were even arcades in hotels and air ports. Spokane airport had an epic arcade as did the Quality Inn aka Qualidome in Great Falls Montana. Rolls of quarters were readily available. What a time to be alive.

We just got an arcade in our mall. Takes up 3 store fronts. Our mall is super expensive for stores to rent space in so I hope they get enough business to last

Im so happy, cause malls are still popular in my country. (way more popular than in usa) I don’t know a single abandoned mall. I love malls.

There's a new trend in bigger cities of these bars/arcades that are super fun. Most even serve food, such a great place for a date.

Barcades are still a thing, and are my go to spots everytime I visit a major US city.

There are still some around, Google it and u might be surprised to find one within a couple hours. I recently figured this out.

I worked in a mall in the 90's. Had a couple of standing deal in the "mall economy".

I got free Orange Julius and fries (no burgers/dogs, guess that was more tightly monitored)

I got unlimited arcade games at Tilt

Got a handful of Sees candy every day.

I provided house brand film and free photofinishing from my 1 hour photo. (we were encouraged to hand out the film like candy since it said return to us for processing and we had free photofinishing coupons that we could give away at our discretion so according to the till and inventory it was all Kosher on my side ;) )

Malls have become abandoned in my area. People now use them for urban exploration. They’re actually very interesting to explore. The mall itself is still open to the public but there are literally no stores left, so it’s just a large, Unmaintained space that’s stuck in time.

Arcades still exist, I’ll bet your city or nearby city has an arcade or bar-cade

A mall near us has a giant arcade and I don’t care how old I get I’m dropping money it’s so much fun

I miss going to the mall. The only place close to me with a variety of shopping is outdoor. It's Georgia, miserably hot, my back is bad and can spasm on me when walking so I can't enjoy it.

Recentlyish married. She already has 3 kids. One thing I've noticed is that not a single one of them has asked to be dropped off at the mall on a Saturday.

Our mall is barely hanging on.

the mall in my city is going strong, I go there all the time

Arcades seriously need to make a comeback, but I don't see it happening until COVID finishes blowing over.

Next to the Harley Davidson store on the Las Vegas strip...there is a place called THE PINBALL MUSEUM ( I think)

It's just an old time arcade with working games...I lost a few buck on galaga, star castle and asteroids

Best money I've lost in Vegas

Larger city nearby has opened an arcade/bar for those of us who want the nostalgia and a drink or 2.

Coin arcades in general. I hate the new card arcades that force you to purchase a card with a certain amount of credits, then they conveniently price the attractions, be it games or skeeball or whatever, an odd number so that you just have a few more credits on your card, making you either buy more credits or leave and have made a donation. Bring back quarters!

Retro arcades are becoming a growing thing and they usually charge a single entry fee and have all the games set to free play.

I wanna go to a mall thats actually full of people. The one bear me feels so empty. Id prob get really anxious in one though.

Here in the UK malls are still a big thing but only in major towns and cities (we call them shopping centres). Also Arcades still exist but only on seaside towns

Arcades nowadays suck so hard, at least where I live, everything is blatantly skewed against you, not like back in the day when the challenge came from high scores or difficult opponents, but now games will straight up ignore button inputs or have WAY too much on the screen making it impossible to continue after a certain point. My last visit to an arcade made me despise modern arcades for how openly bullshit they are.

Barcades are poppin up like crazy where I am, which is a great place to go on a Friday night for this millennial.

Arcades died when consoles outpaced them

What some places are doing now is you pay a standard fee, like $9/ person and you play these old school arcades for as long as you want. They are awesome

There are a number of arcades or fun parks around me, but all the games cost 1.00 - 2.50 now at minimum.

My town has a vintage toy/game museum that also has a full functioning arcade

Oddly enough, you can find arcade games in the main break room in certain Amazon Fulfillment Centers. I know, bc I saw them last night coming in from lunch. This guy was going insane on Pac-Man. Whether or not it takes quarters, not a clue.

Arcades still exist..... But.... Most are just short ass ticket gambling machines.

Can't sit in the Arcade with 5 bucks and play for an hour or more on Ikari Warriors II, Joust, Roadblaster, Run &Jump, Moon Patrol, Wardner......

Still got one where I live

What was even better was towards the end of the Arcade Era in the early to mid 90's we had a NICKLE arcade in Mesa, AZ. You paid like $5 entry fee and everything (except a few newest games) were just 5 cents and even the oldest like Centiped, Galaga and Pac Man were free.

I've found a bit of a resurgence of arcades, but they fall lightly outside the traditional coin-op at least in terms of pricing or venue. Not talking about shitty Dave & Buster's or one of their many "spend a fortune in tokens on a $10 toy" clones, talking about barcades and pay-by-the-hour/-day places. I don't live in a huge city or anything, but there are 3 or 4 in my city, and I can drive 45-60 minutes and hit several great arcades and places that maintain truly awesome arcades alongside everything else they do.

Arcades suck now. Most of them are those stupid ticket games that last 10 seconds.

They still exist but are usually bars for us millennials to pretend things are still okay

Malls, in the US at least, became downright unpleasant.

Rowdy, fighting teenagers, nothing to buy, and aggressive salespeople at kiosks trying to bully you into buying weird face creams.

We still have arcades in Ontario all over the place

A mall near me is turning into a nerd hot spot.

Level Up, gaming store

Custom cosplay store

Comic shop

A few other cool places.

I really think now's a perfect time to open a pizza place in it, talk about making bank.

Arcades are making a comeback in the form of barcades

Somehow the mall in my hometown is still going strong and put in a 2-story arcade about a decade ago. One floor is family friendly. The second has a bar.

Same. I used to love going and hanging with my older brother.

There’s tons of Barcades now.

They still have arcades you just use reloadable cards. Some very different games but some of the same. Same horribly made prizes though 😂

There’s a Tilt arcade in the mall in St. Clairesville, OH. Shocked the hell out of me when I seen it last week.

My mom worked as a medic at a water park one year. It had a bomb ass arcade and we got in free. That summer was one of the best summers ever. Water park all day 3-5ish times a week. Access to all the cool shows and events, unlimited arcade access. I think she stayed there longer than she wanted to just because of the free childcare and she didn’t have to spend a dime pretty much that summer to keep us entertained.

There are at least 3 malls in my area that have them. And 2 in other states I've visited recently. I think they are kinda on a comeback.

Both still around

Modem noises

Trying to call someone several times and all you get is this and thinking to yourself get off the internet I need to call you.

My mom:

"get off the fucking INTERNET!!!!!!!! “

~~My mom:~~ Everyone’s mom

"NO MOM WAIT I'M IN THE MIDDLE OF DOWNLOADING NETSCA#$%{&#+${%&+#{+%& NO CARRIER

Nah, you would just get a busy signal if they were using dial-up.

In Australia we would get modem noises. Similar with a slight difference I think for a fax machine.

1995: Internet getting in the way of the phone

2022: Phone holds the internet connectivity in your hand

My mom made me pay for getting an ISDN line so that we could have one phone phone and one internet phone

Shshhshshsh bing bing peep crrrrrrrrrr

Trying to log on in the middle of the night to check on your NeoPets was IMPOSSIBLE!

Our family computer was right against the wall where my parents bed was on the other side. There was no late-night logging on, lol

I have the dialup sound in my music library just for the memories… And because it helps get Mr Happy in the mood due to years of conditioning as a teenager with a computer in my bedroom.

Lol, you may need to talk to someone about that 🤣

Not that long ago, three and a bit years ago, I was testing a 1400 baud modem. I'm pretty sure the military still has some system, critical infrastructure level, that runs on fucking smoke signals and flag towers.

I remember missing calls from friends because of being on the Internet. I don’t think that happens anymore?

SKSKSK-SHHHHSHH-ZRZRZRJRJR

Because of kerning or the brightness of my screen I thought this said modern noises and I had to check the comments to see if this was a band or something.

For the past 15 years, my custom ringtone for my wife has intentionally been the modem sound. The reason I do that is because 1) it can be heard in almost any situation and be easily distinguished from the background, 2) it is rare enough that I can be certain it's my phone ringing rather than anyone else's, and 3) [most important] I immediately know it's *my wife* in particular calling, and therefore to answer right away.

Call a fax number if you really miss it

I never said I missed it, haha

I do a lot of digital modes on ham radio so I still hear modem noises on a nearly daily basis

I heard that as I read it...

Well, there's dubstep these days....O_o

ah yes. the first dubstep song

And the day you realized you could just snip the wire to the speakers on the modem card.

wait what? haha, I never had that day!!

Now it's music: https://youtu.be/ph5OW9p-GHM

28.8 sounded so much more futuristic than 14.4 with its sha-BING-BING right in the middle

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.

Nah, the real shit move is to hit them with a lightning bolt right before they jump the gap in Wario Stadium so they can't make the jump and fall to an earlier part of the course.

Nah, just jump the left wall on one of the first hills.

This plus the shortcut on that snowy track were a necessity if you wanted to win.

NO SCREEN PEAKING!

Bro i can’t not see you spawn and go throw proximity mines there it’s just natural.

Bro if you're not playing slappers + one hit kill do you even Goldeneye?

Did you know when you go to unarmed auto sun disables making it pretty hard to shoot you?

Some people turn it off all the time but most houses I showed up at had it on.

Anyway it was useful especially in normal modes where you’re under armed and running away.

This was the bane of my existence while playing StarFox64 multiplayer back then.

Didn’t stardom have like a map? I don’t actually remember needing to screen peak in that as much but it wasn’t one of our more popular games

I love the screencheat game. Basically everyone is invisible so the only way to shoot your homies is to determine where they are based on their screens.

In my parts, we called it SCREEN-WATCHING.

...then proceed to pick Oddjob

We had a no odd job rule because it was such a fucking advantage.

Just trying to look down in Goldeneye was such a task

And then play as Oddjob because you are a remorseless monster.

Oh fuck you bro. I know you!

We all know a person like this

Or hard break when the blue shell is incoming and let your friend pass you

My dickhead brother kept killing me in Golden Eye by hiding in a vent and shooting a Moon-raker laser continuously (I was stuck and I could only move forward into the line of fire), and put proximity mines in the area I respawned.

So many great memories playing either throwing knives or proxy mines

I like to hit them before the finish line. Feels so much better. Fun times. :')

it got to the point where I knew someone was going to shell me before the finish line, so I'd save a single green shell specifically for this. Whenever I heard the red shell coming, I'd use the green shell, but hold the button so it stayed behind me instead of just firing it. the red shell breaks the green shell, and not my kart!

All the while being able to look them dead in the eye from the other couch. Complete power move.

Some friends and I spent most weekends for about two years playing N64 pre-COVID. We played so frequently, we all could make the jump without missing most of the time. Rainbow road was our hood off level, but every other track we went all out.

https://youtu.be/Z3vHbOilhpc Swingers NHL clip

Check out money bags over here with TWO couches

The Wario skip caused far more friction in my groups

Yea that was banned in our group. Wario Stadium was an awful track but we loved it.

The jump and lightning each other and leaving bananas all over it! What a world.

Inevitably whoever was losing would cheat or whatever and the console would get turned off.

Isn't that pretty difficult to pull off?

Easier than Rainbow Road imo, you just hit the left wall and jump at the right time. Coming back is hard but even if you can only do half the skip you're still most of the track away.

[deleted]

My husband used to get so pissed that I would do this, I just said you can do it too, no one is stopping you. Lol. Just as well he loves me.

The modern equivalent of this is testing your marriage by double crossing your wife playing monopoly or risk on game nights haha

We had a standing no Oddjob rule, if you know you know.

No golden gun either

Slappers only always made for good times. We would do a similar thing in Halflife where we'd play crowbar only and power jump joust at each other.

Slappers only on the Frigate was the tie breaker in many a sibling dispute

For some reason we always played one shot kill, I think we got sick of that silver automatic gun where you would unload a clip into someone and they wouldn't die!

The nail gun? Yessss

We only played License to Kill, one shot kill. We had weapons categories for particular maps too. License to kill throwing knives at bunker helicopter landing pad was sudden death winner takes all

The Klobb... yeah I always used the DD44 or Magnum instead, they did some good damage. We played a lot of License to Kill as well!

I HAD YOU ON AUTO LOCK WHAT HAPPENED?!

WAIT STAND STILL, LET ME HIT DOWN YELLOW A FEW TIMES!

We would play Oddjob only with rocket launchers. Good times haha

I've always heard this but never experienced odd job as op. He s super easy to head shot at any distance. What were we missing?

The auto aim didn’t work on him. Even the developers admitted a few years ago that using him was completely unfair.

Remember playing time splitters and using the cyber monkey or zombie monkey. My online name then (cant pick it now) was Surrender Monkey (thanks to Jon Stewart). So naturally I picked them. Felt SOOO bad when people pointed out it was essentially cheating cause they are so small. And iirc, the zombie monkey could play without its head. Total oddjob move.

This was my college years

There was a shortcut?

Or got pissed off because you were going to pick Toad but your friend got him first and your other friend picked Yoshi.

I used to hit the Koopa Troopa Beach shortcut with finesse

AND he's right next to you

For my friend group, Smash Bros. on the 64 was the friendship ender.

The jeers and cheers if you pulled it off on lap three while you were behind were unreal.

Wario Stadium shortcut is the real friend breaker...

My brothers and cousins and even my dad and an uncle got crazy on Super Smash Bros. Like you could hear them yelling from down the street. And they'd all watch each other battle each other. Like 8 plus dudes trying to cram in a small bedroom lol.

Nah it's when you lightning someone going over that jump on the wario map

Me and a buddy would play 2-player Gran Prix, and would always end up, either 1st and 2nd or 7th and 8th.

Purely because we didn't care about the AI players, we would just fuck with eachother! 😂 I miss those days.

That shit was a gamble. You either got really ahead or really fucked.

I literally did this to my boss about 30 minutes ago, it was baller.

I then tried to do it on the next lap and completely fucked it, finished last.

or the Fucking blue shell

Wario Stadium 5" lap!

Or until you watched your friends screen while playing goldeneye so you know where to ambush them

Or jumping the wall in the Wario level with all those little bumps

Or the Wario raceway level man! Don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

For me it was Mario tennis.

My little brother would get so pissed off that his face would turn red of anger

Mario Kart 64 battle mode block fort was such an amazing level design for split screen multiplayer. The coloured blocks meant your peripheral vision immediately told you who was in what area. As soon as anyone from a bridge, everyone else unleashed their shells. Must have racked up months of play time on that level.

I know it’s probably a typo but I can’t let you go on living your life on the off chance you’re actually thinking it’s called rainbow row.

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

Worms Armageddon on N64 was another multiplayer must-have. Worms and Mario Kart on N64 still hold up, they're as fun today as they were in the 90s, whereas Goldeneye I don't think is as fun.

GoldenEye aged like milk.

It’s best left in the past lol. I loaded it up a few years ago and everyone was like “what the fuck is this, and how did we play for hours as kids”

Back then it was new and novel. Things evolve.

It's due to come out again all polished up as soon as they feel like releasing it. Since it's all about the cold war and Russia etc it's a bit sensitive at the moment.

That's where you gotta upgrade to the GameCube 007 games like Agent Under Fire and Nightfire. Both still hold up really well, the graphics look like how you remember Goldeneye's graphics looking - bad, but not that bad. And both have so much cool shit you can do like flying around in a jetpack or grapple hooking around the map like you're Spider-man.

I played the shit out of Nightfire as a kid. Didn't play the campaign much cuz the multiplayer was so much fun.

Perfect Dark was even worse.

So has Mario Kart 64. It was fun while it lasted but man Mario Kart 8 is so, so much better. I often wish I could show it to kid-me as a teaser of what the franchise will become one day. He would have been mind-blown.

There's still nothing like waiting to fire the lightning until your opponent is halfway over the jump on Choco Mountain, and instantly dropping them back half a lap. The blue shell has nothing on the sheer rage that used to cause.

I love all these comments. God it takes me back, and man was that a fun time!

Mario kart 64 battle is still better than any part of Mario kart 8

And that was the peak of your life.

Was gonna say - as far as peaks go, that's not a bad one.

He didn't mention he met his supermodel wife at said bar and she was super impressed by his karting.

Granada launchers in the temple no odd job I called if!

[deleted]

+License to kill

Diddy Kong racing was better! Well that’s the opinion of my childhood self. It could be terrible now for all I know.

Mario Kart 64 had better multiplayer but when it comes to everything else I agree Diddy Kong Racing did it better, The track designs, the graphics/art style, the item system based on skill and strategy rather than luck and placement in the race, boss races, the banana system where the more you collect the faster you go, having a hub world and even the music. It's in my top three favourite N64 games for sure!

Diddy Kong racing was really a formative game of my youth but I’m gonna be honest Mario Kart is miles better in every way.

Still holding out hope they put Diddy Kong racing on the 64 expansion for switch, or what would be really cool is if the next Mario kart added Diddy Kong tracks and characters!

Diddy Kong racing has airplane and boat modes in addition to cart mode. Every track is played 3 ways. Mario Kart not so much.

Proxy mines. My fav

Proxies in the Complex. There was that one room where you could toss mines out to all the approaches. Informally, that always turned into a King-of-The-Hill match.

We did that with man with the golden gun. It was understood that someone would end up holed up in there and everyone else would try to root them out, that was basically the meta game that we had come up with. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

Once we figured out you could toss a proxy mine on ammo boxes then run over the box and they'd be invisible but still blow you up proximity mines got banned.

My dogs do this is real life to each other. Get a bit of food, put it somewhere, sit back a bit and watch, another dog walks in unawares and gets majorly yelled at. It’s so funny, little psychopaths!

That’s hilariously awesome.

Question though, Do your dogs do things NOT irl. Are they living it up on the interwebs? Big gamers?

Ha ha ha, well they didn’t learn the behaviour playing golden eye. But fuck it’s funny watching them.

You just said but fuck

Lol, you are welcome.

  • Super Smash Bros and Mario Party

Nobody was allowed to be Odd Job.

I liked having Oddjob as an option, sometimes. Newbies who weren't yet comfortable with manual aim could headshot him from the hip without even trying. He was more dangerous the more experienced other players were. In a mixed group, he's a good balancer.

But if you're playing with your regular buddies and everyone's sort of on the same level, yep - banned.

My brother chose Jaws so guess who jd get lol

Everyone hated the guy who picked Oddjob.

Those were good but you didn't go hard until you were fist fighting over Mario party.

That game tested friendships like nothing else!

​

It just occurred to me someone out there probably has a scar on them with Mario Party being the reason why.

I have the scars on my palms and all my 64 controller joy sticks can prove it lmao

I was so excited for smash on switch but it’s just not the same without my brothers in the room with me.

My friend always blamed the controller, and then proceeded to hit and smash it or throw it. He wasn’t rich or spoiled, but man did his parents have to buy a lot of controllers over the years.

Bad parents then. If I did that to my controllers I would have gotten lectured and then told I'm not getting another one until I can prove I'm more careful with my shit and that a video game is not worth throwing a rage fit over.

I still remember some of my earliest Goldeneye multiplayer matches. I had to use a busted controller for a while, the analogue stick could only move left and right, not up and down. So I had to side-step to get around, which is faster than running straight forward. Which basically paved the way for me being a drive-by badass, springing up out of nowhere to strafe people to death, then bugging out before I could get hit. Fun times.

Goldeneye.. facility.. multiplayer.. mexican stand off with one guy un the bathrooms, one guy at bottom of the stairs, one guy on the stairs, and one guy in the room off the hallway.. proximity mines everywhere.. ahhh, those wheree the days.

Hell yeah! Same here. It was crazy! Caused actual fights sometimes! Great times!

Yes! Add FIFA to the mix too. Mayday all day in Goldeneye

That ducking vent In the toilets…. Fuck n64 goldeneye lol

Gooooldeneye…OMGosh that name is soooo nostalgic lol. I remember getting the “golden gun” with the one hit kill on that train mission

I loved playing with Wario because he was a dick and I am a dick. It was perfect.

Ha ha ha are you my bro in law (i love him really)

Goldeneye was it man

Tetris on the door step outside with the cable connected to your friend.

bruh i want my 64 back!!!

my mom gave it away when i moved out...

The nerve

I dunno, Conkers Bad Fur Day had fun multiplayer too. Also OG Smash Bros

Conkers was GOAT. Total War, Colors, and mothafuckin Beach. Haw-he-haw-he-haw-he.

Total war, running around with that ninja sword was so much fun. I would literally jump and flip all over the damn place, murdering people as I went.

Oh man ninja sword was best. You were silent when running and off radar.

Fuuuuck Goldeneye 64 was some good times. My little sister absolutely sucked (I mean she was like 4 at the time) so we’d give her the maximum health buff and handicapped the other 3 so she’d have fun mowing us down while mostly running in circles and shooting randomly but finally managing to take her down was excitement for all.

I can still hear the laughter in my head ❤️

Ha ha ha gold! Sounds like me, I sucked, but I was an adult!

And smash bros. That and the two you listed on the 64 with your buddies were peak gaming to me

Goldeneye and Mario kart 64. Intense games were had!

I had a N64 for a while. The only games I owned for it were Goldeneye, Mario Kart 64 and Top Gear Rally (? I honestly don't remember the name of the game and this is the only one that comes up when I search for "racing games n64 milk truck").

Super smash was also HOF. Star Fox 64 was super underrated too. 4 person death match was awesome.

Throw in some og smash and your weekend is planned!

Split screen on a 8' CRT somehow

I used to watch my cousins play Goldeneye but we could never get past that mission with the hacker.

License to Kill mode.

And we had a rule: No one could be Odd Job.

We used to have WWF No Mercy tournaments in my dorm room in College. Those were great times. We used to have 8-player AvP lan parties in the computer lab late into the night during weekends, too. I do miss that.

Mario Party 2 and Banjo Tooie are also very honorable mentions lol

My cousin would always play as Oddjob and just sprint up to you, chopping away with that stupid karate chop melee. The character is too short to shoot at when he gets that close, so you go and switch to do your own chop and the bastard backs away and starts shooting you.

Just saying, fuck you Dougie.

Oh man bringing back memories of my older brother and I playing goldeneye for hours on n64 together!

Mario Party 64 was the worst though. I think I still have friction burns on my palms from it. Not to mention every joy stick on my 64 controllers are shot from it lmao

Smash Bros, fam. I was a fiend with Link. Not because I could get killshots. Link sucked at those. But I could knock you off platform and was a straight sniper with those bombs. Could nail you from clear across the map.

Goldeneye, slappers only.

Four player Mario tennis was some of the funnest shit ever.

Mario party!!!

And Perfect Dark, the superior Goldeneye.

Slaps only, good times.

Don’t forget OG smash bros!!

I call Oddjob.

Don't forget Mario party

Double dash and guitar hero are what did it for me...

Goldeneye was good, but Perfect Dark will always be my favorite.

Timesplitters 2

I find I still have just as much with Mario Kart on switch in person as I remember on older cousin's N64s and GameCubes. It's just HD now lol

Me and my buddies would play goldeneye so long the cart would overheat and start glitching and weird shit would start happening like the mines you could throw and detonate with your watch would stick in midair and stuff. So much fun.

Oddjob is OP

Bastard friend always wanted to play oddjob and just went around chopping fools!

Goldeneye. High school spring break 1997. I discovered who my true friends and enemies were.

Good times

Proximity mines in stack was truly amazing at the time.

Proximity mines in the facility.

No fucking Odd-job.

Starfox was a solid sleepover favorite as well.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day multiplayer is unparalleled

Still get the boys together for Goldeneye every once in a blue moon . Rocket launchers in the temple.

For us it was Super Smash Bros on the GameCube moreso than anything on N64. And only one person had a multi tap for the SNES.

Dude so intense!

proximity mines at spawn points

99 stock smash bros 64

And Perfect Dark!

My buddy would put adagio for strings on repeat and we'd play goldeneye for hours while drinking whatever cheap beer he could steal from his dad.

Ahhh, Mario Party! Or or.. Rainbow Six

Don't you dare pick oddjob you fucking cunt! - the last N64 goldeneye party I had haha

Strange I am listening to Mariokart 64 OST as I am reading through this lol.

License to kill + slaps only 😂

And Perfect Dark

Soul Caliber baby!

And Super Smash Bros ♥️

We used to play GoldenEye with either slappers or proximity mines. I wish someone had told me that those would be the best days of my life.

My hubby still has his Nintendo 64 with goldeneye

I miss this specific fun soo much! I was always oddjob, one shot one kill, as I sucked, but this gave me a chance!

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.

Indie developers on PC too. So many fun couch coop games.

Crawl, towerfall ascension, skeleton scramble, gangbeasts, spelunking, enemy mind, those are the ones off the top of my head. Indie games have the best couch experience hands down

Hopefully Party Animals at some point. Also stuff like Zeepkist, Human Fall Flat, Moving Out, Overcooked.

Try spacelines from far out if you like overcooked, it came out recently, really fun couch co-op and they're gonna be adding more to it

Overall, indie is where creativity and innovation lies because formulas rule larger publishing.

Agreed, I tried to find couch co-op games on Xbox gamepass the other day and they were essentially none. Was lucky to find It Takes Two which was fun, but other than that there weren't many options.

Any game that supported both co-op and multiplier has pretty much phased out the co-op and focuses on multiplier and microtransactions instead.

If you have a switch, unravel 2 is a great couch co-op puzzle platform we

Yes Unravel, also Pikmin.

And all the Halo games, bar 5 and Infinite.the Gears games and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Borderlands franchise has couch co-o0 and multi-player.

Eh, played some with my daughter. Diablo 3, this robot game where you work together (co-op only), and some cooking games....but not as many as I'd like.

My kids love phogs, practivally any Mario, any musou, and overcooked for co-op. The trick is finding co-op they can play with a grandpa in another time zone. Too many are online co-op without the ability to keep the room private.

This article might help: https://gamerant.com/xbox-game-pass-local-co-op-games/

Does anyone even own more than one controller these days? Seems there is no reason now

I've got 4 pro controllers. And while I may consider it a miserable experience, the Switch does come with 2 joy cons right out of the box.

As a Switch owner I agree. Modern versions of Smash and Mario Kart are freaki'n amazing! 34 years old and I'm still in awe of how far these franchises have come. The N64 versions just feel so unplayable to me now. But I have grown up with these franchises, playing them all from N64, through to GameCube, Wii, Wii U and now Switch. If one hasn't done this and jumps straight from the versions 20+ years ago to the new ones they might be surprised at how much they've changed.

Yeah, I was really jazzed to play MK64 again on the Switch N64 app... Until I started up 150cc mode and suddenly remembered how easy it was to make your cart spin out. Not to mention the pain of jiggle drift-boosts.

Basically, at this point, Double Dash is the oldest Mario Kart I can still enjoy.

I played so much Mario Kart on the 64 that I can’t even play any of the other games without adapting to them for like 30 minutes. The controls feel sluggish in nearly all of them to me because of how overly-responsive 64 is.

I still get weird looks when I switch drifting to 'manual' on Mario Kart 7 and then bounce around the track.

64 smash is still more fun imo. Less insane items. More straight forward. Just a more pure fighting game

An easy way to get the items to feel closer to 64 is to turn off master balls and assist trophies. I agree with you that those items in Ultimate basically play the game for you, and leave the screen such a jumbled mess that it’s impossible to even tell what’s going on.

Ultimate gives you the option to toggle anything off or on. The majority of online player just use tourney rules. 3 stock, no stage hazards, no items, 1v1. It doesn’t get more straight forward than that.

Never forget. Set damage to 300%; set lives to 100. Constant rinse repeat to set the record for most kills. Kirby is the absolute tits

I feel the same. 64 smash was just iconic characters with similar attacks. Now it's gotten a smidge ridiculous with all the custom gear, perks, fighting styles, etc.

Jackbox games are great on all consoles though, and you can play either local or long distance through twitch or any other streaming service, which is nice.

True, but I consider Jackbox to be closer to something like a board game that's played on the TV rather than a "video game". (I do love Jackbox though)

I hate how little multiplayer games are now. Even on my first iPad I had tons of games that were pass and play or virtual board games. Now it’s all online play with no option to play with the person next to you. It’s sad.

Not really, offline fighting games are still a thing, thankfully, pandemic notwithstanding.

I mean, true, but what sets Nintendo apart is the ability to play with 4+ players at once, and the games are designed to be so simple that a child could pick it up more or less instantly and have fun with it (even though Smash gets ridiculously more complex than that if you fall down the rabbit hole). Not that two friends couldn't play Mortal Kombat or Tekken and have fun, but there's much more of a learning curve to get to the point where you even feel like you have a grasp of how to play correctly.

Good to hear that. I haven't kept up with gaming since like 2006 or so. Looking to come back with my kids in the future.

As a dad with a 4 month old baby, the Switch is fantastic for both quick gaming when the kids take a nap and for multiplayer mayhem. And Breath of the Wild is the single best game I've ever played.

I keep thinking about the switch, maybe it's time!

My oldest kid is 5; when he’s 7-8, I am 100% getting a Switch and taking him to school in Super Smash Bros.

NES Four Score and Super Spike Vball !! I was a happy kid when I got that.

STOP LOOKING AT MY FUCKING SCREEN DARREN!

Everyone named Darren only existed in the 1990s and at no other point in time.

That’s still common at least among my friends group. The Nintendo Switch hardware as well as many games developed for it are designed specifically with this in mind. Think Mario Party, Smash Bros, 1-2-Switch, Mario Kart, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Super Mario 3D World, and WarioWare (just to name a few).

The problem is likely now you and all your friends are adults and have jobs/kids/obligations that prevent all of you from easily coming together to play like you did in the 90s.

Sorta the problem. The internet is the other problem I guess. It a good to know Nintendo is mitigating this in some ways

Steam has also had a lot of solid couch multiplayer games in recent years. And what's extra nice is the remote play together mode, so one person owns the game, and can just invite friends to stream-play. Shockingly lag free in my experiences with friends, we were playing some super twitchy shit that would have showed it

I also really hate having to find a roof to set it up on every time.

Halo LAN parties.

Edit: sorry, not the 90s. Got a little excited.

As you said too early for Halo, but we had plenty of Doom LAN parties.

First ones were daisy chained through the serial ports, but then one of my friends got some left over network cards from his dad's office, so we had a little coaxial network going!

Came here to say this! Doom LAN parties were the best!

So much love for Doom, but where the Duke Nukem love?! Or even better than both (imo) Blood. Damn I loved Blood.

This is my Boomstick!

I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of gum!

Your face, your ass, what's the difference?

Quake, unreal tournament, and Tribes I remember playing like 1999-2001 or so.

Also Half-Life.

MechWarrior (2, I think), Descent, and Starcraft were our main LAN party fodder. Fun times.

I still prefer the 64 though - my kids even enjoy mine. Still need Starfox though.

Descent blew my mind! I was addicted!

Descent... We used to play on the library computers during computer lab and alt-tab back and forth to our work when the teacher would come around to be able to see the monitors.

Be careful! This could be a trap!

Shit, bro. Your house was the place to be.

Don’t forget Warcraft (pre WOW)

Yep. I used to play local multiplayer with Marathon on Macs using serial port connections. Good times.

Yes! I did this, too with my friends!

How bout the good old Age of Mythology LAN game?

Age of empire 2 man. Gtfo with this mythology shit!

😂 That’s a classic as well!

so we had a little coaxial network going

We liked to play Warcraft 2. One of our friend group would rage quit and unplug his computer from the network when he lost. Fun fact about coax networks: having an open port without a terminator installed on the port would cause the entire network to disconnect, so he would cause the whole game to crash by doing it.

Used to get together at a buddy's house like once a month for a LAN party. Like six or seven of us usually. Starcraft and Quake were our regulars but we'd rotate through the new games that came out too.

It was really funny to me when lcd's started to become a thing. The biggest selling point for my friend group was that we could transport them more easily. My old crt was fifty pounds easily.

I really miss those days. There was something magical about computers set up all through the house, ethernet cables spiderwebbing them together, music blasting with all of us shouting at each other whenever we got a frag.

The only thing that compares was smash brothers.

It's a bit ironic that now that it would be much easier to transport computers with no more CRTS never mind gaming capable laptops and things like steam deck, there's less need to do so as everybody can just connect via internet.

Red Faction and Quake then a bit of N64 was where we were at

We were big on Half-Life Lan Parties.

StarCraft LAN parties.

Early 2000s. It was great to have 16 of us in the same house, in different rooms, all killing each other. We all had great names, so deaths would just make us laugh:

"You have been killed by your pancreas."

"You have been killed by Barbie."

"You have been killed by Jesus."

Damn I miss those days. Early 2000's and our dining room was basically our computer room and we'd Lan party Will Rock and Serious Sam and Unreal Tournament. Go to school and we had Doom set up on the computers in the computer room and we'd play all through lunch.

Now it's laptops on the dining room table while we play Dead By Daylight whenever we get some time to get together.

Warcraft LAN parties :)

For the Xbox era the original Halo was awesome.

Command and Conquer LAN parties. ❤️

close though :) I bonded with my kid brothers over Halo. (I was adopted and found my bio mom, went from only child to having 4 brothers and a sister in one day :D ) That game holds soooo many wonderful memories for me.

I made a lan set up in my basement to game with my kids and then realized all new titles are without that feature.

That is unfortunate. Local multiplayer is awesome.

Even better, playing Halo on those middle school computers during computer lab. Not the 90s either but still brings back good memories

UT99 parties were going strong though!

Still a very fun time

Most college dorms had LAN throughout, so we got some very fun games going in the suites via xbox and PC.

But, I agree. Halo LAN was incredible, especially when you could get the full 16 running.

Had a buddy who had 2 xboxes. One in the living room and one in a bedroom. It was awesome playing 4v4 in Halo and screaming shit at each other through the walls.

This is the way.

I've always thought it amusing that the height of split screen, couch co-op was when we had the smallest, shittiest tvs imaginable. Now that tvs are giant and it would actually be good and make sense to do split screen, it's nearly disappeared.

Seriously prefer that to online. Mario Party in person got personal

Edit: also Pokémon Stadium 2. And a massively underrated multiplayer option: Bomberman Generation for the game cube

So many hand blisters!

Fuck you Paddle Battle, Tug-o-War and Pedal Power! (seriously I even remembered the names of these minigames).

Haha Goldeneye screaming, "Fuck you Oddjob!!"

Fucking Oddjob! Who throws a shoe? honestly?

This here seems like a truly sweet spot of fun that’s been hard to duplicate.

Golden Eye, Perfect Dark (not enough praise), and Mario Cart 64 being played in a raucous room full of pals.

Whole days would become nights .. would turn into mornings while playing these with friends.

Miss that actually.

"Stop looking at my screen!!"

The screen is only 24 inches!!

Ok noob, ours was at LEAST 28!

Smash bros 💪

I played lots of smash bros n64.

And I still play a lot of smash bros for the switch, in person in the same room. It’s one of the few multiplayer games that’s still made to be a couch party game.

I would add Mario Party Superstars to this!

Yeh and maybe even play some N64 after!!

You don’t need a n64 to smash your bros

It's just a different kind of Smash bros now

Playing Street Fighter II on Super Nintendo and my mom coming home from work to find 8 teenage boys crammed in my room yelling Yoga Flame and All-You-Get (yes I know it’s Shoryuken, but that is not what we said).

Also almost never having to rotate off because my friends could never beat me when I had Ryu 😂😂😂

Mortal combat, scorpion was the cheapest with his "GETOVERHERE!!" move.

Came here lookin for any comments that talked about the early gen consoles… sad I had to scroll this far!

I remember nearly the exact same thing, except I think it was Street Foghter 1 (though could have been 2), I was at my cousin’s house with like 7-9 of us huddled around a tiny TV shouting as somebody somehow made it all the way to M. Bison on Dhalsim, but died with maybe 1% left on Bison’s health.

Amazing times.

SCREENWATCHER!!!

We definitely got in fist fights over smash bros and NHL95 when I was a kid. Though I guess for NHL95 it would be a tilly.

My best friend and I in grade 6/7 used to run home from school and play street hockey at lunch break. If it was raining, we could fit exactly two games of NHL95 in before we had to go back. We played so much of that game. Was always a little bummed that it didn't have fighting in it like NHL 96 which I never ended up getting.

Joe Sakic and the Québec Nordiques were the OddJob of that game.

Stop looking at my screen!

It pisses me off so much that so many games have dropped this. I don’t want to have an online pass, two stations, and copies of the game just to play with the dude next to me. Especially when we know they’re damn well capable of the technology.

Halo CE LAN parties till the break of dawn.

My friends and I still have Halo 2 parties in person. The tradition only dies if you let it die.

hell, I own a 64 for exactly this reason. I have yet to get a group of adults together to play though. Super lame.

Trust me. If I am over at someone’s house and they have a 64, we’re playing.

I remember LAN parties with my friends where we would all bring our computers and play Quake. Good times.

NOTHING beats an old fashioned LAN party. I used to run them back in the day with my mates. We would hire out the scout hall and bring our PC's in. It was so much fun. Playing CS 1.6, COD, Halo etc.

Have a LAN party with friends. It’s magical and nostalgic

There's some VR games that are played together in the same room. It matches up your play space and then puts obstacles around the room etc. and you run around shooting at each other.

We used to play Cruisin’ World on 64 all night at sleepovers. There were usually 5 of us, so the rule was that whoever lost the race had to give up their controller.

How Cruisin’ World works is that you get points based on how you finish, and you use those points to upgrade your vehicle. You get more points the better you finish, which means you can upgrade your car quicker, which helps you finish higher more often, etc. Kind of like a snowball effect.

It usually turned out that whichever car got 4th the most in the first 8-9 races would be behind on upgrades for the entire night, making it very difficult to compete. So it got very competitive and was real “sweaty” (as they say now) because you didn’t want to be stuck passing the controller and driving the shitty car all night, and you damn sure didn’t want to wind up losing your upgraded car if you were one of the frontrunners, which could happen if you screwed up just one race. It was a blast.

4 people on a 28” tube tv. Those were the days

kinda like how everyone had to be in the same area to play together on the DS

throwing my controller at my friend to distract him. the good ol days

The controller was indestructible; your friend, not so much.

I used to get so frustrated playing bomberman on SNES I would try to break the controller by twisting, bending, hitting it as hard as I could. Controllers really were indestructible. Bomberman was also a really freaking hard game.

i once bruised his right eye with a ps1 controller. good times

A dude in his 20's I know has some Nintendo game cubes from his childhood. Hosted a retro games club, since he has all the original games. There was only 4 people in that tiny room, but boy did it get loud.

This but with my GameCube lol

I threw hands over Oddjob usage once.

My friend and I got into a bit of a brawl over FFVII. Two 14 year old girls getting into a fistfight over what materia should be equipped for a boss fight. He mother was not very understanding about how serious the situation was.

Found my people!

Goldeneye tournaments all throughout the night! Munching on junk food and drinking soda!

This is the only way I play with others. Couch co-op. Otherwise I play single player. Have been playing dying light 2.

fuck we'd get heated at mario party. That game was made to ruin friendships lol. Just steal a star from your friend for 50 coins lol. Everytime they'd be like "brooo why'd you pick meee!"

I miss couch co-op 😭

Thinking you’re doing well in the race and then realizing you were actually looking at the wrong screen the whole time <<<< 😩

We still do that with the switch nintendo really holds up that in person multiplayer experience

We play a TON of switch games with friends. Every family get together we have time spent on various multi-player games and same goes for when we have get together with friends. Everyone in my friend group is 27-35 (maybe 20-25 of us) and we hang out in some capacity every week or so pretty much. We also play games online and we play tabletop games and card games a lot. Tbf we also go to game conventions regularly, and some of my friends run tables at the events. But I have to say, I play games in person in rooms with my friends and family more today than ever before, and everyone should.

And one of your friends was always a screenlooker.

I still play games this way with my friends; we just use a Switch now

Super Smash Bros. fist fights!

I mean a lot of people still play couch co op games

Being called a 'screen watcher' is something I haven't heard in a while when you are destroying someone so they accuse of watching their half of the screen! OF COURSE I WAS, but I would deny it lol

Playing multiplayer games when all players playing on the same keyboard! Oh I miss Little Fighters 2

I remember the Age Of Empires fests in my dorm. We would start about 6pm on a Friday, turn off all the lights, the fridge (which was always empty anyway), put some coffee in our thermos flasks and get at it. We were on a pre-pay electricity meter in our student house which soaked up the pound coins like nobody's business.

At some point, someone would notice it was almost 3am, or someone else (usually me) would have fallen asleep at his keyboard.

God I miss these days so much. For us it was Playstation 1 and 2 games. Bringing your controller over and plugging it into your friend's multitap.

I wonder if kids enjoy games more now, or back in the day. Obviously the tech is a lot better these days, but does this lead to more enjoyment?

We used to put our PCs on wheelbarrows to get to a LAN party.

The switch is still good for this! Xbox has the old Halo and Gears games that are splitscreen. Playstation does have some story based split screens and I think the Lego games are but there aren't too many. Most of the time, it becomes a lan party downstairs if we all want to play in the same room. Everyone has their own console and own TV. It's insane to see.

4 players split screen on a 20 inch tv. Those were the days.

I stand by N64's best feature being the fact that they had the forethought to actually put 4 controller ports on the front of the console.

I'm still not sure why Sony never bothered copying the feature on any later PS1 versions or the PS2, but at least Sega and Microsoft did. IDK if Halo would have actually blown up without 4 person split screen battles on the first 2 titles.

I remember playing some old DOS games over a null modem cable.

Before I had my computers networked with coax cable + Netware Lite.

Heated is definitely the word! Two CRT TVs, two consoles, one small fan, 6 dudes in my tiny room in the summertime sweating our balls off and having the best of times. Sometimes you'd step into the hallway just to cool off.

I only ever did this with my brother until getting into PC gaming in 2003. Then my friends got into it because I got a cool light up blue case with a spider on it. Eventually we did Lan parties in my basement.

God I miss Lan parties.

I just hosted a LAN party about three weeks ago. Had good runs of Team Fortress Classic, Orion: Prelude, and Windward

My brother would have Halo parties and there would be boys in random rooms all throughout the house, and they brought their own TV's and consoles.

For a few summers, my co-workers and I would gather at my apartment, get stoned and play Saturn Bomberman with up to 6 or 8 people because my friend had two multitaps and enough controllers.

Sometimes we'd take breaks and get our bits blasted by Radian Silvergun.

Good times!

Quit screen peaking!

[deleted]

Still going strong in hospitals.

Also many jobs where you have to enter classified areas because it's easier to have a beeper than maintaining service on a phone that doesn't have a camera or whatever other requirements they might have at the location.

I don't think you'd be able to even bring a beeper into a SCIF

Yeah I'd doubt it but there's quite a few levels below being in a SCIF.

I had an issued beeper specifically for the SCIF. Our SCIF stretched across multiple buildings, and you could go all day without being able to access your personal phone.

Know that feeling.

SCIF often have their own beepers for the area.

Maintenance techs, engineers, and system admins often have beepers for large complexes like a SCIF data center. The beepers stay on site.

Edit to add that the beeper communication equipment is also housed on site.

I'll take your word for it.

Also because they can't transmit, only receive.

And Nuke Plants.

and national laboratories

Reliable, great range, and work in places phones don't. In tunnels, etc.

I just got my first beeper. I'm glad I was able to skip that phase of the 90s. I never needed to be found that urgently. The one I have now is less about getting in contact with me specifically than using it to send alerts in a location where there is very, very poor cell signal. It's a safety item, not a communication device.

Sir Mix-A-Lot would like a word with you.....

Blockbuster. Ren and Stimpy.

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY

JOY JOY JOY

WELL IF YOU AIN'T THE GRANDDADDY OF ALL LIARS!!!

Ehhh the little creatures of nature

They don't know that they're ugly! That's very funny!

I TOLD YOU I'D SHOOT BUT YOU DIDN'T BELIEVE ME

WHY DIDN'T YOU BELIEVE ME?!

There is one blockbuster left! In Bend Oregon

Wasn't the second to last one in Alaska?

Yes. It is closed now. Netflix has a good documentary about it. I think it is called "The Last Blockbuster"

Irony

More like OJ writing that book anout not killing his wife

“IF I Did It” hell of a title

I know it's common knowledge, but I love how he got sued by the family and lost the rights to the book. So they changed the font to make the "If" part almost invisible. So it just said "I did it"

That whole fiasco was wiiiild

Norm MacDonald has entered the chat

“Its official! Murder is legal in the state of California!” RIP ya old lump of coal

Well I guess you can add Norm to this list...

Right? Also, I didn't know Juice was out on parole?!

That man has seemingly been trying to get himself locked up for some time now

That reminds me of this movie I saw about a bus that had to speed around the city, keeping its speed above 50, and if it’s speed dropped it would explode. I think it was called, “The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down”

I did something like this in a movie stunt driving mission thing in a game, I didn't know it was a reference to an actual movie until now.

“Speed” (are you referencing the title in a different language? Asking in all seriousness, I think I saw the title in another language that translated to “The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.”)

(Edit: wooooshhhhh)

It’s a Simpson quote.

Ahhh. Thanks.

What a power move lmao

Netflix has a good documentary about it.

The irony there is so thick!

I called them one nigh because I didn't believe it was real. Told them I was teaching a film class at the community College and wanted to see if they had copies of some classic to rent. They did. The voice delay in the call was wild. I heard myself a half second or so after speaking.

[deleted]

ayyy im from perth australia!

I used to go when I lived up there. I had no internet or cell phone service.

Walking into that last Blockbuster is just so surreal. Feels like a time warp. It didn't have the smell, unfortunately.

I live about a mile away. I got in to rent classic movies when they aren't available on my streaming services. Just got Silence of the Lambs the other day to show a friend that had never seen it. 1$ for a week long rental.

In central and eastern Canada there was a large chain called Jumbo Video, there is one left and it's in my city, it's fun to go and rent things still

Yes! I was just there last year. It’s awesome. They only had men’s XXL shirts left but I bought one anyway. I get lots of compliments.

As of last month, there are zero Howard Johnson's restaurants. Didn't see Blockbuster outlasting HoJo.

There is (or at least very recently still was) a Family Video in a minneapolis west suburb

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.0330365,-93.378385,3a,75y,5.52h,87.49t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sRBVTZaeDHo-83vYE_q6gKw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

You EEEEEDIOT!

Literally made some ren and stimpy stained glass art this week and realized it was way too old for so many people to know what it was.

I watched a modern episode of Mickey Mouse and was shocked at the obvious influence of Ren and Stimpy in the animation, and even a little in the plot.

I can't imagine a Mickey Mouse cartoon ever being this cool.

Really?! Can you recommend an episode? I’d love to check it out.

Mickey Mouse and Friends S1:E2 House of Tomorrow on Disney+.

I have a non-played "Log Cereal Game" box saved away in the attic

What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs, and over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack, And fits on your back? It's log, log, log It's log, it's log, It's big, it's heavy, it's wood. It's log, it's log, it's better than bad, it's good." Everyone wants a log You're gonna love it, log Come on and get your log Everyone needs a log log log log whistle LOG FROM BLAMMO

But those of us that do appreciate it!

I appreciate your work tiny_butt_toucher

Thanks tittybuttballs

I haven't seen Ren and Stimpy in decades, but say, "Happy Happy Joy Joy" a lot. I just got a t-shirt with them and that phrase today.

I don't expect many people will comment.

I made a happy happy joy joy stained glass art piece!

I saw that! So fun! What size? If you were to post a photo I would totally look.

So, is it that you would touch Ren's butt but not Stimpy's?

Or are you tiny and would touch both?

I prefer tone on tone (not to be confused with Tones on Tail, the Bauhaus offshoot) so I got my shirt in Cranberry so that the image would kind of blend in rather than stand out. It just came out of the dryer and I am quite pleased!

Edit: mortifying grammatical error.

There’s photos of it on my IG @tinycaffeine ✌🏽

I saw a Rocko sticker at work this week. Made me smile. And I read about nematodes.

Where do I see this stained glass?

IG @tinycaffeine

That is freaking awesome and I wanna be your friend.

What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs, and over your neighbor's dog?

It's log, log log!

It's big it's heavy it's wood!

Fun fact: The creator of Ren & Stimpy is a sexual predator

Not very fun nor too surprising.

They’re rebooting Ren and Stimpy

I hope the animation doesn't suffer. The original had such a way with expressions and movements which contributed to it just as much as the lines.

I don't have high hopes for that, judging by how it went last time they rebooted it and the fact that people have stopped pretending not to know John K is a predator

This must be the 4th reboot

Oh! I remember waking up for uni, watching the X Men cartoon during breakfast and Ren and Stimpy, which I video taped, then loading up a cassette into my Walkman for the walk to class.

My adult kids and I still watch season 1 of Ren & Stimpy that we bought from Amazon three email addresses ago.

Also, I have plastic toys of them that were picked up from a dollar store a couple years ago stuck to the top of one of my monitors.

Ren & Stimpy was the best! The 90’s were a golden era of dark cartoons

We named our cat Stimpy in the early 90s. Oh Stimpy I miss you!

I had 2 ferrets named Ren & Stimpy.

Be kind, rewind

Be kind, Rewind.

Our town has the very last Blockbuster!

Ren and Stimpy! My cousin and I used to watch them every day and laugh our asses off. Animaniacs too.

12 year old me loved Ren & Stimpy, thought it was the funniest cartoon ever

Adult me learned about what an absolute creep John Kricfalusi is

There are a couple of fake ones with the same name in Florence, Italy.

I think I can add even more 90's to blockbuster. How about roller blading to Blockbuster with friends and wearing them in the store as you browsed.

Ren and stimpy is the soundtrack to my teen years. (Yeah, it was a weird time.) I still love ren & stimpy!

Beavis and Butthead!

I have my Ren and Stimpy comic books…still

Eeeats a leeving hellll!!

Powdered Toast Man!!

Knowing your friends landline number by heart.

Still remember one number, to this day.

Still remember them all 30+ years later. I moved 2.5 years ago and don't know my home phone#.

I still remember my best friends house number. We’ve been friends for 26 years and called each other every day for at least 16 of them lmao. Her mom still has the landline.

  • Paper Airplane Tickets
  • Paper maps
  • Typewriters
  • Handwriting important documents

Pre 9/11, you could just jump the gate and get on a paper aeroplane for free.

Ken M is that you?

I kinda forgot about paper tickets until I saw some of my old ones in an album from the 90s I made as a kid.

Bought my train ticket at the counter the other day with cash because my card wouldnt go through on the app..,as I sat next to the guy who sells the tickets. Apparently you can absolutely still buy them and you even get a paper ticket

Paper tickets to rides in Disneyland. I’m so glad I kept some of mine. I’m bummed out they’re not a thing anymore.

So.... paper in general?

Cardboard concert stubs

The last 5 times I flew abroad from the UK I had physical paper plane tickets, including to Spain in 2018 and Florida in 2019 lol

It depends on the airline, well not actually the airline but, the sub company booking the flights. Airlines are weird as even though they own the planes they sometimes pay third parties to run their booking systems (Travel IT is a mess). Some flights have digital tickets (Apple Wallet), some have a paper ticket, some simply email you a QR code and some you just arrive at checkin with your passport and they give you your boarding pass (all for the same airline).

You got sent plane tickets in the mail. Last minute holiday booking wasn't a thing unless you wanted to try your like buying tickets at the airport.

Question was “rare or non existent” I wasn’t putting these in non-existent. I was listing them as rare.

I was just adding to your comment lol.

Just going to tag here. Fair for the rare but I had to chuckle at the comment as I do/use all of them.

I went overseas in 2019 and had paper/physical plane tickets. I have 3 state maps in my car currently. The office I work at has a typewriter for specific documents and other documents we write some of the information.

I'm I still in the 90s?

Atlases. Everyone had a rand McNally atlas in their vehicle at all times.

I still keep one in the car for up in the mountains (as you can't always get a signal). I do offline maps w/Google on the phone, but if you're covering a lot of ground, and don't have the whole area, still handy to have. Especially if there's some stupid, 4 hour detour because the main road through (cough I-70 cough) is closed.

Maybe 15 years ago I needing something to help me get a camp fire going so I ripped out the pages in my atlas for places I didn’t think I’d ever drive my car. Alaska, western Canada, Mexico, etc. Then I used the atlas to fan the flames. My kid who was around 5 at the time was shocked I was ripping pages out of a book but she came around to the wisdom of it. I think that was the last atlas I had.

Or a Thomas Guide map book.

Not only paper, but exchangeable! You could literally just hand your ticket to anyone & boom now they’re the one flying.

Paper Airplane Tickets

Home Alone 2 could not happen today.

It couldn't, but that's not why. Paper tickets are still largely a thing.

Who buys tickets for a paper airplane?

A lot of important documents are still hard copied.

Paper Airplane Tickets

Not sure what you mean. I flew Delta in 2021 and still had paper ticket/boarding pass. Although outside of travel day, everything gas been digital for many years if that's your meaning.

Paper boarding passes still exist, but paper tickets have been gone for a while. Haven't used one in 15+ years. Paper ticket as in you either went to an office or received in the mail a paper ticket that you needed to present at check-in to get your boarding pass.

Ah - okay.

But then let me ask - I recall that ticket/reservations as of the early 90s also leveraged computing to track booking. Would that have meant that losing your paper tickets left you shit out of luck or could they be replaced via a ticket counter at the airport?

That's a good question. I have a feeling you still could have gotten it replaced. I remember airports having a ticket counter in a separate location from the checkin counter, so I'd think the ticket counter would be able to look it up. The last time I used a paper ticket was a flight on Air France I'd booked through Continental. I picked it up from an Air France office, not Continental, so they had to "know" about it. My guess is just that systems weren't interconnected enough to be able to look up the booking and print the boarding pass all in one, although I'm not positive on that one.

Wow, I’m realizing how long it’s been since I got on a plane!

"Handwriting important documents" Bruh... We've had the printing press for a while now.

you can still print out plane tickets and use them

I think they may mean the era when a ticket was a ticket and not digitally tied to a specific person. You carried them with you.

Pagers

I felt like the coolest person on earth when I got my little purple pager, must have been around 1999.

Do you remember the digit alpha codes?

143 meant " I love you" Can't remember the other codes.

Um. I carry two pagers in 2022.

/medicine

It's OK to say "drug dealer."

Heisenberg moment.

Got my first one as a med student in 2013 - stuck with thr dam thing since. I hate that noise (any noise!) it makes. You apparently never lose the startle.

Pagers are still very common in hospitals. Just googling real quick, looks like the number was 80% of American hospitals still used a pager system as of 2019, and I wouldn't be surprised if more have gone back to them since COVID.

I work IT for a hospital and still use a pager when on call. They gave us the options of getting paged on our phones (text) instead but I like being able to separate work devices from personal devices so still carry around the pager when needed.

Smart move.

Pagers will still work in a lot of places without cell phone signal, like down in the basement where operating rooms tend to be. Pretty sure I still have PTSD anytime I hear the pager sound I used in residency.

Yup, nearly every resident has one. I hated that thing so much.

I remember my parents almost got me one as a kid. It took until my step-dad's mom died, and they gave me her cell phone in like 9th grade. I literally didn't get a cell phone until high school even though most kids had them in middle school, because my mom was initally against the idea. She said it was one of the dumber decisions she made later, once she could call me any time and find out where I was, or I could let her know I won't be home before dark because I'm out with friends spinning fire poi and staffs with friends at the local roller rink in a public park. I can see why parents are giving their kids phones as early as elementary school now, with how cheap they are, and the fact that they can be useful education tools as well, subbing in for a calculator and a planner, and im sure other devices i've forgotten

Had a few people in highschool with a cell phone but it wasn’t super common. Didn’t get my first one until I was 19 😅

I remember in the movie Clueless (I think that’s right) girl had a beeper AND a cellphone. Wut? Why?

Price. Minutes were super-duper expensive, pages were cheap. You only used the cell in OMG EMERGENCY times. Pagers were also much more reliable.

Man, I recall hearing those beeps.

For some reason we called them beepers.

cause they beeped. when you got a page.

I always set mine to pocket tickler mode

[deleted]

24 yo here. How do they work? Are they like a cellphone?

And the messages were only numbers.

So coded messages ? Just send a SMS

Sure, today.

Pagers as a thing teenagers carried is linked to a very specific time period…I think like five or six years…where pagers and pager plans got cheap enough for teens to have them, but before cell phones were cheap enough for teens to have them. So pagers were it.

My plan had voice mail, so you could leave a voice mail and attach your number, I’d get the page telling me that I had a voicemail and from who (your number). Or you could just leave the number, and that’d tell me you wanted me to call you when I could get to a phone (again, no cellphones). You could add a -911 on the end, that mean to call you now, it’s important. Or there were a bunch of other stupid codes I don’t remember that we made up, for things like “on the way.”

But of course as soon as cell phones got cheap and SMS was a thing all this went away, outside a few professional environments where it makes sense still.

There was no sms. This was the precursor to texting.

i think what helped as well is that most people could 7 digit dial which left you 3-4 digits to code a message. so when typing in your 7 digit call back number to be displayed on the pager after that it was 411 to call back when not super busy or 911 to call back now.

​

for example 555-1234-411 meant call back (555-1234) when you get a chance

I remember getting one from my job in the late 1990s that was "nationwide paging" , which I guess meant that I could get pages when I was out of town for work. I just remember this being like a big deal to me and my friends.

Imagine a really small cellphone that has one job: receiving short messages. You can’t send a message, but it can receive them.

Only guys that I knew had those were the drug dealers

Province wide EMS, we still use them every day

People taking about them still being used today are missing the point. Where I lived, in the late 90s it was the cool accessory to have as a teen. There were pager (and pager accessory) stores everywhere. All my friends at work had one, but they were for communicating with friends, and paid for out of pocket. People who were too broke to pay for service would still wear a pager to look cool.

You also built up a language of codes with your friend group, and had all your friends' numbers memorized.

Fun story: one night after going out with my friends I noticed my pager was missing. I looked around but couldn't find it. However, I knew that once the battery got low, it would let out a continuous beep until you changed the battery. So, I set my 28k modem to dial it, all night long. I got up in the morning, looked around the house, outside, etc. without finding anything. I go i work the next day (nothing in the lost and found) and my friend I was with comes by to pick me up for lunch. I hear it immediately as I open the door and reach under the seat and there it is. My friend was (jokingly) pissed at me because he thought his car was making the noise. He spent a long time trying to figure it out, but then just drove around with the radio blasting to drown it out because it was driving him crazy.

I had a job in 2000 where I was a text pager operator for MCI. People would call the call center and tell me the message they wanted to send to a text pager. I'd have to type the message on our system and send it to the pager's number. I became obsolete later that year when two-way pager's became mainstream.

They then transferred us to their 1-800-COLLECT and operator services where we became long distance and collect operators as well as directory assistance operators. I guess I say all of this, even though it was 2000-2001, all of this existed in the 90s and is all obsolete now.

We still use pagers at my work 🙄

I had to search for it

Surprisingly, this isn’t even in the top 20 comments.

Pagers were huge

actually they were quite small

Still are. 80% of hospitals still use them. I have one on me right now

One of the main timelines available for 9/11 is the activity on a pager network.

not just the pagers but what you became

the haircut, the golf shirt, the belt, the chinos or khakis, the forest green Explorer

I still don’t know how exactly those things worked lol

Tell that to Dennis Duffy, Beeper King

Those still very much exist in healthcare. My pager literally went off as I was reading this and I thought…I bet someone puts pagers not realizing they are used quite frequently still

They're coming back - technology is cyclical.

I remember back in about 1994 when we first saw a pager. My mother got one for work just in case the hospital needed her there (non-medical job). She was noticeably more stressed out after they gave it to her and was told she had to keep it with her at all times.

Still remember my pager number 293-0393 ah.. good times.

I thought it was 867-5309

Well, I'm peepin' and I'm creepin' and I'm creepin'

But I damn near got caught 'cause my beeper kept beepin'

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.

Oh yes. You felt like a real hacker when you could do that or mess with config.sys!

Did you ever use 4dos? Loads of extra groovy commands making navigating dos prettier and easier.

No doubt! I was also a master of the arcane art of writing modem init strings. A couple friends bought a USR HST 9600bd modem that required an init string as long as my arm to even work lol.

I vaguely remember trying 4dos briefly but not for long, because a relative randomly showed up one day with a pile of disks and books and said 'You're good with computers, maybe you can get some use out of this' -- it turned out to be DESQView which had the QEMM memory manager which made all that SO much easier. I wound up using DV for a while and was going to get into DV/X (the graphical window manager) but by that point Win3.1 was the de facto GUI.

Goot times editing school computers to display silly text on boot!

Mine used to say Hello Dave, it's good to be working with you again.

HIMEM.SYS

OH MY GOD I COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT HIMEM.SYS UNTIL THIS MOMENT I ONLY REMEMBERED MESSIN WITH CONFIG.SYS AND AUTOEXEC.BAT

Back when you had to choose between your cd-rom working, your sound working, and/or your mouse working. You'd need QEMM and cutemouse to have enough memory. And IRQs and DMAs. Fun times.

Mhm. I don't know who got rid of the whole IRQ conflict thing years ago, but they deserve some kind of prize.

It's not gone, it's still here, but it's handled by the kernel now and the plugandplay system

Yeah but it's just not something we have to mess with anymore which is great.

And config.sys

Also,network.cfg

Even Robocop ran on MS-DOS

was it exram ? i can't remember, but i remember loading half a dozen floppies before playing a game...

I played tons of games but that one doesn't sound familiar.

exram is what i recall as the cmd for setting more than 64kb of ram or whatever it was.

loading games from many floppies was the norm, then numerous cd's...

Oh, I have no idea, it's just been too damned long and my memory is spotty.

We used to write rabbit files inside the autoexec.bat file on the PCs at the local PCWorld so when they rebooted the next day it would crash and they'd have to reinstall everything.

Both autoexec.bat and config.sys had a kind of menu system to choose custom boot options. That was pretty snazzy for its time.

The menu thing was only on version 5 and above. Older versions you had to keep multiple files around.

I vaguely remember being able to set up multiple headings to do different things depending on conditions at boot or something? But maybe that was in v5, It's been way too long.

BASIC, where it all started

Then DOS

Then Linux CLI

People these days think when I open the command prompt and enter in a super basic command that I'm basically a hacker

Color A

Tree

This... For me it's like a super basic knowledge, I don't even remember what was the last time when I created a folder from the file explorer, but people will think you are a master of computers just because you type cd and mkdir.

Is it really faster to make folders in cmd? Lol

Never gonna be faster.

Ctrl-shift-n

When you become used to it, yes. Not making folders per se, but the entire navigation and folder management flow.

C:\DOS

C:\DOS\RUN

RUN\DOS\RUN

It is only because of ms dos that I can use a computer now.

I’ve been playing the original Oregon Trail on a dos emulator lately.

I work in IT and basically only use it for checking ipconfig, if a PC can ping something etc. If I am on someone's PC who is quite young they think it is absolute magic like I am hacking into them or something.

I mainly use powershell these days but I still use the command prompt regularly for a lot of things. I use psexec for remote command prompts, and it doesn't play nice with powershell.

Or basic knowledge of basic code!

I don't mind having that. It helped at the bank. One system there is that old interface.

Blockbuster Video was basically still running it until they closed down.

I would generalize that to command line use, as MS DOS isn't really used anymore. There's not much point in knowing DOS specifically. powershell for Windows can be useful, but more so Linux command line, which can be used in both Linux, OS X, and Windows.

I remember when dostree became a thing. I thought it was the hottest shit.

nobody had that. I promise. I worked at an ISP in the mid/late 90's and people couldn't even get in the command prompt, let alone msdos. Getting them to pronounce "Eudora" without naming the Bewitched character (ENdora) was impossible.

Was a teen in the 90s, used DOS. Created directories, deleted, moved files. Ran programs like Blue Wave Mail Reader. Text editors.

Wow, crazy levels of memory unlocking in this thread.

good enough, but you probably weren't calling tech. support repeatedly once you had your account set up and knew the phone number for the modem bank!

Hahaha no, but I worked at an ISP from the early to mid 2000s, so I can imagine the pain of the 90s! We had it easy in comparison!

I used it it to get into computer games. My dad always bought these cheap CDs with a bunch of demos or cheap short games. They always required dos. The tricky part was figuring out the right command as they never told you. Most were just the games name but some were shortened or weird abbreviations.

Had to do a dir listing, pick out the right .exe file. Or the next likely.

Now someone tells me! My dad was never very savvy and us kids weren't either.

I was busy with Amiga Dos CLI

ECHO Y | FORMAT C: /Q /U /C

I had to fix a weird glitch by using command prompt to move a folder - and in a blink the old dos commands came back to me to navigate, copy, rename, etc.

I could almost feel 25 year old cobwebs being dusted off disused information in my mind.

I remember my dad teaching me to make my name fly across the screen using dos commands on the Commodore 64… what a colossal waste of time it was but I thought I was so Cloak and Dagger!”

That's basic. Not dos

C64 used BASIC and not DOS, for the record

DOS command interpreter and MS BASIC are extremely different

Loading MSCDEX?

Only if you loaded the driver first ;)

Knowledge of windows packet editor goes hand in hand with this. Online games used to be so easy to hack.

C:\ DOS

C:\ DOS run

Run, DOS, Run!

"solution is to run a disk check."

"HOW TO PERFORM DISC CHECK IN COMMAND PROMPT"

every time

I am very surprised that those knowledge would be useful 30 years later

Not true. Most of people didn't even know what DOS is. I'd say today the number of people with basic dos knowledge is bigger than in 90s.

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.

i'm a mechanic, and maybe 2-3 weeks ago I had a car that had an actual road atlas in it. Like published 2022, 3 foot tall by 2 foot wide, actual proper USA road atlas. No idea where they found it. I had to explain to the jr techs that these are how you crossed the continent before GPS systems. They were mystified.

I've always kept an atlas in my car. Update periodically before a road trip vacation.

I'm bad about blindly following my gps and I like the idea that I'd be able to have a way to navigate an unknown area if my phone dies or signal dead zone.

My husband and i were just talking about how we need the 2022 Rand McNally for each of our trucks. Our most recent copy is 2018.

I've never used one of those (even back in the '90s as a kid riding with my parents), but I will still grab free paper state maps from welcome centers to have around just in case I'm somewhere without cell service or whatever. It comes in handy sometimes.

I also print out maps of trails and Forest Service roads and whatnot when I'm going camping -- those definitely still get used.

Looks like they will indeed still do paper Triptiks per question 6 at https://triptik.aaa.com/help/index.html

Tried to get a new map of Pennsylvania last week, in Pennsylvania. They didn’t have any :(

I know! I gave away a bunch of AAA maps for an art project only to find out most were no longer available to replace.

I only recently realized that they even have them in store. I mostly order them online these days.

My Pap pa went to AAA in October to get a TripTik for my brother’s wedding and they printed out the google map directions for him. I thought it was sweet. They didn’t bother saying “oh it’s an app now” or anything, they just said “sure!” and printed and stapled the directions for him.

You technically can order paper Triptiks still but the agents always get annoyed when you do. They require something like 2 weeks advance notice and they're just glorified printouts from the app with binding. The days of showing up and the agent highlighting your route by hand and stamping construction zones with that purple "CONST" stamp are long gone.

I remember using Triptiks, they were so helpful. And when I was about 18 and taking long road trips, I'd have the big road atlas in my car and my Dad would carefully write out the route on tiny post-its that I'd stick to my steering wheel. Each route change would be a new sticky. I'm in my fifties now and I miss having someone care that much about me.

Screenshot the route and print it

Yup. Parents would have them map all road trips and swing by to pick up hard copies before hitting the road.

Really? I got a paper one last year for a road trip from Tampa to Phoenix.

I just had a paper triptik made for me back in May.

Edit: maybe only certain stores/regions still do this. Im from central PA

My parents just ordered one a few weeks ago. I was shocked that they still exist. I always loved looking at them as a kid

What the fuck is a “Triptik”? AAA is famous for their folded paper maps.

You would tell AAA what point(s) you were driving to and they'd make you a custom mini-binder (with pages about 5 by 8 inches) of the roads that you need to take. When you finished the route on one page, just flip to the next page, and so on, until you got to your destination(s). Once I made a trip to all 48 states and they even made a Triptik for that.

The most amazing part was the person who made the Triptik. They would trace that map route with a highlighter lightning fast, page after page after page. Then take out their stamp to mark construction, and they would know every area under construction on the map by heart. Stamp stamp stamp stamp flip page stamp stamp flip page stamp stamp stamp.

As a kid, that was always one of my favorite parts of the pre-road trip process. I thought those people were geniuses.

Huh, TIL. When did they stop doing that? I’m in my 30s, and my parents were AAA members for long before I was born. I’ve never so much as heard a thing about that.

Same. We just used Rand McNally folded maps book for each state. I used to just sit and read those on the crazy long roadtrips my mom and I used to take so I have a strangely high knowledge of the geography for places I’ve never been.

I had, at one point, laminated Rand McNally maps for everything north of the Mason/Dixon line. My mom, brother, and I make multiple cross country road trips. Longest was ND-NH-AK. I was her dedicated navigator, and to this day will tell anyone that asks about the drive that I said her several hours by being able to almost instantaneously route her around construction or traffic when it popped up.

Mind you this was in the early 90s. So you found out about construction by driving into a construction zone. Google maps, tomtom, etc were all many years in the future.

Same story here but for the nine western states down through TX and FL. When we got the spiral notebook Road Atlas we held on to that sucker for a while.

We had one of those too!

I didn't do a cali-FL run until after smartphones were a thing, but that was basically "get on I-10 eastbound. Drive until you hate your life, then drive 2 more days and you'll get there"

Kindred spirits, man! Between the maps and that old game called Brain Quest, which were like trivia cards, that’s basically all I did in the car.

DUUUUUDE I HAD SO MANY OF THOSE! The tall thing hinged at the bottom with like 50+ flash cards!

I had a kids’ version of the Rand McNally atlas for road trips when I was little. I remember a lot of road trips to go see family 1,000 miles away. My parents would quiz me on various things in the atlas, like state capitols and geographic features and landmarks.

Looks like they will indeed still do paper Triptiks per question 6 at https://triptik.aaa.com/help/index.html

Oooooo, interesting…

Having smartphones with apps like Waze can make this obsolete, but back in the day it was a bit easier having a Triptik with its strip maps (like having just the part of the map that you needed cut into a small rectangle), versus having huge maps of the state that you had to wrestle with and fold into place. Not a huge difference but a bit more convenient.

I had a triptik for a long drive and used a red LED penlight to read it at night to not wipe out my night vision. I could see the roads and the green highlighter marking. I got to the last page and panicked because the route just ended. It turns out the city names were in red ink and invisible with the red light.

I've never heard of it before, but I like how it's a play on the word "triptych." I hope they're formatted to be folded in thirds like a tri-fold pamphlet.

Triptiks were a flip book of specific sections of maps they would make for you for a long road trip with your route and exits highlighted and construction called out

And all nearby restaurants, hotels, and attractions

😥😥😥

We had a paper TipTrik get us to LA and back

You can't use the app as a souvenir of the trip. And why don't these people realize that not everyone is tech savvy enough to use the app? And OMG don't forget power failure....the app does no good without power. At least with triptik and flashlight you can still see where you are going.

Last time we went on a vacation we got a Triptik, it was only a few weeks prior and they mailed it to us.

I have found l miss the city maps, goggle can get me there, if I want to have an idea of what is in and around the the city a paper map is still my preference.

I was going on spring break in college in 2001. We were driving from NY to Florida and my roommate got a bound book of directions to follow from AAA. I was like “dude, why not just print it out from Mapquest??”

but then your printer settings were wrong so the mapquest printed out landscape in like 72pt font so you had five pages (with ads) to go twelve miles and godforbid you DROP them while trying to read them while driving and then youre just SOL.

And the last page it printed was blank except for the url at the bottom

I just put those ones back in the printer upside down.

Print preview and selected pages were the save for that.

True story bro

I still remember sitting by the printer waiting for all the pages to print.

Are you my dad... He was still printing shit until like 2015. He got a smartphone in 2011.

LMFAO nailed it!

Just got a new job and an office lady told her coworker to print me out a map quest to the job site.

How old is the office lady?

I still get these as a trucker for off site drop lots. All I want is an address, not some copy of a copy of a copy that is barely legible printed 20 years ago!

Buying a Rand McNally road atlas with every US state in as well as maps for the biggest town/city in each state.

And just really hope there’s no detours, or you miss your turn. There’s no “recalculating” your Mapquest directions.

That's more early 2000's

How would you find your way in the 90s? Lol

People memorized most of the major roads in their area so if someone told you "turn right on road Y three blocks after you pass road X" you knew where it was.

For longer road trips there were well, paper maps that you got from the bookstore, grocery store, or post office.

And then there was just "follow me" and you followed your friend's car.

Maps! Paper ones lol

Yes I remember my parents using these im like how even did you drive doing this lmao

I had one in 1994.

The 90's were almost over in 1994. The 90's that people think of when they think of the 90's anyway.

The first thing I did when I got my first car (very early ‘00s) was buy a Thomas Guide for my state. That thing saved my ass more than a few times on road trips.

Everyone in L.A. had a Thomas Map in their car before cell phones. In the dark times.

I would straight up look up directions on a desktop, hand write them on a piece of notebook paper, then look at it as I drove to wherever the fuck I was going.

I did that until 2014, which was the year I got my first GPS.

And it never took road closures or construction into account so a trip from Chicago to Detroit took me and some friends 7 hours instead of 4

AAA still does that. My dad still insists on going there to get maps for their retirement road trips, even though he has an iphone, knows Google Maps very well, and even their cars have built in GPS.

I remember thinking Mapquest was peak technology and not being able to imagine things getting any more advanced than that! 🤣

My mother still insists on bothering the fuck out of me if we ever travel together and she's driving. She used to harass me as a kid to read her the directions so she knew where she was going and to watch out for exits as if she was incapable of driving the car and ya know, paying attention to very clear road signs herself. Meanwhile I was just trying to read a book or play my gameboy on this 4 hour+ car ride.

These days she still bothers me to "help me watch for road signs" and I just want to strangle her. You have a smart phone. You have a car with a built in GPS. Fucking use them. They will tell you when it's almost time to take an exit or make a turn. Stop interrupting my fucking reading because you're a stubborn troglodyte.

I remember writing out detailed directions by hand (including landmarks and other details) for my girlfriend in college (now wife) when she came to visit me at my parents house.

That's a good one too

You've reminded me of going to the local RAA to buy maps, planning the trip with pencils, and navigating the old fashioned way sans phones. Husband drove, I was chief map wrangler. Such fun!

Mapquest

Thomas guides as well

I prided myself on making the best directions on paper

Mapquest

That's a good one too.

Key maps if you didn't have internet yet

I still remember going on road trips with my family and having a bunch of pages of directions stapled together. Better hope you don’t take the wrong turn though!

Just giving directions is a thing of the past.

We carry around little magic boxes that let us find any location and directions how to get there.

Its pretty freaking insane to think about.

My dad calls the maps app on his phone Mapquest all the time. I can’t get him to say anything else

It must have been probably 14 years ago that I last printed out map quest directions.

Google maps still produces reasonably-formatted printed directions today...

I don't miss that....

I work at a library and we have a surprising number of people still come in to print off Mapquest directions on our computers.

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.

Yeah, and if you had to tell the number to someone, you'd have to close your eyes and air-dial to remember it.

I had to recount my friends' numbers to someone once.

I literally had to take their phone and dial it to remember them.

My PC's password is all numbers. If I had to write it out on paper I'd have to imagine a keyboard numpad and make the movements with my fingers.

You must have a painful time using compact keyboards.

LOL, my mom got mad at me when she was at my apartment and sat down to use my computer for a bit to discover that there was no number pad.

rightfully so, get yourself a numpad

I'm using a 40 % keyboard with no numbers printed on it. They're on Raise+top row, but you have to know that. I do have a numpad layer too though, with LED lights to mark it when active. That way I can still use the muscle memory.

Only a couple for me. One of my buddies growing up was the prefix and 2222 so that was simple. The only pattern I still remember is a very good friend of mine in highschool and a couple years after. I dialed that number a million times and it was two counteclockwise circles. It's been almost 15 years and I still know that number.

That's why a calculator throws me off

Same. I didn't realize it until one day I was asked to give someone someone else's number and I couldn't unless I could type it in for them.

The part of my phone number that wasn't the same for everybody in the (fairly large) area was 852 14 70. I'd had it for three years and was about to move out when someone mentioned the pattern and how it was what made them remember my phone number to me.

I was playing easy mode back then. We lived in a small village and my aunt was working for the "Deutsche Post" (German postal service, which was in charge of phones and landlines, too back then).

When our village went from 3-digit numbers to 4 digits, she made a little arrangement for us. My grandma had the number 1001, we had 1002 and my other aunt&uncle got 1003.

That's what I do for my phone unlock. I have no idea what number it is but I can type it in. It's much easier to remember a long number as a pattern than a number.

Well. We still do that pattern thing, when unlocking our smartphones.

For me it was always the numbers, the pattern confused me

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Nah, I had that as a kid. You hate anyone with a 9 or 0 in their number.

If today’s kids had that as their only option, they would suffer it the same way we did. They’re no different from us. It’s just different things they deal with. We had shitty phones, they have school shootings.

I still remember the specific tones that the phone made when dialing my parents' old landline and my old best friend's landline. I typed those numbers so many times that the exact sounds are unforgettable.

My dad refused to have touch tone service because the local phone company wanted to charge extra for it for no reason. He held out as long as he could, forcing them to maintain antiquated equipment just for him. Long after they stopped the extra charge, they had to keep coming out and work on the box every week to keep things working.

Meanwhile we had to sit and wait for the pulses to finish after punching in the numbers while calling out. Always felt like forever.

That's how I memorize the smartphone passwords and ATM PINs.

Far easier than the list of numbers.

A family in my parents neighborhood that we're all really close friends with had chosen their phone number just use numbers in one column to make it easier for their blind parent/grandparent to dial.

It was ruined when we had to use area codes to add 407.

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.

Yeah, but equally lots of people don't answer calls from numbers they don't know.

99% of them are either scams or telemarketing anyways

Drives me crazy. My number gets a lot of spam calls, like a half dozen or more a day, and my father was in a quite lengthy hospital stay so I had to answer calls from a lot of different people that I had to be in touch with. I'd say maybe 2-3/50 calls I answered a week were actually legit

And the worst part is that the more you answer them, the more calls you get, it's a vicious cycle

Yes, and I've also noticed that increases my spam texts as well, but my phone is pretty decent at recognizing and tucking away spam texts. I love and hate current technology

Kinda wonder how much actual bad shit has been caused by the FCC's refusal to stop those spam calls. Like, how many women had their phone stolen in a bad neighborhood or a similar situation and wound up in a ditch because their emergency contacts just saw the 10th unrecognized number calling that day?

I get not answering unknown numbers. But if you're calling someone from a borrowed phone or otherwise unusual number, you should expect to call them 3-4 times to get through. If you get a repeat call from the same unusual number, then you should be answering it because it's probably an emergency. Spam callers don't hit the same number multiple times in a row.

I’ll get the same spoof twice in a row sometimes. about once a day I’ll have a double call like that, out of the dozen+ I get daily.

caused by the FCC's refusal to stop those spam calls

Read about STIR/SHAKEN before rehashing whatever shit John Oliver said 5 years ago

I work for a retail partner store of a major telecom. Do you have any idea how many people come in and ask me if the call they just got was real or a fake? I have to look up their account to check interaction notes seeing that they didn't answer the phone call or the VM the company left and then leave more interaction notes because I accessed their account just to get the company to try to call her again because I don't have access to whatever it is they actually needed.

I just don't get not answering an unknown number. Even when I was getting 8-12 scam calls a day, I would still answer my phone cause it might be someone important.

If it's someone important, they'll leave a voice mail & you know to call back. If they don't, it couldn't have been that important.

I know a guy who has four or five work numbers and refuses to leave or listen to voicemails because "calling is easier", and sometimes does have an actual emergency. It's infuriating but I can't do anything about it.

Yeah, I hate leaving vm, too, and in normal circumstances would absolutely just try to call again later, but emergencies often require different behavior in all sorts of ways.

If someone calls 2x in a row I'll pick it up on the 2nd try because sometimes it is someone needing to get in touch with me.

And I do know that it at least worked once when I needed my sister to come pick me up one late night and it was desperately needed.

Yeah if it's important, leave a voicemail on the first call and call two more times. Almost anyone should get the hint. Although anyone who would call me or get a call from me knows the rule so it's not really something I have to worry over.

I don't answer calls from unknown numbers, but I do check the voicemail if one is left.

If a number I don't recognize calls me back to back I pick up, because of situations like this.

I just hope the robodialer programmers don't catch on

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This works. Long story short I capsized my boat on the way to a hiking trip (on an island), I used my friends phone to text another friend to say who I was and I was about to call from that number.

They might if the same number calls them repeatedly though. My phone also filters spam calls automatically most of the time, so if something gets through there's a decent chance it's legit.

Nah I assume you speaking from experience in USA/Canada. I don't know personally anyone who doesn't answer unknown numbers here in Europe (if the number isn't hidden of course). Never ever heard of it too

That's idiotic.

I have 911 memorized

I completely forgot the phone number for 911, what is it again?

I also have 211 and 0 memorized.

You don’t know your mom’s phone number?

I hand my childhood phone number memorized. My mom has moved twice since then, however, and I have no clue what her number is. It’s in my phone, why would I memorize it.

If you don’t have your phone. You think you’re always going to have your phone? Is your phone surgically attached to your hand?

I can call my wife and mother from memory. That's pretty much it but I figure that's good enough.

FYI to people, if you get arrested they don't let you look up numbers from your cell to call people.

I have a list of like 10 people's numbers on a slip of paper in both my wallet and the glove box of my car .

I kept a notecard in my wallet

True but calling my 85 year old parents might not be much help.

That's the excuse I use whenever I talk about why I never save phone numbers. I know I will never change my phone and repair it half to death until I learn to hold stuff proprly, and that there is no need to fear that I will have no phone when it's an emergency because I literally check for it every time I go somewhere, but I still might need it.

There's still analog phonebooks you know.

I still remember all of the important numbers from my childhood.

I still remember the local injury attorney’s phone number bc it was on every commercial break during daytime/early afternoon tv

877-cash-now

I actually still remember the phone numbers of my 3 childhood best friends. I’m sure those landlines have long since been disconnected, but I still remember them.

4? You light weight!

I have no clue what my husbands phone number is. But my high school crushs number ended in 2650 lol

I still remember my grade school and middle school best friend's "home" number, my long time best friend's cell number, my high school GF's number, my late grandmother's home number, and my late mom's home and cell numbers.

Now if you gave me ten of my most regular contacts' numbers on a blind sheet, I could probably only pick out the ones with area codes from a few specific states/cities.

Only needing to know 7 digits for numbers as well

To this day, I remember my home phone, my best friend’s home phone, my wife’s home phone (we have been together since I was a senior in high school), and my grandma’s home phone.

My parents and in laws still have land lines (my in laws live in the middle of nowhere so they still have internet through their phone line), but now they get weirded out when I call them on their home phones and not their cells.

that definitely still exists, you never know if you’ll have to use a friends phone to call someone. i know my parents, grandparents and sisters phone number

I'm so ashamed of my lack of phone # memory these days. I've been married for 7 years. My mom was killed 6 years ago. I still dial a hybrid of both their numbers if I have to call my spouse without my cell phone on me. I know that sounds oedipean, but I dialed my mom's # hundreds of times before I had a cell phone; I entered my spouse's # in my cell after our first date.

Wait people don't do this nowadays?

Used to know every number I would have any reason to call. Now I'm lucky if I know the number for 911 without my phone.

Not counting my own or 911, I remember three lol.

I still know my Grans landline. She's in aged care. So definitely don't need that.

Fuck, I'd be screwed. All I know is my moms home phone (she never answers) and my own!

Shoot, I used to carry a tiny note paper in my billfold that had all the most important numbers on it, the ones I couldn't readily commit to memory which must have been at least 4-10.

Only numbers I know by heart now is my own and my wife's.

Yeah it's great! I don't even have to memorise 911's phone number, whatever it is.

Duuude.. 16f I used to remember so many phone numbers but a few months ago I lost my phone and my mom was waiting for me outside of the school building and I couldn’t call her to tell her that I lost my phone lol.. a teacher offered her phone so I could call my mom and tell her why she had been waiting for me for 30+ mins. And I couldn’t remember her phone number to save my life…. I had to fake that I did in front of my teacher to not look stupid and was like “aaa she’s not answering .. so weird” as I tied like 4 different combinations that sounded right. They weren’t. I ended up giving up on my phone and found it in my Spanish class the next day. :,v

I grew up in a small town and all the phone numbers had the same first 5 numbers, so you only had to remember three numbers for anyone in town. Really fucked me when I became an adult and had to start remembering all 7, and then moving to a city with 3 area codes, forget it.

911, 411, 0 for "operator" ... what's the other one?

Before 911 there were: Ambulances, Fire Stations , Police Stations, etc.

It’s crazy to think that some people today don’t have any phone numbers memorized and never have

Still do, to this day.

I only remember the numbers that haven't changed since back when memorizing was the norm.

I still remember my grandma's phone number and she's been dead since 2004

I don't know a single number of anyone that I met after then pretty much

I don’t put names down for contacts anymore and instead use their phone number as the contact name. This is more for close friends/family. First heard it as a memorization tip years ago.

I'm still close with one of my high-school buddies. We met in 1999.

He STILL has the same cell phone number since then. He got his cell phone in 2001 I think. His number is old enough to drink!

Remembering emergency numbers. Fire was 4103, and police was 4105. Ambulance was a full 7 digit number.

I know my dad’s mobile cos i memorised it as a kid, 1300655506 (the reading and writing hotline - memorised it from tv ads), and 131008 which is a cab company. I should probably learn my partner’s number but eh

I had a superpower. I could remember a phone number forever if I rang it even just once. Since smartphones, I had to remove my cape and store it in a trunk in the attic.

I think I'm one of a few people in this thread who still remembers numbers.

I remember our teacher asking us to write out all the phone numbers we knew and the winner got a prize (think it was just a chocolate bar), i got like 15 or so, until we realized we weren't going to win because the class phone-gossip queen listed out over 100, with names.

Today I literally forget my own number and have to check my phone to confirm it sometimes.

Omg, I just realized that I still remember them.

Numbers of my Mom’s and my Dad’s workplaces, grandma and grandpa and my 3 best friends from elementary school.

I wonder if somebody picked up the phone if I called there now.

And learning your own number because you always had to give it when phoning up to order pizza. I never learned the last landline number I had.

I still remember all the phone numbers of my closest friends' childhood homes.

I used to know at least three dozen numbers at any one time, plus dozens more extensions at various places. I remember I was in a car with a friend of a friend who told me his number (I forget why, but there was a reason) and I repeated to myself a couple of times and said "no worries, I got it".

Six months later he said "You have forgotten it by now, right?".

I said it back to him.

I still have two of my house phone numbers and two of my former best friends' house numbers burned into my brain from 20 years ago

Can't remember current mobile numbers, but thank the gods I can remember the landline for a guy I stopped being friends with 10 years ago and who moved out of that place 8 years back. Super helpful info

I still know all these numbers. I don't know any current ones though.

Will: 478-9875

Rich: 426-0734

Tom: 507-5686

Danny: 429-3874

Chris: 565-6340

I haven't dialed any of those numbers in over 20 years, but they're all still stuck in there

I'm going to require an area code to make these prank calls. Please advise.

Will and Danny died way before their time, Rich moved to Brazil, Tom is living a nomadic life somewhere and Chris has no short term memory due to multiple heroin overdoses. NYC is a hell of a place. (thats a clue to the are codes)

Guess what State I'm From? Ha ha ha ha, this will be fun! jk

I still make it a point to remember numbers. Call me paranoid but it’s a great counter surveillance move, especially if you have a crazy jealous girlfriend.

I can’t remember my mother’s cell phone number, but I can still remember my best friend’s house phone number from middle school. Haven’t dialed that in over 25 years.

One should still try and teach kids their parents' phone numbers at least.

I still remember at least 4 important phone numbers, including one that no longer belongs to anyone I know. But I always have to look up my own cell number.

I still have one of them memorized, and I haven’t used it in over 30 years now

I’m 33 and date a 25 yr old. I have my moms, both brothers and her number memorized… she can’t get to the grocery store without her gps. Those very short 7 years are HUGE for how we view the world.

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.

"Ears up and listen good, egghead. If I look outside this time next week and I don't see six pounds of metal in the hands of every fucking Kia Boy-"

Police say: USE IT!

I saw one like 3 weeks ago lol. On a car parked at some middle of nowhere hike in cottage country.

The HIGHLY VISIBLE Club

LOL, remember the Trunk Monkey ads? Those were great.

LOL! Where? Is this a local dealership / auto group?

I think it's in Michigan? I'm not 100%. I don't even know how some local dealership got its ads to national attention.

I remeber hearing on the radio ( when that a thing, and they had DJs telling quick interest stories between songs) Some lady got the entier web of her finger caught in the grip of the CLUB. I guess the key wasnt accessible, it was late at night and she ended up stuck in her car.. Obviously cell phones weren't a thing yet, so all she could do was honk the car horn, apparently it took hours for someone to come alog and rescue her. What a strange one-off little incident.

i carried one in my car, in during my late teen years. while never utilizing its intended application, it acted as a deterrent, more in keeping with its namesake.

My car was stolen in '92 with the club on it. My dad was yelling at me and accusing me of not using it. I was in tears trying to convince my dad that I always use it. Cop told him how easy it was to bypass.

You probably won't believe me but my neighbor's car still has it on her wheel..... She's the joke of the block.....

Do you live in So Cal? Because my sister legit still uses hers EVERY DAY. lol.

I see them frequently up in Seattle metro

They’re really easy to pick or drill out. Plus some thieves will just clip the steering wheel with a bolt cutter.

I remember hearing stories of thieves stealing the car and leaving the club behind.

Haha I wish I lived there!!! I'm in NJ, and the owner of the car is this nasty old lady that we all try to avoid when we see her... Lol

At least she’s an old lady who doesn’t know any better. My sister is only 30. It’s embarrassing.

I must say I'm impressed that she even knows of The Club!

Circa 1991 or so, my mother's little Toyota pickup was stolen twice in Long Beach and ended up in a high speed pursuit. Ended with spike strips, but eventually the truck was recovered mostly unharmed. After that, my dad installed a little disconnect switch in a discreet place under the dash preventing it from being started unless it was flipped.

We still use a steering wheel lock on our Astro.

Fun anecdote I once drove my old car to my parents place in my home town to drop it off so my dad could fix it and silly me left it out the front of the house with a steering wheel lock, took the keys, and went straight to the pub to catch up with mates. Dad just dismantles the fucking steering column and wheeled it down our driveway into the garage with vice grips like nothin hard lmao

What a legend.

Here is the legend of vise grip bob.

I saw a person use one of those when they left their car below deck on a ferry. As if some car thief is going to steal the car the car that can't move for an hour and a half before they come back before the boat docks.

I have a sneaking suspicion I did that once too. Thing is, it was a reflex after a while. You did it before getting out of the car then no matter how daft it seems that you have done it, it seems even more ridiculous to take it off again. So I left it.

Funnily enough, someone broke into my family’s ‘93 Plymouth Grand Voyager on the ferry on our trip to Canada. They didn’t drive off with it, but they stole my dad’s video camera, so he couldn’t take movies of the trip.

Its not hard 🤷‍♀️

I still use mine. ’99 Toyota ext cab PU. Under 100k. I live in Albuquerque, so they do work! So far.🤫

I gave up on mine when I heard thieves would put liquid nitrogen on them to make them very cold and then shatter them. That probably isn't even true. I was just tired of using one and needed an excuse to stop.

I once came across a piece of hacksaw with a tape handle. I think it was used to saw a break in the steering wheel, then slip off the club. Very portable.

Came across you say?

When he was searching Ask Jeeves for “how to steal a car” in 1999

Lol I was walking and it was in the gutter! I picked it up and pondered it’s use.

was just about to comment that these things are almost ubiquitous in abq lol

I was just thinking about that, was auto theft a lot higher in the 90s and like crime in general? Because I not only remember those but people keeping crowbars and tire irons easily accessible in their cars in case they got mugged.

I feel like crime was the first workplace to go fully remote. I've only been mugged once when I was a kid, but I've had my debit card hacked half a dozen times.

LMAO I'm sorry to hear that, but you're right there is so much fraud going on with banking. I mean people used to do all kinds of check fraud type stuff but today it is a lot more common and easier to do.

You betcha. Immobilizer systems weren't popular options in cars yet and stereos still went for silly money, so people were stealing Civics and Corollas left-and-right with carefully ground bump/"master" keys or hand tools or just stealing your Blaupunkt stereo with little effort.

A competent thief could steal something like an Acura Integra and have it driving away in just a few minutes. That's why I don't have one any more.

I forgot that stealing car stereos used to be a thing lol. Now they all have alarms or won’t work without the code in the owners manual. Sorry your car was stolen that sucks.

Car alarms, anti theft, and lojack just became more prevalent so it was a little redundant to lock a wheel that would lock anyway when someone tried to steal your car.

it was a little redundant to lock a wheel that would lock anyway when someone tried to steal your car.

GM cars were notorious for having and easy-to-break collar around the steering shaft. Then you could bend the lever out to unlock the steering wheel, and start the car, without keys. All it took was a large flathead screwdriver and a hammer. My '80 Caprice was stolen that way, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in 1989.

My dads 87 Monte Carlo SS was stolen 3 times in the 90s, even with the Club. Finally, he had this 1/4" thick steel collar welded over the steering column. Never got stolen again. The collar is still there.

Yeah those red clubs you could easily smash the locking column by tapping a flathead into the lock and then giving it one good whack with a hammer. It really wasn’t hard to gank cars back then lol.

After I recover the car, I pulled off the wheel covers, and stopped washing it. Then I would always park near a nicer car.

I dont know but car alarms were way more annoying. You even got near someone’s car and it would scream bloody murder at you

BRAAABRAABRAAA OOooOoOoOoo Hrk Hrk Hrk BRooooo BRoooooo BRooooo

You fully took me there! 😂

Yeah, crime rate then was about double what it is now. People always locked their doors. Didn't go for a walk without carrying a knife or something.

I think due to all the theft deterrence it’s much more difficult to steal parked car. All you needed in the 90s for a lot of cars was to break the window and jam a flathead into the ignition. Now that doesn’t work. However, what has taken its place is the armed robbery/carjacking. They almost always happen when people are entering or leaving their car and the robber takes the keys.

I’m honestly not sure if the statistics back my theory but I think it’s one of those weird quirks where a deterrent has lead to an escalation on the side of the group you’re looking to deter because obviously it’s worse to be victimized in an armed robbery than just have your car taken.

That’s an interesting theory. I only know two people whose cars were actually stolen, a family member who left their keys in the car on their property in a rural area and a friend who hooked up with a guy who got him high and stole his car. They ended up finding it just before the insurance cut off point before they’d just pay off the car, they’d driven thousands of miles and racked up hundreds of dollars in tolls. I had my catalytic converter stolen not that long ago, still pretty pissed about that because I’ve staying at my exes house and was saving up money to move. I’d let my inspection expire and there was a car seat in my car. If you’re going to steal don’t steal from people who are obviously broke.

Don’t forget to remove the face plate of your stereo as well!!

Faceplate? In the 90s the whole stereo came out and had a handle. You carried it like a little mini suitcase.

I bought one for my Volvo 240 that locks to the clutch/brake pedal in 2018. I got a slight discount on my insurance, it keeps the car there (well it's currently not running so not a big deal), and it's also a period-correct accessory.

Someone stole the one from my brother’s car along with the steering wheel and the stereo.

Still prolific where I work amazingly. I laughed when I saw the first one, then I noticed that more people gave them than don’t. Boggled my mind when I started. Now I get it.

This really brings me back to when I was young. Completely forgot about that.

Those bars actually made it easier to steal your car though as they could be used as leverage to break the vehicles steering lock.

I had a purple club to match my purple Probe!

I remember my parents had one for each car.

My dad had the knockoff version for his 95 Ranger - the Gorilla Grip

Haha I remember those I think my mom last use that in 2004.

Trunk monkey is better

Still a thing here in New mexico

Saw one yesterday.

One of the best pranks my friends pulled in high school was buying a club from a thrift store and putting it on my friend Lucas’s car.

I still have one, I hardly use it anymore because I don't go to sketchy places nearly as much as I used to.

Crook-Locks.

Still use a club in my 80’s eta chevys!!!!! Would never park without one

Definitely not dead, the Milwaukee police department was giving these out last year in an effort to stem the huge tide of KIA and Hyundai thefts in the area.

They still exist don’t they?

Do they not do anything?

Our skoda felicia ages back had that bad boy. It was yellow tho

Not sure where you are but I see steering wheel locks frequently in the Seattle metro

Using one right now because our car got broken into and whipped round the block. Found it a couple streets down with nothing but a bag of weed left on the passenger seat.

Vehicle theft is absolutely still a thing unfortunately.

I have a soft top jeep and still use one!

We still use them at our work, truck repair shop in a sometimes sketchy area. Had a mechanic working on a truck in our lot and needed to leave it running. Went inside to grab something came back and the truck was gone. So now they use the club whenever they have a truck running outside.

Congrats on living in a place that's not overrun with thieves. In Portland, OR these are still very common in older cars. Obviously not foolproof but the junkie POS will usually move on to the next easy mark instead of taking the extra time to cut it off.

I literally saw one of these in a car today and commented to a colleague that I haven't seen one in years. It was definitely a blast from the past.

They're getting popular again here in the UK due to theft of keyless entry and start cars being on the rise.

Geez, I misread that as "your cats steering wheel" and I was very confused for a moment.

I still use one and my neighbor has them in two cars. For piece of mind since we don't know how good thieves can get into cars by scanning key fobs.

Horribly heavy CRT monitor screens

Lol the best was seeing a new TV sitting on top of an old broken TV because nobody wanted to move the first one out

Zoomers will never know the satisfaction of the degauss button

You could feel that zoink

What about the noise they emitted when running and were slightly wearing down? that high pitched like 15kilohertz noise you'd always hear but your parents would swear was just in your head? Same with older CRT TVs.

Ah! Holy shit, I haven't thought about this in ages.

Used to be able to walk into a room and tell when the TV was on with a black screen due to the whine.

I don't miss that sound.

Also, high frequency ring tones adults couldn't hear well were a popular fad in the mid 2000s.

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My desk collapsed under the weight of two smaller CRT monitors.

Had a 21” CRT, can confirm it was a freaking beast to move. Ditched it when the Samsung SyncMaster LCD hit the market with 2ms response time.

Had to haul my 17" CRT across campus back in the day. These days even a 43" 4K screen is easier to carry.

Not quite, they’re lighter sure but they’re so damn fragile

Yeah, Well, 24" 1080p monitors are bigger yet somehow lighter than that 17" beast.

We used to have to drag these off the desk and maneuver it on to a chair with wheels to get it to a new desk if someone moved cubicles in the office. It was like a big heavy brick

Degauss button was very satisfying though. “Boing - wobble”

I once worked at a company that when they realized my eyes weren't very good they brought me a monster 24" CRT monitor. It was great, but they had to wheel in on a cart and it took 2 people to lift it onto my desk. I'm so glad LCD monitors became a thing, I have 2 24" widescreens now and they weigh like 5lbs each. :P

Bro they should put these monitor on the side of the roads to prevent cars from falling of cliffs or some shit

Parent's cat used to love curling up on top of those for the warms. Occasionally his tail would fall onto the screen, or he'd lean over to try & catch the cursor.

Good days :)

My cat too! 21" CRT on a steel monitor arm, and she'd jump up on it, making it bounce like mad.

I also took mine to LANs, great fun 😂

The cat or the monitor? :P

The monitor! This was just as flat screens were coming in too, and I walk in lugging this giant beige box 😂

Horribly heavy CRT monitor screens

Funny thing is. What is old is new... People want these today to play retro games on them.

Finding good CRT Tvs are hard today...

I recently came across a free 30+ inch Panasonic HD CRT and I couldn’t pass it up. My gf and I were living in a shoebox apartment and it was winter. We went and picked it up and it was almost impossible to get into my car. We got it to our storage locker in one piece. Thing is easily 300 pounds.

I then bought a house and my buddy and I moved it into my basement. We basically had to very slowly slide it down the stairs with him behind it holding it up.

It now lives in the basement and will never leave the house. Even if I sell it. And damn, do my old games ever look great. I’ve played through starfox 64 at least 10 times on it. Started playing windwaker and eternal darkness on gamecube. Even watched some Netflix 🤣

I recently came across a free 30+ inch Panasonic HD CRT

Oh, yea, very cool, I have seen some Sony CRT 16:9 HD tvs before. VERY VERY HEAVY....

If you have never seen one, Mitsubishi made a 40" tube that was sold at retail. They were very, very heavy. I worked at a high end A/V store back then. In our warehouse, the had something called "the 40" challenge". If you could pick up one, carry it across the the warehouse out to your car, you could keep it. Many large guys tried, they didn't get more than like 50 feet with it.

It was entertaining to hear the stories on someone trying to get a free $3500 40" TV...

Truth. 8-bit and especially 16-bit graphics look terrible on modern screens. The games were made to look good on CRTs and they do. I’d love to get my hands on a 32” Trinitron.

Truth. 8-bit and especially 16-bit graphics look terrible on modern screens.

They do, you can get a scaler (OSSC, or RetoTink), that will fix that problem.

Modern TVs do not support 240i/240p (consoles up to the PS1 and Xbox), so modern TVs treat them as 480p, and that is why they look so bad. A scaler will correctly scale 240 to 480p+ and the results are amazing on modern TVs (PIXEL PERFECT).

Still nothing like playing an a good CRT...

My coworkers grandkid died when their 40" TV fell on her. We have flat screens now, but she was still rocking the CRT. Poor baby girl RIP

Touching the staticky screen, felt fuzzy

My dad bought each of us a computer (family of four). Moving was a PITA.

Had 23" CRT monitor back in the day. You know for gaming. My friends HATED me everytime i took it to Lan parties xD

screen burn in before it was cool, lol

Setting up the CRTs and storing them afterwards is one of the most daunting things about super smash bros melee tournaments

I use one daily in my arcade machine. Want to upgrade it but I have no idea how yet.

I had a super badass 21” Sun monitor that literally weighed over 50 lbs.

I still feel this because my grandparents refuse to get anything newer.

My friend have away my badass huge crt because he thought I abandoned it. I had big plans to make a mame cabinet with it. I probably never would have, but I still gave him shit for it.

I swear that Sony Trinitron monitors were made with depleted uranium. Heavy AF, my desk in college bowed from the weight of it.

I had a 32 inch with HD inputs that thing was over 100 pounds. Wish I didn’t give it to family because I miss duck hunt.

I remember one of my friends buying a ridiculously expensive CRT. His argument: I will need to replace my PC every three years or so. But the monitor, I will have for a lifetime...

I hate sounding too much like a boomer because I do appreciate the comforts of modern living. But things (especially pre 2005 or so) really we’re built to last. And if they broke, they could be taken apart and fixed. It’s something society has almost completely lost.

So you are still using your CRT?

I recently got a free hdmi crt off of marketplace. Love the thing.

I loved the fuzzy feeling when you touched one

They’re still important to the Smash Bros Melee Community

yeah these monitors were massive

Critical race theory? :P

VHS Tapes

I have several camcorder tapes I would love to get changed over to current media but I'm afraid of them getting messed up and lost forever, especially with the mail-in ones.

VHS rewinders.... "Be Kind Rewind!"

We will probably never get rid of our old VCR, because we own old VHS tapes of some things that are impossible to replace. The original Star Wars trilogy, for instance.

Tape in general - no more VCR and Cassette players and having to maintain their complex transports

A pet Tamagotchi. God, the chores I did for that thing.

This thread is sending me on a sad nostalgia trip.

No need for it to be a sad thing! Embrace any and all nostalgia. Reflection on life experiences is half or more of lived experience. Seriously! I wouldn't be surprised if we were to discover one day that habitual nostalgia helps stave off cognitive decline.

Oh no it's definitely a sad thing.

I am feeling the exact same way rn 🥺 tearing up here and there. So much has changed

Tamagotichis are very much still being produced! They have color screens and cool apps to connect them to. I don't think they are as popular in the US as in Japan but there is def a market out there. I went on a weird nostalgia kick a few years ago I got a Japanese one and a US one, as well as a crap Chinese knock off. Of course Japanese is better. You can actually potty train the JP ones! It isn't as dire as the 90s version but you still need to pay attention to it a lot otherwise it will get sick and die . Who has that kind of time???

There are also o some quite faithful emulators as mobile apps.

They arent just faithful, they are properly reverse engineered memory rips.

Turns out the handheld device using early 90's tech with a 16x16 black and white non backlit lcd, and a beeper speaker... that all runs on a button cell battery... isnt very complicated electronically, who knew lol.

I bought my kids some for Christmas this year. They were into them for about three weeks and I was like, Yup, that checks out.

Tomagotchis big fuckup was failing to invest in endgame development

But you could argue they succeeded in the greater endgame: separating us from our money.

Tamagotchis are actually really popular again now.

I found my digimon in the basement when I was at my parents’ house last week. I’m currently regretting just putting it back rather than taking it with me. I always took care of my shit so it probably still would have worked!

I recently got a digimon vital bracelet and it's great! might be an option if you don't mind it being newer :)

They still make those bad boys, and if I’m remembering correctly, the packing is still the exact same as it was back then. I started collecting them a year or two ago and now there’s like 30 of them out, and they’re $20 each so every now and then I’ll pick up a new one. There’s some new features involved like being able to take care of two mons at once and CPU battles to train for some evolution lines, and I think it also saves some data in case the battery dies so you can safely put a new one in.

I’d recommend picking one up since there’s a lot of nostalgia there, and it kinda makes me feel like a kid again since I have it on full display attached to my bag.

These were huge when I was in the sixth grade. Half the school revolted during the Great Tamagotchi Extinction of 1997™, when the administration banned their use except during the five minutes between class periods. The place became a Tamagotchi graveyard.

My school tried to ban them. Kids just used them on silent mode, hiding them in their pencil cases. They tried banning Pokémon cards too after too many fights broke out over them lol.

My sister switched the time zone on hers so it would sleep during school. And then she would constantly wake up at night to take care of it like she was parenting a newborn.

Haha I would ask to go to the bathroom purposely just to tend to mine. Then slowly slip it back into my pocket and continue on with the day.

Mine was longer up than me at some point so my mom had to care for it after I went to bed every evening. XD

F's in the thread for anyone who also lost their Tamagotchi to the toilet water.

I had two confiscated by my 7th grade teacher. I got them back at the end of the day, but they were hungry, sad and had pooped all over the place

I had loads lol loved them

The fashion at my school was a bunch on a key ring

I remember my parents making me and my sis do the same to get tamagotchis. Collective human experience :)

They have came back out. Saw them on Amazon

I remember when a classmate's Tamagotchi pet died during a test.

We also had Tamagotchi in the early 2000s, at least here in France. That was a cool toy, kinda limited looking back but man did I loved it

Just bought my 8 year old one

I saw someone at a train station with one the other day! I almost wrestled them for it!

I had a Mamagachi. It was the Queen Mother. Kept her alive for ages with gin, roast swans and new hips.

I miss my tamagotchi!

I was a 2000s kid and I had a Littlest Pet Shop kitty version of a Tamagotchi. I miss it so much. It was fun. I can still remember the music when the car would ride the boat.

I recently bought one for my daughter who was bored within a few hours. It's my unicorn now.

r/tamagotchi is still thriving my friend

Tamagotchis are in colour now? Crazy.

I remember my coworkers having their kids tamagochis with them to work because their kids weren't allowed to bring them to school and left alone at home they would die.

God, all the times I killed mine through neglect.

Does anyone have one still going from back then?

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Yeah it would be pretty amazing if someone still had one going. I imagine it dies with the battery though

Just saw a fancy, kids smart watch at Walmart yesterday and thought tamagotchi were making a comeback.

I just got a Digimon tamagochi for my husband for his birthday.

He turned it on yesterday, and this morning its now stuffed down in the tech drawer buried under some cables cause it was beeping during a meeting 🤣🤣🤣

Now you would have to pay money to do those chores yay f2p

YOU STILL CAN GET ONE! They made a reboot replica series and I loved mine!

Just had to look it up, in the original it had a life span of less than a month. No wonder the little shits kept dying and frustrating me. Some new versions can go on forever if taken care of.

Found mine the other day! Bunch of them, plus random knock offs, and digimon. Good stuff. Way more irritating to play with than I remember, heheh.

mine would always die during school. My friend next door made his grandma babysit his tomagatchi so it wouldn't die while he was at elementary school. I was just jealous because no one in my family would have done that for me.

I just bought a Furby and was considering looking for a tamagochi.

I literally bought one of these 2 weeks ago lol

and the tears you cried when all 6 pixels of your pet died

I stole a Digimon from Target. Didn't get caught but my brother snitched on me.

r/tamagotchi they are still a thing! the modern actual tamagotchi ones are like 100 quid tho bc they’re more hi tech-_- but u can get cheap rip offs on ebay etc for a couple quid that are the same as it was back in the day! and there are apps too haha

Kids found them recently in a box, wanted to play them so we set them up and they had their little bobbing eggs. Impatiently waiting for them to hatch.

30 mins later "how do I turn it off?"

That's the thing kid, you don't

I had Giga Pets and it still burns my ass that those little turds lived longer when I forgot them in a drawer for a month than when I went out of my way to take care of them.

(Digipets for life!)

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

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They threw some damn fine shade.

Did you know that the average body temperature of a housecat is 102F?

The internet existed then, but it was very primitive compared to today.

🎶 POP UP VIDEO! 🎶

LOL I haven't thought of those bubbles in like twenty years

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They were pretty funny, too.

I remember there was a Toni Braxton video they did where she danced (He Wasn't Man Enough), and one of the pop-ups referenced Janet Jackson (I think it was that Toni was worried about pulling off the choreography because she was "no Janet Jackson" or something like that).

Cue the editors putting a still shot of Janet Jackson's head over Toni's for the rest of the shot (including a shot of the back of Janet's head when Toni turned around).

I got a kick out of that.

That was the best thing about them!

I can still hear them

It will be stuck in my head for dayyyssss now. Making some toast… POp Up VIDeo.. gah. Driving to work…POp Up VIDeo…

This is so weird cause I also have not thought about pop up video in a million years and then my friend brought it up two nights ago and now here we are, discussing pop up video. For the second time this week

One of my favorite things from Pop Up Video was when they did this:

"But"

one bubble with just the word "But" in it pops up over a shot of someone's ass

Yesssss 🥰🥰🥰

i still want to swim in them

I love the 80's! Michael Ian Black so good.

He's on Twitter and he's a delight

I heard these words.....

Will always make the think to “Mmm Bop” by Hanson.

/r/commentsyoucanhear

You made me sing that.

https://youtu.be/OUBCRdINnDo

You're not the only one that sang Pop Up Video.

Comments you can hear

The quality of the recordings on YouTube are pretty terrible sadly

I would watch like every vh1 behind the music even for bands I didn't care about

In Australia we had Video Hits, which was watched almost religiously every Saturday morning/arvo. It was huge in the 90s, and still kinda big in the 00s, but it fizzled out after that.

yep as a kid every sat morning wed have it on after morning cartoons id always wait for the countdown to #1 for britneys "baby one more time" then id go play with my friends haha.

100 best/worst songs

It Wasn't Me by Chingy was a BANGER, VH1, why is it the #9 worst rap song ever?

Shaggy, but yeah. I love the guy who sings the chorus basically going "What a fucking stupid idea, I'm just gonna apologize, what the fuck is wrong with you?" at the end.

I was young, but I loved pop up video. I used to watch it with my mom.

Lol the scenes where there are people making out and it points towards the guys crotch which is off screen and says "Has a boner"

I always hated the sound the popups made. I liked the trivia, but hated those sounds.

Pop into pop up video!

Bar-oo 🎺

Behind the music was great as well!

Same. Me and my band made our own pop up video for our music video a couple years ago, haha. Was fun trying to get the sound and graphics close.

Damon! I miss VH1. Playing all the time in the background.

My mom and I used to watch the Top 20 Countdown every Saturday (I think?) morning on VH1, just 10ish years ago. We'd watch it and drink coffee, play Bloons TD, and hang out just the two of us until my brother woke up. I miss it, but I think I miss those times more than anything, because more and more I don't like current pop music lol.

We had VH1 on in the house all the time in the mid-2000s, that was one of my favorite shows

Loved Pop Up Video, and Behind the Music. I actually got into several artists after their BtM episodes, including Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Pat Benatar.

Ayo vh1 music was dope i enjoyed finding new music

you know it's not mtv because it still has something to do with music

I know it’s not MTV, but hot damn do I miss some Much Music.

That was a great show/block. VH1 had amazing late night metal/hard rock blocks.

Haha I remember complaining about this back in like 1998

I hated MTV's Real World from the start. Liquid Television was awesome.

"COULD YOU GET THE PHONE???" I knew reality tv was gonna blow

The song "1985", which came out in 2004, includes "music still on MTV" as a nostalgia item for aging Gen Xers.

That’s when they moved them to MTV2

We would have MTV on literally all day in the background. We loved it

I got to see a lot of trippy imagery as a small child.

We world have it on with a vcr tape ready to tape our favorite music videos. Sometimes we missed the intro portion.

Head bangers ball

Bring back MTV Unplugged, some of them are good

I feel like the NPR Tiny Desk concerts are the sort of successor to that. It's not fully acoustic or anything, but the songs are often so stripped down and done in an intimate way

I keep seeing little known groups that I really like on Tiny Desk Concert, and thinking I wouldn't really like them if that was the only place I had seen them.

"Live on KEXP", and especially if also interviewed by Cheryl Waters, turn into my favorite performances of my favorite groups.

Ima have to check it out

MTV Classics, man. I turn it on and clean the house.

Even in this 90’s this was becoming less common.

The 80’s, however…

MTV used to be awesome. I brought up Celebrity Death Match just last night! Hilariously horrendous

I feel like the 90s was too late for MTV playing music videos already.

They had a decent amount of time with music videos. But even then, the shows weren't bad. You had TRL, some of the early reality tv like The Real World that was good at times, Celebrity Death Match, etc.

Now its just ridiculousness for hours on end.

This was basically my childhood and it had a huge impact on the person I am today. Daria basically shaped my personality. So I’m told.

History Channel being a channel for history

They used to have such good documentaries and now it's all just pure trash, it honestly makes me sad. It's a perfect example of what is wrong with our society

Oh yes, what is now the Hitler channel.

We used to have Discovery, Nat Geo, Animal planet and history channel and they were all interesting - now its just reruns where half the show is a rerun of itself.

Like how cartoon network is now the teen titans go channel

We have a channel called MTVU that plays videos all the time, but it’s the same dozen over and over. I still have it on all the time because I WANT MY MTV!

[deleted]

I'm so excited for that

The "Korn Spot" on TRL behind Backstreet Boys and NSync

Muchmusic (Canada) playing music videos

I think we have it way better now with YouTube though. Plenty of playlists are out there for all sorts of artists that are similar. And you can watch any video on demand, etc

They went back to this format for MTV Japan.

I may be old, and late to the party on this, but I thought the whole music video thing was long dead with the end of music on MTV. However, I randomly found a bunch of Vevo channels browsing the obscure channels on my TV's digital antenna. They had the old original MTV videos from my youth, but the surprising thing to me was that they played new videos as well.

lol music videos are still going strong, they never stopped being important.

It’s just they switched to being mainly worried about youtube views now.

Riding the school bus to elementary school during the first days of MTV (yes, I’m that old) was amazing. Whole-bus excited conversations about what videos had been played the night before.

I miss TRL and BET’s 106&Park

There was U-2 and Blondie And music still on MTV

They have separate channels for music only now

My shit was 106 & Park on BET. 90 minutes of Hip hop and R&B videos, right after school got out. So good.

MTV was fantastic too. There was nothing better than staying home sick from school, and spending the day watching those shitty MTV daytime shows, and music videos.

You should check out the channel MTV Classic. They play nothing but music videos from the 80s to the 2000's.

You'll be happy this exists. I know I am. https://120minutes.org/

Yep! Watching TRL and 106&Park after school....so fun.

In Australia we used to have a music show on our free to air TV every Saturday morning called Video Hits. It was two hours of showing all the top music videos at the time. I feel like there's nothing like that now. If you wanna find new music or artists you gotta do it yourself. Though I am grateful for that opportunity since a lot of my favourite artists now aren't popular enough to make such a list anyway.

And VJ’s! I had such a crush on one of them, can’t remember his name now…? Something Curry….

MTV still has some channels that only play music videos all day, like MTV00s, MTV80s, MTV Live, MTV Hits, I watch them all the time

MTV Classic plays videos.

They have blocks like "Metal Mayhem", "90s Nation" and "Rock Block", etc.

Check out r/mtvgen. Started for exactly this purpose😁

Subbed.

Just wish you had a month Playlist come out for youtube

How are people even alerted of the latest music videos now? Like how does it happen? I realize it's all on Youtube and stuff but we used to get fed the latest shows, music, etc.

Is there like a Netflix for music or something that tells you a new music video is out? Or does no one even care?

I mean legit after school before my parents got home from work, I used to have a solid hour or two to myself where I would just listen to and watch music videos, workout to them, make myself a snack or two. It was a lot of fun. I couldn't imagine doing that and enjoying it now.

Actually this got demystified in an episode of Ask a Network Head. Makes a lot more sense, now. 😎

Wasn't that pretty much gone sometime in the 90's?

I remember the 80's though. VJ's and constant videos.

Damn… I miss those days. Going on a date and then heading home to stay up late and watch music videos. That was fun!

Not sure if it was MTV or some local channel, but they were playing Nothing Else Matters or Smells Like Teen Spirit around every midnight. I can clearly remember myself waiting from 11:30 till 00:30 in front of TV just because of that.

My parents relented and got cable in 1981, and I moved out to college in 1984. I haven't had cable since. As a result, I have never seen anything on MTV in my lifetime except for music videos and commercials.

Really, that was very early 90s that MTV still played music. by 1994 TV shows had really taken over the network.

Maybe I'm showing my age, but a lot of those shows were pretty good and arguably iconic. Around the turn of the millennium they began to focus heavily on reality shows, far more than the handful that had already been introduced.

If I wasn't watching cartoons, it was MTV! Some VH1 too but they didn't show all the weird and gritty stuff. Sad they made a MTV2 for music videos and now they play neither!

MTV started going downhill in 1987

MTV Classic is my jam at night. 80’s and 90’s videos. The commercials in between are awful, though.

I never got this, i had like three MTV channels on my tv like few months ago, all playing music like God intended. MTV 80s was my favourite.

Lately, I've been listening to audio new wave mixes on youtube (zilentno!ze and ceremony both have some good ones). Then I watch youtube videos of many of those songs. Some really good music I never heard back in the day or forgot about.

[Obligatory Why doesn't MTV play music videos anymore?] (https://youtu.be/9ysyZF-DZFY)

Oh man, I miss watching these with my dad in the morning before going to school

Also, in the latter half of the 90s: Bitching about MYV not playing music videos.

While this was normal in the 1990s, this was slowly, but surely becoming less normal.

In 1999, for instance, there were more Reality TV shows on MTV than there was music being aired.

I loved that vibes when they play my favorite ones.

And Beavis and Butthead jamming to those videos

I was just trying to remember if they were still playing videos then or if The Real World cancer had begun.

So what do MTV play nowadays?

MTV used to be the best channel on tv. Now its the worst.

All people younger than boomers can be broken down into three generations:

  • people who used to complain about MTV not playing music videos any more

  • people who used to make fun of the first generation for not being able to handle the fact that they're getting old.

  • people who have no idea what the fuck any of this nonsense is

Did anybody else have a local music channel? Channel 99 was always the local music channel where it was nothing but music videos all day, every day. Different times of the day were different genres. You'd have a random ad for an escort service here and there or the classic phone sex hotline ads, but 95% of it was just music videos.

Oooh, MTV having relevant real time news.

For those that don’t know, we all heard about Kurt Cobain after school from Kurt Loder.

This week I found a segment on MTV where they played music videos. I just left it on. My kids were so confused "Mom, what is this? Do we have to watch this? Mom, you are not watching! Can we switch the channel?"

Every morning before school… yeesssss!!

Seriously, they don’t show videos any more? I haven’t watched in decades, but if they stopped showing videos what do people even masturbate to now?

I don’t understand this. I’m in Australia with a Fetchbox and I get three MTV music channels and all they do is music videos 24/7, just different genres and themes and shit.

I run them pretty much non-stop.

We used to have a music video channel called MCM and it's notorious for playing really esoteric videos early in the morning. You didn't know what you were going to get on the way to school whether it's "Come To Daddy" by some band called Aphex Twin or something from Cradle of Filth.

The internet was also sparse then and there was no Google or Reddit so you'll encounter these bands completely cold with little way to check for info or even share your discovery with others.

Her two kids in high school they tell her that’s she uncool

I know this probably won't be much solace to you but they still do that in some places

This straight up made me think of the song 1985

And MTV Headbangers Ball, in original form!

head bangers ball, pumped that via rca straight into the stereo and record to tape, also mix tapes.

Total Request Live was huge for awhile. The drama once Carson got down to the top 3 and whether your video of choice would finally reach #1, oh man. Simpler times.

And Liquid Television. 🤙

That was the 80's lol

I miss MTV playing anything that isn't reality shows

In my mind, the loss of MTV is the greatest casualty of the internet. I don’t mind the disappearance of malls or miss newspapers much, but dammit do I miss the MTV and VH1 of yesteryear.

My man with the low hanging fruit

Did MTV ever play real music tho?

Specialty show 120 Minutes did.

Yes, in the 80’s. There were no shows at first, just continuous music videos & brief MTV news. Then they developed some ‘shows’ that were really just specific types of music. I was super young, but if I recall correctly it was late 80’s/early 90’s before things that weren’t music related like Real World were added. Before that you could just watch cheesy 80’s videos all day. It was fantastic.

They were when I was in school in the early-mid 2000s. I would watch every day before school flipping between VH1 and MTV (they would often be playing the same video, I especially remember that happening with Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day), but then after school when we had Fuse and they played music videos, that channel was 100x better. A lot of the music they played on MTV and VH1 was pretty forgettable pop/hip-hop/R&B, but there were a lot of classics in there too.

Feels like we got the watered down version here, I remember only seeing hip-hop style crap and super cringy "reality" shows

Yeah, by the time I was like half way through high school, they were starting up Jersey Shore, Teen Mom and stuff like that (2009ish) and not showing music videos basically at all. Then they even stopped showing their fun "reality" dating game shows and slowly morphed into Ridiculousness: the channel.

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"

But it did work. It definitely worked. I had it for a good while.

Netzero (and Kmart bluelight ) was the shit back then. Completely free.

When I was 10, I downloaded both of those apps on the low-down on our family Compaq computer, since my parents kept the AOL password on lockdown.

When they would go to sleep I would stay up and download jpg porn all night and they couldn’t do a thing about it.

NetZero was great and then they started logging you off after like 30 minutes. Which is when the hacked dialer came in handy.

Hell yeah that hacked dialer worked well for some time. It would keep you online and hide the ad banner bar they forced on your screen.

Back in 99 I used Kmart Bluelight free internet and a proxy server on my home computer to get internet at my office when our dialup was down. It was fucking awful but it worked.

I IRC'd all night. Had to throw pillows and blankets over the computer to keep the modem brrrrrr...zzz.... noises to a minimum, lest it wake someone up.

You should have added ATM0 to your dial string. It muted the modem

If i had only known!!! Damnit. Haha

Lol the family compaq that had a monitor the size of a small country.

Internet traffic has gotten bigger since then.

I used NetZero at home when I worked for a Dotcom. Super fast internet at work, NetZero at home. It was better than AOL

Hey, I got a whole 5kb/s!

I mean that is the limitation of POTS line, not so much Net Zero.

Can confirm RE: POTS line 64 ~~KB~~ Kbps limit.

NetZero saved teenaged me for sure as it was the only way I could have Internet access.

Mm… more like 40-56 Kbps. I never had a land line that could sustain more than about 38, even with a v.92 modem.

A POTS line itself has a maximum 64Kbps of bandwidth. Every time that line is used, it is preassigned that full 64Kbps when the call is set up by the DLC or Switch in the serving central office. Whether all of that bandwidth is used at any given time is another story, but a POTS line technically has 64Kbps of maximum bandwidth.

Nah. It worked well for me. Used it from graduating college until i got married. The switched it to dial up from wife’s university until they canceled the service.

Edit hostfiles

ad 127.0.0.1

netzero 127.0.0.1

Etc

Edit: I knew this shit in the 90s but can't be assed to figure out how to make asterisks work on reddit mobile. Meh

This was not my experience. We had EarthLink but Netzero was always faster for me. Maybe it depended on your location?

There was a "hack" where after you dialed up with Netzero, you use the ZoneAlarm's lock function to lock the internet and use that precious few seconds to open up the task manager and kill the netzero banner task, there was a 50/50 chance you can stay online without that damn ad block taking 30% of your screen.

And that's how I play Starcraft and Red Alert Command and Conquer online without intrusive ads popping up from the background.

You could use a firewall to block it from loading as well.

The AOL CDs were the way to go when I was in high school. I'd have people read codes off to me so I could continue the perpetual free trial lol

Haha I did that prior to netzero, but then after like a year or two it changed to $9.99 a month. My local store didn't care if I took 10 of those sample cds though.

Lol it's funny because I did the same thing, netzero and all. Like almost exactly... Even the CDs part!

I convinced my mom to get broadband so she could watch big brother after dark online, and...

It worked! Lmao

I remember the first time I downloaded 1mb/s. I played online games and I thought I was so cool because I convinced my mom to get it for my school papers and could load into maps and load games really fast.

I was glad to be able to use yahoo messenger video chat.. God I feel old now.

Haha I had AOL, Yahoo and MSN. Never had a Webcam in those days though haha.

Juno was the best, it had full V.44 compression and the accounts would last a week after bypassing the adware client. After that all you had to do was delete a registry key and it let you register again, then you just extract the credentials using a tool to intercept the dialup attempt. The lost art of "dunning".

We had people pc. It was a prebuilt machine that came WITH internet (on a cd). I played the shit out of free AOL games on that crappy machine.

I can't remember the name of it, but at one point I was using a free email service that had an app where you could read, write, reply to emails. All your edits are offline until you tell the app to dial. At that point it syncs emails up and down, and then disconnects until you initiate the next sync.

I had Netscape Navigator

Me too! It was pretty terrible... But free.

Can’t tell if this is a flex or a cry for help

So did I. I may have been a reason it became not-free lol

I used to use netzero to tcp/ip into aol. cracking passwords was so much faster that way.

I used to drag that pop-up to the bottom right corner so it was barely visible.

My mother decided to stop paying for internet access when I was young because she didn't see the point of it. NetZero kept me connected and sane for a couple years

I wonder what kind of metrics/data they weee mining from us back then. Like, as kids we just went wild with Net Zero and AOL disks. I’m sure we agreed to be tracked in perpetuity or something.

Sometimes I feel embarrassed about my yahoo email address, then I remember my mom’s netzero email address. lol

Since I only visited my dad every other weekend net zero was perfect for this.

And unlike my mom he didn't care about me staying up all night. So having complete unfiltered internet access all night long...

I'd take a NetZero and AOL disc with me on vacation. One or the other would have a local number and I'd have the motel phone line dialed up the entire trip.

After cancelling AOL we switched to netzero when it was free and then used their paid service for a while until they installed cable internet in my area.

I used that briefly, but you had to click on an ad like every 30min or so or it would disconnect you. Since I was playing online games a lot it got irritating very quickly and I just paid for dialup after that.

SAME!

I taped construction paper to my moniter to cover the ad bar.

cat and mouse hiding the ad banner

had that 'ad' banner though!

I had free NetZero and they either throttled me to 14.4 or the service in my area was so shit that I ended up dropping it and getting cable internet and it was like night and day.

…and it blocking the phone line.

I remember having to kick my sister off the computer because I was expecting a call from my girlfriend. She did not find this a valid excuse. So I did what any 17 year old guy desperate to talk to a girl would do.

I unplugged the phone line that came into the house, so it disconnected every phone, then plugged it back in 5 seconds later and called my girlfriend.

My sister was not amused.

My internet would get disconnected anytime someone called.

The amount of times that I was in a fun AOL chatroom and the phone rang, getting disconnected, and having to wait for a spot to open in the chatroom was a way of life on Friday/Saturday nights.

And family getting mad because they had been trying to call for hours... So they could then just sit there and talk about absolutely nothing....

I used to pick up the phone and hang up just to mess with my brother to knock him online.

My former father-in-law was on the internet so much back then that we couldn’t reach him by telephone for long periods of time (sometimes days). We were so relieved when he got a cell phone.

I managed to convince my parents to get a second phone line, just so I could have a dedicated dial-up connection.

My mom made us install a software from the phone company that would display a pop-up with Caller ID on the computer screen when someone tried calling… I was the only one who used the computer, and I always ignored it lol

If I got a phone call while playing Starcraft, it would pause the game rather than disconnect. People in game chat would complain like who is lagging the game etc lol

Mom had a friend that would call 3 or more times back to back. You can imagine the frustration of it lagging the game lol

EeeeerrrrrrdDEEDUReeeeerrrrrrrrDUReeeeeeeeeeeeDURrrrrrrDEEEDUR

I’d know that 56k modem sound anywhere. I upgraded to that, and my friend was like “you must be FLYING through the ‘net!”

I make this sound when someone takes too long to reply in a verbal conversation. My GF was born in 98 and had never heard this sound. Such a waste of a joke when I use it on her.

Man, I was born in 2000 and know it cuz of old folks reminiscing here on the internet.

old folks

Get off my lawn, ya whippersnapper!

I had to upvote you simply for you typing that out.

Beep booooo beep booooo beep duuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrr, duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur. Beep burggggggghhhhhhhhhh. Bip

And a brief "buDUMbuDUM" and then back to the "EeerDur" in a lower key. :)

I like the sound of grackles cuz they remind me of dialup. Bless the noisy lil buggers.

Reminds me of that sweet new US Robotics Sportster 14.4 modem!

Wait you forgot the DURDURDUR at the end

Having two phone lines, one for the modem and one for calls.

Whoa Richie McMoney over here

LOL

Actually we were pretty strapped for money in those days, but always on the internet, so. . .needed to be able to call home and actually get through.

dial up was such a brief time in history

It's so true.

Even as like 10 year old with minimal knowledge of computers, even I could tell this wasn't the "best" way to do it

Getting yelled at by mum "Get off the internet, grandma is due to call soon"

https://youtu.be/gsNaR6FRuO0

Oh man, memories! The AOL trial discs!

My parents still have @aol.com email addresses to this day

eh, it's normal in rural places still.

People with good money had a PC back then. In around 1995 a Pentium 100mhz was 4k$.

Ours ran Windows 3.1.

this reminded me of using AIM

The internet screamswhen you log on.

Dial up internet

Just seeing this caused the dialup noises to play in my mind - tones for the number dialing, the ring, the tone for "hey, are you a modem?", the hand shake and then finally a few seconds of seemingly white noise as the modems started talking to each other before the modem speaker cut out as the connection was completely successfully.

I still remember the sound it made! And it was pretty unrealiable, too. I remember that one Monday when the PC refused to connect and I had to try like three or four times. Then, I said to myself, "alright, I'll try this one more time, then I'll quit."

The next time, it connected. And I read online that, on the next day, Michael Jackson was doing a press conference at Munich Olympic Stadion at mid-day.

Guess who had an "urgent doctors' appointment" the next day and needed a longer lunch break than usual? ... I handed a present to him. :-)

That wasn't really until the late 90s. First part of the the decade was BBSes. Commerical gloves came off in 95 and then 96/97 when computers start getting affordable and into homes, it was off to the races.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeech!

Trying to sign onto AOL on a Friday night and repeatedly getting a busy signal…

Nah. I had ISDN.

I used to get in trouble constantly because I’d leave our $0.50/hr internet connected all night 🤔

Up all night looking at porn I assume? J/k (but not really if you were me)

LOL 15 year old (female) me was downloading music… obviously couldn’t disconnect! You always remember your first…in my case, Placebo 🖤

A friend in need’s, a friend indeed, A friend with weed is better…

Actually my FIL still has dial up lol

That dial up "noise" lmao

Miss the sound of the modem.

We couldnt reach you on phone for entire day.

  • yeah I dont know why

Why do you miss it? It was worst than what we have today.

I don't miss it... Who said I miss it?

I misread it. Sorry!

AOL free trial discs EVERYWHERE

500 HOURS FREE!

The first thing that didn't make me feel nostalgic on this list.

That shit sucked.

And modems and their connection sound.

Back in 1998 was playing Starsiege: Tribes on a P2-266 with 28.8k modem. It was glorious for it's time

Tribes didn’t just anticipate later trends. It also played an important part in popularizing them. By earning critical kudos, cultivating an active online community that persists today, and demonstrating that the previously undone was doable, Tribes influenced future developers even without being a massive seller. Before such features were standard fare for first-person shooters, it boasted a sophisticated character class system; an emphasis on teamwork, coordination, and team objectives rather than gleeful fragging alone; player-controlled single-person and team-oriented vehicles; a major publisher green-lighting a multiplayer-only release; and ingenious network code that supported an unprecedented number of players amid massive indoor-outdoor environments, in an era when most players were still stuck with dial-up connections. And, maybe most memorably, it offered a degree of verticality and freedom of movement that’s rarely been replicated.

It was also a classic case of, "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

Although jet packs, unlike rocket jumps in Quake, were a fully planned part of Tribes, the Tribes development process included its own serendipitous discovery of a physics-based bug that altered the game in a good way. About halfway through development, software engineer Dave Moore, who was working on collisions and character movement, walked into Youngblood’s office. “[He] said, ‘Hey, I’ve been working on this stuff and I have a bug, but I’m not sure if I want to fix it or not,’” Youngblood recalls.

Moore wouldn’t divulge what the bug was. Instead, he brought Youngblood back to his office and told him how to trigger it. “It was, ‘OK, you’re on top of this hill. Run toward the next hill, and when you get to the top, jump and then just keep jumping as you go all the way down,’” Youngblood says. “And I played with it and was like, ‘Holy crap.’” Pressing the jump button canceled the collision with the landscape, allowing the player to accelerate down slopes and frictionlessly launch into the air, attaining much higher speeds than were possible with the jet pack alone. “[It] was ‘wrong,’ but it actually made the game more fun to play,” Youngblood says. “I looked at him and was like, ‘Nope, don’t fix it. This is now a feature.’”

The mesmerizing mechanic — which wasn’t any less realistic than rocket jumping — was dubbed “skiing,” and it became a core part of competitive Tribes. Youngblood, who joined the Tribes team just after completing an actual skiing game called Front Page Sports: Ski Racing, designed the remaining maps, such as the sprawling, open-air “Roller Coaster,” with skiing in mind. Skiing permitted players to travel so fast that it made the game’s vehicles all but irrelevant, but it also made Tribes a much more kinetic and tactically rewarding experience for players who were willing to invest the time it took to master it. “I knew it was going to be a hit when we had a LAN game going on,” says art director Mark Brenneman. “I sniped someone and I heard him scream across the office.”

For those wishing a trip down memory lane, the entire Tribes Universe is now downloadable for free.

I legit had to buy a book from the 90s on how to setup a dial internet service. It felt weird.

Also, yes I can max out internet for you at 137kbps, but that's for my own insanity not yours.

BBSes long before the (consumer) internet came along.

My friends and I ran our own BBSes of one kind or another for years.

To get you to the BBS chat boards

"Get off the internet I have to use the phone!!"

I don't fucking miss the speed

Downloading like 10 songs overnight and hoping it worked

I miss the dial up sounds and accidentally hearing a conversation because someone was on the phone

Get off the phone, I wanna' use the computer!

Using the newest '1000 Hours Free!' AOL cd as a coaster

We paid $5 per hour in the beginning.

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.

[deleted]

My watch has about the same peak processing power as my second home computer had, and way more storage capacity. (It was a P1 166 MHz with a 2 GB hard drive, the watch is a Fenix 6 Pro with a Kinetis K28F processing unit containing an ARM Cortex M4 with a max clock frequency of 150 MHz, and 32 GB storage.) And a $30 Raspberry Pi leaves both in the dust while still fitting in a case not much bigger than a cigarette box.

They don't even make SoCs as weak as my first computer (8088 clocked at 7.16 MHz, 256K RAM, no hard drive, just 360K floppies)

I did the math once, and unless I messed something up, a reasonably modern smartphone would be the most powerful computer in the world if transported back in time to 1987.

I've tried to fit a VHS tape into my phone and broken both.

And to think, our teachers told us we wouldn't have a calculator in our pocket.

I started using a computer when I was 4, in the 1980s, by the time I was 11 in the 1990s and a teacher said this to me I looked at her and told her I planed to have a computer in my pocket. I wasn't wrong but even I didn't know how much we'd do on this computer.

Christ. How big are those pockets‽

Watching TV on your phone kinda sucks NGL.

My dad still uses a pager 😂

Congrats on the Dr. Dad!

Does he wear polo shirts, khakis, white socks and matching new balance runners and drive a corvette?

Haha he uses it at work so his phone doesn’t go off all the time

I still have my landline phone number from 30 years ago but it’s a VoIP service now.

My parents had a massive Zenith tube tv until about 2012/2013 when it finally died. That thing weighed no less than 75 lbs if not 100 lbs

I have an RCA console TV that probably weighs more than me! 🤣

film camera

This is actually turning around. The prices for film cameras is skyrocketing. A shop near me says they can't keep film in stock due to the demand.

It still is and will remain a niche hobby. It's just that because use of film was almost down to zero that growth seems so spectacular now. There are also far fewer photography stores these days, so the limited demand isn't spread very widely.

My mom kept all of those things well into the 2010s, except for the pager and newspaper subscription. I don't think it was a money issue as much as it was just not seeing a reason to throw it all out if they still worked. Weirdly enough, we had new electronics as well as old ones. Looking back on it, honestly it feels awesome being able to have both as a child.

I remember in 2000 I was hot shit with my flip phone, palm pilot, and minidisc player. I was thinking one day all this shit is going to be one device and it is going to be awesome.

I forgot about MiniDisc. I used to sneak one in to small music clubs to record shows.

You could get all of this in one in 2000 as well. There were PDAs that could be equipped with 2G modules for telephony and play MP3s.

A pager? So you were an on call doctor or a drug dealer?

Engineer at a chemical plant.

I graduated middle school in 99. For whatever reason I remember associating pagers with drug dealers. Even though I didn't know any. It was probably something my parents told me.

Plus a library with actual books in it.

[deleted]

I meant in my own house

You have your own house??

Yeah, I got it in the nineties though...

I don’t think having books in your house is all that weird these days. Most people I know have at least a few shelves of them.

Dial-up still exists actually

You can always use a payphone if you're out somewhere

I still have a CRT TV, camcorder and VCR, the TV is for retro games, camcorder for novelty and filming things, and VCR if I’m feeling like watching a movie back in the day

I still have my CRT TV and VCR as well! I watch movies on them all the time and love them!

Kinda bummed I came into adulthood as newspapers were on their way out. Reading news online kinda sucks, there's so many ads and I don't always wanna read on a screen for long periods of time anyway.

And each of those things were as expensive as shit! Seriously, check out nostalgia ads. A good tv was $1800! A camcorder about the same. Electronics are actually far cheaper now even considering inflation.

I haven't seen anyone mention fax machine yet.

You should still have a newspaper subscription if you can afford it, though digital is fine.

Now you have a "cell phone" that does all of that (except the big TV but I'm sure you have a flat-screen at home).

And CD players.

Surely you listened to CD’s too, on your compact disc player, or did you have a fancy one with a multi-disc changer?

30 years ago people had these things but 60 years ago people didnt have those except for the land line and newspaper . i feels like humanity has made huge tech advances but it is just to make crap

I miss reading the Sunday New York Times in paper format.

I still have a large CRT TV for retrogaming.

Hyper Colour T-Shirts

I just ordered one for nostalgia. I quickly realized why I didn’t like them. If you have breasts, that is what changed color first. I don’t need it to look like I’m wearing a bikini top 👙

those armpits!

This. Yes, lol.

I still remember the counter shirt “hipper color - it don’t do Jack” tee shirts

I lived through the 90s and had no clue what this was. Just looked it up, seems pretty cool

And your friend in class grabbing your shirt and breathing on it just for the color change 😷

Or the heat activated color change shirts

I don't think that's an "or".

Or the shirts that changed colour with heat were even better.

I had a pair of snow gloves that changed when they got cold, loved those things.

Had to go to YouTube. I was in first grade when these came out and don’t remember the campaign but definitely remember the people in their 30s-40s in the early 00s wearing these as their Laundry Day shirts.

I remember those!

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.

The worst part of that is college these days really does next to nothing to prepare you for a job.

"We like that you have a degree, but you need at least 30 years experience for this job"

I've seen Administrative Assistant positions requiring a Master's.

Yes. This pisses me off. Admin assistant position that requires a masters degree and 15 years experience. Will only pay $11/hr.

I'm an office manager with only a certificate and am a bit of a jack of all trades, and I deal with accountants that cannot grasp simple transactions. That degree is super useful. /s

If one of your parents had graduated from a college, that college would almost automatically accept you. As long as you managed to graduate high school, somehow.

But Harvard rejected me.

... this is so true. You didn't have to be the best to get into a good school because our social life was as important as academics. Many of us engineering students were happy with C's (cuz a C's a degree!). I think the pandemic brought back some of that work/home life balance into our culture which is fucking great.

Getting a really well paying job that was not in my field by meeting a guy at a beer fest. No interview, nothing. OK, start on Monday. Here's the address. Had that job 30 years.

So many businesses and even entire industries just needed bodies. And there was a kind of general belief that you could teach anyone anything, as long as you went about it correctly.

We had a joke among college graduates I knew, to one-up with who was working in a field that had the least relationship to their degree. For a while the winner was the guy working in HR with a degree in liturgical organ.

That's another thing, not needing a degree just to get a job sweeping floors. We still had a middle class, and good school results could get you a very good job/apprenticeship. Now if you don't have a masters they wont even look at you.

Just to piggyback onto that, I miss the days when a very average household income, parents with very average jobs, could still provide a good living for the family. In the 90s, I'm pretty sure my dad never made more than $50K, tops. Mom had a low-key, minimum wage job. Yet, we lived in a 2500 square foot house, had two cars, dogs, vacation every year. Life was good.

These days, it's like you have to be upper middle class to actually be what we used to call "middle class."

My wife and I make good income. 1 six figure salary the other near six figure. We own a 3 family house and occupy the first unit. We have 2 kids, a dog, 2 vehicles (one is paid off). We do not live extravagantly or buy nonsense stuff. We feel like we are just at middle class. We have the ability to save some. But it is nuts. We dont live in the city. We both have good jobs. We dont have too much debt and yet we are right at middle class. I pretty much accepted that I will probably never be able to retire due to most of our savings will probably go to our kids college. Its fucking bullshit. Thank god my wife's job has a pension for her. Its just nuts to think about

Similar to getting a vehicle licence. All mum had to do was drive the local police officer around town for ten minutes. Me? 300 hours supervised, logbook, 2 tests etc.

Christ. I applied as an adult so had to write down 60 hours supervised, no oversight/verification other than the supervisor's signature and driver license number, no road test.

I had a friend like this. She majored in German at a tiny liberal arts college because she grew up with a German mother and was bilingual. She then got a Master's in education then refused to be a teacher because she decided the pay was too low (absolutely something she could have figured out long before the Master's.) then she got a job at a tech place in the very early 90s and got all this valuable training that no one would ever get today, and eventually went into tech jobs. Over these six years of school she took one job, ONE, as a waitress. Her parents paid for everything.

What are you working now, after completing your Classics Major?

That's what I'm studying right now (too).

Sounds like a utopian dream. Sigh..

Nope. Won't happen, lol.

Yup. This guy gets it

As a college graduate who finished about a year ago, this hit me the hardest. I spent 6 years in college and tried applying for jobs as either a software engineer or a computer engineer. Nothing. The reality of the situation slapped me across the face and now I’m self-studying to develop my skills while also preparing for interviews with technical questions. And it’s all my fault.

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.

Have you put it on YouTube? You should so that people can share the nostalgia

Isn't this a thing? I remember someone uploading a video of walking around a mall in the 80s. It was really cool to watch.

People like to see random videos like that for nostalgia...this one went viral a while back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbe-35_BaA

Its just a video of some dudes who went to a 7/11 at 2:30am in the 80s and interviewed random people.

Damn, John and Kelly are zooted lmao. This is making me crazy nostalgic.

Edit: also how are they so wholesome wtf

"No no no we're just crazy kids goofing off at night. Hey you have a good night, don't eat that sugar all at once!"

That’s amazing! Yes this is exactly the type of nostalgia video that is so mesmerising

You'll like this if you like that. There's also a comparison video on that channel. https://youtu.be/Y-JDdDGS_hM

Ehhhhh that's cool.

It's on fb. And it's ultra granie. If you don't know them you will see blobs.

Teens not allowed to hang out without an adult present at the mall in my city where I used to get dropped off at as a teenager. Too many teens shooting at each other.

That's why hanging at the mall died. They tried to make my old mall upscale and we just stopped going. Plus got older. Now i can't wait to leave the mall.

Also back then, home video was still a novelty, so everyone would jump in front of the camera and ham it up. Now we have cameras everywhere and no one want to be recorded.

Yes, we had a floppy disk camera and we loved it. It was old and crap but we used it often.

now the mall is a slog.

What do you mean by that? The mall I go to regularly is still very lively.

It's different when you're a mallrat and you go to the mall every day just to go. Cause you live in the same town as the mall. Often times you would meet up at the mall and all hang out.

Nah I barely go to the mall. Maybe once every couple of weeks or months.

And that's the difference.

?

It's all up there. I don't understand why you question marked it.

I’m mentally handicapped so I need you to explain it for me please

It's explained. There is no further detail I can go into without reiterating everything I already said which I'm not going to do. Go back and reread it you will get it.

bro i still don’t for some reason but it’s alrifht

Yes it is also it's alright*** have a great night.

you too man, take care

I don't think the explanation was very clear.

They say, "Gee, my local mall still seems pretty lively." You say, "Well, it's different when you're a mallrat." They say, "But I'm not a mallrat." You say, "And that's the difference." The difference between what?

It's all there man/woman.

A bit late but what I think he means is you only go once in a while, so the mall is still enjoyable, but for someone who went every day / a mall rat, what was once really enjoyable has become a slog (just my interpretation, it could be wrong. I didn’t find it too clear either)

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He personally told me it was though. He knocked on my door and was like, “I was talking about you in that comment.”

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What was a mall back in the day for you?

Not your OP, but Kaybee toys, Waldenbooks, a couple record/CD stores, Brookstone and Sharper Image for gadgets and massage chairs, a Hallmark card shop, a pet store, a bulk candy store, a small movie theater, a Friendly's and one or two other ice cream shops, and Spencer's when it was more goofy crap and not half-porn, small sports shoe and ballcap stores, Woolworth's general store, and Sears that had tools, grills, and riding mowers.

I actually really miss that a bit now.

Suncoast, nature company, Babbage's, arcade... Such a variety. Now it's just clothing and restaurants...

Nature Company 💚

That sort of mall experience is still a thing in some countries. The city where I live in Indonesia has at least half a dozen malls, some of them very fancy while others are more basic. Any time my wife and I go out, 90% of the time it's to one of these malls. They all have movie theaters, large food courts and most of them have decent arcades and play areas for little kids. One of them (located in the more high class part of town, even has an indoor ice-skating rink and an indoor park.

When I go, which is most weekends, I like to check out the book store, the electronics store, furniture store, and DIY store. Usually though I just love to wander around, window shopping all the different places and seeing what they have. The more popular malls are usually pretty crowded as well, especially on weekends. I really don't know what I'd do with myself on weekends if we didn't have that here.

I lived for a while also in Malaysia and Thailand and malls are definitely still a thing there too.

Edit: copy-paste messed up

Damn. I feel like today’s generation has lost that “community” feel for some reason. I feel like gen z’ers and some millennials aren’t really as like close to their peers or just strangers nowadays.

Back in the day people could just spark up a conversation at the store while you’re waiting in life. But now, people will feel awkward doing it or feel like you’re a creep for doing it.

Idk though. I may just be biased.

Kind of envy this as someone who didn’t grow up during that time

Back in the day people could just spark up a conversation at the store while you’re waiting in life.

I literally never did this in 90’s. I only ever saw older people do it or men hitting on women do it. We went to mall as a group of girls mostly to look at clothes or CDs. Sometimes would meet boys from other towns and go smoke weed or something. Weed was a bigger unifier as it was illegal and this the more interesting and experience seeking people smoked it IME.

I did this often. I miss it though. People were less socially anxious.

Yeah. A lot of that chatter was necessary to pass the time back then. Nowadays it's easier to communicate with just who you want exclusively.

I don't think you're biased. It was literally a different time.

Mostly just a place to hang out. You didn’t have an easy way to get information about stuff so a lot of times guys who worked in stores was how you got it. Like you’d just kill time in a record store shooting the shit with other people who hung out there talking about cool albums or bands you liked and they’d be like “oh you should buy this because it’s sick”. I even remember finding out about new bands because Hot Topic got their shirt in stock. I dunno there was a lot less to do back then, it was much harder to fill your time so sometimes you’d just go to place looking for people you knew as an excuse to leave the house.

That's what killed the mall for me when I moved. The first mall had Beanie Baby Kiosks, a merry-go-round, and A&W where you could watch lottery numbers pop up, a video game store where you could play demo games for free, claw machines, clowns making balloon animals, a water fountain, auditions for stage shows you could watch in the food court.

And then the mall we moved closer to had nothing but expensive clothes that my family couldn't afford anyways. Over the years the new mall got better (Build-a-Bear, a really good arcade, more sports bars, VR stations, and an indoor shooting range.) But I suspect most of that stuff was only allowed in because absolutely nobody can afford to lease in the mall anymore. So the actually fun stuff got to slip in. Before Covid, that boring-ass mall was completely fine acting as a hub for snobbish rich kids to throw money at designer brands. Malls have been actively discouraging mall-rat culture, and it's infuriating.

It's like boring and not something i enjoy anymore.

Do teens like, just hang out? I honestly don’t know. We had a few spots where you just kind of showed up to see what people were doing. I guess now that’s social media?

They do. I’ve taught 8th grade since 2012 (have been middle school admin since 2021). And they do a lot of the things us olds did while growing up - just more of a social media influence included now.

Where I went to highschool (5? years ago), people would skip class and go to the mall, or just hang out at the mall, all of the time. Maybe not as frequently as back in the day, but teens still do it.

The local mall here is filled with teenagers still. And still has most of the same stuff malls had back in the day.

I think sometimes adults think things don’t exist because they don’t personally do them anymore. Just because your “going to the mall” experience is walking straight into an anchor store and shopping for sensible shoes doesn’t mean the rest of the mall no longer exists and that teenagers aren’t still chilling in the food court.

Some malls died, yeah. But there are plenty still kicking.

Nah, at least some of that still got that.

This is actually still a completely normal thing in my country (Czech Republic), the malls (well maybe more like a shopping centres, not really sure about the difference) are made hanging out-friendly. There are usually lots of places to just sit and chill, plus there's the food etc.

That was us in the 90s and early 2000s. Here in the usa for the most part teens are run out of malls and shopping centers. I was also security at one of the old strip malls/shopping centers i hung out at.

I am kinda surprised to hear that, since more than 50% in malls in CZ are teens/students , these places are kinda ideal as a meeting spot for people from different towns since almost everybody knows where it is.

That would be where you meet up with your parents after they're done with work. Say you were told me up at the food court at 4 p.m. because we can have cell phones also. Payphones or ask a clerk to borrow the job phone to call a parent. And yeah i have to say that's damn cool. But USA wanted to give there malls a facelift and kick all the kids out. Bla bla bla. Ended up back firing and pretty much ended them.

I don't see why having kids/teen gather there is bad for them in any way, the stores got customers, the customers got services and place to gather and eventually return to, which means more profits. Everybody would be happy, wouldn't they?

Well with the mall i was a mall rat at for sometime we didn't buy anything just wandered around. I personally never stole but a few of my friends did. And we looked and smelt really bad. We were a bunch of grungy ass teens. And from the prospect of an adult security. They are annoying and in the way. Sometimes they spray paint the building other times they would wreck shopping carts. And not really do much in the way of being productive. So i understand both ends.

I kinda understand now too, I am still a teen in a way, so I didn't take into account some more or less important things.

Oh that's fine. It's awesome they got spots set up for teens where you live for you guys to hang out but a few bad eggs spoil the whole bunch for out where I live.

I still do that?

Question or statement?

That was my thing every Saturday! Go to the mall just go hang out. Sometimes go to Photo Galleria, but every time just walk miles around that place and hang out.

Went to a mall yesterday for first time in years. There are no good stores anymore. There was a sheriffs office, H&R Block, Christian book store and other obscure things. Still a Cinnabon and Auntie Anne’s though. The good things don’t change

I think the last time i had much fun at a mall was maybe like 2006-07 timeframe. The malls have really died around here.

Its sad, honestly. My wife and i were in the one local mall a few weeks before christmas last year, and the place was an absolute ghost town. Even 10-15 years ago i can assure you that same mall would have been chaos during christmas season.

Oh I remember back during Christmas time in the mall but that was before we had internet. And i could just go oh that's 20 bucks here. Look online 5 bucks plus 3 bucks shipping and 2 days for 8 bucks I'll wait and walk out the store. The internet shopping killed the malls for sure.

Hi! I'm a part of the younger generation (i.e.: born after the year 2000) How do you hang with people at the mall? Genuine question, like what did y'all do?

Go to different stores if there is an arcade go there hang out and getting free samples. Sometimes you go outside and hang out. We had a park near the mall sometimes go there. Then back to the mall and walk around some more.

And smoke breaks between each of those things.

That's why you walked outside. We went to "the crack" to smoke. Weed or cigarettes.

Smoke breaks inside the mall. I remember cupping my cig when the mall security would walk by because I was a teenager.

Lmao I’m only 16 and I still do this kind of thing with my friends a lot. Now I’m wondering what do people do with their friends if they’re not at the mall/similar place?

Hang on at one of our friends house go for a walk in town go to the strip mall or go to the water. You know normal friend stuff. Now a days we go to bars and the like. Cause adults.

it’s depressing that this needs an explanation

Yeah I know I had to ask my friends for help with answering this. Because I never really thought how to hang out at the mall we just a did it.

Honestly my friends and I still do this. We live in Northern NJ and the big mall by us is still popular. It’s nice to go to a movie, take a walk around and then go to the food court. I’m sure it was more popular in the past but it’s still pretty active. The emo kids that used to hang out by the food court in the mid 2000s have been replaced by people standing around and vaping, though. Lol

Yeah if your suburb still had a “good” mall this is still totally a thing. Not sure how it has fared since COVID, but Southcenter in the Seattle area was always busy and full of teenagers as of just a couple years ago.

I don't know really. You just like hanged out. You don't plan it. You don't overthink it. Just try to have some fun and just talk to each other about anything really. Now people get all caught up and overthink about trying to have like the perfect first impression or the perfect conversation or some shi like that

I’m 20 and me and my friends hang out at the mall all the time. Is this genuinely not a thing with other people? Wtf?

if you have to ask this, your generation is sad.

In their defense, they were asking what people actually did, not how to hang or how to talk to people. The malls by OP could be boring with only retail stores, no movie theatres, arcades, etc. They're probably thinking what do you do standing in front of a JCPenny's? lol

I miss scenie beanie fridays

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

Absolutely. I also remember using a TV that was so old, it didn’t have a RCA input, so play video games, we had to plug in a VCR to the TV, then plug the N64 into the VCR, then turn the TV to channel 3!

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.

Remembering to get the new calendar early so you could transfer all the important dates before the turn of the year.

Uncle John's Bathroom reader occasionally led to numb legs and my parents wondering if I fell in.

We had multiple editions in high school and college.

I still have like 10 volumes of those!

People say I know a little about a lot and my knowledge range is impressive…..and I attribute it to the bathroom reader 😄

I have about 25 of them. In my first apartment I literally had a book case in my bathroom filled with them. I just pulled one out a few months ago and threw it in the bathroom.

Oops. I actually still use mine.

I used mine up until a coue years ago when I retired.

Damn I forgot all about magazines on the back of the toilet. Those were the days!

Mad and Cracked. That was really the only time those magazines were good to read.

Omg I forgot about Franklin Covey!!! I was a planner freak but I was young and I remember it being too expensive for me :(

I thought your first sentence said "Lisa Frank planner," which still works.

You just made me want to put the phone down, order checks, and put a book rack in the bathroom…

I used to get the pages with the New Yorker cartoons.

Filofax! Apparently they still have a devoted group of users, and many of them are younger people.

One of the houses I used to dog sit for still had books in the bathroom in 2018. It was kind of nice! Some readers digest type thing of dog stories, and some compendium bathroom reader. The perfect thing to pick up and read one or two pages of.

I lived with my grandparents for a bit in my early 20s and I loved that my grandpa would still put on the news in the morning while he got ready for work

We had Reader's Digest in our bathroom.

I had a Franklin before Covey was merged. I remember you could buy the binder for relatively cheap when it was not leather and they got you with the refills, so we figure dout stores were selling off sale fill in and then I went to permanent planner books without removable pages and then spreadsheets and versions of opensource calendars and then outlook and more...lol

Jesus. Until I read this, I had totally forgotten about my mom's Franklin planner. That thing was her friggin Bible for basically my entire childhood. Wouldn't surprise me if she still had one somehow.

Working through Steven Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with everyone at work. And then getting the nice leather planner.

My grandpa had a Franklin Covey planner and for his birthday my parents saved up and bought him a really expensive matching pen. My aunt bought him an extension cord spool. He was more excited about the spool.

I still use a Franklin Planner Classic. Since reintroducing it into my work life I’m more productive and I can keep track of things, all in one place! And yes I write a few checks a month, lol!

It's still the best designed planning system. So thorough and detailed. I wish they would move it to software, but I guess they consider selling paper to be their core business. Every other planning system lacks some element of the Franklin Planner. It's just so good.

Only making calls after 9pm because it was free. Having to buy mins on a phone. Long distance calls costing money

After 6pm in UK.

BT also did "free for the first hour" so you'd just hang up after 50mins and call back

Yup. Used that a lot. Strange I've never had convos longer than three or four mins for years now. Texts and snaps these days. Also. I think the after six pm was actually just cheaper, not free. At least at first. Then came the free first hour etc.

I spent more in the 90s on long distance calling cards than I care to remember.

A few years back the old lady next door to my mom died and we helped with clearing her apartment. We found an old hourglass marked with "8 minutes" and a telephone symbol.

That was the time of one "Telephone Unit" which was used for the pricing back then and the hourglass was just to keep track of the bill.

Holy shit. The telephone number for our first dial-up internet provider was long distance. I was a teen and had no clue about things.

Then we got our first phone bill after having dial up. Boy was I in trouble!

long distance calls.

Buying minutes is still alive and well in some countries. Granted out there you're paying about 5usd for a month of 2gb/day of data

Shoulda dialed 10-10-220, 1, and the number to save….

We were more of a 1-800 collect type of family lol

I still have to buy minutes for my phone.

Tracfone sucks, but it's better than a contract I can't afford.

I attended college 500 miles from home in the ‘90s. My junior and senior year I was in a long-distance relationship with my now husband. We would talk for hours. Some months my long-distance bill was insane! And I’d have to go line by line through the bill and add up which calls were mine because I had roommates.

Walkmans

Even as a teen in like 2005 I remember I would wear baggy cargo pants or gym shorts so I'd have a pocket big enough to fit my Walkman in so I could listen to music while angrily mowing the yard.

I still remember the first time I figured out that I could run my headphone cord under my shirt so it wasn't flopping around and getting caught on stuff.

Nothing more frustrating than trying to jam a discman into your hoodie pocket. And the headphones?? I needed a new pair every few months!

Yea the cord always wore out. I have 1 headphone in most of the day at work because I'm alone a lot and it gets boring and man it was such a huge deal when I finally switched to air pods. Even with the cord run under my shirt or hoodie it would just break every couple months because I'm moving and doing physical work.

Freaking love my AirPods as well.

They had MP3 players in 2005....

No doubt, but I didn't lol. I think I got my first Ipod around 2007 and it was magical to me, had that thing for a long time and used the crap out of it.

Fair enough lol.

Walkman makes MP3 players, or at least they used to. Mine was my companion all through college. I've had it for well over 10 years now.

​

Edit: I just looked them up. Looks like they still do.

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Ebay also has a fair amount of aftermarket stuff I've found. But these things seem to just go and go and go. Mine went through a car accident that had me laid up for months and still worked. I dropped it in the rain more than once when it tangled with the earbuds in my pocket, the casing has some serious dents in it, but it still works. I used it and a battery-powered speaker during a 2-week blackout to listen to music to help me fall asleep, its battery life is about 10 hours even after all this time (I was running a generator during the day to keep the food in the fridge from spoiling, so I could recharge it each day). These things are insanely long-lived.

Would've been more Discmans in the 90s.

Ah yes the discman…otherwise known as “God fucking DAMNIT!!! I barely moved why the fuck did you skip and restart?! Mother FUCKER!! 🤬🤬🤬” or also the ever popular “I just put batteries in you and you’re fucking dead already?!!!” model.

The fancy ones had a 10 second skip thing that I assume was just a ram chip buffer.

Yeah those came later. The early ones not so much. They’d skip if you looked at em wrong.

YouTube: Gary Gulman discman

Someone was looking for a discman the other day. Wanted it for when they were mowing the lawn at the cemetery.

Walkman with digital presets and autoreverse!

stupid question as an austrian (english 2nd language):

shouldnt it be walkmen?

90s were Discman territory, correct?

Yeah, they existed but they were expensive. Like $100-200. Whereas a Walkman was $40-50. I would say 1984-1994 was the time of the Walkman and 1994-2004 was the Discman. 2004 and later was obviously iPod.

I got a Sony Discman in 92. It was my pride and joy. Played RHCP blood sugar sex magik album A LOT.

My uncle had a Discman in 1990. I was like 8? I thought it was magical and we had a home computer with Prodigy and a NES which didn't faze me but the Discman was literal magic.

Not super related, but your comment reminded me of Talkboys.

Been updated to iPods and phones

Fun fact. I not only have my cassette player Walkman still but all my mp3 Sony Walkman.

I would carry around a case with like 15 cds wherever I went incase I wanted to change cds

Surely not on your Walkman?!

Oh, must have been a disk man lol. It's been a while, sorry

Transistor radios. I had a red one and a zipper bag of batteries.

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

I remember being sent outside to play in the summer and there was no required time I had to be back except “dark.” And I played with every kid in my neighborhood. I knew them all. I cannot imagine my own kids doing that in a million years. I know my next door neighbors and that’s it. There’s a lady across the street from with 8 kids and I don’t even know her name. Our kids could be playing together. I’ve never thought twice about it until right now.

We made a friend because she just showed up. She moved to the neighborhood and was an only child, she went door to door asking adults if they had kids and if their kids wanted to come outside and play with her. We did go play with her and angie became our friend until we moved. That would never happen now.

When new kids came in the neighborhood, we used to knock on the door and ask their parents if they could come and play with us. During breaks, we used to get up early just to go outside and play.

I remember going to the 7-11 1.5 miles away on my bike just for a Slurpee and no one cared! This was 94-96....

Do people care about that sorta stuff now? Sorry haven't been a kid in a while, but am not old enough to have friends with kids... (either that or it's becsuse I'm redditor...)

That was the tail end of it. From around 2000 on, Boomers call the cops on unattended children. If the kid is 12 or less, they want to report you for child neglect, 13 and over, that damn punk is up to no good, where are the parents. And then the bastards have the nerve to bitch about "Kids these days don't play outside"

Remember how mad people got when everyone was out playing Pokemon? Can't win no matter what you do.

Always hated that. Would go to my highschool football games. If I didn't stay sitting down the entire time (for example, going to buy food or say hi to a friend), the cops would yell at us for starting trouble. I literally wanted to say hi to a friend I hadn't seen in a month or so. I still resent the fact that they thought I was clearly up to no good. I suppose buying a hotdog and a soda makes me a troublemaker.

In the USA, yeah. In 2005 my dad sent me (5 years old) into the dollar store alone to buy christmas presents. He couldn't come with me, because I was buying his present, and then it wouldn't be a surprise.

The dollar store ladies wouldn't even check out my items until I pointed to my dad out on the sidewalk and he waved to them.

This is still a thing in my area, I see middle/high school aged kids walking or biking around town without an adult pretty often. It's only suspicious at night or in industrial areas. In neighborhoods, commercial areas, and parks during the day no one thinks twice about it... except maybe a grumpy WalMart manager lol

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Oh man yeah, I definitely got lucky a few times, remember a couple of really tall pine trees we climb with a friend, felt really dangerous even then when your fear nothing, a fall there was probably fatal. We were 12.

I once shot a bow and arrow straight up into the air in the woods with a friend when I was maybe 16. I have no idea what I was thinking, but when it started to come back down to the ground I definitely felt the fear. Got real lucky that day.

lol my friends mom caught them shooting an arrow at a body board. They were making the youngest brother hold it up! She almost died when she saw what they were doing lol. The middle brother just set it up against something and shot it once, it didn't go all the way through so cmon bro hold it for us it won't go through!

This is very serious but it seriously made me laugh as well. It's always the youngest doing the 'boring' job to set up the fun for the older siblings. I say this as the oldest sibling

yea they were probably like 6,8,10 years old. They also used to fight with real swords in the yard.

Same story, lawn dart.

Kids are stupid but its part of childhood.

Me and a friend climbed a cliffside in the dark, pretty much vertical steep face, at least 25ft. It was early autumn I think?

No idea why. It took longer than just walking the road to get up there.

Plummeting those 25+ feet right into hard packed gravel might not be good for our health if that'd happened.

I reckon we were 10-12 ish.

Yeah, why do you think Unsolved Mysteries was such a hit! Had a never ending supply of tragic lost kids stories.

I wasn't a latchkey until sophomore year, before that I was driven home

Latchkey kids are still a thing, if anything more parents work outside the home now.

Meanwhile I’ve got people at work when COVID had schools closed acting like “who’s gonna watch my kids?!”

And their kids are like eleven.

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Sure. But at the same time when I was a kid it was not uncommon at all for kids to be left home alone at that age. Even for a whole day.

That latchkey kid life.

Europe be like:

Yeah this was pretty much how I grew up and I'm from 2003 so...

How's it being a kid in the US today?

The worst part is if you try and allow your child independence, the neighbors and teachers and other parents freak. It was especially noticeable with my son and his friends. My kid was a "bad influence" simply because of freedom and independence (was a good kid and stayed out of trouble). Can't keep your kids terrified with fear when they see their friend surviving just fine.

Active shooter drills.

Fuck, that made me laugh out loud lmao.

Those damn alarms are loud af, swear I got permanent hearing damage from it.

Helicopter parenting.

with mobile phones being so widespread i would have thought this would have a huge resurgence, but apparently not... i rarely see people younger than 13 on the street without an adult

Where? I'm in Germany and it's a normal sight from age 6 on. Just had three probably 8 year olds in front at the register of a supermarket, alone, loudly calculating again and again if the 5€ they had in coins were enough for their chosen candy bars and pop 😁 (it was)

san francisco, dude it must be the neighborhoods i live and work in because i do not see a single kid around unnatended

this here is a half a million state capital, so it's not a rural "whole village raises a kid" thing either. You see tons of kids taking the sub to school each day with their small scooters to get to and from the stations.

I live in a medium-sized Texas city right now and grew up in a small town of 3,000 people. Personally I still see groups of kids wondering around town without parents, but most kids nowadays would rather stay inside and play video games so there's not a ton of them (especially on hot 100F summer days).

Growing up you were considered weird if you were in your house between the hours of 8am-6pm, and I'm not even that old!

All that to say that kids aren't going outside as often but the whole "people call the cops on unattended kids" thing in this thread seems overstated to me.

Some of that is definitely just norms changing (and parents being terrified by the news), but also some of that is that kids just stay home and play video games instead. Not that I have an issue with that, I've been a gamer since the 80s, but.

Just last weekend I was at a 50 year anniversary event of a (big) local youth centre, talked with some official and basically asked her that, "does the actual youth" (teens and early 20s) actually come, or is the audience constantly aging, and she said it goes in waves. For a while the younger follow the older, then the older get too old, and what they do becomes uncool. But after some years and a generation or two skipped, a new young gen can sorta start fresh and pull in new younger people that follow the cool kids... it's also highly fluctuating in terms of culture circles.

Used to walk home from grade school with my best friend to his house every afternoon until my mom got off work and came by to pick me up. We'd chat about nerdy stuff all the way and it was the chillest thing ever. We made a point of saying hi to Squishy the Squirrel every day, the road kill squirrel that apparently got perfectly flattened out in a sprawled position overnight, and never got scooped up. He stayed there so long that he basically got embalmed by tire residue and asphalt and basically ended up as a flattened squirrel-shaped patch of shiny asphalt that we could pick out from halfway down the street.

Fond memories.

Still happens in Finland.

I had a friend who let their kid go to their friend's house on their bike alone. Generally harmless, she felt he was responsible enough to go out on his own (the kid was ten.) Apparently someone in the neighborhood saw the kid on a bike by himself and called the police because, as the cops put it, "the child was in danger being out alone." CPS was threatened to be called if it happened again. Needless to say, he doesn't go out on his own anymore.

It's not like this was even a dangerous neighborhood or anything, but hey, unsupervised kids must mean they're neglected. I generally believe it's because the area they live in is pretty snobbish and there are plenty of people in the area who call the cops at the drop of a hat because "safety", but still.

My mom didn’t know parents were supposed to meet their kids when they got off the school bus until some time after I graduated in 2002

This literally still happens

I’m sure some places it has but then I hear stories of people talking about having babysitters for their 14 year olds. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and parents tell their kids they have to ride their bikes / scooters where they can see them.

Babysitters for 14 year olds, that's just insane. When I was 14 I was often home alone for days at a time while my parents were out of town. That was in the early 2000s. And I considered my parents controlling. I feel bad for kids today.

Lol 14 year olds ARE the babysitters here

I had to have a babysitter until I was 15, when my parents deemed me “responsible enough” to take monitor my at the time 12 year old siblings

Wow, I think I was around 8 when I stopped having a sitter if I was expected to be by myself after 8pm or so. Around age 11 I started babysitting to make some money.

I do say i got y'all beat. When I was 10 I was babysitting myself and looking after my little sisters until mom got home around 5:00 that was 3 hours not horrible when I turned 13 my little sister was old enough to take care of our youngest sisters. Well that freed me up and my mom would drop me off at the lake 15 mi away from our house and she would leave me there all day in the middle of summer so I could go fishing (that was all completely upon my request) she gave me her old hand-me-down TracFone with like 5 minutes of prepaid time on it back in like 2008. Needless to say I think I spent probably every other day of my summer out at the lake or a river just fishing with zero parental supervision when I was 12 to 15. Then I got my driver's license bought a beat-up pickup and spent pretty much every single day fishing until I enlisted. Needless to say I view fishing pretty much is my religion. It's what brings peace to my life and is well some of my most fond memories is a toddler and some of my greatest memories as a kid. I also came within 2 lb of breaking a state record on hybrid in Illinois. Back then I caught one that weighed 13.4 lb and the state record was 15.2 give or take from what I remember. If it would have just eaten one large bluegill I would have had my name and a state record book and that's still my goal today.

Yeah I didn't have a baby sitter after school, from age 6 on. I'd get home, my mom would usually be home for dinner, if not, I would have dinner in the fridge that I'd need to heat up. She only left me with my grandparents if she expected to be home well after dark but she stopped that around age 8. So I'd be home til sometimes 2am, 3am in the morning by myself after age 8.

At some point, I had a friend who told me about student discount bus passes, asked my mom for one around age 10, as at that point, I had to pay every ride (which was cheap). Then I was really all over the place after school.

yea we were done by 8 and 11. They just told my sister to make sure I didn't get too wild, but really we'd just play outside or watch cartoons or draw. At 11 and 12 they also hired my sister to babysit other kids. The 90's were wild. I had some interesting babysitters more than once to say the least.

Huh. When did you turn 15? Once I was 12 (2012) I was deemed old enough to hold down the fort. Same for my brother. But it wasn't scary being home alone because my bro was 14 and knew what to do if anything happened and we knew the neighbors if we needed help.

I rarely see kids roaming now. They all seem confined to small driveways and the front yard. I'll see them ride a scooter 2-3 houses down then back. Kids are on a much tighter leash now it seems even if many of them do go home to an empty house, there isn't the unlimited freedom we used to have. I've seen 6 year olds with iphones now!

I just had this conversation with my mom last night. I used to ride to my after school day care that was miles away from my third grade class. I actually caught my mom playing hookie one time and she told me to join her and I replied I didn’t actually have anywhere to be since my school day was over.

From kindergarten on? Bro what the actual fucking fuck? From like 3rd or 4th grade MAYBE but who in the actual hell is leaving a literal five year old home by themselves? A five year old can barely eat without killing themselves 10 different ways. You leave the average 5 year old alone for 5 minutes and they shove something up their nose or swallow a toy or something, much less leaving them home alone for hours at a time. And I say this as someone who works in a school and is around children all day.

for me, it was from 1st grade on. Generally kids seemed to never be by themselves in my neighborhood though, they usually were out playing with friends til their parents came home.

I see that a lot in my neighbourhood still. Different culture is maybe a factor but it's definitely still around. Definitely a lot less.

Kids still do that in Finland

I’m 26 right now but when I was around 10-11 years old me and my brother and sister got our own house key so we could go home after school instead of to some sort of daycare. We would have a cup of tea and a biscuit or cookie and watch tv or play outside on the trampoline or in the neighbourhood for example. I’m from Europe btw.

“At 10 we would have a cup of tea and a biscuit.” How to say you’re from Europe without actually saying your from Europe.

Tea or lemonade. I’m not even from England haha

Still a reality in places like the Netherlands!

That was not happening in the '90's. You have to go back to the '70's for that.

Nope, was totally a thing in late 80s and early 90s. I was there.

It was so a thing in the 90's. I grew up that way. Streetlights coming on meant it was time to go home after a day of doing basically nothing but roaming the neighbourhood with friends we'd pick up from their front yards on bikes and skateboards and roller blades.

It was the mid-2000's onwards that all changed.

It's still a thing now too. Neighborhoods age. The hoods full of little kids are full of aging parents now and all those little kids are raising their own little kids that are running around in newer developments.

Oh that's so cool! My youngest brother's grew up in the 2000's, while I was born mid-80's, and they just didn't get to experience the same childhood I had. But that was purely because their friends parents didn't want them roaming, my parents didn't have a problem with it. So they spent most of their time indoors under the watchful eye of a parent otherwise they wouldn't have had friends to play with.

I really hope it makes a widespread return because it's so crucial for kids to explore their spaces, make their own mistakes without parents around, get in to trouble and figure out how to get out of it themselves.

I hope so too, my friend.

we'd sometimes go in our backyard and just yell our friends names as loud as we could until they heard us yelling and they'd come outside. Sometimes their siblings or parents would yell back to us "he isn't home right now!". We def roamed the neighborhood and farther. Where I lived there were sidewalks everywhere. As long as we were on the sidewalk no one cared. We'd could bike or skateboard to stores etc. It was awesome. Skating to the skateshop just to hang and look at stuff.

It was still common in the 90s. Helicopter parents that didn't let their kids out were on the rise, but at least in the early to mid 90s most kids still had that freedom.

-90s kid (was 7 in 1990, so just getting that freedom)

Definitely happened in the 80s and 90s.

Born in 85, I definitely let myself into the house after school and was there alone with my sisters until my mom got home at 6-7, as were many of my friends. I didn't even have a key because the house was never locked

Born in 94, was a thing for me and several of my friends

You were a latch key kid.

Showing up at your friend's place unannounced. Now you gotta send a text 4 years in advance.

My wife gripes all the time that stopping by unannounced has become so taboo. We lived in a neighborhood for five years or so (up until 2018) where that actually did happen at least weekly (Old Town Alexandria, VA) and it was such a refreshingly simple throwback.

Maybe it's progressing through my 30's, or maybe it's the world we live in, but I feel like people have gotten a lot less casually social, if that makes sense. Everything is planned and instagrammable and overwrought.

Growing up family (aunts, uncles, cousins) would just walk in by the side door without knocking (only guests used the front door). I can’t imagine doing that now.

Also no one has side doors anymore. The house I grew up in had 4 entrances into the house. The house I live in now is almost 3 times as big and only has a front door and sliding glass door in the back.

The house I grew up in had the front door, the back sliding door, the side door that let into the garage, and my parents' bedroom had its own sliding glass door that basically never got used.

My aunts and uncles would often drop by and let themselves into the back yard via the fence gates. I think people would freak if someone did that today, but it was expected back then because then they didn't have to take their shoes off or freak my clean-freak mom out with their dirty shoes on her clean floors.

My friends house has a side door that goes into his kitchen. That’s the door everyone uses. We’d always freak out when someone would ring the door bell of the actual front door.

Kids don’t knock or use the doorbell. We would go to their window and yell “yo Charlie” or whatever. Seriously the grownups would get mad if they had to answer the door and it was a kid knocking.

I lived in an apartment complex when I was a kid and we would just shout up at people's windows all the time lol

Nobody in my friends group ever knocked back then either. It didn't even matter if nobody was home, just come in. It wasn't at all unusual for someone to be waiting for you to get home. Maybe they even brought takeout or cooked for you. Have a little too much to drink, you know where the blankets are.

My best friend used to have pj's for me at her place (she's tiny and I'm super tall so she saved a super long pair her nana had passed on to her). It was super common for me to be there after school and eventually just call my mom and ask if I could stay. I miss that.

whoa hadn't even thought of that! But you are so right! We had side doors growing up, but not once I was an adult. And yeah, friends and family used the side door. strangers used the front door.

My house has a side door but we don’t use it cause its blocked by too many things.

My grandparents have always had a knock and walk policy for people we know. I lived with them from ages 9-19 and then for a while when I was 23 (so 2018) and it was actually really nostalgic to me for family to just burst in whenever. The number of people who have the code to their front door is insane lol

I'm in my underwear, eating vanilla pudding straight from the tub.

It's better for everyone if you give us a heads up.

It’s best to eat it from the tub because you can just rinse the extra with a shower head when you’re done.

Exactly. No one is wearing pants. Please give me at least half an hour so I can get everyone in gear.

Gotta track down the whole damn outfit if you drop in on me.

... where can you get tubs of pudding? Asking for a friend...

Ol' timey bathtub, a big ass spoon, and the will to make your dreams reality.

Oh, and no shame. Shame will only hold you back.

I have the same question but I'm asking for myself. I could absolutely use more pudding in my life.

It took awhile for my wife to understand what I was requesting when I asked her to give me a heads up when her parents were dropping by unannounced. She would always know, but my unshowered, no pants wearing self needs a heads up..

My pants and shoes come off at the door. MIL showed up once and I was completely naked. I kicked her out.

I’ll bring my own spoon, what time is good?

A knock is a heads up. Just put some pants, that's what we did back then.

I just had a neighbor couple over with no prep. They were tending the yard and we struck up some conversation so we invited them for drinks.

It's awesome not to have any expectations. Just enjoying reach others company.

Yeah, I think people don't realize that dropping by unannounced was really just a necessary evil, and most people would without a doubt prefer some notice. Like, I'd rather be comfortable in my own home than have to drop whatever I'm doing for company, especially if the house isn't as clean as I'd like it to be for said company.

I want some too

I once saw a doormat that says something like: unless you're delivering food or have an actual invitation, turn around.

It was years ago and I still regret not getting it.

You should NEVER be eating anything "straight from the tub" and you should NEVER be just in your underwear! That shows no self-respect. Either wear some daytime clothing or your PJs or something.

I straight up don’t answer my door if I don’t know you’re coming.

I know a lot of people who feel the same way, but I do not understand this behavior. I'm not an extravert, but avoiding someone at the door feels childish and short sighted, no? Like, do you stay quiet and away from the windows and hide until they leave? How do you know your cat didn't get out, or some idiot hit your car, or a legitimate emergency? Easy enough to pull some pants on and see?

Thé flip side is people cancelling plans casually over text messages. Back then you had to decline hours in advance (to make sure your friend or whoever hadn’t already left the house) and you had to tell them. Now I feel like you’d be lucky to get a let down more than thirty minutes beforehand.

I hate that. Have the decency to decline rather than accept and then cancel at the last minute.

For sure. People plan things out way too far in advance and cancel like three minutes before the scheduled time.

Visited my parents home country for the first time in a decade recently. The just randomly dropping by culture was still alive. Sometimes people were home, sometimes they weren't. One day we were just driving and my cousin said, your dads cousin lives around here, wanna stop by. 2hrs later we were leaving with a full stomach. Its was nice.

I do not miss waking up and getting dressed for the day in case someone dropped by. Or keeping the house ready for people to drop by.

I much prefer having an hour at least to do basic tidying and put on real clothes. It's not that I live in squalor, it's that I don't want guests seeing me in workout clothes and all the couch pillows thrown on the floor.

As an introvert, I am beyond glad this is now taboo lol

Legit. I get into my head how I'm going to spend my day, and get flustered when someone fucks that up by just showing up or proposing plans out of the blue.

I'm only kind of an introvert (and also kinda not) and I'm still fucking glad this is taboo--like I enjoy having people over but I gotta prepare for it, you know? What if the house is a mess? What if I'm a mess?

Exactly. I like people too, but introverts need recharge time and company is draining, even people I love seeing. Sometimes I need to be a degenerate scrub and would prefer randos didn’t drop by while I’m in a bathrobe and underwear playing a 3ds and drinking wine with my hair pretending to be a modern art sculpture lol

Sometimes I need to be a degenerate scrub

That did not go where I thought it would.

My friend I just moved close to, dropped by once and I said "what are you doing here" ' I generally don't like people to much.

Yeah it's not just stopping by; it's actually getting anyone to WANT to hang out period.

Half the people don't respond and act like they never saw the text (I saw the "read" notification pal) and the other half will just say "maybe" but never show.

I love the pop in. The pop in is good.

Old Town is a dope spot. Lived there a few years ago. Not too much going on, but still close to everything.

On the flip side, coming to someone's house without an invitation can be a burden for the person, bc now they're expected to host and entertain you. I have relative dropping in unannounced all the time, and they just expect me to be up for whatever they want.

Sometimes you just need time to decompress from people, and just enjoy your own presence. Also, what if people drop in when you're busy like having book club, WFH, a date, etc.

Totally agree with all of that, but in a way people also kind of act like since everyone has a phone and can contact anyone at any time, we don’t need to plan ahead. Maybe it’s just my social circles, but it’s like people just text an hour before they feel like hanging out. Also in my 30s, so pre-cell phone was like middle school for me, but back then it was like we agreed on a date and time that worked for all involved parties.

That ain't bad, but oh my God have you ever had to spend an hour texting to schedule a happy hour at a bar you and friend can both walk to, a month in advance? I think social media has pressured people to be less spontaneous because spontaneous is rarely the aesthetically optimal experience.

I agree that people are a lot less casually social, when I’m walking or driving through my neighborhood I’ll sometimes see people walking, some of them look in my direction, I give a friendly wave, and They see me wave as they continue to look at me for a few seconds and then they turn away and don’t wave back. It’s so weird lol. Apparently a casual wave is “too much” these days, they can’t swing it. Some do wave or say hello don’t get me wrong, but some clearly go out of there way not too when they are clearly seeing you wave. In the 90s it was much more friendlier in the neighborhood I’d say.

That something I don’t miss at all. I don’t want to have to be in entertain mode without a heads up.

I totally agree. I think it’s a product of kids that didn’t have enough free play all grown up and the fact that most of us have set up our lives and communities in a way that doesn’t make this easy. Throw in the ability to communicate everything in advance on the phone/a pandemic/possibly remote work and it’s a bad combination for spontaneous socializing.

There are various friends of mine that you need to schedule a hangout weeks in advance with. So many people now prioritize the need to “protect their energy,” are addicted to opting out of social events, and think they’re taking care of their mental health when in reality they might be further atrophying their social tolerance level and abilities. We’re getting all the convenience and isolation we wanted but I don’t think it’s what we need.

It’s the pop in

Depends on your age group I guess but other than a heads up (we’re in our 20s-30s), half the time we don’t plan anything at all. We just get together and decide from there, sometimes it mean just hanging out. Couple hours notice usually works.

No preset plans can be the best ones. No one feels like they’re forced to do something they don’t want to.

I'm 45. I've stood on the porch when an uncle from out of town stopped by unannounced and didn't let them in my house. I have maybe one friend that I would not be pissed if they stopped by unannounced--and they would probably only do that in an emergency. There is literally no reason with the technology we have available to not give someone a heads-up before showing up at their house.

So I guess I'm saying, "know your audience." I need time to both physically and mentally prepare for guests and it has nothing to do with Instagram.

I'm an introvert, and sometimes disorganized, so I always prefer notice. If it's family, or one or two select friends stopping by, I'll be glad they stopped by, embarrassed if things are messy, but just deal with it. Anyone else, though, I will be irked they didn't reach out ahead of time.

stopping by unannounced has become so taboo

Hated it even in the 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzOv2jrC1I8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eL3zUUSB18

Was gonna say. It was never a well liked thing. My parents always got mad when my uncle/aunts or grandparents just randomly showed up. Even their good friends there needed to at least be a phone call or some sort of plans set up before they just popped in.

I only have 1 person I can drop in on unannounced

Everything is planned and instagrammable and overwrought.

It's sad. But it's natural as technology and communication has evolved so much. When I get older, the sort of things you experienced, I'll also most likely also experience.

Old town Alexandria is So Friendly. I used to work there... I'd move there in a heartbeat if I won the lottery

I think because we simply never stop socialising - our phones have us connected all day from waking up to going to sleep. So the novelty of or desire for spontaneous socialisation isn’t there anymore.

My friends actually stopped by our house unannounced recently. While it's not super common in my friend group to do that, often social things are just someone texting and then a group hanging out. Not much planning if any involved.

Yeah, its crazy. You just don't show up unannounced anymore! Even as a pizza delivery driver people get all weird when I show up. Dude, you literally asked me to be here!!

doordash refined food delivery to have as little socialization as possible. It's just: look for a car going slow, they say "r u him", you say "i'm that guy pal", handoff the package, assure no witnesses, and leave. It fucking rocks

“I’m that guy pal” lmao that’s fucking gold

My kids friends still crash our house, same with her and them.

I mean they ring the bell\knock now, instead of just strolling in and helping themselves to something out of the fridge like we did at their age, but a lot of the world\US isn't quite what reddit likes to make it out to be.

To be honest, i have no idea where she has fucked off to now. They said the park down the street, but who the hell knows.

Except now they have cell phones so in 15 minutes i can call her and ask her where the hell she is because i told her to be back by 8, she can see the time on it, and to get home. And if she isn't back by then, instead of having an arbitrary argument about the street lights not being on, i can point at the clock in her pocket.

And if i really wanted to be a dick, i can track her phone.

I have this with my daughter too. They come and go with and to friends quite often and I let her have the freedom to go around. I'll only track her phone if she is at least half an hour late and is not picking up her phone. I feel like too many parents keep track of their kids 24/7. Give them a bit slack and let them explore a bit on their own. It was the most fun I had as a kid so I'll allow her to do the same.

yeah, we get some shit from relatives or comments from other parents about her having a phone at her age. I don't get it. I can contact my kid, she can contact me or someone else if she needs help, and she has the entirety of human knowledge in her pocket at all times.

Do they fuck around with it? sure, but at least at her age i can passively police it without it being an overt violation of her privacy and try and instill good habits with it, vs, "oh, here is your first phone, go crazy" at an older age.

I love when my friend show up unannounced, it's like a pleasant surprise. I'm very extraverted though

Now you gotta send a text 4 years in advance.

How else will I know when to put on pants.

I read this as shooting up at your friend's place unannounced and was very confused

Now I get texts from people asking if it ok for them to call.

I actually prefer this. If I'm busy I can respond when I'm free in an easy way.

If you're busy just don't pick up or pick up and say "can't talk right now."

Ezpz

But if they text me it's the same as not answering and I have an easy thing to come back to when I'm free.

That's actually a very nice habit which I wish more people had

I've picked it up too. It is kind of nice, if you're busy, being able to say "call me in 45 minutes I'm eating dinner" or whatnot.

True. TBH I don‘t even want wo ask some people if we want to meet for a glass of wine because the process feels like I was asking to book a hotel room.

I moved to a new town and my new neighbor-friends just swing by here! It’s fucking crazy! Like what are you doing here? oh you noticed I finally got the blueberry bush in the ground and wanted to see it and say hi? well that’s nice, would you like some chamomile tea? and then we hung out for an hour, until the sun got low enough that the mosquitos cane out. it was awesome.

Better not even get close to the door. Not sure what those adjacent buttons are for either.....

Yea, that still happens for me. Sometimes it's nice and other times they break into my room randomly at the worst possible times.

Eh, my friends do this all the time, no texting or anything. It's become a running joke that my best friend lives in my walls because she just pops up randomly. Sure, we plan things sometimes but we're a pretty spontaneous group so hang outs happen at the drop of a hat.

I mean, isn't thos better? I hate when people show up unannounced.

If it’s rude to drop by your friends house unannounced, you don’t have friends.

Otoh it’s always been rude to have expectations if you drop by unannounced. They might be gone, busy, on their way out, have company, etc. You have to be ready to roll with the punches of course.

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Friends and I did it all the time.

My kids and their friends do it now from time to time too.

Would just ride our bikes to each other houses and see if they wanted to do anything or what they were up to.

Almost like having to text someone asking if it’s ok to call them

I don’t wear enough clothes when I’m not expecting company to have anyone show up to my place unannounced. Just the other day, I was home alone and washing dishes in my underwear(laundry was going) and someone knocked on the door. My wife called me because she got the alert from our ring. She said someone was at the door. I said I wasn’t getting it because I’m in my underwear, but mostly because I didn’t invite anyone over.

ok but I still do this these days, although sometimes I'll send them a text in advance when im on the way saying "I'll be at ur house in 5 mins, get ready"

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.

This is what reddit is good for, I've seen 100s of people find out about white dog poo on reddit. Amazing

Swear to gosh, I am 47 years old and been on Reddit for 2 years (I blow up/change accounts often).

I have learned more on Reddit in these last 2 years than everywhere else in my entire adult life combined. It's insane and amazing.

Grain free dogs foods do this

I forgot this was even a thing. 🤣

We moved into a house in 2002 and I remember there being a white dog turd in the yard. Then, when I read this, I thought "I haven't seen a white dog turd in ages". 🤣🤣🤣

I remember seeing "low-ash" dog and cat foods as a selling feature in the 80s and 90s.

What! I thought they were just ancient poops.

Used to kick them at mates on the way home from school.

The good old days.

Yes! What has changed so there's no more white dog poo?? One of life's mysteries. Edit. Never mind. Didn't read the rest of the comments.

Locally variable. There's a B side track by one of my favourite bands of the era (The Wildhearts) recorded in 97/98 with the line "I want to know why there's no white dogshit any more", so at least here in the UK it had definitely vanished by the 90s.

Now lick that turd

I’m laughing my ass off reading this- but I don’t know if there is a deeper reference here- enlighten me if so please- now lick that turd!

Reference to the Will Farrell movie “Stepbrothers”. Edit to include the link

Shut your mouth, ESE!

Yep, you got me with that one.

It went away as mysteriously as it came.

Talk about a memory that I didn't know I even had... and now I know the reason too. Outstanding Reddit.

My friends tricked me into picking one up in elementary school, somewhat convincing me that it was fake poo. It has been 30 years, the memory is still vivid.

Holy BALLS I forgot this was even a thing until now!!

I literally scrolled just to see if this was here.

Funny you mentioned this , earlier this I was thinking what happened to white dog poop, is the dog food healthier so that why I don't see it .

Oh my dogs still do these as I often give them bones while nobody is home to keep them occupied.

If you feed a raw diet it’s still white!

Had to scroll too far to find the correct answer. Was everywhere and now you never see it.

I never thought about this until now. Strange how memorable it is...

Thanks Obama.

‘Lick that white dog shit’

Oh shit. I didn't know about it

You can still get this

Thank god. I've been missing some white dog poo in my life!

Still with its classic pallor and crumbly texture, just how you remember it

Having an actual answering machine plugged in with the phone. Having to go home to hear messages

And getting home before your parents to delete the message the school left about your unexcused absences.

You know you could call into it, right? Enter the code and get into the menu system. Listen to messages remotely, change the out going message, etc.

That's how we pranked our dorm buddies back into the day. Causally pick up their answering machine. look at the code on the sticker on the bottom, call in when they weren't there and change their outgoing message later. Good times. No caller ID so they didn't have a clue who did it, lol.

Not all answering machines had this feature. Most probably didn't. Ours was nothing but a cassette recorder with the most basic mechanism for fulfilling its duty. It didn't even record or tell when a call had occurred.

That said, even this simple thing did malfunction once, accidentally recording an amusing family argument happening in the background of a call with perfect clarity, the only audio recording we have from that time.

To hear messages and to even know whether or not anyone tried reaching you.

Yeah! Remember wanting to see that blinking light showing you had messages? Simple times

Simple in the best way 😊

Gotta change that answering tape, oh god I gotta change that tape!

​

Gotta change Maggie, dear god we gotta change Maggie!

My grandpa still has one.

Some machines would let you call them and play back messages, sort of like voicemail.

A private conversation

Without the corresponding “coincidental” ads you’d see on the topic days later.

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.

One of the only purchasers of kale!

I don't even remember getting a choice at most places. It was either iceberg or nothing.

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.

They were inescapable! Ditinctly remember picking them out of mayo on white bread on the 90s

They are very easy to grow in a container in a window.

You don't even need a window

They may be in your supermarket now. Look in the refrigerated section of the produce department. I regularly get them for my sandwiches.

My problem is that I will buy a container of them, use them on one sandwich, then forget about them until 2 weeks later when they already need thrown out.

I think you clearly need to be mapping out a 3-4 sandwich plan.

Alfalfa Sprouts

They still sell them here in Thailand, but I have no idea what they are used for. I've never seen them used in a local dish.

Why aren't they a thing anymore?

There are some in my fridge right now!

Bad outbreak of TB (I believe) due to some bad sprouts. Probably. I would google it

[deleted]

That's what it was. Happened when I worked a short stint at Jimmy John's back in the day. They used to have Alfalfa Sprouts on their menu.

Thanks!

I forgot all about that! It was so good! I used to get some kind of vegetarian sandwich from there. There was always an insane amount of cheese for some reason, some avocado, tomato, sprouts, and the multi grain bread slices... and now I'm craving one horribly bad.

Me, too! That was the first sandwich I thought of when I saw alfalfa sprouts. Was so good - super distinct taste

Yup. I used to get those on my Billy Club sandwich from there. They do have some good friggin sammiches.

It's worse than that. It wasn't just one outbreak. It happened over and over again. Outbreak would happen, sprouts off the menu. Sprouts back on the menu, outbreak happens. This went on for years. Everyone decided that it was too much of a liability to offer sprouts. No more sprouts.

I love those. Always a treat

I miss these so much

Wow. That’s always been such a passive memory, I never really noticed they’re not really a thing anymore. But yeah, I remember a lot of alfalfa sprouts in my childhood. lol

Man, I used to buy them and make turkey sandwiches with them and some sliced avocado. I miss that.

You can’t find them in the grocery store anymore?? I always have them on hand.

I live in California and haven't seen them in the grocery store in several years. They might be at the farmer's markets around me, but I hardly ever have time to go and look. I miss them!

Try Ralph’s, Vons or Sprouts. I’m also in CA and the only store I go to that never has them is Trader Joe’s. They stopped selling them after that outbreak some years ago.

Toasted wheat, thin sliced deli turkey, avocado, sprouts, some whole grain mustard, a nice tomato slice. Man, I lived on these sandwiches in college!

Oh man I have such a hankering for this now! A little bacon would send this over the top

I knew I was forgetting something !

One of the restaurants that provide catered lunches for my company still makes sandwiches with alfalfa sprouts.

Why is this accurate as fuck for no reason?

WOW! I forgot about the devil’s pubes being a popular sandwich condiment. That was a persistent trend from the 70s to … ?

Always felt like hair on a sandwich to me… never understood them.

I was just thinking about this the day.. what happened to everyone having sprouts in their fridge?

I miss sprouts 😩. I always wondered what happened to them. Did they give you e-coli or something?

Damn. Forgot about that

Being English I had to look up what you meant. We call it cress, and it's still used here in sandwiches with salad in. I love it personally

Wait, cress and alfalfa sprouts are the same thing???

Just looked again sorry, they're very similar but cress is a bit more peppery. We have cress here in the UK, not alfalfa sprouts. But its used in the same way in the sandwiches. I like it

Oh, thanks for letting me know.

Ugh those were revolting.

One of my kids really likes them, I buy them semi regularly.

Forgot all about these. Pretty healthy I think, may have to start growing em

I was talking about this the other day and then realised my local sold them! Still great :) :)

Is that another name for cress, or is it a different plant? Because you never see egg and cress sandwiches anymore!

I used to get sprouts on all of my subs, everyone had them, then there that whole salmonella thing, but then no on really got them back after that.

Using "A/S/L?" as an online introduction

You: "M"

Other person: ends chat

Hey now, there is a modern version of this. The Reddit user posting in a NSFW gay subreddit and then being surprised/angry/confused when you as a man like their NSFW man bits because said poster isn't even gay in the first place.

If it was one time I'd have called it as an exception BUT IT'S NOT BEEN ONE TIME!

So they just want to be ogled at in silence, unless a woman happens to be browsing a gay NSFW subreddit and then also wants to reach out privately?

The only explanation that I've been given that has made any sense is they are just karma whores. I suppose because they think women are out for those famous internet dicks instead of just the ones that look nice and are attached to a decent personality.

Ahh the memories.

[door shut sound]

18/f/cali u? xx

I was actually a female from Cali and would get called out for being a liar all the time.

You are 100% without a doubt a creepy 60-yr old man.

Actually I'm only 40

Living in a van by the river?

A van? I wish!! It's a Ford Tempo

Lmao. We had a Tempo in the early 90s and what a POS. It blew up with less than 20K miles. We ended up getting a 90 Honda Accord and I fell in love. I ended up owning two of those 4th Gen Accords after I got my license. Awesome cars.

Every Honda we've ever had lasted at least 250k without major problems. It was amazing. My parents 1985 didn't die until 2012-3. And it was the body that went, not the drivetrain. If it wasn't for road salt, I'm convinced that thing would still be going.

That's exactly what a creepy 60-yr old man would say.

Not necessarily mutually exclusive. The quote is "WAS a female from Cali"

From Arkansas

Which brings up something else that is rare or non-existent now, but was common in the 90s: respect for your elders.

to be fair we've just moved to a system of respect having to be earned rather than simply granted due to age. And given that our elders poisoned the planet, tanked the economy and now charge us extortionate prices to put a roof over our heads, those elders need to do a lot to earn that respect.

Meh. You did a real song and dance to explain why you judge an entire group of people as unworthy of your respect without even knowing them. It doesn't work that way kid. If you don't show people respect from the start, you'll never get there.

I don't judge an entire group od people; that's the point. I don't judge them - or anyone - as being worthy of my respect until they show me that they are worthy of my respect. And someone assuming that they should have my respect because they're my "elder" is a pretty quick way to lose my respect. As is calling me a kid when I'm 33 years old. Nobody automatically earns my respect for being older than me.

Nor will anyone find me disrespectful until they present me a reason for it. I'm a perfectly polite and friendly person and have no trouble making friends and working well with colleagues and clients alike. But if someone is to assume I should show them respect because they're just older than me, then that means they're automatically deeming themselves as higher in the pecking order for some reason, and that won't pass with me. I don't care if you're an "elder", or my manager or the god damn queen. You don't get my respect until you treat me as your equal.

Most of the time when someone complains about "kids these days" having no respect for their "elders", it's usually down to said elders having no respect for kids and assuming authority that they don't have.

Simply put, I've no interest in kissing ass to someone who hasn't earned it. You want my respect; you give me a reason to respect you.

Dude, if you treat people without respect from the moment you meet them, why the F would they ever "earn" your respect. YOU JUST SAID "you want my respect; you give me a reason to respect you." Guess what? Treating people disrespectfully IS A REASON for them to NEVER give you a reason to respect them. You can't remove your OWN behaviour from the equation and just blame the other side.

That's exactly what I do though, that's my point. Really when I meet someone they find me at my most neutral; and then it is their behaviour which will determine whether I respect them, just as I expect the same fromt hem.

Point being, I don't "respect my elders". I respect everyone who deserves my respect and I don't base that on their age. But if someone expects me to treat them with higher respect than any other stranger on the street simply because they are older than me - and again this often converts into a sense of self entitlement and authority simply due to age - then that's a way to rapidly lose my respect.

That's really my point. This idea of "respect your elders" usually translates to "do what I say and behave the way I tell you to and give me priority because I'm older than you" which is bullshit. It's an inflated idea of self importance and an assumption that age should give you immunity from other people's backlash simply because you've lived longer. I have every right to talk back to my boss or my parents or a police officer or my teacher (when I was a student) if I believe they're wrong and I'm right, or if I believe they're disrespecting me. I barely believe in authority hierarchies as it is, never mind ones based on age.

I'm an elder, did not go for the career, never ear we much, never got a driver's licence, etc

Why in the world are you getting down voted!

Could it be because I'm an "elder"? Nah... LMAO

I'd imagine, (I didn't vote so don't come for me lol) that it stems from those who didn't have respectable elders. I was raised to respect my elders, but those same elders that I see now that I am the elder as well, were really some PoS people in my life and I had no control over allowing them in my life because at the time I was a child.

I honestly believe before the age of 10, you should respect your elders as you're told to do by your elders. But after that age, it needs to start transitioning into a 2 way street. If you can't respect the children you raised, then you should not expect them to respect you.

Respect is GIVEN not expected. I'm just talking about being kind and friendly to older folks in public, but nope, what I see is exclusion and ageism. Everyone is "creepy". WTF? Current society and it's helicopter children are oblivious to what it takes to build a town or community. If this "creepy 60 year old man" comment was a one off, that would be one thing, but I see this shit everywhere. Until I talked to the 80+ year old man alone at the bar, the other day, all the youth in there acted like he was a piece of furniture. Younger generations think they are super inclusive and non-judgemental, but it's all virtue signalling. They will age to be worse assholes than the baby boomers. (If the baby boomers don't cause WWIII).

No, that would be me

Are you.... are you not a female anymore? I mean, you used to be, but not now?

/s

LOL I’m in a different state now!

The male state?

What part of Cali?

Are you from Frisco?

“Frisco”? GTFO

Its that city close by the Silicon Valley

Im from San Diego. Moved out of state now

I put on my robe and wizard hat!

I meditate to regain my mana, before casting Lvl. 8 Cock of the Infinite.

No? Me neither. I just wanted to make sure you were cool.

and 36/24/36 if someone ask for measurements.

only if she's 5'3"

I think that was my locker combination

Lies everyone knows there are no girls on the internet...

And when you actually ARE 18/F/Cali... omg, the creepy mofos I used to talk to on AIM. LOL One man told me he loved me and wanted me to send him my panties.

You should have offered to sell him some of yours, could have made a fortune!

I wasn't as clever as the 18 year olds are nowadays. The internet was new and strange.

Not falling for that shit again

This is honestly how I met my friend in an AOL chatroom in 1998 (23/f/UK, let's talk about Duran Duran)

The only correct answer! Lol

I always use ASL as an online introduction, but then I’m an interpreter who does video remote interpreting

If that is true, then your presence at this comment was quite serendipitous.

I use asl too but that's because I use interpreters

Don’t you have to be born with that?

Born with what?

Username checks out

I’m young enough I read that as “American Sign Language”. Took me a moment to figure it out.

When I first encountered ASL as a kid, I thought it was a strange way of getting around the filters. I thought it meant "asshole."

F 18 hornet

Do you mean horny?

No ✈️

i used to see that on omegle at lot when i was in high school, lol

Followed by, wanna cyber? And it was just you and your middle school friends on the other side, laughing and assuming the other person wasn’t doing the same to us

And "m/36/FBI" joke replies.

[deleted]

Chris Hansen, is that you?

Today it would be trickier answers would be like... 37/ them /furry convention

I don't even know what that means

Age sex location

Ohhhh, the old chat room introduction. Thanks

I learned/used A/S/L when I used text omegle in middle school around 2009-2011

Wait. Is this chathouse.Com?

[deleted]

It can’t be that hard to type F or M.

Now it just means “as hell”

I remember using AIM. I remember some asshole scaring me off it by trying to sext me or pick me up when I was like 13.

I do NOT recall what A/S/L is.

I’m from the 80s and 90s but sort of missed AIM somehow. What was ASL?

Hi reels, what's your Age Sex Location? I'm 22/f/NY

Oh, got it. Thanks.

Apparently now it means "as hell" or something among the youths.

I still use it and I still use chatrooms

Oh i remember this

Damn, that reminds me of my random chat phase I had when I was like 16.

Old enough to know better/no thanks, you’re not my type/at my computer

I dunno, I never did this. I didn't care about all that as long as I knew that the person I was chatting with wasn't a young kid.

That's where I got my username from, since I made this as my nude-posting account! Everyone asks if I know sign language though :/

VCRs

I still have 2 in my house.

Is one broken and holding up the other?

They actually both work.

Dub a tape!!!

Craig, can I borrow your VCR? I need to dub a tape.

Bye Felicia!

But can you figure out how to set the timer?

Black tape over the flashing 12:00 !!

One to play a video - one to record onto another tape?

I copied all the movies I rented lmao

My buddy's grandpa did exactly that. His library was hundreds of videos too. Said it wasn't illegal because he kept them all for himself and never sold em.

Your buddy's... Grandpa? I'm getting that old?

His grandpa is younger than my dad lol don't worry. Also this was like 15+ years ago.

Ok I'm only in my 30s, was getting worried.

Just 2? Get on this level https://www.twitch.tv/original_joni

“Be kind, rewind” stickers on every rental VHS tape.

Forgotten_VCR = most fun channel on twitch.

Bought one recently for Nostalgia

Forgetting to set the vcr to record your favorite show

In my bedroom as a teenager I had a tv with a vcr built into it I'd bought myself and I felt like the coolest ever. I used to tape shows I liked (such as Xena) that were on when I was at my afterschool job to watch when I got home.

AKA VHS players; not sure if this is a Mandela effect or not, but I feel like everyone has amnesia that they are called VCRs and we’re never referred to as VHS players.

Its only a VCR if it records. These days you don't see too many with that function anymore.....not that you see a lot of VHS devices anyway. Really wish they were easier to get. I dont trust my VHS reader anymore. Fucker likes to eat tapes.

I remember having one VCR rewinder that models a red sports car.

I miss that thing.

Man, I remember the day a friend gave me a DVD instead of a VHS and I thought they just assumed I was rich.

People calling each other instead of texting or emailing

It’s crazy how quickly you can adjust to some new convenience and then the idea of going back fills you with dread. Back in the 90s-00s I had no problem calling up anyone for whatever reason. These days I can barely summon the energy to call my dentist to reschedule an appointment

Phone calls have always filled me with anxiety. It's just that now I have an alternative way to contact people.

Why is that, if you don't mind my asking?

Is it the lack of facial expressions/gestures?

Do you get anxiety just talking to people normally?

Anxiety over phone calls seems common and I've been trying to pin down why.

It's the lack of facial expressions & gestures, along with a lack of cues for when I'm supposed to start talking. I feel like I accidentally interrupt people thinking that they are done, or we end up talking over each other. Cell phone connections are often bad or have low sound quality and it's hard to hear or understand people.

I don't generally have this anxiety about talking to people in person as I feel it's easier to pick up on conversational cues, and I usually don't have trouble hearing them unless we are standing next to a jackhammer or something.

I also feel more comfortable talking on the phone with family members or people I know well, as I feel like I'm familiar with their conversational rhythms or whatever they are called.

Hope this answers your question! It's an interesting topic.

Crystal Clear Pepsi.

Back in '17 I found a few bottles of Crystal Pepsi in a tiny, run down gas station in the ass end of nowhere, tucked into a remote corner of the beverage coolers.

Logic tells me Pepsi briefly brought back Crystal Pepsi.

My heart tells me that shit was sitting there since the 90s.

And it was fuckin' delicious.

Why did I think you were talking about 1917 at first

YOU DRANK IT!!!!

How does it taste anyways? I never got to try it.

Vaguely Pepsi-ish, but like cough syrup if it was ice cold.

“Right now!” 🎶

Pogs of all kinds.

Omg. I have my collection somewhere. Now I have to go find it!

Please share if you do find them! They're really cool, I remember having this really glitzy Spawn slammer and it was so satisfying to use.

I used to frequent a comic shop where the owner had an almost supernatural sense for when things were going to stop being popular.

He got big into football cards when they were going popular then got a hunch that it was going to die down and stopped ordering them just before football cards went totally dead. He had one box left in stock when suddenly everyone stopped buying them and some of the other comic places in town were stuck with cases of them and ate a pretty big loss on it.

Same with pogs. His store was pog heaven for a while, and a few months before pogs stopped being something people did he stopped ordering them, sold his remaining stock and had none left when suddenly pogs were yesterday's news and no one wanted them anymore. Again some of the other comic shops had piles and piles of pogs they couldn't get rid of no matter how much they marked them down.

Dude was just good at judging when a trend was going to end.

Did he buy some Gamestop?

Username checks out.

Maybe he was the guy. He controlled the fads.

Did he get in/out on fidget spinners?

No idea. Last time I was in his shop it was 2014.

Yes! Like ALF pogs!

Remember Alf? He's back! In pog form.

Stop! Don't Touch! Don't Eat! Keep Away! Daddy's Soul Donut (mmm... forbidden donut...)

Anyone remember devil sticks

There are still marks on my parents' ceiling.

I had some devil sticks!

Right. I hijacked this comment because I went so far down and didn’t see it. Figured if you used pogs you’d be the age group to remember devil sticks.

I had a solid metal slammer that looked like a saw blade. That destroyed everything. It was magnificent.

I miss those days.

Remember alf?

He's back... in pog form!

Pure Poison.

That was my favorite slammer!

Good ol Tazos.

Weird right. Pogs were posh but could only be bought from smokey corner shops. Where as Tazos were trashy and came free in packets of the posh crisps. So odd. I wonder if there are similar examples from other media.

I miss pogs. One day I found 5 huge tubes of them at a park! It was the greatest day of my life. One tube was entirely slammers. There must have been at least 300+ in total.

I found my old set of pogs in my moms basement and gave them to my daughter. She LOVED them and so did I. Ahh the 90’s, I miss you!

The word now means something else altogether

Remember Alf?

He's back! In Pog form!

Still have mine! Love those things

Oh my god. I LOVED my pogs. Completely forgot that feeling until just now. 😭

Cool prizes in cereal boxes.

They were a good resource for Pogs.

Better yet, the iconic baking soda submarine from Cap'n Crunch. You put baking soda in a compartment on the top and it would rise and sink in the water.

I don’t remember those.

I have pogs that the local hospital where I was a kid had made. I don't know why the hospital made pogs.

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

There was one episode where the villains stole everyone's voices and everyone was struggling to communicate with each other without talking. Nowadays, they'd just text each other.

Man I remember watching Buffy as a kid and i would go “why didn’t they just call each other” and my dad reminded me they only had landlines. Apparently btvs was the first tv show to use “google” as a verb(i think willow used it like she googled someone)

Everybody was still using Yahoo search then. Google was still in it's infancy. It's sad to think now that Yahoo search doesn't even exist anymore. Yahoo uses Bing now

fucked up. I remember when askyahoo went down. sad day.

Damn bro you just made me realise that part of the internet is missing

Yahoo chat. Then using Yahoo games for chat.

I think that’s why they gave the kids in Stranger Things radios. The actual 80s/early 90s combination of landlines, payphones, waiting, leaving notes, answering machines etc would be too confusing for a modern audience.

Walkie Talkies were a badass Christmas gift to get when you were a kid in the '80s. Top tier. Of course their range was so shitty that you were still in yelling distance when they started cutting out.

The ones in ST are higher powered ones, not the cheap ones sold as kids toys that could only go a couple of blocks. They’re 3 watt. That’d give you about a 5 mile range.

damn I just don't care for the actual "strange" stuff in stranger things lol. I didn't finish watching, but what I liked most about it is the 80's aesthetic. It feels like an old feel good film or something when I was watching it.

This kind of attention to detail makes the show so enjoyable.

My friend's Dad had a proper set of relatively long distance walkie talkies that could tune into the police band, it was amazing.

yea now you can just listen to them online all day. I did that a year or two back to hear if I could get info on the raid they were doing on my neighbors house. I came home to suitcases, armored police, 10+ squad cars, and they were pulling out a battering ram when I was walking into my house. I went straight online to listen for that shit lol.

We used to use walkie-talkies at Disney when we would split up.

I bought legit walkie talkies that have 5000 feet of range at the beginning of the pandemic lol.

I think a lot of people who watch Stranger Things remember when that was common. I'm not even 30 and I remember that

By confusing I mean they would find it hard to relate to, not that they wouldn’t understand the technology. It would make an already complicated plot even messier. I struggle to remember what it was like and I got my first mobile after high school.

Just watch "Thief" because James Caan just passed away and wanted to catch one of his classics. Big part of the story was the characters finding landlines and payphones in order to communicate important info to each other.

I think it would have just been boring for them to search for phones differently.

[deleted]

I can't find a source but Disney comics (more the Italian ones we get here in Germany) omitted mobile phones for the longest time because they made story telling worse.

this is a really smart observation that made me think about a bunch of things regarding the writer's perspective - something I can forget when I'm watching a tv show as opposed to reading a book

Wow, I literally just realized how ironic it is that, in a show where the premise perfectly sidesteps the "conflict would have been avoided if they had cell phones" thing, the conflict would actually have been easier to portray if they had cell phones.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm kinda struggling to come up with any of the plots that would have been easily solved by cell phones. I'll admit it's been a long time since I've last seen the show, though. Like 90% of the time, everyone is dealing with their own immediate danger at once.

I'm kinda struggling to come up with any of the plots that would have been easily solved by cell phones

I've been watching it through this year, and there's multiple that have come to mind. There's multiple times where attempting to get someone picked up at the airport on time, one of those in particular had Jerry's flight or destination airport changed so needed to let George and Kramer know where to find him.

Then there's one where they're trying to coordinate one of the main 4 buy movie tickets while they all want to go off and do something else instead of waiting in line.

Also people were more willing to just go “eh, Bob was supposed to meet me here, I’ll give it 10 minutes and then carry on” and the expectation was that at some point you’d find out what happened to Bob.

DuFrene party of two. How can someone eat while the DuFrenes are missing.

Bob had a baby pizza boy.

Only 90s kids will understand this ... but for real?

Same with Friends, over half the plots would have no story or conflict as written if cell phones were a thing like they are now.

It took a while for writers to adapt to cell phones, there was a brief era right after cell phones became ubiquitous where every movie or TV show would start by having the characters tell each other that due to X their phones won't work here, or they'd just have the person's phone run out of battery and no one would ever think to charge it, or whatever.

Then they came to terms with the change and shows, books, movies, whatever have phones normally and they found ways to write in suspense or confusion or what have you without taking away the phones.

I never noticed it being a pain back then. People actually showed up. Post 2004 or so when everyone got a touch screen phone, flakiness became a national trait, and since then people are hardly there when they are there - staring at their phones.

The early seasons of Sex and The City as well! Its actually like a time capsule in some ways, a lot of then new tech (cell phones, laptops, email, Amazon…) was featured on the show.

They haven't posted anything in a while, but check out "Modern Seinfeld" on Twitter. https://twitter.com/seinfeldtoday?lang=en

Rom coms:

"Hey, is Sarah here? I need to tell her I love her before she moves back to her parents and leaves my life forever-"

"Sorry, she just drove off two minutes ago. Enjoy dying alone."

But the converse with that is that people were less likely to flake.

Its so easy now to shoot a text and go "hey, im not going to make it" or "i'm going to be a bit late".

Back then, if a time was set, you kind of had to be there.

I imagine Home Alone being filmed today.

“Hey mom, you all left me at home when you went to the airport. “

End credits

So true! Funny.

Heh, we've been rewatching Seinfeld since it came back to Netflix and I'm laughing a bit at all the things that would be lost on current generations. For example, one episode where Jerry's girlfriend du jour (Lorelei from Gilmore Girls) would actively rearrange her speed dial entries as a sort of ranking of relationship status. Kids today: "What the heck is speed dial?"

I just started watching a few weeks ago, I’m on season 7. My friend was always raving about how great and funny it is so I gave it a try & can’t believe I haven’t watched it sooner!

A corollary is the satisfaction of slamming the phone down when hanging up after a fight with your gf.

all the households i still know in the UK have landline phones, albeit it's starting to die off but most people still have a landline of some form.

Do you still have copper cables for them to plug into or are the home phones going through fibre or 5g?

we got rid of our landlines when we moved a few years ago, and at that point it was connected to our internet modem to work

Opposite for me. I haven't visited a house in the UK with a landline in about 6 or 7 years.

Do you like scary movies?

My grandmother's the only person I know with one. Last year a flood destroyed the little box in the back yard the copper lines connect to. ATT doesn't bother fixing the copper anymore, they just put some kinda device in the house that ties the land line to their fiver.

I think it stopped working a few weeks later. lol

My cell phone gets terrible service where I live and having Wi-Fi calling seems to make no difference. So I’ve been dropping jokes with family when we get disconnected that I’m going to just get a landline for them to call. I’m still somewhat considering it.

My son is 14 & he can barely grasp this concept. Its hard for him to understand.

I moved into my current house in 2006, and I have NEVER had a landline installed.

They are in a big part of households where I live (Germany) because they're included with your internet service (you get a landline to landline flatrate) but most people don't ever use them.

I still have one

Still fairly common even in Metro NY

Many rural areas in the states rely on landlines

I still have a landline (no phone connected, but I could) as it's the only way I can get internet access. 75mbps so perfectly usable but I would like faster speeds.

Paying in order to listen to a song you liked, or sitting in front of the radio with a tape recorder and trying to get it fully without the radio staff speaking mid chorus.

My tape recorder was so bulky! Now I have Spotify and can’t imagine going back.

Buying batteries, so many batteries

And they were all shitty Zink Carbon batteries as your parents bought the cheapest ones.

This is true unless you have young kids. So many batteries...

Was about to comment this. The amount of batteries required for kids toys these days is insane

Tho I see a lot of toys going for internal batteries and USB charging.

Damn that first gen Lego Mindstorm. Needed 8 AA and didn't last like an hour.

This is a legit response. Lots more embedded lithium ion recharging batteries now.

I used to get a brick of 40 AA batteries for Christmas every year for most years in the 90's.

Free battery cards! RIP Radio Shack.

I saw an old Radio Shack sigh a few days ago (think it was the back entrance) and was flooded with nostalgia.

There are still some shops that sell stuff branded "Radio Shack" and can keep the signage of some sort, but its online name or twitter seems to be owned by some kind of sleazy crypto company now.

and happy cake day.

Actually I think we buy more batteries now than ever. Fire stick remotes all over the place. Powered toothbrushes. Lots of other accessories.

I live a battery-free lifestyle nowadays. Anything powered by DC gets it from a charger in the wall.

I do it for my electronic toothbrush still

My dad was ahead of the curve - NiCD AAs everywhere and AA to D adapters - sure they were only 500mAh, but enough to keep a bored kid entertained and got recharged after I was done

I still have rechargable batteries from the late 90s. For the limited number of low power things I still need them for they just keep on going..

Sanyo Eneloops have been around for about over decade now. They actually stay charged for long periods and totally worth upgrading to. Also handle high power loads very well

I'm a caver and that's all I use underground. I have some Eneloops that are over 12 years old and they are still going strong.

I still use batteries for a number of things. Wiimotes, wireless Xbox 360 controller, roku remotes, bluetooth keyboard, and now kid's toys.

People with an Xbox punching the air rn

always went w/ the smoking section cause the wait was shorter

The smoke would end up wafting into the non-smoking section anyway

It’s still crazy that only like 15 years ago we still had smoking sections. I’d say a ton of restaurants before the Great Recession in 2008 had the smoking section.

Smelling cigarette smoke is kind of nostalgic to me now, even though its super bad for you.

That heavily depends upon the region you are in. Some more liberal states banned smoking in restaurants years before 2008. There are still some more rural parts in the South where smoking in restaurants is not only legal but still common today.

I smoked pretty heavily from 18 onwards and then quit when I was 22. I'm in my 30s now but damn I will always love that smell.

Pubs/bars just smell like beer now. The combined stale beer/cigarette smell to me felt soothing.

and farts, and sometimes BO

Yep, cigarette smell masked all that well.

Yep. I'm glad the cigarettes are gone... but I don't like smelling what they covered up.

I stopped at a restaurant in Texas that had a smoking section.

...in 2016

When I was 6-7 or so, I remember going to dinner at a Cracker Barrel with my parents and grandparents. We were seated where the smoking and non-smoking sections met. There was a lady sitting at a table next to us who was smoking pretty much non-stop. Now, as a kid growing up in the 90’s, I was used to being around people who smoked, but I remember trying to stifle my coughs, but couldn’t. Eventually, my grandmother got fed up with this lady and told her to stop smoking because I couldn’t breathe.

I remember a Fridays in my town just put in this big expensive ventilation system in the early 2000s and like literally a month later smoking was banned in NY. It was kinda funny

I remember always saying "first available" when asked.

There was always a moment of tension when my dad would look back at the family before answering “smoking” or “non smoking” because it might have meant waiting an extra ten minutes at Bonanza

I’m up in Alaska and we have a restaurant up here with a smoking section, blew my mind cause I hadn’t seen one in so long

The wait. Is that for a restaurant? I've never really experienced waiting for a restaurant except in Korea.

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.

Before there was smoking/nonsmoking, there was just smoking. Smoking was everywhere. The separation of smoke/nonsmoke in restaurants didn't start until the '70s, at least in the U.S. I think the airlines started separating the two about the same time, which made no sense at all considering everyone is breathing the same recycled air.

There’s a restaurant called “Big Boy”?

Yes. Bob's Big Boy. In my opinion, the best chain resteraunt for casual dining. Great burgers and frys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s_Big_Boy#/media/File:Bobs_big_boy_burbank_2014-01-21_3.jpg

Also Frisch's Big Boy. Same thing, just depends what part of the country you're in.

Abdow's Big Boy checking in.

lol that’s even worse. What a weird name

Yeah, they were JB's Big Boy in Montana.

Yes ... it's got a weird history and relationship with Shoney's.

This happened to my family in Austria in the mid 2000s.

It was always geared towards the ‘smoking’ too. Almost felt like you were the odd one for saying non.

Isn't that weird? I remember as a kid thinking that too. Like my family was being uppity and acting better than everyone else for saying "non". I always felt like 80% of the people sat in the smoking section and that just a few yuppie loosers like us sat in non smoking. I feel like the hostess would almost roll their eyes at you too like "oh some of these people".

I wish we were going "non" back then.g At least Y2K happened and now smoking indoor almost everywhere is prohibited.

​

A long drive in a car with 2 smokers is unbearable....

Oh man I know. My dad was really against smoking and would always talk bad about people that smoked and no one on either side of my family smoked.

Then my first serious girlfriend in high-school - half her family were smokers. Her grandma and 2 aunts would chain smoke ultra lights all the time and if you ever rode in the car with them they would just barely crack the window, would smoke in other people's cars and houses without permission, and basically smoked one every 5 minutes. I loved them all but man I took some rough car trips and some of their houses were unbearable for me to be in because I have asthma.

I guess if you bring in even just a moderate group of half a dozen people or so, there's a good chance one of them is going to be a smoker (especially back then, it's less common now) and that's all you needed to have to be seated at a smoking table.

Having a smoking section in a restaurant was kind of like having a peeing section in a pool.

More like smoking or just breathing in the haze lol.

I was still pretty young when they banned smoking in restaurants where I live but I vividly remember thinking "wow, it's almost as clear as my house in here" the first time I went the restaurant that I can still remember the most vividly from that time period.

As an aside, that was such an awesome thing as an asthmatic.

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A big part of the campaign to change the law where I live in Canada was a woman who was diagnosed with lung cancer and what her doctors called a "smokers tumor" her claim was that she had never smoked a day in her life but she had been a waitress for 40 years in a diner, constantly around second hand smoke. I remember she was a single mom and she would talk about how the air was blue from smoke and stuff like that.

Her name was Heather Crowe and it actually looks like some of the ads she did even made it down to the US because the end of this short one I found on YouTube has markings from an anti-tobacco group from South Dakota:

https://youtu.be/W4fzTdjqvt0

Ya this is so insane to me. I'm too young to remember smoking sections in restaurants (I think Canada banned it earlier than the States) but even as a person who smokes... the idea of everyone smoking, INSIDE, in a place where they serve FOOD?! It just seems so unsafe and nasty

And you always have to walk through the smoking section to get to the non-smoking section. I'm so glad so many places have outlawed indoor smoking.

I'll choose non smoking but put me right next to the table of people who are smoking.

​

(I should write Family Guy cutaways).

I'll still occasionally walk in to a restaurant and say "4 for non" and the hostess will look at me like I have six heads.

I do that, too!

"First available"

Around 200, me and my buddy/boss did a weekend drive to Vegas from Winnipeg (24 hours drive). Stopped in Salt Lake City, at a Denny's, and asked for smoking.

Waitress is like "This here is a Mormon state, boys, there is no smoking anywhere!".

Boss - "Ha! We've been smoking in the car the entire way!"

“Smoking, non, or first available?” And you always said “first available” because you were so damn hungry!”

Didn't hear that im a long time.

Yep. And sometimes even if you wanted non-smoking, they'd only have a table in the smoking section, so you'd take it to avoid having to wait longer

my 2002 taurus had an ash tray and cigarette lighter. when i finally had to get a new car i was so lost without it. what an amazing convenience it was. i remember my dad had an older lincoln car and even the back seat doors had ash trays!

And I remember the first cell phones were plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car! Today, cars don’t even have cigarette lighters!

I have an ‘86 Hyundai Pony, it’s so basic it doesn’t even have a clock or a passenger exterior mirror, but it DOES have dual ashtrays in the back!

Smoking on an aeroplane seems wild now! I did it all the way to and from New Zealand in 1992-93. 20 Benson & Hedges cost £1 on the plane!! So cheap!

Still normal in some places in Europe and Asia, just not on the planes

Asia is at a whole different level than America ever was. People smoke everywhere over there lol

I mean people smoked everywhere in America too. Doctors used to smoke in hospitals and all sorts of wacky shit.

people smoked every where in america too.

doctors visit? doctor is having a cig while checking on you and you are having a cig while geting a check up and chating with the doctor, people smoking at hospitals, people smoking on planes, people smoking every where, walking in to friends houses with a cig ect.

In Thailand its so unusual that anyone smokes now that it sticks out like a gut wrenching punch go the face when someone actually does. A lot of people vape but I've noticed my sensitivity to it is now through the roof being free of that shit. A person having a real cigarette 10 meters away is truly fucking revolting now. Thankfully its rare, maybe once a week - and I'm constantly out and about.

You probably want to steer clear from Indonesia then

Those metal ash trays built into bowling alley seats.

And every office, including the doctor's office.

Matches, single cigarettes, packs of cigarettes behind the bar.

I went to a casino in Florida and was so confused by the ashtrays and smoking. It had been so long.

And at work. My first office job, in 1990, I had an ashtray on my desk but no computer.

And I and all my friends smoked. Now I don't know anyone who does.

I miss smoking

You miss every public place smelling like an ashtray?

I’m an addict that somehow managed to kick cigarettes. Every time I smell one, every time I read a thread like this, I want one.

My mom died of complications living for years after a double lung transplant so dropping cigarettes is the only thing that stuck.

The booze or drugs will get me some day, but not today, fuckers

Edit: don’t be judgy /u/deathspiral321 maybe I’d like to smoke on my own private property dingus

Honestly it smells nice, my grandma used to smoke, it’s a nostalgic smell. Also I used to be a smoker sooo that might be a part of it

I hate most things about smoking, but I do miss how social it it. It’s an excuse to go outside, take a break and talk to the other smokers. It’s also a great ice breaker.

That used to be the case, not so much now. I still smoke, and it's so rare to find other smokers who you can strike up a convo with. Now if I go to a party I'm almost the only one popping outside for a smoke. Its not a social thing anymore because virtually no one is smoking. No more random convo's at the bus stop or train station, or even just out on the street when you're out shopping - now it's find a space where no one is around so you can have a quick one without being thrown dirty looks or having people mutter comments under their breath. There's no more social aspect to miss.

That makes sense. I suppose it’s good that smoking is becoming less and less popular though, but it’s too bad about losing the interaction.

Yea I miss how social it used to be and you were the weird one if you didn't smoke. But at the same time it's good that less people are smoking and there's less people being damaged by it. I've been smoking for just over 20 years now and I keep thinking about quitting, but then things happen and it's my stress reliever so I just don't end up quitting.

Quitting is worth it, but it’s hard! I only smoked for a couple years, but I’m glad I was able to quit when I did.

At the moment I don't have the willpower for it, but it really has to be a "I really want to quit" for it to stick. I tried 15 years ago as my mum wanted to quit really badly but didn't want to do it alone. It stuck for her but it didn't stick for me and I just snuck around smoking behind her back until I was eventually caught by her - I wasn't even living in the same town haha. I just didn't want to quit at the time.

Yeah you for sure have to be completely dedicated to make it stick.

It took me a couple years to not crave them. Now there is no way I would ever have one, but that took a while.

Yea I don't how mum managed it honestly. Took a lot of willpower.

Good on you for making it stick, I'm always happy to hear when someone has been successful in giving it up.

it’s a nostalgic smell

This, I understand.

it smells nice

But it really does not.

When I was in HS/college, I thought a smokey bar was part of the proper atmosphere. Years after it was banned I finally went to a casino for the first time, and it literally smelled like a giant ashtray. It hadn't occurred to me before how much I didn't miss that stench.

I don't smoke but it smells kinda comfy and reminds me of parties and good times.

I quit smoking a few years ago but if I could smoke on a plane I 100% would

I flew American Airlines a few years ago that went from Chicago to Puerto Rico. The plane still had ash trays on it. Couldn’t believe it.

I absolutely do not miss all the smoking everywhere. I have asthma now because of it. Thanks Mom and Dad.

I don't miss smoking on airplanes. OMG it was horrible.

Bingo still does this lmao

And lighters built in to cars.

When I started university in the 90s, many classroom desks had built in ashtrays too.

the bowling alley near me just got rid of smoking like 2 years ago lol. It was the only place I knew that allowed smoking still. It was wild to me that in 2019 or so you could just smoke cigarettes in there while playing pool.

After I moved form SoCal to SLC in the early 90s, CA had banned smoking and one time for at rip trough NV and especially Vegas, went to a restaurant and they said "smoking or non-smoking" and I said "you can't smoke here it's against the law" lol I didn't realize that each state set their rules...I was only 19.

Smoking sections went out in the nineties in Minnesota, But at the native run casinos they were still active until very recently. It was always wild to have gotten so used to their not being smoke everywhere and then if you went to the casino and walked in it would hit you like a wall.

Ash trays in restaurants, bars, cars, and airliner seats

In stores too, I still have an image in my head in a department store, at the end of every isle, there was an ash tray....

In Ohio when they changed the law to no smoking inside I was in high school. My parents and I went to Applebees. Mom lights up. Waitress comes over and informs her she’s not allowed to do that inside anymore. A year later I was in PA and walked into a Bob Evan’s. Was asked if we wanted smoking or non. It was weird for sure. I’m really glad that became a thing.

People born in the 19th century

Ww2 vets

As a child and teen of the 60s and 70s, I recall meeting some old men who were old enough to be World War I vets. I also had a great-uncle who died at the age of 96 in 1980 (born in 1884). He told stories about knowing his great-grandmother (my 3 times great-grandmother who was born in 1805 and lived to be a hundred!

I remember in 1995-6 when I was in kindergarten meeting WWI vets at the ANZAC Day memorial ceremonies. Ancient men in dusty uniforms remembering their fallen friends and comrades when they were barely older than we were.

I imagine that would have been emotional. What those soldiers went through with the trench warfare and the stalemates punctuated by these huge battles which were like 'meat grinders' in terms of casualites for both sides.

Here in the US, most Americans' knowledge of the role that the ANZACs played in the First World War probably is from seeing the movie 'Gallipoli' with Mel Gibson. That was an awful event and I remember talking with some friends about that movie. We talked about the unfairness of all these soldiers from the British empire from far-flung places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa going to fight and die for what seemed like 'a family quarrel' between the royal families of Europe.

Of course, the US did eventually come in for about the last year of WWI and many American solders died but in no where near the numbers that we lost in WWII. So I think that the First World War doesn't 'resonate' with Americans in the same way that conflicts like the Civil War, World War Two and Vietnam do.

That’s AMAZING. I met my oldest relative who was 97 when I was in high school. She was born in 1916 and told me stories about my gggg grandfather.

You're lucky. My grandfather was born in 1898 but he died when I was two so I don't remember him. I did meet some of his brothers briefly in the late 1970s.

Okay, but 19th century means 1800’s, js.

Which is ridiculous in the first place, because how many people born in 1850-1890 made it to 1990? Probably not a lot haha

About a million

https://i.imgur.com/qpwn4x4.jpg

huh. Sounds like a lot, but if that's for the whole world population, I suppose it's not. Also, you can't really gather anything from that pic you're sharing (it's cropped to cut off a lot of info/details).

People that were born in the 19th century and made it to the 21st century must have seen the most amount of technological change of anyone in human history. Widespread use of electricity, telephones, cars, antibiotics, radio, music recordings, TV, air conditioning, flight, nuclear power/weapons, space flight, computers, the internet and smart phones. It's truly mind boggling.

My grandmother was born in 1907 and died in 2010. Her life started with horse drawn buggies, hardly anyone had a car, no airplanes, most didn’t have indoor plumbing. Lived through automobiles and all of the highways and roads being built, electricity and plumbing becoming standard, air travel, radio, movies, television. Was a teen during the roaring 20s. Lived through the Great Depression. By the end of her life we would write to each other via email. She lived to be 103. I was always asking questions, loved listening to her life stories. Wrote a biography on her for a school project. What a century to live through.

And we are still changing at such a fast pace. It’s amazing to think about how quickly innovation has changed our lives starting around the industrial revolution.

That's an amazing story, thanks for sharing!

I think comparatively we're slowing down. Most of the new technology we've seen are evolutionary vs revolutionary. After going through science classes from high school through university, for me, all the discoveries in the 20th century were the "low hanging fruit".

The amount of time and money required to make a game changing discovery now seems to be orders of magnitude larger. A crude example is cures for some forms of cancer are possible now (CAR-T cell therapy) but it wasn't discovered by accident like penicillin.

Yes. When I attended a high-tech conference called portentiously "Accelerating Change", it occurred to me that my grandparents ha seen much more striking changes in their lifetimes than we have. It should have been called "Decelerating Change". The big changes during my life have been the Internet, Political Correctness, cellphones, and unattractive tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair colors.

My great-grandmother was one. Born in 1893, died Christmas Eve 1995. She had some interesting stories to tell sometimes.

I’m 42. My great great aunt died in 1994 when I was 14. There is a picture of us eating ice cream together. She was born in 1889. 🤯

Yep, my grandparents didn’t quite make it! They were like 1910!

My great-grandfather was born in 1891 and died in 1991. Pretty sure he's the person I personally knew who was born the longest ago.

My great-grandfather who I never had the chance to meet was born in 1894 and died in 1996 at 102. He was at least able to meet and get to know my older brother.

Columbia house 1cent deal

I had BMG. Same thing basically.

I was bold and did both. So did my dog.

Same. My teacher told us they couldn’t get us before turning 18 and to load up. I had a pretty great CD collection!

He was a great teacher.

The babysitter my parents hired for my little brothers taught us this same thing!

The Science Fiction Book Club for me. Then I'd forget to send in the thing every month and I'd have to pay for a book that I didn't want.

I think i owe BMG $30...

We all owe BMG $30

Still have my 2 VCR tapes needed to watch Scarface. Cost me $80 when all said and done. Don’t recall what I selected for the penny! 😂

I had Scarface, Titanic, and Casino- all long movies that needed 2 VHS tapes.

When I was in high school, we had a foreign exchange student from France. He subscribed to both Columbia House and BMG - got a crap load of CDs and then went back to France. He owed them both so much money when he left.

I will see you a Columbia House and up you a BMG, you got like 12-15 for 1 cent + like $2 shipping.

Books, music AND movies

i would alternate between Columbus House and BMG, getting the intro offer, then ke woideping whatever they sent until they got pissy about $. i would respond by writing a letter stating that as a minor, i could not enter into a legally binding contract outside parental consent. lather. rinse. repeat.

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!

I know its only like 500 cents now!

500 cents? Well that sounds like a steal!

It's not even an option on my text keyboard anymore. I have to type out cents now.

Prodcue sections used to be full of cent signs!!

Remember when the produce section would have a man going around misting all the green stuff?

I worked in retail and grocery in the '00s and early '10s and actually used the cent symbol pretty regularly. There used to be a fair number of things under a dollar... like tins of soup or packets of noodles.

I want to go back to the 90s im tired😭

First tank of gas I ever got for my own car was 99¢ in CA and that was the one and only time I paid less than a dollar for gas.

I remember filling up once for 66 cents a gallon in '99

It was in the 70 cent range when I first got my license. I figured I could fill my my clunky SUV for under $20 forever…

I remember sometime in the 90s my friend's mother filled up their Land Rover for 20 bucks and it blew my mind how expensive that was every time they needed gas.

When Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris’ record, a gas station in my hometown sold gas for 62¢/gal the next day.

I was a cashier at a truck stop during that week, and it was the busiest week ever it was insane, we had so many drive-offs, it was like wtf why are people still stealing gas when it's this cheap?!?

I, too, watched that scene in Die Hard.

I remember being properly pissed off when it went over $1 a liter in Canada.

Lowest I remember paying was $1.35 ish. Lowest I remember seeing was 88 cents.

Was living in Black Diamond, AB. .33/liter during Gulf War

You realize a gallon is 3.76 liters, yeah?

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It averages out bc the cold makes Canadian penises 30% smaller

Was I supposed to convert it? Didn't say it was the cheapest. For Canada, might've been close though.

Cheapest I've ever heard of for Canada. Wow....

I started driving in '98 living in Alberta and it was still in the low 40s

I remember paying $0.80 a gallon for 94 octane premium and bitching about it because regular was $0.73 a gallon. My camaro was thirsty at 7 mpg, 22 gallon tank.

Shoot, during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 I was paying $1.20/gallon in TX. But the lowest that I remember paying for gas regularly, was 99 cents/gallon in the late 1990s.

I lived in the SF Bay Area and gas spent most of its time in the 1.00-1.20 range until mid 1999 when it went to 1.50 and people lost their fucking minds.

Gas wars in the 70’s. Ten cents a gallon.

Truth. I delivered pizza and could refill the gas tank with the tips from the first delivery.

I remember when a slice of pizza in NYC was 75 cents.

I remember it dipped below a dollar in 1999 but for the most part I remember gas generally being around 1.20-1.30

I worked at a gas station from 1993-1994. Regular gas was $1.20 when I started and $1.35 by the time I left. However, there were certainly cheaper as well as more expensive prices in other parts of the country. Can also remember a few times after I left it briefly dipped below $1.

What I find amusing is how people remember that era. The brief dips in prices are remembered as being the entire period of time. And The reason most people rarely spent more than $12 on a fill up is partially the majority of cars I was filling up back then were tiny, 4-6 cylinder cars with 10-12 gallon tanks. The average car today holds 18-20 gallons.

It dipped below a dollar in 2020 in some areas. Lowest I paid in that time was $1.20 though. What I would've give for another oil war between Russia and the Saudis.

When I started driving in NY in 1996, diesel was .99¢/gal, regular $1.09/gal, mid grade, $1.19/gal, and premium $1.29/gal. Used to cost me $13 and change to fill my 86 Vw golf diesel and a tank lasted me over 400 miles. ‘‘Twas a good time to drive for no reason.

I bought my new F250 power stroke diesel because diesel fuel was 80 cents a gallon in 2000, several cents cheaper than gas.

Same here. I ordered mine in 2000 and in the 6 weeks it took to be delivered the prices swapped, and diesel became more expensive than unleaded where I live. So yeah, blame me :(

Back when diesel was cheaper than gas...

Pepperage farms remembers…

I remember people complaining about how high gas prices were back then.

I also remember people commenting on how they didn't know how good they had it when it went up to $2/gallon. "Man, remember when we complained about gas going up to $0.90/gallon? And now we'd love to go back to them."

I remember it going over a dollar and my mother almost had an aneurysm because of the price.

I'm so glad she isn't around to see it now..

I remember "putting a fiver in the tank" in college in the mid-90s filled half the tank of my sedan.

The very painful and sad thing about this comment is that minimum wage has barely budged from what it was when gas was that cheap

Yeah, but I was making $3.35 an hour. That wasn’t cool.

Ah the days when you could fill the tank and get change back from your $20

I remember when a gallon of gas at the pump was cheaper than a gallon jug of water in the sore.

I really miss the days when I was a teenager and complaining with the rest of my country that gas was like $2.50 a gallon because of the Iraq War

Remember filling your tank before you paid?

Could say the same... But for a liter not a gallon (Not US).

I remember prices being 50 pence/litre. I paid 4x that per litre, 2 days ago (that’s approximately $9/US Gal for any of you USA folks).

I also remember when fuel went over £1/litre and there were mass protests. It went over £2/litre to nothing much more than a “slight tutting”.

Yup. I remember when it was $0.99.99/gallon for regular and $1.24.99/gallon for super. My mustang took super.

I took a picture of it last time it was under a dollar for sentimental value

In the mid 90s, i had an 89 hyundai excel as a teenager.

It had maybe a 9 gallon tank. Never once did i spend more than 10 bucks to fill it, and i would roll into the gas station with the engine cutting out at times.

When it went over $1 a lot of places around here had to put the 1 on a piece of cardboard cause their sign couldn’t handle anything more than 99c

Neither could the pumps. I remember the short period of time when they put half the price on the pump and doubled it (until they got a new pump). Of course, that was pre-90s...

I remember being a kid and it being a big deal when it went close to a dollar a gallon

Smokes and gas for the same price . Everyone would empty their pockets and chip in. Get fountain sodas a couple packs of cigarettes and the rest in the tank and we would just cruise.

That was 2 years ago. Briefly.

I've seen a few abandoned gas stations in the Southeastern US that left their last gas prices up on the signs.

Lowest I've seen was 95¢/gal, and another like $1.93. For 93 octane/premium

I've seen it under $1, one time. It was .74 at a Love's somewhere off I-35 in Oklahoma back in 1997. Gas was regularly a little over a buck a gallon at the time. I'd never seen it under $1 before or since.

I remember when 9/11 happened the diamond shamrock by my house went from $1.05 to $1.25 overnight and that's the highest I'd ever seen gas in my life. $1.25!

Aussie here, it's like two dollars a litre or some shit now (keeping in mind a litre is less than a gallon and an Aussie dollar is worth less than a US one which I'm not sure counters it or not). I remember my mother complaining when it was 80 cents one time, me thinking that was pretty cheap to fill up a car (I assumed that was the cost of the whole tank, not just a litre lol).

Technically I’ve seen it under a dollar in around 2013. It was 99 cents a gallon. Though it was gone in a day or so. Will probably never see it that low again.

I remember being 17 and freaking out when gas was 79 cents a gallon because it was so expensive.

Around the time I started driving, it was $1.25 a gallon. 🥺 I miss it.

I remember thinking how expensive gas had gotten, being $1.15 when I went to college. I was excited to see it for 99 cents there in my small college town until Labor Day hit and we all went home for the weekend.

Fuel was 97 cents a gallon for premium when I was in high school. Used to raid couch cushions for gas money

I could drive for days for 3$

The most depressing shot in the movie Die Hard is when the cop exits the convenience store/gas station and looks up at Nakatomi plaza and the camera pans up past the sign with the gas prices… I remember when all the parents of my friends and classmates lost their collective mind when gas went up over a dollar and never came back down.

I remember noticing that gas was 89c/gallon the day I started driver's ed in 1988.

I remember my dad would give me a $20 for gas and i'd have plenty of change left over to buy a few things for myself

I remember 73p in the UK. And then remember they had to change all the signs to include another space to start using 100s of pennies. Currently in Scotland it's 169-195p which is fucking diabolic. The highest I've ever seen it.

Every time I see Die Hard, I see the Arco with gas 74/77 cents per gallon..lol

Gas under a dollar lasted longer than most people realize. The last time I paid 0.99 or less was around 2006. Not recent anymore, so the connection to the OP is valid, but most people seem to think it never happened again after 9/11.

And driving a car with a 3.5 liter engine and not worrying about consumption. Drive as much as you want, it's cheap.

And as an European: insanely (for our standards) cheap diesel fuel

Yeah I was gonna say $1.20 for gas was expensive!!!

It went to 95-99¢ in 2020 for us in the South. Now over $4... In 2019, it'd be 2.50-3ish

I can remember being in high school and being able to fill my tank with a ten-dollar bill.

99 cent gas was amazing. If I let the car get empty, I would hand the dude a $20 and still get $7 back in change.

My parents would definitely miss that. Nowadays, you'd be lucky to get even $4 a gallon.

The US was paying way too little for gas back then

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.

Wasn’t it the law in the 90s that either you or someone you knew had to have a birthday at a roller rink?

I feel like this one is making a comeback. So many ppl are getting into rollerblading. In nyc - they just started a roller rink season @ Rockefeller center.

Big picture, yes…but there are 2 near me in the suburbs and my daughter had a lot of fun going last week!

This guys daughter had fun there last week, guys....the industry is saved!

You know you don’t have to comment, right?

That's how I feel about continued existence of the masses

There were 2 near where I lived. One was open since ‘61, but it’s roof collapsed and they couldn’t afford to fix it so now it’s gone for good.
The other one I went to a few weeks ago is kinda lame now for kids. It’s 2.5 hours per session (which sucks cause then you have to go out and pay for another one if you wanna keep skating) and it sucks for kids cause under 17 you need adult supervision of someone that’s over 24, so kids can’t even go to stay out of trouble on the weekend anymore without a guardian. When I was a kid my parents used to just drop us off for a couple of hours with a few bucks and that was that.

Legit, ours shut down last January. It was very sad. More and more people just sit inside now a days.

My elementary school did skate nights. They would reserve the ring once in a while and it was so fun to go see all my friends outside of school. Parents would just drop us off and let us have fun for hours. I'd play arcade games and roller skate all evening. Once in a while they did them for free also and those were the best ever, no entry fee!? I'm surprised but my cousin is only 14 and somehow he loves roller skating and goes pretty frequently with his friends. Idk how they got into it, but it's cool to hear.

There's one a mile from my house and I keep thinking I need to take the kids before it disappears.

They have a roller rink near me, like 3 towns over (20-30 minute drive depending on traffic) and its been there since the 90's, the redid the whole place like 10 years ago or so. Ita kinda nice and it's always packed

Before covid? Like 2020?

Had a birthday party at the local roller rink. They were still sending my parents postcards to have another one years after I moved out! My kids have been but it is not the same. My current local one requires adult supervision on Friday nights now.

One has just opened near me. Super trendy at the moment!

Hell theres one in my town, one in the city south of me 25 minutes away and one in the city east of me 25 minutes away. They're not as dead as youd think they are!

I was going to say inline skating/rollerblading. There are still a few roller rinks around, even near me, but the days of seeing a bunch of people skate around are gone. I would probably try to pick it up again myself if I could find good ones in stores, but most of the crap you see is for kids and I won't buy stuff online like this.

The last roller rink I knew of around here was still hanging on until COVID struck. I’m still pretty bummed about them closing.

We had regular skating parties hosted by our school back in the 90s. It was a lot of fun. I think theres still one roller rink by us, but the other was turned into and indoor shooting range, with a bbq food truck outside. Very american

They were hangouts... Where we would meet girls.... LOL

My city still has a roller rink that's been around for decades. I'm not sure how busy they are in the age of the pandemic but they're still in business.

I remember seeing a Vice tv documentary not long ago called “United Skates” (I think that was it) that covered this topic. It was very interesting tbh :-)

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.

I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I woke up January 1st, 2000. I was 10 years old and kind of hoping for The Jetsons lifestyle. LoL

We didn't get them in 2015 either.

Back to the Future missed the Cubs by just one year, though.

There was an old show in the 90's called "Beyond 2000". It really made it seem like amazing days where ahead. I mean, there are some amazing things now that weren't around then. But it sure doesn't feel like it.

To some extent there are "flying" starboards but last I checked they're on a set path. They're literally hovering off the ground due to some magic science stuff but the magic science stuff has to be on a path and the "hoverboard" can't get off of it.

Video: https://youtu.be/bvYUq6Ox0Hc

I didn't realize this video is 6 years old... I wonder if any advancements we're made.

2001: some terrorists gave America a bloody nose and we stabbed ourselves in the heart to stop the bleeding.

I wish those of you who never knew the optimism of the 90s could go back and feel what it was like. Things weren't perfect, but everything felt like it was going in the right direction.

Oh for the days when the biggest news story is whether or not the president got a blowjob.

Was on french-abroad trip when it broke: our guide was baffled why American media thought Clinton was a virgin and didn’t use his power for pussy. Baffled.

Yeah well they had Berlusconi as their neighbour

They don't need a lecherous neighbor to look to, they have themselves!

In modern times, it is remembered the strong character of Danielle Mitterrand, who had to endure a wave of information about her husband’s extramarital affairs, former French President, François Mitterrand (on presidency 1981-1995), published after his death 1996.

The story continued with each of Mitterrand’s successors: Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. The first (married to Bernadette Chirac, a woman of aristocratic origin) had several romances and even rumors of an illegitimate daughter. Despite the apparent problems in the Chirac marriage, Bernadette remained beside Jacques and always advocated in favor of the conveniences of a married president.

The next tenant of the Elysée, Nicolas Sarkozy, also put his name on the list of presidents with romantic scandals. The President between 2007 and 2012 entered the office while he was married to Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, however, almost a year during his term, Sarkozy divorced to marry former model and Italian singer Carla Bruni, whom he had an affair with before.

The next French President, François Hollande, has been no exception when it comes to extramarital affairs and divorces. In January 1014, the French magazine Closer published an article which claimed that the president had a relationship with the actress Julie Gayet. The scandal took its toll for Hollande’s wife, Valérie Trierweiler, who had to be interned in a hospital for stress. The couple divorced and months later and Trierweiler published a book of her memoirs in which described Hollande as a “cold and manipulator liar”. Years before, in 2007, Hollande had already divorced Segolene Royal, the mother of his four sons, and current minister of government.

Well, the issue is she was an intern. Using his power over her was a big no no. And he lied about it.

Silly Americans, why haven't you normalized a man in a position of power getting blown by a very young intern?

I long for simple sex scandals.

Oh for the days when the biggest news story is whether or not the president got a blowjob.

The beginning of the end. Rs rode that shit into the stolen election because folks were still on about purity, and stupid women were mad that Hillary didn't divorce him.

I mean I still think Hillary should've divorced him, evem though I believe he should've continued as the President.

I always felt like they probably had an open marriage. But the public couldn’t even tolerate her damn name being hyphenated so I’m sure we couldn’t handle that then or even today

If he could do that and run the country... Clinton was talented AF

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On the Arsenio Hall Show, another 90’s throwback!

gestures arm rooting motion

Spoiler alert: he did

I like the way you worded this as if there was a channel you could check in on this 24/7. Lol

And then one day, it actually happened.

And not knowing what that meant and you just run about your day

Or a shooting

I mean, that same president also killed half a million Iraqi children with economic sanctions, and bombed a pharmaceutical plant that produced much-needed medicine in Sudan. The fact that the US considered a blowjob to be a big scandal while condemning hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Africans to death warranted barely a shrug, if that, isn't a great indicator of a better country that used to exist.

Downvoters are really just saying that the lives of Arab and African people don't matter and that killing human beings in Asia and Africa is not a significant issue. It's remarkable the extent to which Americans have been conditioned to casually accept mass murder as a matter of course.

The sanctions you're mentioning were from the United Nations after Iraq invaded a UN member state. Tell me about your opposition to current economic sanctions against Russia... no, don't bother.

The bombing in Sudan was justified to us as retaliation for Al Qaeda bombings, because we were told the plant was manufacturing nerve gas for Al Qaeda. Clinton was told it was manufacturing nerve gas. Bad intel led to bad decisions.

America has a long and problematic history of Calvinist morality. The Lewinsky scandal was the political right wing leveraging that for political gain.

Your downvotes are saying YOU are full of shit.

The UK is about 30 years behind with this one...

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When you think about what we lost, I guess the terrorists really did win.

I think they said that it was actually their entire point. They literally did win.

That was just revisionism, read what they said at the time.

queue counter strike voice

To this day I opt out of the TSA scanners just to make gay jokes to the man while he touches me and my junk.

Dude, I’m former TSA and that is such bull shit. What, you think I wanted to touch your junk? Fuck no. It’s part of the job yes, but no one in the TSA wants to do it, we have to. We do it because we have to make money. Many TSA officers are veterans too. All you’re doing is being a dick head, you’re not changing anything.

I remember when those full body scanners became a thing, and a huge deal was made about how everyone should opt out of them and ask for the pat down instead. So the first time I came across one, I was given the choice and stated my preference.

Before the guy even began the procedure, I saw his huge sigh, and as he started to describe what was about to transpire I told him I'd actually prefer the scan. Sorry, he said, once you make the choice there's no going back.

Brother, I had no fucking idea they'd be sticking their hands down my pants while being more thorough than me scraping the last of the queso out of the container. And he legitimately seemed to hate the experience as much as I did. I don't know how many more times he was asked to do that, but that was definitely the last time I ever chose that over the scan...

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My man likes to roll the dice on who’s gonna handle his balls. I think this is just your weird fetish, man. It’s impolite to bring others into your fetishes against their will.

And me and my family avoid the USA for any and all international travel. We’ll take the overlay in Europe, even if it’s more expensive.

9/11 was the beginning of the 24 hour news cycle and the ticker across the bottom of the screen. I remember how completely confused everyone was and the ticker and constant coverage was like triage in a way. I remember wondering when it would go away and on a lot of channels it just never did. We had our collective anxiety cranked all the way up and never made an effort to bring it back down. I remember telling folks in 2020 that I suspected COVID would be a lot like 9/11 was in the sense that all of us would sense and even talk about a “before” and “after”, and here we are.

Edited to add: somewhere there’s a collection of videos from various news stations-local and national-on the morning of 9/11, presented chronologically. It’s weird to watch the whole thing unfold this way and look back on the way the news came out in bits and pieces, often incorrect. You can sense the panic and confusion even though the newscasters put on a brave face.

Ah yeah, I just watched a few days ago what I was told was newly released footage of the Regis and Kelly show on 9/11 and it was weird seeing them try to keep it light when Kelly was clearly shaken

I watch documentaries/news footage every year on the anniversary and sometimes just randomly, so I'm sure I've seen the video you're talking about. I don't remember the day itself, but I remember what feels like every day afterwards because my parents had the news on 24/7. When I was really little, I wanted to watch the news because I thought that's what smart people did. I remember it being way more chill pre-9/11 at the very least, but I got used to news being in your face pretty quickly. Aw man, that transition must've been rough for adults, especially those who had just started to come of age around 10 years after the AIDS crisis and near the end of the Soviet Union. Like, a few good years of promise just taken away. At least my generation grew up with it. But weirdly as an adult I feel more sorry for covid kids than post 9/11 kids (the ones who didn't lose their families or their own lives during/after the attacks), especially in terms of the time they lost than I do adults now

Ah yeah, I just watched a few days ago what I was told was newly released footage of the Regis and Kelly show on 9/11 and it was weird seeing them try to keep it light when Kelly was clearly shaken

Most of us turned to cooking shows and Animal Planet. All the baking contests on Netflix are responses to terrorism.

Listen to the 9/11 episodes of Last Podcast on The Left

But honestly, my life after covid has been considerably better than before - flexi work hours and more work. For the first time in my life since I graduated (10 years) i have landed a permanent and well paid position. I can now buy a house. I could demand a higher salary and a office.But political instability and inflation is a big problem.

"I'm doing great but the world is going to shit" is a very common feeling right now.

9/11 was the beginning of the 24 hour news cycle and the ticker across the bottom of the screen. I remember how completely confused everyone was and the ticker and constant coverage was like triage in a way.

Yep, in addition, fox news really came into its own after 9\11. You can track its ratings jump from there into the iraq war. We've been paying the price for that ever since.

I was in middle school or something when 'they' ( the school or adults or something) tried making 'freedom fries' a thing. God everyone knew it was stupid and collectively rolled their eyes but deep down it just felt... Bad. Like wrong.

I dont think anyone could really articulate the feelings, but for me i remember feeling " Why should we change a fundemental facet of our lives that we know and are comfortable with, and serves no purpose other than to spite some dudes i know nothing about half a world away."

It just felt...wrong. I still cant quite articulate it but it was like forced patriotism that no one really asked for.

And it didn't even spite the French, the whole world was just laughing at America. You guys spited yourselves. I feel bad for Americans now. You are not bad people but your country is fucked.

You guys spited yourselves.

Elected officials attacked products with French sounding names.

Dannon yogurt. The plant is in Western Ohio, currently Jim Jordan's congressional district.

Even better, it was to spite some dudes a quarter of a world away. Early 'murican patriots were mad that the French were dragging their feet at going into war with the US. IIRC, it wasn't even Afghanistan, but Iraq. So they had absolute legitimate beefs with sending money/blood on our behalf.

And some asshats tried to rename our fried potatos over it.

I was 14 when the US invaded Iraq and my family (right wing) was kinda scary with how thoroughly they wanted to go to war; I remember talk radio being incessantly bloodthirsty and angry and my god, it really was different from the 90s by then.

The bush administration went full court press on selling that war. Truth be damned. Most people were fooled.

The Bush administration did an AMAZING, Goebbels-level propaganda move and linked the more easily justifiable actions in Afghanistan to an invasion of Iraq.

The ones who were skeptical were shouted down. The only rep who voted against a war resolution needed extra security amid thousands of death threats.

The Iraq war protests were the largest protests ever held.

Feb. 15, 2003, somewhere between 6 million to 11 million people turned out in at least 650 cities around the world to protest the United States’ push to invade Iraq.

And while they did mean a blue wave in the midterm elections here, all they really achieved was pushing the right in America even farther to the right.

On the March 15, 2003, episode of Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey reported this on the satirical Weekend Update: "In a related story, in France, American cheese is now referred to as 'idiot cheese.'"

Damn I forgot about that hilarious tidbit. Why not simply “fries”?

Internet was a place of freedom, almost the opposite of what then become.

We took a serious hit in 2001 and a second, maybe harder in 2020/1

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You can draw a through-line from one to the other though.

A lot of things changed after 9\11 that led to 2016. The media environment (fox news in particular blew up after 9\11), rising xenophobia\america turning inward\more focus on 'security' etc

2008 as well (not the election...the economic crash).

2001 and 2016 were disasters to be sure, but they only affected a few countries at a time. COVID, general global political destabilization, and inflation affect everyone.

Yes. A lot of people didn’t understand it, neither governments nor corporate had real control and this was overall a good thing.

I was a kid growing up in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was released from jail, we got a new non racial constitution and everyone thought we would be the America of Africa. We were going to be the African exception and we would be a middle class nation. Now our government is corrupt as fuck we have black outs daily and nation wide riots occurred last year which everyone thought could result in civil war. 😔

Crazy times. I hear that Ghana is the America of Africa atm and it used to be Liberia, for obvious reasons. I hope SA can turn around, but tbh, most of Africa seems to be in some sort of neo-colonial arrangement with China, so

Nigeria has the largest economy but rawanda and Botswana are most functional right now. Rawanda is very safe and clean now and Kigali apparently has a thriving fine art scene. I've never been but hope to go early next year (gorilla safari is my dream!) Botswana is safe and stable but very boring in my opinion, although good (but very expensive) safaris. China is definitely making its way into Africa with the new silk road plans, it's good and bad. It was wierd seeing billboards in Botswana which were written entirely on Chinese and not English.

I mean, South africa had this thing where the rich remained rich and didn't actually change the social order, so instead of blatantly oppressing black people they oppress poor people, with black people being way more likely to be in poverty.

It's a shitshow of corruption, mismanagement and the old order now not being racist directly. From a foreign perspective.

So a bit like America after all

I remember my friends and I laughed at one boy who transferred to our semi-rural school from possibly an even more rural school who called french fries freedom fries. We thought he was a little weirdo, but years later I found out some Americans were calling them that as an act of patriotism and he was probably parroting what his parents said. The 2000s were such bullshit!

To be fair, I grew up in a pretty conservative environment, and I never once heard anyone call them that as anything other than a joke.

Ah nah, he meant it. That being said, at the time I was living in a pretty conservative place myself at the time, but no one was that intense about it. Hell, my best friend was Iranian and no one in class gave her shit, at least to my knowledge, fingers crossed. That kid was being sincere, though. I'm not sure exactly sure what the environment he moved from was like, but it seemed ultra southern conservative compared to where we were. Not to say every conservative at the time was that crazy, but we can't pretend people weren't saying it in sincerity either.

Oh, I don't doubt he meant it; it just doesn't surprise me that you were taken aback.

Music got darker

I think this is a classic example of selection bias. The 90s were defined by grunge music and Nirvana. The 00’s was the era of Britney and Boy Bands. Perhaps you began listening and absorbing different music as you got older, but I couldn’t disagree more with your assessment that mainstream music got darker in the 2000’s.

The 90s were defined by grunge music and Nirvana

I feel like that was mostly early 90s

Britney\Boy bands came out in the late 90s.

Britney’s debut album came out in 1999. NSYNC’s No Strings Attached came out in 2000. I agree that they came out in late 90s, but they were peaking in the 00’s.

I wasn't even 10 when 9/11 hit- I listened to what was on the radio and what my parents bought me lol

I just remember I think nu metal? becoming more popular. I agree that not all music became darker- that's an oversimplification- but music with darker tones did become a little more popular. Idk if nu metal is exactly dark in subject matter, but I always found it gloomy. Still, between that, the weirdly patriotic country drivel, and some other pop songs likely referencing everything, music was pretty bleak for a year or two, imo. I'll admit though, I was still mostly listening to tapes and Radio Disney that did play a lot of bubblegum pop and not much else. Music probably just changed under my nose. Late 90s music sounded different than post 9/11 music and while I can't certainly attribute all of that to 9/11, I do think some genres were boosted by the event for at least a year or two

Boy bands were definitely more of a 90s thing. New Kids on the Block started the trend in the late 80s as they were huge internationally. In the UK we had Take That and Boyzone in the early 90s who were both massive and dominated the charts for years, and groups like Backstreet Boys got big in the mid-90s if I recall. Then the girl power trend started with the Spice Girls around the same time and girl bands started popping up too.

All this was happening alongside grunge. I remember specifically because my sister was into boy bands and I was into grunge and metal and we used to argue about hating each other's music all the time.

Grunge definitely defined the alternative scene, but the mainstream was all boy bands and dance music.

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I suppose it depends on where you're from. In the UK boy bands were big news well before 1996. Take That, for example, were banging out top ten singles all the time between 1992 and 1996, they were easily the biggest band in the country at the time.

I never saw anyone actually say freedom fries seriously, I only remember people saying it as a joke to make fun of how dumb it was to try to rename French fries to freedom fries.

For me it was Colombine, then 9-11 and I was like, Oh yaaaa, I'm an adult now

I was a senior in high school when that all went down. Was quite a "welcome to the real world" shift after spending my formative years in a time of peace and optimism.

Ya know, I was just talking to my wife about this exact sentiment just a while ago, I was in my 20's in the 90's, and you and /u/Grimalkin hit the nail on the head.

Now I'm just sad...I think I'll go to bed.

I want to tattoo this comment on my body.

Things felt right. Moving towards a better future.

Not this.

Things FELT right.

But they weren't, and the "feel good" vibes while not making changes for a better future led to this.

The present is the result of the past, the future is the result of what we do on the present.

We are still moving towards a better future, fella. Maybe take a break from for-profit news and social media for a bit, spend some time on gapminder.org .

Also, did you know that 7% of all the people who are ever estimated to have lived are alive right this moment? A lot of us think that we have a long history behind us and that we're in the end-game of humanity. But we're only just getting started, in the grand scheme of things.

If you've got twelve and a half minutes, I really recommend checking this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEENEFaVUzU

The 1990s were absolutely a far far better time of it now. Every since 2000, things have gone more and more downhill.

You can blame terrorists, economics, whatever you want. Personally I honestly blame the internet age. People are too stupid for this technology. It was grand when the realm of computing was inhabited by geeks who would get trouserly engorged because they spent three weeks programming a sprite that runs across the screen and jumps and has more than four colours.

The world inherited from this realm a system so huge and gigantic which should have revolutionised education and how we interact. Instead, the best this sad race of stupid idiots has mustered is to provide ever more ways of sharing dick pics and nudes. Don't get me wrong, I like a nudie text (or email these days) just like the rest, but that seems to be all the internet is useful for.

That and crazy ideology being promoted and praised, rather than calling it what it is: crazy!

The 1990s were absolutely a far far better time of it now.

If you were rich and white maybe. But the 80s & 90s had a ton of just blatant corruption, major crime issues in cities, major race issues, war on drugs was causing a lot of issues in inner cities. Like the 90s was far far from good for most people

Yeah it was all whitewashing. I went to school in the 80s and 90s and the general vibe was we “won” at everything. Civil rights was a past issue and everyone was equal. Bad guy countries were beaten or handled quickly. Global warming will be beaten by recycling your coke cans. We were out of our adolescence as a society and reaping the benefits of exceptionalism.

As a suburban white boy, it seemed plausible to me. Then I became an adult and the 2000s happened.

I don’t know…I was 18 in 2001 and life felt pretty much the same for me after. Maybe the newness of college, being away from parents and dating kept my mind occupied.

Idk if the US was so much "going in the right direction" in the 90s as much as we were just enjoying the spoils of being the leader of the free world while technology exploded.

We still are, at least until China's bubble pops and the world economy crashes as a result.

In my country, the 90's were the wild west of politics and the mafia (after establishing own country and getting from under communist rule). The 00's were literally better for us - joined the EU, got plenty of political reforms, the country grew, people were better off...

Ive said this for years, I really believe the 90s were when we peaked as a culture. Its been nothing but downhill since 9/11

9/11 consequences are a result of the 90s feeling of "everything is good and we are great" when things were not good and the USA was not great.

Exactly. As I’ve read more and more about Clinton and Gingrich and the 90s generally I’m just struck by how divorced American self perception is from reality. We’re basically still dealing with the consequences of the 90s, whether that be in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, domestic political acrimony, the surrendered left, etc. America was high on its own power and acted recklessly.

Everyone things about war when talking about this, but don’t forget the American psycho style financial sector. This was (and is) basically actively destabilizing of a control loop in technological terms.

I told this to a friend. He moved here to the states about 8 years ago, says how he doesn’t really like America. But I wish he could have experienced it in the 90s/2000s. It was different. It was simpler back then, the nostalgia is strong for that time period.

In the UK, the Labour party's landslide victory in 1997 was to the tune D:Ream's "Things Can Only Get Better". 90's optimism was palpable.

Then a few months later Princess Diana died tragically and the nation went through a collective grief process that I don't think we'll ever see the likes of again.

Things were a bit more subdued and cynical after that. The Millenium party was a high point for many, 9/11 obvs followed fairly soon after, foot and mouth was a big deal for rural communities. Many were affected by the dotcom bubble bursting, then there was the "dodgy dossier". Shortly after in 2004 there was the equally dodgy business with David Kelly's suicide (a government weapons expert who came under scrutiny in light of the lack of weapons of mass destruction being found). Not long after that in 2005 there was the worst ever terrorist bombing attack in London, followed by Russia poisoning people on British soil in 2006. That pretty much rolled into the financial crisis of 2007/08 which we're still not even recovered from.

In short, I know there was terrorism, scandal and political scummery before the 90's, but a bouyant economy seemed to make people willing to press on to a brighter future. That was all gone by the end of the 90's and has never come back as we've rolled from one crisis to another.

Things weren't perfect, but everything felt like it was going in the right direction.

Here's the thing, though... things were generally worse back then. But they were boom times, it looked like perpetual growth forever, there was always some new gizmo or distraction, it was easy to ignore all the corruption and oppression and bigotry and inequality if you were a white kid with a tamagotchi and a happy meal and highly filtered top-down media and a parent or two with cradle-to-the-grave employment.

It wasn't even the war on terror, all it took was for the growth to stop, then for the measures designed to mask the lack of growth failing. When times are good, you can do no wrong; when times are bad, you can do no right.

For me it also feels like 2001 was the beginning of everything. I wish I could go back to the 90s

Been longing for that feeling since the end of the 00's. Don't think I will ever feel it again. Very sad.

[deleted]

Exactly. It was a foolish and selfish optimism.

While a progressive Afghanistan went down the drain following US supported terrorists and saw the rise of radicals, the eastern bloc was rampaged, robbed and raped following the cold war end, and many countries struggled by under economic oppression from the west. The economic miracle of Japan slowly growing a bubble of inflated housing prices and false economic expectations.

But "the west had won the cold war", "liberalism had prevailed", and "the end of history" was a real narrative among the west.

The true story is that rich western elites won, many outside the west lost, and the average person in the west and abroad stayed as they were, losing purchasing power due to inflation.

A defeat for the average person

You could tell by the movies that were coming out then - unlikely dystopian futures that were never gonna happen...

Yup. The richwhite hatechristians fucked everything up and continue to fuck everything up.

Fuck, this hurt me more than anything. Just last night I was talking to some of the new hire kids (almost out of high school) and said something like "You kids nowadays, I don't know how you do it. All us adults just failed you."

If anyone in their 20s or younger see this comment: god damn, I am so sorry at how badly we all failed you.

I agree. Sadly, PoC and LGBQT communities were treated unfairly behind closed doors. Other than that, there was alot more optimism in the 90s. Today EVERYBODY seems miserable.

Jfc…that first sentence is an absolutely perfect analogy.

Except it wasn't going in the right direction, because look where it ended up.

I have this conversation regularly. People who are a year or two younger than I am don't really remember 9/11. I was just old enough to have that optimism and then have it taken and being told in a very immediate and drastic way that the world isn't all a good place and there are really bad people.

9/11 was the day that everything felt like it changed, atmosphere even. Everything is just politics now.

Always has been politics, distractions are just less effective

Damn, you just killed me with a single succinct post! That’s right - the outright optimism. Shit!

Not exactly optimism but freedom. „I kind of don’t like what that guy over there is/does, but it doesn’t affect me, so whatever“

You can thank Bill Clinton for that.

This hurt.

Wasted potential and too much regret

The truth often does sadly.

Ugh the potential seemed limitless

Things are going great, and they're only getting better
I'm doing alright, getting good grades
The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades

It still does. It just now seems inevitable that those in power will use that limitless potential for dumb, selfish shit that leave most of humanity in the dirt.

We all thought back to the future movie would be the future but it was actually Mad Max who got it right

Ah yes, a basic feeling of peace

It's not something that exists nowadays

The 2000s were going to be awesome right? Everyone was going to socially evolve. Like the utopia movies we watched.

But instead sadly everyone for the most part de-evolved and can't tell fact from fiction.

We're all Devo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlQM3-Rzjg

Lol for some reason I read this as “can’t tell a fart from a fraction.”

Well we’ve definitely socially evolved… just backward. Social discourse now is about as good as it was when cavemen were slinging shit at other tribes.

I do miss that delusion.

Yeah, turns out the real millennium bug was humanity all along.

I remember planning my career when I was a youngun and I figured I would just be a cashier at a grocery store, because there was a lady who worked at the local store who had been doing exactly that. Had been working there for I think 10 years when I was little. Actually still works there now, though that might have something to do with the economy being so shitty she can't afford to retire.

What's weird is that quantitatively, the world is so much better for almost everyone. But somehow it doesn't feel that way at all.

Access to more information than ever is what changes that. We're suddenly so much more AWARE of everything going on rather than huge chunks of the population living in blissful ignorance. That's what people fail to realize when they look to the friggin 80s and 90s as if nothing crazy, political or otherwise, was going on.

No, you just didn't know it was happening.

Yeah, and it's especially problematic when news sources (be it big news channels or social media) is incentivized to provide stories that get the most engagement, which tends to be the most horrible stories. So we accidentally built a machine designed to bombard everybody with terrible news all day.

Well when you know the world lost 2/3 of its wildlife during the last decades, i can't see how the world could be better for anyone.

Wow, 2/3 of wildlife? Where did you see that? I knew that wildlife was having a rough time but didn't think it was anywhere near that bad so I'd like to learn more

Those sad figures come from the living planet report 2020 from the WWF

Wow, yeah. Reading the detailed report linked on that page and the Wikipedia article for Living Planet Index is pretty shocking.

So I guess it'd be more accurate to say things have been better for almost all humans. Not so much for the other creatures on the planet. And even if someone didn't care about animals, that decline will (and does) affect humans too.

the world is

so much

better for almost everyone.

While economically this is true the poltical polarization in the West and the democratic backsliding everywhere else (LatAM, CEE, East-Asia) really spoils it

That's probably true as a general for the whole world, but for the Americans here, it feels like things are getting worse in our country. It doesn't help that the majority of the news that's reported is negative (which is intentional) and that our government is out to make our lives worse for the benefit of corporations and the 1%, but I do think there's still some hope left to have. It might be foolish, especially since I never got to remember the optimistic time of the 90s (born in '98 so my childhood was formed by economic collapses and post-9/11 politics), but I think things still have the chance to get better for the U.S.

I just want to be able to own a house someday, start a family, live a comfortable life, and not be a slave to the economy, all of which are feeling less and less achievable...

I think its the realization that theres a 60% - 40% split in the country that just hate each other. I work in the service industry so Ive thought the majority of people in this country were scumbags for decades now, but most people seemed to think the good far outnumbered the bad. And now they are realizing they dont.

Not to mention for the first time since Ive been alive we have actually gone backward regarding laws in this country. I mean Im sorry, but I cant just be all optimistic when almost half the country refuses to believe if they lose an election, think abortion should be illegal for everyone everywhere, dont want immigrants in the country, and still praise the worlds most obvious con man despite seeing him literally try a coup attempt. How am I supposed to feel great about this country when I see that?

Im just trying to do whatever I can to set my kids up for success and stay in a relatively sane part of the country. And hope much of this poison dies off with the older generation.

The thing about the news is that for the majority of the 90s you didn't see it unless you sought it out. You had to pick up a newspaper or watch a scheduled news broadcast. Now between 24hr rolling news channels and social media all the world's shit is pumped directly into your life on a daily basis.

I know you can limit social media and avoid the news channels, but it just feels so much more difficult to get away from the world's nonsense today than it did back then.

I hate it here, in the world, after the year 1999.

And that you can afford to buy a house

It was probably very similar to how the late 60s we're for the hippies and free love and civil rights.

I always think to a monologue from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

The book version is slightly longer I think the movie makes a concise version of it.

That monologue never fails to give me a sense of beautiful melancholy.

I was in college in the latter part of the 90s and I can say that there was some very strong concern that the optimism of the time was based on lies. Gingrich's Contract On America was really the set up for knocking the legs out from under the economy. Bush's recession started BEFORE the 9/11 attacks.

This was portrayed in a literal manner in the UK when the Labour Party ran a 'Party Political Broadcast' ad campaign for the 1997 General Election with people looking optimistic as they got ready to go to the voting station while 'Things Can Only Get Better' by D:Ream was played. Labour's massive landslide victory ended 18 years of the very right-wing Conservative Party's rule.

Unfortunately, we're still feeling the devastating effects of that Conservative government now, in addition to more devastation under the current Conservative Government, so it's safe to say that things got better for a short while before getting even worse.

It is weird, though, to think that serious academic essays were being written in the '90s about how history had ended and society would maintain a comfortable stasis from that point onwards.

Remember the morning after the Blair election win and all the streets to Downing street were packed with people cheering and welcoming them.

I wonder how many will turn up to see the latest ghoul enter?

Ah yes, the days when we had the optimism of New Labour, and Boris Johnson was still a relatively harmless cartoon character that you were more likely to see on Spitting Image than destroying the country on the 9 O'Clock news.

We had this in the US too, Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop (the full chorus is “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow”) was a big part of Clinton and the Democratic Party’s campaign. Then they got into office and basically did none of the progressive shit they promised and instead became quite conservative.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton really are quite similar figures lol

Oh man, that really is too similar to what happened over here. Tony Blair's Labour had pledged to hold a referendum on voting reform, and while this might not have resulted in full-blown Proportional Representation, it certainly would have been a more progressive system, but instead they did nothing, presumably because they realised that they were the dominant party and there was no need to water down their vote share.

Clinton, like basically every US President, got his legislative agenda snarled in the Senate, then got whacked in the midterms.

That is a feature of our system, not a bug. And it happens to both parties.

Clinton was a dixiecrat pretending to be a progressive

And I would disagree, it's absolutely a bug. The Senate is way too damn powerful and doesn't represent the will of the people.

I don't mean feature as in "good thing," I mean feature as in "designed to be there."

The Framers wanted a slow and deliberate system, and only some of them cared about representing the will of the average person.

Man, like I wasn't already having a shit day! Cheers, mate!

But things did 'get better' and were pretty good for most of the 00s. Which doesn't really fit with OP's point. It wasn't until the financial crisis in 08 that shit really hit the fan.

The U.K. isn't like the US. We long ago lost that innate optimism and belief, as a nation, that we're the best and things are always on the up: the sun set on our empire a looong time ago. Our contemporary national outlook was/is more, 'it's a bit shit, but it could be worse'.

90s UK wasn’t one of a freewheeling, saxophone playing, playboy President. It was John Major, the most boring ~~politician~~ man imaginable. It was the Poll tax riots. It was the criminal justice act that criminalised social gatherings with music with a repetitive beat. It was the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The death of Pricncess Di.

There was still a lot that was great about the 90s, don’t get me wrong. And there was definitely a sense of optimism that came with the Blair years and things like the Good Friday Argeement. But when 9-11 happened it didn’t shake our collective national consciousness, it felt more like swapping one flavour of terrorist threat for a new, slightly spicer variant.

9/11 didn't, but I think the subsequent Iraq war, and repercussions of that, was the tipping point for both Blair and the national sense of optimism.

Things started to get weird in the mid-00s with lies about WMD and Dr David Kelly and kind of spiralled from there through the the 2008 recession, "bigoted woman", Con/Lib w/ Nick Clegg as deputy PM, the world finding out Cameron face fucked a dead pig, Ed Miliband's manifesto stone and bacon sandwich, strong and stable.

All culminating in the Brexit referendum which was an extremely effective and nasty way to divide a country almost perfectly in half with schisms that will take generations to heal and led to our first political assassination in I don't even know how long.

Fun fact about D:Ream, the keyboard player was Brian Cox. Same bloke as did all those science documentaries on the TV

Aye and he's a massive cunt. I loved his documentaries until just before the social history one came out that he was promoting and he was all over Twitter saying Social Sciences is a bunch of wank and does nothing for society unlike the hard sciences. I had a huge fight with him about it (I am a sociologist) and later that day he changed his viewpoint and apologised for being a dick.

It was just so weird because that next docuseries was literally based entirely on social science.

I can't watch anything he's on now without feeling totally pissed off and noticing how utterly smarmy and cocky he is in everything he says.

He was the hot new thing about 10 years ago. Seemed like everyone was talking about his scenice programs. It feels like he's dropped down a few notches since then.

Isn't it funny how every western conservative government has a massive tract record of stagnation or destruction? It's like some sort of mental illness made manifest by a horde of backwards thinking people. Hmmm

That was before Blair turned out to be more tory than the tories...

I was gonna comment the same sentiment. Looks like im not the only one. Thought the future was star trek and now its looking more like mad maxx is whats going down.

Ahh, those were the good ole days.

Sheesh I came here for nostalgia not an existential crisis

Fuck, I think I'm gonna cry.

Yea, the 1990’s were awesome. I know being in my 20’s helped but that decade had an awesome vibe. Great music, great movies, EDM and Raves, great economy and tons of jobs, Cold War over!

Dude.

I mean, facts. But dude though.

We were full of so many hopes and dreams.

I actually thought about that recently and it genuinely made me depressed. I guess it's part of growing up, but the future does seem bleaker than ever before.

And you could do anything that you put your mind to!

Lindsay Ellis (YouTuber) made this video essay about Independence Day vs The War of the Worlds and how they compare from being made before 9/11 and after. The kind of movies made and their tone, attitude, and themes really changed after that in 2001. Its an interesting watch.

Well it was the peak crime decade in America and the maturation of "latchkey kids" of the 80s/early 90s as women had better career opportunities than the past but no one figured out how to family yet. So it did get better.

A lot of families back then were so shitty. These days I feel like Millennial parents are going too hard in the opposite direction as someone who has to deal with their rotten, undisciplined, feral children almost every day for work. They could stand to be a little more stern with their kids, granted this is in a "privileged" area compared to where I am so it could be postcode dependent. But at least they aren't screaming at their kids for not eating all of their food, or leaving them in cars, or publicly humiliating them anymore. Maybe they will grow up to not be riddled with mental issues like me and so many of my Millennial brethren are stuck having to live with. But then again, a lot of them are gender confused furries so I don't know maybe the problem is society as a whole and not the parents.

I feel personally attacked.

ah the pre millenium optimism and excitement, spurred on by a bubblegummy 90s billboard that promised parties and dancing and fun we didn't believe could be over the horizon during the grunge and melancholy of the early 90s, but then the two towers fell, and a burning cynicism and paranoia would permeate into a new millenium of economic crashes and narcissism.

The future is bright, the future is Orange™️

All these comments make me feel old as fuck while having flashbacks into untapped memories.

It's the feeling of having all your hopes and dreams shattered in an instant.

For me that feeling continued through 2014 or so, it died completely in 2016

Note: applies to cis, straight, white people only.

I'm embarrassed by my ignorance back then.

Racial relations were better in the 1990s than they are now. Everyone now is so angry and depressed even though everything is “better”, and people were happier back then even if they were more ‘oppressed’. I’d rather the old way.

You're confusing the fact that the anger and hurt of POC is more visible now for an increase in the amount of anger and hurt.

Yes, but... when I was a teen in the nineties a lot of GenX people did think that everything was getting better, that almost no one "our age" was racist and all we had to do was wait for the old people to die off. The laws weren't all there but the... optimism? definitely was.

Then came 9/11 and Fox News and after it, 4chan. Now it feels like just as many or more Millennials and Zoomers have been radicalized to be as racist as Boomers. The young people aren't our guide on how to be better any more, some are great of course, but so many people say all this racist shit out loud that definitely had to be repressed in the nineties or everyone would have shamed the one saying it, even the republicans.

Right. White people, like my family, felt like almost nobody was racist anymore, and we felt like the racist parts of our society's systems had been fixed.

In reality, people of color were still suffering greatly, and we just didn't hear their protests.

Outside of that, there were zero protections for trans people (transgender wasn't even a widely known word), no protections for queer people regarding housing or employment, same sex marriage was a pipe dream, gay sex was literally illegal in 14 states, and HIV was destroying an entire generation of queer men with basically no attention from the federal government.

People haven't gotten more prejudiced, they're just more open about it. Marginalized people haven't gotten angrier, it's just that we can hear them now.

Yes and no. I'm saying that even though POC were still suffering greatly, everyone felt like things were on the way to getting better, improvements were being made, although not nearly as quickly as needed. Now... not many people feel that way, about any issue from race relations to women's rights, immigration, and yes, gay rights... and I really really do think people have gotten more prejudiced and encouraged to be more prejudiced from their online echo chambers. White kids from families that "just don't talk about this stuff" in the nineties would have gotten all their messaging from PBS and CNN telling them racism was bad, mm'kay? now go to reddit and 4chan and some of them get sucked in to the point where their families are horrified by the racist shit they say.

Yeah, uh. No. The people suffering greatly and being persecuted by law were not feeling that things were getting better. People were saying that 4chan shit all through the 90s, whether or not people like you and me believed it.

The future IS bright.

Violence not only at an incredible low, but on a consistently declining trend.

Medical there are medical practices today that were barely feasible ten years ago. They were science fiction twenty years ago.

One of my favorites, with current industry changes the "point of no return" in damage to the earth through global warming has shifted much further out.

Education is more accessible worldwide today than it ever has been and is growing more and more daily.

The world really is great. The problem is that when everything is advancing positively, the negatives, though small, become more dramatic. More important. There's still some negative stuff trending, things that are causing problems, but they seem bigger than they are because we're far more focused. We need to address these things, they are part of our world and make it worse, but we also need to be better about stepping back and realizing how good things are sometimes.

It was so bright, we had to wear shades

https://youtu.be/8qrriKcwvlY

And Howard Jones to assure us of it!

Turns out I didn't need to wear shades after all. sigh

I agree with you there. I'm still not sure if it's because I'm getting older and more jaded, or there was a massive cultural shift. Possibly both.

I was finishing HS, playing Diablo, Starcraft and Ultima Online, dabbling in web design, looking forward to starting uni. Simpler times.

Low-key wish I'd be able to experience that.

I miss that feeling, but I feel lucky that I got to be a kid in the 90s.

tbh i feel that way now

In all honesty, what really helps with that is studying -- even in a casual sense -- history. Not even deep history. Schools teach so little modern history, at least in the US, that a lot of people have no idea that the kind of shitshow we're living through was normal for most of the last 250 years. (And it doesn't matter if you're talking about racism, wealth inequity, insurrections, culture wars between the educated/urban and rural/ignorant, pandemics and medical quackery, police violence, Supreme Court overreach, etc)

It doesn't necessarily help with the tactical stress of living through this patch of time, but it helps to realize how many times we -- as a country -- have been at this point, and gotten through it.

Ooof. This one hits pretty fucking hard.

I think the vast majority of us Americans are suffering from cynicism, & media-perpetuated-negativity. Politics got people more worried than before, to force their support…

The good news is you'll feel he same way about current times in a couple decades, as well. This happens for every generation, things keep getting better but people keep feeling worse about it.

I remember being hopeful, felt great.

There’s a reason why the machines chose the year 1999 to build the Matrix around. Look how good we had it back then

So much this. Been talking with a Gen Z kid about how it feels like everything is getting worse now, whereas in the 90s we had just "defeated" Communism ("Groovy, smashing. Yay, capitalism."), the internet was becoming mainstream and everything looked rosy. No wonder Gen Z has so much anxiety.

Cd's

Going to the music store to look for new CDs was the best. My friends and I were always looking for singles and bootlegs of our favorite grunge bands.

We had a great place that specialized in rarities. We could spend hours there. Mr. Mucks.

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.

And the damn DJ kept talking over the beginning of the song. STFU dammit!

It's like they know you're recording it.

Yes haha the simple times wonderful days yes we got the internet and technology today and it's good but id go back to the 90s in a heartbeat.

Me too. I would go all the way back to my first day in my first apartment in 1995.

I was like 11 in 1995 I don't think we really appreciated how good those days were at the time it was around the first time I think we got dial up net at home to and a desktop oh and maybe my first mobile phone

It was incredible sending txt messages and logging in the internet to anywhere in the world I was excited.

But now living in it for so long and where it is today id give it all up for a simple 90s life haha.

I was 18. I did not have a computer with internet at home until much later. When I was in college from 1995 - 1999, none of my friends had cell phones, neither did I. None of us had computers in our rooms. We all went to the computer lab to use email or the internet, and write our papers.

My first cell phone was a Nextel in like 2001!

Hahaha interesting I think mine was philips savvy cost like $60 bought at the supermarket.

i still had to call the landlines most of the time. My first phone was minute plan shared with my mom. It was only for emergencies and you had to pay by the text for sending and receiving texts so I just wasn't allowed to do that.

20 cents per text here we had deals in the late 90s free texting all weekend haha the networks would get jammed

You're goddamned right I'd go back to the 90s without hesitation. Modern technology and being connected has produced some good things... but with every few years that pass by, the more I start to hate all of it. I'd love to just take a hatchet to 90% of what modern tech has given us and go back to the 90s.

I can live without all the tech if I had to choose very easily but they have made us become so reliant on it in this modern current world we all graze in

It was definitely helpful during the COVID pandemic, though. What would we have done if it had been COVID-91 instead of COVID-19? The technology to have virtual meetings didn’t exist yet. We wouldn’t be able to have school! We had the internet then, but it was mostly just used for email, and the very thought of your teacher emailing you seemed invasive!

Absolutely helpful - because the other option was to delay school indefinitely and not finish (which would absolutely affect high school grads going to college). That scenario is in the 10% of the things I would probably keep from modern tech. The other 90% - the really invasive and toxic parts - can all die in a fire lol

Social media and the fucking algorithm are the worst things to happen to humanity in the past 20 years. Social media (at first) was a fun novelty... but once big companies, data brokers and political extremists exploited the connectivity of social media... all downhill from there.

I did this for Stone Temple Pilots' Interstate Love Song in high school. The man who took my request started asking questions about me. I said "I'm 16" and hung up. The DJ then dedicated it to "the girl with the sweet voice". Still have that cassette somewhere..

And screaming with rage when the damn DJ ran his fucking mouth over the beginning and/or end of the song!

I would get so pissed at my younger brothers for barging in and ruining my recording of Casey Kasems Top 40. I had my cassette recorder pressed against my clock radio🤣

This, this should win. Remember staying up forever just waiting for your song to come on?

Please, we had Napster back then too.

I was not aware of Napster until like 2002.

It was big in 1998.

My friend, mid 40s here, Napster appeared in my college years 1995-

Kind of my point lol. Just wish they figured out proper p2p networking earlier…

“Like now, Go! That was the original download.” - some atmosphere song.

I did this for the bloodhound gang roof is on fire song and I think 311 Down as well

The first three and the last one are still alive and well. Not sure why people have the idea that it isn't.

Not so much in New Zealand the streets are empty every kid is stuck inside zorbed by tik tok and social media.

Then complaining they are bored

i’m sure when you were a kid the generation above you said the exact same thing. just replace tik tok and social media with whatever people complained about then lol

That's very nice grandpa, did you take your prune juice it's almost bed time

38 bro not bedtime here 2pm lol I actually like a lil prune juice goood for cleanse.

Whats your go to bed time drink Coca-Cola 🤣 🤣

Everything here except making tapes from the radio are all things kids still do today. Granted, the movie selection has moved to netflix et al, but I literally watch all the other things on this list happen in my neighborhood all summer.

Hahaha not in my neighborhood when you mention Netflix can watch what you want at anytime you want i find that boring.

I liked i was limited to how many movies I could hire out at one time and the whole process of spending hours on end with mates choosing movies we were going to watch.

Much of this time it was watching old school WWF main events to haha.

Having abundance in what we can watch yet people still are bored from it.

Until the latest series of whatever program they watching comes out.

Kids of today in my region don't even no what a tree fort is.

Now as I said its the times we are living in for sure and the simple days in the macro are long gone.

Absolutely, my town is full of kids on bikes and the bush is full of clubhouses.

leaving house door unlocked

Crimes rates now, at least in the US, are half what they were in the 90s.

Really wow certainly not like that in New Zealand huge spike since the 90s and worse crime to barely a shooting in the 90s.

Now gun crime weekly

In the US, mass shootings are up of course, but overall homicides and violent crime are way down since their peak in the mid 90s. Some people attribute this to policing, some to reducing then banning lead gasoline. Some attribute the drop in crime to Roe v Wade legalizing abortion in 1973, resulting in fewer unwanted babies, resulting in fewer angry young men 18 to 20 years later.

Hey, the butterflies one hit home! I recently got really into gardening and growing beautiful flowers and tasty veggies - butterflies are still out there, they just have no reason to be around most places anymore. If you plant some milkweed ((DO. NOT. PLANT. IT. IN. THE. FLOOR. ITS INCREDIBLY INVASIVE AND WILL ROOT 12 FEET BELOW THE SURFACE, AND SPREAD LIKE CRAZY)), Monarchs will use it as a host plant for cuccoons, and you'll get visits from swallowtails, other monarchs, cabbage whites...maybe even some dragonflies. :) It's been a beautiful summer so far with all my new friends out there. (another reason I think we don't see them so much is how often we are all inside now. ) Seriously guys go give it a try though. It's pretty easy to grow, just buy some seeds for $2-$4, and a pot for $0.50, fill it with potting soil and drops the seeds in, water and sunlight. Easy peasy, butterflies will thank you. 🍻

Dubbing music from the radio on cassette tape.

I have a cassette from my youth where I was attempting to do exactly this with one of my favorite songs, except in the middle of recording it, my younger brother comes in and starts talking. I was not a very happy camper that day, to say the least. 😂

Hahahaha awesome

That brother of yours ruining your tape might be the very thing that gives it value today though! If I had anything like that I'd love to listen to it now and share it with him for a good laugh.

The Aussie has entered the chat.

How about trying to convince adults to illegally buy durries for you at the serv-o?

😆 Funny I didn't smoke in the 90s sure tried a few darts but not actually smoke till I was 19.

I do remember standing outside supermarkets trying to get some random to buy us a box of beers though $12 or so a dozen back then.

Funny it was in the 90s supermarkets starting selling alcohol to

Sounds like your experience of the 90's is just being a kid. Pretty sure they do this now too.

🤣 🤣 My 6 year old niece has a better phone than me. Sure we moving with times but they don't even go outside. living in bubbles where the reliance on technology is crazy the amount of devices and the focus span is like a tik tok reel.

I think going forward we will be less and less outside and just going to become complete zoids.

At some stage humans will no longer talk to each other verbally it will be through computers

Just curious, why give a 6 year old a phone? I know a lot of kids have them now, but that seems a bit young

Ask the parents 🤣 🤣 its all restricted though she can only have it at certain times can't take it out of the house I'm sure these restrictions will ease as we go forward.

Oh, sorry, I thought you were talking about your own kid.

Nope don't have any kids and if I did they would not have smartphones or any devices till a certain age.

Anyway I'm not going to be the parent judge guy though

Radio —> cassette: YES!

Also, I remember when I was (young and stupid and) disappointed that the song I thought was Ice Ice Baby was some other song.

You just described my childhood and I grew up in the early 2000’s

Honestly, it sounds like you just miss being a kid.

For sure but I doe enjoy many things of today but time is the currency

I've never heard the term "hire a movie" before.

There was a van here in New Zealand that would go around to your house open the door and it was a mini video store I the back they also had gaming consoles.

Nintendo mainly 😆 Hire a movie was commonly used bro lets go hire a video

New Zealish - makes sense now. We just rent that shit! I'm in Canada eh!

At least we can watch Stranger Things now.

🤣 🤣 Never have never will series I do remember was The OC, Prison Break, Heros.

Never really been big TV guy

What I meant is that Stranger Things, as it plays in the 80s, picks up many of these nostalgic themes. If you have Netflix, I‘d def. recommend it.

Oh thats why Master of Puppets got some 🔥 lately nice haha na I'm good I prefer a podcast.

id love to start a 90s you tube channel or a theme page like I'm constantly told its never been easier to make money in history than it is now.

Especially with our supercomputers we have but I think that's boring making money from your phone sounds boring.

I just do not think anything of today id go hey fuck no thats way better than the 90s.

I love the 90s, not so much for pop music or culture, bur rather for 90s futurism and aesthetics. Basically what Vaporwave now grabs up. It think growing up in the 90s had a strange in-between-feel, closer to the future than the analogue 80s, but far away from the established futurism of the 00s. Interesting project!

I'm pretty sure most of that is related to childhood more than the 90s. Some things like going to the movie store are just replaced with Netflix.

Ah yes, we used to play kick ball at the intersection in my neighborhood. Wasn't even arranged. So many kids just out you showed up with the ball and you had a game.

Man we played test cricket matches 3 day tests haha and yeah rugby dodge ball.

Yeah they were the best ones people just joining in especially touch rugby thats huge in new Zealand growing up then it got to many people and we would have to take the game to the local field.

The neighbour's would like invite their bros and so on we were all so friendly with each other.

These days I don't even no who my neighbour's are lol

Even if I was drawing or playing video games, as soon as I heard other kids playing on the street I was out the door! Damn I miss that shit.

I like that I have still done some of these recently. Yay!

Recently had a conversation with a friend on how we just used to leave all the doors open all the damn time. You just can't do that anymore and I grew up in Chicago. Showing up to a friends house unannounced was just normal too.

Interesting I am in New Zealand it was totally the norm in the 90s like it wasn't even thought about.

I no the crime in Chicago is pretty bad so that is interesting.

Sure haha and if one mate wasn't home go knocking on other doors till someone is home.

They barely were not home though.

Yea and its not like there weren't horrible things that happened before the 90s, yet the open door policy was normal. Now by the mid 2000s or earlier things changed, even if you lived in a super safe area, you still lock everything.

Btw the crime perception about Chicago is severely overplayed. Its a metropolis of almost 3 mil people. If you live in the few selected hoods then yea its fucked, other than that its the same as any other city on the planet with millions of ppl.

You're describing my life in the 80s.

Classic well I was born in 83 I do also remember in the 90s and I lived in suburbia although lots of bush surrounding and close by awesome tracks.

But it was normal to walk along these tracks and see a person with a rifle slinged over their back.

One of our favorite things was going to the dairy after school and getting like 50 cents mix of lollies haha back then haha much of the lollies were 4 for 5 cents 😄

With the exception of the all day public pools and dubbing music, i think my kids live your 90's life

damn right in the childhood did all of this. Made dirt "ramps" and tracks in the woods. We'd work hard for fun back in the 90s. We made ramps out of wood in the garage, we'd bring shovels and rakes to the woods to make dirt tracks. We'd spend all day building a snow fort mostly just for the fun of building it.

Haha the bro across the road loved his BMX we would all lay on the ground he would jump over us.

Mini Evil Evel Knievel shit going on

Some epic home made ramps

Haha yeah for sure the process of that hard work was fun though.

I still can't believe we had Bush behind us and literally you could walk for hours in it good fun.

Going in the bush all day to build tree forts and tie a rope to the trees and swing from it.

Yeah, it's all waxed these days.

Well I got no kids but I no alot mates with kids and they all focused on their devices or Playstation all day.

We can blame parents partly but this is also the times we are living in the digital era and it is only going to get more and more advanced in many ways its a good thing for sure.

1, 3 & 6 still happen.

2, well it wasn’t a treat for everyone. A lot of families bought fast food often back then.

Well what i experience today they don't happen the streets are bare.

Its because we are living in this bubble where we are told it's unsafe to do this can't do that can't say this.

Long as you got your technology everything is good

Or using my talk boy to record WWF entrance music so I can listen to them whenever I want

You guys brought ropes with you? We'd just look for a loose branch or a vine and hope for the best. Didn't even realize a rope would be a viable option.

I once saw a flock of migrating Monarch butterflies come over a fence during recess. They enveloped me. It was 1992.

Guessing between 55 and 59 years old?

Born in 83 lol try 38

Lol, seem like some of those thing were earlier for me. I’m 58 and the Saturday morning cartoons thing seems like it was before cable for me 🤷‍♂️

Yeah the cartoons was much before cable we had like 3 channels in new zealand those cartoons were good especially The Jetsons, Speed Racer and Ducktales

Omg recording songs on tape. I used to make radio shows by myself, like do an intro or talk about whatever and then record a song. And then my dad would supposedly listen to them on the way to work whenever I finished one.

Aw good memory

You must be me because that’s e everything I would say.

Haha I got plenty more but much of it has been mentioned i thought ringing up your mates and talking to their parents before them was a good one

Getting up 6am on a Saturday to watch the cartoon marathon that would finish at 10am.

Lmao, you just reminded me of this and how I used to wreck my parents’ Saturday AM “routine.” Never understood why they were always so pissed off I was bothering them when I could hear them moving around and having fun doing whatever. “Oh wow mom and dad sound so happy to be alive on Saturday mornings. Must be a really good backrub. Guess I’ll go watch cartoons .

I also remember at some point my mom realizing she just needed to wake me up at 6 and have breakfast ready for me to keep me on the other end of the house for a few hours. I was ecstatic because I never missed more than a few minutes of Camp Candy. Dad still had to pass through the family room to the kitchen all sweaty to make coffee around 8am though. “Oh wow, Ghostbusters is already on, guess I slept in today. Enjoying the cartoons bud?”

It truly was a win-win.

So many of those are still 100% normal... The neighbourhood kids are all over the place.

Kids still play sports on the street, at least they do in the suburbs.

Not my way all inside on devices training to be zoids

Fast food used to be a treat for kids, but now it's something that you'd have if you're a 19 year old college student and have like 20 bucks in your pocket.

A genuine feeling of hope/togetherness.. I was 2-12 in the nineties and it was the best time ever. Video games just hit harder back then. (watching an Ocarina Of Time stream right now lol)

9/11 was the beginning of the spiral, and we haven't stopped spiraling since.

I remember there being so much hope and optimism for the future. Sure some bad things happened in the 90's, but overall the mood was positive. Then 9/11 happened and it's been a shit show ever since. At the same time it feels like we've given up as society, every problem is insurmountable and will never be fixed

No shit. 9/11 put the brakes on everything, and we've never recovered. Downhill spiral is right. I was working for the US Mil. in Germany at the time.....and overnight, the mood changed to paranoia, and looking for the enemy. It was pretty gruesome.

daamn that sounds intense. I loved Germany

Agreed on the spiral. It's shaped my entire adult life. I was 18 when it happened, so yeah, literally has shaped it all, with everything afterwards. I miss how it was when growing up, just the sense of hope about the future after decades of the Cold War and the bomb hanging over everyone's heads.

It seems like since then the country is being torn apart along a number of different fault lines. (sorry for the mixed metaphor.)

Video rental stores. Blockbuster was big but lots of locally owned businesses too. I miss being able to go through the aisles and discover something new.

When I was really young, I remember going to a video store with my mom and her best friend to rent a movie. They had a section for VHS and a section for Betamax. I can still picture the place. Small narrow shop with orange carpet and a wood veneer front desk.

Me too, me too.

Video stores really did exist for like 30 years. I’m sure somewhere out there there is someone who opened the first store in their town and worked the job long enough to close the last one.

RIP movie palace

Ohhhh this was my favorite last time with friends! We would do that each weekend!

We never had blockbuster over here we only had those small mom and pop stores the last one only closed like last month or so

All those godawful cult classic horror/slasher films....

My Bloody Valentine. Critters. Slumberparty Massacre.

Subway club card

Pizza Hutt Readers Club 😭

Book It! Man, I would kill for a Personal Pan Pizza right now.

I would kill for a late 80’s/early 90’s Pizza Hut pan pizza…they are so shitty now!!

Just as an FYI… some physical copies of Shredder’s Revenge come with a coupon for a personal pan pizza.

I’m not sure why you need to know this, but you do!

Book It is still a thing! I signed my kids up online and we should do it!

…are box tops still a thing?

Yes but now you have to scan your receipt in your phone within so many hours of shopping and it electronically credits your school. Highly inconvenient because the receipt usually requires multiple scans because they are so long and half the time it doesn't recognize your items.

I think it’s just one “t” unless you’re referring to the gangster in Space Balls.

Totally forgot about that! They had the little sticker dispenser by the register. Man thanks for the memory!

I still have some sub club stamps

Newspapers! They were still highly relevant up into the late 90s and early 2000s. Want to sell something? Place an personal ad. Need the showtimes for a movie? Go to the entertainment section. Current events? Comics? The actual news? It was all right there.

WWII vets

WWI vets.

They were already rare back in the 90s

Rare but I remember a few standing up when they asked vets to stand during a veterans day church service.

Vietnam vets being early middle age guys.

Its weird when I hear people talking bout their grandparents being in Vietnam...thats my dad an uncles....and then I realize the Vietnam "war" ended less than 15 years before I was born. Dammit.

Same! For me it was teachers, although my Dad almost went to Vietnam. Had he been in the class of '73 at Annapolis, he probably would have been sent over. While the war was still ongoing when he did graduate, it takes time to send new ensigns places. He did end up in the Pacific fleet, but his Asian experiences involve the Philippines and then Japan in the 80s. I was born 8 years after the fall of Saigon.

Even growing up, it felt like the Vietnam War was so long ago, but in retrospect, being born in the 80's put you was closer to it than we are to 9/11 today

Crazy to think of it that way. Definitely agree about Vietnam feeling really long ago growing up, even though it wasn't.

Both of these comments are super sad

Who were my teachers back in the 60s......

Using a giant book to navigate when driving instead of Google maps

This is one thing I’m really glad off because I’d be so fucking hopeless with a map while driving

CD players without Anti Skip… they sucked.

Even with anti skip they sucked. Except for the ones that were super top of the line that no one would ever buy for a kid.

Had to buy my own when I worked at target. I think it was like $90 or something huge for a 16 year old.

Woahhh... Did the $90 one perform well?

Yeah, I could walk to school with it not skipping, you would have to be careful when your first started the disc until the anti skip built up.

Two spaces after a period.

Those of us who learned to type on a typewriter still think this is normal.

I can’t stop myself. See?

Still sort of a thing, double space on most smart phones places a stop automatically but removes one space.

That is the right was it has always been the right say and I will not hear anything different

Indenting the first line of a paragraph too

Wait. I still do this. :/

Those fucking slap bracelets

More fun to crack your buddies with than actually wearing them

Lol, rulers wrapped in something pretty. I never knew.

pretty common today, you just aren't a child

Yeah my 4 yo just got one in a goodie bag

lol I was going to mention party bags, but I thought they were just a British thing

Those got banned at my elementary school. It felt like a grave injustice at the time.

They're back. My kid keeps getting them from birthday parties.

Calling Miss Cleo😂

My dumbass ass brother in highschool came home drunk and called Miss Cleo. Passed out for a few hours while on the phone and our parents phone bill was 800 bucks. He got in a lot of trouble for that one.

At least he gained valuable knowledge of the things to come

The fact that your phone bill would go up hundreds of dollars for just a couple hours on the phone... If the same applied now, I'd be paying thousands of dollars.

Finding porn in the woods.

It was like finding buried pirate treasure as a young man. It was this magical feeling like your day had been made and nothing better could possibly happen. You’d made it. Life was good! Haha I’m kind of sad that young men these days will never experience the joy of finding porn in the woods.

Now we just find porn on the internet and feel like we unearthed the one place nobody knows about but us.

Start leaving porn out in the woods.

If I ever have a boy that fucker will find some porn in the woods because I'll stick it there and send him on a Easter egg hunt for new "car keys" but he'll find something better.

Obviously I'd make it a proper care package with straight and gay, tissues, key to the guest house. All the things you need to celebrate and while he's celebrating me and the potential wife will also celebrate by enjoying the silence.

WHY IS IT WET?! It hasn't rained in WEEKS!

In fifth grade my best friend was a boy named jack gough (pronounced “Goff”). I never understood why my parents would always crack up when I said his name. But we totally had a playboy in the woods. Me, jack and Patrick Murray would sit and peel the wet pages apart in silence. And while, as I got older, many people assumed I was a lesbian (or a dude) but I just ended up being a straight girl working in the sex industry.

So when did you realise the reason your parents laughed so much than because his parents must have known although it would be a perfect porn name too.

Why a dude because its not that hard to notice a girl unless you're blind?

i was very naive concerning sexual things until i was much older. so it wasn't until deep into high school that i realized that his parents were cruel, cruel people. his ears stuck out, he was small and skinny. we grew apart around the end of fifth grade because that was when it was decided whether or not one was cool or not. i was not cool. jack gough was cool.

i was pretty dudely looking when i was younger. now i have the tools and skills to be able to have no hair and whatnot and not be considered a dude

Ben there but with me its like going to college just put up an impenetrable wall between me and my friends because we went from celebrating our end of year exams and final day by been typical teens and partying in the woods at our usual campsite (just a few pallets and tarps) but the next day it was as if i was in another world.

That kinda sucked depression wise and the new friends i made were less friends and more users and abusers the type of people my mother moved us half way across the country to keep away from.

I didn't find that out until i was raped and they all changed because they all assumed i was the rapist i guess when you're not getting any on a regular basis and you're fat and ugly they think the only way i'd have sex is by rape.

Fuck them and everybody else who needs fake friends anyway.

Lol why is this such a thing. All my guy friends speak lore of “forest porn” from when they were kids…

I did find a notorious BIG cassette tape with parental advisory warnings on it in a tree in some woods and I imagine it felt kinda the same as finding forest porn.

Men and kids not allowed it at home.

We had a stash den for crossbows, porn, that sorta stuff(!) in a wooded area by a railway line. It all disappeared one day. Must have been disturbing for the railway dudes who found it if they thought we were adults.

I had a stash in the woods too when I was a kid. I had nowhere secure enough to hide it in my house, so I hid it in the woods. I had a certain spot where I kept it. One day it disappeared. I was pretty bummed out about it.

Did you have a walkman to play it on though and what song/album was it?

It or it was a right of passage in films you have the dads taking the kid hunting or camping and drinking a bit of beer but in reality it was finding porn and that was a day you became a man.

omg, I forgot about that

The equivalent now would probably be finding your dad's porn folder.

Finding porn by the big ass recycling dumpsters they had in grocery store parking lots was absolute gold.

I can still smell those magazines

Omg wtf really

Yup if you were lucky it was in a plastic bag usually near a mattress and way too many used condoms which you could smell way before you found the stash and if you were really lucky they'd be some unopened beer cans with it or a video.

I was lucky enough to find 2 stashes one at 13 which was playboy and men only so mostly stories i learnt a lot from those and my filthy mind went wild. I found a second stash at 18 but this was the hardcore stuff and german but they was an issue of brazzers and playgirl so i gave that to my female friends to fight over.

Either way it all went underneath my mattress and my mother knew full well that you don't come into my room when i'm not there. I had it for 3 years before she found it so at that point i just left my porn out in the open.

Thats fucking funny

I remember finding condoms when i was younger but forest porn? That is so funny. So bizzare

So if i felt like busting one, id smuggle my magazine into the woods do my thing then hide it in the bushes for next time?

For me the porn was next to a mattress that had beer, condoms used and unused so it was probably a sex den given a small shelter had been built on the site to.

I worked as a maid in the 90s and we cleaned a lot of offices. I would hope it's not common anymore, but I was surprised at the number of men's restrooms that had hardcore porn mags in them. These weren't public restrooms, but like private office restrooms.

Those were the days, ours was all hidden under an old wooden dog house that had ‘justice’ painted across the top (name of the puppy). I still remember that one 90s issue where they had some guy in glasses that looked exactly like the blue power ranger being held upside down by the ankles by one woman with his..you know what in the mouth of another. Someone’s got to remember it was either Playboy or Hustler from like ‘95. One of the older kids got paranoid his Dad was going to find out and set the stack on fire.

He burnt it, you don't burn you bury it for future boys to find like buried treasure they'll get a rise out off.

Burning porn is as bad as burning books and just as wrong.

It’s coming back to me now, he shredded the magazines because they were taken from his Dad’s garage and had a feeling he was going to go out there and find them. We would find the pieces under the leaves and try to save them so then he lit the area on fire haha. The power ranger porn was stolen and hidden in a toy car’s gas tank until some parents found it down the street.

I wonder what those parents were thinking when they found it and more to the point what their kid was thinking when they got grounded.

I would have hit him though that was a sacrilegious thing he did.

I think they did nothing about it and never mentioned it, I was just shocked they had the blue power ranger getting a blowjob upside down as a fold out scene.

Probably re-enacted it instead than maybe.

Damn… a memory I forgot I had.

This just unlocked a weird memory for me

we did not have the same woods

Seriously, why was this such a thing? Who was leaving all the porn in the woods??

I left porn in the woods as a kid, my friends and I would find it pretty often riding our bikes on the side of the road, I eventually got scared of having it in my room so I deposited it in the woods, I think I'm my mind it was safe from getting me in trouble but still possibly accessible.

It eventually disappeared so I assumed the cycle started over with other kids.

I think truck drivers would buy porn and toss it out before they got home, the porn roads-woods life cycle was strong back then.

It weirdly makes me feel better to hear your story. A kid stashing porn in the woods is pretty innocent compared to the shit I was considering about adult men going out there with it.

My buddy's street dead ended at the woods. You could actually reach back pretty deep under the street. That's where we stored ours. It was in a plastic bag so it was waterproof. I went back about 15 years later and there was the bag. It had gotten ripped at some point so the magazines were nothing but mush. A little part of me died that day

After i moved onto online porn i buried mine in the same woods i found them in at the same spot in a metal lockbox that i had duct taped a black bin liner around to make extra sure it would be safe and someday i'll probably take a trip and see if its still there.

Old chicken coup next to the park for me. Old boards could be moved to get in since the door had been nailed shut.

Nice providing it wasn't covered in chicken shit or worse.

No chicken shit. I don't think it'd been used in decades. It was torn down when I was around 11. Always wondered if the porn was still in there.

Who knows but if it was i bet someone found it.

Or in your brother/cousin/other male relative's room, while they weren't around 😂 Or all over the cubicle walls in public bathrooms, resulting in: "Are you alright in there? What's taking you so long, did ya fall in?" 😂

Yeah i remember going into the public bogs on the river and just seeing gay porn pages all over the wall with numbers of call this for a good time with a glory hole in the wall to the other cubicle usually stuffed with bog roll so no one could peek while taking a shit.

I miss that given that where i live most outside public bogs have been demolished and those that do are far enough way from the public eye that the council don't care.

I did leave pics of an ex's tits and pussy she sent to me 6 months after dumping me for the guy she cheated on me with so in my moment of fuck you bitch i shared them with my work colleagues and had a female friend put them up in lesbian stalls with her name and number and this was before revenge porn had a name and also one of the reasons i've never been one for sending nudes or getting them and why i'm adamant about it in general but if you can live with the consequences than let them send what they want.

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You must have a park or 10 in the city but i guess if that city is ny than it would be central park but if your a brit reagents park if you're in london

This should have been way higher since I'm willing to bet the average zoomer will be confused as hell (at least at first) on why this was ever a thing.

I bet they are as some already seem to be. I do hope that in rural areas where wifi is spotty to none existent that boys are still finding porn in the woods or forests at this point probably along with still using blockbuster another thing renting actual films and not streaming.

I like my tech but some things are been killed of because of it and thats sad.

My stash was in an abandoned shed in the woods across the street, under the floorboards. When it got wet (how?) the titties and hard-core scenes would be half-transparent to what was on the other side of the page, and also kinda stuck to the next side page.

That must have sucked but also cool in a destroyed porn kinda way.

Lol the first porn I ever found was the holy grail. Some shed in the woods but there was an upper attic area that could only be accessed by climbing through the barn door. I had brought a buddy with me and he boosted me up. I pulled him up after and we found boxes that lined the walls with so many porno mags, if I decided to take them all I would probably still be jacking off to new porn if I used a page or two a day to date. It was the unspoken spot for a long time until one day they tore the shed down.

Hiding porn in the woods

Cinemax Friday after Dark, and that one channel that had scrambled porn.

Ah yes…Skinamax.

I remember watching part of a movie on there, the guy is a fanatic for this model lady who is kinda of a bitch, he kidnaps her and wants to convert her to not being a feminist and the only main scene I remember is her trying to get through the doggy door, topless and she gets stuck because of the size of her breasts. So, what is solution to help her get out? He greases them up with a huge tub of margarine, eek.

​

Aww: Private Obsession!

Uncle pull taaab

I had a TV where if i flipped the channels up and down real quick I could sometimes get the scrambled channels to sort of sync, everything was alien colored and warped to hell but by god it was good enough

If I tuned to that channel with the VCR, which was connected through RCA cables, and with a Y splitter the SNES was also connected there, and I turned on the SNES with no cartridge, it fixed the jagginess and I just had to deal with the scrolling and the alien colors.

Stolen Playboy stash hidden in the woods

Lol the spice channel

Squiggly Spice

Squiggly porn is still best porn

Ah, scrambled porn...

"Oh, shit, better turn it down, I wasn't expecting them to moan that clearly."

"I SAW AN ASS AND A TITTY."

Porn? Hell I watched every Wrestlemania scrambled too! But also lots of Showtime for the boobies

I feel like I misunderstood this comment for a moment.

I wanna see some skinamax... for the nostalgia.

The scrambled “Spice” channel! One step up from Victoria’s Secret lingerie issue. Or, Good Housekeeping for some people.

Black boxes that unscrambled the cable channels.

We had a kid in our grade that had one of these and he was a complete jerk but we all tolerated him just in case he let us come over.

I'll raise you scrambled porn

a billboard for a beeper company that had a sexy woman in a bikini suggestively straddling a giant beeper (that, I assume, was on vibrate)

Omg please Tell me the beeper was pink.

I had a very cool beeper. It was keychain sized and clipped on my pants. So I kept my keys clipped on my pants with it. Beeper codes were crazy.

no. it was green?

Clear teal green, to be exact

Big Bob's Beepers!

Hey Arnold reference?

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must be a big-ass beeper

Big Ass-Beepers sound kinky

Privacy.

In the 90s you could just go somewhere and not have to worry about every tiny thing you do, everywhere you go, what you wear, what kind of cereal you like, etc being harvested. Now it feels like every single thing we do or decision we make in life is monitored and recorded.

Worse yet, people seem to be okay with this because it's convenient.

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You’re one of those conspiracy kooks, aren’t you? /s

Yeah pffft, look at this guy liking privacy. What a weirdo. What do you want privacy for? Weird sex stuff and murderin' people?

I'm living in a small rural town, and yesterday I noticed they have installed cameras all over the town square.

Makes you wonder who they’re selling the data too

Is it just all for data collection and marketing now?

I have no idea who is watching or what happens to the film.

Robots are watching and mining the footage.

What's funny is if you said that in the 90's people would think you're actually crazy. Now this is an accepted fact of life

Unless there’s an unusually high amount of crime in your town, this makes me very sad…

There isn't.

Hot Fuzz. (The movie I mean)

I also hate how normalised it’s become for people to be filmed or photographed on a bad day without their consent and for it to go viral.

This stuff is thankfully illegal where I live. Not that it doesn't happen around here, but it usually allows for the spread of such videos to be limited more easily.

Can I ask whereabouts that is? Without you doxxing yourself obv. I just wasn’t aware this was illegal anywhere!

Germany. You have a right to your own image here.

Worse yet, people seem to be okay with this because it's convenient.

And because it's basically the only option unless you're an advanced PC user who knows about the more underground shit that doesn't do this.

Most people barely know how to google something, let alone remove data tracking.

I dunno, growing up in a smallish city in south west England that’s exactly how I felt actually

Maybe it was old ladies instead of security cameras watching what you were doing.

Yeah but also the fact u were almost guaranteed to run into someone from school, or someone who knew someone from school, whenever you did anything

It made being a teenager incredibly hard. I had to live my teenagerdom out in London in my 20s instead. I’ll take the big city and it’s surveillance anyway, there’s still at least a perceived anonymity which is very mentally uplifting. I love it

I think social media ruined a lot of stuff. Nobody lives in the moment anymore, everybody has to record and post every aspect of their life. I miss the days of just enjoying and living in the moment

Unless Sting was into you. Then he’ll be watching you.

Heading down to Blockbuster to rent a VHS.

And sometimes taking forever to choose one! So much fun.

Playing Street Fighter II or NBA Jam while being there.

Street Fighter was the bomb yo.

Ahh the netflix and chill of the 90s....
Spending an hour or two wandering the blockbuster, making out with your lady in the aisles, trying to find just the right flick.....
heading home
and fucking through the movie instead of watching it

Good times!

Please be kind, rewind!

It's basic decency!

And having to return it the next day!

Don’t forget to rewind it first!

Please be kind, and Rewind!

How about answering the phone without knowing what number is calling you.

Not being able to fast forward through commercials.

Having to drive somewhere to watch a movie you don't physically own.

Meeting people at the airport gate when they get off the plane.

Seat belts in a car that were only a lap belt.

Many people using a check to pay for everyday items, such as groceries or clothes.

  1. 2 to 3 foot snowstorms in MA every winter that didn’t melt right away.

  2. Putting a disc in my PS1 or PS2 (early 2000s) and just playing the damn thing without having to stress over downloads/uploads/installs/random updates/online crap.

  3. Kids outside all the time until the streetlights went on.

Blizzard of 93 and 96, good times. We tried to goto Lechmere but roads in Worcester were toast. Which also reminds me of Jordan Marsh, Strawberries, and the Aku Aku.

Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins! I know the recipe is out there but getting one fresh from the bakery was bliss.

i found my cookbook.

J. Marsh blueberry muffins:

6 table spoons butter, melted

2 eggs, beaten

1/4 teaspoon salt

1.25 cups sugar

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 cups blueberries

Heat oven to 400. Mix all of the ingredients until moist. Do not overmix--muffins will become tough. Spoon into 12 lined muffin cups. Bake 20 min or until done.

She also mentioned the story goes a woman loved the muffins at Jordan Marsh so much she asked to buy the recipe and was charged $250 for it on her bill when she thought the waiter said $2.50. The customer was so angry she gave it to everyone she knew.

This is incredible, thank you! I swear just two days ago I clicked on a bookmark I've kept for a while for this recipe and it was a dead link. Thank you!

My mother got the recipe for the blueberry muffins from Jordan marsh waaaay back when, and included it in a family recipe book i got a few years ago. :D

Ohhh yeah the blizzard of 93 my family of 7 was moving from Sturbridge up to Milford, NH. Not that far but I was 5 at the time and remember it as a very dramatic adventure. I do remember that on the last night, all of our things were in the moving truck except mattresses and the power went out so we moved them all into the living room to sleep.

Yikes, what a time to be on the roads. They closed school for like 2 or 3 days. I remember my eyes being glued to WCVB school closings and the weather channel.

I was a kid in Southbridge Ma! Those were awesome days! Me and all the neighbor kids played in the parking lot of an abandoned factory! The town plow would push all the snow from our street in there and we built tunnels in the banks! Talk about unsupervised kids doing dangerous shit! Nowadays nobody would let their kids do that! Too many kids died that way!

My mother was a Paramedic in Boston, and she remembers the blizzard of ‘96 well because that’s the night that while loading a man who had a heart attack shoveling into the Ambulance her partner slammed the ambulance door on her right hand.

Car doors were heavy then, an ambulance door? Jesus. Hand shattered.

96 was the April Fools Blizzard, right? I was driving back to MA from Long Island, and 95 was a freaking slip and slide.

Yeah it was the late season blizzard. I think it was called the storm of the century. It hit like the entire east coast

No, the April Fool’s blizzard was ‘97.

Don’t forget Filene’s and Filene’s Basement! I miss those stores. The original Filene’s is now a Primark, and the clothes aren’t as good as Filene’s. And the original Filene’s Basement is now an upscale Roche Brothers. It seems like a desecration of sacred ground!

OMG the Aku Aku! I live in NE CT and would often drive through Worcester with family on the way to spend the summer with my grandparents in Maine and the sign for Aku Aku was one of the many landmarks. How sad I never got to experience actually going there. Its a stupid 99 now which is even sadder!

The Last Boston 'Snow Farm' Finally Melts

Remember 2015 when the snow didn’t melt until July?

That was the winter from Hell. We lived on Mission Hill at the time and the sidewalks were like one-way corridors because the snow was piled 5’ tall on the side of the roads. I’ll never forget the sight of someone’s Jeep being left on the street and plowed through with snow for the entire winter.

God, I remember that year. Lived in the North End, and had to go to Roxbury/Dorchester for school, at BLA. I always say that’s the year we got over ten feet of snow in a month, and I tracked the progress based on if I could see the white van in the staff parking lot or not. Edit: I also remember school being cancelled for 90% of February, lol. It was like clockwork, go to school on mon/tues, then a storm would hit and cancel school for the rest of the week.

I moved to California that April, and there was STILL snow on the ground when I left.

I don’t miss snow.

That was the worst!!

I was plowing. Things started to get pretty tricky by storm #3.

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I'm with you 100% but you can download games and updates in the background now. I know it's not the same as grabbing a new game, unwrapping it, and playing it immediately, but I use my Game pass and PS app to download almost everything I play while the consoles are resting

That is the number one thing I miss about console gaming. No updates to download, no long wait for an installation, just pop the disc in and play

I'll always remember that time we got like 3 feet on April Fool's Day

Fk me. I miss just putting the game in and playing!

2 to 3 foot snowstorms in MA every winter that didn’t melt right away.

when I moved from IA to the south I was 11-12. We still had a little bit of dirty old snow on the ground in IA, it was june. We moved in june.

For real about the snow here in MA also thunderstorms that were loud, bright, and lasted more than 6 minutes

Yeah, I mean they still happen but the trend has been downward over the years. It’s mid-July and I’ve probably had one storm so far, and barely any rain, and it seems to be like this every year now.

The twin towers being shown during scene changes in movies and shows staged in New York City.

yea the scene changed to the war on terror

This was not in the 90s. It was in the 00s

Sorry mate, I think there's been a misunderstanding. It was super common to use the twin towers as an establishing shot in the 90s but, like OPs question says, not now.

I wasnt trying to say they collapsed in the 90s, just that establishing shots of them happened a lot.

You know what. I am an idiot. I was thinking Lord of the Rings The Two Towers, not the World Trade Center. Thought it was talking about trailers for the movie. It was a long work day yesterday…

It's alright, it happens to the best of us.

I feel like there's a joke about nerds somewhere here but I'm not sure how to construct it.

...I don't know how to respond to this.

Uhh, for all but a year and a half of the 2000s it was most certainly NOT a thing, buddy…

No shit. That’s why you only saw them before that.

67 69

These still work,

I just tried *67 on my boyfriend, who is sitting next to me. It works! Mind. Blown.

r/UnexpectedlyWholesome

I used *67 not too long ago when I needed to make a work call from my personal cellphone. I also use the work VOIP to make work calls from my phone, but I didn't have access to it at the time for some reason. (My job has a bunch of reasons why they only give certain people work cellphones and they're mostly dumb reasons, but whatever.)

Yup, I use it constantly for work so client's don't have number, lol.

what is this?

I'm guessing 67 is to make your number hidden to a Caller ID. In some countries in Europe it's * 31 * or #31# on cell phones. 69 is to call back to the number that called you last afaik

*67 before dialing the number will block your cell phone number. I use it often for work.

*69 will call back the number that just called you.

A single family home under $200,000

In small cities around here you could get a nice home for 40k in the 90s.

Bought my first house in Toledo Ohio in 1993 for $50k. 3 bedroom 1 bath, small yard. I was 8 months pregnant when we moved in.

Did you meet Klinger?

No, not personally.

My parents bought a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, ranch-style home for $70k back in the mid-80s. It sold for $150k in 2002. Oh, and it had a half-acre of property.

My folks bought a war home in 1986 (sold it a year later) for 25k. It just sold for 489,000. Four walls and a roof. Fun stuff!

yep 3 bed 2 bath with a basement in Iowa for $36,000 late 80's early 90's.

I bought a house in the UK in 1984 for 12,000 Pounds. It's 170, 0000 today. Which is about the equivalent of 12, 000 in 1984.

That would’ve sold for $1.2M in AZ at least today

You could get a house for under 70k in my town less than 8 years ago. Those same houses are around 300k now.

My folks bought a house in North Sydney for 20k (AUD) in the early 80s. Then another one nearby in '84 for 25k, then a large rural property in '88 for 40k. All while having yearly incomes that matched or exceeded the house price.

And now they keep asking me why I don't buy a house. Well, fuck, if I could buy one for a year's salary I goddamn would! The best I can do now is in the middle of nowhere for 3 years' salary, but there are no jobs that'll pay me my current ask where these shitty "cheap" (twist: they're not cheap) houses are.

Our home was 77k in 1987 and I thought that was a fortune.

My parents bought a place in the late 80s in the 50-60k range. That place is now worth 230.

A few years later they bought a place for 115k. That place? Now worth over 300k.

My parent's house was $50,000 in 1980. It's worth $200,000 now.

I mean if you calculate inflation that’s about $180k in todays money.

1995 - Parents bought a three story home on a half acre with a nice flat yard. We had a huge kitchen, big living room, formal dining room, huge family room downstairs, and a basement so big we rode our bicycles in circles down there in the winter. Three decent sized bedrooms with closet space. Dad worked in Lawn and Garden at Walmart then. Got a job with a small town police department lager. Mom stayed home with us until we were in school, then picked up part time minimum wage work. House was $40k

I wouldn’t believe it now if I didn’t live it…

My parents bought their house for 225k in the mid 90s on one income and it’s worth over 2 mil now 😩

Check out Springfield Illinois and other smaller cities in the Midwest.

Yes. Mid Michigan is VERY inexpensive.

That's not possible under $400k by me. And even then, that 400k home will need a lot of work.

I was browsing Zillow today.

It's fucking depressing.

Zillow is a fucking joke when it comes to home pricing. They can be off by a lot.

I was only looking at listings, not their estimates.

There's basically nothing even listed below 325k, and nothing I'd even want to look at below 425k.

Depends on where you are, really.

In 2019 the median US home price was $234,000 CNBC identified 13 markets where median price was under $200k. In the 3 years since, the median price is now $354,000 and only one or two of those markets would still make the list (https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/08/29/us-cities-where-the-average-home-costs-less-than-200000-dollars.html)

So that's in 2019? Everyone's talking about 1990s. In 1990 the median price of homes was $98,000-$110,000

And in 1990 your interest rate was 10% , compared to his 3% or so on homes in 2019. Assuming you don’t pay your mortgage off early over 30 years, homes were effectively cheaper in 2019 by over $20,000 over the life of the loan in 2019 than 1990 before factoring in inflation.

Median home price where I live in 2011 was $130k. Today it's $533k. Outpacing inflation juuuust a little bit.

Bought mine six years ago for that price range

I’m curious, how much has it appreciated since then? Still under $200,000?

i know my parents house has appreciated from £200,000/$236,000 to £650,000/$738,000 in around 15 years, which is just fucking ridicilous, not bad for them though as they can sell and move out to the countryside but if you want to live anywhere practical it's just stupid.

Not sure. Holding out to see how things settle. We may be on a bubble.

Can still be easily done in the Midwest

Let’s all just move there then!

That’s…one of the choices!

In the UK this wasn't even possible then, in the mid 90s my parents moved into a realtively urban area and bought a small 2 bedroom house for £200,000/$236,000 and this was barely big enough to fit 2 adults and a baby in it, they then moved a bit out of town to a small 3 bedroom terrace for the same price, that's the house they still live in and it's worth now £650,000/$768,000.

It's just stupidly expensive.

This is regional. I live in a 50k US city and my home was less than $130k 2 years ago.

Parents bought their house for 170k in 1980. Now worth 3 million cries

You can definitely buy that in rural America today. There won’t be many jobs around or much to do for fun, but you can be a homeowner. I bought an absolutely adorable fully remodeled house in a city of 5k people for $79k & a small factory for $100k (came with 4 acres) when we decided to start a company. Being an entrepreneur is no cakewalk.

There are downsides as I mentioned, but it’s utter bullshit you can’t afford a house or property in America. You just want to buy in the middle of the expensive areas & be in cities which are always going to command higher dollar than rural land. So what you’re actually saying is OMG I can’t believe I have to price compete with all these people who want to live in the same place I do. America is unaffordable! Lol. No, it’s absolutely not. I’d love to move out to where my family lives in Colorado, but I can’t afford that right now. That doesn’t mean I can’t own a home. And I’ll have all of this paid off in under 5 years & will be debt free. What’s your priority? Location or home ownership?

When most people say they can’t afford a house, they’re obviously not considering scenarios where they abandon their life and family to move to rural Mississippi. They are speaking from the perspective and with the assumption that home ownership should be generally attainable.

This is, in my opinion, a crock of shit. I am happy that you were able to do this, truly. I’m not going to move a 4 hour flight + an hour drive from my family to a place where there’s no jobs and nothing to do for fun aside from outdoors stuff (which I enjoy but still). You are privileged to be able to purchase $180k worth of property in the middle of nowhere and clearly not have to worry about how you’re going to pay the bills.

My first house, 2018, was below 150k USD. But not in the US so I’m not sure how relevant that is anymore.

The property my parents bought in 1990 had their property value crash to below 30K in 2008. They’re selling(trying) for its appraised value now of around 200k.

I bought a ten year old split-level on a large lot in a desireable neighborhood in Colorado Springs in 1995 six months out of college. $99,999.

Divorced three years later, and sold it for 125K. I can't imagine what it is worth now.

Anyone from the area want to chime in? It was in Briargate.

Well, even before this last six months, you gotta adjust for inflation.

the house I grew up in was $36,000 in the late 80's early 90's when my parents bought it.

But is that 1990s money or 2020s money?

Depends on where you live. I have a family of five and we bought a three story house for 200k just 2 years ago. We're in a "city" of 10k in a rural state in Southern USA, though

Still a thing in NY

My city's housing marking is especially bonkers right now. 3 bed 2 bath homes that aren't even in great condition are selling for $450,000+ and people won't stop buying.

My wife and I looked at a house that had no central air, for some reason all the interior doors were removed, and whoever painted it got paint on the counters, cabinets, light fixtures (basically everything) and it sold for $430,000 less than 4 days after being put on the market.

Beanie babies

Yes, before they put those big stupid googly eyes on them!

I still have a box of these tucked away, just in case 🙌🏼

Payphones. Pen pals. Pager. Tomagotchi. Pogs. JNCO jeans. Over sized Disney/cartoon clothes like Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird and Daffy Duck.

Twitty Bird and Daddy Duck 🤣

Haha auto correct on mobile. Thanks! Lol

Those are all Warner Brothers cartoon characters. Disney is Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, but yeah, you are correct. Malls had Warner Brother's Super Stores and they made that kind of clothes super popular and they started being solid at other stores as well!

You used to see Animaniacs T-Shirts everywhere! There were literally hundreds of designs available over about a five year period of time.

God I miss JNCOs

They started selling them again. They're expensive though

https://jnco.com/

Landlines. Extra points if you ever got so wrapped up in a Convo you also got wrapped up in the long-ass cord that stretched from the kitchen to the living room. 💯

And then holding the receiver down towards the floor and letting it spin until the cord untangled itself.

Lol, you, my friend, get an extra extra 10pts.

Pagers and code speak: 143, 187, 411, 07734, 58008

Back then: writing 58008 on the walls

Now: lol 69 nice

Long drunken debates over things that can easily be settled today by a quick Google search.

Yeah, this is one I’m glad is over. Even when you were alone and you couldn’t remember a famous name or whatever. It would drive you nuts all day.

Aol

I still have an aol email 😁

Been my primary email since ‘93.

I wouldn't use it if applying for some jobs. Seeing it suggests an applicant is a Luddite.

You lamer.

What?

The general consensus among the hacker scene back then was that AOL was "lame" and anyone who used it was a "lamer". Nobody in that scene would've been caught dead using an "@aol.com" address. AOL is one of the services that brought the internet to the mainstream. Before then you either had to be a university student, government official, or a hacker to access it and that's just how we liked it. After AOL showed up, we saw the beginnings of the ".com bubble" and the rest is history.

Haha oh I don’t know why I didn’t know this. That’s cool! Thanks.

Paying with exact change in cash.

Paying with cash.

Touche

Come to Germany, I just did this yesterday. Cash is still king here.

It’s still really common at least in Eastern MA. It drives me crazy waiting for someone to slowly pay.

I have only used a card maybe twice, and it was a friends, I only pay with cash. I didn't realize that's not common!?

Yeah, Germany still uses cash a lot. And the US, both are very backwards/conservative in finical tech. But yeah, globally in developed countries cash is uncommon.

I'm Swedish, and the last time I payed in cash is probably pre pandemic or even further back

We shouldn’t let paying in cash go away, one of our last means of privacy in the economy

I still do this and wasn't aware other people didn't?

Old ppl still do this! I kinda love it

harder to do in places where the 1 cent/penny coin is/has been phased out.

Nah the cashier just rounds it to the nearest 5 cents!

but it isn't "exact" anymore.

nobody cares about $0.02 loll

from a kid perspective this is what stressed me out about having to be an adult. that and directions. thank god for apple pay and google maps.

I was out with my daughter yesterday, and at the checkout her phone was refusing to work and she was so embarrassed, apologising to everyone in the queue and the cashier.

I had real money and handed over two twenties while she was scrolling, to my own amusement; she justifiably thinks that I am old fashioned.

Her digital problems gave me a flashback to standing and waiting with my sister who would always hold up the queue sorting through coupons and small change.

Who doesnt do this?

Basically the only thing I use cash for is buying weed, and even then, I don’t have exact change.

We don’t have pennies anymore

Leaving home in the morning with nothing but a key. No phone, money, i.d., water bottle or even a watch.

And have no anxiety about it.

I didn’t even carry a key. I lived in a neighborhood where no one locked their doors.

I didn’t even wear pants!

That brings back a memory from back then. I turned 16 in the 90s. I had bought an old MGB in anticipation of getting my driver's license knowing that if I wanted a cool car I'd have to get a fixer upper so I bought it when I was 15 and did a lot of work on it to get it road worthy. The month after my 16th (could get license at 16 + 1 month back then) my dad and I put a lot of time getting the car ready.

I got my license and went to my part time job. When I got home that night, my dad told me that it was too late to take the car out, but it was ready to drive.

The next morning, I went down to the garage in just my boxers with the intention of just admiring my car. That admiration led to sitting in the car. Sitting in the car led to starting the car. Starting the car led to driving down the block. Driving down the block led to driving around town.

I thought that was in movies and a few places in the Caribbean. In Barbados many of my family used to leave their door open because they many of them lived the same proximity.

I used to live in a village where people would leave their keys in their car in case somebody needed to move them for some reason. There wasn't a lot of parking "downtown"

Did you at least wear pants when you did this?

lol you know you can still do this

Smoking a cigarette in McDonald’s

Those little tin ashtrays with the McDonalds logo on it.

I had forgotten about those OMG they was a real thing

I worked at Hardee's in the early 2000s and remember those cool ashtrays fondly

And the little McDonald's coke spoons

Thank god that's no longer a thing.

If you're eating a greasy fast food burger, smoking shouldn't be a concern.

At least with the burger you have a choice to ingest it or not. When people smoke(d) in public everyone had to breathe that air whether they wanted to or not.

We're talking about inside a McDonalds. You're bad faith, or illiterate. Either way, your opinion and stance on things is authoritarian and not worth hearing. Be a better person tomorrow.

Being inaccessible.

If you went out and your friend called you wouldn't hear about it until you got back home, and that's if you left a message. Even online it would show up on your away message, and not directly to you.

People would have to actually call you at work in they wanted to get in touch with you during the day.

If you left the office for the evening you weren't subject to getting 900 emails telling you what you missed. More importantly you weren't expected to respond to them outside of business hours, unless you were a doctor or had another job where you would have a pager or some way for people to always get in touch with you because of emergencies. For the vast majority of us however once you left for the day you were gone.

I still refuse to be contactable outside of work. If you're not paying me to be on call talk to me when I get to the office or get bent.

I try to do that, but somehow I always fool myself into thinking I’m only helping myself by making tomorrow that much easier.

Yeah, not so much.

As a kid being able to go out in my neighborhood at pretty much any time without telling my parents and them not worrying.

Listening to cassettes on my walkman.

Walkmans were legit. The later Discman battery life was absolute crap.

Dollar burgers.

I miss 'buck burgers' night at the bar.

39 cent Taco Bell tacos.

(there is no cent symbol on the iPhone!)

They're still out there, but perhaps not much longer.

I was just telling my husband that I miss the McDonald’s all American meal, $2.01 for cheeseburger, fries and a drink.

In high school in the mid 90s McD’s ran a 29 cent cheeseburger unlimited amount deal for awhile. My friends and I would have burger challenges. We’d scarf down 10 burgers for 2.90!

BBS's or Bulletin Board Systems all but forgotten.

Not by me. I remember FIDONet, which was the first message board that worked across the country.

Plus online text games like Trade Wars and Pimp Wars - and lots of ANSI art.

I would get local computer magazines with listings of all the local BBSs around and call them all up.

I ran Cnet BBS on an Amiga 2000 then on a 3000, it was a chat board and always in use.

I did pull in FIDONet, and I had a friend who got Usenet to work on my system.

Food Fight was an online game I was caught up in. I had an Amiga game called Hack and Slash people just loved, yet I never saw the attraction.

Amiga FTW! I never ran a BBS but Terminus on my A1200 was a fantastic way to peruse BBSs (and early dial-up Internet).

Trying to chat with the sysop

Kurt Cobain playing a show

[removed]

lol honestly I could listen to Kurt Cobain whine about things all day long. He was the best.

Having a blank cassette ready to go in the tape deck while you waited for your local radio station to play that one song.

And when that song came on, your flew across the room like The Flash to press the record button.

And it might even have a bit of static on the track. Still felt like a win!

I remember calling the radio station requesting a specific song and then asking not to say "101 the best station..." during the song lol

They did not play my song

Koosh balls

I have 3 original run "fuzzy" koosh balls in my plastic drawer a few feet away. 30 years old and still intact and smell right. (They're selling at Target still, btw)

edit-fuzzy, not furry!

Matches for free at every bar/restaurant/hotel.

Movie stars with yellow teeth

And their original body parts

Yeah it's really bad in 80s movies too

Grunge music

It’s making a bit of a comeback.

Something In The Way finally charted 30 years after its release.

Thanks, Batman.

Plenty of new grunge feeling artists on spotify so id agree

Got any recs?

Staking Polly, VIAL, Destroy Boys, Aberdeen, Press Club, Death Lens, Mannequin Pussy.

Just to name a few. Maybe not all "grunge" but same type vibe.

Just checked out Vial and Aberdeen. Stoked to hear new rock music that doesn't have that annoying post-alternative Breaking Benjamin formula of "30 second buildup then cliche chorus". Instead we are getting the original lyrics and experimental music that made grunge hit so different.

The "post alternative" I'm referring to is found in bands like Falling in Reverse... cliche asf

All I can say is go listen to Barb Wire Dolls. Classic feel, great lyrics & solid beat. Their album Slit is a personal favorite

I fucking love Vial. They’re from my city and I’ve been to so many shows. They’re absolutely sick

Yoooo! Nice to see another Vial fan, been listening to them since early 2020. Been dying to see them live. You lucky bastard

Hell yeah i love destroy boys

So are eyebrow piercings.

Yes!!! Lots of bands popping up in my city that have a grungy vibe.

Layne Staley.

Ah, Layne. Maybe the ultimate example of "yarling". Although if you want the funny version then there was also that guy from Creed. And maybe the first Stone Temple Pilots album. Or that Days Of The New guy. So many r's after sustained vowels...

Music in the 90's was in general better.

And the 80’s

Funny how all the comments are about how haappy and inocent things were. Remember Jeremy? A hit song about a boy who shot himself at school. Everything was 'angst' and backlash against the saccharine 80s that even infiltrated hard rock with its glam. The world may have been simpler but we were still a bunch of morose motherfuckers, a la Mallrats.

That was actually one of the first songs that came to my mind when I answered. Also, Nirvana. There will never be another.

Its still around but more uh progressed? Check out the band Aberdeen, they make some kickass grunge music

It says rare or non existent. Although, I didn’t realize it still existed.

I THINK I'M PARANOID

I currently have a Nirvana cd on in my car. Yes, I'm old.

Yep. I'm down with that. I was a huge fan back then.

It’s all still available on Spotify.

Lot of people claim to love grunge in general, but can't name any band except Nirvana.

Good thing I didn’t say I love it.

Not talking about you, I'm talking about people in general who say they like grunge.

My bad. Sorry for the saltiness.

I miss browsing CD stores. It was magical

And putting on the headphones to preview the cds!

Omg bruh it was like finding excalibur in the rock when the headphones were there!! Legendary

Today, that would be considered unclean and they would make you put sanitary napkins on the headphones before and after you used them.

Chunbawumba Tub Thumping was my first CD purchase at age 9.

"Boyyyyy dannnyyy boyyyyyy"

i got that same CD for my birthday when i was around that age haha. I wish i could remember exactly how old. Shit slapped

There's a store in my town that still sells CDs, records, cassettes etc. They even sell old video games and consoles, tapestries and cool music memorabilia.

Thats dope im surprised theyre still in business!

Curling your bangs

A girl I was in school with had the most perfect circular bangs. I use to stare during class, wanting so badly to see if it could hold my pencil if I just rested it right in there.

Luckily my bangs hid the burns I would give myself on my own stupid forehead

I definitely spent a good chunk of my life waking up early to curl bangs before school!

Computer that takes half of your desk or TV without a remote control-the least favorite child in the family would have to run to the TV to change the channel 😂😂😂

Remotes exist since the 70's. Our SONY Trinitron came with one around 1980.

The latter wasn't normal at all in the 90s.

Cigarette vending machines

They still exist in italy 🇮🇹 lol

Germany as well. But I think we Europeans smoke more than our American friends.

Spain too.

So anyone under 18 could buy them??

Atlantic City. Except they cost fifteen bucks.

Still half the price of anywhere in Australia.

Pretty cheap for a vending machine.

75 cents for my foster father’s Kent’s😂

I go to multiple bars in the NY metro area that have their og ones in use

I was going to say “indoor smoking”.

In the men's bathroom even.

Smoking rooms in the hospital I used to work at… The door would open and a cloud of smoke would come out!😂

They still have one at my favorite shit hole bar, and they're not too ridiculously priced

I just saw a combination candy and cigarette vending machine in a bar. It was new!

And you could pick up a free matchbook pretty much anywhere you went.

Wallet chains.

Still very popular in metal & punk scenes

Fruitopia

Shout out to the one McDonald’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Fruitopia is the only reason I go to the McDonald’s when I go into our office there. Last time I was there was late 2020 right before COVID lockdown and they had it in their machine.

I miss those drinks!

Shenanigans that stay between you and your friends and do not haunt you for the rest of your natural life.

The middle class

Ace Of Base

I still hear "All that she wants" semi-regularly on the radio station we have on at work that plays older music.

TIL it’s Ace of Base and not “Bass”, which I always thought was an odd choice given how little bass is in their music.

Brick weed.

Schwag. Kids don't know!

A livable wage for low skilled workers

Size 32 pants

Still in them 💪

This one hit me right in the gut

Got you beat. Size 28 Levi's, and they were falling off me. Real Levi's mind, the ones made of 16 oz denim. Although not that I'm ill, I can get into my Levi's jacket I last wore in 1988.

Friends randomly showing up to your house to hangout or vice versa.

Stopping at a highway gas station to grab a map before entering the city

Being happy

Being happy? Left that behind a long time ago.

Are you okay?

Nope, but i'll live.

I hope things improve.

Fingers crossed. Thanks though. Have a good weekend.

You're welcome. I hope you have a good weekend as well.

Just simply being.

All the feels to you 🤗 I'm in that headspace today.

Yeah…no bueno as it’s Friday and I “should” be just happily “being”…but nope, not today. Hope both our heads ease into simply being today (she says as she is texting this, watching a zoom meeting and observing my OTHER phone go off…) Ugh.

Video games that didn’t require a fucking subscription.

I just saw something about BMW charging you a subscription for heating your car seats. Geesh!

"Special offer! If you pay $18.99 a month, you get 3 free level skips+1000 coins"

Going to the movies without the internet already spoiling everything.

Some of the trailers back in the day were a lot more spoilery than those of today though.

To throw your buddy into the pool and not worrying if you ruined his $1500 phone.

Pay phones

doing everything without needing a cell phone

Well, you still needed calendars, driving directions, recipes, calculators etc., but the need could not be addressed by a single portable device

Back then, you had the cell phone installed in your car by an actual installer. Theportable phones did not get to be reliable until the later 90's.

my dad had a bagphone in his truck. still adamant that he had better cell service back then then he does now with the cheap androids he buys.

He did have better service. The bag phones were a full 3 watts on an analog network. Way better coverage than digital and the low power of handheld phones. I kept a bag phone in the car for years just to be able tto dial 911 in remote areas if needed. The analog networks have been shiut down, so those old bag phones no longer work. There may still be a digital bag phone available on some networks, but they are rare and usually marketed toward remote areas where coverage is sparse.

Human memory was just plain better before cell phones, too. Although, my dad did insist upon carrying a pocket calculator everywhere, out of spite from being told he "wouldn't always have a calculator with him" in school. Yes that stupid phrase has been around for a long-ass time.

Human memory was just plain better before cell phones

[citation needed]

“citation needed”🤓

if you need a citation, your memory is definitely worsened.

I could remember whole addresses, long numbers, web addresses in my head, not that it was anything special before. Now things being so digital, my memory has become very lazy and i don't like it.

If you dont use it you lose it, its that simple with the human body.

My memory is just fine, thank you very much. Without needing to remember phone numbers I can use it for something more useful, such as a foreign language vocabulary.

Yeah I don't think so. My everyone wrote phone numbers and addresses in a little notebook, recipes in another or had recipe books, printed out or wrote down directions.

It's all just in one device now.

Cd player to watch movies , cd burner built in to computer

I bought my first CD burner in 1998 (I think), $900 worth of copying bliss! I think it was one of the first 4x speed burners, seems so archaic now.

And now computers usually don't even have a disk drive!

An answering machine with a cassette tape.

[removed]

Seems like we should be doing that in the US. Maybe make the Nickel the smallest denomination. No one wants pennies.

I hate pennies. I have a shit ton and no bank will exchange them and every machine at the jewels takes a cut just for using the stupid machine

I have a commemorative coin from when you all got rid of your pennies.

Floppy discs

1-900 numbers. I’d wager a lot of people under 30 don’t even know what those were.

And what were they? Hmmm? Hmmmmmm? What 900 numbers were you calling? 😏😂

Edit: turns out I’m the fuckin perv 🤦🏻‍♂️

My parents let me call in to save Larry the Lobster, but it didn't work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_the_Lobster

Once I called the New Kids on the Block 900 number twice a day every day for a month one summer. My best friend made me do it, I swear!

No joke, as soon as I read this, I could faintly hear You've Got It (the Right Stuff) in my head. Haunting.

Nintendo switched their game counselor line from a normal long distance call to a 1-900 number sometime in the early 90s and I remember being mad that my parents wouldn't let me call so I learned the hard way with a pocket full of quarters that you can't call 1-900 numbers from a pay phone

I remember being in middle school and just getting into makeup and having the brilliant idea to call Wet N' Wild and see if they'd send me free samples. I figured their number must be 1-800-wet-wild. Boy, was I surprised.

Thank you for calling 1-900-FATGIRL where it’s so easy to just stick it in…your credit card that is…

Can confirm, mid 20s here and I don’t know any numbers between 1 and 900

I’m way over 30 and don’t know it. Tell me (I’m Dutch)

In the US (maybe North America generally?), a phone number of the form 1-900-XXX-YYYY is used with services that provide information or entertainment for a price, which is charged per minute and billed to the caller, appearing on their monthly phone bill. In popular culture it was associated with things like psychics / fortune tellers / spiritualists and adult entertainment, both of which advertised heavily on late-night television. There were also reports of people racking up astronomical bills from calling such services.

Other more legitimate services used 1-900 numbers as well, such as Nintendo's game help line. It was also used for viewer feedback for TV shows, like how NBC's "Friday Night Videos" would have a segment pitting two music videos against each other, telling viewers to call one 1-900 number to vote for ZZ Top, and a different 1-900 number to vote for Duran Duran (either way, the viewer paid a couple bucks to cast their vote).

The technology was rendered largely irrelevant by the arrival of consumer internet, first in the form of AOL and similar dial-up online services, and more completely by the web.

Of course, we had similar numbers over here. Thanks.

Calgon taking me away

Go back to the 1980s when Calgon had the "Ancient Chinese secret, huh?" commercial that would go over like a fart in a diving bell now.

And Madge telling women, 'your soaking in it.'

My first job out of college (1998)was AOL tech support.

It paid $7 an hour.

That was more than enough to support my husband and I, pay all bills and groceries, gas for my station wagon to drive the 30 miles to work and back, and eat out every night, with plenty for wants..

My boss at AOL told our work group we'd only have to work for a couple years before retiring because our stock shares would be worth millions by then.

AOL was doing so well, with stocks splitting twice a year, that this was completely believable.

Wow, I wonder where you lived because in 1984 I was making $7.83 an hour and I was near tears because of my embarrassingly low salary. I was able to get by but barely. Fast forward 15 years having purchased AOL stock, thanks to a friend who worked at a brokerage firm, I had a good little stash. This substantial initial investment, helped supplement a decent lifestyle for years to come.

I don't think they are telling the truth. I was making $7.50 an hour in 98 and barely scraping by as a single person

Having a husband out of college

Actually, I got married my junior year. He had a good job with benefits, my parents were moving out of state, so we had a small wedding.

It was ultimately a really, REALLY bad decision.

We all thought AOL was going to be what Amazon actually became.

Affording your own expenses including a place to live, without roommates and with the ability to save money without limiting yourself to eating beans and rice. I'd say ramen, but packs are going for almost a buck each now where I live. Used to be like 25 cents for 4.

The carry-over years of the earlier 2000s were the same. My mind boggles at how anyone can pull this off now. I had my little basement apartment, two bedrooms for $750 a month (plus utilities) at 20 with only an okay-paying job. I only got a roommate because she was a good friend and needed a place to stay. It’s so grotesque what life has become.

Absolutely. I had my own apartment (a studio but 600+sq feet) for $650 in 2006 in Oakland. I feel so much for younger folk and I’m not even 40 yet. At 22 I had my own apartment, went out for pizza and beer regularly, and no room mates. In the fucking Bay Area. That’s just not possible these days for the average person.

I remember when parts of San Francisco were so undesirable that you could easily find studios for $450-$650, like in San Bruno and the Sunset. I really, really miss those times, you were able to live by working. It feels so impossible these days, where you work but still can't live.

Same. I actually passed on another cheaper studio that was in a really unsafe neighborhood for mine that was just in a plain old unsafe one. And I could afford to make that choice with a $15/hr job.

yea I have 2 roommates for a house with electrical that doesn't always work. A broken window, all the door knobs are broken, the living room is concrete and has no light fixture in it (we use a tall floor lamp) and a broken doorbell to boot. I live paycheck to paycheck and can't afford anywhere nicer, but shit my rent went up last year and the year before, and for what!? this house is a shithole. They didn't even have the carpets cleaned before we moved in and the carpet is awful. It didn't need cleaned but replaced probably 5 years before I moved in and I've been here for 3.5 years now.

They used to be 10 for a $1

You're paying way too much for ramen. Who's your ramen guy? They're $0.33 at my local Albertsons.

You're paying 33 cents a pack? My store still has them for 15 cents each.

Who's your ramen guy?

Hahaha this gives me strong Creed vibes (from The Office).

I was super broke in the 90s. No way could I have lived alone then.

Yeah, when I moved out at 17, a $5.25/hr job paid enough that one week's pay covered rent and all bills for an apartment in a good location, and the other three weeks/mo was all spending money.

Kinda wish I'd invested some of it back then, but we were out on our own for the first time, some parties had to happen.

Yeah, no way I could do that without roommates back then.

I guess that’s location dependent- I lived in San Francisco all through the 90’s (and beyond) and could never afford to live without roommates, granted I wasn’t quite in a “career” phase of my life back then.

Find someone with a Costco membership. Big box of I wanna say 48 packs for $10.

[deleted]

In my area you need to make 60k, minimum, to be able to support yourself. I'm just talking about housing, food, utilities, transportation, and nothing else for one person. It's like that in many other areas across the country as well. 60k isn't that unattainable, but most people aren't making that much here. It used to be that if you had a full time job, other than maybe fast food and the like, you'd be able to support yourself, and only places like NYC or LA were unaffordable for the average person. Again, im ONLY talking about housing, food, utilities, transportation, and nothing else. Just the basics. That's not the way it is anymore for more and more areas.

Fortunately for me, I make enough to where I can support myself and I'm living quite comfortably. Most other people aren't that fortunate.

Everything is more expensive but jobs in the area still pay $12 an hour?

Catalog shopping and using the phone book for looking up people and businesses. Now these are used to start fires lol

Playing outside with your whereabouts unknown until the streetlights came on

Landlines. Frosted tips. Yo-yos. Using the word extreme for every product

Renting movies- hoping the new release was available at the video store, and having to remember to return it on time (and rewind it before you did). Having to wait sooo long for movies to come out on video.

Zip Drives. I remember going to my boyfriend's apartment with my Zip Drive and download shit off Napster (more 1990s for you) for hours because he had a cable modem and I still had a 56K modem.

click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

Oh, I wonder if it's just this drive. Let's use this disc in another drive.

Click click click...

I was amazed at how much Zip and Jaz drives could theoretically hold. But the disks and drives were just terrible.

Across-the-aisle political compromise.

And respect for the Constitution and the democratic process.

Nowadays it's "Kill every politician because fuck them"

And not just politicians, but any celebrity or online personality that someone has a problem with. A few days ago, I literally saw a comment from someone saying that she was going to send Taylor Swift death threats for not releasing "Taylor's Version" of a certain album before she released a different one. DEATH THREATS. I was appalled! How much more entitled and effed up can you get than that????????? It's like everyone wants to be a madman or madwoman dictator who chops off people's heads for minor inconveniences.

A job with a pension.

Legal requirement for all employers in the uk to provide some sort of pension scheme for employees nowadays. This was not a thing in the 90s. Not in the uk anyway.

guess original commenter is american.

In fairness, am American (and Canadian) and have two pensions.

Join a union.

Union I'm in had most of their pension stolen by the leadership, thankfully they've transferred it into an independent one where no one can touch it.

Even the union jobs for healthcare workers around here do not have pensions anymore and matches to 401k/403b have plummeted

Trade unions mostly all do that I know of. Anything under AFL-CIO.

https://aflcio.org/about-us/our-unions-and-allies/our-affiliated-unions

Mixed bag there. You literally could not start a pension now because of the funding structure (AKA scheme). Also, you don’t control the money. (Not bitter or anything.)

Government jobs still do pension

Yep I got a union job as a diesel tech and I get a pension

Ooooooo this is huge. The “p” word is no longer an option in most places, even top jobs offer only your own investment plan. Everyone from that working generations future has changed as a result.

Smoking inside the house, restaurants, bars etc. When I was a kid there was at least 1 person smoking in a room basically anywhere. People would smoke in their house or even your house regardless of if you smoked or not and this was considered normal.

Yep, I remember we had a stack of ashtrays. "Go and get a clean ashtray" was a command often issued to me.

I can remember my parents and aunts and uncles ALL smoking, and watching the sunlight play through the smoke. People used to smoke at work, on planes, trains had smoking carriages. Shit, in restaurants. I remember in the early 2000s in London just before the ban came in, sparking up a cigarette in a restaurant.

Yeah for sure, I remember babysitters smoking in the house or smoking while driving us around. In movie theaters, restaurants damn near anywhere

It was only polite to have ashtrays handy even if you didn’t smoke, for your guests.

Yeah totally, my grandmother never smoked a cigarette or had a sip of alcohol in her life but people would smoke in her house all the time she had multiple ashtrays.

Same, and let me guess you were perfectly unaffected by it just like myself.

I always thought it was gross and hated the smell. I don't think it had much of an impact on me in the long term no, I had asthma when I was a kid like most people grew out of it, who knows.

You can grow out of having asthma? Huh TIL.

Also wow you had asthma and was around smoke all the time and yet are perfectly fine, that’s amazing.

Depends on the form. Some are really persistent and you'll likely be on inhalers for your life. Mine wasn't too bad I just had emergency inhalers not maintenance stuff and it just kind of went away by the time I hit 20.

Yeah really, I'm jealous. I had/have asthma and if I as much as stand next to someone who has been smoking recently, my chest starts to get tight and my breathing sounds like bagpipes doing their warm up.

My entire family used to smoke, uncles would go weekly to the cash and carry to purchase whole boxes of cigarettes for the family. It seems crazy now, and when I look back at family pictures you notice all the branded items that they got by saving up the tokens.

I remember my parents rolling their own cigarettes with the little machine. I like sliding it back and forth. That was my job for about 1 minute until I got bored.

My grandparents had a large serving platter of silver with cigarettes, pipe tobacco, cigarillos and lighters neatly arranged. They would put it on the table whenever there were guests in the house. I remember how me and my cousins used to get down on the floor to play in their living room when we were there for family gatherings, because that was the only place where you could still breathe a bit of almost clean air

With the single fan on the ceiling spinning at the slowest speed basically just swirling the smoke around.

[deleted]

Reasonably comfortable air travel

Crack. Sure, it still exists. You don’t hear about it like you did back then though.

Same with AIDS. Thankfully.

Now we’re back to cocaine.

You do not live in north Philly. I’m literally looking at an empty crack can on the sidewalk as I type this!

I dunno, the president's kid seems to think otherwise

Faaaaaaaaaaart

This comment wouldn't have been downvoted in the 90's

Yeah he's retro. Not as retro as Trump Jr. and his straight powder cocaine habit.

That's different, cocaine never actually went out of style.

Now, if one of his spawn got caught with quaaludes, that would be retro.

He's even more retro. :D

Crack is whack!

Payphones. The one I know of is in a café in Hamilton, Montana lol

Blockbuster

Good one. I do remember going til about 2004 but still.

I used to go there with my mom on a Friday evening as a kid… good memories

VCR and manually twisting the little knobs that held the film to rewind a movie

Unlocking new content in games by beating them in certain ways. Especially fighting games.

Loud Music, now everyone has headphone/earbud, Boombox was a way of life in the 90 in Quebec city.

​

When i was young, i used lived in "La basse ville" the Downtown geto of Quebec city (now it's all Touristy), and during summer time there was music EVERYWHERE in the street. Boombox, Loud Stereo, Street performer. It was vibrant, colorful (sorta), Educational, Communal.

now we all live in are tech bubble, Isolated...

What i'm saying is talk to your neighbor, Ask them what they like, have a small BBQ. Share your life

So true. There doesn’t seem to be much of a sense of community any more. I remember my suburban neighborhood as a kid in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We kids would play outside while adults congregated on various front porches.

Le scrapyard de sculptures à l'Îlot Fleurie!

Bra's on cars.

Saturday morning cartoons

Measuring Baud in single and double digits for internet speeds.

I don't recall anything slower than 800 baud.

Right you are. 8.8 was one of the first I ever had. I looked it up, and it's kinda cool, with telegrams and morse code you would have ACTUAL single or double digit baud. I'm glad you called out that the speeds were measured in thousands, so even single or double digit connection speeds was still multiple thousands of baud(s?).

I had a USRobotics Sportster modem that was 14K baud! Those were the days

Look at daddy warbucks with the 14.4K Baud modem. My first one was a 2400 baud, it took an eternity to download a full screen cga image.......one line.....at....a.....time. Unless someone picks up the phone. Then reset the eternity timer.

USR was the bomb. I still have one hidden from the wife who says I hoard things.

14.4kbaud thanks

Oops, my bad 14.4Kbaud. You're welcome

Trying to pause my vhs at the right time to see nudity and trying to pause it where the lines don’t block out the good part.

Gotta use the tracking knob to adjust the lines.

9 planets

at least in the US, arcade games inside of 7-11's. So much street fighter.

Kids being taught cursive writing.

I believe they stopped teaching this 10 or so years ago, after a lot of Western schools went digital.

I was born in 1992 and I learned cursive in 2nd grade. I can write cursive and print and both are neat and legible. My younger brother was born in 1998 and did not learn cursive.

I began learning cursive in 1992. 😉

I write in cursive daily. It's a shame that it's no longer taught, because I find it much faster.

Definitely faster

Are kids still learning how to read analog clocks?

Not from what I've seen in schools. There are no clocks at all, and all my students just use their phones. I of course wear a watch, and have shown them the face when they ask what time it is. Nothing, blank stares.

My kid is 9 and has been writing cursive since he was 7. I'm in Scotland. And he can read my cursive handwriting.

As a lecturer, what I have seen is students (16+) not able to write properly at all: it's a fucking mess, they write too neatly and therefore slower or they write in text speech.

The other thing is that they have no idea how to use computers cos they use a phone and tablet all the time. I have watched students type with their THUMBS on a laptop. They don't even know what "control-alt-delete" is when you help them sign into campus computers.

All those kids were from shit high schools and were failing so badly they were sent to college to get taught different courses. 95% failed my classes (criminology) because they had no want to learn how society effects everyone, including themselves and couldn't answer questions like "how do you feel about X affecting you and society?"

It's fucking sad and that's not a failure of me doing a 12 week course, that's their 15 years of mainstream urban schooling.

Wait, how do kids learn to write a signature then?

They draw an X.

Over 20 in my town.

I’m okay with this one. I can read and write it, but it’s easier to read block lettering compared to cursive. I can also easily type 100wpm.

It’s like we can write in a secret code and the kids don’t know what it says.

My daughter was forced by her 5th grade teacher to spend many lunchtimes practicing cursive writing. That was 2010-2011. I didn’t know about that until later.

Yeah I was born in ‘98 and taught cursive through the 5th grade, 2011. I still use it and really appreciate that I was taught how to do it.

My youngest sister was born in 2004 and wasn’t taught cursive though! They even learned a whole new kind of math in school and about global warming, which we didn’t learn about until 8th grade, 2013. I have a couple other sisters born ‘99 and in 2000, and they did learn. So somewhere in there it changed, at least in NYC.

Yeah here to. My sons (16 and 14) can both write in cursive.

Whaaaaat? Are you serious? I am from 2007 and have been taught cursive. At least in Poland.

I haven't seen anyone wearing JNCOs in a while...

Thank goodness!

JNCOs have relaunched several times since the 90s. They most recently relaunched in 2019 and you can buy a brand spanking new pair right now if you wanted one.

[deleted]

Not out of the norm for designer jeans given that a pair of Diesels costs $130 and the JNCOs use at least twice the fabric than a pair of skinny jeans. Obviously either purchase seems insane to me but to each their own.

They were ahead of their time honestly.

Those giant pockets could fit a whole fucking ipad in them now.

I only recently learned that JNCO stood for “Judge None Choose One”.

Meeting on time at the agreed location.

Rotary dial phones

I bought one when we moved to a rural area with no mobile reception (Scotland) in case of power cuts. Proved its worth already!

Rotary dials had been replaced with push button phones long before 1990.

Listening to the radio instead of streaming music.

And on road trips the signal fuzzing out when you’d gotten too far from the broadcasting tower.

Pay phones… 10-10-321. Please state your name “MOM PICK ME UP AT THE MALL.”

Multiplayer games when everyone brought their computers and their monitors to the same house.

Buying porno

"The book" at the local rental place that one had to page awkwardly through and not get seen

Tucking one of those small porn mags into a Spin magazine or rolling stone and then going up to buy it. Hoping to god the porn didn’t fall out when it was rang up.

I wasn’t enough to buy but I remember the times when you’d happen to find a ripped up page in the street, or a magazine if you were lucky.

Woods porn.

I guess that’s the suburban equivalent. Lol

Going to the ravine hoping to stumble on a porn stash

People do that now. $10 a month on OnlyFans for free nudes from a random Twitch streamer

Writing checks for sure. Haven’t seen anyone do that in a minute

We write a few here and there... But it's become increasingly rare. Then again, we're old-ish.

I write checks to pay my lawn guy and my taxes. Before I owned a house, I used them to pay my rent, and taxes, lol.

Back then I would sit down to pay my bills once a month. Wrote six checks, put them in six envelopes, stuck on six stamps, walked to the post office. Autopay? What's that?

I dated a bank teller. She NEVER used autopay. She had to deal with peoples accounts when “issues” came up and they kept getting billed for things. She was very much cash and carry, a check if you had to, kind of person.

I'm not a bank teller but this is me. Though I do use autopay for my credit card now.

I still do. I don't care for autopay personally.

Paying your bills by check is about as old school as it gets!

I just wrote my first check today to join my local chamber of commerce... I'm 35.

Girlfriend and I run a home cleaning business, shocked me how many people offer a check as their preferred method of payment. It's way more than you would think.

I know my mom does that with her cleaners because it’s proof of payment in case there was ever a dispute. Her cleaners don’t use financial technology apps so this is the next best way in case there was ever a debate about whether payment was made.

Same just write it out for cash

The older guy who took 20 minutes to scan 10 items at the self checkout in front of me at Walmart then tried to pay by check. The guy kept holding up his items in front of the screen, I guess to show the machine what he was trying to buy?

My landlord only accepts rent payment with check or money order. They don't offer online payment. Not sure if that's the standard for other rental agencies, but I was told they prefer this way (probably because with us having to physically drop off a check, they have the money in hand as opposed to getting a notice electronically it was paid.)

Except they don’t have the money in hand with a paper check. Anyone can write a bad check that bounces. My landlord accepts only paper checks or money orders as well, and he has lost my checks on several occasions. It’s annoying to cancel the original check and write a new one, then fight with him over paying the bank’s cancel check fee. Once he sat on 6 months of rent checks and deposited them all at once, triggering my bank’s “suspicious activity” alert and freezing my account. So annoying. I’ve practically begged him to let me pay with Zelle, but that’ll never happen.

Serious question. How did you pay before, and wasn't there a fee that the landlord would have to incur?

I have a tenant (early 30's) and with me renting to him, he had to get checks for the first time (I guess, because I had to educate him on how to do that). I don't want to take payment services because I lose some money when they do that.

I know I'm old, but this thread is underlining that. (But I have NEVER written a check to buy groceries, and still steer clear of the checkout lines that have old women in them)

I'm mid 30s and got a checking account (joint with parents) when I was 14/15. I still pay most of my bills with checks. Just bills though not for things like groceries, gas stations or restaurants. All of which I've seen people do around here.

I'll use a check for church donations for record keeping. That's it.

I've had a few people pay with checks at my job. They were all over 60yo.

But, somehow, every. single. day. I encounter many people who don't know how to use their debit card.

"It says 'remove card.'" blank stare

You haven't had my grandma(94) send you money I guess then.

Live in a small town and deal with the elderly. They will whip out the check book and hand it to you to fill out . They just sign it

I use checks to pay the water bill because I don't feel like dealing with the city's website.

I'm in my 30s and write them occasionally. A lot of small companies that I've had to call out to the house (plumbing, roofing, HVAC, etc) still want checks.

This is my parents. They don't write them as much anymore but they still do. My dad gets paid from checks from some of his lawn care customers still.

I haven't had a checkbook in probably 15yrs. I might need a check once or twice every couple of years, I just get a cashier's check from the bank or a money order from the post office.

Then you haven't been behind a granny in Safeway recently. 😒

My husband refuses to stop writing them... I used to pay the monthly bills. Took me about 15 minutes to pay for mortgage, power, water, etc online. Now we are single income and he pays them. Takes him 2 hours of check writing, balancing account and filling out envelopes.

Same end result.

Go to cvs the customers love to pay by check lol

I use checks mostly for wedding and graduation gifts, or paying plumbers & contractors

My grocery store line would like a word.

Hahah maybe it’s just me then!

I saw someone pay by check at Costco the other day. Instant nostalgia.

I pay every bill with checks except for my credit card. I don't like having all my accounts joined to my bank. I try to avoid online accounts in general. The mail becoming worse has made me debate this stance though.

Just waiting in general.

Next time you're waiting for something and other people are doing the same, just look around, everyone and their mothers are on the phone, all the time.

No one just stands there anymore and just waits.

I left my phone at home yesterday while picking up a pizza and i just stood there, i swear people looked out from their phones at me just standing there.

I'm fairly introverted anyway but I stopped going out with most friends when I realized everyone was just on their phones most the time. Why should I pay a premium to stare into my beer and go outside to chain-smoke because I can't stand the awkwardness of it all vs being at home and comfortable.

Ever see this from Seinfeld? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE

I was in NYC a few weeks ago killing time while waiting for something, and people kept coming up to me until I hopped on my phone. It really killed my people watching.

If you wanted to learn how to do something, you had to find someone who knew how to do it and kiss their ass until they showed you.

Or learn about movies or music, you’d put up with all kinds of nonsense for information or skills. The pre YouTube life.

Life without anxiety. Why me god, why?

Just you? Nooooo......everyone.

Yeah, but I don't care about your problems.

A middle class.

Yeah, well. We have quite a few politicians to blame for the loss of that....

Friends or family not knowing exactly where you are at all times.

Wearing an onion on your belt, which was the fashion of the day.

Good episodes of the Simpsons.

Relying on the promo commercials to find out what next week’s episode had in store.

Edit: Hell - for that matter, having to wait a week for a new episode. God forbid it’s. 2-parter!

Maaaat-lock! 🤣

Latch key kids

I'd hear my dad come home after I had already gone to bed and I'd wake up to an empty house since he had to leave early

I'd get ready for school, do my morning chores (trash can on curb, turn off lights, etc.), then lock up and walk or ride my bike a mile to school (until we moved, then I walked 2 miles to the bus stop)

I'd see my sister occasionally, but she stayed with friends if my dad was working a lot

Months straight sometimes

Pagers

2 pac and Biggie!

The American Dream

starter jackets

Being able to dislike something/someone without being called a hater.

Nowdays you cant dislike anything and anyone without being seen as the bad guy.

I agree. It’s crazy sometimes.

Apparently it's OK now to hate haters. Also various "non-protected classes" (to use the legalese) like bankers, Republicans, the British, Americans, the French, redneck hicks, capitalists, wyte people, cis-males, frat boys, pro-lifers, bold comedians, Trumpites, Texans et al. I think it's still allowed to dislike New Yorkers, but maybe not for much longer.

In movies now, the worst people are almost always southern white male redneck conservative White Trash. Evidently it's fine now to hate them. Especially if they're poor and rural.

An Atlas under the passenger seat

Idk we're like half a finger away. ...

I’m a 2002 baby but I went on so many car rides with nothing to entertain me, just looking out the window, listening to the radio etc. Even in road trips. And my brothers (2016 and 2017 babies) can’t get in the car without watching a movie/screen time. It’s just different.

Using the paper version of TV Guide.

Getting your ass beat for running your mouth at people.

Hammer pants

For me it was going to the mall to watch a movie, get some food, play foosball at the arcade, meet girls from other schools with my buddies, sometimes hang with them or another group we met. Pretty much that was every weekend for me in the late 90s.

Pagers, cassette players, wired phones on the walls

VHS, vcd, floppy disk, TV humor that might get someone cancelled.

Smoking and non smoking sections in restaurants

AOL -You've got mail.

A cafeteria exploding with excitement.

No DVR and no Streaming meant we knew we were all watching the same thing at the same time, and limited internet access and limited phone access meant we waited almost a whole day before we met with our friends and gushed about the most recent episode of our favorite series. We had no other outlets unless it was the weekend. The anxiety over not being able to wait, the fact that we wanted to go to school, and then...it just popped. If the school was old enough, the whole building would tremble.

Now we all get it out over social media immediately all by our lonesome and without that same degree of excitement being thrown back at us since everyone else either does not know or already let out their excitement.

Being able to do dumb shit with your friends and not having it plastered all over social media. Us GenXr's got up to some stupid shit but there's no evidence of it!

This is exactly why I think if we're not going to just agree to shred everything from childhood which would be kind of stupid, at the very least everyone should get a pass on whatever stupid not-illegal shit they did as teenagers.

A 16-year-old sending nudes to her boyfriend is an idiot, not a CP peddler.

Driving directions printed off from Mapquest.com.

Or even asking someone for directions and writing them down and hoping they didn't miss a step.

My mom was doing that until the 2010s

NBA players staying with one team for a long time.

White dog poop.

Going to the video store to grab a VHS and a video game for the weekend.

Being yelled at to get off the internet so my mom can make a phone call.

Dial up internet was the best /s

When dial-up, it was a second line. I remember getting a busy signal lots of times because the other person was on the net.

And that hissing noise as the dial up connects to the internet.

Letting your kids out to play on their bikes all day without supervision knowing they would be fine.

People accessing the internet via a PC. Chat rooms where people would straight up say things like "17/m/cali, any ladies wanna chat press 333333" and then all of us smart asses would type. 2222222 and 444444. Also portable cd players were really popular. I bought a 2 minute anti skip portable cd player, for $200 in 1997. At that time most people could only afford a 15 second anti skip cd player. Mine would also play burned cds. Shit theres another one. Everyone had burned cds with permanent marker cover art. What wasnt readily available was more interesting though. Like smart watches. I have had 2 smart watches in the 90s. One i still wear to this day. Unfortunately it will no longer update my time via satellite, it used to have atomic time. It was also a pager watch. If anyone wants to see it I wear it every day. And will post a pic.

I would like to see it :) sounds awesome

Timex and Motorola got together and collaborated making these watches. It holds up to 150 phone numbers, it used to be able to have 2 time zones you could chose from as quick options on the screen and was a pager as well. The Beepwear pro was, if i remember correctly, the 3rd smart watch ever made. Beepwear Pro

Having tons of phone numbers memorized.

Crossing the Texas/Mexico border to shop, eat, and drink the day away and never be overly concerned about making it back home safely.

That crackling sound computers made when they were loading something.

Circling what we wanted for Christmas/birthday in a Sears catalog.

Balls inside computer mouses.

A liveable wage

It was okay to not know things and it was okay to not be around.

Guys approaching girls without being considered weird or threatening

Privacy and true anonimity.

Now,

  • Your bank records every transaction you make and sends it to IRS who later analyses you in bulk
  • Google records your heartbeats, temperature, exact location and movement (Fitbit or Android) as well as your opinions and general profile on all major issues (Google Search & GMail). They provide this info to Police/gov at the very least on demand.
  • Your land-line ISP records all info on where (which sites/IP) you connect, how long and how much data you transfer. This also results in a profile bound to your real id. The data is accessible to the Police/gov.
  • Your mobile phone service does the same as your land-line ISP except they also record your approximate location and your text/SMS messages
  • Every app records and relays whatever they can get away with. This is used to create another profile useful at the very least for ads. Your OS (Windows) now refuses to operate without you providing an id they (Microsoft) can bind "telemetry" data about everything you do on "your" PC.
  • "Your" TV/tuner records which channel you're watching and for how long, creating another profile based on what you're interested in. If they can get away with it, they also record what files you play through the built-in media player (LG).
  • Your video game console records which games you play, for how long, which games you so much as look at for more than a second in their store and generally everything you do as long as the thing is ON.
  • Your car records all your movements, how many people are on board, video feeds from several on board cameras and whatever else they can get away with. Next gen cars are built to fully work only when connected to their services and so they demand you put in a user profile to enable all car functions (see savagegeese video about next gen Toyota software).

There's much much more (e.g. Siri, Alexa) but I'll stop here. This is called a free society, btw, one that pays the highest lip service to privacy and private life. Reality is woefully different, of course, as there's mountains of $ to be made from handling people like farm animals and the gold rush is ON.

level 1PlasticPandaWarrior · 23h agoPrivacy d ...

Thanks, this stuff is important to know. The trend of some restaurants (and all airlines selling food) refusing to accept cash makes it even harder to have a life private from commercial and government surveillers and exploiters.

What surprises me is that many young people who know that they're being monitored all the time (by computer programs and sometimes by people) don't seem to mind it. If you see the movie The Lives of Others, about East German STASI surveillance about 35 years ago, realize that current technology makes it much easier to spy on, oppress and control everybody now.

Miss Cleo infomercials!

Not knowing everyone's political views and being able to have rational discussions with people.

Fucking up the family computer with every virus and bit of malware known to man after spending an evening downloading ONE song.

Making arrangements to meet friends where turning up "fassionably late" was not possible.

"We're going to meet at Town Hall Steps at 10AM."

You met at 10AM. If your mate didn't turn up by 10:10, you presumed their plans had changed and you just went and did whatever you were going to do.

No calling them to see how far away they were. No sending them a message letting them know where to meet you. They missed the boat. That was it. And everyone kind of accepted that - nobdoy's feeling got hurt because people didn't wait around, or someone stood them up - we just ... you know ... coped.

Years that start with 1

CD players

Discman, with anti-skip that never worked

It worked better than one with no anti-skip if you even breathed heavily your music would skip.

You do have a point. It did work better. Lol

I moved to Mini-disc the first chance I could, anti-skip on steroids for the day...

Ohhhh, I had a Panasonic with excellent anti skip

SAME! I actually still have mine lmao. And both the CD player, display and anti-skip works. The only time anti-skip did not work is if the CD was realllllllly messed up...

Remember how they were rated in number of seconds for anti skip?

Bass boost with the anti-skip

Or Cassette players. CD stuck around until today, and while it's rarer these days you can still see it fairly often in peoples homes, even if it ain't used that much anymore. Cassettes, though? Those are mostly gone for good, but where still everywhere in the 90s.

LOL, what?

CDs are still considered the best medium to listen to music from. They are still purchased quite a lot by people that like their audio to be perfect.

That's not true. CDs are so inconvenient to use. Even using something like winamp with .flac files is a better option due to the way you can manage playlists and won't have to bother swapping CDs. And .flacs are lossless mind you.

Then there's streaming services that provide lossless or at least near to lossless quality nowadays. Highly convenient and you can easily take that playlist with your phone too.

That's not true. CDs are so inconvenient to use.

I didn't mention convenience. Yes, they are definitely less convenient than streaming.

Now, back to audio quality.

All audio is compressed in some manner. The term lossless is referring to the conversion from another format... usually from a CD.

Talk to any audiophile, my friend.

Let me just say first that I have no objections to CD in terms of sound quality, heck even spotify is fine for me. Or YouTube is at times. CD to me is "hifi" in terms of sound quality.

Usually when people talk about compression in this context they mean compressing the sound after the analog to digital conversion so from .wav or whatever the original file type it is stored in before becoming an .mp3, .flac etc for us consumers. There's all kinds of digital conversion related things like aliasing... well it's a complex subject and I don't know that stuff.

Theoretically the most true to the original recording would be a vinyl as there's no analog to digital conversion step at any point. Even tiny miniscule physical variations in the vinyl in other words imperfections (tiny holes, wear over time) alter the sound therefore making it no longer absolutely true to the original. You know that crackling sound vinyls make in music? These are physical imperfections in the vinyl. CD due to the information in it being in digital format doesn't wear in a similar manner. Vinyls have all kinds of problems like lacking dynamic range too so in practice not truly lossless.

On the other hand the conversion process from analog to digital for storage degrades the quality. The degradation of it is mainly limited due to the nature of digital audio. Sampling rate. From the analog signal samples are taken at a set interval. The most common sampling rate in audio is 44.1kHz for example. The thing is, with analog signal the sampling rate is infinite kind of but since the 44.1kHz is so high (or even 48, 96, 192kHz etc.) one can't really distinguish it from the analog version.

In that sense there's some stuff lost already in the analog to digital conversion process. In practice that sampling rate is good enough to be considered lossless to our hearing.

However to come back to a more practical situation. CD is just a vessel, the files in it can be anything, .mp3, .exe, .flac, .jpg etc. There is a standard so to say with music stored on CDs. A typical CD stores music in said specifications: 16bit, 44.1kHz, 1411kb/s. Bits, sampling rate, bitrate.

These are downgrades from the original source but you can store anything on CDs and newer CDs do support more space so they're not all according to the above standard. I have an audio CD with music in these specs: 24bit, 96kHz.

But since CD is just a storage device, why not just use something more advanced like what we all have in our computers like: HDDs or SSDs. More space, faster everything, even the storage on my phone is better than any of these crude CDs. Just store your music in digitally lossless format .flac format. Flac is like a zip file and literally 100% equal to the quality of truly lossless .wav files are. Flac files just like zip files don't lose any information on the conversion process.

Then we have even another dimension to this whole story which is the most important and practical one: With your ears and audio setup can you hear a difference between a 320kb/s mp3 and a flac file and if so, did you do so by squinting so hard you weren't listening to the music but isntead to your audio gear. That's a common topic in the audiophile communities year after year. Only a blind test is a good way to check the difference here: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ That test isn't the best but it's something.

I've personally demoed tidal's and spotify's quality many times and when I looked really hard I think I heard a very faint difference in sound but it might as well have been the placebo effect at work. Having said that, the difference there is so miniscule, I just couldn't justify a tidal subscription.

On the other hand I have some music in .flac format on winamp. Best of it with specs like: 24bit, 96kHz and 6000kb/s. These albums aren't available on spotify, that's why I have them as local files on my PC. Spotify is just fine to me.

Ugh! A wall of text.

The best fidelity is vinyl. I haven't bought a CD in 20 years. Why use physical digital when you can just listen to digital?

CD's are lossless. Mp3s and most streaming services are not

CDs are lossless by today's standards, but not the 90s. Much is lost going from analog to CD in the pressing and mastering process

t. dummy who has no idea what lossless entails. Analog to digital is not compressed audio. Also what does the mastering process have to do with the conversion from analog to digital?

The best fidelity is vinyl.

Absolutely zero audiophiles would suggest something so ridiculous.

Vinyl is a personal choice. Nothing more.

"still exists in a niche market" does not mean "normal" though

Skinny eyebrows.

I barely have eyebrows. Hooray hypothyroidism!

Thank fuck for that.

They’re coming back in style lol

Those horrible brown alarm clocks. If you don’t know what I’m referring to consider yourself lucky !

Pretty sure those are the best alarm clocks. A deafening shock of the most heinous noise to roust you from sleep to ensure you wake up on time.

(Somewhat) affordable housing

Kids playing outside

VCR’s

Pay phones and if you couldn't find a pay phone most businesses would let you use their phone to make a call in an emergency. Now some businesses don't even have a phone number you can call or a landline and they only take online orders.

Food for thought

They are not all ghost kitchens (we have a few here that sell vegan food out of a normal Indian place which is interesting) I’ve tried to call places where I’ve been to the physical restaurant only to find out that they didn’t have a phone and worked at a juice place that didn’t one. Just an iPad to take mobile orders.

Buying an entire album and listening to it in one sitting.

That’s making a comeback though - Thankfully

Going to Kmart.

Pluto

POGS in Alf form

Me thinking a 6th shot of Jager was a good idea.

Tequila for me! 🤣

Friday night Blockbuster Video trips for movie night and renting the same movie every week.

AFAIK there is still exactly one Blockbuster in business today.

Telephone Booth (I been down hearted baby, ever since the day we met, ever since the day we met)

common decency.

True, and basic manners.

MSN messenger & Ask Jeeves!

Blowing in video game cartridges.

Just set up my Mega Drive and N64 again. Back at this.

Answering the front door

Common fucking sense

Cool winters, warm summers.

Grew up in Texas, never experienced just “warm” summers and very rarely any kind of “cool” winter.

Aussie here this winter has been cold .. summer hot as hell

Huh?

The weathers all fucked up

Evidence?

Tell you don't understand climate change without telling me you don't understand climate change.

A pitcher throwing a complete game.

This comment deserves more upvotes!

This is too far down

hitchhiking

Ah yes, the old Cold Case Files audition.

Maybe the 70s, but not really the 90s

I hitchhiked everywhere in the 70s, but I never would have in the 90s. Now I pick up random people in my neighborhood who are walking home from the bus stop nearby.

I hitched to both coasts twice, from Oklahoma in the early 90's. Some of the best times of my life. It was incredible. Only once did I ever have what I consider to be an odd ride, and all the guy wanted to do was pay me to watch me jack off. 🤷‍♂️

I hitched all over the USA and Europe. In the late 1960's and early 1970's there were still Hippie Volkswagen busses with flowers painted on them that would give hitchhikers rides. There was a vague camaraderie among the hip. And soldiers in uniform would get rides. Then during the decade things changed, and got a bit creepy. Hitchiking became seen as especially dangerous (to hitcher and driver alike). And strange sexual offers (like the above) and robberies got more common. I heard of a kinky driver who offered to pay boys for their used dirty socks. Things had got too weird, so I stopped by the 1980's.

I still see the odd person trying to hitchhike..I don't pull over to see if they are ever picked up

dont its kinda risky ngl

Arcades

Not having a cell phone

Honey mustard and line skating

calling your friend and having to talk to their parents first.

Buying magazines

Pooping without a phone.

Kids being outside until the street lights came on.

Fingering

Remembering someone’s phone number.

I still remember phone numbers I haven't dialed in over 25 years. Except for my best friend who I called the most. All I remember is the first 3 digits because they were the same as mine

Restraint.

Minimal airport security

Thick skin

Blatant sexism.

TV stations ending their broadcasting day and seeing static on the screen after 12 PM.

Cordless phones (land lines)

Bomb-bags. Back in the mid '90s they used to sell these little plastic pouches that contained baking soda and a smaller pouch with some sort of solution that reacted with the baking soda that made the whole things explode when ruptured. The result was a semi-loud bang, and I would buy like 4 of them for a dollar and just have a blast throwing them around. Well, sure enough, columbine happened and they stopped selling them (at least in NYC where I grew up.) Idk if they still have them anywhere, but that was the last I saw of them.

Edit: I just looked it up. They sell TONS of them on Amazon and at online at Walmart. I know what I'm doing this weekend :D

There was also a version called the fart-bomb. Same idea, but contained a horrible sulfur compound that reeked like rotten eggs when it popped. My friends and I would cause absolute havoc during Octoberfests, throwing them into the beer tent, and sometime into the comic shop or post office on Main Street. One time, the cops caught us with them and confiscated the bags, and I had to get my mom to go to the station and retrieve them, I got them all back in a sweet evidence bag. Good times.

Human compassion

Pagers.

Teenagers with pagers.

Doing your tax return without tax software could be quite the adventure.

Three little letters: V. H. S.

Paper maps.

Wtf is a pager?

Thanks for making my point!

Cheers!

Underground warehouse raves

Teletype machine, carbon paper, good weed

Pagers. Hawaiian Punch. Smoking cigarettes inside of restaurants.

What? You can still get HP

Old ladies walking through the mall for exercise.

Dangerous playgrounds.

Freedom of speech.

Pay phones Corded phones Car "mobile" phones

Mexican brick weed.

I definitely dont miss deseeding

Good rap.

Grunge music

Healthcare workers smoking in the hospital

Restaurants with separate smoking and nonsmoking sections, both of which were indoors

And with only a symbolic partition.

Natural tans from actually going outside

Video rental stores

Gameplay hint and cheat hotlines, such as the Nintendo power line

Dating not being a fucking minefield.

Wasn't it always?

Nor to the extent it is now, I'm currently single for the first time this century, in my day, you went to the pub, saw someone you liked, offered them a drink and saw what happened. Things have changed mightily, in many good ways but certainly not always.

At 10 years old I would leave the house after breakfast to play with friends around the block and beyond, and only return for lunch and dinner. I don’t think a majority of kids have that freedom from their parents anymore.

Knocking on your friends door to ask if they want to hang out, play soccer, hide and seek etc. generally also just remembering how normal knocking on someone’s door was! It is almost frowned upon now.

Looking in the classified section of the newspaper for a job, an apartment or basically anything you needed.

Looking in the paper to see What shows Where on, on the tv

People with a sense of humor

Being able to walk under the eiffle tower without buying a ticket

People knew men couldn’t get pregnant in the 90’s

Landline phones

Walking home in a hurry while repeating a 7-digit number to yourself, lest you forget.

Gas at less than a buck a gallon

LOL, I remember when my mom's boyfriend RILED about gas being over a dollar. And look at us now!

Actually, I think he was mad about it being 98 cents.

Leaving the house without being in constant communication. As kid, you could just leave the house bike around the neighborhood for a few hours and be home before sundown.

Cool people and block parties that were at least a little safe

Reading a newspaper.

Telephones

Beepers and blockbuster

Phone books

Floppy disks

Thinking the Internet would be a positive for society.

Holographic charizards

Traded mine like a month ago for a fuck ton of store credit, bought 3 board games so far, still have a lot remaining.

The original NFT

But you can hold yours!

[deleted]

Wasn't it melamine? Same stuff a mr clean magic eraser was made out of.

Good music

A Walkman!

Dial 1010-321 before a long distance call or waiting till 9pm for free long distance

This is something that seems like such a foreign concept to me. But when I was a kid, if I wanted to play with friends I had to walk to their house and knock on the door. And if they weren't home I had to walk all the way back home or somewhere else. Now if somebody knocks on the door it's like alarm bells going off. You automatically know it's some bible pushers or salesman because your friends texted you an hour ago that they're on their way.

Why not just call them on the phone to schedule something, wtf? I was around for the 90s too.

Not something we thought of as much. We spent more time outdoors and we would just wander over someone's house as part of our movements. I could be riding a bike for 20 minutes alone and just decide to go to Kevin's. Get there and he's outside so he grabs his bike and we decide to go to Eric's. No plans, just doing stuff.

Walking 30mins to a friends house to find out they are not home.

Peace

Collecting baseball cards

Cassette tapes. Tube televisions. Landline telephones in every home. Kids playing in the street until dark. AOL. AskJeeves. Limewire. Napster.

Worrying about Y2K.

Respecting your elders.

People that where born on the 1910s

Toys r us

The air vent right up underneath the steering wheel in cars

Soviet union

Not being able to access contraception, abortion or divorce, homosexuality being criminalised, the incarceration of single mothers... Ireland is pretty progressive today, but we came to it late...

Finding money on the street.

As kids we could always find some coins if we looked hard and go buy candy. Today almost no one uses cash

The fear that all computers and cars with microchips would suddenly stop working at midnight on Jan 1st, 2000.

Ah yes my doomsday scare cherry

Dial up internet, and be kind, rewind.

The save button was real

Acid rain features way less prominently in talks of pollution now. Turns out that stricter environmental standards have massively helped the issue in North America and Europe.

Good job nobody wants to roll those environmental standards back for naked and short-sighted economic gain, eh?

Dobermans, you don't see them as often now.

Getting along and respecting each other even if you disagree politically.

  1. Dial-up modems.
  2. Pagers.
  3. Civility.
  4. Fun.

Game demos on cds that came with a magazine.

Also - magazines.

No social media, therefore, kind and helpful people in real life. IRL

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding

Kids with scrapped knees.

Human Decency

Nightly news was not filled with violence or hatred.

Family dinners nightly.

Everyone minding their own business.

Phone sex lines? I'm assuming so. I don't see the ads on tv anymore. Also I haven't saw anyone roll their own cigarettes in probably 25 years.

now days it's people rolling joints.

Ya but that hasn't changed.

Fear of quicksand 😅

The President of the United States wasn’t suffering from Elder Abuse

George Bush and Bill Clinton if I recall were pretty old when they ran during the 90's.
Though this Bob character seems to be off his head half the time.

Edit: Biden* I said bob cause reasons.

LAN parties. Very prevalent in the 90’s and early-mid 2000’s. Now it’s all online gaming for the most part (save for video game tournaments, I guess). If a developer ever includes a LAN mode these days, it’s usually out of generosity more than necessity.

I remember those days. playing some Star Craft over at a friends house. After lugging my PC with me.
Oh yeah, it really was my very own PC too I bought it with my first few months pay.

Being able to afford buying a house.

You could talk to a real person on the phone when calling the pharmacy or utility companies and if there was a problem, you could talk to someone in a supervisory position in a reasonable amount of time. Nowadays forget it, they don't even pretend to care.

Payphones, I wish they were still around.

me too. I rarely bring my phone out with me and would rather have a few quarters on hand.

Seeing my dad

CRT televisions and computer monitors.

Funny how hotels still list “flat screen TV” as though it means something different to “TV”.

Casual sexual harassment in movies.

For example in rush hour the guy pretends to be the gay designer to get the women naked and look at them, in American Pie the guy films the girl masturbating and the whole school watches, but she gets sent back to her country and he is the victim because he’s embarrassed he came too early when he tried to have sex with her. In another American Pie Stifler yells pussy shark! Then goes under water and grabs the girls’ vaginas. It’s supposed to be funny. So much crap like this in 90s media but there’s more awareness now so it doesn’t happen like that anymore. Except sometimes I still see it in shows like family guy.

Was that American reunion or one of those direct to video American pie movies because that didn’t happen in the first 3 movies

Yeah it was the reunion one

That movie is only 10 years old though

I know it was just what came to mind as behaviour in older movies. There has been a ton of progress in the last 10 years

So basically every John Hughes movie?

I loved Revenge of the Nerds because the nerd got the hot girl in the end, but really he just raped her, then later gave her consent, I guess.

Yeah it’s nice that consent, or I should say women’s humanity is finally a topic of consideration

It's strange because as a real person, it's always something I've personally considered, but for a long time never thought about the way it worked in film.

you sure?

Just flip the gender in your brain and see how you feel about this.

I like how the guys on the left and right pass out too!

Not at all the same. Also sex is not the same experience for men as it is for women. Men don’t get pregnant from it, it’s never painful for them, they’re not shamed for being sexual, and they’re not physically weaker than women and scared of what they can do to them.
Nice try trying to compare years of degradation and oppression and sexual assault to one clip of a hot guy’s abs being revealed. Not at all the same.

yeah let's forecebly rip the clothes off of the female character in a pg-13 movie in 2022 and have the male characters all stare and eat grapes while she struggles. I'm sure you'd loooovvve that.

"it's just a hot girl's abs being revealed"

the loudest people like you are always hypocrites. you want revenge, not equality. I saw right through it. later

Clearly no one is listening to me. I never said it was ok. I just said it wasn’t the same.

You're a fragile pathetic human. American Pie is an all time classic was then is now. It's a sex comedy and if you're offended by it you shouldn't watch. There was a time when that was the solution, you can choose not to watch things that offend your little fragile sensibilities. Now we have to scroll by your incoherent radical feminist ramblings instead of you just shutting the fuck up and moving on and letting people enjoy entertainment they like.

It's like you saw someone giving a weak-ass take and thought "hold my beer, I can give a much worse take"

I wonder if you would say the same thing about racism in regular movies. The concept is the same. I also don’t get why you’re so offended that women don’t want to only be portrayed as sex toys and have all the media pretend sexual harassment is ok. I highly recommend going to therapy and maybe educating yourself on the female experience.

The movie utilized teenage voyeurism akin to teens sneaking a peek in the women's locker room. They didn't know she was going to masturbate afterall. It was the very early days of the internet, well before something like widely posting a sex video had the connotation as it does today. The actress had a decent career specifically spawning off that scene. Eye candy sells, men or women, you think Thor would get his role if he was ugly?

The difference back then is a voice like yours was a small small minority of the public. Men and women alike loved that movie back then and thought nothing of how it "made women into sex toys" or whatever your mind seems to come to the conclusion of. Now, we have outlets like twitter and reddit where a voice like yours is amplified to the max, in the 90s nobody would know about your voice, because your average person didn't give af. We live on the verge of puritanical society due to wokeness overload that was birthed by sentiments just like the ones you hold.

Women never loved only being portrayed as disposable sex toys or having sexual harassment portrayed as ok in movies. That would be the equivalent of me saying black people loved being portrayed as less than and called racial slurs in all shows back in the day. I don’t know why you seemingly have no empathy. There is no point in further discussing.

Were you alive when it came out? It was nearly universally loved by men and women alike. You are the person that chooses to be offended by teenage boys that want to see girl's boobies (oh what a revelation!). I admitted that the webcam broadcast would be overboard by today's standard.

Like I said, people like you are borderline puritanical. You act like we aren't sexual animals and every urge and desire has to be wrapped up and encased in bubble wrap for you to not feel violated. It's crazy.

BTW funny you mention black people in movies, where the hell was the 90's racism for black actors? Some of my favorite movies of the 90s (and 80's had awesome black actors as main and supporting characters. We didn't use to think of every single thing in the lens of who it offends and we also somehow cared LESS about race than we do today. Today, everything is viewed through a racial lens even if it doesn't apply.

Just because a movie is funny doesn’t mean women love the sexual harassment aspects of it. But ok dude. Be angry. Dehumanize women. Think sexual harassment is a joke. Nothing I can do to stop you I guess.

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Except if I understand what you're referencing correctly, one person was a victim a sex crime and the other one was made fun of for orgasming quickly.

victim a sex crime

As I remember, she (played by Shannon Elizabeth) was into it, and not outraged, and she demanded that he do a striptease for her. The "victim"hood was that he knew about the embarassing camera and she didn't.

Sorry but no one calls men sluts and shames them for being sexual and you’ve also completely ignored the part about sex being a totally different experience for men than for women. Not saying any sort of exposing against one’s will is ok, but that scene does not at all compare to what’s been made of women in countless movies, especially because women deal with sexual misconduct in real life.

[removed]

It's not a joke to women being groped by some sweaty prick.

Easy for you to say when you’re not always on the receiving end of sexual harassment and only being portrayed as a disposable sex toy. People are also largely influenced by what they see in the media. I can’t believe you’re so offended we don’t like being degraded and constantly portrayed as toys to use for fun. Despicable.

I think joking about things helps to show their flaws, South Park is usually a good example of yhis

Cause it's funny, no reason to be so sensitive

I really hope you’re joking.

Its about as serious as the movies in question. In other words its a damn movie, its not real.

Actually stuff like that and worse happens to women all the time, and sometimes people let men get away with it because “boys will be boys.” So yes, it is real. And when the media propels the narrative that that behaviour is normal it gets even worse for us in real life.

I'm sure you do

You do realize that its make - believe and nothing really happened, right?

You do realize people learn from movies and sexual harassment happens all the time in real life right? And you do realize it would be nice to see yourself portrayed as something other than a disposable sex toy, right?

Sorry. I don't get offended by something thats make - believe.

But that’s the thing, it’s not make believe. It happens to us all the time and normalizing it in the media is largely a reason why. I think you need to learn how to have some empathy.

It’s obviously a joke, jokes about things that would be offensive irl are sometimes funny as long as the joke isn’t meant to offend people, but entertain them.

Being allowed to have a different opinion than other people without fear of being completely ostracized.

Oh yes, I remember those days. In my early years in college, I remember getting into political debates with other students and it was very good natured. I have trouble imagining that now.

I've, personally, experienced the opposite. Partly likely to where I grew up. I've moved back now but I think tech and the internet has popped the bubble a bit. As a kid you had to be near identical to everyone else or be made a pariah.

You can still do that. Being a piece of shit isn't having a different opinion.

Maybe on minor issues, but otherwise you sort of can't. I experience this constantly a left leaning gun owner.

I support things like universal healthcare, expanding education, affordable colleges, better benefits and wages, legalizing drugs, pro choice, LGBT rights, taxing the rich, etc... but because I'm pro gun I get demonized in a majority of the subs as some child killing, military LARPing, ammosexual. On the other hand, in most of the gun subs you get demonized for not supporting whatever garbage candidate has an R next to his name, regardless of how many other civil rights and liberties they're trampling over because sHaLl nOt Be InFrInGeD.

And it's not some issue exclusive to reddit, I deal with this practically every day in real life too. In the end I get generalized and lumped in with the other party by both sides. While I certainly relate to the views on one side more than the other, I'm cautious to ever talk about anything political around someone I don't know really well, regardless of what I may think their views might be, for exactly the fear of being ostracized.

I definitely relate with this. I remember having a group of friends with mixed political leanings and we had drunken discussions/debates all the time that didn’t result in any rifts. They included the “extreme” ends of each spectrum too! No one is cool like that anymore.

I feel that way too. I lean mostly to the right but hold a few positions associated with being on the left - like nationalized health care - but the biggest issue is that I’m an atheist. All of the other conservatives I know are super Christian so I always feel like the odd man out because of that.

There it is

There you go

Only women can give birth

That depends on if you're using women to describe gender or sex as the two words meant the same thing until fairly recently.

OnLy mY OpiNiOn cOuNtS

I think you're just angry for the sake of being angry. Kinda sad.

I mean if your opinion is that the white race is superior or that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, then it’s not just a “different opinion”.

[deleted]

Yeah no, racists and misogynists don’t believe they are racists and misogynists, but they love calling Nazis “very fine people”. Not my problem that you pretend it doesn’t exist.

[deleted]

Don’t listen to them. They’re just 500 cats typing stuff. What do they know

Humility and accountability.

☝️- Wasn’t an adult in the 90s

Not being connected. Not being able to get a hold people or people not being able to get a hold of you. It was so nice being able to Not be at the worlds beck & call.

You can still do that by not answering your phone

A 1990 Ford Bronco un-lifted, unmodified, un-beat, un-POSed.

Playing outside

This for sure. My 16 year old is bored and complaining about it. It's July and 73 degrees outside. He has a bike and there are tons of places to ride around here. I'm like "GO OUTSIDE!!"

No, that's boring.

That transcends generations, though; I did that at 16 in 1993.

Of course, my folks' solution was to make me get a job.

Smooth move, 1993 me.

I feel like I was born at the tail end of this (1995) when I was little we would still go outside and play with our friends all day till it got dark.

Playing outside, unsupervised without any way to be reached or tracked.

Yeah. Too bad my parents knew my friends' landline phone numbers... so they asked around is he there

Especially when they couldn’t just call or text and say “come home!”

My mom knew that eventually I'd get hungry and be back for dinner.

I don't know where the idea that "kids these days" don't play outside comes from. It still happens plenty.

Looking around, I feel like there's a big selection bias in this. Everyone remembers playing outside with their friends.

Then they grew up. And moved away. But their parents stayed in the same place. So now their parents sit looking outside at an empty street wondering why kids don't play outside anymore.

And they moved to a street full if young people with no kids and they look outside wondering why kids don't play outside anymore.

We moved to a street that just happened to have loads of kids around the same age as ours. It's summer holidays here now and there are kids out there every day from 9am to 9pm, riding bikes, climbing trees, swinging on a rope swing and playing sports.

But their parents stayed in the same place. So now their parents sit looking outside at an empty street wondering why kids don't play outside anymore.

Really? where do you live?
I went back to my old neighborhood in 2017,
If there were 5 houses that had preY2K families Id be shocked.

Yeah. "Kids these days".

No, it's you these days.

It depends where you live. In Pittsburgh elementary school kids ride the city bus alone to get to school and there are always unsupervised kids alone at libraries and parks, often well passed sundown in the summer time. Here is it illegal to be in a public park after dark and everyone is a busy body whose in each others business. I wanted to let my daughter who was 9 at the time go to the park that was BEHIND the fire department with her friend and my ex said I was crazy for thinking that was okay. Like she's 9? The park is a few blocks away from our house? If anything happened they could ask for help and there would be fire fighters like right there it's probably the safest playground on planet earth.

I still see kids playing outside all the time. Though I don’t see as many teenagers outside as I did 10/20 years ago though.

I see evidence of teenagers. They come out at night and leave food wrappers, beer cans and cigarette butts at the edge of the woods like no one is going to know exactly who left that shit around

Yeah I see kids on bikes going around my neighborhood all the time

I never see children at the playground behind my mom's house. I know children live in some of these houses. They almost never play outside.

During the current UK heatwave, I've been going out for walks down by the river on a late afternoon, and there are literally hundreds of kids out. All in groups of about 20, just jumping into the river for several hours. It's nice to see.

Yep, I live in a neighborhood where you can hear kids shrieking at full volume all the time as they're running around outside, and playing in the road with no regard for traffic. I wish I lived in this mythical place where they stay inside all day.

Yeah, my 10 year old told me he rode his bike to the end of the bike path in our town and halfway through the next town before he turned around - about 5 miles.

Not only do kids still do this, but some parents just don't allow their kids to do this or do anything fun outside. As a 15 year old, I was just recently allowed to ride my bike to the other side of my neighborhood. And even then, it gets boring after a while.

Where do you live that kids no longer play outside? Is quite the false assumption that kids no longer go outside to play because they are all playing video games now.

As a millennial I watched a hell of a lot of tv and movies yet still played outside - the kids of today are the same way but with video games. Kids today are now socializing while they are gaming so they are actually probably socializing MUCH more than we were because once we went home that was it unless you got some telephone time - the rest of the time at home was only with family.

Only if the parents are shit do kids not play outside

3 random kids just knocked on my door this afternoon see if my daughter was in, she's 5 the kids were maybe 6 or 7. Unfortunately she was out with her mum. Walking home about 15 mins ago the same 3 kids go running past me pretending to be Pokémon ! Assuming they've been out all day just playing! My Ellie is maybe a bit young for me let her roam just yet but maybe next summer ? I am in Canada BTW so the kids don't usually carry guns

Hobbies that don't involve tech

Even my low tech hobbies like crochet and cross-stitch involve downloaded patterns on the PDF reader on my tablet.

Can you give an example?

Blowing shit up.

Looking at your wrist to tell the time.

I wear a watch everyday still

Same! Either some Casio or a mechanical. I like wearing a watch.

[deleted]

Or just regular watches? They are still a thing.

Manners and humbleness. Everyone seems so entitled nowadays

Getting called a f****t… I know we still have a ways to go, but we really have come a long way with homophobia since the 90s.

NGL I still find myself saying “no homo” when complimenting another guy on something. I know it’s wrong and I try to catch myself but it’s just so ingrained.

I get it. It was very normal in our everyday language for a long long time. And I give you props for even recognizing that its usage is past its prime.

This is still a thing on certain unscrupulous websites.

I know, or certain video game chats. But few people yell it out in the street or in hallways anymore. I’m sure it probably still happens in schools. Maybe it’s more of a “I’m not in my teens anymore” type of thing. Idk

Going round to your friends house when you want to play games together.

We would just show up without any notice at each other's houses. Sometimes they wouldn't be there and you would have to walk to a different friend's house and try your luck again.

Analog modems

Candy watches and necklaces

Privacy

Pagers

Saying you’ll meet somewhere at a time and place and have them show up on time without any texts

Surge

Balancing your check book.

Rad neon colors. Use of the word rad.

Smoking or non smoking

Calling someone collect

THISISBOBWEHADABABYITSABOY.

Using a pay phone

Breakdancing

Payphones

Cathode screen tvs

Also vhs taped and floppy drives

Dial-up.

Good music and radio

Knowing phone numbers of people close to you off by heart

Memorizing everyone’s number

Smoking sections in restaurants!

A genuine conversation

Belief in the American dream

A single income household

Good Rap music

Hanson bros?

Slap shot is a great movie.

Phone booths, maps in glove compartments, record/cd/tape stores.

Ashtrays in malls and restaurants

Pagers and pay phones

Phone booths/pay phones

Payphones.. haven't seen one in years lol..

Pagers

Pager

Filming strangers at a K Mart with a video camera the size of a small dog.

Phone book

Pay phones

VHS tapes

VCRs and audio cassette players

Walkmans and CD players.

Gas under $1

Beeper codes so you didn't have to pay full price.

For those who don't know what this means, basically back in the day, beeper companies would charge you by the character (letter or number) you sent. However, to encourage people to use the service, they gave you a 'free' limit. Usually about 10 characters or so.

To get around that, people worked out these simple numerical codes to tell people to call them.

Beeper codes:

143: I Love You

607: I Miss You

477: Best friends forever

121: I need to talk to you

911: Call me NOW!

411: What are you doing? or Where are you?

10 characters for free per message oh my God I can exploit the hell out of that!

Calling your friend’s house to hang out and their mom/dad answering the phone

Not having an email address.

Frosted tips

Lisa Frank notebooks, stationery, stickers, and the like. Getting school supplies was always super exciting for me each year, and I miss that feeling.

So Today I had to explain to my teenager what the stick looking things on the hoods of vehicles are.

Having to call your crush's parents/sibblings just to speak to them

Phone booths.

Being happy

Individuality

Warehouse raves

Telling my mother I was going to a friend's house and then peacing the fuck out for the night. No communication until I got back home, and my parents knew I would be fine on my bike and wouldn't die or something

Freedom baby, that is what I miss from the 90's most

Closeted homosexuals and indoor smoking

Smoking in restaurants

Most children have no clue what their parents do for a living or their friends parents. I knew what my parents did. I ask my son he’s like “ you work “ lol

Pagers

Good music on the radio

Smoking in bars.

My parents allowing their 10year daughter to hop on her bike without a helmet, leave the house without any idea of where exactly she would be only returning at dark.

lol, yes! Be home by the time the street lights come on! Summers were fun because the street lights didn’t come on until like 9:30. I could have been anywhere!

Getting a girl/boys number then having to call them on there home phone and ask them on a date.

The twin towers.

That was my first thought too

Dial up internet. I miss AOL and that old modem connection sound sometimes!

“GET OFF THE INTERNET I WANT TO CALL UR AUNT”!!! Everytime

People straight up smoking in the middle of the kitchen or in mostly closed rooms with kids wandering around.

Music videos on MTV

Smoking indoors

Waterbeds.

Seeds in your marijuana. 😝

Hmmm haven't seen it listed yet... Mooning people

Sic transit gloria mundi!

Payphones. Also, collect-calls from the aforementioned payphones. "DO YOU ACCEPT THE CHARGES FROM Wehadababy IT'Saboy ?"

Video rental stores.

Good music.

Collecting Pogs

Landline calls.

Dial-up internet

[deleted]

I still see a lot of younger people riding bikes in my area. Usually, it’s dirt bikes.

Silly string

Pay phones on busy street corners and at 7eleven

To afford a living by yourself...

a good comedy movie

Jane Lynch: God I miss the 90’s.

iPhone: What was that like?

Jane Lynch: Ugh. It was like a cluster bomb going off in my pants.

Reading before bed

Ordering a normal coffee. If you wanna get fancy add cream and sugar.

I still just order a normal coffee. Only milk for me.

Being happy

adequate pay and a decent home work life balance

Being able to buy a pretty nice house with just one person working a basic job.

“See through” technology

Public Computers and Internet Cafes.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I remember there seemed to be a public computer café in every street corner.

Cheatcodes in games

Letting your kids play outside and not worrying about anyone calling CPS for "abandoning" your children

Riding in the bed of a pick up truck

Kids playing outside without the thought of them getting taken

Old dog poop turning white.

Yeah. I really miss that

People with police fuzz busters, I don't really see them being used anymore. Guess lasers got em beat?

Apple maps warns me about speed cameras.

Letting your kids outside without supervision, not know where they are

Teachers hitting kids. The probability is low but never 0

I mean yeah there is homeschooling. Totally not from personal experience

Damn. I could never school is my outlet. At least my mom doesn't tell me to kms. Your situation sounds/sounded tough

Music videos on MTV

GET OFF THE INTERNET, I HAVE TO USE THE PHONE!!

Smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants.

With a paper partition in between the two areas..

Manual roll down windows in a car

Saying “that’s gayyyyy” after something you didn’t like lol & “no homo”

Going to Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, or any corner video store to rent a movie for a sleep over, date nate, family night, then forget to return it on time.

Having all of your friends’ phone numbers memorized, calling your parents collect from a pay phone if you were going to be late for curfew. Looking up the movies that we’re playing in the theatre in the newspaper or calling & listening to a long message listing them & the times.

Fighting with your siblings over whose turn it is on the computer. Fighting for the dial up internet.

Buying a house

Being able to talk to someone without it evolving into a political shouting match or name calling. Innocuous conversations that didn’t turn political were the norm, not the exception as they are today.

Supporting a family on one income.

Going outside and being a kid with other kids, no way of contact just get out there and have fun.

Trying to look at dial-up porn at night while parents are asleep and forgetting how loud the modem was when it fired up

Going to friends houses to check if they were at home

Cassette Tapes.

56k modems

Trying to muffle it late at night.

good music being released

There is so much music being released independently that you comment reeks of main stream ignorance.

Actually GOING places. Book store, CD store, video store.

Smoking indoors.

A middle class.

The Internet used to speak to us

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding" 

Platform train…oh

Heavy metal tshir…. Oh

Baggy jean….oh

Rage against the Mach….oh

Accountability in government!

Dialing operator to make a collect call on a pay phone, and when it says "please say your name" you say "mom, were done at the skate rink, come get me" and understanding and trusting in this to not leave you stranded lol

1 800 C O L L E C T

My memory retention for phone numbers and addresses/directions.

Getting "100 hours free!" AOL CD-ROMs in the mail every day.

Captain Planet

Going to the video store to rent some movies

“Smoking or non-smoking” sections in restaurants.

Holes in the Ozone layer.

Calling someone "gay" as an insult

Learning cursive at school

European currencies besides euro

Letting kids play outside unsupervised. We used to run all over the neighborhood all day.

Using a pay phone

Owning a house before 30

Pagers

Pogs

Middle class

Going off for hours unaccompanied by an adult. We'd go down the creek and just follow it for hours. No way to be checked on, nothing.

Malls as hangout spots

Dropping by a friend’s house to see if they’re there and if they want to hang out.

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr ​kakingkakingkakingtsh ​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding

10p fredos

Going through the TV guide and highlighting things you want to watch throughout the week.

not being able to use a phone while on the internet

wait when was milk delivery a thing? (I'm 17 and apparently they used to deliver milk to your door)

Not in the 90s, I grew up then and it was still something way before my time

The week's TV listing / TV guide coming in the Sunday paper. I remember always pulling it out to track my cartoons and see what football teams were playing on TV that Sunday.

"smoking or non-smoking?" In restaurants

taking a shit and doing nothing but shitting

You didn’t have magazines?

good point, although still much less common today

Getting ‘beeped’ ,, pagers lol

Healthcare and emergency workers probably only two groups of people that still use them.

  1. Common sense
  2. Bad hair

Knowing someone’s phone number.

Proper bullying

Answering machines that were connected to your landline, with a little cassette tape inside for recording voice messages.

Having a "family computer"

Looking for the hardcopy TV Guide to see what shows were going to on at certain times

Riding your bike just to see if your friend is home

Smoking and non smoking sections in restaurants

Phone calls interrupting dial up internet

Smoking

That's the first thing that came to mind.

I don't miss the days of going to a restaurant or bar and coming home smelling like smoke.

Seeing bumblebees

No mow may

Get clover in lawn helps

Let natural yard flowers like violas bloom

Music videos on mtv

Decent happy meal toys

Pay phones

Going to the mall and stand at the magazine section of a store reading /browsing magazines for hours.

VHS?

Dial up

The cigarette vending machines.

The dial up tone, burning cds and or recording songs from the radio on a cassette

Cheaper gas

Blockbuster and Hollywood video

Public telephones

Common sense

Finally the film you've waited ages to see comes out on video, you get to the shop and all seven copies are already out on loan. Then wait another week to see if you can get there first.

People making plans and actually keeping them. These days it feels more like a hostage negotiation. To be fair, I’ve definitely been on both sides of this one.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, A, B, select, select, start..

Kids taking their yoyo to school

Pagers

Columbia House, where 97% of us got our free CDs and then dragged our feet buying any more.

Also, you recorded songs off the radio, and weren’t dragged into court for violating piracy laws.

Last, everyone was scared of HIV/AIDS.

Young people buying/owning houses.

Having children playing most of their time outside

Running to press record on your tape deck when your favorite song came on the radio.

Video game instruction manuals

Housing prices

Floppy Disk

People in their 20's being homeowners

Affordable housing.

AIDS

Great thing for that, because back then it was a death sentence.

Knowing that "everyone" watched the same popular shows on TV the night before.

Having a decent amount of intelligence and common sense.

Getting off of school or work on Friday and going to blockbuster to rent a couple of movies for the weekend. I remember this as a kid looking at all the movies they had, and my parents telling my siblings and I we could pick 1 movie between us to watch. Good times

Edit: spelling

right?! Putting some real thought into picking out what you watched! This is at a young age I realized it was important to know the director! John Hughes?? Let’s watch it!❤️

A sense of hope for the future.

​

I feel so bad for these kids born in a post 9/11 America. It really used to be something.

My abs

Randomly generated video game maps

Playing on the streets as a kid.

Blowing into your video games to get them working.

Having one job that could Pay all the bills

Calling a wrong phone number, and having a 20 minute conversation about what the weather down in Texas is like this time of year.

Rotary phones.

Walking to the neighbor to borrow an egg, flour, ect right before suppertime.

During a tornado siren all the neighborhood men out on the street mlooking for the tornado. Then, after the weather blows over going over for lunch at one of the houses and visiting for next hour.

Coming home after a night out with your hair stinking of cigarettes.

Paying respect to others！！　So sad.....

Looking at TV listings in the newspaper.

TV Guide

AOL // Dial Up Internet

Landlines // Corded phones

Floppy Discs

Gameboys

Blockbuster

K-Mart

Toys R Us

Lil Caesar's Pizza - still common, but it was better then... not good, just better

Kmart is still booming in Australia.

Accepting help from a paperclip

A family having a single computer

In the dining room

On a Secretary desk

With the worlds worst chair

Tapes, floppy disks, VHS, phone booths, to name a few.

Investing your life savings in beanie babies

Listening to awesome alternative music radio stations, usually broadcasting from a university.

These answers brings back so many fond memories.

Play outside late night

Tamagotchis

We didn't used to ghost people like this before social media and online dating.

There were actually manners, and people could develop themselves with constructive feedback, even if it didn't work out, people were mature enough to respect that, learn a lesson and move on.

Flip phones

Be kind, rewind

Smoking sections in restaurants.

1.59 gal gas

Magazines

Talking to your girl all night on a land line.

In 1990 everyone knew what a woman was.

Getting up at the butt crack of dawn and waiting in line at Tower Records for concert tickets.

Common sense. Reasonable Discourse. Definitions for the words "man" and "woman."

Reasonable Discourse

With the acceptation of a few things people in the 90's didn't have knee jerk reactions to just about anything.

Yeah, I mean, I was there. I remember debating abortion in a college classroom and nobody screeched or anything. It was a magical time.

People knew how to debate knowing humans can have views different from them.
Now days it's either people who are ignorant and unaware of political issues or people who look like their ready to cut someone who disagrees with them.

It's almost safer to have no opinion on a subject than to state one or the other.

Finding porn in a hedge. Classic.

Get off the phone so I can use the internet

I'm thankful I never had that issue growing up. I think my providence was among or even the first place to test out methods that didn't require phone/internet to counter act one another.

memorizing phone numbers

New Nirvana songs.

[deleted]

in Canada Rogers went down nation wide. I bet many Rogers users wished they had access to a landline payphone.

I was desperate for a stack stereo unit. Turntable Cassette Radio

Then CD's came in & the unit was destined for charity shop or the bin!

I remember asking for a CD player for my 21st birthday.

I got a bike.

Worrafeckinjoke.

Masturbating using only your imagination

erotic stories were great for this. but you would have to brows for a while before finding the good ones.

Special magazines that had weekly TV schedule. They were usually bundled with daily newspaper once a week

Downloading low-quality porn videos on a 56k modem.

Not pulling a phone out at a gig

In 90, it was quite normal to be a criminal element. Now, of course, you can try, but you will soon go to jail.

In the UK at least, in the early 90s Cannabis was mild and lovely...thc and cbd ratios were in balance.

A lot of the Cannabis came in the form of hard brown slabs, called Soap Bar, you could crumble into your joint, or resinous dark putty called Squidgy Black. You could roll that into a long thin sausages that you'd lay into the joint. Both were light, mellow smokes that would pull extra dimensions out of your music and a bit of funny spacey wonk to your chat The mid nineties brought Skunk...which was different. Intense, mutated, mute making, edgy, expensive, anxiety inducing stuff...ultimately not what I want....I think a lot of it was sourced in less exotic nurseries. I never thought about it at the time, but I'd guess The War On Terror can't have helped.

I suspect most of our recreational drugs were cleaner.

In the US we had brick weed. Had a buddy who would drive it up from Mexico. Not necessarily brown, but it was definitely compressed and much darker than homegrown. That dude made a long trip with a bunch of stops and eventually ended up near Canada. Fun times.

Definition of a woman.

Being able to remember the names of songs/albums/bands. Since I've used Spotify over the years I find it hard to recall alot of titles. Or maybe I'm just a dumb fuck.

common sense

Hanging out at the mall

porn DVD's for sale or rent in that one area of the liquor store.

Having a beeper.

People keeping the same address for more than 4 years. Everyone seems to be in a perpetual process of "upgrading" and never seem to be happy.

Some people just side grade but yeah, that sounds like it could lead to economy problems in the long run.

Playing in the street with random kids from other neighborhoods

Floppy disk

Public phones

Playing with your friends in the street and when the night lights came on you knew it was time to head home.

Waiting for the song you heard on the radio to come back on while your finger hovers over the record button on your cassette player to catch the song at the right time otherwise your copy of the song either is cut off at the beginning or has the end of a commercials/other songs playing before your actual song starts—only to find out afterwards you didn’t fast forward your cassette enough and now your old song is cut off awkwardly at the end by the new song you just recorded.

Memorizing telephone numbers. Printing out or writing down map directions.

Not being reachable 24/7

Film cameras

Female pubic hair.

Recording songs straight from the radio and making mix tapes.

The best. Until the wow and flutter hits. Cleaner heads, better metal tapes didn't always solve w&f. But I still loved mixing tapes.

Playing with friends after school. No parents. No play dates. Just going outside and doing almost anything.

Born in 1990. Here's my top list:

1) Making a mix tape with a blank cassette tape, waiting by your boombox for a specific song to play on the radio and hitting 'record' in time

2) As a kid, you have 2 options to get in touch with your friends- call their house phone, or, if nearby, go over to their house to see if they are home and can play (and also regularly having unannounced visits from friends at your door- this was completely normal and it was actually exciting when the doorbell rang)

3) Dial-up internet, and unless you had multiple phone lines at your house, the phone would be unusable while someone was on the internet, if you picked up the phone to try and make a call it would just be a weird signal while the internet was being used

4) Zero streaming/on-demand tv. If you wanted to watch something on tv but were not going to be home while it was playing, you had to use a blank VHS tape and set your VCR to record the channel you want at the time you want

5) As a kid, parents giving you a time to be home by when hanging out with friends (or 'be home by sunset'), and them not having any contact with you once you leave- just waiting and trusting you'd be back by that time

6) Calling into radio stations to request a song you wanted to hear, again, unless you had a song on tape/CD, there was no on-demand streaming (Youtube, Apple Music, Spotify, etc) ... an eventual caveat to that of course was illegally downloading songs on Napster (and later Limewire)

7) I don't have kids now so I can't personally confirm, but I’ve heard from other parents today that parents often chaperone and join kids when going to their friend's birthday parties, which, previously it used to be that parents just dropped you off wherever without question and just asked when you needed to be picked up

8) Payphones. If your parents forget to pick you up at a public place (perhaps you went to the mall with some friends, or had a sports practice somewhere), you'd likely have to use a pay phone- which were everywhere in the 90s. In addition, 'Collect call' commercials were very common (1800-COLLECT; 1800-CALL-ATT). If you didn't have money for payphone, you could dial a collect number, give them the phone number you wished to call, they'd call that number and the collect employee would say the name of who is calling collect to the receiving number, and then the receiving person would have to accept that they would pick up the cost of the phone call for it to continue. My parents forgot to pick me up from basketball practice once when I was 9 as they thought someone else was taking me home (which they weren't), so having memorized these numbers from the commercials that played constantly, I called them collect from a pay phone (which, in that realm, it was more important back then to memorize people’s numbers)

9) Airports- pre 9/11, anyone could go through security up to the gate. When someone in your family was leaving or arriving on a flight, you'd all go through security and either see them off at the gate or stand right at the gate to welcome them home.

10) The yellow pages in your phonebook were Google. Looking for a restaurant or a home repair (etc)? Short of asking your friends for recommendations, you'd look in the yellow pages. Similarly, people were much better at directions and knowing how to get to where they were going prior to going there. No GPS for most, so you'd either write down directions, use a map, or memorize directions that someone gives you.

Being able to let the kids run outside all day and not have a care in the world. You know they would be home before dark in time for dinner.

These days it's too much helicopter parenting and people are terrified to take their sight off the kids for 2 seconds.

Can you blame them?

Good hip hop music.

Best answer I've seen... So true!

  1. CDs in the car.
  2. Music videos on MTV and VH1.
  3. Doing what was right and not what was political.

Fax Machines

Phone books. You can still get them today but no one but the elders do because why would you? You can just look up a number online.

My hopes and dreams of a better future.

Phones large enough to Crack open the head of an individual. That coincidentally was an American tradition dating back to wall mounted phones before that but it was upheld in legislation or whatever till the early to mid 90s

Watching television everyone just watches YouTube or Netflix nowadays

Lotta people here upset they can't be racist anymore.

There’s literally no one in the comments who’s mad about that.

"I used to make black jokes all the time and nobody got offended! "

Well now there's a black guy in the office so stfu.

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Bruh are you really just going down my comment page and trying to get a ride out of me? Because this is about all you're gonna get.

Actually I sorted by controversial and responded to a lot of different people. You just happen to have also done the same and wasn’t reading usernames when I responded lol

Being racist without consequences, you mean?

Because racism is still alive and well in this day and age.

I dunno, a lot of these read more like thankfulness that it's not that way anymore, rather than wistful nostalgia. But I'm probably just being optimistic.

centrist politics

edit: reading through this taps into the ol' nostalgia like crazy. This is why I always love watching movies like you've got mail

Everyone's a centrist until the politics affects their wallet, their loved ones, or their rights.

centrist politics

It's fairly hard to define centrists in a world where politics are more and more global. Eg: in a number of policies the Dems would be seen as the far-right in Europe while in some other they would be the fringe-liberals. Similar goes for Republicans.

You can't really define centrists when there isn't clear cut political sides

how about rephrasing it to something like: people listened a bit more to other opinions more and there wasn't this "you're a terrible person" stuff going on.

Yes definitly, politics was less polarized across the Western world.

Being able to talk to someone without it evolving into a political shouting match or name calling. Innocuous conversations that didn't turn political were the norm, not the exception as they are today.

That's still largely the case during everyday in-person interactions. Online discourse easily devolves into this sort of aggressive, dehumanising tribalism because there is no flesh-and-blood person to contend with, just an abstraction manifested as text.

Those still happen all the time, you just spend too much time on reddit.

Hugging people

[deleted]

I like hugs myself (from people I trust) but I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

There's plenty of legitimate reasons someone wouldn't want to be hugged. Maybe they're autistic. Maybe they have some unrelated sensory disorder. Maybe they have anxiety.

And it doesn't even need to be any of those things. People have the right to bodily autonomy, and it's wrong to violate that autonomy.

Parents who genuinely look after their children in a sensible way instead of having electronics babysit their kids.

Lol you think parents haven’t been doing that this whole time? The tv has been around for a while. Plopping their kids in front of the tv was a 90’s past time.

Considering TVs aren’t portable, that option was only available in households and when they spend a lot of time, they were encouraged to go outside to play. At the end, TV consumption was mostly moderate. Now, children stare at their iPads, smartphones like a zombie as long as they are awake whenever, wherever. I was in a family reunion last week and there were plenty of toddlers… staring at their screens… don’t bother to interact with each other until the families return to their homes.

Before you go full “Ok Boomer”, I’m 24. I don’t think but I know that parents are getting lazier to take care of their children. There MAY be exceptions. But the fact that sensible parents being an exception alone is grim.

No offence intended but the example that you gave is not even comparable to what’s happening right now.

Your kids will hate you.

Roe vs Wade.

Phone books and physical newspapers.

Movie Rental Stores

Employers paying decent wages.

actual freedom. real social lives not social media. american pride. wholesome family values. were way too "connected" people think their opinions on virtually everything should be absolute and applied to everyone else. makes me sick.

I mean I wouldn't say freedom but I agree social media screwed up big time.

well back then you could go "off the grid" if you wanted, you cant cuss your spouse without the nsa reading it these days.

Eh. The NSA knows what I'm about at this point. "it's 0323. He's probably fapping to those weird hentai videos again. Yep tentacle gangbang porn. Knew it."

hey hey! 30 years ago tentacle poen made you exotic and mysterious...

30 years ago I was a zygote so I think the government would have a lot more questions than what porn I'm fapping to.

„Live and let live“ was kind of mainstream. The best kind of freedom.

"live and let live" is still pretty mainstream. The acceptable way of living is the difference now.

"American pride" and "wholesome family values" were racist, oppressive, and deadly to a lot of marginalized groups; they can stay in the past.

ok ok take the race card back on somewhere else. thats not what any of this is about. you know if you make everything about race everytime something triggers you, your probably the actual racist

Show me a picture from the 90s of earlier that showed the iconic American suburban family advertisements (aka “family values”) that showed a family that wasn’t all (or primarily) white

so fuckin what? your just riding the same political train as all the mfs trying to nay say my comment. do you hate white people? bc you know even though were the devil that still makes you a racist.

And what do you mean “so what” much of the growth, and spread of “American family values” was through those various advertisements and television shows. The fact that you can’t pull up one, shows the fact that the foundation those values were inherently rooted in racism

For the rest, what the fuck are you saying?

fuck you, you have no idea what your talking about, your political beliefs and the need to be socially accepted have blinded you from seeing whats right infront of you. the entire country is not a breeding ground for white terrorists. i grew up in a diverse neighborhood, i have 5 fucking children and only 2 of them are 100% white. so go ahead and spread some mayo on that dick sandwich your making over there, sprinkle on some new age hatered and take a big bite.

What political beliefs did I mention? What do you mean you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the topic at hand

You have brought up politics on 2 separate occasions, I have yet to mention it one

Did you say I have “new age hatred” for white people?!!?? well I will have you know, I had sex with a white person before AND grew up with white people. It is therefore impossible for me to be racist according to you

i dont have time for childish bushit.

”No time for childish bullshit”

”spread some mayo on that dick sandwich your making over there…and take a big bite”

wanna point out again, you literally tried to pull a variation of “I’m not racist my friend is black”

Edit: and kinda ironic you call me childish when you don’t even know the difference between “your” and “you’re”, this is first grade shit, get it together

okay but what they stated is historically accurate. they didn't 'make it about race' they merely recounted that the reality of America isn't all sunshine and killing nazis.

jesus christ im an american, and i love this country. every fuckin day i have to hear leftys and rightys argue about this and that and whatever! this is what im saying, it didnt used to be like this. i didn't say hey lets bring back oppression and murder of whomever. i just want to love america again without somebody bitchin and whining.

I think their point is that the 90s were super awesome...if you were a heterosexual white guy. Meanwhile it was considered perfectly acceptable to be casually racist, mysoginistic, and openly homophobic. Also the satanic panic was ridiculous.

I don't know wtf you're on about when it comes to "loving America" either since the 90s was when shit went really downhill when it came to contentious partisan politics and when America's glaring issues became a huge topic of discussion (I'd argue that actually trying to address these issues is the most powerful love of country there is but you seem to be blatantly blindly nationalistic and openly nostalgic for willful ignorance in your comments so).

this is exactly what im trying to say. im not addressing race, or anything negative. i would prefer to live here, in the country where im from. it is NOT MORE COMPLICATED than that. i dont give a fuck about your politics or your opinion. i wrote a comment for the OP's post. so i love america? who cares? most of you are so ate up with the bullshit on the news, im not about that. i work hard, pay my mortgage, love my dogs? fuckin haters. quit trying to read between the lines.

this is exactly what im adressing. in the 90s you could say "GOS BLESS AMERICA" without some overly woke asshat trying to give you a speech. life is hard, and painfull and unfare. evil shit happens all ovwr the world not just here, theres too much negative shit already, i miss the past for this very reason. you kow what i hate bananna pudding, if you disagree then your a terrible human being. not really but thats what it sounds like to me.

they proved your point in a big way! I know exactly what you mean. I love this country. I miss the 90s.

thank you. good lord. yea the 90s were the shit, it seems a little corny now but i felt like mysic was real, not all electronic, not every snack and food was totally fake. mtv was still music videos! its just nostalgia maybe.

I don't think it's purely nostalgia. It's scary how quickly things have changed. It's ok to miss the good times - doesn't mean you want to bring back the bad. And EVERYONE is entitled to their opinion- not just leftist liberal nuts. Not mention every generation/place is going to have some not so pleasant things. In 20 years, there will be something that's ok today but condemned during that time.

While I am at it...

I miss teachers not talking to 5 year olds about what their sexual preference is.

I miss respect for yourself, others, and most importantly your parents. I promise they have your back more than ANYONE else ever will. (In most situations)

I miss when opinions were allowed and free speech was important to people.

I miss common sense the most. Examples: not wanting children at a gay pride parade. That doesn't make me homophobic. Saying I'm not racist doesn't make me racist (not that I had to say that often, if ever) no matter what liberal spin you put on it....

And I REALLLLLLY miss those 4 pack of cinnamon rolls and icing from burger King. Called cinna-minnies or something like that..was that the 90s or 00s?

You like free speech but don’t want kids to learn what you don’t like? 👏👏👏

I must have missed the part where I said that, or even implied it.... please enlight me

The 90s were actually incredibly progressive and extremely chill. The people who had the most adversity were gays and they were making great strives in society at that time. As for casually racist and misogynistic, those are both very inaccurate statements. You make it sound like everything 30 years ago was the same as it was in the 50s, and it wasn’t even close.

This. The downvotes are likely coming from a bunch of zoomers who think the 90s were the same as the 50s. Or, you know, that everything before the smartphone age = bad.

Remove the race factor

Your country was still shit for most of the world

How many goverments did the country you love overthrow because they needed to give money to the 1%

Cheap obvious troll lol

American Pride is historically racist dude

Some of the most patriotic people I know are immigrants who have most certainly been discriminated against in the past due to who they are. They also happen to have much more traditional values than the average American as well. You can have "American pride" and "wholesome family values" and not be a racist white guy.

Ah so I see. Caring about family is racism. Guess everyone who’s not a self hating leftist like you is racist 🤷‍♀️.

What’s a “family value” to you?

Mothers and fathers both being in their children’s lives and having a healthy relationship with one another, even if divorced.

Ya ya racism everywhere

What a shit take lol

That’s not even close to true.

We need another Red Scare to put your cancerous elements in jail

right winger admitting that they don’t actually care about freedom right here

There is no freedom to subvert the country and run it into the ground. Just as I don’t believe in the freedom to murder babies or genocide - which I’m sure disappoints you too as a pro-abort sharing the same ideals as eugenics, the party of the kkk, and slavery.

Your kind abuses freedoms to ruin society for the actual contributors. You aren’t a member if you’re subversive and don’t deserve the freedoms and privileges of members. Fuck off

Deeming political views you don’t like as cancerous and stating they need to be jailed is totalitarianism.

You don’t need to follow your world view in order to have the ‘privilege’ of freedom.

You’re ideology has always been the one associated with the likes of slavery and eugenics, and that is infinitely more relevant than some party label.

It’s great to see your true colours coming through. All that talk of freedom and liberty when in reality you want everyone to conform to your world view.

If you had your way you’d destroy dissent. My goals are a country where disagreements are common and unity can be found, but those who want to destroy free society have no place in jt

If I had my way I wouldn’t destroy dissent. Cause unlike you I don’t follow ideals of tyranny and totalitarianism.

Your goals can’t be a country where disagreements are common when you support jailing those who you disagree with. That very statement is paradoxical.

The idiot I replied to was saying family values are racist and oppressive. That’s subversive and cancerous to the body politic. That shouldn’t be allowed in any country because it’s not helpful or useful, it’s deconstructionist and obviously dangerous (destroying families).

There’s a line for what free society can tolerate, and ideas that threaten free society can’t be tolerated.

You disagree? You love freedom at all costs to the point where you’d allow murder? Those ideas are murderous

You hold no grounds to deem views you don’t agree with subversive. He didn’t say family values overall, but US family values with have commonly been associated with very hierarchal and traditional ideas like the nuclear family. This isn’t a new or ‘dangerous’ criticism, and it’s been raised by many academics and researchers.

Highlighting a potential issue in society, whether true or not, should not be treated as a threat. Instead it should be understood, analysed, and concluded on by the collective opinions of society. What you’re proposing isn’t the actions of a free society, it’s what fearful and controlling ideologies do to resist change.

You’re an idiot so I don’t expect you to comprehend this, especially since you deem critical thinking as ‘cancerous.’ However, the very ideals of liberty mean you have to get used to ideas that challenge what you see as normal and just. Grow up and get used to it champ or just admit you’re a totalitarian-loving shill.

Ok, do you this fascism should be tolerated in society? Do you think genocidal factions should be tolerated? Where do you draw the line?

The fact that you think the nuclear family is a problem tells me enough: gtfo out our country then if you hate our culture

Why do you assume everyone on the internet is from the USA?

Oh I’m sorry. What country are you from? From now on I’ll be sure to assume everyone is either from the US, or from your country!

Found McCarthy. Have you no shame, sir?

[deleted]

Spoiler alert: people like you talked about "the way it used to be" back then, too.

Blockbuster

Tape players

Using a payphone

VCRs.

Coconut Joe

[deleted]

By the end of the 1990's, online privacy already had almost ended. After the 9-11 attacks in 2001, virtually all calls and emails are recorded and (automatically) analyzed for suspicious content. Now that includes online web accesses like Reddit messages (like this one).

VHS tapes

My youth.

Public telephone booths

Answering machines!

DVDs and CDs

Pagers

You could strangle someone with a phone, well not the phone, but with the phone cord.

use your phones charging cord

To rent videos at Blockbuster

Pogs

Payphones

Silly bands. Where did they all go?!

Getting to know people by having an in-person conversation.

Hope and optimism

Telephone booths

Dial up internet.

You've got mail!

I can still here the voice.

Edit: of the guy saying “You’ve got mail!”

Good music

I'll give you the vote, but truthfully 80s New Wave is my jam.

I have access to soooooo much more music now. I used to have to save my money to buy cassettes and CDs.

Mp3 players.

I got one 2 months ago

Hitchhiking

Payphones.

Pay phones

Road map books.

Saying its the 20th century

CRT monitors, I do miss that trinitron.

AOL

Pay phones

Cassette tape players in cars

Knowing what the save icon is

Boxes of porn in the woods.

Not having a PC or a cellphone.

Payphones

Pagers

Pagers.

Smoking in restaurants and at work.

Roll up windows

planning a time to talk to your friends as you needed to make sure no one was on the internet while you were using the phone

Partying like it's 1999.

Beige computer cases

1-800-COLLECT commercials.

Having a Beeper Code so people knew who was paging them

Crystal Pepsi.

I loved that stuff!

Not being able to use the phone and internet at the same time

Floppy disks. I seriously miss them. It’s how I stayed organized for school: orange one for English class, purple one for history class, etc…

Making mixed tapes for people you liked.

That stupid car alarm pew pew pew pew pew pew bwoooooop bwoooooop jer jer jer jer jer boooooeeee boooooeeee etc.

Just waiting without doing anything. I actually feel weird now just waiting for something and staring off at nothing. Sometimes it’s just nice to do nothing and think for a long time… it’s like relaxing a muscle you hadn’t realized you had been flexing for hours on end.

Typewriters in offices

My trusty AE86, it is no longer around. Also, my free time… And my friends.

And mix tapes. I miss making mixtapes for the women I like.

Cigarettes

Are they really that rare now?

TV shows “finding” new bands and having them play an entire song during episodes. I remember quite a few shows from the mid-late 90s doing this.

Cameras that use film

Also owning a dedicated camera

Also owning anything in this world of subscription based commodities

It was pretty great being a kid in the 90s. It was keep your room clean, do your chores, get decent grades and be home by 7 for dinner. That was the extent of my responsibilities. My parents had their life, I had mine. As long as I wasn’t fucking up or getting in trouble, no questions asked.

When my parents bought me a cell phone to take to college, it sat on the charger like a landline. Why would I want people to call me when I’m doing stuff?

My self esteem.

80s there were bars bars bars everywhere. 🍸 live music dancing. Now gone for the most part. Hope Uber brings it all back. Signed broke musician

Having a home phone hooked up next to the toilet

Bicycles, bicycles everywhere

Kurt Cobain

Reading the contents of the air freshener in the bathroom since you didn't have a phone to stare at.

Answering the phone or door

Boomboxes

Pogs

CDs

Phone boxes with working phones in them.

Pay phones and needing coins to make calls.

Bathroom puzzle books and readers digest

Calling something gay as an insult

On /wallstreetbets, now, "gay bear" is not a compliment.

Making sure nobody else in the house needed the phone before getting online

Nokia phones

Nintendo Game Boy that big heavy Game Boy with sweet games.

Sega Dreamcast console

Letters ??? Receiving correspondance letter... I really miss that time, now we have the bluetick 😬

Casual homophobia as a punchline in every movie or TV show. Sitcoms especially

Maybe. In movies, every single portrayal of gays that I can remember has been positive since the 1971 James Bond movie "Diamonds Are Forever", in which two probably-gay crooks (Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint) were unsympathetic. A gay in a movie has to be practically a saint now. A good example is the recent "The Shape of Water". The one white male in it who wasn't bad turns out to be gay, so he is OK.

Being completely alone and unavailable by any form of communication for hours at a time. I miss it.

Smoking

Hitch-hiking. God, I used to hitch so much circa 1992-93. How the hell am I still alive? Teenage females are murder bait!

Blockbusters

Beepers.

Pagers. We all had pagers to stay connected before cell phones. The prestige was having a toll free pager, cause you could communicate through pay phones for free. Oh the simple times

Movie/game rentals. You also could rent consoles from video stores. Hollywood video and blockbusters were everywhere at one point.

Playing Roadrash on 3DO.

The wage gap

aol.com email addresses

Smoking sections in restaurants

Blockbuster Video. Wow what a difference.

Calling on a landline phone

Hypercolors

Beepers

Pay Phones, you never saw em slowly disappear. One day they were everywhere, the next day were gone and you didnt even notice they were gone until about 6 months to a year after while you were scratchin your head thinking "Hey! Where did all the pay phones go?"

JNCO jeans and those wallet chains. The wider the pant legs and the bigger the chain the better.

The chains seem to be coming back, at least with K-pop fans. Took my daughter to see Stray Kids and the pile of confiscated wallet chains was enormous.

Getting up to change the TV channel.

Good music.

Pagers

road maps, then printing mapquest directions before going on a trip

Payphones.

Going to the library for researching and actually reading handheld books

Rotary phones

Radio stations in your car!

Pogs

Common decency

Common sense.

Pagers/ beepers

I've probably never been in an arcade but I've always heard they were fun

Planning the most fun evening around a Hollywood Videos trip

Landlines

Pagers.

VHS Tapes

Payphones

Reagan

Riding bikes in the colder sack. Me, my sister and my neighbours used to ride all the time, playing games and such. This stopped when me and my sister got to highschool and had enough homework in one night to take us all week

Colder sack 😂😂😂😂😂

High speed VHS rewinders

Small-ish personal media libraries. When I was a teenager I had like ten CDs. Maybe 20 by the time MP3 happened. So many of my friends had just a handful of videogames for their game consoles. On a family trip I stayed at a house where the kid had a GameCube and exactly one game. My wife had a GameGear as a kid and she had exactly three games for it. Nobody really seemed to think this was that weird.

Nowadays it's instead normal to have hundreds of games in your Steam library, to have almost every song you can think of available on Spotify, tons of movies and TV available via streaming services, etc. Stuff like Game Pass and PS+ make it so that you have seemingly unlimited games to play.

If you had told me this was how it was going to be in the future when I was a kid in the 90s I would be totally blown away. It would seem impossibly surreal to just have the default state of almost any piece of media be "available instantly".

Smoking sections

Using reference books from the library to write a school paper and manually creating/formatting a bibliography

Clearly Canadian lol

Seeing like 3-6 kids walking around the neighborhood two with a bike just talking doing their own thing

Getting wrapped up in an extra long phone cord while talking on the phone.

Respect and sympathy for your fellow humans

GAS

Phone books, phone booths, caller ID devices, answering machines, hope, car phones

Vending machines with Homies toys.

Transvestite jokes

Pay phones

Beepers

Smoking inside restaurants

Half decent music

The way music was released. I remember the hype albums would get, the music videos, live performances and I’d be so excited for release day. Even after an artist would release a project they would continue to promote that body of work for a while. Now music feels so empty and just rushed. You can’t savor it like we could in the 90s.

Kushballs

Taking a family member or friend all the way to the gate when flying

Paying by check. The reason we needed 10 item or less checkout lanes was because most women paid by check at the supermarket. If you see a woman with a big purse, you know she is going to wait until the total is given BEFORE filling out her check. Takes like 5 minutes per customer. No more checks today.

Blockbuster

My parents being together...

How we'd drive to random places like parks or other cities, play word games in the car or similar things. The roadside gas station stops fro snacks etc. The distances felt like days, now when ever i drive with my mother its barely 30-40min sometimes...

Shit i just i miss being a kid and being able to discover the world and always be amazed by everything. Last decade i cant fucking wait for it all to end, i feel like i lost that spark of amazement i had.

If you have enough savings and near zero family liability (i.e having no kids and SO) you can still do that, albeit it wont similar.

Disposable cameras. Not so much rare as they are uncommon, but you don’t see them around.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Common sense.

A living wage

Burning CDs

Arcades

Smoking sections inside restaurants, at least here in the US.

ahahaha the smokers' ghetto ;-D

Blockbuster video stores.

Monochrome CRT computer monitors. My kindergarten had 2 orange ones and my dad had a green one issued from his employer.

Man was it mindblowing when we got windows 95 a mouse and a full color display.

Going to a record store and buying random vinyl because you either: 1) liked the artwork, or, 2) it was on a label that had other artists you liked, or, 3) the band and/or album title had a name that resonated, or, 4) it was in the discount bin and, well, why the fuck not?

Pagers

Privacy on the internet. I remember being raised with my parents telling me "don't tell anyone on the internet anything about you". Now we hand over our addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, and our most intimate information like browsing history and patterns, all for convenience sake.

Diskmans

Principled Political debates involving defending your viewpoint respectfully and not just to "own" the other side.

Pay phones, paper maps

my happiness

Staying out of other people’s business.

Car phones

Landline. Stereo components. I lived in Austria in 1990 without a cellphone or a credit card. I called home once a month on a phone in the post office at $2.50 a minute.

Kids playing outside

Renting a movie for a weekend. Or Video game you are SUPER pumped about.

Loyalty

Payphones

Going to a birthday party as a little kid and being offered a choice of Coke or orange soda as a beverage.

Everyone is talking about technology and malls, but what about smoking indoors? It was absolutely miserable to try to eat at a restaurant in the 90s with people smoking at their tables (or in a glassed in smoking area), but now it's almost non-existent outside of Vegas.

Tamigotchi and the Macarena dance

Calling cards. A little prepaid phone card you'd use at a pay phone.

manners.

Netscape Navigator

  • Scrambled TV. Owning a pirated descrambler to watch scrambled TV.
  • For the poors, watching the scrambled show hoping to see a scrambled boob

Page me so I can tell you.

AOL floppy disks

Phone booths

Dialup

Calling Collect

Beepers

Smoking inside. Especially in bars and restaurants.

Payphones. Movie rental stores. Home phones. Dial up internet. Books for entertainment.

Memorizing Phone numbers.

Phones attached to walls.

Dial up modem noises.

Computers with no hard drive that you would boot and then change floppies to play a game or use a program.

Kids with individually labelled floppies at school to store homework.

Waiting in line to use the 1 computer at the library with a CDROM drive to use Encarta.

Buying a house on a single family income.

1000 Free hours of AOL on a disc.

Late night coffee houses

Manners.

Being able to support a family on a single income.

An affordable house, with minimum wage...

I think that was possible back in the 1950's, but not in the 1990's.

Common sense

MP3 players

Not being able to make a phone call and surf the web simultaneously.

Tamagotchi

Fotomat huts. They were everywhere. Now not a single one in sight anywhere.

Ash trays inside a car

Dial up

Fax machines.

Landlines, and voicemails from anyone that isn’t a doctors office

VCRs/VHS tapes.

Playing CDs in your car

Hope

Calling time and temperature or having to watch weather channel local on the 8s to know if it was gonna be hot or gonna rain

Recharging AA batteries for my walkman.

Pogs

I wonder what people of older generations equate to the things listed here. Like boomer or silent generations, for example.

When I said some music of The Silent Generation (early 1950's songs) seemed to have no point, my aged aunt said "It's not SUPPOSED to have a Point, or a Message. it sounded good, it was good music." (in contrast to the protest songs of the late 1960's.)

Lan line phones, pay phones. Yellow pages, map quest, politeness,

Payphones

Internet making noise. Always loved the sound i don't know why.

The spin dial phones

Phone books

Pay phones

Arcades(yes they exist but they aren't as prevalent)

Faxing 📠

Cassette tapes and cassette players in cars!

And VCRs & VHSs

Phonebooth

Pagers.

Walking your relatives past security to the gate at the airport when you're not flying.

Pay phones in the Best Buy parking lot.

Fireflies.

Owning a house

Getting a girls phone number, only to call later and her father answering the phone.

VCR

VHS tapes, good riddance!

Payphones

Reading the back of a shampoo bottle (or any other reachable-from-the-🚽 bathroom item) while you took a 💩

Memorizing telephone numbers. It used to be a sense of pride when I would recite friends or family's numbers before anyone else. Now I know maybe half a dozen phone numbers of only my closest relatives.

Printed newspaper. Remember taking the train back then during rush hour and almost every other seat, someone was reading a newspaper.

Now, everyone's got their nose buried in their phones.

Respect

Privacy, modesty and accountability

Interactive Card Games, like Pokémon, Yugioh, Magic, and even Showdown which was a fun baseball Card game.

And hand in hand with their popularity was their presence in public, kids would just play anywhere.

Not as popular at school yard but yugioh is alive and well. I went to a tournament last month and it was much much larger than I remember those events being when I was a kid.

Walking clear to the gate and saying goodbye there when escorting someone to a flight.

Respectfully disagreeing.

Quality live action kid movies

Common sense and personal responsibility

Common sense

Openly smoking cigarettes almost everywhere

Pagers

Pay phones

Your camera and your phone were two different objects

Z. Cavaricci Pants !

Interacting with people in person.

actually going to the mall, and it being crowded and fun.

Going out to play with friends and coming back hours later.

A feeling of security and hope for the future.

Collect calls, and really stupid commercials for collect calls.

Morals and respect

Being able to stand up without groaning...

sigh.

Rated R movies.

Pay phone

Smoking in doors. Like in restaurants half of it was smoking area. It was yellow and smelled awful. Glad this changed.

Thr smoke was never contained to the smoking section either.

Common Sense.

Yeah, nowadays people fart in public like it’s normal… where’s the common sense in that?

Affordable housing

Rotary telephones, VCRs, cassette tapes, showing up at a friends house unannounced

Young adult home ownership

Waiting until after 7pm to make a long distance phone call.

Lying about facts and nobody being able to check

Your phone attached to the wall.

Smoking inside restaurants and bars

Landlines.

Pay phone, Yellow Pages, beepers, floppy disks, roller blades, cds in big boxes, Gateway Computers, Circuit City, malls, and a new line of cars called Saturns!

Pay phones

Nokia and Blackberry phones

Kindness.

not having a cell phone

Blockbuster

Land Line Phones.

Happiness

waiting with a friend at the airport before their flight.

Curbside Check-in!

Large groups of youth hanging out in various spots in the neighborhood. I think the movie Kids showed this really well.

Before cell phones, people met through 'spots' which were basically agreed-upon areas where young people would hang out in large numbers. You could go to one of these spots and reliably run into people you knew, and so people tended to congregate in them. People would also deal drugs, plan parties, hook up with people etc there.

For my neighborhood, we had the basketball courts, the 'circle', the 'couch', the area near the theater, cherry hill, 'lincoln' (most of these are nicknames) and a few others I am blanking out on. It was pretty common to have 20+ youth hanging out at all of these spots by 5pm on a weekend.

Today? Most places do not have these anymore. The advent of cell phones and social media made these 'spots' not necessary anymore. You rarely ever see groups of youth hanging out like that.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Get off the phone. I need to use the internet.

Installing games from CD-ROMs

Pagers

Floppy Discs, ya know.. the save button icon

Smoking Sections

Vhs rentals

Beepers, pagers, pay phones

I bring this up a lot. You rarely, if ever, called someone and began your conversation with "Hey, where are you right now?"

Having "I Fucked Your Bitch You Fat Motherfucker" as an opening line in Diss Track

Being able to afford a house.

Hats that say happy new year: 1991 prob aren’t made anymore

My will to live.

Bands that wanted to make music without worrying about image or PR actually making it big.

Writing down phone numbers on paper..

Friends. Not just the show but actual friends. I miss all my old homies.

Gay jokes on TV

Cocaine

Having to wait until after 7pm to make a long distance phone call because the rates went down.

Humor.

Pop-up headlights in cars.

Let me introduce you to the Thomas Guide…

Blockbuster Video -- Wow, what a difference!

Ravine porn/Woods porn

Anorexia being the standard of beauty

Payphones

My dad :(

dialup sound

Sitting down and watching TV movies live. And everyone talking about it at school the next day.

Phonebooks

putting a lot of effort into having an awesome outgoing answering machine message

Parents that weren't overprotective with their kids or needed to be involved with every minute aspect of their children's lives. "Be back home when the street lights come on" was completely natural.

Pagers 📟

Being able to take a joke

Be kind rewind

Hanging out at the mall all day.

The mall.

My will to live

Good music

Using a map or calling for directions. Late 90s early 00s I still remember my mom printing out map quest directions to take me to a new friend’s house in grade school

A Rolodex 🤣 I had one for a long time, used it daily and always thought it was so fun and now probably no one under like 27 even knows what that is.

Playing outside around the neighborhood unsupervised.

Coming home from work and not knowing what each other did that day.

I misread this as 1900s, and got confused when someone mentioned “arcade” in the comments

Poohka shell necklaces

Pizza Hut buffets

Blockbuster, A fully functional phone booth, Beepers, A functional Rotary home phone (not just sitting around as decoration), Sega Genesis, DreamCast, Printed TV guide, Smoking and non smoking sections in restaurants, Altoids (chocolate ones were my favorite)

Being able to go out as a kid but having to “be home when the street lights turn on”

It’s sad that kids playing outside or exploring the nearby woods or walking to the nearby McDonalds or whatever seems to have become the exception rather than the norm.

Let’s go rent a vhs movie tonight but gotta remember to rewind it.

Cassette and VHS maintenance. Pencils were an essential in every tool kit

Making mixtapes for your friends on little cassettes. I'm only 30 and i remember that.

Pagers and pay phones

Saturday Morning cartoon with the toy advertisements and the obligatory happy meal commercials so you know what the toy was this month or the next theme glass set. Had trouble waking up at 7:00 for school but, you were up at 6:00 Saturday to watch Go-Bots or the Snorks.

Smoking cigarettes indoors.

Using those 50 state atlases to travel

Land lines

Car and home phone

My happiness

Pay phones. Super handy but you had to carry change and remember just a 7 digit number.

I wouldn't say it's rare or non existent since it's taken another form but taping a program on TV used to be pretty normal and impossible to regulate so basically tolerated by the TV people. But now you can just save it til later to watch or if you aren't paying for a service download it or find a sneaky website that has it ready to hit play.

i thought blockbuster video would be at the top!

Atlas or state map in the car for road trips.

AOL becoming, by far and away, the dominant ISP.

Good music.

Cassette Tapes

Pagers. 07734

Waiting at the gas station pay phone in my car behind the guy waiting for his pages to come in, then sends his friend inside to get another roll of quarters so they can keep holding up the line! I haven’t seen a pay phone in close to 20 years. Then again I haven’t traveled outside of my state in that long either, pay phones still exist anywhere??

Good music

Pagers

Having energy.

Collect calling services.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

White dogs poo

People having pagers. Then paging someone and waiting by the phone for them to call back and bring afraid your parents would answer the phone first because it’s your weed dealer.

Spend the night downloading music, to then burn on a CD the next day.

Cassette tapes and records. Today you can meet people who don’t recognize them.

The TV Guide Channel

AOL Instant Messaging. Do you remember your AOL screen name?

1-800-collect commercials.

Long Distance phone calls costing extra money and having to shop for a long distance provider. I remember the commercials/competition. I remember MCI and AT&T having commercials all of the time

Phone booths, cigarette vending machines, people letting each other be imperfect lol

Pox parties

Having friends & family’s phone numbers memorized without it being a big deal

Things taking light years to download

Common sense

Hanging out. I sound so old, but kids now don't just hangout. They pull out phones or whatever device and are instantly entertained

Kids playing outside every night.

Renting physical movies from a physical location.

Cool kids

sex on a waterbed

Laser light shows at the planetarium

5 minutes before class is out, getting your CDs out of your backpack and putting into your CD player the one you wanted to listen to during lunch, making sure to hit play a minute or so before the bell rings so the anti-skip can kick in in time.

Watching the scrambled Spice Network. Every 60 seconds or so, you MIGHT get to see a boob!

Sinkholes and quicksand.

the 1990s

Road maps (like paper ones)

My happiness.

The little black book of phone numbers in the back slacks pocket

BMG and Columbia Music Clubs. The 15 CDs or tapes for 1 cent or whatever it was and then you had to cancel or send back any new ones they sent by subscription that you didn't want to pay for. I had this when I only had a cassette player and I got sooo many tapes for bands i had barely heard of that I just thought sounded interesting and ended up getting into. I only had four or five I knew I wanted, the rest I was going in blind. Wish I still had those tapes now.

Also music/media stores like Sam Goody, Hastings and On Cue. You could find obscure stuff at many of them, listen to new stuff in the store, there are still some places like that but the big ones are mostly gone, as a teen everyone I knew loved going to those places.

I don't remember the name of it for sure but there was an 800 number that I think was called 1800 MUSIC NOW. You could call and beep in the first few letters of bands' names and listen to 2 minutes of any of their available songs over the phone to see if you liked them, for free. The sound was terrible but I called that number a lot 😂

Pogs and slamers

Privacy

Encyclopedia sets!

VCRs, audiotapes, even the iPod is rare or nonexistent. Also we had more places to go to like Toys R Us, Borders, Natural Wonders, Discovery Zone, Zany Brainy, a local Blockbuster, KB Toys.... God I miss my childhood sometimes.

Technology however was a fucking godsend honestly. But then again there were things we just weren't ready for.

Making collect phone calls. Remember those 1-800-COLLECT commercials? That was huge for like 2 years then cellphones really took off, making collect calls completely obsolete.

Honorable Mention: Pagers/Beepers.

You'd pay monthly for a phone number associated with it, so people could call you (collect!) and send you their phone number or a numerical code to your pager, so YOU could call THEM back again Lol. What a time to be alive.

sanity

Cassette/Albums.. I would buy a new album almost every Friday in high school.

Owning a home

A carefree life. And respect

Me not being alive

Phone books and payphones.

Living in the 1900's

Miss Cleo!

Getting Lisa Frank everything for my back to school supplies!!!

Going outside as a kid from sun up to sun down.

Twin towers

Kids playing outside. I don’t ever see them just out on their porch or anything. It depresses me so much for my own son that he doesn’t have that big neighborhood type of feel that I did. I grew up in a lower income area to though, which may also be the issue as to why they’re not out as often where we live. But as a whole, I don’t think this generation of kids do that near as much as we did, growing up in the 90s.

Saturday morning cartoons

Ringback tones

Morals💯

In the early 90s I was a teen. Any movie that came out in the theater. You had to wait 1 year before it was on video. The mid 90s you waited 6 months. I hated this to today. Same with TV shows. Summer sucked because your favorite shows were all reruns.

Optimism

Doing goofy/stupid/funny things not for likes, but just because it was fun.

Happiness.

Hope.

7 digit phone numbers in America

Driving a reliable car

Friends. People were a lot more reliable and willing to hang out back then. It's amazing how hard it is to make new friends let alone maintain existing ones today vs back then. I have friends and I do a lot of things but I don't do a lot of things with my friends. We are all just "too busy" all of the time and it sucks that that's the norm. It's the same with my extended family. We just never talk or interact and it takes such little effort to send a text or reach out. People just don't seem to care.

Oregon Trail, Tetris, & Adventure (my first 3 computer games- Adventure was text-only. "Inconceivable!" cry the children, not even realizing they are quoting The Princess Bride.)

Also, who else remembers the 5 1/2 "actually floppy" disks that came before the ones recently described to me as "3D-printed save icon"?

Pubes.

The Crotch Chop!

Blockbuster, pay phones, the understanding that nazis are bad, playing outside.

Carrying cash in my wallet

All the kids riding their bikes, and you knew where all the kids hung out at

Common sense

Walking to the gate at the airport to see off your loved ones

Edit:spelling.

good music

The utilization of Landline phones.

Affordable Housing and Payphones

Surge

Pagers

Happiness

Roe v Wade

90s Kids.

calling the theater to hear a recording of what movies were showing and at what times

"Hello! And welcome to AOL moviephone!"

Lol! Yes! It would take forever sometimes if it was a multiplex!

me being a child and not having any bills to pay

Can't find where you're friends are? So you ride your bike around town/ neighborhood checking everyone's house and your hangout spots for a pile of bikes.

Asking strangers for directions.

CRT style televisions.

Netscape internet browser and msn messenger.

The amount of happy hormones in my brain

Going out to knock on your friends door to ask them to go out side and play. Playing video games on either an N64, NES, SNES, Gameboy or PS1. Being a shit disturber and being able to get away with it without fear of being filmed by a camera.

Ussr

Pay phones.

Having a pen and paper near your home phone along with a telephone index (those little a-z number books with the plastic slider)

Blockbuster

People that don't pick up their dog's shit.

It was so nice.. I wasn't even a teenager yet and was blissfully ignorant that it was even a thing I needed to do as a future dog owner.

AIM. Hands down. 60% of my high school drama unfolded over AIM.

I'm sorry but I'm in senior year, but I still don't know what this is. I'm not bashing you or anything but what is it?

AOL instant messenger. It was a chat/messenger program that was on your desktop computer. It’s basically how 90’s and early 2000’s kids texted.

I've actually heard of that before lol just didn't know it was called aim

Paper maps for road trips ... lot of them to bring together the entire route.

I got my driver’s license in 1990, but I am horrrrrible at directions, maps, so on. Idk how I would ever be able to go anywhere now without Google or Apple Maps & directions! Remember the big map booklets? My Dad would get those when we went on road-trips, lol.

Smoking at restaurants

Having a home phone… cute times.

Sony minidisc player. So cool

Home land lines

Record sales

You've Got Mail

Payphones

Pogs.

pagers.

Pay phones, phone books, landlines, cassette players, VHS players, tube TVs, dedicated family PCs.

AOL CD's

Calling a travel agent to book a trip for you (unless people still do that?)

Remembering all of your phone numbers that you needed

People not taking offense at a joke.

“Hello and welcome to MovieFone! Using your touch-tone keypad please enter the first three letters of the name of the movie you’d like to see!”

BEEP BOOP BOOP

“You have selected SPANKING THE MONKEY, rated R. Now showing at LANDMARK’S OPERA PLAZA FOUR. Today’s remaining showtimes are FOUR THIRTY, SEVEN, and TEN THIRTY.”

“Thank you for using MovieFone!”

Serious question. How did anyone get anywhere without google maps? I live in a big city and I even get lost with travel apps sometimes.

If it was a person's house you would call their home phone and they would explain directions. Turn by turn.

If it was to a business and you didn't know how to get there, you would tell them what side of the city/town you lived in and they would give you generic directions from the closest highway off ramp to them.

Playing trivia games in a pub where you had a receiver, the questions were on TVs, and you played against other people in the pub. There was a screen that showed the leaderboard too.

I think I would go back to pubs if they brought those games back.

Common sense

Stories about spontaneous human combustion

Inflatable furniture. It was for kids and teens, but if you had blow-up furniture in your room as a kid in the '90s, you were definitely envied.

Nudy magazines, porn tapes/DVDs.

Enjoying life without needing to be "connected".

Common sense.

AOL Instant Messenger

I still have one of the free trial disc

Saturday morning cartoons. If you slept in, you’d miss them. Now you can watch whatever, whenever.

Yoyos.

I still have my Coca Cola one somewhere in the attic. If it was still cool, I would take it to the office every day.

Don't use the phone, I'm on the internet!!!

Affordable housing

Affordable anything*

I hate that you're right

Same, honestly that's one reason why I'm moving to Mexico cuz it's way more affordable. An online job based in the US and moving to Mexico. Definitely can live a lot easier

Good luck, brother. Hope it works out

Watching time-travel movies where the future was actually the future.

Blockbuster.

Having a phonebook at home and each family member has his own portable tiny phonebooks with their personal contacts. It was used so much that we used to change the phone book and rewrite all of the numbers on a new one yearly.

Dial up internet!

I’m at a payphone trying to call home

Happiness and looking forward to the future.

Pagers

Answering machine. Top 8 numbers pre-programmed on speed dial.

Kids having part time jobs. Most of my friends had random odd jobs by 14. Farms, paperboy, umpire, cashier, caddy..etc. most 17yos today tell me their parents pay for everything. I even know a few colleges who say the same. Families aren’t rich but it just done. I feel like in the 90s everyone had jobs in High School. That’s gotta be contributing to the worker shortage

We shoplifted instead. It’s faster.

Rewinding movies before you take them back

VHS

A beeper. Also fax machines.

High speed tape rewinders

Cassette tapes and CDs

Memorizing lots of phone numbers

Phonebooks. Especially not being used as phonebooks. Piling things on them, stopping doors with them, looking stuff up for fun...

Taking pics for yourself and not for social media. I used to take pictures for my own memories but since like 2013 sooo many pictures have been for “the gram” or snapchat or something and they just lose that authentic feel because i know so many people will see and i wanna save face.

Payphones?

A pair of jnco baggies that ain't fucked up and mud stained.

*67 and prank calling people at slumber parties.

Printing out or writing down directions on how to get somewhere new-to-you.

Pogs

Having to choose to either access the internet or talk on the home phone.

Encyclopedias. I remember sometimes just being a bored kid and plopping down on the floor with a pillow and the encyclopedia. Then there were school reports and projects. Even in the mid and late 1990s there was still Encarta.

I loved the game built into Encarta

Yep Mind Maze. I remember the school librarian being so furious because they thought we had some how managed to install a game and play it while we were supposed to be exploring the new encyclopedia. Calm down. It is the encyclopedia.

Haha it was an educational game that literally taught you things as you played

Pagers, Video and Audio Cassettes, Home (Landline) Phones, Analog Cable, Lead paint on toys, POGS, Beanie Babies, using the phone book/411, using paper maps.

needing to keep the phone line free so you could get online

1 800 c-a-l-l a-t-t

Dial down the center!

Nickelodeon

I live in Canada and we like to complain about the weather, But when I was a child growing up in the 90s, there is not as much snow anymore, it used to be 5 feet deep where I live now we’re lucky if we get 2 feet of snow and it used to be cold all the time now it’s only cold one or two days a year rest of the time it’s -33 T-shirt weather.

George Forman grills

Circuit City

and

Incredible Universe

Chain restaurants with distinctive architecture.

You could always tell a Pizza Hut from a Domino's, or a McDonald's from a Burger King just by looking at the building.

Nowadays the buildings they inhabit are nigh-identical soulless boxes; sure, it makes it easier for one chain to move in after another leaves, but c'mon... seeing those dull, drab blocks where the only difference between them is the sign out front is depressing as fuck.

I work at Jersey Mikes and yeah god damn it sucks just to look at. Free sandwiches are worth it though

This thread is making me incredibly sad. I wish I was alive back before iPhone and all the technology that came from iPhone existed. Yea it’s convenient, but I’m completely at the will of my phone. I can do anything I want without leaving my couch or bed. There’s no incentive to live like a real person. I yearn to hear the phone call and pick it up not knowing who it is and being excited to hear what that maybe person has to say. Or going to somebody’s house cause you’re not in the area and it not being incredibly rude to just show up. Or going to the mall to just hang out. Or having places outside to be able to exist in whiteout it being illegal. Or browsing through movie rental places, being able to physically pick up movies and talk about them. I remember doing that as a young kid and I was always astounded at how many movies we could possibly watch. I vaguely remember payphones existing, and that such a convenient thing because if my phone dies then I can just use one of my insufferable amount of coins to be able to call somebody and let them know my phone died but I didn’t and I’m not being rude by not responding. Or taking pictures with an actual physical camera and having them printed out and most of them being candid or shitty. I want that. I yearn for that time that I wasn’t even a consideration in my parents mind. Like having a disposable camera and then going to Walmart to print out the photos and keeping the ones you like on your wall and either throwing away the rest or putting them in a photo album? That’s the dream. Now I just have a thousand pictures in my camera roll that I’ll never look at and will at some point be deleted, never to be seen again. Or having a fucking answering machine that I can just press play and listen to whatever somebody has to say while putting away groceries. These things may seem tedious or things that y’all don’t miss now, but since most of my life has been involved in advanced technology and I understand the ramifications of such technology in regards to hormones and emotional maturity and the health of your brain, I’m so fucking jealous of the people that lived without it.

jnco jeans that were so big you could put a 2 liter in the back pocket and still have room left over.

Racist jokes that are ”just jokes”

Jnco jean’s

Smoking, in general. I know one person who smokes now. It was almost nostalgic the other day when they sparked up as we were heading out for lunch and I got that smell waft in front of me

AOL install CDs. You couldn't turn around without bumping into those things...

A phone book. Used to have to sit on one when I was too damn short to eat at the table.

My dad

my mom

Your mom, my dad, me, you, and the asswipes we ate in the Mcdonald's bathroom.

Niceness

Blockbuster

Ozone holes.

Pagers

The Soviet Union.

Layaway! My parents struggled financially and we’d do back to school shopping in June so they could pay it off and pick it up for back to school in September

HBO’s Taxi Cab Confessions and Real Sex back to back on Saturday nights while your parents were home so you had to be sneaky by having a back up channel set to the “Prev” button on your remote control in hopes of not getting busted for watching softcore stuff at 13yrs old. Quietly.

Checks and cash.

Knowing your mom’s phone number by heart.

What do you mean? I STILL know your mom's phone number by heart! (Come on, you know I had to).

people born in the 1920s being alive

Fingering and not expecting it to become full intercourse

Patriotism divorced from nationalism.

Making mix tapes by recording songs that played on the radio

A computer mouse with a solid metal ball covered in rubber. Basically a non laser mouse.

diskette 💾

Lines of people at pay phones looking at pagers about to use a phone card to hit someone up about going to the CD store. Also, collect calls.

TV Guide scrolling channel

Pay phones

Cd holders. Needed to store a collection of cds a few months ago, I went to 3 different stores to get one. It was at this moment I got a harsh realisation of time and technology passing by.

Movie renting

$1.00/gallon gas, affordable housing, affordable education, paper maps

Earning a livable wage.

When I was younger there was a local "gag shop" down the street that I always rode my bike to. I would collect change to buy fake vomit & cigarettes, gum that turned your mouth blue, fish tasting candy, fake bugs, funny posters and keychains. They had an adult section for 21+ and I remember always trying to sneak a peek at the nude magazines until the owner would come around. I had a hay day playing pranks on my parents/friends back then! Miss those carefree days.

Having to read the back of a shampoo bottle while pooping

The freedom to say what you wanted and how you wanted without fear of offending someone. Inclusion meant hanging out with your group of friends and not a political ideology, agenda or gender issues.

You had a good chance to get the username you really wanted. There is no way I'd be able to get the same email address I had when I was a kid.

Smoking sections!

people born in the 1920s

Bein under 18 dating older men

This sound.

Blockbuster video stores

You can insult anyone and they wouldn’t cry like a sensitive lil bitch.

Eye contact

VHS movies, and a VHS player

brutal mosh pits at live shows of a heavier flavor. understandable tho....it would be hard for everyone to be on their cellphone amidst boisterous physical expression of musical appreciation.

Recording on tapes from the radio or recording from the TV

sticking a piece of paper or tape over the holes over cassettes lol

Occasionally talking with your neighbors.

Not just in the friendly "nice weather today, huh?" way but rather borrowing a cup of sugar, asking to use their phone because yours wasn't working, and depending on if you were closer or not even stopping in for coffee and a chat unannounced.

Now if a stranger knocks on my door I'm assuming they have ill intentions or are trying to sell me something. Everything is so individualized now like never before it's not even funny. I imagine there will be entire generations in the future who don't know how to be humble or want to help a stranger in any way due to how bad it's getting now.

Existing in the 1990s

going to the arcade

We had great music … Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, DMB, Sarah McLachlan, STP, Tori Amos, Concrete Blonde, Queensryche, Pantera…we still had quality music videos and full acoustic shows (Unplugged) on MTV and we had amazing concerts without the distraction of smartphones and social media.

Pagers. Fax machines. Rotary dial land line phones hadn't yet entirely disappeared. PAY PHONES, there's a major one.

Beeper, Walkman, cassettes, and VCR's.

Walkman 🥰

Using a prepaid calling card on school trips to call my parents and check in

Pogs

payphones! i had to walk about 20 mins to be able to call someone

Smoking in buildings

Calling the movie theater for show times and what’s playing

also calling the time and temperature number at the bank 247-6693 and 247-5333 I remember the number to both lol

Floppy discs

Corded phones.

VHS tapes, Stereo Music Players

Fax machines

Calling a number to get the time so you could set your clocks

Pagers

Booking with a travel agent.

Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves search engines (before google existed) Mapquest. Getting off instant messenger so my Mom could use the phone. Calling cards for long distance phone calls.

Topless women and thongs at the beach and swimming pools.

Toughness. Kids are soft nowadays. No team loses-- BOTH teams are WINNERS! Opinions, if your opinion doesn't match theirs (and vice-versa)-- One person is automatically wrong. And holy shit if you hurt somebody's feelings, or offend them, in any way.

Using the smaller cable for internet instead of the larger one.

"Word Processing"

"Dial-up"

Instant Cameras

Floppy discs

livable wages.

Exchanging money. Recently got back from Scandinavia and never even bothered to get any local money, it's all just credit cards now.

Going to the drive in movies

Parents who backed up the teacher not their kid.

A promising future

Rent videotapes with movies.

The glass bottles of Coca Cola! The green ones, ppl sell those for a lot

Having newspapers delivered.

Are my beanie babies finally rare again?

Walden Bookstores. Woolsworth. Kmart. Blockbuster. Toys R’ Us. Circuit City. Showbiz Pizza. Funcoland.

  • the green FBI warning screen that played before Disney VHS tapes
  • tasteful music
  • applying for a job in person
  • frosted tips
  • carrying around change
  • quality MTV shows
  • star stickers for your ceiling that glow in dark
  • being able to buy a house
  • landlines/pagers/pay phones/phone books
  • chia pets
  • jorts
  • smoking in restaurants

Calling people on "three-way".

Smoking/smoking section in restaurants.

Hooked on phonics... Fuckin Muzzy Denver the last dinosaur

Empathy

Slap bracelets

Maybe not the 90s but when I got my first cellphone in the 00s I charged it like once every 14 days.

Boom boxes with the huge speakers and the handle

Driving across the country without a real map or a cell phone. Like I had an interstate map in the glove box that listed major roads, but not local streets. You knew to go South on 65 until you saw a sign with the name of the city you were headed to. If you broke down no one really panicked. Someone, usually "Dad", would just get out and walk/hitchhike to the nearest gas station or even a house and ask to call a wrecker.

Having to wait until a certain time to watch a movie on TV, seeing ‘what’s on’ in the TV guide and looking forward to it. Now we have instant gratification always. We barely have to wait for anything!

Rewinding.

For me personally: excitement for what the future might bring.

56k modems

The red, yellow, and white plugins on the back of the television for video game consoles.

Lan parties.

*69, pager, mci, aol- Destiny’s child

Young millenials

General respect for all

Look up ppl phone number through a phone book

Text messages

Pay phones in literally every corner of any public building you happen to be in.

I never see rolodexes being used now that everyone keeps their contacts in their phones.

Phone booths

Going to the video store on a Friday night and perusing what you wanted to see, "ooh they still have a copy of Goldeneye!" Then casually going into the separate area for "adult movies". Asia Carrera or Janine?

Land lines

Pay phones

VHS tapes and not being a pussy. The 90s/00s were great

Hah, affordable housing/rent/food/pretty much anything else

“be kind please rewind”

Encyclopaedias!!

Affordable housing

Printing Mapquest directions to get somewhere you’ve never been.

Pay phones, collect calls, answering machines, writing checks over for cash at the grocery store. Midnight CD release parties. Camping out at the record store for concert tickets.

The whole renting a movie experience with friends. Getting munchies, taking your time and selecting movies you would never pick nowadays. I miss that.

Walkman

Affordable housing.

Kindness

Manners

Parents beating some sense into their kids.

Cassette tapes with necessary pencil

Printing the MapQuest directions.

Not being gay

Knocking on a friends door asking if he's coming out to play.

I know this is a bit dramatic but mentality. When I was a kid, I was rarely indoors during summer holidays. And if I was indoors, I was doing something constructive. Whether it was chores, some school exercises to keep my mind fresh or arts and crafts. I babysat my 9y/o nephew the other day. All he wanted to to was watch videos on his phone. He couldn't even eat his meal without being glued to that damn phone. It took him nearly an hour to finish a small bowl of chorizo and potatoes. Then I asked him if he wanted to play at the park a couple blocks away. He said yes, and then proceeded to return his attention to his phone.... for another 30 minutes! For two days he just sat there, slumped on the sofa, watching these mindless videos. I tried to get him to interact with me, help me cook, do some school exercises, colour in one of my zillion colouring books... Nothing... He wouldn't budge... The mentality of kids today, I just can't wrap my head around it... They're unmotivated, lethargic, lazy, zombie-like... Even their imaginations are becoming more dull... Its terrifying!

Cartoons on Saturday mornings

Having to be kind and rewind

How about getting a phone call when you didn’t rewind or charging you if you forgot

Payphones

Payphones

People enjoying stand up comedy without being offended

Folded paper atlas maps for directions. Haha 😄 🤣

Portable CD players.

JNCO Jeans.

The sound of a connecting modem

Actual MDMA, Not all this cathinone shit

Dating whilst accepting imperfection.

Roller skates

Feeling comfortable letting you kids disappear for hours to let them go play with friends

Letting your kids play outside without adult supervision

Calling for the time 844-2525 after a storm or something knocked the power out

Having two phone lines so your computer wouldn’t get kicked off the internet when someone called you.

Tape decks in cars

Over the top baggy clothes

Phonebooth

I remember cigarette vending machines being in restaurants.

While not quite “rare or non-existent”, I’m still amazed and thankful for how quickly smoking cigarettes went out of style, at least in the United States.

still strong in Europe

fast forwarding through the do not pirate warnings on VHS tapes

Dial-up internet

It’s sad… proud to be an American and optimistic about the future. Now, a grey cloud of doom and uncertainty is ever present… and I feel fucking helpless about what’s happening to our country. I see our democracy fading away… and don’t believe most Americans see the tidal wave that’s looming… autocracy, fascism and more of our rights being taken from us… the Supreme Court has the majority leaning right or extreme right… I think Biden needs to stack the court and add 4 more justices. Fuck the GOP!

celebrities with crooked teeth

I remember all the time my dad would just be in the area of a friend’s house and just stop by to chat for a few minutes then we headed out. They’d do the same at our house. I could never imagine doing that with my friends today.

Pogs

Thin eyebrows.

Getting AOL discs in the mail and collecting them just in case

Going to some strangers house and asking to use their phone to make a call

Oh also MAPQUEST DIRECTIONS! Anyone remember printing out a page of directions and hoping you don’t f up 😂😂😂

SO. Many. TIMES!

Especially since it's not exactly possible to consult a conventional map while driving solo without pulling over.

Printing out the text-based directions in a large font size so you could read them washer at a glance was pretty cool for a minute!

The World Trade Center in NYC.

people driving on the road without being on their phones

Going to the store and being surprised about some NEW electronics or game you didn't know was now available.

The optimistic thought that the folk who came before us were making a better world for all instead of exploiting the poor for the futile idea of infinite growth.

Never thought I'd see so many corpses on the road to "a better future"

The dream exists for only a few right now, don't be drawn in by the bootstrap paradox. Fight it. Fight them. Assert yourself. Take back the value of your work that they have stolen from you.

AND PLEASE REMEMBER:

THEY WANT US TO FIGHT AMONGST OURSELVES OVER MINUTAE

NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR

EQUITY FOR ALL

NO TOLERANCE FOR THE INTOLERANT

IN OUR STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE, WE HAVE NO CHANCE UNLESS WE UNITE AGAINST THOSE WHO ONLY USE OUR HEARTS AND BODIES FOR THE PROFIT WE WILL NEVER SEE.

“Would you like to be seated in smoking or non-smoking?”

You had to buy your porn and water was free

Home phones

Gas prices that didn't make your eyes water

Worrying about Y2K

I had a beeper from 1992 to 1997 or so

yellow pages

Smoking indoors, EVERYWHERE. Malls. Restaurants. EVERYWHERE.

Waiting 10 minutes for one hires pic to download

Landlines, writing checks, and leaving your home to pay a bill. Scripted sitcoms, trying on something before you bought it, social games like pool and hacky sack--because you don't have a computer with internet service.

As a kid if we were good on an aeroplane we would get to go up and visit the pilot and look out the front window in the middle of the flight.

People talking to each other over dinner

Maybe at your house.

I was thinking more in restaurants! I see folk all staring at their phones instead of talking to each other so much - maybe it’s because I find it annoying and sad that I notice it more, I dunno!

Pubic hair

Time and temp phone number.

Phone cards to call different countries

Political correctness

Blockbuster

Common sense.

Getting a whooping from your mum. Although looking at yoof today most of em could've done with a few sound beatings

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Corded phones

Pagers and pay phones

The degauss button.

JNCO jeans.

Pagers... Oh! And modems!

A positive view of the future. Cold War ended. Financial future was looking good, especially if you bought into the bubble. No 9/11, no looming shadow of "turrurists!", the '93 attack on the WTC was trivial compared to 9/11 or the Oklahoma City Bombing. It pre-Columbine, it was pre 20 straight years of war and occupation, pre-Trump, and pre-whateverthefuckwe'recallingthis. The Screaming Twenties? Didn't have to try and figure out how to buy houses ranging from $400k-800k, around my area at least, while making $7.25 an hour. All those big pay jumps mid-pandemic and during the "Great Resignation" did not last long. Jobs paying $17.00 starting are back to $7.25 and the stores barely manage to function from lack of staff. If it even manages to function.

Grunge music.

The landline phone being engaged for hours because someone was using the internet.

Hypercolor

It being taboo to talk about who you were voting for.

My will to exist

Smoking sections at restaurants

Maps

Spanking your children

Those aluminum one use ashtrays at fast food places

If you wanted to sit in a smoking or non-smoking section at a restaurant

Printing out directions and taking a stack of papers with you on a road trip

Spice Girls, and pogs!

Getting 2-3 magazines in the mail from marking Bill Me Later on a magazine subscription card.

Decent rock bands comprised of relatively young people.

Walkmans!

Dunkaroos

Blockbuster

Your vhs tape getting messed up in the vhs player and needing to manually fix it or even resplice the film with tape to fix it.

Waiting for your favorite song to come on the radio so you could record it on a cassette in your boom box.

"Aaaand welcome back to 98.5 THE ROCK!" Me: "goddamit it's ruined." Prays they replay the track soon.

Ring ring.

"Can James come out and play?"

Whenever you drove anywhere the front of the car would have lots of species of dead insects all over it.

A real “it’s all bullshit” attitude, a real hatred of yuppies, and a real understanding that advertising is the root of all evil.

Asking smoking or non at a restaurant.

Nokias

Putting a quarter into a payphone to call someone. Reading the news paper for news , stocks and obituary. Going to a vhs rental store to rent a vhs. Then rewind it when your done and return it. Checking your answering machine for messages when you got home. Getting disconnected from the world wide web whenever someone calls in.

Not using your real name or other information on the internet.

Myspace and Facebook turned that around though.

Football results on Teletext. So much fun

LOUD DIAL UP CONNECTION NOISES

Having to stop on the highway to physically pay for the toll with all the different lanes depending on how you wanted to pay

Wind breakers

Money on the ground, free for the taking.

I kid you not there used to be change everywhere. I'd come home from the mile walk from school through town and find a dollar a day in quarters, dimes and nickles. Enough for a G.I. Joe every week.

Phone books

The internet died when the someone was calling.

Under $1.00 gasoline prices.

My hair

Buying porn from stores

Using the physical Yellowbook to find business numbers and cabs

Episodes of cartoons that were basically PSAs warning you about drugs and racism.

Pay Phones

Telling jokes. I don't think I've heard a real joke, with a whole setup and a punchline, since about 2007. You can go to r/dadjokes or r/jokes for nostalgia's sake, but it seems like people basically don't do it in social situations any more.

D: man you're right. Never thought of it but its true! Haven't heard a joke for aeons

Not reading news headlines that it's the hottest day/month/year on record

The tv guide channel. Hell, the tv guide book.

I don't remember when I last time saw kids actually playing outside without phones or tablets. And if they are playing something it always is related to video games. I think it's kinda sad these days.

It really is I was just talking to a buddy of mine about this. Last time I saw a bunch of kids and adults outside was because of pokemon go. And you're right cause of a video game.

Walkmans !

Picking up another receiver to listen to someone else talking on the other receiver, then hearing the phone click and knowing you got caught lol

Trying to find the scrambled channel late at night to maybe see a boob.

newspapers being a major form of media

​

now everything's on the internet and anyone can broadcast their opinion, for better or for worse

In the 90s people rarely used the p word and the c word in public. Now it’s everywhere.

MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs.

Hope

[deleted]

That’s still common now

Good movies were ALOT more common.. now its just remakes of old ideas mostly

Smoking in restaurants.

I remember basically every food place, fast food included, allowed smoking.

I can't remember the last time I saw an ash tray anywhere other than at my grandparent's house.

Affordable houses

Pogs.

Joy

Pop up headlights on cars, sharing video game cartridges with friends.

Edit: Cartilage to Cartridge

Dirty magazines. finding one of those as a kid was like finding pirate treasure.

Calling a house and hoping the right person answer.

Concerts without everyone filming it.

Smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants

Magazine subscriptions and a magazine rack next to the toilet

Good music

Not knowing if or when a friend was going to show up, and waiting for them anyway.

Those paper tickets on the bus

Hitch hiking on the highway when the car broke down. No cell phone to call anyone, so it was hitch hike or walk for miles.

Daisy chaining caller ID box, answering machine, and finally the telephone.

Showing up at people's houses unannounced.

Also: calling people whenever you wanted (without getting their permission to call first, via text, since texting didn't exist yet).

Logic

People not requiering constant validation of their identity, sexual orientation and personal beliefes.

Riding in the back of the truck, it was one of my favorite things ever.

Renting video tapes. Rushing to get new releases. Paying an extra fee for returning the video that was not rewound.

Buying a separate video tape rewinders, so you could watch a video and rewind another one at the same time!

Arcades

Smoking sections in restaurants

Ringing friends doorbells to hang out now it's just rude to show up

Carrying change for the payphone or using a calling card.

Affording a house on minimum wage

Manners and common decency.

Hope for the future.

Trapper Keepers

Making own mix tapes by recording songs of the Radio, Phone Books, Phone Booths, having pockets full of change, Smoking in Pubs / Bars / Restaurants etc..

Affordable housing

Hope for the future.

Picking up the phone to kick someone off the internet when they'd been surfing too long.

Payphones; early 90s with coins, late 90s with phone cards.

Checking the TV channel show timings on the newspaper

Wow this unlocked so many memories!

There was no GPS back then, so my dad had to use a street directory to memorize the roads and direction if we're headed somewhere unfamiliar.

Having a phone card or spare coins for public payphones.

Chatting with your friends over the phone after school. Our parents knew our friends' names.

Chalkboards, dusters and overhead projectors were commonplace in classrooms.

Me and my sister shared a discman. We thought it was cool. Lol. And we borrowed CDs from friends.

Finding this year's holiday via Teletext.

Fax machines

Smoking on airplanes

Windows 95

Complimenting a woman …. Not harassing, just a simple “You look nice today”.

Me seeing bands every weekend, getting blind drunk and wasting all my money.

Floppy Disks, the Concorde and also SoftRAM95

Developing like 10 rolls of film at once.

People being arrested for having gay sex

Not having internet and if you were lucky it was a dial up modem where you could go make a sandwich in the time it took to connect

I printed an entire FF8 walkthrough/strategy guide at school, put it in a binder and added handwritten notes. No internet at home and definitely no printer that could handle a job that big.

Pay phone,.arcade the awesome. McDonald's fries.

Tribal tattoos

On white people anyway haha

Floppy disks

Lyrical rappers

Elephant jeans

Phone booth

Overhead projectors in school.

Chocolate cigarettes for kids

Happiness

Portable music players.

Mix tapes

Curtain partings

A/s/l

You died of dysentery.

Coke in Cola

Dial up modem tones.

Watching movies on CVR

Floppy disks

Friendships

Phone booths

Cassettes.

Affordable housing.

World war 2 veterans

''Would you like to be seated in the Smoking or non smoking area''. Even though the entire restaurant was open

Looking down from the World Trade Center.

Waiting for the password to be published in the newspaper so you could phone-up and make your fantasy football transfers

Calling your girlfriend from the home phone and having to talk to her parents who answer the phone before putting her on

JNCO jeans

I don't know if it was common in other countries, but we all had these pre-paid cards for payphones that you carried around so you could call home.

Boomers getting pussy

Custom ring tones

Reading the TV Guide to see what's on.

Oh man where to start, Blockbuster, using an actual map or printing out your directions 😂. Shit fashion, toys that could definiltey wreck you lol so many memories

Smoking everywhere

Common sense!

Which never existed in the first place ,,,

Not remotely “normal” in the 90s.

Aside from VCRs and VHS tapes, buying a dedicated cassette tape rewinder to do it faster than your VCR and without wearing it out as quickly.

Buying a house

Having home phones with looooong cords.

Paper maps for any trip by car that you dont know road completely by heart :'D i kinda miss having this bigger than myself map spread out, trying to navigate my dad :D felt sooo important and like i am essential to our travel, pretty much as important as the driver himself 🤣🤣🤣

(We still got lost a lot, oopsie)

Snorting crack

Cheap cigarettes.

Chatting with college classmates between classes

Smoking inside, everywhere, not giving two shits if there are kids around.

Common sense

Crack a joke without everyone being offended

Getting kicked off the internet because someone called your house.

That wasn't the usual issue, as a dialup connection would block any use of the phone line and return a busy signal.

However, someone in your household picking up the phone receiver would disconnect you.

I'll throw out a curve ball, but bear with me.

The F slur. When I was a teen in the 90s it was used copiously as a pejorative and in the 30 years since then it still blows my mind how unacceptable using it has become. And I'm good with it. Some times things dying out in my lifetime isn't a bad thing, I'm just blown away at how far this particular thing from my formative years has been removed from common usage, and I think we're better for it.

And if that one is far too serious, then I'll just go with making a Nintendo game work by blowing in the cartridge like it's a harmonica dying of suffocation.

Good music

Great music...

Damn, I miss mid 90's grunge. 1993 was a hell of a year!

I was just listening to some Alice in chains earlier …

In '93, I was buried deep in Nirvana: In Utero. Pearl Jam: Vs. Alice in Chains: Dirt. Stone Temple Pilots and a smattering of early RAtM.

Honestly, my musical taste hasn't changed since I was a teenager, either. It's all still on my gym, driving or MTB playlists.

Teletext

semi functioning democracy?

Developing pictures & picking them up with excited anticipation, not knowing how they turned out!

Pagers

For vacations my family and I used to drive to Italy. Late 90's wi-fi or roaming wasn't a thing, so for those 3 weeks we would be completely cut-off from the world going on at home. We would just spend our days reading books and doing crosswords. I remember getting home and catching up to everything that had happened.

Ah I loved those holidays! Recently stayed at a cottage in Scotland with no phone signal and no wi-fi, it took me back to that time. So it’s still possible if you find the right place 😊

I hope that'll be a trend in the future - holidays offering total seclusion where you have to be offline

Sony Walkman cassette players.

Quality grunge.

Tamagotchi

Smoking inside buildings.

Phone booths

A good Weezer Album

Hope

Vhs tapes

Tv program guide

Sitting on the phone book as a booster seat.

Calling your friends house to see if he has time to hang.

Knowing exactly how many texts you can send.

Panic mode when you accidentally hit the internet button on your Mobile.

Dial up internet. Not that anyone actually misses it. Or that God awful tone lol

Doooodiiiiiiiifiwbdkvjdkshwkdhdjsbdhfksbskcbdjeh

The mail you would get with a big fold out catelog of cd's, and you could pick out 7 or so to have sent to you for "free". I'm pretty sure you had to pay for them at some point but teenage me never got farther than the "free" ones.

Kids tv stopped at like 10AM. No 24 hour kids tv back then.

The first part isn't true; there was Nickelodeon. (However, they had Nick at Nite after their target demographic most likely went to bed, which was like old sitcoms and stuff.)

Non smoking and smoking sections in restaurants

Optimism

Physical maps in cars

Someone under 35 who has cable.

Dial up internet

those clear landline phones that let you see all of the interior electronics. usually had a few lights inside to jazz them up.

Downloading fun ringtones from magazines. Or Nokia had those ‘tattoo’ wallpapers.

Now I don’t even know my phone ringtone but I don’t want people calling me lol

Audio Cassettes

D.A.R.E.

Socializing without cellphone glued to face.

Saying your goodbyes to somebody going on a trip at the airport gate.

The ability to concentrate for longer than 15 seconds

There was a number you could call to get the exact time.

Starter jackets!

In Germany we had gumball machines in every other street where we got our cheewing gums from.

Payphones. It's hard to find working payphones

Memorizing phone numbers. I used to have a mini-phonebook stored in my brain. Now I can't even remember my own number.

Going to the video store to rent a porno on VHS.

Not having a cellphone. Or alternatively, free local calls after 5pm/on weekends.

Payphones.

Local multiplayer, splitscreen.

Going to Target/Kmart/Zellers/some big box store cause you had nothing else to do with your summer. (You can still do this now but.. it's different now. I don't look at things and imagine owning it, I look at it and go "...they want HOW MUCH?!")

Playing N64/GameCube games at McDonald's

Going to blockbuster

Unexpected company

Polaroids

Nice affordable and easy to fix JDM cars

From personal experience, serotonin.

ckshhhhccllr̃cr̃r̃r̃SHHhskshhhr̃r̃r̃wlurwlurwlurwlerwlerWLERtrrrrrEEEEEEEEEEyawweEEEeyyyaaawwwKSCHHHHHhhhhhkccxxchk WELCOME. You’ve got mail!

Affordable housing

Pornography with good plot lines

Logic

A few minutes of peace without some asshole trying to sell you something you don’t need or cause anxiety because of horrible news somewhere in the world.

Land Lines! Even if many were cordless then.

Definitely asking your neighbors for cooking ingredients, if you were to go to your neighbors this day in age and ask for sugar it’s a 50% chance they’ll say yes. 50% they’ll say no. 100% chance they’ll think you’re broke.

Calling time to get the time "At the tone the time will be 5:01"

“La semnalul urmator va fi ora 7 - 20 de minute - 30 de secunde. Beep”

Free speech

Holy shit how has no one mentioned SMOKING INDOORS

Kurt Cobain

people under 190 lbs

Collecting WinAmp Skins

Manners

Touching the tv screen and feeling the "fuzz"

Saying that’s gay when you dislike something

Beepers

Having to remember phone numbers.

Everyone not being at each throats because of politics, news media and social media

America Online

VHS PORN

Mtv

Going to a friends place and asking if he can come out to play

Telling your sister to get off the phone because it cuts out my one hour of internet time

Ashtrays

Calling the weather from our house

Pay phones.

Remembering a 100 phone numbers!

Dogs with balls

Sometimes when you'd call your friend, you'd have to talk to their mom first

floppy disks...

Bill Cosby as a role model.

Physical maps for driving and getting to places

Block Buster or Hollywood Video.

Cassette tapes and floppy disks

Fat free every possible junk food.

Fat free Oreos, fat free Lays, fat free chips ahoy, fat free wheat thins. Fat free cream cheese.

Pagers were a thing

Landline phones.

Owning a house and supporting a family of five and paying for your father's retirement home on a power plant worker's salary.

Years starting with 199

pagers 📟

Having that one guy at work trying to sell you shitty burnt movie CDs, even with the CD card layout printed by the same computer.

Soda cans with the small mouth you drink from now everything is a large opening for your high fructose corn syrup needs.

And look under the lid to see if you win

Wordart in important documents.

The twin towers😬

Putting your finger through the coiled phone cord.

Using a Compact Disc of some kind.

Rollerblading

Waiting for a printed TV programme to come with your newspaper and underline the shows or movies you wanted to see this week with a pencil :D

Trustworthy drugs

“You’ve got a collect call from… MOM IM GOING TO JESSICAS HOUSE… if you’d like to accept, press 1…”

Affordable housing

Insert disc one, wait for loading, insert disc 2, wait for loading, insert disc 1 again, wait for loading.....

Just going to a friend and ring the doorbell to ask if he has free time

Driving through a swarm of bugs that splatters on your windshield

Tape cassettes, DVDs, CDs, hand Atari

Not knowing anything about which political party casual acquaintances belonged to.

"when will you be home so that I can call you?"

Sneezing without pee coming out

Actually going outside

Carrying cassette tapes in your pocket for your Walkman

goths

TV guide channel. Waiting for what felt like 20 minutes to see what was on a specific channel. Looking away right as it passed and having to wait for it to loop through again.

"Call that number to find out what time it is" and just the concept of not having most clocks synced up

Remembering phone numbers.

Going over to a friend's house to see if they were home and what they were up to.

Physically going to a friend's house and knocking on the door to see if they wanna hang.

Smoking Sections

Affordable housing.

Thinking Fascism is bad.

Having hope for the future.

Friends

Blockbuster

Netscape web browser.

Pagers

People reading books.

Local multiplayer games

Cable TV

Maps

Pay phones

That every home had a landline.

Pager

Privacy

Trusting that you could let your kids play outside and they’d be mostly safe. Unlocked doors/windows.

Phone booths.

VCRs

Landlines

Change

Making a mixed tape

My first gf made me a mix cd before asking me out

Making a mixed tape is really a good way to tell someone that you like them.

My dad 🧍‍♂️

Buying fuel for your car and a pack of cigarettes and then still having change.

People not owning a mobile phone

Calling cards for long distance pay phone calls. And commercials for nationwide collect call companies as in 1 800 collect.

Saturday morning cartoons! TGIF (Family Matters, Step by Step, Full House), The Disney Afternoon (Ducktales, Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck, Gummy Bears), Nintendo Power magazine. NBA Inside Stuff on Saturdays (Saved by the Bell, California Dreams, Hang Time)...Napster!!! PS The X-Men cartoon on Fox and Wizard magazine.

Landline telephones

Playing outside ... nowdays kids just play fortnite all day or watch streamers ... noone goes outside to play its like ghost town in every place.

You're not wrong, but parents also weren't as paranoid about kidnappers I don't think. I personally wasn't allowed to go over to friend's houses. Or to walk anywhere alone.

Smoking in restaurants

Actually having remember people's adresses and phone numbers

Writing/Sending a letter

I had two pen pals growing up in the 90s, they were nice. It was like omegle but didn't make you lose faith in humanity completely.

14.4k modems. You’re welcome.

I'm in IT, grew up in the 90s, and I haven't the slightest idea what 14.4k modems are

Playing outside

Using a real map

Retirement

Getting kicked off AOL whenever my mom wanted to call my aunt

Floppy disks

Hope for the future?

Rock em sock em boppers

Property ownership

Seeing lots of stars at night.

Old Country Buffet

Picking up the phone and just calling someone without texting them first to check they're around.

Talking to people instead of having your face buried in a mobile device.

Fingering pay phones and vending machines for leftover change.

Having lots of photo albums and printing out photos, not many people do that today

Common sense

People asking A/S/L

People who were born in the 90s

Tolerance.

Keeping your thoughts to yourself. We got along so much better when the internet wasn't brainwashing us into thinking that we're special enough that our opinions mattered.

During meetings with friends, no one was on their phone, kids were going out on their bikes and stuff

Looking in the classified ads for work. Looking to buy something in the paper. The paper also contained the time movies played.

Beepers

1990s calendars

House phones

Being happy

Common sense and women's autonomy... Wtf happened.

Pay Phones. Growing up I saw them in every corner. And Used one, one time to call home. Now I don’t see any at all. How am I supposed to call home now?

Knocking on peoples door without knowing if they are home or not

Free range parenting, sadly.

Using real paper maps when driving somewhere. My mum, me and my sister were driving from Poland to Russia, i was very little. We were using a paper map to get there the whole time. I can't imagine doing that these days, how is that even possible like how do you know where you are on a map?

Pay phones.

Or calling collect and not wanting to have whomever pay, so you jam all the info into the name area, like, "mompickmeupatthepool".

Nuanced debate in good faith between people with opposing views who still respect one another...

Gameboys and all you can eat CC’s pizza for $2,99

White dog poop. Used to be everywhere when I was a kid and you never see it anymore!

In the UK, DIY raves. “Raves” are now professionally hosted for profit at big clubs like Fabric/Printworks/Warehouse Project

Answering machines

Rental movie stores

Those t-shirts that changed colour in the heat. Global technicolor or something

Ooooo now I have to check my old storage boxes, I loved that hyper colour shirt so much

Buying a CD single and playing that one song, a remix of it and a bonus track on repeat for weeks.

Gathering for drinks with friends and not checking your phone every 5 minutes

An affordable house

A woman's reproductive rights

Tamagotchi

Decency

Pop up headlights

Kindness ☹️

Buy a book with cheats and walkthroughs for games

Getting film developed

People were tough, not fucking pansies as they are today

You could call 110 in my country and ask for phones or addresses if you had the name. To an actual person. Seems surreal now.

Me being happy.

Drinking a big glass of milk

Actually good rap

Photo processing booths and pay phones

Beepers

Snow in the winter

You made your own way to and from school. If you did something after school and your parents were late to pick you up, nothing you could do. Sometimes other parents would wait with you, sometimes not. Sometimes as a little kid I’d walk home from something in the dark, a bit scared but did it.

A rollodex

Affordable housing

carrying around a radio

Landlines

Good music

A Queen album coming out right before Freddie Mercury's death. Miss the Queen album coming out, not so much Freddie dying.

Nearly everything mentioned here has been related simply not having a phone/internet in our pockets at all times... God I miss it, it's not been worth it.

Just saying "I'm heading out" to your mother at 9 or 10 yo, with your mother not freaking out.

My willingness to re-marry.

Lisa Frank

Eating dinner at the table together

The Geo Prizm

Calling cards

Cassette tapes

Biking with like 6 kids around the neighborhood

Kids standing around playing hacky sack.

AOL Instant Messenger

House phone

Floppy disks

Cassette and vhs tapes

The goodnight kiwi on TV. Stopped broadcasting in 1994 I believe. (Just realised I’m not in the New Zealand subreddit)

Pay phones

Just wondering things without an easy way to get an answer.

Pagers and pay phones

A landline/home phone.

Having a house phone.

Calling out someone on being fake (poser).

Trip Tickets from AAA, salad bar and tables at Pizza Hut

AOL

Pogo Balls, Hypercolor T-shirts, Common Sense, Free Range Kids

Smokers smoking inside when their kids and kid’s friends were around.

Pagers

Always keeping change on you incase you need to use the pay phone

AUX or Channel 3 for hardware.

landline phones

in households at least

Being bored in waiting rooms. Thank you iPhone. awkwardly kisses iPhone in waiting room

Dial up internet

Looking at the TV guide in the news paper to see what shows were coming on. I mean like when the regular season ended for that show.

Blockbusters.....

Going outside to play after school

Checking the newspaper for job listings

Going to a friends house unannounced and asking if they could play.

Payphones ! Last I heard NYC was converting them into Wi-Fi hotspots. The idea of a collect call seems to be lost as well.

LAN Parties

I see your calling movie theater with, calling time and temp number.

Toys r us :3

A sense of humor.

Recording songs from the radio onto a tape cassette

I miss movie and video game rental stores. Going to Hollywood Video or Blockbuster as a kid for N64 games was the best

Owning the shit you buy and being able to have it repaired by a local repair person, not the overpriced manufacturer.

Telephoning peoples houses. Arranging to meet them, & being there.

Going to the library to check out the latest video game cheat code book

Microfiche ugh

Pearl Jam🤣🤣🤣

Taking a joke.

Knowing by heart all of your friends and family phone numbers

“We’re sorry but if you’d like to make a call please hang up and dial again if you need help hang up and then tell your operator.”

Land line phones in your home.

Arcades.

1-800-collect

Good video games

Pay phones.

Pontiac cars.

Dot matrix printers

White dog shit.

Packing a big ass camcorder & the tapes to go with it, camera & the film to go with it, walkie-talkies, atlas, physical books, physical & terrible games to play in the car, & a car phone every time you went on a family road trip.

Do you know how much materials we used to get all of that stuff? A lot. Ya know what the digital, online, & smartphone age has brought us? Less stuff. I hated having all that stuff. We didn’t brink all of it for most car trips, but it was still enough to make it a pain in the ass.

You know those stupid “hooked on phonics” sets you had to buy & then convince your kid to play? I have a Pinkfong ABC Phonics app that my 3yr old wants to play. We play it every night before she goes to bed. In fact, sometimes it’s the only way to get her to peacefully agree to go up to her room. That’s where we play it. And it’s amazing. My 3yr old knows dinosaurs better than I do, can subitize up to 5, knows her numbers through 20, & knows how to identify every letter of the English alphabet. That’s been a combination of having easy access to a plethora of physical toys online that we didn’t have access to because online shopping wasn’t much of a thing in the 90s & having amazingly fun learning apps downloadable at the touch of a finger!

Know what’s also awesome? Not having cable! No more god damn constant TV with constant commercials! It’s been AMAZING!

Common sense in government

kids in arcades

Calling cards

Payphones

Pay phones.

Using the newspaper TV guide to figure out when my cartoons were coming on. Turning the tv dial to channel three to play Nintendo.

The yellow pages.

Happiness

Damn, you're not wrong

Walkmans. Haven’t seen one for a loooong time.

I have one but that’s bc I didn’t get a phone until high school. I keep it around bc I have all my music on it. It’s the little grey circular Sony one with those crappy foam headphones 💅💃

Recording a song from the radio to use as your ringtone

A sense of humor and not being easily offended

VCR

Smoking in the office.

Richard Marx on the radio. Guess jeans, Benneton, coca-cola sweatshirts,

Certain types of cars/car brands

Collect-call tv commercials

Asking for “that 90s show”?

WWI survivors

Playing with toys.

Smoking indoors

Pay phones, home phones with cords on them, rotary phones!

Printing directions off mapquest

Smoking sections in restaurants

Barely being able to go anywhere without being offered a job.

Smoking sections

Letting your kids play outside alone

A sense of wonder about the future.

A paper atlas. Going to rent a movie, hoping your favourite movie is still available.

Telephone ☎️ booth

Magic Jesus sure seemed a lot more plausible back then.

"Don't pick up the phone! I'm using the internet!"

Common sense

Not having a phone when you leave the house

Sending your young kids outside to play unsupervised in the neighborhood.

This pains me so much

Having a pager.

renting movies

My lack of existence.

VHS, the Walkman, cassette tapes, denim Skirts and denim jackets in white lol!

the brick

Normalcy

The rat tail.

Beepers

Living on the east coast: Not knowing the scores of West Coast baseball games because the game ended too late for the paper to publish it.

Critical thinking, not believing everything on the internet as fact

Beepers

Manners and Respect

Sanity and general reason. The existence of a social contract. Some semblance of feeling safe. Mystery. Affordable milk and gas. American democracy. I can keep going…

Calling a bar expecting the barman to pass the phone to whoever you want to talk to.

The feeling when you press a VHS tape into the VCR and it hesitates a little before the player grabs it and pulls it inside.

A bottle of soda from a vending machine for 25 cents. I remember being SO STOKED finding a quarter because a 20oz bottle of coke was a huge deal to 7 year old me.

Going to the video store to rent a movie and then remembering to rewind said movie before returning it to avoid a fee.

"Be kind. Please rewind."

Smoking indoors, especially in restaurants.

Answering machines! Get home & check for the blinking light. If no blinky, then say, "nobody loves us." 😁

Payphones

kurt cobain

Good rap music in the charts.

Also: the charts.

2400 baud rate dial-up modem.

Rollerblades.

I just got a new pair! Now I just need my frog skin glasses, bullfrog sunscreen, and my favorite mixed tape and Walkman, then I'm good to go. Maybe golf visor too.

Bullfrog was the SHIT wasn't it? Bought some a while back and it has very much so lost its magic.

And I still wear golf visors because my head gets too hot...but, now I've lost enough hair that I get a head sunburn, haha.

Presidents being fellated in the oval office

Going outside to see if anyone was around to play with.

News broadcasts that the information was actually vetted and could be trusted as 'best effort' for accuracy and not 'first' overall. It was already going downhill even then, but it was still way better than today's "news".

Going to the family encyclopedia to get facts for your homework.

Good cartoon shows. Nickelodeon was lit

Common sense

“You have a collect call from, ‘Mompracticeisoverpickmeup,’ would you like to accept charges?”

“No.”

Buying an Atlas to plan a trip. Sidewalk in neighborhoods. The freaking price of⛽️.

Saturday morning cartoons on regular television.

Common sense and Thicker skin maybe.

Harvey Weinstein producing movies

TV shows and commercials with Dads and Husband's shown in a positive way vs. the bumbling idiot father or clueless husband/boyfriend seen on all media today.

Well to be fair, the 90’s was the era of the dead mom bit.

Staceys mom

Early 90s Bipartisanship in government.

summers that aren't just heatwave after heatwave

Pagers.

Payphones

People without their cellphones recording everything and actually having a good time with each other , kids actually outside enjoying playing at the playground, music where we had no idea the amount of bad stuff that was actually being talked about (90s kids today are still finding out some of the stuff that our favorite singers/rappers were really talking about), Lil Kim not looking like a being from another planet, The Kardashians being nobody super important, kids and teenagers looking, dressing, & actually acting like kids, for the nerds to just be the nerds and not cool, for girls to enjoy things like cheerleading, and Barbie, The Viper Room, Donald Trump just being a real estate mogul, Conrad Hilton and owning Hotel chains or timeshares to mean you were the richest and/or coolest, people going to malls and buying cds, Stripping and entertainment jobs being frowned upon/a secret job that you kept to yourself, people actually visiting the library and hanging out there, Philly/Jersey/New York as well as Georgia/Texas dominating the rap game, playing snake on a tiny cellphone, playing games like Frogger & Minesweeper for fun, having to push a single button three times to send a text, using your parent’s phone to call your sweetie, dial-up internet, & Wrestlers being heroes instead of wrestlers with a huge social media following

Having an “ugly” phase and going through all of it—-braces, glasses, pocket protector, and school uniform included along with the Yahoo! & AOL chat room interactions after school and on the weekends to go with it all

Knowing a phone number from memory.

not having a computer or cell phone

Landlines and discmans.

had to have that anti-skip action

Using an Encyclopedia Britannica

Phonecards

Seeing kids outside playing. Like I'm 33 and in my neighborhood there's no kids outside. I remember growing up you could go outside from 4pm till it got dark and everyone was outside. Now I see people twice my age outside more than I see kids. All my neighbors have kids, I'm the only one without kids and I'm probably the youngest home owner where I live but still none of the kids at together or outside.

Nah, they're all clustered at the closest Pokestop.

Or somewhere in range of their home Wi-Fi.

Smoking indoors.

Phone booths

Video rental stores

Postpone Saturday afternoon plans with friends because you had to install Windows 3.11 and Microsoft Office using 3 dozen floppies in total on your blazing fast 386 only to find out that floppy #22 is corrupt.

Payphones

Home telephone lines/phones

Street directory sliding around the floor space of the passenger side of your car

Landlines

Smoking cigs in public places were a thing in the 90s.

Pay Phones.

calling a friend's landline after fetching their number from a written phonebook, speak to his parents or whoever answered the phone and ask to speak with your friend.

The numeral 1 starting the year.

Land lines.

Jogging bottoms with poppers all the way up the side.

Landlines

A family desktop computer that everyone shared.

Page phones

Returning DVDs

TV Guides. I remember I used to look forward for them to arrive so I could know what would be on TV that month.

Those weird stretchy sticky hands from gumball machines that you’d slap against walls, railings, and mirrors for like 20 minutes and then had to throw them out because they immediately got breaded in dirt.

Ms-dos

Being able to talk about a TV Show (possibly Seinfeld) the day after it aired with other people who were watching the show at the EXACT SAME TIME on their own! Or being able to make fun of or rave about a commercial the next day because it played during that show that everyone was watching at the same time. Back then, broadcast TV was a large part of the American culture. Now we're all in our own little streaming worlds.

Right! Now a days we have “no spoiler” conversations about shows. Even if someone is in ear shot, can’t talk about a particular show past whatever episode anyone hasn’t watched.

House phones

Pagers

Speaking as an expert on something because you have actual training and experience, versus because you just googled it.

Smoking indoors. EVERYWHERE! Malls, restaurants, you name it.

Floppy disc

Floppy disk. The k makes it old.

USENET postings.

Just going out and disappearing for the day, because nobody had any way of contacting you. If you weren't home when someone called, then you might as well have been in another country.

10-10-220…. to make “cheap long distance calls”

Or #1-800-SKYPAGE.

People knowing how to get by five minutes without a cell phone

Dialup modems to get online

Kurt Cobain

Dogs with nuts.

Drinking beer cans anywhere in public.

Unsupervised children playing at all hours.

Selling animals on the street.

Pay phones

Being able to get an abortion

Having a cassette shaped adapter to use my discman in my car.

Mid-Range Jumpers

Music that was bold; and not afraid to say “Fuck the police”, the establishment, the government, or even better, music that wasn’t afraid of being against the grain!! Pretty much all music up until the 2000s was like that… now we have ______ (meh)

Sitting in the middle of the back seat as a kid with your head sticking out between the passengers in the front seat just chatting them up - while the car is still moving.

Having to rely on a land line. All the movies in the 90s rely on land lines. Today we got computers in our pockets. I'd like Carpenter to come back from rocking to make a new wave satire horror flick that takes place in present time. Also throw in some Verhoeven Satires that hasn't gone away and you got an extra edgy hit! Hell shock and awe it up! Roland is a great hack! Never mind I'm lost in 90s late 80s bliss. I guess I'll always have Jack Burton.

Fanny packs

Making a comeback.

Hamburger phones. 🍔

Being able to actually afford things.

My dad worked part time at a church, and my mom was a part time librarian, yet they could afford to have 4 kids and 3 or 4 houses that they would rent out to people.

Meanwhile I on my own probably make 3 times what they made combined back then, and I still can't afford a house

Napster

Pogs, skippits, sockumboppers, tamagachi, jnco jeans, Santa Cruz shirts, portable CD players with 60 second anti skip technology, and running through the sprinklers in the front yard.

If you missed an episode of a TV show, there was a good possibility (at that time) that you may have to wait months, years, or forever to catch it again.

I owned a 'buzzer'. If someone buzzed me, the telephone number appeared on the screen and I would go to the telephone booth to call this person back.
Walkman, double tape deck, 90 minute casettes and all. Maxi singles, picture discs.
Vanilla ice and MC Hammer.
Early 90s, we still had black and white tv and a rotary dial telephone.

Meeting and becoming friends with complete strangers. Now there's an app for that

Smoking areas in Restaurants

Writing scripts for funny answering machine messages.

Or was that just me?

Definitely wasn’t just you

Phone booths.

There was a mystique to things, if you wanted to find something out (assuming no internet), you went to the library, hoped someone knew or you just had to figure it out. There is no mystery anymore, we have google in out pocket PC’s!

Planning your trips in advance with maps. Also collecting updated versions of your maps from the newspapers

Those AOL CD-ROM installers that you would get in the mail.

Signing a 12 month lease and getting one month free

Smoking or non smoking

Applauding after landing.

Kids shows being limited to fox on Saturday mornings

Demos tapes. If you wanted to get out into the music business you HAD to have demo tapes. You had to leave the house to send them. Wasn’t no Souncloud😂

4:3 aspect ratio for television and video. It's so rare that you can almost always use it as a gauge for a video or shows age.

In a flight: Applauding after landing.

Still happens.

Looking on teletext to get holiday offers. So annoying missing the page and waiting for it to come around again

Casio G SHOCK watches

Being able to support a family and buy a house on a normal middle class single household income…..

MTV playing music videos

landline phones

The middle class

Good jokes, masculinity, Hard work

Free-range children. My mom would always tell us to come home when the street lights came on

Buying CDs and browsing the booklet while you listen to your new album

burning CDs with music

AIDS

Rights to Roe v Wade.

Pay phones and pagers.

Walkmans

Printing out directions from MapQuest

1980-1990s was a huge time for culturally appropriating Kokopelli and other southwestern tribal religious symbols/stories for marketing and profit purposes, without crediting the Native Community. This happens a lot less today in media.

Maybe scarce in 1990s, but some still were used: Mercury thermometers.

Depending on where you live. People here still use them today, though it's likely a force of habit since the weather app in your phone gives you much more useful information.

The ones for checking fever were particularly risky. I broke 2 and chasing those mercury beads was fun and frustrating. Currently, all my 6 limbs are okay tho, dunno about my brain, lol

Heh.

Well, medical mercury thermometers are prevalent around here for their accuracy and cheapness. You have to be cautious around them, sure, but they're not extremely dangerous.

Rarely do some pharmacies sell them nowadays. I saw one in a Toronto Rexall. The SDMs I've been to didn't have them, but of course I wasn't actively looking for them at all those SDMs. But I did purchase the one at Rexall, the wider glass, European standard. Hard to miss on accuracy. Not dangerous, but the extra limbs I grew come in handy ;) Yeah, exercising some caution when handling them is a good thing.

Being able to joke about anything without anyone feeling offended, no pre-flight security checks à go-go,

Where I live, handing your ticket to the bus driver to punch.

Good new movies

NetZero dial-up

I remember getting 10 free hours per month.

Heh, I remember times when 10 hours was all you had for a month.

Then, it wasn't much to do online back then except ICQ.

Home telephones hanging on the kitchen wall with long stretchy cords.

Dial up internet

Being bored (not nearly as bad as it sounds)

Reading books

Not having 24/7 distractions.

Smoking everywhere; pubs, planes, cinemas.

Mastery of taping cassettes and, later, burning CDs.

Waiting

Gotta get off the internet because my mom needs to use the phone

This is going in a different direction, but waving. Waving when someone lets you in, waving when you are crossing a parking lot to get into a store or building and someone stops in their car to let you cross. It’s important, do it!

Also, if you or someone else is pulling out of a parking space, snd you are walking, for God’s sake, wait! Let them pull out. Stop thinking that because you are walking, you have the right of way. You don’t stupid!

They do have the right of way. Doesn't mean we have to like it though.

Yes, but only in the angled line area. Waive anyway. You might get a smile in return, which these days is quite wonderful!!!

Wall phones.

If you want a good laugh, ask a kid born in the 2000s to dial a phone number using a rotary telephone. They were on their way out in the early 90s but certainly still around.

Good music

The weather channel.

Not THE Weather Channel, but a 24/7 radar map of the area with the automated voice giving all the weather updates at the time.

Any time serious early-morning storms would roll through, you could catch my dad sitting in the living room, illuminated only by the the green (and red and yellow, depending) of the screen.

Finding porn in the woods. Seriously, who were these people hiding their stash in the woods for kids to find?

Found a kind of a, I dunno, textbook on advanced sex techniques in an abandoned burned car once.

To answer the question why the heck I grew up to be such a perv, LOL.

Looking forward to most Tuesdays, because new music albums you waited months and years for would be finally released. You'd queue up and get your CD. Napster and the internet ruined music. It was so awesome when you had stuff to look forward to on a Tuesday that you waited a long time for. Nowadays everyone needs instant gratification. Hitting up the local record store after your high school day ended to pick up a new album and talk about it on Wed. with your friends was awesome.

Song clip ringtones

We had a short phone number we would call, and a robot voice would tell us the exact time.

100, was it? %Cityname% time - is - %time% - hours - %time% - minutes.

I am somewhere in East Europe. It was 958 for us, and we only have ONE exact time for the entire country, like savages. :D

Calling into radio stations to request the song you want to hear and then waiting for them to play it.

printing directions from mapquest

Calling local radio stations to request songs you wanted to hear!

Printing out mapquest maps for trips.

Recording a song from the radio on your phone as a voicemail sound.

Looking at the newspaper for a TV guide.

Pagers.

I recorded the opening credits for PsiFactor and Wunschpunsch using the standard Windows recorder (the one which required some questionable use of magic to record anything longer than 60 seconds). I proceeded to use parts of these recordings for Windows launch and shutdown music (which was a thing back then). Several years down the road, it was parts of Gethsemane by Nightwish (and a different version of Windows because you changed them every few years back then).

Having a landline. This is why I have 0 issues with younger kids having cell phones. Growing up every house had a house phone. That isn’t the case anymore. And most adults have locks on their phones so a kid would have difficult time being able to call for help in an emergency. (I know you can call 911, but I’m meaning calling your parents or something if you’re at a friends house)

Writing cheatcodes on paper and using them while playing.

We had gaming journals or websites for that

"Have you heard of this thing called the World Wide Web?"

"Yeah it's dumb, it'll never take off"

Corded phones in random locations out in public that would cost one quarter of a dollar (small disc made of metal used as official currency) to use. These telephones cost more if the call recipient was in another state.

A new beastie boys album

Answering machines

Blockbuster Video Stores

Quality music, interracial mingling, disaster movies, being a member of the LGBTQ+ community and not expecting anyone really to care because they saw you for you and not what you are.

Dance clubs! (pop, not country)

Microsoft Encarta

Shopping for new release music cassettes and CDs on Tuesdays.

Also, used CD buying.

Making plans with someone for a week from now - and both showing up without any communication between desired meetup time

Shock jocks on morning radio. Dime a dozen in every market in 1997; try to find one now.

grunge.

Getting those AOL discs in the mail.

911 on your pager

Common sense

Missing the channel you were waiting for on the TV Guide.

They don't even show a scrolling list of shows anymore, do they?

they do…its just hard to find the channel now bcuz iBelieve theyre not 24/7 now, they roll actual commercials instead of taking half the screen like older times

It's so crazy to think that at one point my little kiddo brain was blown when I realized I didn't have to keep flipping around channels dodging commercials just to see what was on.

That and the Weather Channel will always have a Place in this Heart ✊🏿

Oh right, and the moment I discovered what the Return button did on the remote. This boy got real lazy with how many channels he cared to watch (2) in a given evening.

Curly-fry style phone cables

Landlines. They used to be state-owned (and therefore paid by taxes). Then they were privatized, and since then less and less people rely on them, because a mobile phone is so much more convenient.

(Justified for where I live anyway).

Brick weed 😆

All them stems and seeds 🤦🏿‍♂️

Yes sir! I haven’t seen a seed in years!

A walkman and cassettes. Diskman and cd albums

Smoking. And the excitement of not knowing who was calling when the phone rang.

Idc smoking will always be cool

Smoking looks like it has always looked... stupid and disgusting.

I disagree

Let's see...

It stinks. It makes your breath stink. It's dirty. It makes your teeth yellow. It can give you mouth, throat, and lung cancer. It can give the people AROUND you cancer. It promotes hypertension. It diminishes your lung capacity. It's expensive, and it's highly addictive.

So... what are the good points?

Agree to disagree then I guess

Enjoying the sound of your dial up modem, knowing that in a few minutes you could wait another 5 minutes while your emails downloaded into your inbox.

or in the next 5 minutes youd have to get off cuz someone needed the phone

Normal well adjusted people.

Hope for the future

Encyclopaedias

Memorizing phone numbers of your best friends

Classic hip hop albums

Not digital stuff, like not even cassettes, DVD are also rare these days. It was nice to have my own stuff and not renting digital things from streaming sites.

Mini Disk

It was a great tech the day...

Asking for directions! Random people rolling down their window asking and you having to describe the route. …left at the gas station then go a mile until you get to 5th st…….

Intelligent thought

Really baggy t shirts

Kurt Cobain

Big map atlas’s for road trips. Good ol’ Mr. Mcknally

Cars with vents under the steering wheel that would blow cold air on your balls.

Latch key kids?

Saturday morning cartoons. Or maybe that was the 80s. Definitely the 80s but maybe early 90s.

Landline at the house. Mid to late 90s was when cellphones started really getting accessible for everyone.

Junker cars out on the roads. Paint peeling, bumper falling off, dented in sides where someone T-boned them. People don’t drive junkers much anymore. Not sure if it’s because of safety rules or easy car loans.

Being able to see your favorite band live without having to drive to another state.

Homework assignments with no option to just hop on the internet and research the answer. If it wasn’t in the book and your family didn’t know you were out of luck.

A landline

Kindness gone. Gone. Gone.

see through technology

computers, phone, game boys

Making appointments with friends that didn't need to be constantly re-affirmed. I'd say, meet you at the bistro at noon next Tuesday and expect them to be there.

Humour.

Fax machines

Still used extensively in the medical field for some stupid reason.

Oh no, hope that changes soon. :/

A trip to Radio Shack

audio tape copies of albums or rave mix bootlegs

people understanding that attempting to overturn an election is bad.

Filling my SUVs tank up for $30

Home CD recorders

Tamagotchi

Drinking Surge

Phonebooths.

VCR, Kasetts, writing letters to friends because phones didnt have a message option, and if they did those were the expensive ones, having to go to develop photos made with a camera and then having to explain to people that you arent a vampire its just the flash

Blockbuster

Wind-up windows

Pagers

Payphones

Dial up internet - Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​*ding*ding*ding*

Blockbuster

Longer attention spans - and I'm very much including my old self in this too.

To not have to show everyone what your doing in life constantly and living in the moment.

Candy cigarettes

Making plans a week or few days in advance AND sticking to it!

"Lets meet at the mall next Wednesday, inside the doors by JC Penney at 6pm"

Puka shell necklaces

Printing out Map Quest directions. Then trying to read them and drive at the same time. If you're lucky you had a navigator beside you to read you the directions.

leaving the phone off the hook and no one could do anything about it.

corollary: the engaged / busy tone

Phone calls on land lines that lasted more than 30 seconds bc man did it feel important to have someone call for you.

Racing to return a movie at the video store.

A dress code for women at work. I was required to wear a skirt and blazer, heels and stockings to work in the office at an insurance company. I sure don’t miss that.

A large piece of furnature made just to hold your CD's and floppy disks. You knew the party was going to be amazing when you saw the CD rack.

Having to rewind a movie when you finish it

Puffy stickers, small wheels on skateboards, abortion rights.

Good music

calendars from the 1990s

Goths

reading books

Going to blockbuster video

Books full of cheat codes for games ... Trying to memorise them because my mom would not understand the utility of spawning a tank in the middle of Vice City ...

prank calling. "Hello? I'm calling from the refrigerator maintenance company. Is your refrigerator running?"

Pay phones, phone booths. Long distance charges. Phone numbers were public information by default, you had to request an unlisted number. 1-900 charge $4.95 per minute to talk to a psychic or a sex worker. If you wanted to get to the internet you better pray dad doesn’t pick up the handset because otherwise you’re boned.

Printing out directions to a destination on map quest.

Hope

Payphones. some kids had pagers, but then you still needed a payphone if you were out somewhere to call whoever was paging you. those of us who didn't have pagers it was because our parents heard that only drug dealers had pagers.

so I never had a pager.

also, video games used to come with instruction manuals. some were not much, but usually aside from telling you the controls and a list of disclaimers, they would also have some nice art and lore in them. if you were in the backseat on the way back from the mall, you could pop that open and read up.

Yes! There were some really neat game manuals. I remember the "Shadowrun" game had a dope handbook. Sometimes they had a section for cheats or just blank lined paper for note taking. For when you had to write down a door code or safe lock combination you found at the beginning of the game only to have the chance to use it near the end.

When someone calls ,the pc stereos knows first

Minding your own business

Residential landlines

Dial up internet Fax machines Car phones

Magic Eye posters. Them shits were everywhere.

Qualudes

You go to someone’s house and knock on the door… without having contacted them by phone or text prior to going.

Common sense

Kids playing outside until the street lights come on. Its like all the kids are gone!

9AM: Hear a new awesome song on the radio. No idea what that song is.

9PM: Hear the same song in the radio again. Still have no idea what it is.

Tamagochis

Landline phones Pay phones Pagers Print magazines and newspapers CD’s and CD players Cassette tapes and cassette players VHS tapes, VCR’s and video cameras Cameras with film

Being able to use regular words without hurting someone somewhere

Getting a legal abortion in red states.

Good paying jobs for people without medical, law, or stem degrees

People minding their own damn business

children not being shot in school

Competive LSD sales. Example: Oh this guy's got vials for $100, oh this girl has geltabs, this guy has em for 5$ this guy has me for 4$.

Disposable cameras and places to develop film in an hour. Now you have to get your film sent away and wait a week to see what you captured....

Pagers, Yak Bak's, POG's, telephone booths

asl in yahoo chat rooms

Address books

Tamagotchi

Kids as young as 8 riding around on bikes in their neighborhood and communities. I was given $10 and allowed to go order ice cream and roam around between 8 to 12. I don't see that hardly ever (30F)

I'll give you one better. It's something that was normal in the 90s but has gotten so much worst. How many bus stops kids have. I used to have to walk far as hell just for my stop. I got stuck behind a bus the other day and no kidding it stopped so many times it turned a 10min dirve into a 25 min drive. It would stop let two kids out and drive 30ft to the next driveway to let more kids out.

You can’t let a kid walk alone and stand on the corner 2 blocks away these days.

When you go home to watch your favorite cartoons on TV after school.

Blockbuster and pay phones

Renting movies.

Optimism

My childlike sense of wonder and imagination

Rainforests

Trust in your fellow man.

Savage Garden

Pogs and slammers. They were hella cheap, and impulse buys at every gas station checkout.

My brother and I had a ton of them.

[deleted]

Calling your friend and hoping they answer instead of their parent(s).

Dial up…Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding

getting an AOL disc in a tin every week

Floam

Printing out MapQuest Directions

Green and purple ketchup

Really great new music that would give you tingles.

A childhood free of constant technology

Not being a little bitch who gets their feelings hurt all the time.

Being able to afford a home on a single income

Biggie Smalls.

Cordless phones

Pagers

*69

Peace of mind 😳

My youth

Pay phones and “free-range” kids, and very alarmingly- bug splatters on the car windshield

Wallet Chains

Not spending your whole day on a phone.

AOL and dial up internet

Also teenagers wanting to learn how to drive so they could go hang out with their friends.

JNCO jeans

Joe Biden forming a coherent sentence

Girls gone wild ads on TV

Safe schools…

Unexpected company at the house, being excited when the phone rings, planning your day or night around a television event, Blockbuster nights, plastic toys that were "see-through" where you could see the mechanics inside (almost always purple or teal), playing outside all day without anyone knowing where you were, using the internet for innocent little games and simple fun things, discovering new websites, a rich Star Wars extended universe, ordering a large pizza for delivery cost less than $15 with tip, smoking sections in restaurants, paperback video game guides, going to the library for fun, Hardee's fried chicken, actual hope for the future, etc.

Hope for the future

A working government with a surplus.

Calling in to the radio station with a song request

Big Mac being big.

Phone books. Also waiting at home because you're expecting a call.

Pagers/beepers

Good music

Going to the library to figure out some random question or subject you were studying

I know its kinda boring but this surprises me.

Listening to the band Massive Attack and hearing them on the radio. Nowerdays I have never heard them on radio and any kids I know or any kids of friends have no idea who they are. It just supprises me as they are genuinely a incredible band.

And Zero 7, Morcheeba, Groove Armada, Portishead, Ivy, and Hooverphonic!

Flipping through a CD binder when you wanted to listen to your favorite Nirvana song. Now it’s played on the radio 5x a day and vehicles don’t have CD players.

Walkman!

Kids playing outdoors unsupervised

Residential corded phones and payphones

Pagers

Phone books

Colloquial greetings as people passed by

TV repair stores

Analog electronics (alarm clock, tube TV, film camera)

Book stores

Blockbuster

Circuit City

Toys R Us

Compaq computers

I've lost interest in further exercising my memory.

Collecting AOL cds for no reason

Respect for others

Abortions

Respect ..

Peace and quiet. Nowadays it's all school shootings and us vs them in america.

Crystal Clear Pepsi.

Jokes

Normality

EVE...RY.. THING! I miss my 90s.

TV Guide

Abortion

Fireflies

Good music

Porno magazines

Bruh, I was at a place and seen a bathroom ceiling under construction. Reached up there and found a noodie mag about half an inch thick of naked women. Blows my mind every time.

  1. Love Letter
  2. Giving neighbour house phone number as your contact number.

Beepers… I loved my clear beeper

Respect for people?

Kurt Cobain

As a kid it was calling collect from pay phones to let your parents know you'd gotten somewhere safe.

Democrats who to think that pointless foreign wars were bad and that you should question the government on things like lockdowns, wearing masks and taking vaccines.

Society has lost the ability to accept people's choices and opinions.

Renting a movie and then watching it 3x before returning it.

Dying from AIDS

Obviously the easy one is renting new movies and games at blockbuster, and if they were out having to wait to watch the movie you wanted to see

Tobacco products sold in an aisle of the grocery story, and being allowed to smoke in grocery stores, and restaurants.

Waiting for people at the gate in the airport, pagers, party phone lines, you got mail...,

Floppy disks

Both micro and soft

Sending your 10 year old son/daughter too school on their own. Common sense. Offensive jokes (which people find funny regardless of if its about them or not because they know its a joke) Leaving your kids at home alone. Actualy listining to the radio. Lots of games with no save or auto save.

Blockbuster

Comedies

Free AOL cd's

A strongman tearing a phone book in half.

A notional honesty at the core of any statement.

Aol instant messenger

Telling jokes without feeling to be walking in a mine field

PUBS we've lost 10 in like 2 mile radius of were we live sad really, was a great place to play darts and pool leagues, lock in

Monarch Butterflies in Maine

Mosquitoes in windshields.

Long distance telephone commercials

Collect calls to tell your parents where u were at or calling POPCORN for the time

Dial-up local bulletin board systems (BBS's). Think local subreddits isolated from each other (usually) that are accessed by using your landline and modem to connect yo another computer in your city, usually hosted in someone's spare room, home office, bedroom, or basement. Games, message boards, downloads....and a little more. Various software platforms including WWIV and (I forget the others).

It was like a local secret club for insiders and those in the know. Many, many local user meets in my city back in the day led to decades long friendships and more than one teenage romance.

Indoor Mall Culture: Indoor shopping malls were experiencing their peak in the 90s. Even though the 70s/80s featured some of the most iconic structures nationally, the 90s is when it finally reached peak saturation before a steep decline beginning in the 2000s.

The malls had everything for entertainment at the time before the modern internet and mobile device saturation: dining variety, retailer variety and inventory levels, staffing and pay that resulting in better service standards as well as livable (barely) wages and benefits, special events, entertainment (movies, event spaces, game-related businesses like VR and simulators, gimmick rides, and much much more.)

That era is long gone, never to be seen again - just like the dominance and importance of department stores and their catalogs up thru the 1990s.

Encyclopedia Britannica.

I still have the whole goddamned collection of what I imagine is a lot of outdated information and things missing. I remember writing papers for school and having to thumb through all these pages for information about specific things, and if it didn't have it, having to use the card catalog at the library to search for books that might have it.

Common sense.

Common sense

Smoking in cars

Asking anonymous people their A/S/L on chat rooms like ICQ

Permission to make mistakes and be forgiven

Burning music onto CD’s.

Hooking up with a girl and any videos of the event Would never show up on pornhub.

pay-phones everywhere

Music on MTV? I remember watching music videos on it but I also remember tv shows. I think it was a mix with the two. Now it’s JUST tv shows.

Seven digit phone numbers

Tobacco, looks odd these days to see a smoker.

Patience in general

Casette tapes

Pensions

Saying you were born in the 1800’s now you would just sound like a vampire

All Seinfeld plots that require locating a person, barely missing a person, not knowing where they are, etc. Cell phones solve all those issues.

Thinking you were the ultimate knowledge source because you could look something up in an encyclopedia or almanac. The number of times questions went unanswered because there was no information source available. The problem with the internet is there is a plethora of information immediately available and if you search long enough you’ll find an alternative fact which agrees with your biased viewpoint. The Big Lie wouldn’t have gotten much airplay in the 1973 World Almanac.

The only way to find out the actual lyrics was to buy a CD that had them printed in the booklet cover thingy

I was born in the '90s, but I would say one of the most normalized things was the phone book. It was possible to look up peoples' phone numbers, both businesses and residential, in the yellow pages.

We don't have that anymore. Also, payphones.

Manners

Address book. And yellow pages. My mom asked me to look for a new address book. I couldn't find any!

Buying CDs

Jack In The Box antennae balls. Or any antennae balls, really. Nowadays cars have antennas built into the windshield (I think).

Like, interacting with people, like, in person?

Starting to download things at night so it would be ready by morning

Your computer making weird sounds when trying to connect to the internet

Affordable housing.

Having almost 100% control over your persona, identity, and public image.

Unless you were running for public office, people really didn't have a convenient way to look into your recent past to investigate you.

Don't like the way things went in high school? Move away from that local community and restart your life however you want. This could be repeated as many times as you liked or needed until you found a lifestyle and environment that made you happy. Nobody was looking you up on social media to see if everything you've ever done was consistent with the person you are today and if you've ever expressed an opinion they disagree with so they can write you off before you even get a chance to know them in the present day.

You could go on vacation and try out a new fashion style or persona. No one would know you're not a leather daddy biker, but a clean-cut librarian back home.

Payphones

A couple in their twenties buying a home.

Anything from the GM import car brand Geo. They were cars based on ISUZU's, Toyota's and Suzuki's. I'd love me a really clean Tracker or Bubble Metro honestly...

going out to play and coming home when the street lights come on. i would never let my daughter out of my sight let alone leave for the day playing with friends outside.

Beepers

Smoking everywhere

Talking to people face to face

To me it feels like yoyos are sorta disappearing

Smoking in restaurants.

Getting off the phone to use the internet.

Going outside or touching grass in general

All the bees that used to be in that grass. :(

Movie phone

Pay phones

Floppy Discs

So many things you could put here.

I would say my top things would be...Instant information you get from the internet. We had the internet then but it's nothing like it is now. Now the internet is similar to The Great Library of Alexandria. To research something you had to go to your local library or visit the place of your research or call using a land line or phone booth and or go to college and learn about it.

The way you buy and listen to music is very different. You had to buy a CD and play it in a CD player or a walk man or buy a cassette tape and play it in a cassette tape player. If you wanted to have a playlist of your favorite songs you have to make one and it was very time consuming. You could record songs off of MTV, VH1, BET, using a VHS tape this was what most people had at the time to watch movies on or record stuff on. I used to spend hours as a teenager recording songs off of the BET channel.

Pagers were cool back then.

There was a lot of technology in the 90's but it was not accessible to the general public due to availability and price.

Everything was written down on paper. Your school work, office files, etc. Sure some things were stored on computers but it was not the main way of keeping records.

Watching a tv show during its actual timeslot. Then if you missed that episode, having to wait until summer to catch it on the re-runs.

Blockbuster 😭

Walkmen, cassettes, VCRs, pagers, dial up internet, bulky computers, Windows 95, tamagotchis, Baywatch, carrying around an entire phonebook worth of numbers in your head... This is like a catalogue of my childhood.

Modem squeals.

Ashtrays. I showed my kids Crocodile Dundee and they were so confused when he was looking for an ashtray in his hotel room and used his hat. These are teens too, it’s just become an anomaly in their life when people smoke, I don’t think we even know anyone who still does it.

Color negative film🥺

Phone booths.

We're stuck in the matrix now.

Telephone booths

Hanging out at the mall.

White dog poo.

No more bone meal as filler in dog food.

I told my nanny kid how my phone used to be attached to a wall and had a wire on it so you had to stand in one spot and talk. She thought I was lying.

Dialing “popcorn” on rotary phone to hear the correct time.

Common sense

Smoking everywhere, no seat belts or helmet, walkman, audio cassettes, VHS, CRT TV's and monitors, landline telephones (sometimes calling the neighbor of the person you needed), ringing a doorbell and asking if your friend can come out and play, playing outside without supervision...

Drive in movies are quite rare now, most have shutdown.

Smoking! Smoking everywhere!

Kids taking off alone and having to trust they will be okay until they get home for dinner. There is no way I could've hidden my bike accident from my parents in today's tech-age. Imagine a world where a 15 year old can get hit by a car and the guy who stops to help doesn't have a phone but helps you to your feet so you can try to walk to the nearest gas station to call someone. Nowadays, I'd never have even gotten that far bc of the tracking apps. Oops. Lmao.

Having a VHS collection

Being able to be a scantily clad goth/punk girl, and no one dared touch you. That changed in about 2001. That hard image/aggressive image, but just in a crop top, combat trousers and big metal boots: that became mainstream sexualised.

I miss those days, when alternative industrial music style, or cybergoth "girl with the dragon tattoo" type of genius goth, was niche and not viewed as an open ticket for sexual harassment.

Waiting for the movie/show to be on the TV and if you miss it, well fuc*.

Payphones

Blockbuster

Common fucking sense.

drive in movies

Crabs

Talking to people face to face or meeting new people in person, because everyone is on their phones lmao.😏😅

Phone booths!

Smoking sections in public places like restaurants and malls. I’m in my 40s and I remember when I was really little the hospital had a smoking area inside.

Having a landline in your house

Learning phone numbers.....

Kids playing outside by themselves

Payphones

Pagers

Going outside to play

AOL free trial CDs

CD's (compact discs)

Casual homophobia comes to mind. Calling each other f--- was a national pastime to my memory. Pretty rare to hear in most contexts now

1-900 psychic hotlines.

Beepers

Going to Blockbuster to rent a movie

“I just thought of something that I’d like to know more about”

“That’s too bad”

Pay phones

Physical maps (more specifically, if you were in southern California and a few other metro areas, the Thomas Guide).

The TV Guide

Wired home phones

Knowing anybody's phone number from memory.

Womens rights

Breaking a toe by slamming it into the doorframe while running to answer the phone

^my ^pinkie ^toes ^will ^forever ^look ^that ^way

When you could dial a number through the phone and get the newest song through the line :D

Smoking in the house.

Beeper or Pagers

Anyone else use ZipDisks? Or was that just me?

Solicitors calling and asking to speak with the man of the house rather than asking to speak with any parental guardian. I don’t know exactly when this stopped being common, but I recall being asked this often when I answered the phone as a kid in the 90s.

Having to wait 3 days to see pictures you took.

You know, unless you developed your own film.

Smoking sections in a restaurant. I just went out with my mom and sister the other day and walked up to the hostess booth and said 3 for non… and stopped myself. Luckily the hostess was old enough to understand what I was about to say and we had a good laugh about that.

Meeting people at the gate at the airport.
Taking people to the gate and waiting with them until their flight departs.

I remember coming home from the Navy and my family meeting me at the gate.

Privacy

Personal pagers.

Backwards jerseys

Pay phones

As a kid, just showing up at someone’s house unannounced and asking if their child can come out and play

Going to the mall on Friday night

Time off to vote 😉

Being bored😕

Games without microtransactions

Drum and bass

In mexico we had a phone number (030) to get the hour.

Walkman, pager, disc changer, cassete tapes, nokia 5110

Calling someone on the phone without first asking them (by text) if they are free.

Everybody not knowing news instantly.

Tape cassettes

Planning your entertainment by looking in the TV guide. Arranging to meet people at specific landmarks at specific times. Renting videos and feeling like that was almost as good as going to the movies.

Atleast here in finland cash

compassion

This whole thread has been a wonderful trip down memory lane. I feel for the youth today and get why anxiety is so high... There just wasn't the worry back then bc no social media. My hats off to you young people. Take a page ...

Free speech

Printed maps and actual books of maps.

Beepers

Hitchhiking

Affordable homes

MTv

Toys coming in thick styrofoam packaging

Wide ass TVs and computers, the ones that looked like minecraft blocks

Memorizing phone numbers. I still remember the phone numbers of my friends and family back then. I still have to check my phone to make sure I’ve got my partner’s number right now. Lol

Hope

Using free time to imagine things. Now teenagers use there free time to use smartphone.

Smoking sections in a restaurant

Dial up internet

Actually knowing peoples’ phone numbers by heart.

6 stacker cd player in my car with a tape deck.

Children playing outside People not being easily offended by every little thing Common sense The ability to make a joke/ not panic that someone will take offence at you laughing at a joke

People being able to laugh at themselves.

USA Up! All night and Captain USA. The good ol days.

I’d say things that require AA batteries. Everything electrical seemed to always take AA batteries but now almost everything electrical can just be plugged in and charged.

VHS

Be kind, rewind

Looking through the yellow pages/phone book

Blockbuster

Beating children

In the Dutch city I used to live, we had skipping ropes tied to the doorlock hanging outside of the mailboxen in our front doors. As kids we could always come and go in the houses of our neighbours. No chance that’s happening nowadays…

The little cards in the back of the book in the pocket that you had to sign out and sign back in. 😌

Not knowing the answer for something simple. I can’t believe I lived in an era where if I didn’t know something, I couldn’t just look it up immediately.

memorizing phone numbers 🫣

Mapquest before every trip

Hardwired phones

VCRs

Normal people

Common sense and Kindness

Going into school without having to be buzzed in, from a worker inside

Not caring what a stranger half way around the world thought of you.

Love

Crystal Pepsi or clear cola

Blockbuster .

I fucking miss blockbuster. Every Friday night I'd be up there loading up. It was amazing

[deleted]

Right?? A traumatic time for me when the local blockbuster went under. I live in a small town. People still call the building "the old blockbuster"

Not asking people "where are you?" when you called them on the phone.

Oh, also, calling people on the phone.

Kids with fathers

Rollerblading

Retirement, buying a home, not living pay check to pay check cries in poor

gay jokes (kinda)

Baggy pants

Going to blockbuster to rent some movies for the weekend. Making sure to rewind the tape. And fighting with your sibling over who gets to put it in the drop off slot

Affordable, nice housing.

The R word

TV snow

The "Vertical Hold" and "Horizontal Hold' knobs on a TV.

Common sense

Landlines... unless your me of course.

Dial-up internet. Still listen to this sometimes for the nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

For me it's the start up tune that older consoles had. Not sure if the new ones do that any more.

Stacking newspaper coupons for exchange with an atari, pots and meydan-laruosse ansyclopedias.

People in their 30s with a house and 2 cars

Smoking.

you know non smokers? I'm the only person that I know who never smokes.

Juice came and a giant tin can. You would have to puncture one hole to pour, then one hole to vent. Then you would have to use aluminum foil or wax paper on the top so that way it wouldn’t pick up the smells of your refrigerator

Malls

If nobody said it yet, Jinco Jean's and wearing my dog's collar...and overly long chain wallets.

hitchhiking

Nokia and flip phones

You didn't hear Nokia made a comeback. If I recall their focusing on the low to mid end of the market.

I miss breaking in the streets and carrying 30lb boombox on my shoulders. Lol

Yellow pages/ phone books

Walkmans

Dying of AIDS. Getting HIV used to almost be a death sentence. Now it's like every other chronic disease.

No safety laws

No security at airports

Shareware games

Sadly shovelware games are alive and kicking.

You can find simple games by looking up past game dev events and downloading what people make. Not sure if it counts as "shareware" though.

In the early 1990s, people totally disabled and dying from AIDS. With the new treatments, that's uncommon now, at least in the USA.

Gameboys

A good rock band.

Payphones

phone booths and collect calls

Caset tapes, Walkmans, Phone books, Landlines, guys wearing short shorts, VHS tapes, Disney FastPlay, Good Cartoons

I definitely feel there's been a change in kids TV shows from child friendly family viewing to just child aimed programming. I wonder if it's the number of parents putting their kids in front of screens as opposed to doing activities together.

No it's due to the amount of parents who are complaining about them being "too violent" i.e. Tom and Jerry and Loony Tunes

Beepers and pay phones

Saturday Morning Cartoons.

Pins everywhere and for everything

My brother had a pin collection but they kept falling off cloths.

Cigarettes in restaurants

Lighting bugs/fireflies

Privacy

Respect

Respect

Credit card slide machines with paper slips

Carbon paper gone. That's a good thing.

Bulletin Board Systems.

Leafs getting out of Round 1.

MP3 Players

Knowing the phone numbers of your family and friends "by heart", as they used to say. And your workplace. Knowing all of your co-workers' extensions. Dozens of numbers.

Because you dialed them so many times.

"SOMEONE GET THE PHONE !!! " bellowed multiple times a day while a phone was ringing and ringing.

"I can't my hands are full!"

"And take a message if it's for me! I can't come to the phone right now!"

"But it's her turn, I did it last time!"

"You get it, if it's [name] tell them I'm not home!"

"If you people don't start answering that damn ringing phone I'm going to jerk it out of the wall!"

All of the yelling at people in other rooms about the ringing phone ...

Paper TV guides

I used to be so excited whenever the TV guide came in the weekly newspaper because I could look up what time my favorite shows were airing and what episode was airing that week.

Those cool informercials aimed at kids but you had to be 18 or older to call and order.

"Please be kind, Rewind."

Calling your friends mom to see if your friend was home

Being straight

Yugoslavians

Flying domestic without security checks and flying on non name specific tickets.

In 1999 i was flying and it was less than 10 minutes from steping into the airport until we where pushing away from the gate. In these 10 minutes i had bought tickets for me and my friends as well.

When you where under like 24 SAS allowed you to buy hitch hiking tickets thay where very cheap but you could only use empty seats after everyone else had boarded, these where the tickets we got. The plane we got on had just finished boarding the regular passengers as we arrived,our baggage we just threw in the bagage chute as we walked out to the plane. The aircraft started moving before i was seated and the cockpit door was open so you could see what the pilits where doing

Getting home and checking your caller ID for missed calls and then looking at your answering machine to see if it is blinking for new messages.

Also having to share one house line meant having to get off of the phone when someone else needed to use it to make a call, and when using the internet if someone called in it would knock you offline. This especially sucked since without specialized software, downloads would not resume and would start at the beginning, and it took around 20 mins to download 1 song, and overnight to download a highly compressed divx. So basically you could start a divx download the night before, wake up the next day and be at 97% done, and then someone calls and completely resets your download.

Packing up your desktop, monitor, mouse, keyboard, and about 100ft of ethernet cable so you could play Starcraft or Quake 3 Arena with your friends.

cassette tapes and human interaction....

Don’t know how to get to a place, then buy a book with maps of that place, still not knowing and have to stop people and ask for directions

Writing phone numbers on your wrist and trying to remember not to wash them off before you could copy them down.

Smoking sections

Physical manuals for consumer operating systems. Giant catalogs for Macy’s, JCPenney, etc. (Maybe those are still a thing?)

Ash trays on the back doors of the car

A Bulls win?

Cost of gasoline - $1 to 1.25ish.

Actually sitting through commercials. At the time, it was annoying but good for bathroom breaks, snacks, etc. For everyone on this - I found that watching commercials from the 90’s is insanely relaxing and nostalgic! I highly recommend searching on YouTube for commercials for when you were 10-14 years old, it will instantly transport you to a simpler time - there’s some excellent channels on YouTube for this.

Smoking sections in restaurants

Rampant homophobia that was so normalized and ubiquitous that people didn't even seem to realize they were being hateful.

Yeah pretty much

Not worrying about getting shot at school.

Columbine intensifies

Talking to the person next to you at the Bar.

This is still a thing.

your parents footing the full bill for college

Human being resilience / not being a lil bitch

racis- oh wait. never mind

Fathers in homes

Black fathers

Pubic hair.

Restaurant menus with no gluten-free options.

Also I wonder what people with nut allergies did, just not go out?

There were far fewer people with peanut/nut allergies 30 years ago. Theories vary as to why, but likely young exposure to allergens was more prevalent, so immune systems did not over react as much.

That's a load of rubbish

Tell that to the Mayo Clinic:

https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-q-and-a-number-of-children-with-peanut-allergies-has-increased-significantly/

Common sense

No, it's just that news is a 24 hour cycle now and Florida sunshine laws kill time with no consequences to the outlets telling them.

Talking in person, eye contact.

Knowing people’s address and phone number.

Dating someone for a while to find out if you’re compatible.

Listening to an entire album without skipping. Buying an album. Knowing what an album is.

Speaking as an autistic guy, expecting eye contact is problematic.

I know that's a small thing to focus on, but my point is that being unwilling to engage in eye contact doesn't mean someone's being rude, and I'm glad that that idea is dying.

And it happens less and less now, i’m not attacking your austism. Just threw out a few things i’ve noticed.

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Asking for accommodation for a disability isn't "inherently rude."

It's not doing any real harm to you, it's just bucking a tradition that started in a time when neurodiversity wasn't understood.

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Everybody got fat

Accountability and responsibility from individuals.

How old are you? That's never happened in my lifetime and I'm in my late 30's

Smoking, I have never in my life seen a young person smoke. Not to say it’s doesn’t happen, but from the stories of my mom, it’s definitely not nearly as commen.

They just Juul instead.

Vaping is all the rage now

Not as much this but I grew up in a Big Tobacco area in the 90's and I had a lot of friends whose parents were either loyal Philip Morris customers or employees. Every year when I was in elementary school, probably through like 2000, there was at least one kid in my class who came to school on the first day with a Marlboro backpack or lunch bag. Several had Marlboro jackets.

Smoking Cigarettes is less common for sure but vaping is very common.

Those anti smoking ads that came on all the time around the 2000s-2010's were very effective on me, haven't once ever touched a cigarette.

you must be living under a rock

No for real, I still see people hitting cartons hard.

I have never in my life seen a young person smoke.

LOL. I see it all the time. Your personal anecdote is meaningless.

EDIT: LOL at all the downvotes without one response as to why. hahahaha I take these downvotes with great pride.

Personal anecdotes are, in fact, meaningless. And I, in fact, see kids smoking all the time near me. That's why anecdotes are meaningless. They are only a fraction of a snapshot of one persons experience. You cannot assume your experience is the same everywhere. That would be absolutely ridiculous.

LOL

The main cast of a Tv show being white and straight.

To be fair HIMYM was from 05-13.

Fair, I was thinking of Friends.

Let’s be real.

It’s the same thing.

Who the fuck cares? I have no idea why this matters just watch the damn show or go cry about it

I never said it was a bad thing. I stated a fact in response to the question posted. You appear emotionally invested.

Ok then, you should of specified, people are obviously going to assume that it is negative, because look at the other comments, why wouldn’t they?

Oh no! Other people exist!

Cocaine

you dont hang around the right people then

thank god they dont

Yeah, because getting old sucks. In my 20s, I could get an 8-ball or pretty much anything else I wanted with 1 phone call. Now most of those people have either quit or are in jail. I can't just go to a club and ask where the drugs are being sold without being labeled a narc. Talking to random college students looks even worse. How the hell do you make friends with drug dealers in your 40s?

Have your people call my people

Jokes.... you could actually tell them, back then, without people getting offended. Hell, some jokes were intentionally offensive.

No, people still got offended, but they were forced to move on and deal with it.

These days because of social media, everyone has become very entitled in the way they think something as subjective as humor should be. If they don’t like that joke, no one likes it, and if people do like it, those people are wrong and evil.

I swear social media was probably the worst best thing to ever happen to our society on a technological level in the last two decades.

Comedians have always had to answer for the content of their comedy. Most modern comedians are on some victim complex shit. George Carlin actually got arrested for telling his swear words joke.

Now every comedian claims they're being "cancelled" and then proceed to rake in the $$$.

George Carlin raked in money too so I guess it was all ok that shitheads like you wanted him silenced

Fucking embarrassing that you like Carlin & think he was anything but left

Chappelle's left and the far left hate him. Anyone that thinks Carlin would be siding with sjws over Chappelle has brain worms

Why? Because he's black & likes weed? You're out of your element fartbucket

You still can. Only difference now is the people complaining can actually be heard.

You make a good point. Even minority positions can get a lot of exposure in today's world of electronic media.... especially if there are inflection people who agree with the position.

5% of the population could strongly hold a position and make it seem like a majority position today.

Sort of. In talking specifically black people have always had issues with white people using the n word. In the past that fact mean little to nothing. In the present or complaints are heard instead of being swept under the rug. Partially because someone can post video of a business owner saying it and have a protest at his store in minutes to shut his business down.

I’m black and I’ve never had an issue with white people saying it unless they were actually being malicious about it. And by that I mean, actually referring to my people as a group with the term.

As a whole, black people don't go for that. Generally black people have one white person we don't care. Culturally I'm 76% sure emenim would get a pass. But just because you don't care doesn't mean the rest of us don't. I don't care when white people wanna touch my hair. The bulk of black people will break their wrist for trying.

I’m not to argue on behalf of all of us like you just did, cause I ain’t all of us and it’s impossible for me to know the what every other black person believes is and isn’t okay, but I can say that, regionally and generationally, that has not been the case in my 30+ years of experience. I’m not sure your take is as accurate as you believe it to be.

Jokes back then: literally just some horrifically racist statement with little to no punchline

That’s a vast oversimplification of those jokes. I know humor is subjective but statements like these lack nuance.

That is western.Go in Balkan subs for 5 minutes.

Link?

r/balkans_irl r/askbalkans r/2balkans4you ~rip:(~ and many more on reddit

Ahhhh I too really miss for the days when I didn’t have to suffer the consequences of my actions

You still can

Not when your around me! I’ll even get mad at jokes that hint at the possibility of race

Try joking about pegging your boyfriend in the 90's. Your show would instantly be canceled

Dave Chappelle would like a word.

Conservatives with integrity, respect for time-honored and time-honed procedural norms, and a reverence for the efficient and fair functioning of pluralist democracy.

Conservatives worshipped the ground Rush Limbaugh walked on. This shit isn't new. Now it's more widely known.

Conservatives haven't really ever had integrity, now they're just more free to bend and break the rules.

God wouldn’t it be nice to not have to share this country with christofascist degenerate scum.

Your country would self implode without “Christo fascist” scum haha, its happening right now

You are right, anyways, Tennessee lawmakers whats your opinion on the age of consent

Suuuurreee it would champ sure it would. It’s imploding BECAUSE of their existence and their inbred stupidity. With them out of the way we could actually fix what’s left of this pathetic country and make meaningful changes. Changes such as paid family leave, universal healthcare, mandatory paid vacations, executive pay caps, climate change mitigation and a plethora of other desperately needed changes.

We made this country, you’re the one that should leave

Bwahahahahahahaha you didn’t make shit, a small portion of christofascist extremist fled England because they couldn’t control the lives of everyone around them and just like you modern christofascists they cried about be “oppressed”. Then once you were here the poor indigenous peoples took potty on them against their better judgement and like all good deeds they paid a HUGE price for their generosity. Nothing would please me more than to leave this country but if we don’t fight you here and now we’ll just be stuck fighting you later with a far more terrible outcome. Reevaluate your pathetic life choices and accept that you’re a terrible person, then and ONLY then can you actually change for the better.

Which anti depressants and medications are you on? How many disorders?

Because I’m a healthy person I don’t stigmatized people with mental health issues the way you’re ham-handedly attempting to do. Not that it matters but I’m not on ANY psychotropic drugs, again not that being on any is a bad thing. I find it extremely telling how much of a degenerate scumbag you are for implying that someone must be on antidepressants just because they’re disgusted by your wildly ignorant beliefs.

I implore you to seek help for your abhorrent ideals.

With how derangedly far-left you are I can guarantee you are medicated for anxiety/depression/other mental illnesses. The correlation is too high here. It takes a mental condition to be as fucked in the head and hateful as you are

Lol whatever you’ve gotta tell yourself to protect your pathetic christofascist bubble there champ. Have fun at your next book burning or the next meeting on how to harassing the lgbt+ community. I would still like to believe you’re capable of being better than what you currently are. If you seek professional help you can overcome your fascist ideology.

I think the people standing by the confederate flag did the opposite of build this country but ok

I’m anti confederates lol. I love this country, that’s why I want garbage like yourself out

If you are anti-confederate then why do your positions align so closely with theirs

What?

This idiot said persecuted Christians were “christofascist scum”.

I said: “we built this country, so if you hate it so much you should leave”

None of this has anything to do with the confederacy lol

I’m saying nearly all confederates seem to be “christofacist scum” and those confederates tend to side with the same ideals as the “christofacist scum”

Ok. Maybe confederates are “christofascist scum”, but the founders of this country weren’t and that’s who OP was talking about and I was calling them out for

The founders of our country only wanted ~one sixth (half of one of the three gov branches) to be directly elected by the people

Also most were Christians who thought that god wanted them to kill natives (aka manifest destiny) and own slaves (self explanatory, and a bit of “white man’s burden”)

Actually🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓 this country (America) was made against totalitarian ideals and laws and people who sided with confederates only helped to further divide the nation 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓

I don’t side with confederates, I actually love my country. Subversive elements like yourself would have joined the confederates

Yeah I’m sure a "subversive element" like my self would travel across the Atlantic to America, find a settlement and not fucking die of what ever disease, I (like everyone else) would be working my ass off in some farm or something for the church or king(queen). If you genuinely call yourself a "christo-fascist" then you would have join the confederates, Jimbo🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓

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Basic human decency.

common sense. nobody knows how to joke or laugh anymore. Everybody is hyper sensitive and is offended by everything nowadays.

Parents in the 90s were literally offended by Pokémon and Nintendo.

Looks like someone forgot the Satanic Panic!

Dungeons and dragons will corrupt your children and turn them into Satanists, the not sensitive era

I honestly don’t know where people are getting the idea that anyone has ever been reasonable in any point of time.

Everybody downvoting is just proving him right

I hate to break it to you, but people have always sucked and clutched their pearls over dumb shit.

It used to be the religious-right who were the “pearl-clutchers”. Hence the name.

Now it’s the woke-left.

Yeah, because right-wing people are super reasonable now? I’m guessing you haven’t heard about the Mr. Potato Head thing or the gingerbread people thing.

Or the whole neo Nazi thing.

I never said that the right were reasonable. Burn your strawmen on some other person.

You said it used to be the right and now it's the left. You very obviously implied it

You kind of made it sound like that the right still aren’t the pearl-clutchers, which absolutely isn’t true.

So many conservatives are offended by LGBTQ+ people just existing on the same planet as them.

God I'm so sick of the hypocritical right that lives in a field of strawman and whines when anyone else has one.

There are so few actual right wing posters in the mainstream comments here that you bored leftists are stuck shadowboxing anyone that questions your group-think. When’s the last time your viewpoints were actually challenged? Don’t you get bored with constant confirmation bias? I’m guessing you’d get torn to pieces (metaphorically speaking) if you ever ventured outside of this echo-chamber that you confuse for actual discourse.

When was the last time you gave a fuck about making a real challenge?

You play in pure lies and idiocy, its not a challenge.

You don't DESERVE credit for just making any wild idea.

Don't you get bored of NOT EVEN TRYING to challenge anyone with any real facts or ideas?

Guess more. God knows you have no clue how to make an argrument or have an idea based on facts.

Guessing is what cons live their life by because they're lazy.

Do you call ANYTHING you've shown here actual discourse?

Yeah, oppressed people just took it on the nose. It was great back then.

Lets ignore the creation of the parental guidance codes because they thought lyrics are too offensive

That seems like common sense to me. The alternatives are parents having to listen to and approve of every song individually, letting their young children listen to anything unsupervised, or not allowing music they don't already know. Those alternatives do not sound better than parental guidance warnings.

And if you got a daughter older then 15, I'ma rape her

Take her on the living room floor, right there in front of you

Then ask you seriously, what you wanna do?

Are you really defending these lyrics as inoffensive or suitable for all ages?

Stop pretending being offended by everything is a new phenomenon and realize this started not with rap music but rock and roll music.

bUt WoNt SoMeOnE tHiNk Of ThE cHiLdReN

When did I say being offended by everything is a new phenomenon? I'm implying that you lack common sense, something you keep proving with your comments.

You literally said everyone is so hypersensitive now implying its a new phenomenon. Keep up

I did not say that. Open your eyes before you open your mouth or you look like an idiot.

common sense. nobody knows how to joke or laugh anymore. Everybody is hyper sensitive and is offended by everything nowadays.

Hmm

Everybody is hyper sensitive and is offended by everything nowadays.

Hmm

Everybody [...] is offended by everything nowadays.

Hmm

Everybody [...] is offended by everything nowadays.

Guess I just misread

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Check the username. You did misread, I suspect it goes along with your lack of common sense.

Oh I guess I got you and your alt confused or maybe you are two separate people with the same generally stupid take

You never answered my question, assume everyone is the same person, and prove you lack common sense repeatedly yet I'm the one with the stupid take...

Do you really think the DMX lyrics I posted are suitable for all ages and are inoffensive? Clearly not or you would have answered instead of create your own fictional reality where you can do no wrong. Swallow your ego, it's just a stranger online, and accept that you said a lot of stupid things today.

Tiles for kitchen counters

That was a gross trend. How many food particles got stuck in that grout?

People who never heard about covid-19

Pay phones

A stable economy.

Affordable housing? Bought a 3br/3ba 2,200 sq ft townhouse for $228k, new construction, on a $58k/yr salary. Seattle, 1997.

Teachers buying homes on their salaries

decent rock music

The F slur

It was originally used for old and crippled people. The idea was they were an unnecessary burden on their family and community, like carrying around a bundle of sticks for no reason.

Honestly it's a good insult, we should take it back.

But also, it was something to call your friends when they were being fucking stupid.

It just rolls off the tongue so smoothly.

Women’s access to reproductive healthcare in the US

Manners

Abortions

The game "smear the queer"

Abortions

Ooooh, edgy

Lol are you going to comment that under every comment saying abortion?

People that aren't offended by EVERYTHING

Pretty sure a ton of people in the 90s we're offended when 2 guys kissed.

They were offended by rock music and people literally just imagining shit and rolling dice.

There were still Republicans in the 90's. I remember Fox news was trying to cancel the Simpsons every other week back in those days.

There were still Republicans in the 90's.

But at least they called it censorhip :D

No, you don't.

Bill O'Reilly used to have an almost weekly culture war segment against The Simpsons.

Is he representative of the entire network? Do you folks REALLY think that Fox was gunna cancel the show that was at least a quarter of the reason they were able to establish themselves as a network? That actually seems reasonable to you? Any and all Fox talking heads you "remember" ranting against the Simpsons (or anything else at the time) were playing into their own carefully crafted onscreen personalities. Gotta make the old folks watching at 8pm mad at SOMETHING. Get it?

Is he representative of the entire network?

Yes, he was their main pundit at the time. Objectively representative of the network.

Do you folks REALLY think that Fox was gunna cancel the show that was at least a quarter of the reason they were able to establish themselves as a network?

Yes. Fox news and Fox entertainment were always at odds and have since split. The right cancelled the Dixie Chicks, they've been on this culture war shit for decades.

Who denied the right's own culture war? I'm fully aware of it. Saw it happen in real time, all the time. My only point was - and it stands - Fox News was never (NEVER) calling for the Simpsons' cancelation.

According to what the modern rights definition of cancelation, Fox news repeatedly tried to cancel Simpsons and so many others

Dude. Don't change the goal posts that way. That's exactly what they accuse us of, all the time. Most words have precise definitions - don't let them change the language to suit their ugly needs.

I didn't move the goalposts at all.

Most words have precise definitions but unfortunately the right uses an extremely fluid definition for "canceled" which can mean anything from simply disagreeing with a right wing idea on social media, to publicly condemning an action, all the way up to actually pulling media or a personality off of a platform. So the goalpost for right wingers on the term "cancel" seems to be wherever is most convenient for their argument.

The right claims Dr. Seuss, Eminem and Dave Chapelle got cancelled. Very laughable.

If the term can be defined as "something or someone being exiled from their industry over vocal public outrage" the only people who really fit that definition are people like Colin Kaeperknick.

The term is mostly meaningless at this point. I mean if you ask most rightists, Trump is cancelled even though he's still a billionaire and front runner for Republicans in 2024.

It's all part of a broader fake victim complex that the right are using to virtue signal. They're trying to paint the left as anti-free-speech because Twitter makes you click an extra time to see COVID misinformation. I mean Trump objectively cancelled the correspondents dinner. Why? Because Michelle Wolfe told the truth about him in joke form.

They night not. But I do.

You remember Fox News trying to have the Simpsons canceled every other week? Please, link a pertinent clip.

Or you could Google 🤷🏾‍♂️ it's right there on your phone. I'm neither Alexa nor your teacher.

You could not have made your self look any more stupid than you just did. Yikes.

Yea I know not doing someone else's research is so stupid. Lemme waste my time looking for proof of something multiple people are aware of.

The burden of research is on the person making the claim, don’t stoop down to his level and give him a source

Yea no way in hell am I gonna Google shit for them especially trying to find a news clip from the 90s. It's out there but it wouldn't be viral so it's buried. I don't have the motivation. I was there I don't have reason to go back.

Yeah, I figured. Your memory is garbage.

Pretty sure you remember too which is why you're reluctant to do some research. No worries.

Easy win, when the conditions are, "I'll claim to remember something, and provide no proof at all that I'm right." You're a champ.

Well one of us has collaboration and the other is stomping his foot saying "no no no you're the snowflakes!" But go off ig.

Did you mean "corroboration"? I'm not stomping my foot. I can't prove a negative. I watched Simpsons religiously every Sunday for years, until around 1999/2000. Fox News wasn't calling for their cancelation during those times. Simple as this: if you remember it differently, show some kind of proof. Not for me, but for the other folks reading the thread.

Lol no one owes you sources bub your attitude is garbage.

It's not about me. The right swings for the fences with bullshit claims all the time, and NEVER sources. Ever. Yet they continue to believe utter bullshit, because it "feels right" to them. I expected someone who didn't seem to have a conservative bent to want to do better, and not put bad information out there for impressionable minds to ingest.

Here's me, giving a shit about how you feel about my attitude.

You are just really far into this argument and it seems really moot. You are more or less just talking to yourself here

Nah, I'm talking to you, Susie.

https://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/23/the_simpsons_parodies_fox_last_night_s_25th_anniversary_jab_was_only_the_latest.html

That...doesn't prove the point the other guy was trying to make.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/doh-murdoch-s-fox-news-in-a-spin-over-the-simpsons-lawsuit-93571.html?amp.

Doesn't say a thing about attempting to have them canceled.

I remember when leftists (Tipper Gore) were fighting against musical lyrics

And I remember rightists screaming to jail young people for murder during the Satanic panic because they played Dungeons and Dragons. 🤷🏻

Pretty sure we just had less of a platform to voice our concerns without fear of repercussions.

Heck, that goes for both sides of the aisle.

Always existed. I remember when Christians protested "The Last Temptation of Christ." Conservative Cancel Culture at its best. Made that obscure movie super relevant and way more popular than it would have been otherwise.

Dignity

Non-politically preachy tv and movies

Art has always been a platform to convey political messages and views. There is also plenty of non-political movies/shows around today.

Art has always been a platform to convey political messages and views.

But there's a difference in a write conveying a his/her political message or a corporation sending the "safe and proper" political views. One is honest, even if you disagree with it while the second leaves a bad taste even if you agree

You’re getting downvoted but you’re right.

Not really. Nearly everything has preachy political crap injected into it unnecessarily now.

Sure art has always been a platform for which political messages have been made. But entertainment and art are not necessarily the same thing. When I go to an art gallery, I’m looking to be challenged. When I’m watching a super hero movie, I want to see super heroes fight bad guys, not fight my political views.

Unfortunately, now political messaging is injected into every aspect of media - even in what should be entirely non-political.

I get that ppl like you probably like whats being said, but take off your bias glasses and recognize how annoying and off-putting it is for those who don’t. Its literally everywhere now because these media companies know the audience doesn’t have many alternatives at the moment, but its going to come back to bite them at some point.

But entertainment and art are not necessarily the same thing

Movies and TV shows are all a form of art.

When I’m watching a super hero movie

I’ve watched a lot of the new superhero movies. Asides from a few ones like Batman, most have had little to no overt political commentary. They’re all full of the typical action without much of anything else so I’m sure you’ll be fine watching them.

political messaging is injected into every aspect of media

As stated before, this isn’t new. Political themes have been apart of media for as long as they’ve been around. Go spend some time analysing film from any other time period, and I’ll guarantee you’ll find political themes present to same degree they are today; just in another way.

even in what should be entirely non-political

Why do you get to decide what is allowed to be political?

I get people like you probably like what’s being said, but take off the bias glasses

I don’t actually like everything that’s being said, I’m just simply realistic. I don’t expect creators to dumb down their work into palatable junk media for me.

“Movies and tv…”

I didn’t dispute this. You’re reaching for straws.

“Super hero” Then you’re not paying attention. And this is just an example I used, they’re not the main culprits.

“Political themes”

And as I’ve stated before, it was never as overt or preachy as it is now.

“Why do you decide”

Well. I’m the consumer. I get to decide. And its not a “decision” I’ve made when this entertainment becomes political. Its a “decision” they’ve made to shove it down my throat.

“I don’t actually like…” Ya. Sure, dude. Credibility lost.

Then you’re not paying attention

I am. The actual political commentary in these movies is quite minimal.

they’re not the main culprits

Out of curiosity, what is?

Well I’m a consumer

Then don’t consume it. That’s the choice you can make as a consumer. If enough of you do, they’ll stop it.

Ya. Sure, dude.

I don’t.

You can try and make assumptions about me to fit your weird preconceptions but it doesn’t change anything.

Credibility lost

gasp not my credibility with u/deltavictory

I disagree. Art is a method of expressing personal creativity, an expression of the artists inner truth. Sure that could manifest in a politically salient way but I think op is referring to the forced insertion of ideology intended to shape the thought of whoever receives that “art”. That’s not art it’s propaganda. The same is true of “art” that holds itself back so as not to be offensive in the name of political correctness. Again, that’s not “art” that’s a business model

You’re correct on my opinion. Thanks for putting much more eloquently than I could have.

Well there’s “plenty”, but that’s only because they’ve existed for decades prior. The amount of non-political movies/shows that are put out vs those that are is a very small minority. I knows it’s anecdotal, but I watch something like 100+ different shows throughout the year, and I haven’t managed to stumble across one that doesn’t at least have one or two episodes preaching some kind of political viewpoint, often without any kind of nuance.

Edit: I don’t know why this is downvoted. It’s true for practically every show that’s come out in the last 10 years, and probably half of all movies that have been made.

You’re being downvoted because its reddit and some ppl can’t stand truth. You’re correct though.

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You missed the point. Put down your bias for a second and think critically.

I misread my bad

Reasonable conservatives

And reasonable liberals.

Sincerely, someone who strongly dislikes both radical cons and radical libs.

Imagine believing liberals are radical. I too think having salt on your food makes it too spicy

I never said that liberals are radicals. I said that I dislike radical liberals. I guess I know which camp you fall into though.

Imagine thinking liberals can be radical

Joe Biden... so crazy and radical. Lol

Reasonable democrats

Very true.

a sense of humor

People who didn't get their feelings hurt too easy.

I totally disagree lol we just didn’t have social media.

Ok. I can accept that. I guess I just didn't go out of My way to find someone.

Stop lying. Schools banned Simpsons T-shirts because Bart was such an “offensive” character.

That's not hurt feelings. That's someone being angry. There never has been a short of supply of that.

  • remembering not being able to watch certain shows because they had a gay character cameo in one episode * yea nobody was ever offended in the 90s!

And we only recently got gay marriage lmao 🤣

Let's see if we keep it 😒😒 Republicans seem dead set on taking us back to the 60s.

Mhm. And they still say were the sensitive ones. I've never understood it either.

What with them complaining about comedy in the comments, they seem to forget that jokes are usually funny. "Tran bad" "gay sex gross ewww" and "41 haha tr00ns amirite?" Aren't exactly groundbreaking.

LGBTQ humour is nice. Hell, i love being poked fun at. It's the difference between laughing with me and at me.

Like the gay army bomb that has a 41% chance of prematurely detonating. Downright had me chuckle, but the tone behind it was one of mockery instead of unity.

Son: Dad, what does "gay" mean?

Dad: It means "Happy"

Son: Are you gay, Dad?

Dad: No, I have a wife

Yea it's usually something hella offensive like "gays cause AIDS with their immortality lol!" And in just like no some guy ate the wrong monkey brain and a ton of people died. Tf? Then it's "it's just a joke it's not that serious!"

But if I say rush Limbaugh looked like a frog with laryngitis then I'm a horrible person 🤷🏾‍♂️ I don't get it.

...Or really make a joke about anybody other than women and queer people (for example; cis men or the toxicity of straight culture of hating your spouse) anf you'll get a novel written about the left not being for equality.

And the jokes aren't truly offensive. I don't like misandry, and pay attention to if its a negative generalization or a convenience one. Like a video on a guy doing something crazy on r/justguysbeingdudes and someone going "lol men really got no chill".

Versus "god damn, men have imbeciles from the beginning of human history. Just the trash taking itself out"

They realize the impact and distastefulness of what they say. They don't view whoever they are targeting as equals.

Similar to the men fretting at doing "women's work". It is seen as lower, and as men are perceived to be higher, doing low status tasks are an insult.

Oh yea the only jokes you can make about cis men are gay jokes or woman jokes. "oh no did I hurt your feelings. Lemme get a tissue from your purse ya big f**" anything along the line of "men really convinced themselves not crying about their dead mom is a positive thing." And suddenly you're an intolerant leftist extremist who wants to destroy manhood in America. I mean I do but not the way they're thinking.

I still can't figure out why that one took so long. smh

Eating your necklace (UK)

Do you mean candy necklaces or were Brits chewing on metal?

Candy necklaces 😂 Although depending on where you are in the UK, locals probably eat metal

Respectable Republicans.

Ronald Reagan was the 80s. Newt Gingrich came to political prominence in the 90s. You might wanna rethink this lol. The American Conservative party began its downfall a long time ago.

Access to comprehensive healthcare for American women.

Casual homophobia

People with politically central opinions. Now everyone is far right or far left.

You just never hear about centrists or apolitical people. "Mostly reasonable man thinks Roe V Wade being overturned is a multifaceted discussion, and sees both sides of the argument" doesn't really get the headlines as well as "rioters burn down 14 churches in 3 hours"

Plus we (because I consider myself politically central left leaning) don’t shout as loud. I dunno I didn’t expect all these downvotes, I just find people who share my views hard to come by!

But objectively it's wrong to take away human rights though, so people who take a "centrist" viewpoint on Roe are actually incredibly far right.

On one end, you see human rights stripped away, on the other end, they see people gaining the right to murder babies out of convenience, it's all a matter of personal opinion. Honestly all that I see is the layer of duct tape that was Roe and the Democratic party is only bitching an moaning about it rather than doing what will make abortion a federal right, because they might get term limits.

Jus cause it’s you’re opinion doesn’t mean anything. A woman’s right to bodily autonomy and consent outweighs your ‘opinion’ on what abortion is.

Roe v Wade is not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of human rights.

Jesus christ this shit again.

The only difference between either sides argument is when you think human life starts.

The left thinks its not a life, so the fetus has no rights, therefore the mothers rights over rule it.

The right thinks of itas a human life, so the fetus has rights, and abortion would be considered murder to them.

It's not hard to see why either side believes what they believe. Stop pretending either side is purely good or evil.

I agree that women should have the right to bodily autonomy, I just think the roe v Wade ruling was putting a piece of duct tape over a gaping hole. It was made based off of a very lose interpretation of the constitution. Once it was repealed, the constitution no longer protected it therefore can be left up to states. The only way to make it a federally mandated right is to make it an amendment which would require a constitutional convention in which the people will vote for the amendment. If such a thing we're to come to fruition which I hope, it would likely also add term limits, which is why the Democratic won't even propose that. There are enough people who are pro abortion in the US to make an amendment like that happen, unfortunately it won't because, our government cares more about staying in office than the rights of the people.

This is the stupidest thing I've seen all day

thanks for this incredibly compelling comment

Jus cause it’s you’re opinion doesn’t mean anything. A baby's right to bodily autonomy and consent outweighs your ‘opinion’ on what abortion is.

A “baby’s” consent and bodily autonomy does not extend to imposing itself on a unwilling womens body.

And human rights are currently up for opinion and discussion. You’re “opinion” doesn’t mean anything either if enough people don’t acknowledge it. Human rights are “made up”

RvW isn't about abortion per sey. Its about your right to privacy. The repeal of RvW means HIPAA no longer applies to law enforcment. Now, cops, lawyers, the state doj etc. don't need a warrant to demand your medical records. They dont need ANY reason, and that's WILDLY fucked up.

The only reason it applied to abortion is because that was the context of the suit - a cop got between a woman and her doctor, violated her HIPAA rights, and charged her with murder - and RvW ruled that, regardless of the question of abortion specificaly, aquiring medical records without a warrant is a violation of search & seizure - you know, the 4th Ammendment.

Here’s one example of the world being far more nuanced and complicated than you seem to think.

Lol yes because RBG would have voted to repeal Roe 🤣🤣 sure thing 👍

"Mostly reasonable man thinks Roe V Wade being overturned is a multifaceted discussion, and sees both sides of the argument"

The problem is...that's not really saying anything.

I mean now saying “honestly maybe we shouldn’t violently stab poor people to death” makes people “far left”

Disagree. I would hope that people across all political spectrums would agree that in the vast majority of cases violently stabbing anyone is not OK!

Exaggeration is a thing you know?

Even then if the exact same thing happened but it was a cop who was screaming “stop resisting” while doing the stabbing, then a good chunk of Americans would all of a sudden see this as a nuanced issue where both sides were in the wrong

Except it wouldn’t be a stabbing in America it would be a shooting. I would like to hope you’re right but sadly I still think way too many people would only see one side at fault.

Di…did you just “both-sides” a made up example where it was implied that the homeless man did nothing wrong

My god….like you were supposed to make a counter argument or something….not provide first hand evidence of my claim

Well it depends on whether they really did do something wrong doesn’t it. Being homeless in itself isn’t a crime, if they did something else and for whatever reason gave the officer reason to think his own life was in danger then it may well be nuanced. If the officer was stabbing for the ‘crime of homelessness’ then it’s not nuanced or ‘both sides’. Ngl though I did misunderstand you point I thought you meant Americans seeing things as nuanced was a good thing. Because generally speaking I think people do have a tendency to oversimplify things.

Ok so let me get this straight

Me: saying the homeless shouldn’t be stabbed to death is leftist now

You: no it’s not

Me: it’s an exaggeration but if you put a badge on the person doing the stabbing it all of the sudden becomes nuanced

You: actually cops would shoot the person, but anyways both sides can be wrong in that situation

Now there was no mention of the situation changing, all that changed was a person stabbing the homeless to police stabbing (or as you said shooting) the homeless

There was no change in anything, and you immediately thought that the homeless man could have provoked the police officer and both of them were in the wrong

You proved my point, stfu

Whilst I stand by my original statement that the majority of the time a stabbing (or shooting) is rightly totally unjustified, I actually do think an on-duty cop is more likely to be one of the exceptional situations. It’s a cop’s job to respond to these violent situations and so they are more likely than the average person to a. find themselves in a situation where their life is threatened as well as having a duty to protect the public at large and b. For this reason are more likely than the average person to require a weapon on their person and so are more likely to carry it and need to use it. Obviously police brutality is a real thing there is no denying it, but there are plenty of situations where police shooting a suspect is justified, and that’s why questions should be asked, rather than just assuming that the cop or the suspect, in this case the homeless person, was 100% at fault and that the shooting/stabbing 100% unnecessary. If the cop was off duty then that may well be a different story as presumably they weren’t responding to a call and you would question why they had their weapon on them at the time so they are more likely to be unjustified in the attack. With all that being said it’s rare for cops to carry knives so that would probably be less nuanced than a shooting.

I don’t believe in violently stab poor people to death and I’m far-right . Strawman Lol

Ok so there is this thing called “exaggeration” now I know that is a big word but you got this!

Now everyone is ~~far right~~ normal or far left

Extremists on either end suck, buddy. Extreme leftists and extreme righties are both just as stupid and annoying.

Yeah but nowadays a lot of people will call anyone who doesn't agree with them "far right". Like how the sub OnGuardForThee calls the Canada sub "far right", which is downright silly.

Also true. Like how "Nazi" is now the new token insult for any disagreement lol

Extremists on either end suck, buddy. Extreme leftists and extreme righties are both just as stupid and annoying.

Joe Biden is president. Lol

But did people vote for him because they like him or because they hate Trump…

Well as he won the primary, somebody liked him more than other more progressive candidates.

Ngl I’m not even American so I’m not overly familiar with the others.

Wrong

They’re right. I’m far right, as are all the people I know

They’re sooo wrong now there’s Christian fascism and those who want to see meaningful change for this society like ooohhh I don’t know mandatory paid vacations, universal healthcare, paid family leave etc. but according to the fascists and the ignorant tHaTs bEiNg fAr LeFtiST

You guys throw around fascist and nazi so much it's lost any meaning.

I love how apologists like you have to wait and see people being exterminated before you’ll admit someone is a fascist. There were people like you in 1920s and 1930s Germany. They pretended and defended the views of the nazis saying things like “they can be controlled” and “they’re not a meaningful threat” until they couldn’t be and they were.

Nah, no "apologism" going on here. I'm just from a place that has history spanning more than 250 years which helps me understand that people and politics warp and change from decade to decade, and along with that the actual threats the current state brings to a system.

And I can also tell the difference between greedy/stupid and evil without considering that whomever disagrees with me politically is the next Hitler.

But you do you, I'm sure it will work just fine for you

Yeah well how about this when you’re living in a country that has a political party comprised of a voting base that is openly calling for acts of violence against the least represented groups, that is twisting and blatantly violating the political process to maintain and expand their power, and is armed to the teeth and has managed to co-opt and spread into both the military and law enforcement agencies then you can sit there and tell me how you think they just have differing political views.

Not all political views are equal, not all counter points are valid. If this was the same level of stupid I’ve come to expect from the Republican Party in the 80s, 90, and early 2000s then I would agree that calling them nazis and fascist is overblown but that’s NOT what we’re dealing with anymore. The fact that you either can’t see that or refuse to acknowledge it shows you don’t know enough about the situation to make a valid argument or you are just an apologist.

Yep, "the truth is only how i state it, black and white and only the other side is evil and does all these evil things...or you're a nazi/apologist/stupid etc etc". That tracks.

Had it not been for the inevitable socio-economic after-effects that will come after the US implodes due to the sheer amount of fearmongering and hatemongering all of you pile on each other it might have actually been entertaining.

As it is, here's hoping some of you manage to muster some common sense. Since it's doubtful you could be one of them there really is no point in continuing this.

The fact that you don’t actually debate anything I said but simply reiterated your own flawed position is all the proof I need to know you’re incapable of having a legitimate opinion about the situation. Have fun pretending you know ANYTHING about what is going on in this country.

The right to an abortion

Straight people

I mean.... statistically you are wrong but ok.

Women’s rights to bodily autonomy in the US.

Free Speech

Freedom of speech is not (and never was) freedom of consequence.

*hate speech.

You can still say what you want. You're just more likely to get called out of your being hateful about it.

Hate speech is so derivative though. What one person considers hate speech another doesn’t give a shit about. It’s arguing subjective viewpoint and is problematic to our society.

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Your perception has been acknowledged. I shall now go to jail.

Yea any negative generalization made about an entire group of people meant to dehumanize them is here speech regardless of how someone might feel about it. Was fairly popular in the 90s and early 2000s but now that people are realizing that people who aren't cishet white men aren't less than for not being cishet white men making those comments is less acceptable. You're still free to say what you want, however you now have to answer for it.

No… no it wasn’t. How old are you? Are you over 20? This sounds like something someone younger than 22 would say. Or someone who was raised on the west coast or in the northeast.

I hate this "but everything's subjective" argument. Hate speech has a definition:

Abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

If it fits the definition it's hate speech, if it doesn't then it isn't.

Pretty much everything is subjective though. And the people in this comment section aren’t talking about actual hate speech. They’re talking about people making offensive jokes. You’re allowed to be offended about a joke, but to say that because it offended you or because of the content of it, that it’s hate speech, is wrong. You know who makes the most jokes about my people? My people. They ain’t real though. They jokes. They’re not supposed to be taken seriously. They’re funny cause they fucked up. That’s the point.

But yeah, speech is subjective. Especially jokes and what people call hate speech.

Free speech =/= freedom of consequence

Primary school students born in the 80's.

Being paid a living wage

Calling people gay was an insult. :/

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Why is it an insult to you?

The President being able to get an erection.

... attended to in the Oval Office in the White House.

My parents having sex

Frozen yogurt. Wherefore art thou TCBY?

The ability to get an abortion in most states, if not all of them. ~~Sorry to be a buzzkill,~~ but this shit matters.

HIV Becoming AIDS, and the loss of so many way too soon.

Hope

Voting Rights. Free and fair elections. Court approved redistricting. Women’s right to choose their medical procedures. Assault rifles ban.

Being shocked by school shootings

Being able to define what a woman is

Work ethic

A standard of living

a living wage

https://www.bum.com/

No fucking WAY they still make BUM wear? Thank you so much for showing me this! I will be getting some of this stuff.

Price for everything being cheaper. Getting a house was affordable. Having a big family was a slice of cake. Music was so much better. People were not aware of social norms and you could always have fun or a opinion without hurting someone’s feelings

"disciplining" kids by hitting them

US reproductive rights...

Character

Common sense

Apparently Manners. I get called "Okay Boomer." For saying things like "Thank you.""yes please."" Sir, Madam." etc. :|

If it makes you feel any better, this isn't a new phenomenon. You're just of the right age to be targeted with it now. We've always had a certain number of punkass kids.

I don’t believe you. Nobody has said “okay boomer” in response to you saying “thank you”.

You'd be surprised. :/

Again. I don’t believe you. I say “Thank you” all the time, and nobody has ever reacted that way to me. Perhaps they’re reacting to something else about you. You just want to assume that they’re reacting to your politeness out of a lack of manners on their part because the real reason they’re calling you a “boomer” would hurt your ego were you to admit it.

I say thank you all the time and I've never heard it...so yes I would be very surprised. Lol

Are you lecturing them on that they should say thank you?

It's not that hard of a word to say when someone does something nice for you. I've gotten "yea, okay man." etc. :/

Something tells me you also use the phrase "kids these days dont want to work" or "millenials have no work ethic"

I actually have never used those sayings, I didn't know them until you stated them. ::/

Lol, good lord. Do you live in a cave.

no? You do realize I'M a Millenial / Gen Z / Gen Y on some pages? :|The Gap we have is confusing , so there's misinformation on some of the pages. :/

I don't realize anything, because your experiences seem so odd.

Try being sped and your own mother not teaching you street cred. I've had to learn on my own the "Social Norm." this is why I seem odd. :/

Mm. So true. And the youngs of today are going to be shocked when they mature and find the next generation of youths they raised are just as toxic as they are

Hmm I wonder who raised the current “youngs” 🤔

Guess who raised today’s youth.

Not me. I’d never raise such a generation of rude punks

Okay Boomer

Oww 😣 my feelings

So you can stereotype an entire generation but not the one you belong in?

Yes.

Can you see how the viewpoint lacks perspective and understanding?

I can see the lack of understanding, but not lack of perspective.

Stereotyping other generations without seeing the stereotypes in you’re own seems really hypocritical thus lacking perspective.

Woke, SJW media

Bwahaha...is that's what is happening with boomers now?

Hilarious.

What are you talking about, you punk-living millennial?

Lol, nope.. gen x. But we're all tired of boomers. Lol

We’ll get ready to not get rid of us. We boomers are on the verge of our greatest science project yet: Immortality.

Lol, you're already dying the the boatload.

https://incendar.com/baby_boomer_deathclock.php

Oh you ageist fool. Sweet, ageist fool. You gosh dang nasty person.

Lol, you guys are by far the most toxic generation. You hate all others.

And all hate you.

And that's how you will be remembered.

It's not agism.

Just your generation.

I'm OK with silent. Millennial. Z.

Ever notice how they're not ok with you?

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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Goofy ahh comment

Gimme those kids…the ones…from the basement.

What do you mean by this?

The comment was very goofy

I mean mainly to enquire as to the significance of the "ahh" bit.

Goofy ass comment it means

Oh so it was a typo, no worries. Cheers for explaining.

No no not a typo, I meant to say goofy ahh

That doesn't make sense. Why not as ass if you meant ass?

Because it’s funny

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Pretty sure those still exist

Show me where the "Other" checkbox hurt you

[removed]

Something tells me you struggle with object permanence

The existence of transgender people proves that they do. There are also numerous studies that prove they do, it takes a 5 minute google search to debunk your bigotry. That’s not a good look.

Those still exist, when speaking about sex anyway, they are just incorrect because intersex people exist.

Going to school without fearing a mass shooting. Going out without fearing some asshat with an AR-15 is going to kill you and a bunch of people.

Common sense, reason

Still the majority of people. Just no longer the majority of famous people. I personally blame the Kardashians.

You’d think so, but the kardashians are only popular because there was a group of the population that made them popular.

When I go out on the street it seems like people are reasonable but I know that some of them go home and use Reddit

[deleted]

Like the sweet?

Humor, without anyone crying about being offended.

LOL when was ther ever a time when comedians didn't offend people? I'm 36 that's never happened in my life time! George Carlin was been arrested for his comedy once actually.

He wasn't arrested in the 90s

Comedians have always offended people. What has changed is, those people used to suck it up and move on. Now, they all complain, censor and cancel.

Top comedians won't play college campuses for fear of the backlash & getting canceled.

George Carlin was arrested for obscenity laws. And he fought that vigorously.

The offence is old, the crying is new.

Actually comedians have always faced complaints and cancelations.

The crying is not new. And in fact its almost always been predominantly rightist "family values" types doing the whining.

Nice try though lol

It's different today and you know it. Go watch "Airplane" or "Blazing Saddles" and imagine those hilarious films even being released today, much less having the box office and critical acclaim they had. The complainers are winning today, and that's not good for anyone.

Watch an episode of South Park or Family Guy.

It's not different today. You just have a victim complex.

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Oh no the poor uwu macho man can't look at other greased up macho men as often :c

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The men aren't upvoting my comment they must be gone :(

No they don’t, it just proves that other people disagree with you, and not being able to take that isn’t very "masculine" is it Gerald?

Yall mfs are allergic to the truth. Down voting the truth doesn't make it go away lol

Ok, sounds like somebody can’t admit they are wrong, take your damn allergy meds Simon

Masculinity still exists. It’s just that people decided maybe it isn’t the best when men bottle things up and kill themselves.

Not being covered in tattoos

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Whats wrong with discussing a bundle of sticks?

Good music.

listen to some more

Good music

You have clearly not listened to enough music lol

Hey Adelle slaps!

https://youtu.be/tQ2ANR_vF2E

bug guts coating your windshield

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Sounds more like you’re the triggered one lol what a pathetic little person you must be hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Damn it's almost like we've been pumping toxins into the air for the last few decades while developing super bugs by not taking antibiotics properly.

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Research does suggest traumatic experiences might change your epigenetics in ways that can be inherited.

It doesn’t need to be that complicated though. Kids who are exposed to violence, substance abuse, and instability are more likely to repeat those patterns. It can become a cycle.

Womns rights

Wouldn’t say we had all those in the 90s but at least people in the 90s had the common sense to allow abortion

Abortion rights 💅🏻

Oooh, edgy

Once again, y’all just repeating the same thing with no argument lol

Racism

Bruh why are you all downvoting? Hes just saying tha t there used to be a lot of racism, not that he is racist

Yeah idk why people thought otherwise, I think it’s cause there’s a lot of racist comments here

The ability to make a joke regardless of who you are

Still exists, look at Dave Chappelle, the undeniable GOAT of comedy. He still has the most watched comedy special in the world.

I think the guy means, before, if someone was offended by a joke, they just moved on from it because either they had to, or because they realized, offended or not, a joke was a joke. Chapelle gets a lot of heat these days for telling jokes people in the 90s might have been offended by, but wouldn’t have actively tried to get his work taken down or his shows cancelled like they’ve tried to in recent years.

That is more common now.

JNCO and DC shoes.

Answering: 1994 to the question "what year is it?"

People with strong mindset and emotions who wouldn't get offended by everything

Going to Hollywood Videos on a Saturday night or spending an afternoon perusing through CDs at Tower Records

Good music

I swear, rap nowadays is fucking garbage.

《2015+ Rapper Starterpack》

-mumble rapping

-repeating the same lyrics that's in your verse.

-constantly bringing up your haters (even though you "dont" care about them).

-bringing up anything sexual.

-bringing up your money, and/or how expensive are your accessories and clothes.

-"skirrrrr" "bow!" "brrrrr", Just basically shouting an onomatopoeia.

-saying the same shit you said in another song.

-slow rapping with fast beat.

-rapping off beat or no good rhymes.

Payphones

All-white or all-black sitcoms. Now they are significantly more diverse.

Manners and open mindedness.

I'm sure that'll trigger someone, haha.

Getting excited for the next Netflix disc in the mailbox

Women having no rights- oh wait

To crack offensive jokes and get away with it

Flip phones

Staying out all day and riding your bike home under street lamps from your friends house.

Early 90's boom boxes, young adults used to walk around town with a huge portable stereo sat on their shoulder blasting out disco music.

smoking on planes

The soviet union

I mean, it was on it's way out by then. They gave up their occupied nations in 1989

Slavery

Payphones

Flip phones

A conversation in person lasting longer than 1 minute, non business related. Manners. Respect for others. Patience. Spatial awareness.

Having money

Common sense.

common sense

Sexual Harassment

Still common

Abortion

Having keyholes in cars

Good manners here in England.

dips biscuit in tea and purses lips in mild outrage

VHS.

Logic.

The ability to buy a house, a car with a 9-5 Job.

Common fucking sense.

But hey now we have man children and women children and children.!

Affordable housing

A sense of optimism for what the future may hold

Free AOL trial floppy’s and discs

Common sense.

Respect and morals

Imagination. Competence. Creativity.

These things have been replaced with plagiarism, inaccountability and performative victimhood.

Foreplay. Guys just stick it in expecting u to be wet like they be like "giveth head" and its like "noo head shall be given u skanketh fool" ...than they beat us. And we're still not wet.

Im so sorry! I thought it said 1900's 😭

What was normal in the 1990s?...brown hair...non-existent now....brown hair...probably should dye it..

Democrats and Republicans actually working together for a solution, even if they got it wrong. Or was that the 80s?

Common sense and the ability to have a heated debate with someone and not having to fear for your life afterwards.

Women's right in the US

Karate

More of an 80s thing.

Pay rises

Republican politicians that weren't corrupt and racist

Reasonable expectation of safety at school

[deleted]

Dude had donated billions to disease and is funding ground breaking tech to save our planet (fission, solid state etc)

Correction i meant fusion:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a40167535/mit-sparc-nuclear-fusion/

Solidstate: quantumscape

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No look into fusion, i had a typo. Thanks for mentioning it though

Commonwealth fusion systems

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a40167535/mit-sparc-nuclear-fusion/

I was talking about this recently to my wife. Gates has performed one of the best 180 PR campaigns in recent history. Seeing Gates as the “cute cuddly multibillionaire” just because he touches on some liberal talking points in interviews makes me giggle, quite frankly. Guy was an absolute pariah in the 1990’s when he was taking over the world one computer at a time. Multiple movies were made about his ruthlessness and complete binding and gagging of the free market. Even if he wasn’t a pariah to you on the 1990’s, you certainly didn’t look at him as a “good guy”.

Sex and gender

Child abuse and people saying hitler did nothing wrong

Buying a house on a minimum wage job.

Flu deaths

Phone books

Self reliance.

Unsupervised time for kids and teens.

Having friends with different opinions.

Empathy. Maybe it’s just me, but I remember in the 90’s people seemed to be genuinely interested in getting to know someone knew. Like figuring out who they are what their story was. Now it seems like most people are just into the phones.

The conversations are one way. My wife and I both played this game at our jobs. We ask people just simply how their weekend was on Monday or how their evening was the night before. Then we see who asks us in return after they answer. In my retail job only one person ever asked me back after I asked them first. In her office the same thing, only one asks her how her weekend/evening was. The rest of the time people just talked about themselves until they were exhausted or time to go back to work.

We went to the park the other day with our daughter. This grandma with 2 kids our daughters age (around 4-5) comes to the park too. We’re the only ones there as it’s a small park. The kids start playing together. Almost immediately the grandma whips out her phone and is buried in it while my wife and I are watching our daughter interact. Eventually my wife asks the grandma simple/polite question like “how old are you little ones?” To which she answers but doesn’t ask any question or ask the same thing in return. Instead starts to talk about how she’s their grandma and how many kids and grandkids she had. My wife asks a few more questions to be engaging, but still this woman only continues to talk about herself/her family until she runs out of things to say then gets back on her phone.

Maybe people just got tired of hearing the same stories over and over from different people. Maybe people got tired of the same personality flaws. Maybe people are just that much more cautious, but it also seems like people are just less caring in general.

Using common sense and not get attacked by woke-movement.

Party lines

Does racism count?

Making plans and sticking to them. Cell phones killed stable plan making. Because why stick to a plan if you can text on the way there? With only landlines you had to say when and where you would be otherwise no one could find you.

Americans considering Nazi’s and white supremacists the BAD GUYS.

People of normal income owning houses

Access to abortions in the US

Common sense

If the dogs runnin, and you ain't. There's your sign

Not wanting to be called gay

Move in ready homes under 100k. What a time to be alive

Patriotic Republicans, or at least non-Nazi ones.

Abortions

Not being lgbtqia+

Straight people

People being able to have their own opinions about something without being shouted down, shamed, un-friended... What ever happened to being able to have a polite dialogue with someone that you disagreed with? What happened to being able to present your own point of view instead of just parroting whatever CNN or MTV or "The View" told you was "the correct way to think" about politics, religion, abortion, charity, poverty, race, etc.

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Oh god, it’s such a hard life to give basic recognition and respect to Trans people. However will we survive

Oh no a complex definition of expressing a specific gender is finally being treated as such and people are struggling to articulate that? What a disaster this is worse than climate change.

Respect for adults

Nah. Kids are always shitty; decade doesn’t matter. It’s a part of growing up.

You must havent seen the inside of a public school in a while. Not a dis. I just mean there is not a relativism at play here, respect is objectively dead.

It’s really not. My sister is a middle / high school teacher and we’ve had this conversation so many times. The kids are still shitty, just in different ways. It really is just a product of growing up.

Never had any of that personally. I was raised to respect who respected me.

Pogs, although pawgs now exist and are far better

Rational Republicans

Rational Democrats

Like those that respect the rule of law and election outcomes? That seems to be a partisan issue these days for MAGAts.

The GOP has actually been pretty consistent with their views over the last 40 years, and have only deviated a little (to the left mind you) with certain issues regarding LGBT issue. The Democratic Party on the hand has moved further and further to the left over the last 20 years, and is part of the reason why the two groups don’t get along. It also doesn’t help that our news medias like CNN and Fox have become extremely partisan and are more wrapped up in getting views than reporting stories (due to being a 24 hr news cycle) which causes a lot of tribalistic thinking. Add in social media which was fine up until they started allowing for news stories to easily accessible on the site, and now you have a bunch of fringe groups with extreme ideas.

That is an extreme opinion based position you are taking. Just take gun regulations and destroy your own argument please.

No? There’s literally studies you can look up online.

Or you can just watch old videos of republican and democrat politicians from the 70s and 80s and see how similar and different they are compared to today.

I mean there’s a reason why “classical liberals” are often mislabeled as conservatives these days when 20 years ago they were the biggest critics of republicans.

I appreciate that you dodged my statement entirely because it would show how indefensible your position is. No one wants to do that.

However. Equating the current fascist embrace of the GQP to traditional conservatism is absurd. I have no fucks to give for your incited “studies”.

I ignored it because it had shit to do with my original statement. You might as well of written “yeah, well, dinosaurs existed and some of them don’t believe that”.

If you’re gonna argue against my response, stay on subject. Throwing ahit out about gun control as a “gotcha” isn’t enough to make what I said any less true.

And fine don’t look it up and don’t believe me, I couldn’t give a shit either way. Believe what you want.

It had everything to do with your original statement that Republicans have been consistent for the last 40 years. Republicans also were not run by evangelicals 40 years ago. To you, advancing the definition of liberty is extreme. Liberals think of it as honoring the founding principles of the country. The pursuit of justice and liberty. Granting rights. Not taking them away or restricting them. Ronald Reagan would be a moderate in todays GQP. and you know it.

Which is to say, he’d be like the majority of republicans. And it had fuck all to do with anything, you through it out there with assumptions and I don’t care enough about your hostile ass to endure a six day argument with you.

Yet here you are…

Again. Don’t respond to any of my points. Because you can’t.

Dude, just shut up. You keep wanting to bait me into an argument I have no interest in.

You make statements that you refuse to defend. You draw your own conclusion.

I countered your statement. You have no response but deflection. You lose.

You’ve countered nothing, you’ve made no points, and I’m defending because what’s the point? You’re either a teenager or in your early 20s, so you see the world as black and white, is and them, good and evil, OR you’re so cemented in your beliefs that no matter what I or anyone else were to say you’d still be a raging, finger pointing, assumption making, argumentative asshole.

So why bother? And besides, what is it to me if you believe what I say or not? I dont care, I don’t even know you.

Now you are just lying. You can clearly see above that I provided examples to refute your claims that the GQP has stayed the same and the left has gone radical. None of which you have even attempted to address.

The problem with what you have just stated is that you have provided ZERO defense for your argument. As if just having strong feeling that you are right is sufficient. It is not.

You’ve provided no examples. You just made statements with nothing to back them up. You’re literally doing what you criticize me for.

Now you are just embarrassing yourself.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/

https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/texas-republicans-take-hard-right-turn-guns-who%E2%80%99s-behind-wheel

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/24/texas-gun-laws-uvalde-mass-shootings/amp/

I’m not embarrassing myself, this was the first comment you’ve bothered actually showing any sources too.

Waiting…

Good movie.

Thoughtful response.

Preciate it.

You thought you could get away with the last comment. But just as you will one day have to move out of your mom’s basement, you are wrong.

You really give a shit about internet points don’t you?

OMG you are lame.

https://www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-abortion/

And this is the second. Should have been doing this shit like 8 comments ago.

Dude. Weak. You are the one that CAN’T justify your position.

Dude. Weak. You’re the one who blah blah blah who gives a shit? Is this all you do with your life? Do you not have any friends? It’s pretty sad.

Look who is typing. Days go by and you just can’t stand not having the last word. Lose the argument so start the insults.

Lose the argument so start the insults.

It’s like you never bothered reading your own replies.

It’s like you are unable to defend your position.

Pot, meet kettle.

You are the one that stopped responding to position statements and went to the ad hominems Dufus.

”Ad HoMiNeM”

I swear all of you sound like first year college students lol

Snort laugh. You have a short memory GED boy.

“Haha, that guy has an education and I don’t.” -You

I’m happy that you are proud of your GED. I’m sure your mother in anxious to beget you out of her basement.

“I got into college and feel insecure about people with a higher education than me”. -You

If I graduated from a prestigious University with a BBA why would I feel insecure that my wife has a masters degree?

Consider yourself taunted further.

“I have no life outside of Reddit, let me prove it.” -You

You are one to write.

TLDR. Republicans have become more extreme. Not democrats. You lose again.

There’s nothing to lose, you’re just bitching to bitch at this point.

Sorry your feelings are untenable.

I mean, you’re definitely sorry.

Yawn.

You should get some sleep.

You are pathetic

More like I’m bored.

You can not be a Trump voter and think you honor the republican legacy. He is a disgrace.

I never mentioned Trump and neither did you?

He is the leader of the party. You own that.

Lol no. On both accounts.

If you don’t like that. Stop voting for fascists.

When did I vote for a fascist? Doesn’t really address why you brought up Trump either. You’re kind of all over the place.

Are you a Republican? Yes or no? Or can you even answer THAT since you seem to avoid everything. What is the term. “Fuck your feeling”. Support your position.

“SinCe YoU aVoId EvEryThInG”

Are you you the child? Wtf?

Common sense and hard work.

Beating your wife

No one beats my wife, except me.

Imma give an upvote in the hopes this is a joke

[deleted]

I think this depends on your area, I was taught manners before I was taught subtracting

Good deep thought movies.

Say something without offending someone

You can say most things without offending someone. Most of us just don’t tolerate racist, homophobic and transphobic comments because we respect all of them as equals.

straight people

considering they make up 97% of the population, I’d say your statement is false.

it was a joke lmao. yall really getting heated over some humor.

No ones getting heated, it just makes no sense even as a joke.

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The black people you were slurring cared.

I am 18 years old and did not want to say it ever. I remember a time where people did and I'm an asshat for remembering it? Also when it came to the soft a some wouldnt care, I really do think that the soft a becoming more offensive currently now is a product of its time.

So how can you even reasonably say you're answering the question? You weren't even alive in the 1990s. You don't know what it was like back then.

I saw interviews and around the 2000s it was like that so I assume it was like that before the 2000s

No that's been off limits since my mom was in highschool around the 70s/80s. Only difference is white people wouldn't care. You'd have to say it in public to not get your ass stomped out. And school doesn't count. I'm talking streets with lots of white people and preferably cops who might save you from that ass whipping.

Another normal thing in the 90s was a hot chick being relatively unaware and less egotistical. In towns you could likely find a really attractive woman just working the counter at a store. Now with social media she has 5,000 or 100k followers and recieved hundreds of messages showering praise and attention.

Gun-free schools

Columbine was 1999 so still counts.

No. There were guns in schools. NRA used to do events at schools.

Anal

Nazis being rare.

Straight people

That’s still 90% of people shut up

Straight people

Ik what you said, I can read, that’s why i said that was still 90% of people, can you read?

[removed]

Seems like someone has no good points, not the kind of conversation I should waste my time with.

Humor.

Sex:

°Male

°Female

A thriving economy.

People who are not offended by everything.

Being straight

[deleted]

They weren't even released until the tail end of '98.

Affordable housing.

nano babies

Landline phones.

Good music

Boredom.

Happiness

Undercuts

Cow and Chicken

Automatic seat belts

Floppy dicks

Yep. They have pills fer that now.

You seen the newest Jackass movie?

Years that ended in 9 insert number 1-9 here

Creating a paper form CV and going around companies handing them out, maybe an application form to fill out. Now everything is done online and there are a lot more questions asked.

Smoking in airplanes

A kids party area in McDonald’s. They always seemed to have plastic mushroom seats and a plastic Ronald or Hamburglar. You could book a birthday party in there and other kids thought you were cool, way back when getting a burger was a special treat.

I liked how hokey McDonald’s was back then. The ball pit was to quote the 90’s “the bomb.com”. All the modern McDonalds are very boring aesthetically in comparison but it’s does have so many more improvements tech wise than ever before.

Orgies

Sex, most people just fuck nowadays not have sex

Did anyone find Carmen San Diego? Also, I'm pretty sure all of us 90s kids died of dysentery.

Being a lawyer as feasible and profitable profession.

Giant UFO pants

Do people still use home phones?

Yes? I thought that was still quite common for most.

Maybe it’s just my family then lol

Pagers

CRT TVs and monitors

Pay phones.

Raves, Extasy, CD players, cd’s, TiVo, grunge bands, Napster, cheap concert tickets, personal lockers in airports, heroin chic, The Rachael haircut, dial up internet.

Toys r us

JNCO

Cocaine as medicine

rewinding tapes

Happiness.

Going to the playground alone w/ siblings or friends. No parent in sight whatsoever

I know it went on into the early 00s, but that's what i remember the most

blockbuster video

Renting movies.

Calling collect

Buying CDs

Payphones, pagers, bag cell phones, cassette tapes, answering machines, outdoor play, riding bikes

Playing outside

Going to your friend's house unannounced to play

Pogs and slammers

My sex life

Buying steak to eat. Nobody can afford that now, right?

Old Country Buffet. Flip phones. Original Disney movies and 2D movies. A non-greedy EA, the video game company. So many awesome things gone. I miss the 90s.

Carefree summers (just me?)

Except when you are terrified of Acid rain and Sink holes!

Don’t forget the killer bees!

Balls on a dog

Non existent CD player, portable and not.

Library card catalogs

Wearing a watch.

Fax machines.

Ketchup of different colors

Semi Rational republicans

Scanning barcodes for your Barcode Battler.

Landlines

Home phones

Affordable mid-engine sports cars

Pogs

I was just telling my boys about pogs yesterday

Playing outside

Tape decks in vehicles

Minutes to download a single image off the internet.

People asking on instant messenger: asl (age/sex/location)

Have to use buttons on a phone to type a message, like type the 1 button three times to get to a ‘c’ lol used to stress me out when I was arguing with my then bf and I just wanted a quick angry text lol

T9 was awesome.

Pagers

Junk food vending machines in high schools.
My high school had Surge, Coke, Pepsi, Doritos, Cheetos, Hostess Cakes, powdered donuts..etc.

Pay Phones. Collect calling. Probably been said, but not gonna sift.

Road atlases

Separate caller ID box

pagers/beepers

Burning CDs

Going to a friend's house just to see if they are available to hang out.

House phones

Using Thompsons Map Guide to get around before there was Mapquest.

*Thomas Guide

Haha it’s been a minute since I last used one.

Chicken pox

Beeper

Pagers...

Me experiencing happiness.

Land lines and dial up internet. Gay slurs and the r word as everyday insults. Smoking sections in restaurants.

Creepy crawlers

Not talking about politics.

Rand McNally atlas in the car.

Privacy

Walking down the street without hearing some ignorant motherfucker on speakerphone or blasting their shitty music.

Slap bracelets, jelly roll pens and pogs.

Joining someone to play 3ds, wii u is fine but not 3ds (or dsi)

Watching movies on a VCR

Playing hockey in tennis court

Asbestos in homes. Poor health conditions. Poverty.

​

[Yes I do realize that some of this stuff might be common today.]

Pagers.

My mom bought me one as a graduation present so she could 'keep track of me', even though half the time I never called her back when she paged me.

Surge

Pagers... which also meant actually remembering phone numbers

Pay phones

Pay Phones

Magazines in the bathroom

Opioids

People buying houses in their 20s.

Remembering phone numbers

Pay phones

Wearing oversized pants down at your crotch with massive boxers that went up to your hips

Cassette tapes

Pay phones

Yoyos, Tamagotchi, Furby, Pogs, Pet rocks, Super bouncy balls, Fake temporary tattoos were fads when I grew up in the 90's

Getting excited when your dad gets his first mobile phone, because not only is it the first in the family, it's the first you've ever seen in your life.

Walkman/cassette tapes

Smoking sections in restaurants that were just a different area without being closed off.

Acid rain?

I remember being horrified learning about this as a kid in school and then...

???

The knowledge that it's okay not to be happy, but we were mostly happy then. We just didn't realize it till now.

A living wage

Having fun

Smoking or non smoking option at restaurants

Going to a movie where you could guarantee the only light you'd see was coming from the screen.

DVRs.

Some people's family.

Parent's having no clue where the child was. Also playgrounds where the neighborhood kids gathered to play. Just showing up with nothing but shoes and readiness to throw rocks

Trips to blockbusters!

Getting the floppy out….for the computer 🤣

Pay phones

PSAs on children's programs for what to do when you're home alone (how to answer the phone or the door, especially).

Pay phones

Pay Phones. I miss them.

CD albums where you kept all your music CDs or playstation games

Privacy

Pagers

Malls, land lines, playing outside all day until the street lights coming on. Cell phones were rare!

Parents yelling for you to come inside after playing all day.

'70s kids were smart enough to come in when the street lights came on.

You had all the serial killers 🤣

Back before we all had cell phones hanging out with friends was way different. There was a presence that just doesn't happen any more. No one was in contact with anyone else. You would just be there, present, in the world together.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Acid/LSD

beepers

Landlines

Getting the internet by snail mail on a CD that you then had to download and install using dial-up.

Payphones. Walkmans.

Kids playing outside for hours without a phone.

Common sense.

Buying toilet reading materials. Poop books if you will or shitreture if you're cultured. I always liked knowing that every time I pooped I'd gain some form of knowledge and grew to see taking a dump as a level up in certain bathrooms

Gaucho pants

Going to the video rental store.

Pay phones

Arcades

Roving groups of kids on bikes just having fun.

Feels like happiness any more lol

Ringing your neighbors doorbell to see if “x” can play?

Reading the newspaper

Misogynistic stand up comedy, and it was freaking gold.

Pagers, glow sticks, crank Buffalo losing the S.B.

Phone booths

Going to a party without everyone on their phone or the need to document everything. Or just having a conversation when you can bullshit and people have to check google to verify

The American anti-war movement.

Pogs

optimism

crank calls

Smoking

Cds for eeeverything!

Doing stupid shit without it being on the internet

Collect calls.

The computer room. Slow internet. No way for anyone to instantly get a hold of you. The dollar menu.

Heartwarming Christmas movies

Smoking in places. In the 90’s, I remember being able to smoke in certain grocery stores and flights. Almost all restaurants and bars

Albums that were on a disk and took hours to download

I'm glad no one is saying it lol the good Ole handlebar mustache

Pay phones

Eating Torengos… those are one snack I do miss very much!

Smoking in restaurants. It was still pretty big in the 90's. Especially in casino's up until maybe COVID hit. Then I think they finally banned it? I could be wrong on that one though.

Good extasy

Pay phones

Dial-up

Having a quarter for the pay phone

Pagers.

Payphones

Genuine empathy.

Hypercolor T-shirts

Phone boothes

Roller skating rinks, smoking sections in a restaurant.

Edit: My wife’s virginity.

Mail.

Calling the operator

Good boomboxes. Portable speakers have made a resurgence in recent years and it's not rare to see groups of kids walking around with a bluetooth speaker being annoying to literally everyone around them.

But they're not that good. They're cheap, the sound quality and volume is usually bad and their connection is often dodgy despite being close to the phone they're connected to. If you actually try to find a boombox you'll be surprised that it's not so easy any more, and there's not many options. Back in the day it was assumed most people had one, and even the most basic ones had tons of features. AM FM radio, two tape decks, a CD player, mic input and a decent sound quality and volume. Throwing an impromptu beach party was not at all difficult. There would always be at least one on every school trip.

Pay phones

Hanson…. Lmao

Shake and vac

Yelling 'mom, get off the phone' to get online

Pay Phones Joe Camel

Shopping at Sears and Kmart

Zubaz

having sane people in society

CD's

Celibacy

Driving to the lake with all the kids in the back of the pickup box following the rule of "Stay down until we get out of town"

Portable CD players

Big binders that you put all your CD's in.

Neon colored clothing

Children riding bikes

Cell phone!

Having a portable device to play music only. I miss those devices. Sometimes even think of buying an ipod

I don’t. It’s nice having everything in one (phone, tv, movies, music, games). The other items still exist (standalone MP3 player) but why bother at this point?

I don’t know… I like to bother myself…

PAGERS! I wear one because I’m in medicine, but always get weird looks in supermarkets.

Women’s right to choose.

A good time.

Dial up internet.

Buying newspapers from the dispenser for like 50¢.

Cartoon Network.

People born in 1900

Playing outside with your friends as a kid.

Pagers

Facts.

Twirling the cord of your phone while you talked.

Looking in the classified ads for :

Yard Sales

New pets

stuff for sale

its all FB marketplace now.

Calling a taxi company to schedule a ride.

Those cranks that roll down the windows in cars

Mullets

Ghb

Perhaps the uncontrolled abuse people gave to each other and probably slavery as well

Not communicating with someone for weeks at a time. I dated my husband long distance and we sometimes wouldn’t see each other for 3-4 weeks.

Kinda more 2000's, but paying for ringtones.

i paid for "Anthem pt. 2" by blink-182 to be my ringtone in 2021

Oh gosh, mix tapes where you would jam the titles in on those little cards and draw pictures. Turned into mix CDS I guess a Spotify playlist is similar, but somehow just not the same.

Getting lost and having to pull out a map and figure out where you were in the highway to get back on track.

Madonna. Thank bujeezus.

Selling music on CDs

Good music

Payphones

Whoopins

Seeing large groups of kids out playing

Pay phones… and always having quarters.

Landlines in homes

Common sense.

The amount of money in my wallet.

Blockbusters

Polio

Nokia 3310

Pay phones, home phone, Saturday morning cartoons.

Not answering your phone because you're out, calling your answering machine to check your messages, keeping change in your pocket for the payphone, Jack in the Box being called Monterey Jacks, Drive-In movies, really really long telephone cords so you could walk around, etc. And the important patience, kindness, chivalry, helping random strangers, etc.

Independent thought.

Late 90's, but Gameboy Colors. I've seen new ones unopened sell to collectors for crazy amounts. To think me and two siblings each had one of our own at one point.

Video arcades

People on TV justifying promiscuity by saying, "It's the 90s."

Dial-up internet

Personal voicemail, numeric pagers, payphones, answering machines

Remembering my Mum’s number, any situation I can use someone elses phone and now my Mum would pick up, same with calling her on landline

Dwayne Johnson with hair

Playing trading card games, marbles, pogs, or other such games especially on the playground...

That and kids being excited to go outside and play (as an uncle and friend to those with kids I see this or hear of this everytime)

Meeting at the flag pole

Translucent everything, in a variety of colors

Pay phones

Grunge music, thank God.

Pay phones being a thing

CDs

Playing video games without having to update everything

Aol

Pay phones.

Ninja turtle bed sheets

Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC playing on the radio every 30 minutes. Pokémon cards being traded at recess. PlayStation, Super Nintendo, N64, and Gameboy color ruling our lives. Everyone reading to get a personal pan pizza for book it.

Using "gay" as a general purpose pejorative, probably.

It's definitely for the best that we've moved on from such. Mostly.

Shell suits.

Making a middle class living working a common job.

MY dad worked at a furniture store and owned a home with the money he made.

Same job pays like minimum wage now.

Beta Max/VHS

Pagers instead of cell phones.

Decent behavior.

Phone booths

Kids being out of the house for basically the entire day, and riding bikes as their primary mode of transportation.

pay phones

Happiness?

landline phones

Pay phones

Talking face to face and actually hanging out getting to know each other.

many things

Scruff McGruff

Pagers

Calling parents via collect call and only leaving a quick message so they can pick me up

Payphones

Top hats

That one pokimOn card

Remembering my address so if I ever get lost I can tell the cops where I live

Walkman and diskman

30-foot coiled phone cords

Being able to see my dingus when I look down

Having a list of my friends phone numbers in my wallet.

Roller skating rinks! Those were a blast.

Writing notes to friends to pass in school or letters to friends as adults.

Brick phones.

Knocking on the front door.

Also, answering the door when someone knocks

Gateway computers

VCRs and Walkmans

Crack

Collect Calls

“Dial down the center!”

Credit card imprinters. A lot of credit cards don't have embossed letters and numbers any more either.

Not as much flannel now.

Common fucking sense

Homes with shelves lined wall-to-wall with VHS tapes or CDs.

Incandescent light bulbs that could set your house on fire.

TV Guide magazines.

"Holographic" art on literally everything.

Public pay phones

A mortgage

An affordable mortgage for middle-class people.

No cells phones

Actually reading a magazine

Wearing wristwatches ⌚️

Screen savers.

I miss flying toasters on my screen every night…

The weekly TV guide that came in the Sunday paper, so I could plan out my after school shows and weekend movies (with commercials).

Did anyone say cigarette machines yet? I used to run into the local pizza place and buy cigarettes in grade school. The trick was doing it when the employees were busy so I wouldn’t get kicked out. I was kind of a delinquent.

Back pf the bowling alley when I was in middle school.

Dying repeatedly due to lag playing Counterstrike on a dial up modem.

Records, cds, tapes

Being able to go out in public without any concern of being photographed or recorded.

Dodo

Movie rental stores. Man do I miss those places

Pagers

Common sense

Wild ring-tailed lemur

Having a physical copy of your music

People born in the 90’s who are under the age of 10

Looking in the newspaper for movie times.

Dial up

2nd hand smoke everywhere

Smacking your kids in public.

Having to clean bugs off your windshield after a road trip.

House phones with a cord.

Adam Sandler tapes "Piece of Shit car"

Affordable housing

Pay phones and calling cards

Flipping through every channel on TV until you finally found something you wanted to watch.

Everybody actually cared

Long distance calls.

Happiness

VCRs…talking on the phone…using paper maps and atlases…giving/getting directions somewhere…buying travel guides…buying books…disengaging from work at 5pm…sending faxes…trying new restaurants without any idea if it would be good…

Floppy discs and pay phones

Legitimate representatives

Kids playing outside. Using the imagination. Hardly ever us9ng a home computer.

Taking a newspaper/magazine in the bathroom to read while dispensing of mud pies.

Things that didn't suck ass.

Telephone booths

Happiness.

Natural affection

Needing to wash my wind shield every time I refuel, or more, due to all the bugs on it.

Quality

Fax machines

Smokers, phone booths, VW Bug.

Reebok pumps

Checking your answering machine messages

Telephone booths.

Landlines.

We have one for reasons I won't get into (sore point with the wife), and only one real person calls it -- the rest of the time, it's spam and political ad calls.

SoBe drinks, the ones with the lizard on the bottle? Everyone used to drink those.

Phone booth

Cool stuff.

Giga Pets

Walkmen/tape music and CD’s you carried around to play music while you walked along. I was born in 2005 and have only experienced IPods and IPhones with Spotify, Apple Music on the etc. Walkmen to me are a myth but to my Cousins, Sister, Dad and various other members of my family they were normal and used often. Back then Walkmen we’re the norm you could buy in most shops like WHSmiths but now a days you would have to go to a bootleg car boot sale, search your loft or look deeply on Amazon and EBay just to find one

I kinda miss Mall Rat culture.

Skater kids hanging inside a JCPenney lol

Pay phones of course! They just removed the last one out of NYC that was in Times Square earlier this year!

Ozzy

Pagers/beepers

Pagers and payphones. Riding the bus. Floppy disks. The Phone Book. Trusting that people will be somewhere at some time without being able to check status.

Backbone

Beepers

Your friends yelling your name out the window so you would go out and play. And playing outside until the street lights came on.

Knowing you friends phone numbers by memory

Rappers killing each other

  • Magazine subscriptions.
  • Saturday morning cartoons.
  • Dial up.

Pay phones.. functioning indoor malls.. boy bands

No TSA

Pay phones

Pagers.

VCR and beta max

Pogs

Belief in the motto "Do what you love, the money will follow!"

I wish I could go back and scream "NO!" at myself and my graduating class.

Good music

Remembering something to bring to read while you poop

Reading

Compromise

Independently owned, hole-in-the-wall video rental stores

Pagers - pagers everywhere…

Pagers

Having several potential choices of housing to rent in a small town.

Comfortable weather.

Beef for school dinners ...

Parents who were barely conscious that you existed

Pay phones.

Lazerdiscs.

For those who don't know, just picture a DVD...the size of a vinyl record.

Surge

Walking in San Francisco WITHOUT having to step over human caca every 10 yards. That city is unrecognizable. Glad I left it in the rear view mirror.

Paying with cheques

Grunge singers.

Clear cased Unisonic land line phones

Ooh, payphones

quality drugs.

Pubes

A fun childhood

Pay phones! On the side of the road, in malls, schools, other public places.

Parents that are still together.

A VCR and watching tapes of pre recorded shows, sometimes battling the 12:00 blink to set the clock and timer, only to find you have no blank tapes and need to see what’s going to be recorded over.

Picking up/dropping off people at the airport gate.

Playing game boy color

cassetes were prety normal and sounded great at the time :D

Corded car phones

The Ozone layer

90s sitcoms. I think.

CD Players!

Comedy.

A Discman

happiness

Radio Shack

A rolodex with all your contacts.

was going to say low rise jeans but then gen z happened. so now i’m going to say cassettes.

Knocking on a friends door to see if they’re home

Dollar theaters or anything for a dollar, really

Reading the back of shampoo bottles while going #2

good music that you'd be waiting for to come out.

(mostly) civil political discourse.

being able to say whatever you were thinking without being "cancelled".

not every movie included the extended marvel/DC universe.

super size mcdonalds but somehow less overweight people than there are now.

affordable rent.

golden age of anime.

jncos.

better commercials on tv.

Kids going outside

Red #3

a happy marriage

Writing someone a letter. Feels as old-world as hiring a chimneysweep

Smoking inside

Pretending to be the Spice Girls with friends/cousins shrug

Nerds Ropes

  1. Answering machine for your home phone

  2. Home phones

Fax machines

remember devil sticks? At least that's what Canadians called them.

Toys in the cereal boxes

Payphones

Politicians with somewhat good intentions

The backhand

Wearing a Fanny pack around your waist.

Card catalog. Did more than one State Science Fair project without a computer thankyouverymuch

Getting paged by the video store for not rewinding the tapes you rented

Also, Hammer time dance

Support a family off one income.

Male or female.

Paying long distance for national phone calls

Having time with my own thoughts. Now every single service wants my attention. Every politician, salesperson, charity or just loudmouths who want me to join their cult of thought wants my attention.

Dunkaroos

White dog poop

Faxes

I was about to say sexism but you cleared "rare" or "non existent"

Bees

Couples having babies.

white dog shit

Having a smoking and non smoking section on planes .

Dial-up internet. Or BBS (bulletin board systems) for that matter.

Republicans you could negotiate in good faith with.

Mounted GPS lol

Nu Metal

People born in the 1800s

Sitting and twiddling your thumbs. Then came cell phones.

Compromise in the USA?

Looking at the newspaper for the movie theatre line up and times.

Sending the kids to shop near home.

Phone booths

"Dude that's so gay."

Candy kids

Cartoons that inspired public outrage.

Pay phones

The phrases “no discussing politics or religion in mixed company” and “you need to get in touch with your feminine side.”

That last one, I think, is sorely missed

Perspective

Shoobies

Unapologetic comedy movies

AOL trial disc art projects

Chip & Pepper

Pogs.

Happiness.

Comedy

Bush. I’ll let you decide which ones

A world I don't exist

Finding cash on the ground.

Everybody uses their phones or plastic cards now. Most vending machines accept cards, as do a lot of laundromats, and video arcades have also moved from cash/coins to refillable cards.

It breaks my heart knowing that the overwhelming majority of children these days will never, never, know the joy of finding a $20 bill on the ground.

Man, just typing this out loud, I'm tempted to give this experience to my niece. Next time I'm out walking home with her and the family, I'll slip a $20 on the ground, let her find it and add it to her "journey to outer space" fund.

good minimum wage?

Transvestites being some of the toughest, most resilient people you can get to know.

My virginity

No seat belt in the back of some cars and smoking everywhere 😆

Cheap gas.

Transparent colorful electronic devices

Sony Walkman

Fax machines

Being asked the time but a stranger. The only people that ask me now are usually friends too lazy to reach into their pocket.

Buying magazines (or finding hidden stash) to look at pictures of naked women.

Disposable cameras

Smoking in a restaurant

Payphones

Pagers

A reasonable level of privacy

Floppy Disks

morals

12 year olds with alcohol and drugs say hello.

Nokia cell phones.

Telephone operators

Getting into your friends car and immediately flipping through their GIGANTIC CD BOOK and roasting them thoroughly on their shitty musical tastes.

Carrying a pager/beeper.

Carrying change.

Rational thinking

Pagers.

The Soviet Union

For like two years. Didn't exist in most of the 90s.

It was in the 90s WASNT IT

Blockbusters <!--3

-->

Smoking in restaurants

Common sense

Ball pits!!!

Typewriters

Furbys. The creepy furbys.

I still memorize phone numbers lol

Telling your kid to go down the medical store and buy a pack of cigarettes for you.

Tazos/pogs

Smoking indoors.

Knowing your friends phone numbers

Pagers

Having private moments with photos and videos of Pam Anderson.

Freedom

Knowing peoples phone numbers

Common courtesy.

Wind up windows in cars.

Home phones

Minding one's own business to be frank.

Sorry, Frank.

CD stores, I miss you CD Source and CD World, hell, I miss you too, two story Tower Records on Lemmon Ave. cuz, it was the nineties!

Casettes

pay phones

Beepers

This popped into my head randomly last night, but I wonder when was the last time that one deep-voiced 90s movie trailer voiceover guy did his thing?

Leave home at 9am aged 9 and not come home until 5pm. Parents had no clue where we were. Mostly in the woods…

Playing outside. I miss the days of taking my ski and rolling down the hill. Wipe out just to get back up and do it all over again with the other street kids. Made the best bros that way

Discmans and those giant books of cds in the car.

Saving my college work on floppy disks and hoping my giant cell phone wouldn't wipe them (which it did once costing me a whole semester of work). Buying a new disk man with longer anti skip. Late 90s programming monophonic ringtones into my phone using the keypad.

Street maps.

Pyrenean Ibex

Napster

Telephone booths, I don't think they even exist now.

FAX machines.

A blowjob from my wife.

DIAL ON YOUR PHONE NOW!

Dial - up internet

Just walking up to a friends front door unannounced to see if they wanted to hang out. Pre cell phones, and we were just a year or 2 off from discoring AIM or like other online chats.

Time to actually care about people.

Smoking indoors

cassette decks in cars.

White dog poop

Beepers

malls

Kids being brought up to respect their elders and be polite.

Sidewalks that dont have human shit every 20 feet.

Minutes and 10 cent text messages

Don’t know if this has been said, but landlines in residential homes. What is the point anymore?

I would say asbestos but nope still here

You didn't have way too many options to choose from.

You picked one TV show to watch at a certain time

You picked one movie from Blockbuster and you watched it.

Pay phones

CDs

Good kid shows like hey dude and salute your shorts…

Free time. I remember watching TV with my parents several nights a week, as my dad read the paper/a book. Or, having free weekends to hang out with extended family.

Now, I have zero free time, even on the weekends.

Coping skills.

My Son was alive and in his 10’s Best times

Whale tails.

Home ownership.

All you can eat Pizza Hut in Australia

WW2 Vets

Getting aggravated waiting on people for a movie. Do you go in or not? They're five minutes late...stressful.

Pagers.

Hope.

Pay phones

Writing checks

Waiting until 9PM to make a phone call.

Optimism.

DVD 📀

Home phones

Pay phones

Kids aimlessly roaming around the neighborhood without adult supervision.

Pay phones. Last one I saw was several years ago at a dead strip mall. I remember as a young kid in the mid 2000s seeing them a bit more, but they've just gradually disappeared.

Wars in Europe... oh wait...

Giving your phone number without the area code.

Mortgage rates 4x what they are now

Home prices 1/4 what they are now.

No, I do not think that is a coincidence.

Pay phones

Frosted tips

That sound the internet used to make when you deliberately had to connect to it lol

Going outside till the streetlights come on.

Land contracts or owner financing property. Once a way of selling land between individuals now go to the bank and get financing.

People who can navigate with a paper map, road signs, and a sense of direction.

AOL CDs 💿 in the mail.

1-900 numbers like psychics and chat girls. Those late night commercials were hilarious.

Affordable, high quality furniture

Home phones

Waiting 15 minutes for your McPizza to be ready.

Prepaid calling cards: I still see them for sale in some ethnic food stores near me so I guess it’s still a way for immigrants to call back to their home countries though.

Watching vhs movies

Calling on AOL to get their shit right.

Payphones/phonebooks

Video cameras

VCR

CD player

Kids playing outside somewhere in the neighborhood for hours or even all day. This was out of site of the parents and sometimes out of site of any adult - like when playing in the woods. Kids would get a snack or lunch at whatever house they were near when hungry. Oh yeah - every neighbor was also allowed to discipline any of the kids.

Yankees winning world series titles

not being reachable 24/7

"Ok, so, I'm gonna log out now..."

Pay phones

Pay phones, phone booths and fax machines.

Smoking sections.

I still remember there was a smoking section in a burger resturaunt in the mall in my.hometown. they kept it until it wasn't allowed by law. It was separated from the rest of the mall by a glassware that was airtight(except for when the door was open).

When they finally had to remove it, one side of the wall had serious nicotine stains for years before they remodeled.

Renting a video tape.

Puka shell necklaces

Pogs

Pagers

Landline phone

Smoking inside

Malls, video tapes, family guy and the Simpsons having good episodes.

Camping out to buy concert tickets. Having to drive 2-3 hours to the nearest Ticketmaster site, wait in line, often overnight, then pray and hope that by the time they got to you, the show wasn't sold out already. If you were really lucky, score tickets that you had no idea where you were sitting until you got there.

PCP

gas for under $2.50 a gallon

I would say sexism but-

good comedy

Home affordability.

Listening to cassette tapes

Less anxiety and paranoia. There was no stress in the air, if that makes sense.

As an American, after 2001 people really retreated into their own lives. With the rise of tech, scammers became more efficient and widespread, and people became less trustworthy.

More examples on the contributors. But point is, people used to have far, far less on their minds and you could see that reflected in society (in hindsight).

Aim icq

Phone booths

From what I have read so far, most things have improved over the years. Its nice seeing that there were positive changes in times like these.

Leaving your house without your phone

Phone booths

Jnco jeans

Phone booths

Porn magazines

Hope for the future.

Palm pilots. Buying maps.

Sound of cicadas

Affordable housing

Dial up

Common Sense

AOL cd

I used to have to buy dirty magazines to get off. Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse.., all gone now that porn is piped directly into every phone and household.

Hot and cold running smut still blows my mind. When I was a kid I used to beat off to soggy printed filth I found in the woods by the elementary school I went to.

Common courtesy

Happiness

My friend calling me at home number cuz I don’t have phone .. I swear that social media ruined our life .. when I remember the real connection and real life in the past I really feel sorry for new generations ..

Having a landline inside your home. Most people just default to cell phones and no longer use a land line.

I miss reading the instructions that came with a new video game. Also, game demos in the magazines.

Decent music

Pagers. Blowouts.

Good Music.

Dial up modems

Common sense.

People getting married

Trench coats and men's eye liner

"Smoking or non?

1800 Reverse to get mum to pick me up

Taking about how the current president is bill Clinton.

Blockbusters

Blockbuster being a place to rent movies and video games (this was also around in the early to mid 2000s as I wasn’t born in the 90s), ToysRUs being a common store to go to for toys and other kid-themed stuff, Furbies, VHS tapes, and CD’s/DVD’s (those were either replaced by Blue Ray disks or most films/TV shows became digital).

The absence of the internet.

The Internet was a huge thing in the 90s.

Not ubiquitous at the time though.

Edit: I see their reply was changed. I won’t disagree with them. It was a huge deal. But for a moment in time through the 90s, there was a sense of freedom from it. Now, it’s glued to us every existing moment.

I couldn’t remember what exact year the Internet was invented from the top of my head lmao. All I know is that is was getting super popular in the 90s.

She’s right. I lived through it as a kid. lol

Buying a video game at the store and reading the manual on the bus on the way home

Electric can openers, MySpace, pagers, gas for under $1/gal...

The Walkman. I own a lot of CDs and wish I had something to play then on out and about on walks.

World War II vets

Smoking indoors like at a restaurant and what not.

Also phone booths

Beepers, pleated pants, VHS tapes….

Abuse

Going to a concert and not seeing an ocean of cell phones recording it. Just people singing along and enjoying themselves.

Hope

Kids inventing entire universes with what they found outside.

Also kids being outside.

Wearing soothers around your neck.

Jerking off to Better homes and gardens magazines

Rollerblading

Smoking, like, EVERYONE i knew smoked to some degree as a teenager\adult in the early 90s.

Not wearing a seatbelt in the back of the car. Even in the front people didn't look at you like you had 2 heads.

In the UK phone booths if you have no coins, 0800reverse to charge the other person for the call

Going to a concert and everyone enjoying the band! Pre mobile phones!🤟

Laser disc…

Wind down car windows

VHS. Floppy discs.

Phone booths

audio tapes

vhs tapes and vcrs

Payphones

AOL compact disc's in everything. Esp. magazines and newspapers.

I remember watching VCRs, and hearing the now coming soon on DVD sound. That’s nostalgic

Pagers and having a set of cheat sheet of numeric codes that stood for different things. Phone number followed by 911 meant it was an emergency of course, but my friends and I came up with a whole long list of codes. Meet me here or there. I made it where I am going safely.

And don’t forget the ever popular 80085.

Staying home and waiting by the phone because your crush is supposed to call.

Blockbuster

Residential land lines.

Actually writing down people’s phone numbers and then not remembering who the person was because you never wrote down the names!

Walkmans.

Cassettes.

CDs. DVDs.

Blockbuster

Landlines.

Giant king James version bible sized phone books. Now they're the size of like a slightly thicker magazine

Pagers

dial land line phones

Birthdays at McDonald's

Being able to tell someone to suck it up. Everyone’s a victim now.

BBS's

No CGI in movies.

There where plenty of movies in the 90s with CGI

Yeah, sure. Even star wars was full of cgi and it was before the 1990s but there were also lots or movies in the cinema without cgi. I dont think you can find a single movie in the cinema without cgi today.

the org star wars movies from 1977, 1980 and 1983 did not have cgi before Lucas rereleased them later on

Didnt episode 4 have a new cgi technology where they used three dimensional CGI? Of course they were updated in the 2000s but they did use some CGI even in episode 4.

the abyss was in 1989 and was one of the first noticeable cgi movies followed by terminator 2 in 1991

Milk men

Dying of AIDS related complications

Beepers

Affordable housing.

House phones

Remember those circles of payphones in malls? Like they'd have 8 or 10 of them or something in these big circles and people would be lined up to use them?

Letter writing.

Big ole boom boxes

Dog fights at my local park. Young couples showing affection to each other.

Pagers.

landline. Especially those kitchen phones that had 20 ft cords.

Tape recorders, although now you can just voice record on your phone. You could hear the recordings go backwards though when you rewound the tape, which was always amusing.

Balding men that don’t shave their head

Landlines/home phones and dial up internet

Long-distance telephone calls!

Cold earth

a cautious sense of optimism for the future? affordable housing?

Cassette tapes thrown in the road and the tape strewn all over the place 🙃

fucked a white rhino

Having to wait to use the internet because a family member is using the phone

Being polite

Pay phones.

Kurt Cobain

Beepers

Landlines

So many video cassettes. Movies, childhood videos, show recordings you name it.

Calling a number to get the time and temperature.

People holding lit lighters up instead of taking movies at concerts

people outside

Blockbusters

Rollerblades

Smoking in pubs

Making prank calls

Pay phones

Fake car phone antennas.

Needing cords to play/trade pokemon with friends.

Or just the insane amount of cords everything had.

Source: grew up in the 90's

Beating your kids regularly.

Getting put on a waiting list at your local video store, for a movie that just came out on VHS. Getting that call after waiting for a week or two was so satisfying. It also made that first viewing of the film was also extremely satisfying.

AOL instant messenger and the amazing away messages that accompanied it ~tHrOwBaCk~

Edit: change the to that

Payphone booths

Answering machines

Rotary phones

Calling the movie theater to listen for the movie times.

You know, the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland

https://youtu.be/TZt-pOc3moc

Teens in spandex and dinosaur helmets doing cheesy stunts and sitting in giant robots… my childhood 🥹

Sane people.

LA in the 90s was like the Wild West.

Tamagachis

Buying "calling cards" for long distance use. Also...collect calls.

Pay phones

Corded phones

Laugh tracks

Pay phones.

The 1990's

Bandanas

Being happy

Janko jeans

Rotary phones

Chivalry

Pay phones

Movie phone

Beepers..and reading the back of shampoo bottles for entertainment

Privacy

JNCO's

Floppy disks.

Smoking sections in restaurants .

Page me.

Pay phones and collect call company ads.

Bob Wehadababyitsaboy and the Doug Flutie 10-10-220 commercials were classics.

Hurrying to end phone calls due to long distance charges.

Renting a VHS

Boxy ass TVs

Smoking with kids in the car

Dressing up, Miami Vice style

1990s Atoms

VHS and Dial Up Internet.

On the note of VHS I remember having to put my VHS tape in the rewinder and rewinding it. For some reason it was the best part lol

Pay Phones

Movie rental stores.

huge computer monitors

odd, in the 90s I had a 17" crt now I have a 27" ldc a 24" ldc and 2 17" lcd's

Calling friends everyday using landline 🥲

Printing out mapquest directions and then missing your exit and having to get off the highway and figure out how to get back to some place listed so can get back on track.

I was looking for jobs around Seattle so we could move out from Montana in 1998. Washington is known for not having a lot of signs (or were then) and especially in Seattle, not all exits off I-5 always have a corresponding exit getting back on. So you might realize that you missed your exit, get off on the next one and then not have a way to get back on to go back the direction you came.

There was one interview I was going to that the directions said, get off on exit ##, and listed a numbered street and a named street. Since there is a lot of numbered streets, and I would be going 60 mph while watching traffic (I wasn't really used to the traffic, coming from MT) I thought it would be easier to look for the named street instead of the numbered. I didn't see it and kept going south. After a few minutes I realized I must have missed it, and got off, got back on and when I was coming north, saw the sign. Turns out the south-bound sign only listed the numbered street, while the northbound listed both.

The job I finally got was down on 5th, 5 blocks from the Space Needle. I was like 45 min late, partly because of getting lost and partly looking for parking. The manager was not upset, he got it.

Smoking in restaurants. I remember going into a restaurant and them asking "smoking or not smoking"

Letting your 5th grader hop on their bike and ride 3 miles to the mall sans adult supervision (that might have been more typical of the 80’s)

Kids playing with the greatest toys ever created

Me being a child

A house phone

Reading a newspaper

free speech

Cigarette vending machines and payphones

Popping over for a visit unannounced

Common sense. It isn't that common anymore

Smoking inside or in public

walkman

Pagers

Pagers

Columbia House CDs and cassettes

Bees

Mixtapes

Payphones

Pagers.

White dog poop

Tower Records. Borders books. Toys R Us

I'd love to see* this question posed again with the add on of "besides all the usual suspects that people reply every time this is posted, landline phones, dial up internet, video rentals, kids playing outside, etc etc etc." Because I think there could actually be some really interesting and thought provoking answers to this question, but it's always just the same old dozen or so responses.

*someone more dedicated/better than me at Reddit, get on it!

Gigantic phone books and you’d get a new updated one every year? Few years? Can’t remember.

Rotary phones

telnet(ing), BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), and dial-up internet service, "Free nights and weekends" (cell phone service plan)

Dialup modems

Pagers. *37911911

Fun

Ska punk

Smoking inside restaurants/bars.

Apparently quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle. They seemed like real hot button issues that would be major day to day concerns as a kid growing up. Good thing they got figured out.

Common sense

Non GMO foods.

think most the food on eath is non gmo

Calling things you don't like "gay".

"You couldn't get tickets? That's so gay..."

Dial up internet

Windows 95 or windows odyssey

Windows 98 too

Pagers

think this was an usa thing only never saw one, people began getting cellphones around 95 instead so maybe it never made it here.

Pressing record on your cassette tape for the top 10 radio songs

Using the R word was just second nature and now that shit doesn’t fly. Same with calling things gay.

Home phones

In high school we would all come home and eat and then just know to meet at a certain parking lot and figure out what to do that night.

The benefit I feel like was people who where there were down to do stuff and we'd pick the best suggestion and do whatever the majority wanted.

Now that everything is texting people are wishy-washy/change plans/string you along. Like people are just afraid to say "no, don't want to." People feel pressured to reply with an excuse something. Just drags it all out and somehow makes it harder to organize.

Beating up a bully who was threatening. Zero tolerance was introduced, circa in 1993, but didn't use it as a cop out. If you were acting in self-defense, the bully would still be punished if they attacked first. Parents of bullies sided with the victims, telling their bully of child, as that's what they get.

Once, a bully keep bugging me because I had a lisp. Finally, he hit me, so I reply with a kick. We had our mothers with us. Jerk's mom told my mom, thanks, in Spanish. Clearly, he didn't learn and went to pick on a female classmate with a motor disorder because she was half Asian. The teacher refused to help this time, it was in school. One of the stupidest reasons that bitch teacher had was not making eye contact. Finally, half Asian kid had enough and punched the jerk, street-fighter. We ignored his cries and the demands of the teacher. Two teachers who also taught special education heard the noise.

TA was just getting back from an errand when bitch teacher told the jerk to the nurse. The TA knew what had happened, but she remained silent, as the student had been rude to her before. The jerk had done some things to the other special education teachers. None of us got in trouble. The other teachers just nodded at us and carried on with their day. (The last year that teachers in Massachusetts were allowed to hit students was 1970.)

Try this today, even if the parents sides with the kids.

My niece got into trouble at school for fighting a few years ago. It turned out that the other girl had teased her about her heart condition. Her mother, one of my sisters, and me explained about the matters, but nope, wasn't going to cut. I just got my niece some pizza and let her play PC games. She's now 18 and is looking at some colleges.

Prank phone calls

Payphones

The Soviet Union

Carbon paper and typewriters

Carbon paper is pretty much everywhere

Really? I haven’t seen any in probably 20 years. But I don’t work in an office so maybe that’s why I haven’t seen it.

Yup. It’s still around. I work in a print shop and people ask for it all the time and my wife pretty much lives at Hobby Lobby and they have tons of it

Well, golly, then I stand corrected. Glad to hear that not everything from my childhood has disappeared.

Using a payphone.

McDonalds Arch Deluxe

Coke2

Crystal Pepsi

getting catalogs in the mail

A home phone.

A home.

A.

a.

Twenty five cent oysters or wings!

Pay phones and beepers

Napster was pretty popular at the end of the 90s.

Racism

Smoking in restaurants

heck even smoking in airplanes

Land line phones in homes.

Cassette tape players.

CRT TVs.

Pay phones.

Buying a Sega Master System

........outside Brazil

Intense dark lip liner. But I’ll admit I love it lmao

Attention spans longer than 5 minutes.

Public phones.

Mossimo and Stussy being a high end brand.

Magazines

Landline phones

Dial up Internet

Physical card catalog in library

Encyclopedia Britannica on CD

Pay phones

Pagers.

Wallpapers in homes. Those flowery patterns plastered on your living room then another design in the kitchen. For every room a different pattern. Ugh!

Hypercolor t-shirts.

Mexican brick weed

Ordering things from a catalog. One tiny little picture. You fill out the form in the catalog, do the math, write a check and mail it off hoping it gets there. It’s crazy you can now get things delivered the same day you order them.

probably the KKK

Human Rights-apparently the US had SOME integrity before the new millennia ushered in a new era of pains, pokes, and prods unlike anything world history has ever seen….

Accepted racism + homophobia.

Personality

Card catalogs

Bugs splattered all over your windshield after a long drive.

JNCO jeans

Pagers.

Cars built in the 1980s.

Smoking or non?

Malls. Picking up KFC box of bbq chix wings(before lard was outlawed)CA). to take to the drive-in.

Rage music show countdown top 40

My sex life.

Remember the fat free craze? Fat free cookies, fat free chips, blah blah blah. I don’t know if it was intentional or just bad information led to that, but they just pumped up the sugar content to make things fat free. Now we know sugar is the real problem.

Ska music

Trimmed pubic hair

Hypercolor shirts

having sex with someone born in the 1950s

Pagers

My sex life.

Having flip phones

Real heroin.

Breasts being covered up

Although some of that started in the 60s

Dial up

Gay killings

The perception of democracy

The tolerance of offensive things in movies and TV. I watched The Mighty Ducks for the first time recently (I didn’t grow up in the 90’s so I hadn’t ever seen it before) and I kinda realized that had they tried to pass that script nowadays, the movie wouldn’t have been greenlit. That “Oreo line” thing is a key example.

Handycams

House phones

Mom and Pop Video rental stores.

Good, classic oldies

Pay phone and using collect call services

Video rental car that used to come round once a week and had boxes of video's for sift through and rent :D

10-10-321

manners

Joy

Submissive women

Raycisms

Blockbuster

Wind breakers. Slap bracelets. Mondo fruit drink. Surge cola. The list goes on.

The Gateway 2000

Light up sneakers

Astro pops

Looking through the Delia’s catalog and ordering clothes… I guess just buying clothes in general from a catalog

Commitment

White people

Floppy disks

Born 1990s

JNCO jeans

Pay phones

Calling Blockbuster on a tan, rounded rectangle shaped cordless phone. Pop that antenna.

Childhood imagination

Phone book coupons.

Buying a house with your regular job money. Just a regular ass job. 40hr/week. That pays for everything you need.

bottled water, was not a huge thing people trusted tap water to drink then that movie with the lawyer in CA showed it caused cancer and the utilities company knew.

crew neck sweaters with wacky patterns on them

Kurt Cobain

Phone booths.

I’m gonna go with ‘shock value.’ The 90’s had a lot of shock value as far as scandals and how people received news. Today it can be hour to hour, minute to minute before we move on to the next thing.

BLOCKBUSTER

Phone cards

Beepers

Friday/Saturday night at the Video Rental store.

When buying a pc game it came in a big box, usually with instruction manual with artwork, lore etc. Sometimes other goodies as well.

I loved the boxes.

Talking on the land line while drinking Ecto-Cooler.

Kids playing on their own without parents anywhere in sight.

Smoking or non smoking?

Dial-up internet over copper phone lines.

Good rock music lol

Long distance phone charges.

holding the antenna of your TV for better reception.

Checking your pager.

Pay phones and street corner mail boxes… they were everywhere!

Rollerblading

Affording rent, food, car on one income.

Minidiscs.

VHS and needing the space the store them.

Going to some crowded event…a concert, college parties, etc and completely losing your friends with no chance of locating them.

Our childhood

Battle.net

Our political parties working together

Payphones

Phones that are the size of an actual brick

Real men

Men in tights!

New episodes of "Figure it Out" on Nickelodeon

Slamming the phone on someone.

Phone booths

Smoking indoors

At "family" restaurants

Fax machines.

CD Walkman

music cassette singles. Had the song on one side and maybe the instrumental on the b side.

Good music and the political parties in America being able to compromise off the top of my head.

Having a pager.

Pay phones

Phone books.

Neighborhood kids playing outside together in the neighborhood. Kids now are hovered over and can't leave there parents sight, which with how wicked people are i guess i can understand. Times were a lot simpiler back then.

Blockbuster.

Ironing your clothes. When did we stop doing this?

Pagers

Thomas Guide and other paper maps in the glove box

Slinkies

Pay phones

Grape bubble gum-I’ve had a craving and can’t find it!

smoking section at the restaurant

Playing outside after school until it got dark out

Dial up internet

Busy signals

Land lines. Public phones in restaurants and at gas stations.

Class mobility.

Folks being able to freely express their opinions

Smoking at the mall. It was social contract to not smoke in the stores, everyone just naturally didn’t do it. The big open areas were fine.

Not having a mass shooting everyday

Duckman!

Vacuum tubes

Pizza at McDonald’s and blockbuster.

My excitement for life

Zima

Bees

Optimism

Paper street maps of the cities

People used to just stop by. No call, no text, just ring the doorbell and see if someone’s home.

Also, Pepsi Clear.

Long Distance Cards. Pay Phones. Road Atlases.

pay phones

White men in commercials.

Faxing legal documents

House Phones

Going to Blockbuster to Rent-A-Movie.

Landlines

DIAL UP NOISE

Coke cocaine :)

Black Face

Cd players.

Real Heroin

Hope and optimism

The will to live

A 1990 calendar.

Going to an ATM before a night out. Does anyone still use cash?

Getting excited when door bell rang

Buying a house fresh out of college.

Civility

Affordable housing

Getting an AOL disc in the mail all the time

Royal Crown Draft Cola. This soda is the best soda I’ve ever had in my life. It’s not the same as regular RC cola. They used to sell it in the US in the 90’s.

those brick mobile phones that you can use as self defense.

Taking a crap without any form of entertainment or distraction

You didn't look at bra photos in sears catalogs?

Such luxury! All catalogs were throw away upon delivery. During Christmas time the sears catalog was kept in the living room per parents instructions.

Maps. Got lost, phone died, tried to find a map in a store. No luck. I had to find some stranger with a phone to look up a map and give me directions. This was an interstate drive, not trying to find some street in town.

going to somebodies house.....and ringing the doorbell

And running away...

lol, touché

Browsing the mall record stores.

My parents' marriage.

Pay phones

Phone books and paper maps

A job

PHONE BOOTHS!

Pay phones

Using the TV guide booklet/in the newspaper.

Standing ashtrays next to the couch in nearly every house. I bought one the other month, best purchase ever.

Yo-yo

Saying things were "gay".

Checking a road atlas or asking gas station attendants on how to get back on the major highways.

Good pizza

Remember the Sega Channel? That was good stuff !

Snow

Phone books

Knocking on your friends door to play. Also, being on time and not flaking

Tie dye/fluro colored shirts

Payphones

Payphones

Pay phones

Men and women.

Blockbuster. Nothing beat a night at blockbuster with your friends before a sleepover

To be yourself and not a wannabe celebrity

Dial up, Lan parties, and discmans...and video games spread over 6 cd rooms...and worrying about hard drive space for Games.

Pogs

Getting laid…

Pagers

Maps. Paper ones.

Smoking sections in restaurants

Smoking sections anywhere

People’s common sense

Blockbusters

Pagers.

White dog poop. Dog food manufacturers used to use a whole lot more bone meal in dog food.

TV show plots that can be solved by a cell phone call or text.

"NO FEAR"

The ability to buy a house

Pay phones

Not just pagers, but knowing what the codes meant.

Calling collect and leaving "momimdonepleasepickmeupfromthemallthanks"

I went to the mall in Eagleton and they only had one Burberry.

My will to live

It'll all be ok.

Tower Records

Privacy

Born in 2003 and still relating to many things here makes me question my childhood but also glad I had that. Growing up now in a always connected world must be shit

Meeting someone at the gate when their plane came in and seeing them come up the ramp. Other side, waiting with someone at the gate until boarding, hanging around until you watched their plane take off.

Pay phones

I went to a diner a few months ago and they still had one.

Suggestive scenes in children's movies. They were more prominent and in your face back then. I have, in recent years, re-watched some of the Disney movies I used to watch as a kid in the late 90s, and I am baffled that this was allowed on television when I was 5, especially movies like Blank Check, which LITERALLY has straight up pedophilia in it. If you watch the movie, you will know what I am talking about.

Those execs at Disney must have been smoking crack back in the day if they really let this slide.

Privacy

mobile plans with capped minutes and free calling after 9pm

Oh, dang, that unlocked a memory...

Pogs

Pagers

Dial up internet and AOL CD 💿 ROMS

Beepers.

“You’ve got mail”

The greatest cologne ever made: Old Spice- Whitewater

Punters and progs.

If you know, you know.

Land lines

Flip phones

Phone books

Couples holding hands in public.

Kids playing outside.

People singing in public.

Dot matrix printers.

Skylines. They don't produce them for left side driving. Probably JDM cars in general.

Giant boxes of free AOL install disc at retail stores..

Using phone books

Smoking indoors (thankfully)

Pagers

Solid movies with good plots

When the street lamps go on. It's time to go home!

Smoking in restaurants.

New Grunge bands.

I worked for a video store in my 20s. It was the early 2000s, so I was mostly part of the wake. RIP.

CD players for listening to music

JNCO jeans.

100 CDs for just one penny!!

Respect

Pubic hair

Gogurt

Hope.

Pro-milk propaganda. While it’s still present today, it has never again reached the level of appropriating a bunch of popular figures to convince children to drink it.

Walkman, fax machine, dial phones, jokes about Cindy Crawford

Mood rings. Those were fun.

Needing an actual physical map to orient yourself in a trip or just on the town if needed.

Flashlight 🔦 tag! We would play in a two block radius and hide in strangers backyards, sheds, crawl spaces, trees, bushes, etc.. Ten to twenty kids just playing in the dark. It was a blast.

Napster. Launched June 1, 1999

Checking TV schedules, and waiting for your favourite tv series to play every week. And talk about it with your friends at school the next day

Stamps - because you got real

mail including

printed bills that you coudn't autopay so once a month you'd have a billing night and have to write out checks (and if super responsible, balance the checkbook)

Saying "that's gay"

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Now you get canceled for hurting someones feelings

Windbreakers and fanny packs

Lol casettes my little cousin saw one and you should have seen his face when i said what it was 🤣

Not being a douchebag

Manners?

I’m not sure how common this was in the 1990s overall but where I lived there used to be a huge fixation with jokes about gay people, almost all of their punchlines involving anal sex in some way.

I guess ☭ MOTHER RUSSIA ☭

Just dropping into someone’s house to visit without letting them know first. It was so common to have friends just call in but never happens nowadays.

Playing Oregon Trail

Multiple Land Lines. I need two voice lines, one fax line, and one line for internet!

For those too young, before cell phones, you would need a physical phoneline ran to your house. If more than one person wanted to make or receive calls, you needed more than one line. the internet also required a phone line, so it was not uncommon to have an extra line so that you can still receive calls while on the internet.

Pay phone

The 90s (and early 2000s) were the golden years of wrestling. It's absolute wank nowadays

Hairy pussies

Hostess: Smoking or non smoking?

Floppies

Clubbing. Every night of the week!!

Vacation homes. Now you can’t even afford 1 let alone 2

Furbies

Calling time and temperature

Fun

Slow Internet

Pogs. Skip it. Crossfire..Crossfire .CROSSFIRRRRRREEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

Blockbuster Video. Wow, what a difference.

Kids knocking on front doors.

Calling a friend for help when you're stuck when playing point and click adventure games

TOUCHING GRASS

Good music.

Beepers, Dial up modems, home phones, people getting a newspaper every day....

Command and Conquer Red Alert Lan Parties and lugging around a 17inch CRT monitor. I remember having an epic 9+ hour battle. I was losing but I made my friend pay for his victory. It was the most satisfying defeat. Mouse & keyboard hand cramps were had that following morning.

Pagers and telephone booths.

Writting letters to your friend or a pen pal. Why pay for stationary and postage then wait days or weeks for a piece of paper to arrive when social media is at your fingy tips and you pay for the phone and data already? Whether you're in the same room or halfway across the world, you can get a hold of anyone in seconds. But, there's just something special about getting a personal letter in the mail from a loved one.

Orbitz

Edit: probably why I like bubble tea

Pagers 📟 📟

Calling the movie theater and listening to the recording in order to know the movie times.

Rollerblades

1990 Calenders

Video cassette recorders

Portable games that didn’t require constantly spending real-world money to complete.

We had arcade games for that.

Reading the newspaper for movie times.

People dying from AIDS

Exhaust jeans

Beepers

Hope for the future.

floppy discs

Knocking on someone’s door.

When I was growing up, it was normal. Now when it happens I think I’m being robbed or something is very, very wrong.

Smoking in every restaurant

Beepers

IOS

Laser discs

Birthday parties at fast food joints

Basic rights for Americans

Of the various malls in this area, there is only one that has anything still going for it. One of them is mostly empty and the local farmer's market moves in there using about a third of the space in the winter, which runs from Hallowe'en to Easter here. This is mostly because of the plague, but they were getting emptied even before that because of online shopping. Because of the plague, I got used to ordering vitamins and groceries for delivery. I'm back to grocery shopping about once every two weeks but most of the rest of it is online. The exception: clothes. The few experiences that I had with clothes online were unhappy as twice I got the wrong size (clearly marked on the receipt) and once I got the wrong color (also clearly marked on the receipt.)

Compact Discs and DVDs

Phones with keyboards

T9

Being able to ignore lunatics.

Kind of hard when some are running important countries.

Milk vendors

Just showing up to see what’s good

Pay phones

A drawer full of take out menus.

Mom and dad arguing. They’re divorced now

Dunkaroos

Smoking in McDonald's

Payphones. I used to call my folks once every Sunday when I was away for college and I didn't have a home phone or cell phone. Pretty much nobody did if you were from out of town.

Concerts without half the crowd holding their phone in the air recording something that will be unwatchable

Public ashtrays.

Fresh Air.

Kurt Cobain

Flared jeans

The World Trade Center

people investing in stuffed animals

Music CDs. You just...dont see them anymore now.

DVDs are still kinda prevalent but not nearly as much.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Having a pager

Etch a sketch?

Privacy.

They replaced pogs with pawgs

Phreaking

Payphones

Jynco jeans

Cultured women

Music videos

Saturn or Geo cars.

My Reebok Pump basketball shoes, from 1994!

I actually have a never worn mint version of the exact shoes I wore playing basketball as a teen. They are fantastic!

I was going to pass them down but none of my kids played basketball.

Zima.

A "computer room" in your house

Beepers, Nextel, talking..in person..to an actual person.. great live concerts that didn't cost so much!

Photo Albums

Pagers

Hidden characters that you unlocked through dedicated gameplay or as a sort of achievement. Now they just charge you for every new character they decided to add as dlc.

Cigarette machines in bars in the early ‘90s. The sensation of breathing clean, fresh air after stumbling out of some den of iniquity felt truly miraculous: it was as if the gods themselves were filling your lungs right before you found your way to a shitty fast food joint to further poison your body.

Good testosterone levels in men..

Pogs

No Fear stickers.

Kids used to hangout outside of the movie theater too

Picking out movies on vcr at blockbuster

Not getting shot at school.

Real metal

Pagers.

Pay phones

Pagers

Kids hanging out on the corner

Calling friends on landlines and telling them" Leave your house now and I'll meet you half way".

Pay phones

Walkman.

Pagers lol

Dial up modems

Affordable education, housing, healthcare, gas, competent politicians no matter the political spectrum, and reasonable wages. C’mon guys this question is too easy.

Blockbuster. R.I.P my friend.

Common sense.

Pay phones

Pay phones

Movie rental was done in a store

Pagers

Payphones. Calling collect. Slightly better income equality (prior to the first bubble in the late 90s.)

people

Getting a tank of gas, two packs of cigarettes, and a cup of coffee for $20.

Getting blockbusters

Faxing.

Printing out directions on Mapquest

Audio Cassettes & Walkman

Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon. Totally normal product to find on liquor store shelves. Now several thousand dollars for a bottle.

Men old enough to drink dating freshmen. High school freshmen. We did not take statutory seriously back then.

privacy.

Yo yos

Porn mags in bushes

Kmarts 🤮

Also, smoking indoors or anywhere in general... I use to skip school to go sit at the mall and smoke smh

Hope for the future

Meeting up based on reputation

https://www.shareable.net/the-guy-who-worked-for-money/

This is where Facebook could have brought us.

"Hey, we know you like [huge list of your interests] see that person over there (highlights their face in your smart glasses) they like all those things too! Go talk to them!"

Liberals with sanity.

Pay phones

POGs

Tape adapters.

skating rinks !

Arguing about whether something is factually true without anyone pulling out google. Also, knowing nothing about a band you really liked accept what was on the album liners and what your friends told you.

Home phones

Being excited when someone knocks on my door.

90s: friends coming over

Today: telemarketers or serial killer.

Why in the hell are telemarketers knocking on your door? That’s not how they work!

… door to door salesmen… clearly I was not thinking clearly lol.

Payphones.

Blockbuster.

Hacky dacks and paper football.

We would play everyday during lunch at high school. My 8th graders last year didn't know what either was when I taught them how to play.

Breakdancers.

Not picking up the poop when your dog shits on someone else's lawn.

crystal Pepsi , Zima , and Mistic

-When you only had a cell phone to play the snake game. -Kinkos -game boys -home videos -Dancing in the sprinklers -VHS Disney movies with commercials I could go on…

The "Hanson haircut"

Video stores, we are so spoilt for choice now

Phone booths.

Dancing in clubs for FUN with the purpose of having a good time vs going to clubs now for just bottle service and clout on social media

Common sense.

Mechanical gauge clusters in automobiles.

Pay Phones

The "spoiler free" time. I could have never watched blade runner in the 2000's and no one would ever spoil the story to me because that's a shitty thing to do right? Then the 2010's came and suddenly you only had 1 week to catch up before the spoilers came. Now it's worse, if you didn't watch the leaked premiere function of avengers 7 on the deep web with a paywall of $100.000 within the first 10 seconds since it appeared, tough shit, you get your ass spoiled all the way from the freezing highs of the everest to the everlasting flames of hell, all because it was "my responsibility" to catch up faster than light with that, like come on, are you serious? Like i don't have more important things to do right now since free time is becoming more of a luxury than anything else nowadays.

Pogs

Bees.

Bringing a couple coins with you, so you could make a phone call.

I used to ride my bike to the local mall about 2 Mi. away to see a movie or play games in the arcade. I always kept a couple coins in my sock so I could call my mom from the pay phone to get a ride home. The ride home was uphill and wasn't nearly as appealing as the downhill ride there. Later on, I would learn from commercials I could have just spent the coins at the arcade by calling collect and using the "wehadababyitsaboy" .

my dick

Chuck E. Cheese. I remember everyone had their birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese when I was little but now it’s just there.

LSD.

tamagotchi

Pay phones

Yogos!!! :(

CFCs

Cassette tapes

Pay phones.

Raves and Layne Staley.

Agro skates

Pay phones

Blockbuster

AOL message boards.

If you want to go back a little further than that.

Olduse.net

It's usenet on a 30-year lag.

Meeting unconventional/eccentric characters.

The internet has made society so bland and homogeneous.

Big hair perms

Marathon LAN parties at work. Marathon was the predecessor to Halo, and had arena free for all mode as well as AI mode where you fought the rogue computers and evil extraterrestrials.

Good backstory and tons of levels, amazing physics. This is 1991.

I might be the only one that remembers this.

Pagers.

Parents letting their kids wander the earth until dark

Recording mix tapes straight from the radio.

Pogs.

Having and using good manners.

Pagers

2 band concerts. Seems like that was it, then came monsters of rock, lalapalooza etc. probably still around, I’m just old now and don’t pay any attention to it.

Wearing a long sleeve shirt under a short sleeve shirt

Kids running around the neighborhood with no supervision.

Beepers

VCR in the house.

You mean an actively used VCR right because I totally still have two of them in my attic.

Yes. Of course. I was just looking at my entertainment center yesterday (I’m 25) and I was thinking, crap I don’t have a VCR. Then I thought, I don’t have any vhs tapes, soooooo I guess that’s not a problem.

If you have any home movies on VHS I highly suggest buying even the crappiest of digital converters and converting them immediately.

20 to 30 years is about their limit. And that's if they're stored well.

Already done. But thank you my friend.

Hope.

Spending hours talking to your friends on the phone after school and on the weekends and calling people on 3-way.

Mixtape trading?

The Greatest Generation

I honestly think that younger Millenials and Zoomers missed out by not having them as your "old people" when they were growing up. So much pride, but also shame, manners, humbled, and living through the depression made them appreciate what we had.

(now some edgy kid will call them racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. and I won't deny it but I'll also say that no generation is perfect. A Zoomer just shot up a black grocery store in Buffalo, so it's not like they eliminated racism

My grandparents never golfed in their lives but in the 90s they started tuning in to see Tiger Woods and thought it was wonderful that he was integrating the game.

They were good people capable of growth. Tried to be good. Tried to do good.)

Cassette tapes and recording songs from the radio on them

Beepers

Common sense

Payphones, blockbusters, cassette tapes, hell, even CDs.

Chalky looking dog poo

Beeper with codes.

Payphones

Kids playing outside for non sport related purposes.

Home ownership

Video stores

VHS tapes and the joy of closing your eyes while rewinding the movie

Car alarms were so sensitive. I lived in an apartment when I was a kid and a loud clap of thunder would set off the entire parking lot.

Pay phones

Walkman/cd player?😭

Being cool.

Payphones

Wallet chains

Needing to be in front of the TV when your non sporting event show was on.

Stopping at a gas station to remove insects from the windshield.

Got milk posters!

$600 a month rent

Pagers

Terry's flat top

Double denim

ISDN. At least it didn’t interrupt the phone lines. Super expensive. I remember configuring it to talk to the network at work, and because of Apple talk, which is a very chatty protocol, we accidentally ran up hundreds of dollars of connection fees in the first weekend. The phone company forgave it.

I worked forever to get this ISDN connection working, and it was so novel that at the time they let me speak to one of the backroom engineers that you don’t usually have access to. We worked extensively for months. We were on a first name basis.

At some point I couldn’t reach him and later found out he had passed away.

https://xkcd.com/686/

RIP that guy.

Kindness, empathy, and consideration.

Blond jokes. I feel like we’ve finally understood these are pretty mean.

Actually looking at porn for the articles.

I always thought that was a joke but it turns out Playboy bought stories from basically anyone.

Many actually good authors got their start there.

Playboy had a lot of good articles. They really were a magazine that happened to have pictures of nude women. Older Penthouse issues also had some decent articles but around mid 90s they started going more hard core and the article quality took a dive.

Phone book

Blockbusters

Payphones

Pay phones.

Discman

Saying ill call you tonight

Kool and Newport cigs being glamorized

House phones

The 'cheap' way you got songs to listen to was buying a single cassette tape from CVS then calling into the local radio station with a request that you'd then record on your parents' boombox.

You could get Kodachrome film developed in full color.

Blockbuster/Hollywood Video, in addition to hole in the wall video rental stores that stocked all the horror/anime you otherwise wouldn't get to watch.

I actually had to call my friends to get their attention to hang out (and I'm one of those Gen Yers who hated phone calls like an irrational fear)

Jnco jeans

Dial up....

Payphones

When you weren’t aware of a movie that was coming out until you see a trailer at the theater first.

I wasn't born in the 1990s, but I think being allowed to go out or to a grocery store by yourself if you were -18

Grown men wearing shorts that go below the knee, a necklace and ball caps flipped around backwards. …..Oh yeah, huh?

Good cartoons

Smoking in bars, restaurants, casinos.

Beepers

Physical maps

Video games in fast food restaurants

Eating at a dinner table

The old coke recepie

Changing the time on a VCR

VHS Tapes, the only ones I now know are from my parents and relatives weddings.

We even cleaned out all those old movie collections when we moved.

Trying to find a pay phone.

those phones that you need to roll for each number (usually at the grandparents house) or phones attached to walls

Ballpits

Friends

going on dates and actually spending time with your S/O instead of just wanting sex or nudes

Renting VHS movies from a physical store. Also the "Be Kind, Rewind" stickers.

This also means that VHS cassette rewinders were normal then as well.

Anonymity. Now everyone carries a video camera in their pocket.

Blockbusters

Dot matrix printers

Partylines. My friends and I would be 4 or five on a phone line through the magic of two-way calling. Yes there is group video calls now, but it's different.

Going to the bathroom at work and hoping someone left a newspaper in one of the stalls.so you'd have something to read while you were doing your business.

Also- newspapers.

Video rentals

kurt cobain

POGS

Smoking indoors

Calling “information”/411 to get numbers to places

Testosterone.

Paying a company to come and spray toxic herbicides on my lawn every month.

those little red spider mite things

haven't seen one in so long

List of numbers in your wallet and pay phones

payphones

Pre 9/11 level of sanity.

Going to Jean machine to buy concert tickets

Ha! Ticketmaster used to be sold in the oddest places. I think we had a newsstand/tiny bookstore for one, and the next closest one was at JC Penney or something similar at the mall.

VHS tapes / players

Feeling safe at school

showing status by having a teeny tiny cell phone and a gigantic two way pager. opposite rules apply, losers had tiny pagers with one line displays and colossal cell phones.

Pagers

A home phone. I don’t know anyone who still has one of those. My wife and I have our cell phones, and of course I have a line at work, but not at home. We may need to look into it in a few years when our kids get old enough to start wanting to make phone calls, but more likely we’ll just get them some sort of basic cell phone

ICQ.

I can still hear that “uh oh!” notification sound

Bartman t-shirts.

A single income family owning a home

Reading magazines.

Getting all your fashion inspiration from musicians and actors.

Optimism...

The holy mixtape!!

Rocket Power. I miss that show :'(

Calling to get the time after a power outage. Calling moviephone to find movie times in nearby theaters. Pagers. Changing long distance providers every couple of months to get free money. If you did have a cellphone, only using it at certain times of day to save on minutes unless there was an emergency. Getting an AOL disk/cd in the mail just about every day.

Pagers

Living in the 1990's

Paper bags for groceries but they were done away with to stop global warming

Film cameras.

Just showing up at a homie’s house and chilling without a text or a call first

Memorizing your friends phone numbers

Pay phones

Payphones

Answering machines

Blockbuster, toys r us, etc.

Blockbuster video

Teasing your bangs

Paying to develop film.

Pay phones

Saturday morning cartoons, kids playing outside using the street lights as supervision, movie rental stores

buying a house in your 20s

Smoking became a lot less common

My Aunt Kathy's yearly update letter about what everyone in the family was up to. Or calling Aunt Jacki, the one in charge of keeping everyone's phone numbers and addresses... And sewing for all local family members.

Smoking inside. Soooooo rad.

People saying “Wow, I sure am glad the year is 1995.”

Carrying a pager.

Memorizing peoples’s phone numbers!

Pagers.

Phone books and flobby discs.

Cigarette vending machines in the dairy queen

Telephone booths

Christmas beetles. :(

Music videos on MTV

spanking as a form of discipline

(speaking from experience)

White dog poop. You still see it every once in a while, but most dog food thankfully has better balanced nutrition than it did then.

Pay phones

Perms

Bulls winning titles

4 15's in the trunk.

Going to school without the least suspicion you might get shot.

Ash trays in cars

A rewind machine for your VHS tapes.

The sound of dial-up internet.

Staring into space while waiting for/ to do something

Pubic hair.

Asking someone what decade it is and having them answer “the 90’s”

Cheat Code Central

House phones and copper phone lines.

Beavers

calling cards i still remember the commericals 1800 CALLATT

TV guide

10-10 numbers

Pay phones

Blackberry "smart" phones (I don't miss them)

Making sure you had cash on hand for everything from bus fare, calling home in an emergency, or just buying stuff. While debit cards existed, cash was far more ubiquitous. If I left the house without my wallet I likely wasn't getting very far or doing much. Now I can do everything from buy groceries, pay for train fare, buy Starbucks with just my watch. Currently, my wallet sees more action holding my ID and insurance card.

Asking if grapes have seeds

Walkmans I think

UHF TV. With the circle antenna, clickless channel knob, and vertical hold

Individuality. I know, it seems like there's more but everybody wants to put somebody in some sort of group.

Micheal Jackson

Walkmans and beepers

Payphones

"It is now safe to turn off your computer"

Cliff notes.

Publishers Clearing House and Columbia House ads. Trying to pick just 2 books or five cds from all the options. And I was too young to actually send the forms in!

Sparrows, stay cats and dogs in our city, rain, higher water level

Clunky shoes. God damn I miss clunky shoes.

Stopping by someone’s house without letting them know before hand. Just like the Sebastian Maniscalco bit.

Rotary phones.

Smoking in movie theaters.

Betamax and VHS

Payphones

Truly skunky bud.

Tupac

Frutopia

Patio Burritos

Families surviving comfortably on a single income.

Passing notes in the classroom

Arcades with bowling alleys

Laser tag!

Being born in the 90s

Smoking in restaurants

Meeting friends at the time everyone agreed on AND not flaking last minute

Showing up unannounced to people's houses.

None of my friends would ever do that today.

Even my 87 year old grandmother calls and asks permission before stopping by...

pagers

my dad

Hypercolor T Shirts

Payphones

Meeting friends during a layover at the airport for lunch.

Talking to people without hiding behind a keyboard

Pagers?

owning music
owning software
owning movies
being able to use all the features of the things you owned

Super Nintendo games at a normal goddamn price

My parents were together

People having to wait until you got home for you to return their call.

Eaton’s Christmas catalogue, also the autumn catalogue with the back-to-school clothes.

Being scared because your teacher phoned your parents to talk about your behaviour/grades.

Making plans with others a month before the date and having everyone turn up with no last minute apologies.

UK version: Going "in for a friend", then onto the next friends house and the next. Groups of friends walking all over the town to see other friends and hang out. Now it's just friends sitting in the house texting or facetiming each other.

Concrete playgrounds that were extremely dangerous. Making up your own game of "tig" and kick the can. All kids in the street playing hide and seek.

Smoking in restaurants

Boomboxes

federally legal abortions

Being born in the 90's

Aquanet

Pay phones

Dial-Up Internet

Using payphones.

Collect calls and wacky collect call commercials.

  1. Having to actually watch a show when it aired, no dvr or tivo yet
  2. Having to rewind tapes
  3. Actually listening to a whole CD not just having a playlist with the hit single
  4. Driving somewhere without GPS

Car stereos with removable face plates. Normally for the move expensive Kenwood stereo with the sub woofer under the seat. There was also the carry bag for the face plate.

​

From my experience, it was mainly drug dealers who had these in the 90's.....

Good cars

Cassette tapes, aerosol hair spray, Jacked up Monte Carlos

Pimpin'

Pay phones with the telephone book hanging from the bottom.

Pay booth phones

Being able to joke about anything. These days, you get slapped.

$1.13 gasoline.... i miss 1992

Car windows that you had to manually wheel up.

Lol my car has that :(

I gotta ask, what car you got?

Beepers

Loyalty.

Be kind, please rewind.

Having a conversation in which a question arises, no one knows the answer, and that’s the end of it. We just never find out.

Calling your friend’s house phone only to have their mum pick up first then there’s this weird interaction that has to take place between and 8yo boy and a 35yo woman

Messager chat service - ICQ

Using Internet Explorer.

natural beauty

I wasn't a 90's kid but what about pay phones/phone booths? where those still a thing?

Back yard football games

Common sense.

Renting movies and games from those little mom-and-pop stores.

Skating rinks... I don't see them much anymore, which sucks bc I love to skate...

Smoking. Smoking in bars and restaurants, especially. I don't know if smoking in planes was still a thing, but I remember flying in a few clunkers back then that had the metal ashtrays in the armrests.

I remember smoking in bars in Florida 15 years ago, and having to step outside from time to time because the nasty ashtray smell got too strong.

Glad that shit went by the wayside in most (hopefully all) places.

Jnco jeans

Payphones

Dial up

PAY PHONES!

I win.

Being human

Yo-yos. I haven't seen one of these in like a decade. They used to be everywhere. Pretty much every kid had at least five of them, doing all kinds of cool tricks and things with them. Then they kinda just vanished as videogames got better.

Going to the record store on Tuesday when they released new albums, sometimes racing after school so they didnt sell out. No album and you would have to wait for radio or MTV to lay it to hear it.

Renting videos, in fact owning a VCR! Using landline phones from home, using payphones, more use of letters, sending postcards from holidays instead of pics from your phone..

Really powerful Super Soakers

Phone booths

Cereal toys

Pogs, discman, nano pets Polly pockets tomogatchi

Tamogotchis

Public pay phones.

Cell phones were a thing but nowhere near as accessible or reliable as they are now. So, if you needed to use the phone for anything, you need spare change.

Trapper keepers

Blockbuster / Any Video Rental Store.

Heck, People don't even rent anymore.

Pay phones

Good music

R&b/hip hop that had an actual message and wasnt auto tuned to death cuz they cant really sing

A work life balance

Common sense

Rollercoaster tycoon

Spending hours calling a hotline for concert tickets.

Going to blockbuster for weekend movie rentals

Tamagotchi

Public phones.

Somewhat affordable housing

Split screen gaming especially racing games

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Wheelies

Call a cab and have no idea when its going to show up

dial-up internet & modems

Frosted tips on guys. That was definitely popular among my classmates and friends.

Kurt Cobain live.

Using a pay phone.

Pagers

Rolodex

Calling a girl's house and having to ask her dad to talk to her.

Disposable income.

Comedy that was funny

Blind dates. Now if someone sets you up, you can look at their social media and get an idea of who they are and what they look like. Also, most people will text prior to meeting instead of going in completely “blind.”

<$1.00 gas.

Film camera.

Smoking.

Tamagotchi

idk… pogs?

Smoking section in restaurants. Smoking or non?

Ufff, a lot of things, most replaced by digital technology.

telephone cabins and stuff (cards, coins, etc), split screen multi-player answering machines calling people homes and hoping they are there to reach then, otherwise leaving a message. movie rental like blockbuster old credit card carbon copy and sign dial-in phone internet connection

Pay phones everywhere with giant phone books on a cord.

High revving naturally aspirated engines in cars

“You’ve got mail!”

Recording your favorite song when it plays on the radio.

Beepers, payphones, candy cigarettes and roller blades

Casually throwing around homophobic slurs.

Bud ice, bud dry and reddog beer.

AIDS

Telephone Booths

The card catalog at the library.

Kids outside

Upsetting/ awkward commercials. I'm looking at you Qiznos Sponge Monkeys!

Enter AOL sounds.

Sanity

Smoking in restaurants.

Ball pits

Drive in theaters

The rejection hotline

VCR and tapes

Navigation with paper maps

Digital/analog alarm clocks

Floppy Disks 💾

Floppy discs

Pay phones

Beyblades

People wearing hypercolor shirts. They were kinda cool, but also just gimmicky. I haven't seen one in forever.

For reference, Amazon DOES sell them. Here's a link in case no one knows what I'm talking about.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Shifter-Changing-Sensitive-Shifting/dp/B00CMUXMQ0

Common sense

Rotary dial phones

Lol. The lack of cell phones.

pagers/beepers

Payphones.

Tupac

More than often nice cops. (Inless you were black I guess)

Going to your friends house and ask if they want to hang out. Nowadays if you do that people think you're crazy.

The band Pearl Jam.

A lot of these replies also appear to apply for the early-mid 2000s. I was born in 1998 and saw most of the stuff mentioned in elementary school

Smoking in restaurants

Pager

Smoking sections in restaurants

Blockbuster

Landlines

Answering machines

People who look at you when we are in a conversation. Now a days People are just staring at their phones saying words back.

Landline phones

Those sticky hands on the ends of the stretchy band that was the same material. I can't remember what they're called but I thought they were so cool.

Being able to live separately from your parents. In my 40s and still gotten move my family back in with mom. She can afford her home alone anymore and we can’t afford ours even with two incomes with inflation.

JNCO Jeans

Funny comedy.

Eye contact. Cell phones have rekked us.

JNCO pants

Reasonable, sane Republican Politicians

Going to a convenience store to make copies for 5 cents each with the store's copy machine.

TV shows making fun of everything. Now you can't make fun of anything without someone making a gigantic deal out of it. I think this is part of what made early Simpsons great

Landline homes phones.

Manners

Going to the library to read books, play chess and use their fast computers.

Dial up internet

VCRs

Getting to know someone before having sex.

Beepers.

Mixed tapes

VCRs

Pirate 🏴‍☠️ Satellite tv

Being able to talk and reason with people!

Encyclopedia Brittanica or if you were poor, Funk and Wagnall’s, we got our set at Winn Dixie one at a time over the span of about a year.

Pay phones, video rental stores, novelty corded home phones like those clear ones or my neighbor's train phone that Choo Choooed instead of ringing. Terrible awesome movies like Léon: The Professional or The 5th Element.

Bag phones, shout out.

Low gas prices

Answering machines

We all thought of blockbuster right :D

Common sense.

Chilli bowl haircuts

General optimism about the life and the world. Was (for the most part) a time of global growth, peace, and prosperity.

Having to call the movie theater to hear automated showtimes and/or looking in the newspaper for movie times.

fluo. fluo everywhere

Multi disk CD changers, in your house or your car.

Debates between Smokers vs. Non-Smokers

Pay phones

10 year old to ride a bike to the store, lock it up, buy something, go home

Smoking cigs 🚬

Discmen 💿

A 4WD truck under 40K.

Getting 5 CD’s for a penny mailed to you

Calling card to make calls

Pagers

drinking gin at work on the 40th floor of a manhattan office building at 10:00 am. now they drink fireball

People honking at you if you were driving with your headlights on during the daytime.

Smoking section.

The Box. Just waiting for some person richer than me to pay for a music video and hope it was one I liked.

TripTik Maps from AAA. Paper maps in general.

Basically Everything that was fun to joke about, now everyone is so fucking sensitive they can't take a joke anymore.

Ashtrays in cars and ashtrays in general.

In-vehicle cell phones, and in-vehicle mounts for handheld cell phones.

VCRs and Walkman

Internet access CDs

Getting pics developed from my disposable camera

Michael Jackson

Pagers. With the exception of Healthcare

Bugs on car windshields.

Crazy how many there used to be, but not anymore

Printed encyclopedias.

Dealing with my dad’s bullshit

Asking strangers for the time.

Smoking in restaurants

Smoking in indoor public spaces.

Discman

Payphones, fax machines and answering machines. Also VHS, audio cassettes and Floppy/ Zip disks.

Talking for hours on the one landline phone in the house, or picking it up to the sounds of the internet, followed by yelling from upstairs.

Chicks with bushes

Cassette and VHS tapes. CDs started gettin hot tho!

Smoking indoors, thank christ.

Playing marbles on the street.

Being a good person. Lol

Home ownership. . .

payphones

Getting internet free trials from AOL in cereal boxes.

“GET OFF THE COMPUTER, I NEED TO USE THE PHONE”

Video rental shops

Sex free from pornographic influence & expectations.

Home phones

Phone books.

Dial up internet (at least after AOL got popular.)

Answering machines.

Landline phones for homes.

TV antennae.

Grunge music.

A frightening number of species. Like way way way more than you'd ever guess.

Smoking

Definitely dial up internet

Kids were allowed to walk to school or use buses. No parents who drove their kids to school.

And kids were allowed more things. I lived in a village near a wood with a large river. I was playing most of the day alone, also often alone in the woods. No telephone, no tracking device. I just had to be back till evening. The other kids were allowed the same.

The Club on every steering wheel

Abortion access in the USA?

/s, but also not /s.

Dads hanging up posters of bikini/lingerie models all over their garage.

Not being jacked in all the time. I was way more on the tech cutting edge than the average person, and I didn’t have a PC with internet connection until around ‘95. I generally had access to a roommate’s computer for years prior to that, but younger people nowadays would find it hard to understand how offline the world was prior to 2005 or thereabouts.

56k modems

We could talk about ANYTHING…

beepers

Getting up to change the tv channel

Greeting everyone in your sight

Handwriting (printing) the first draft of a school paper and the FINAL draft in cursive

Police scanners.

At least locally they've all gone encoded digital. I used to sit on the porch at night with my father listening to all the crimes, chases and fires. I knew the lingo and slang. Good times. I miss dialing in the squelch.

Well now they have digital ones!

Any source? I know nothing these days. I used to make buddies with some cops and they'd give me the codes instead of my having to buy a book with the codes in them.

Still work by codes? I need to get me a modern Bearcat.

You can find some on amazon here:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=digital+police+scanner&i=electronics&crid=2M5EZ1VUI98CW&sprefix=digital%2Celectronics%2C142&ref=nb_sb_ss_c_2_7_ts-doa-p

Talking to people who were part of ww2

Working under the table at 13

Roe V. Wade.

Palm Pilot

Music tapes

Landline phones

Probably commented already but MIXTAPES! Amazing part of growing up

Vanilla Ice?

The tootsie pop commercial

VCRs.

A tab or frescia so

Cassettes and CDs

Chivalry

Pagers, everyone seemed to have one.

AOL lol

Smoking in restaurants

Slime.

Phone books

Payphones

Edit: that's probably been said 100 times, so I'll join those who have said "having actual money on you"

Smoking sections.

Customer service.

Smoking cigarettes

1990s calendars.

The AT&T 210

Dewey decimal system

Televised car chases. Seems like you’d see one fairly commonly in the 90’s. I guess we don’t see them now cause we mostly just have streaming tv now

Quicksand

Vinyls I’m assuming

The floppy disc

Blockbuster

affordable housing

Kurt Cobain

Walking to school (rain or shine)

[deleted]

Pogs

Surge!

A clean and stock EG civic.

Computer BBS systems

Kids playing street hockey. Jumping off the roof of your garage or house. Arcades. Losing ALL contact with your favorite cousins now

My social life.

Cassette tapes and CD’s

White dog shit

All that and a bag of chips

Your peeper (pager) goes off in the middle of a business meeting.

Carrying around a portable CD Player & a folder of CDs.

I still have mine. Did not have the anti shock so I had to carry it with very steady hands

Palm Pilot

VCRs. I loved video tapes. And taping things from TV. And you would have a couple movies on one tape. I remember when I was like 7 or 8, I taped Teenwolf and Terminator from TV. I would watch both at least once a week.. hahaha.

Cassette players

Pogs

Video Games in Cereal Boxes...

Like Chex Quest or CD versions of board games.

Actual Republicans. That "group" is a cult of rabid, deluded bastards now.

Landline phones.

Public telephone booths

The ability to make friends after turning 30

Good rap and hip-hop

AOL CD-roms

Everywhere, in the mail every other day. Piled up on the counter. Check out aisle at the super market.

Then later came the CD wall art from said CDs

Rotary dial phones (when I moved in 1990, touch tone was an optional add-on for an extra couple of dollars per month).

Floppy disks and the Pepsi Challenge

Screen watching N64's GoldenEye multi-player, and denying it every time you get a kill.

Pay phones?

Rollerblades

Social skills

POGs

Going to the CD shop on Tuesdays to get new CDs.

Sitting in the car and looking at album art and reading the cover

Pagers and pay phones.

Sense of humor.

Pogs

Empathy

VHS tape rewinders

Happiness

Fun

Writing the date as a year beginning with 19xy.

Pagers?

Being able to have a conversation with someone without talking about race, politics or religion. It was a good time when people were cool with each other’s differences.

Being homophobic lmao

Breaking up being easy

Living your daily life without being constantly interrupted.

DVDs

The Learning Channel showing surgery full on.

Pay phones

Watching porn and having sex

Heelys

Center partings

White dog poops

Unibrows. Laser hair removal has ended the unibrow look.

Those big winged ants that would show up every summer when I was a kid. They no longer do.

Phone booths

Having to call the movie theater to know what was playing at what times.

Weird. I can’t see a single mention of CDs! I haven’t touched my hide collection in years.

Being born in the 1990s, people just dont do that anymore for some reason.

living in the years 1990-2021

JNCO Jeans

Planning a trip by unfolding a paper map

Smoking in the Airplane

Pogs

Good journalists

Just going to someone’s house and knocking on the door.

Suzuki Samurais and Ford Escorts

Optimism

Car splattered with bugs after driving for a few hours

Grotto Beasts.

Women without an only fans

Home phones

Pagers...

Tie Fighter for MS-DOS that came on 7 floppy disks and a manual based DRM

Zip discs

Smoking indoors

Gender

Being able to take some cash and a note from your parents asking the store clerk to sell smokes to you for them.

And the clerks being fine with it.

Catalogs had order blanks. Pleasant Company still made American Girl dolls. They had more and better outfits and little maroon boxes that their outfits came in. They still made Felicity and Kirsten and Molly.

Cool beans.

Smoking. Everywhere.

Beating your children when they act like shits

Making friends online and never knowing their name

Getting Magazines delivered to the house. There was nothing better than coming home to a Nintendo Power or EGM or Nickelodeon Magazine as a kid. Gave you something to look forward to. Or if a game came out and having to wait to see what the scores were. Just a different time. Now it’s all instant.

Affordable housing

I remember my dad sitting at the kitchen table with a calculator, balancing the checkbook and getting the checks for bills ready to mail

Hope and optimism for the future.

Phone booths and brick-like cell phones.

White wall tires

At the third stroke it will be 11.10 precisely

Arcades

Good music

VHS players

When I was in gymnasium (highschool? 15-19 year olds), one of our teachers said that in the 90’s, early 20’s, it was normal that students were dating the teachers. We were all weirded out because it seems to outlandish now due to the age difference but I guess no one batted an eye at the time

Your teacher should be investigated

Homophobia and Payphone’s

Fun.

Water beds. Everyone in my family had one and they were Soo weird

BBSes, and your upload/download ratio as an early form of clout.

Pay phones

Type writers

Hope for the future.

Waiting like 5 minutes for a website to load. VHS. Being able to go through airport security without a boarding pass.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Thankfully not 90s fashion

Smoking in bars

People following through with plans.

In the 90's if you made plans with someone or a group they would either actually follow through or they would call and cancel or tell you they're running late well in advance. Now people just ghost you30 seconds before the meeting time or much, much later.

Land lines in homes

Crystal pepsi.

Magazine subscriptions

Hanging up the phone hard after an upsetting conversation. Clicking ‘end’ just doesn’t hit the same way.

Thats why i bought an otter box now can throw my phone

IRC chat rooms

Blockbuster/ movie stores. The best.

Cassette tapes - rewinding them and playing the fave song over and over again !

Blockbuster video

Buying gaming magazines and the cover disc demos was my gaming for the next month

Cds

Internet cafes

Watching TV constantly. I was basically raised by The Learning Channel and Nickelodeon. Now I rarely watch an actual TV show beginning to end, and never on an actual TV.

Rolodex by the landline

Real looking toy guns

Movie rental places. R-I-P Hastings 😢

Good rap/hip hop music.

Dial up Internet installed from a boot disc mailed to your home.

Beepers

Smoking in restaurants and bars

Cruising.

5th St was my social network. Nobody ever knew where anyone was, ever. If you wanted to meet up with someone, you had to make plans and hope that motherfuckers showed up, or hoped for the luck of the draw circling town.

Treating everyone with respect and dignity no matter what

Full service gas stations

grunge

People shrugging and saying "Hey--it's the 90's!"

As a kid, I was really surprised people didn't find some way to carry that into future decades.

A sense of hope for the future. Yeah it was pretty nihilistic at times but now people have none at all.

Brick and mortar music stores in the mall. The feeling of walking around looking at cds as a kid was something you’ll never be able to replicate. Finding new artists. Checking out the new releases. Listening to the demo tapes of the cds to see if you’ll like it or not. Waiting for your local store to finally get the cd in you e been wanting. I guess malls in general are kind of a thing of the past. Really it’s quite sad tbh.

Ginger spice dyed hair strips at the front

"Save the rainforest!" bake-sales.

This made me miss the 90's even more, I wanna go back to the 90's.

The humble Automobile

Plane hijackings. They used to be fairly common. You’ve probably seen the last one, now.

Beeper codes. 911 143 411 121

Having to somehow remember phone numbers.

Pay phones, and when your phone breaks midday you really miss them

Home ownership.

Collect calls. 10-10-220 and others with commercials and catchy tunes

My thigh gap

Body Shop strawberry fragrance

Calling the landline!

Having a VCR

Blowjobs in the oval office.

Hope for a better world

Beanie babies

Station wagons.

What is everyone's obsession with sitting higher than everyone else?

VHS

Human rights. Specifically good ones.

Pogs.

Waterbeds

Pay phones.

Short-sleeve button down shirts made of rayon, with knockoff anime characters on them

Fax machines 📠

Pay-phones

A republican capable of having a reasonable conversation about anything

Honesty

Pay phones

Knocking on someone's door when you get to their house

Conversation

There were still a lot of men wearing "studs" on the soles of their shoes in the 1990s. Mainly older men but they still existed. You heard those guys coming from 60 yards away.

Encarta

JUST GETTING ON A FUCKING PLANE

Sex

Pager

A sense of humor

Walkmans

Technology was developed to serve humanity in the 1990s instead of signing up for skynet's rusty serrated strap on.

justin bieber hairstyle

Cameras with film rolls .

Full size spare tyres

Space shuttle flights

being paid a living wage

Roll-down car windows.

Pagers

Pagers

Lightning bugs. What happened to those things?

Faxing

Devil sticks

Walkie talkies like kids in the 90swould use them to talk to friends but no kids get phones

Good music

Busy malls

AOL free web time discs.

Pogs.

Fun sport cars

Pubic hair.

Video stores

Cassette tapes and to a lesser degree CD's.

Happy people

Being genuinely excited when someone knocked on your door and you weren't expecting anyone lol.

An album where most or even all the songs were good

Not being fat

Pogs

Smoking sections in restaurants (in the US at least)

Smoking indoors

Blockbusters

everything tech related basically

Blockbuster on a Friday night.

I know at least 7 separate groups of 5-10 people all in college, in the same apartment complex, and born after 2000 who have group mario kart and smash bros nights.

Ringing the phone number on a gaming magazine to buy cheats and tips.

Laserdiscs, riding in the back of a pick up truck with about 5 other heads and 105.5 KNAC!!!

Dodge neons

Blockbuster on a Friday

I would like to say Disaster movies. Volcanos, asteroids, tornados, and huge tidal waves. The natural disaster stuff.

Are they still being made?

Pagers

Your parents not knowing exactly where you were. Me and the neighborhood kids would be running around our corner of suburbia from the time school let out until dinner and all day on the weekends and nobody your parents couldnt call you or track you or whatever

Going to Best Buy to buy music.

Happiness

My erection

🙁

Tim Curry as the voice of every Disney villain 😢

Tvs that weigh so much you need more than 1 person to carry them.... Fuck LAN parties back in the were a hassle.

Carrying a huge CD bag to your car and back into your apartment every day because you didn’t want them stolen if they broke into your car.

Curtains. (Hairstyle). RIP.

Spice Channel

Spice Girls in the news.

Morals

Pro life democrats

Calling people, now it's mostly apps and texts

No cell phones recording a concert. Pure bliss.

Monarch butterflies and many other insects.

Bye bye ladybugs

Negerbollar

Memorizing phone numbers ☎️

D U N K A R O O S .

Emos

Getting to the airport maybe half an hour before your flight took off

Car cell phone. I remember my parents having one that plugged into the cigarette lighter. They would only use it to tell people they were running late or to check in with the babysitter haha.

Buying Pokémon cards (WOTC) booster packs from the stores

Pagers

Pay phones

Men and women

People that drive manual transmission vehicles

Burning CDs

AOL and brick and mortar computer super stores. Hobby shops (NOT Hobby Lobby) that have model trains, cars, planes and that sort of thing are pretty hard to find.

Pagers and watches

Rollodex (spelling?)

Landlines.

Pagers

Physical media in general. It's kind of crazy how far we've come with technology in just 30 years or so.

Ska bands

Trusting someone would meet you later without tech.

Pagers

Landlines

Young kids in the front seat.

Children walking to school. (Yes, I realize this still happens but in my experience, way less. My parents live in the same house I grew up in. We walked to school and basically so did everyone else unless you took the bus. Now, when school lets out, parents' cars are lined up for a mile. And they still have the busses. It's just that fewer kids walk these days. I've heard this from my friends with kids too.)

Having to juggle mum wanting to make a phone call and me wanting to use the internet

There were sooo many cows and goats outside Grandma's home in my childhood, now i see nothing

Rotary phones

Land lines and pay phones.

Cars with manual transmissions. Now they charge more for one and play it off as an "upgraded sport transmission." In the 90's it meant you didn't shell out an extra grand for the automatic. I miss my clutch =(

Riding my bike anywhere. Miss that.

weed being considered a big deal. the worst drug was heroin, but even then you didn't hear about someone from your high school dying multiple times a year from an OD. just in the past few years, i've heard of like 5 people dying from Fent ODs. that used to be really rare.

Hypercolour tshirts

Surfstyle jackets

Electronic Skip Protection

REAL, true, High Fidelity, loud and clear, rock your face off sound systems.

Comedy being comedy

Pagers.

Following this to unlock some nostalgia

Playing outside with your friends as a kid till the street lights came on.

Sex with condoms

Telephone booths.

My ex-wifes hyman.

Carrying around lose change. Not only is the most common reason, pay phones, virtually extinct, but cash is becoming increasingly uncommon for most transactions, including little purchases, even vending machines.

This..this is a great thread guys. Thanks for this yeah.

Pop up Headlights

Pagers

Eye contact

Lightening bugs

Calling collect. 1-800 c.a.l.l.a.t.t.! I wonder if that still works.

Hairy vag?

White dog poop

Pagers. Need the clip hanging out of the pocket of my Jncos.

We still had shame. People used to be better at being ashamed of themselves when they got caught doing something atrocious.

Calendars from the 1990s

Kids playing outside

Frosted tips.

Gameboy printer paper.

Privacy

Pay phones

Butterfinger BB’s

Gen Z

POGs.

People who want to get tramp stamps.

Financial security

Trapper Keepers

Collect calls.

Skipping school

Kids playing outside.

Pay phones

Thought.

1-800-C-A-L-L-A-T-T

Manners

Using a paper map to get around.

Saying back in your day kids played outside instead of playing video games while ignoring all the kids playing outside. Oh wait...

Buying a house

Saturday morning cartoons?

video store

Playing Magic: The Gathering for ante.

Common sense

Jnco's

Pay phones

Answering the telephone and having no idea who was in the other end

Payphones

Beepers/pagers

Going places without a phone on you.

MTV

Pay phones

Not, Duh, & Did I Do That

Something less nostalgia filled: being weird about someone being gay was normal.

Recording a song you like off the radio on to a blank tape

Mike Tyson level boxing

CDs in your car

Having a smoking section

Pay phones and those 10 10 3 2 1 number codes

Being in the moment and enjoying things without distractions. Smart phones and social media have ruined a lot of things

Asking your friends mom to call them back to meet up and play

Calling your friends house and asking his mom if he could play. Now you just text your friend.

Standing in line to buy concert tickets from Ticketmaster

Didn’t see anyone mention smoking sections in restaurants Thank god that’s long gone

Pay phones

Knocking at your friends’ house hoping they’re available to play outside without texting first

comic books

Beepers

Comedic expression

VHS renting

Putting a scratched disc in a machine to fix all the scratches. Used to go to Blockbuster to get it done.

Pay phones and calling collect. In door malls.

Telegram

Walkman that played cassette tapes?

Beepers?

Reading PAPER books?

Using a payphone to call somebody. I haven't seen one in probably 15 years at least. I miss checking them for change people left behind, it was habit. Or collect calls. Remember the commercials? Fucking carrot top sticks out the most. I miss the 90s.

Pagers

Dial up internet

Super soakers that worked and were powerful.

Calling Collect from a payphone (because you've got no change--or you're just cheap) to get a ride from somebody.

Using a CRT TV

Pay phones

Grunge rock.

VCRs, mall hangouts, board games, people actually talking with each other, mall shopping, my sanity, being able to keep myself busy in the car, being a carefree kid with no worries— crap, I forgot Americans don’t know what “no worries” means.

Smoking in restaurants and other indoor/public places.

Talking on the phone after having had memorized your friend's phone number. #90sKid

Puffy spin art tshirts

Thomas Guides

Burning a CD for an ex and hoping it will make him want you again….spoiler, it never worked

The Van of Sin

CD and tape music stores.

Smoking indoors thank god

Smoking inside public places.

Cordless touch tone phones.

Music videos on MTV.

JNCOs

Birthday parties at McDonald's.

As a 90's child, just being a kid in the time. Now we 90's kids are all grown up.

Asking strangers for the time

Beepers/pagers

Keeping a map in your glove box.

Pay phones? Idk wasn’t alive lol

Local Ska Bands

Pagers

Video tapes.

RadioShack and toys r us. (Yes I know there's supposed be a comeback but I've yet to see it in oregon)

Must See tv! No one watches the same shows so there isn’t conversations at work about what we all watched last night

Tamagotchi

Playing unsupervised all day until the street lights came on

Seeing retro game consoles

Reading some of these comments makes me realize how reliant we’ve become on technological advancements from the past few decades, mainly phones. It’s easy to forget when you have so many things at the touch of your fingertips, yet it’s important to remember its like a double edged sword. I think it would be beneficial to not be so reliant on these things, little things like starting off by keeping analog devices or learning a new skill can help. It will help you survive

Grabbing a movie or 2 from the Blockbuster on Friday night.

Smoking in a bar or restaurant....now there are virtually no places that allow you to do it...I remember being asked smoking or non-smoking in restaurants.

Affordable housing

Waterproof disposable Kodak cameras.

NetZero

CD players

Payphones

Music without autotune!

Using a beeper

Kids being encouraged to leave their electronics in the house and go play outside till sundown.

Telling a joke and not offending someone.

Flannel shirts tied around your waist.

Tupac

Borland TurboPascal

Sick boom bap beats

Hyundai Pony

Conversation

Parachute pants

Carrying a beeper

Having a designated place for your family to meet in case of a fire in the home. I guess now you just run away and hope that everyone is alive and well.

Safe, legal abortions.

Still available today.

Movies not having a sequel

Going out somewhere with a paper and pen to get numbers of people you met and were interested in.

Also, planning to meet somewhere at a specific time and people ACTUALLY showing up on time. Now I feel that too many people use meeting times as suggestions, because they feel its fine to just text that they are running late.

Hanging out at the mall. All. Fucking. Day. Not buying anything because....poor.

Voicemails and faxes

grunge rock

Phone books

Landline telephones

Pawn shop offset fender guitars.

Camping out at the Ticketmaster location for concert tickets to go on sale for a show that you wanted to see.

Landlines

Telephone booths and beepers

True happiness

Using numerics to exchange text messages through a beeper.

"You are receiving a collect call from, 'HIMOMCOMEPICKMEUPFROMSCHOOL,' press 1 to accept cha..."

click

Finding out news in the newspaper.

Beepers

Just showing up at someone’s house, friend or family.

My theory is that before cell phones, it was reasonable to be out and about and decide to stop by to see someone. Now that everyone is available via cell phones and 100 messaging services, there’s no excuse to not check in with someone first.

home ownership xd

Compact disc players, along with rows upon rows of CDs.

BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES!

Pay phones.

My virginity (early on).

Calling Time & Temp.

Pay phones

what do you mean I see Public bathrooms everywhere. some of them even move underground on rails and on the ground with wheels.

Being excited when someone rings your doorbell

Corded phones....hung on the wall of your kitchen.

Dialup internet

Compact discs

Band posters.

Has anyone said your wallet attached to a chain yet?

No, you're golden. Go for it!

Making gimp bracelets at summer camp

Dial up internet. I will never forget that sound. Nor the pain of being disconnected when someone tried to use the phone.

VCRs and Super Nintendos 🙏🏻 Still have my Super Nintendo from then but no VCR. 😢

Walkmans

Interesting/educational content on TLC, the History Channel and Discovery Channel. Before everything was ruined by reality TV and fluff.

Beepers

opening your girl’s car door

Kick ass super soaker water guns!!!! - nothing these days comes even close

Non-Smoking sections.

Knocking on someone’s door, instead of texting “im here” on a date

Downloading your favorite song as your ringtone

Dollar Double feature movies and a Drive in theater.

CDs

I used to write. I used to write letters. I used to sign my name. I used to sleep at night. Before the flashing lights settled deep in my brain.

Pay phones.

Smoking inside.

Pizza at McDonald's.

Hanging up the phone to go on the internet.

JNCO jeans :(

Pocket Watch

Payphones

Riding in the back of pick-up trucks

Driving around with a suitcase-like case of compact discs to listen to.

Grunge

Using sun in for sun bleached hair.

Arcades, video stores, book stores, the common indie coffee shop, skate shops, indie video game stores where you can rent time to play consoles, pay phones, arcade machines in random places, audio systems playing loudly in cars

Smoking sections in restaurants

Talking on the phone.

Seeing a video store on every corner.

Blue jeans where one leg was a different color than the other leg. And of course, the pockets were alternating colors too.

I’m not sure if this has been said, but I scrolled a long way and didn’t see it. CDs. In fact, I think I still played tapes in my car in the 90s. Actually, it wasn’t all that long before the 90s when I had a car with an 8-track player in it.

Smoking in restaurants

Having a landline

99¢ Stores

School Fundraisers which the students and teachers work together. Please tell me I’m wrong. C’mon internet! I’m counting on you!

Pager/beeper

Courteous behavior

Ashy dog poop piles

Pagers

The AV cart at school. If the TV/DVD on the wheeled stand was in class when you arrived you knew it was an easy period.

Good music

Buying concert tickets on the phone or in person at the venue. Getting seats for a popular show has become a nightmare.

Having to sign up for presale’s, then wait in Ticketmaster’s god forsaken ‘queue’ before you enter the freaking Thunderdome where you battle with professional scalpers AND TM’s scammy ass ‘dynamic pricing’.

Most of the seats are marked up like crazy and wind up on StubHub. Takes all the joy away from actual fans.

Telephone booths

Good Simpsons episodes.

The best part is Gaben made a percentage off of every single item you sold and then got the remainder when you bought the SD.

Well played Gaben, well played.

Smoking cigarettes, EVERYWHERE.

Yuck.

Speculating about Y2K

Not getting into a stranger's car.

Tivo

Sharing video/game CDs in school.

AOL discs

VCR’s and Please Be Kind, rewind.

Showing up to a friends place unannounced

floppy disks

Michael Jordan winning championships

Good TV advertising

Pay phones

5 TV channels if you didn't have cable, and 30 if you did.

Oh yeah, and getting up and walking over to the TV to change the channel.

Pay phones

Yellow Wendy’s

Blockbusters

Pagers

Cable tethered personal phones

We had rotary dial phones in my house in the early 90s. I think I was the last kid I knew that still had them growing up. I remember when we bought our first push button phone. Those were the days!

Answering machines. Analog TV. Car phones. Big CD players in the trunk of the car. Pagers. Cars with only one or two airbags.

Pagers

Pagers/Beepers

Pay phones

Ah, video rental.

Beepers.

Pagers, tramp stamps, r&b boy bands, girl groups, music television

Blockbuster

“That’s gay”

Shame.

Pagers

VCR , POLAROID CAMERA, HBO BOXING.

Fax machines

As a kid we used to play Manhunt, which is basically just hide and seek after dark and it was helpful to wear dark clothing so you could hide around people's bushes. Absolutely unthinkable now.

Mel Gibson

Having to either use quarters or use pay card to make a phone call.

CRT meant something else. I am still confused for a split second when I see a headline about CRT and can’t figure out what old televisions have to do with anything.

The absence of school shootings

Privacy

A landline.

Being able to get a date if you are less than average looking

imagine thinking that dating was easier in the 90s x,D

Republicans that weren't complete traitors, or at least better liars

House phone with the longest cord you can imagine.

Using paper maps and/or Atlases for traveling.

I can’t believe I haven’t seen this yet: calling anything you didn’t like “gay”. Maybe this was particularly a 00s thing, but I remember being annoyed at all my friends, including very liberal ones, doing this right up til around 2010. It’s also a trip to watch old Simpsons episodes and see how often the joke is that someone is “gay”. I know we still have gay jokes now and not all of them are made in good faith, but the absolute universal casualness of “gay” meaning “bad” for what felt like decades is basically gone and sometimes I still can’t believe it.

At least around the people I remember who said it a lot, they were not actually anti-gay. Some of them were actually gay. It was an exaggerated “ghey” and I remember it being sorta ironic. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ghey I’m sure other people did mean it maliciously though.

At some point around 2013 or so I noticed all the gay jokes became ironic. Before then it probably depended on what circles you were in, but even people who had nothing against homosexuality would just use it to mean bad. "That's so gay," my friend would complain when someone headshot him from a hiding spot in Halo. No trace of irony, yet no intended maliciousness. Much as calling someone a "pussy" even now isn't always said with active/conscious misogynistic or homophobic intent.

I remember a radio host being super offended that people were calling him out for using the word that way. "I have nothing against homosexuals, that's just what the word means!", he said. "If something sucks, it's gay!" Thankfully enough people eventually realized that words actually just mean whatever we use them to mean, and so we can get rid of that dumb, harmful meaning by just not using it that way anymore, and everyone else just got pressured into agreeing I guess.

Smoking (cigarettes).

Don’t get me wrong—there are still obviously smokers, but the changes in the last 20 years have been unbelievable. I was a server when we still had smoking sections, and one day it was just… gone. When I was in high school, we had a designated smoking section outside for the students and teachers. Done. Very few of my friends smoke, even fewer of my younger sibling’s do, but I know of very few adults my parent’s age who didn’t (or don’t).

Internet via dial up modem

As a videogame collector... the original cardboard boxes that videogames came in for the NES, SNES, N64, Gameboy and Gameboy advance. The older the system, the harder it is to find the boxes in good shape. Kids used to just rip them open, stomp on them and throw them out like trash. For many games, the box can be as much or more than the actual game itself because of this. I've got some video game boxes worth hundreds of dollars, for the cardboard the game came in...

People walking up to me and giving me a bit of blow.

rolodexes and franklin day planners, though those were starting to go the way of the dodo by the end of the 90s with things like Palm Pilots gaining popularity

Pagers!

Pointy white sneakers.

Open mike/ spoken word/ poetry slam night at the local indie coffeehouse..

Nocturnal Cafe, I miss you...

1-900-Numbers. They used to have a 1-900 number for anything.

payphones

Separation of church and state.

Bowl cuts.

Radio contests, video rental stores, people with a thick skin..

Batteries

Home ownership among younger people.

Roller Rinks

Going to Blockbuster or Movie Gallery with your family on a Friday night and picking up the latest VCR release Good Burger. While you’re in line to rent the movie you call Pizza Hut for a delivery so that the delivery guy will get there soon after you get home.

Very specific, very nostalgic. ☺️

Hand written post cards

Home phone lines

WebTV. It was the Internet… but big, with background music!

Casually getting together just for the heck of it. Most people nowadays have enough excuses, responsabilities or roundabout ways to make reunions their last choice

One person showing up to meet up with another person, that other person not showing up even 20 minutes after the agreed-upon time (for whatever reason), and the first person simply going home again. With no communication going on between the two.

Catalogue shopping. Sears, Victoria Secrets, Delia’s, Car & Driver ... every market group had at least one that appealed to them.

Kids playing outside, riding bikes without a helmet, getting dirty without helicopter parents hovering over them.

Overalls/Suspenders

Having/using a paper map or writing down directions.

(Lamented those days during the Rogers internet outage in Canada last Friday as I tethered to the one non-Rogers neighbour for 30 min to download a map to get me to my camp site.)

My dad always gave very detailed directions, like there 3 trees and a big Boulder on this corner. Told my sister once "there will probably be deer in this field" and sure as shit there were deer there.

Haha, a couple of days late but yeah, those are the kinds of directions my dad gives. My dad still wants to give me directions even though I have navigation. I used to stop him and tell him it wasn't necessary, but now I realize it's his way of helping so I just let him tell me, nod and listen, then I turn on navigation when I get in the car.

Kids playing outside

Receiving a computer game in a cereal box.

Reruns

Pogs

A night without existential dread.

Internet terminals in airports. Pay phones. Calling collect. Long distance fees. Dying of AIDS.

JNCOs

When you were off work, work didn't bother you. While it may not have seemed like it bosses cared more about your time back then then now. I once had my phone going off throughout the night and still had to be at work the next morning. This went on for months with almost no pause. They didn't care until I almost ended up in a psych hospital. The only reason I didn't is because my jobs insurance wanted to send me to a special place designed specifically for my occupation to include I had expectations that were also work related.

Your dad he had you in the 90’s then went to go get milk and never came back

Places just smelling like smoke.

Maps

Happiness

Tips N Tricks magazine for video games

Reading magazines in bookstores

Phone booths

Those candy cigarette packs with the nasty chocolate inside

Pagers

Vídeo rentals, VCRs and dialup modems

dark anime

Pagers

Fax machines

Rotary phone.

When malls actually had customers

WWII Veterans

Waiting until night time work weekends for free calling/texting

Pro sport teams in Detroit winning games

Phone booths.

cocaine

Pagers?

Pagers

Gun racks in trucks were totally normal

Upward mobility

Agreeing to meet somewhere and not being able to make any changes to the plans.

Occasionally, you’d arrive, they wouldn’t be there and you’d find out what happened later.

The mystery of living in the 90s

The fear of Y2K

paper mail

Double legged him into a steel door and beat the living shit out of him for a sold 10 seconds before I got pulled off him.

Playing multiplayer video games split screen and in-person.

Freedom and privacy.

Web rings, online.

The 56k modem handshake sounds.

Waiting a couple minutes just for half of a picture of a naked lady to load. Forget about video.

"You've got mail."

Writing your own web page in plain HTML.

Struggling to play your game boy with vary little light.

Having an attention span longer than 90 seconds.

Waiting until after 9pm to shoot the breeze with your friends. I remember paying a few dollars a month to Sprint to have non peak start at 7pm.

Dial up, landlines, sexual harassment in the workplace, fax machines, tape deck in your car, camcorders, neon colored clothes, gas cheaper than milk, freaking about Y2K, asking the pilot to see the cockpit of the plane while in flight...

Able to make jokes without being cancelled

Tonka speakers that you could sit in while rolling at show where a DJ is flipping real vinyl.

Dial up internet

Asking for traffic direction to strangers

Hope

Chalky white dog poop.

Blockbusters.

Pay phones and pagers

A physical bulletin board in your hime for things like upcoming tickets, coupons, photos, school calendar, etc

Pagers.

I still have my sister's pager number memorized. It's been almost 30 years

Ironically, I still call her several times a week but have absolutely no idea what her cell phone number is.

Pagers.

Equal rights

Ribbon Dancing

The belief that the future looks bright. Seriously. I grew up in the 90s and the future looked great. Now the world is facing disaster with climate change. Our country is extremely divided to the point of hostility and violence. We have gun violence in schools. It looks like hard times ahead.

Saturday morning cartoons. I remember getting up early on Saturday mornings to watch shows on Fox Kids and Kids WB. Nowadays, you can just watch everything online.

Getting chicken pox

As a surfer we had to read weather/ isobar maps call a coastguard weather phone line and watch the weather on the news and have a good guess to see if it was worth going on a road trip for a surf. Now it’s all automated with cameras and forecasts at spots makes it very easy

The phone book. Phone calls calls. Being outside. Knocking on doors. Having your door knocked. Feeling safe in school. The library. Renting movies. Walking to friend’s houses, neighborhoods.

It was such a good time except for some major things: we didn’t have anything available at our fingertips, more sexism, more racism.

no full sleeve or face tattoos

Arcades.

Smoking indoors, landlines, payphones, gameboys, roll up car windows

Cassette tapes.

The art of wondering

Movies and tv shows that didn't feel the need to have a token character

Pagers

Beepers.

Moon shoes.

Going to Blockbuster to pick out a movie. It was a fun event. The walls lined with VHS and DVDs

Pagers. Now pretty much only doctors use them.

Making someone you like a mixtape

Pager

A phone that you unzipped.

Phone Booths

Landline phones. Laser disk movies. MTV. Democracy. Pay phones. Recorded on tape phone messages. CDs, floppy disks, Zip disks, Napster. Your mom’s virginity.

Integrity.

Sitcoms with casual homophobia or racism or sexual assault played for chuckles

Payphones

Minding your own business.

VCRs

Cat's Music.

Being bad at trivia

Spare time.

Democrats being anti-war.

The long straps we all had hanging off the side of our jeans. I think they got big around the same time as WWJD.

Cd walkmans

Chocolate actually tasting like chocolate. Anything pre 2000 in Canada was loaded with trans fats. Chocolate was made with cocoa butter instead of wax. Food just tasted better back then. Yeah, I know Palm Kernel oil is destroying the planet and heart disease stats were very high….But dang if I don’t miss real sugar in soda/pop and animal fat in everything

passing notes in class

Answering the phone

Sobe

I was born in 2002, but…

Not having a phone.

Lightning bugs

XTREEME FLAVORS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Going to the mall

Hearing SKREEEEEEEEEEEwooooooooooooooWEEEEEEEEEEEEEE when getting online

Smoking. Absolutely everywhere. In homes, car, child in lap, restaurants, stores, malls, parks

Home phones

Home phones.

Privacy! No cameras and internet light.

Top notch content on the History or Discovery channel

Pay phones, mail boxes etc, 1-800 collect, buying cd's & blank tapes, *69, video rental, Diet Rite, psychologists talking about a "chemical imbalance," DARE, white people confidently doing accents from around the world, all sorts of stuff. Now we just have mass shooters, revocation of human rights, climate disasters, pandemics, neo-fascism, ...but with wifi and touchscreens so everything is better!!!

Extreme

POGs

“Art” that required you to unfocus your eyes in order to see the image. I think they were called stereograms.

Having questions you had no way of getting the answers to.

Wooly willy

Calling something stupid or weird, gay.

Pay phones

Pauly Shore

Opinions

People born in the 1930s.

Smoking in restaurants/inside in general

Smoking indoors

Renting movies on vhs tapes and listening to music on cassette tapes lol

I miss the 90s ...there were phone booths, cigarette dispensers at Denny's, smoking in Denny's (the smell of cigarettes mixed with breakfast .. miss that!!) .. everyone drove a stick. Less regulations in general.

Sticker albums for movies.

​

I still have my Lion King one.

Privacy rights

Blockbuster

Modems

Having to discover and memorize all the button combinations to mortal Kombat move sets (fatalities, brutalities, etc)

Using a magazine to learn how to play your video game (looking at you, Myst)

People asking you "how are you?" and others responding "good" and actually meaning it.

Real vanilla in desserts

Watching ESPN, purposely

Smoking everywhere

Quicksand, spontaneous human combustion (probably because we eradicated it with stop, drop, and roll).

floppy disks

White dog poop on the footpath 🤷

The 1990s

People having pagers

Snackwells

Memorizing phone numbers

Paid Phones, or any non-smart phone in general.

A place we would regroup, if we got lost, when we reached a venue, (aka pub, festival etc).

Phone booths

Yo-yos and pogs

Old Television and messing with the antennae. The old PlayStation start-up noises. Family dinners... ☹️

having a 1990´s calendar

MySpace.

Paying for something with a check

The SnackWell’s cookie man

Spanking your kids

Pubic genital hair.

Pay phones

Smoking inside

Forest Porn

Loyalty,honesty, the pledge of allegiance

Pay phones

Being able to afford a house

Beepers/pagers.

Dial up.

Aol cds

Volkswagen Beetles or “Slug Bugs”. I’m only 16 but I know they stopped production in the early 2000s so don’t yell at me if I’m wrong

My teacher would tell me about a time when there used to be designated spots in our school for smoking. Sounds believable but also crazy to think about since they also cracked down on vaping and stuff before I graduated

1990s calendars

Pogs

Phone booths

Knocking on doors to see if a friend can come out and hang

Parachute pants neon color block

Fun

A 1991 Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle.

Using Reader’s Digest to pick the shows you want to watch with the family that night

Scrolled for a bit. May be somewhere and I missed it...women's rights in the all mighty USofA?

Unsupervised children

Conversations that didn’t involved politics, or social issues.

Young people affording a house

Payphones.

I miss all the punk bands touring around.

VHS rewinders. Needing to rewind VHS when renting.

CDs being the main way people listened to music in cars. CD holding cases. CDs skipping.

Paperback game strategy guides

Cross country trip requiring a book of maps of all the state roads. Would spend a bit before the trip highlighting out the route we'd take.

Pagers

Agreeing to disagree about a fact.

With the entire collection of human knowledge in our pockets, we can’t help but prove our point to win an argument these days. Facts from reliable sources end these kinds of discussions.

Could you even imagine what it would be like if different groups of people had their own versions of the truth for literally everything?

Moving the TV antennaes for clear reception

Buying the latest CD

Movies on video casettes with previews and extra features

Having conversations without having someone check their phone 15 times

A room for the computer

Surge

CD's and DVD's

Having a landline at home

Being on the phone with someone, suddenly hearing dial tones through it mid convo and then yelling "MAAAAAA I'M ON THE PHONE"

You know what? I'm going to say channel surfing cable TV. Not that fancy satellite TV or digital TV where you could bring up a menu and select a show playing at any time. I'm talking about needing the TV guide, watching that one channel that scrolled through programming currently on, and then just straight up channel surfing trying to find something good. I honestly loved clicking through the channels and not knowing what I might find, stopping on something interesting, and then deciding if I wanted to learn more about it or not.

It's so hard to channel surf or discover anything new in today's on-demand always streaming society.

The closest thing to it these days is using an OTA antenna on a cheap TV without a guide. If you live in a large metro you can get like 30-40 channels to flop through.

I also really miss this for some reason…. used to have analog cable at my grandma’s when i was growing up…

Years that start with a 1. I swear it was like every year started with a 1 when I was younger. Now, you almost never see those anymore.

Knowing your neighbors. I could tell you when I was growing up who lived in each house up and down my block. Now I barely know my next door neighbor. I have thought about coordinating a block party for the neighborhood I have lived in since 2017. As an anxious introvert, though, I’m afraid I would be like one of those kids who invites her whole class to her birthday party and no one shows. 🥺

People that said OJ was innocent and actually believed it.

2pac and B I G G I E

Dialup

Video rental stores. I was just talking to my wife today about how I would love to go to one but I’m not aware of any close to me.

Optimism

I have never had my own landline, but I still remember my parents original landline number. I’m gonna be 40 next year.

Video rental stores.

Some good fucking music

Realistic levels of minding your own MOTHA FUCKIN BUSINESS. Now a days everyone is all about everyone’s business and I don’t give a flying turd about anyones personal stuff

Pay phones in public

Fax machine

Writing letters to loved ones and sending them via post office

Roller blades, playboy magazine

Picking up the phone and hearing that someone else is already on the line.

Paper maps and directions.

Writing love letters

Blockbuster

Pay phones.

Purple ketchup

Finding an address in a Mapsco.

Guitars.

Sex

N64

Teens with pagers.

Asking permission to speak to your friend after polite conversation with the person that answered the phone. Me: Hi, Mrs. Owen, is Stephanie home?

Them: one second, Kim. I’ll get her. How are you?

Me: Fine. School’s good. How are you? Them: we’re always just so blessed. Here she is!

AOL.

Going to video rental stores and renting movies and videos games 😢

9 year olds having keys to the house they live in

Filling your car up with gas for $20 or less

Phone books.

Updates regarding work being restricted to the work day only.

PDAs. I just bought a bunch to dick around with. XD

Based on everyone's answers: happiness.

Film photography, I've started getting into it recently, I was born in 04. I wish I was born early enough to have experienced it in its prime. I have a thing for a lot of the classics.

Sega dream cast, game cube, & playstation one.

A map book in the car. My parents had one into the early 2000's, and had to go out and buy an updated map of the city every so often to keep up with changing developments.

Ordering from a catalogue! I remember looking through the Delia’s magazine (okay this might have been early 2000’s-like 2001) and my mom having to order it over the phone.

Ashtrays. Like, everywhere.

Common sense

Sit down/buffet pizza hut

Being happy

Cassettes and VHS

Pogs

MapQuest.

Milk men

House phones

House phones are near non existent now?

Atlases for navigation

Zima, moviephone, and cigarette ads

Driving around Los Angeles with a Thomas Guide on your lap.

Answering calls from numbers you don’t know

Landlines!

Going to Blockbuster and getting movies, popcorn and cotton candy. Every Friday after school. Was pretty dope being a kid in the 90’s for sure.

Life without the internet or cellphones.

Some people had pagers.

Getting a page on your beeper then finding a pay phone to call them back.

Kids playing outside and going places without much adult supervision.

Waiting an hour for a song to come on the radio so you can tape it, only to be pissed because the idiot DJ talked over the first 10 seconds of it and ruined it.

Cassettes, VHS, take a penny leave a penny (may not be accurate globally Canada discontinued them but it was a big thing for a long time here). Smoking indoors, kids buying smoke with a note from parent, gas outrage as it hit 60 cents a liter. Actually talented girl and boy bands and mixed groups, back street boys, sclub, spice Girls (today I can do all myself with auto tune I am lorde ja ja ja)

Video game content quality peeked, Hollywood still had ideas and WWF vs WCW was the best show on TV

Sex was a different thing in the 1990’s because AIDS was a death sentence and everyone was scared of it.

Long distance calling cards.

Fax machines in homes

Truly funny sitcoms on TV.

The 1990s had

Seinfeld (1989-1998)

Everybody Loves Raymond (1996-2005)

Friends (1994-2004)

Fraiser (1993-2004)

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990-1996)

In other words, something for just about everyone.

Rock music.

Tamagotchi. Where are they now?!

I got thirteen off the top of my head:

  1. The lights turning on outside, indicating it's time to go home. Not sure if this is still a thing, but it was for me in the 90's.
  2. Finding friends by where their bikes are parked.
  3. Video game magazines. Nintendo Power was the shit.
  4. Midi files. I heard DBZ songs in midi format before I heard the actual versions.
  5. Cliques. Fear of being considered a nerd/geek/dork. Definitely not a thing anymore.
  6. Local arcade scene. Me and my older brother used to kill the locals at Marvel vs Capcom. Closest I got to being famous hahaha.
  7. Web TV. 90's internet at its finest. Why use a desktop when you can use your TV set?
  8. Saturday morning cartoons. Not sure if this is a thing anymore, but the hype of waking up and watching Pokemon or the shows on Toonami was real.
  9. Disney animated movies. The 90's was the Disney Rennaisance era, and it was so exciting to see what came out next. Nothing ever topped The Lion King.
  10. VHS and cassette tapes. Using a pencil to wind the latter up if one of them came loose.
  11. Casual racism. Remember when Larry Bird was called "The great white hope"? Yeah, sounds racist.
  12. Newspapers. Grandpa used to read them all the time. It was interesting to look through as a kid too, especially the comics. Newspapers are pretty sparse these days and full of ads.
  13. Finding new music by listening to a movie's end credits. I'll never forget loving the end credits of Ghostbusters 2. Got me into more hip hop-style music. Also listening to music in a video game by making your character stand still.

Pagers

Movie rental stores.

Arcades.

Hitchhiking, my parents did a dangerous amount of that while backpacking europe

Haven't seen this said yet. Most of these posts are technology related which is bringing back some nostalgia.

Culturally though, politics not being people's only identity. I get that this likely led to the clusterfuck we live in today, but it was a blissful time of not taking on some party platform personally.

Retro videogames.

I mean, they are not that rare. But go outside and find good conditiok copies for reasonable prices.

Living in the 1990s

Pogs.

The Twin Towers

House phones.

Affordable housing

All the different teen magazines and cutting out pictures of your celebrity crushes to hang on your walls.

Kids playing on the streets

Having like 20 phone numbers memorized

Unless you were currently standing in a library, people could lie about whatever they want.

Tear away pants

Decency

Remember those car CD players with the detachable face? And the portable CD players with a tape so you could play your Matchbox 20 CD out of your tape deck?

games with no microtransactions

As far as I can tell... Gak?

Obvious answer is the smoking section at family restaurants.

Fruitopia 😞

Corded phones in every household.

The sexy sound of modem talking to the other modem when connecting.

Wassuppppppp

MTV

Worrying about your audio cassette tape or video cassette tape getting tangled up inside the machine! (Especially if it'd happened, before.)

Cars with cassette decks and manual roll down windows.

Hacky Sack Circles

Things being a positive surprise.

It’s kind of an impossible thing to explain to people born after like 1990-1992, but people didn’t used to be able to have their fingers on the pulse of every single thing that was happening in media, or in general, in real time.

Major movies, books, comics, video games, albums, and TV shows could come out and be a complete surprise to the vast majority of people, even people who were hugely invested in whatever thing it was.

Only the minority of media projects got coverage on television and in magazines. And you had to watch those shows and buy those magazines to see or know about any of that coverage, most of the time. There would be some word of mouth, but it wasn’t as interesting without actually seeing the coverage, so you didn’t always pay attention.

New, awesome things could grab you and all your friends by total surprise in a positive way that I don’t even think happens to anyone anymore. Now, only negative things tend to be communal surprises.

Also, the prolific reach of local and regional chain stores. Before everything was a Walmart or a Target, there were local chains that could be as insular as a tri-county area or as broad as a National region. Some businesses like this still exist, like local pizza chains, but it used to be common in pretty much every type of store there is, from restaurants to convenience stores to grocery stores to department stores.

It was interesting, because they all had exclusivity deals with different brands.

You might think that sounds less convenient, since you can now get most brands at a single store. The reason it was cool was that there wasn’t as much shelf space competition for the exclusive brands, so stores were able to carry a wider array of products from the brands they had deals with, leading to a lot more market experimentation and the consumer’s ability to discover products by surprise.

I mean, now you can just Google anything in the world and buy it on Amazon.

Before that, though, exploring different stores was how you found cool shit. Then you got to tell everyone about it, which was also fun.

Good 🎶 music

Ashtrays in restaurants and airplane seats

Riding your bike to your friend's house, knocking on the door, and asking if they wanted to hang out

Maybe kids still do that, idk!

Cigarette Machines

Hailing down yellow New York City cabs…and racing down the street to jump in one before the person across the street got to it first.

Ahhh…those were the days, before Uber ruined all the fun.

Public pay phones and landlines

Walk in to a gas station with your shirt off and a lit cigarette and no one cares.

Pagers

No social media

See through electronics

Vertical striped shirts and denim shorts. They don’t have to be though.

Smoking sections inside restaurants.

Tomagachi’s

Green ketchup

Ask your kids to act like they’re talking on the phone. How do they hold their hands?

Reading various labels on whatever was in reach while taking a shit

Smoking

Grunge

Long-distance charges

6 disc CD changers in the trunk of your Dodge Neon.

Getting travel guides for your trips. I used to love doing that.

Respect for elders

K - cars

VHS tape rewinders.

Reading the newspaper and always starting with the sports pages first.

My hair

Beepers. Loved mine.

Waiting for someone to get off the phone so you could play a computer game on cartoon network.com

VCR's, Only reason I know what they are is the only way I could watch star Wars was through VCR but now I don't think any children even know of em

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Putting my pager on silent or vibrate rather than sound mode.

The CD tower next to your component stereo system.

Radio clock ⏰

Walkman CD Players

Long distance phone bills ... Back in the 90s MCI was a company that got rich because they introduced 25-cent PER MINUTE long distance rates!

Recording TV shows on a VHS tape because if you missed it you might not get a re run

Sex.

The place where I live was very loose and people were outgoing and fun in the '90s but now they are conservative, uptight, and don't speak to each other.

You could get laid for a compliment in the '90s. Now if you tell someone they look good they look at you like an alien.

Not staring at a cell phone all day

DSL & waiting eons for your computer to do anything

Paper day planners, address books

Having a home phone

With the caller ID box

Floppy disks

Pay phones.

Smoking sections in hotels, restaurants, planes...everywhere really.

Making ring tones for all your friends.

Using ringtones.

Tamagotchis.

Pay phones

Smoking inside airplanes. Or clubs... or restaurants... or anywhere...

Super Nintendo built into the van TV.

Payphones.

AOL messenger and chat rooms

You got mail!!!

Payphones! They've all disappeared!

House phone

Respect for men

Landline phones in everyone’s house and pay phones out in public .

Flip phones

Rotary phones, in case loss of electricity makes cordless phones useless

Roller decks. Such a nice feeling to flip through those

East coast vs west coast rap

Home phones

JNCO Jeans

Stalking the return bin at blockbuster on a Friday night to grab a new release movie when someone was returning it because it was out of stock on the shelf

Ringing the bell of a neighbors house asking if a friend could come out and play.

As someone who grew up in all of the 90's... The one thing I can for sure say is race/color wasn't a thing for KIDS!

As kids, at least where I am from, everybody was friends with everybody!! All races and creeds. Same thing with our parents! We all had fun doing whacky things and not worrying about cell phones and the internet and social media and politics.

Was a simpler, friendlier time as a child at least.

The advent of the Internet certainly changed things for better and for worse. I saw it unfold with my own eyes.

Bugs on your windshield when you go for a drive. Insect numbers are way down.

Early 90s = no cellphones

Late 90s = only “important” people had cellphones

Paper food stamps

Not caring about someone’s sexuality, not making it a big deal. Like really, no one gives a shit, as long as you’re nice the average Joe will treat you like a person.

Dial Up internet

D.a.r.e. drugs are really excellent

Billiard halls everywhere. I was pretty good . Now there's nowhere to practice except for beat to death coin tables in pubs with crooked cues.

Beanie babies

Happiness

Navigating a road trip with a map and trying to identify the road signs. Now we just GPS.

Zines

Smoking on airplanes

Payphones, flim cameras, pagers, Blockbuster (physical movie rentals), Surge (soda)

Mullets

(As a Jamaican) summer time we'd play (ramp) entire day and go home when it started to get late or it was dinner time.

Non-smoking sections because smokers ruled the world

People getting arrested for marijoowanna.

Answering Machines. Jeez, I remember those like they were yesterday. Some people would have funny messages, some serious, others would just wait to hear the voice on the answering machine, and THEN pick up the phone. A caller ID before caller ID!!

Slamming down the phone when you hang up.

My happiness.

pagers

Video shops

Affordable rentals

Literally everything

Walkman

Promo movie collectables that weren't plastic junk.

Like the drinking glasses from McDonald's for the Muppet Movies when they were released. These were glass, not plastic. I remember having one from The Muppets Take Manhattan - Miss Piggy on a motorcycle, crashing through a stained glass window.

Smoking in restaurants. Even McDonalds allowed smoking in its restaurants until 1994 (and much later, unofficially at many franchise locations.) I have a few of their disposable aluminum foil ashtrays somewhere, and at least one of their glass ones.

Fat Thicc TV’s

1-900 numbers.

Pogs

Having a lot of bugs on your windshield when travelling on the motorway.

Tegridy

Prank calls.

Caller ID and *69 messed it up for everyone!!

Pagers and pager code.

JNCO

Collect calls

Telephone booth.

Good ecstasy. [•Sigh!•]

Reading the manual on your way home from buying a new video game, and being fascinated by the most mundane shit.

"Press A to jump" - Oh, that's pretty cool.

Finding little hidden away gems when travelling. Nowadays there will be a queue of 500 people to get in…because nothing is secret anymore

Privacy

A wide variety of currencies in Europe

Kurt Cobain

Common sense.

Pay phones

Buying a cheap sports car for under $10k

America Online

Pay phones

*67

Pay phone.

Pay phones

Talking on the phone

Jokes

Smoking in restaurants or the smoking/non-smoking sections of restaurants

Seeing a dodge intrepid anywhere

Not having easy access to porn, I jerked off to the vague mental image of my high school crushes butt crack and cleavage more than I care to admit

Smoking in fast food restaurants.

Having an opinion

Pay phones

Orange Julius

Having to go to a store to find a movie to watch at home on a Friday night.

Making mixed Cassette tapes

Pagers

Mercury thermometers

Pay phones

DVD. I had one growing up, still have it under my TV.

Making playlists in cassettes.

Beanie Babies

Canned laughter.

Phone books

Pogs

High testosterone levels. They've fallen enormously since the early 2000s alone, not to mention going back to the 90s. The top 5% most masculine men in the 90s now essentially don't exist due to the shift in the bell curve distribution

Video stores

Skinny chicks lol

Playing snake on a Nokia cell phone

Fax machines as state-of-the-art instant written communication

My parents loving each other.

orgy

Ashtrays INSIDE grocery stores

*69 their ass back! See who it was!

Letting kids play on there own all day with no oversight. My mom used to tell me and my siblings to go outside and not to come back until the streetlights came on. Not because she didn't want us in the house per se, but because she didn't want us sitting around playing video games all day which we totally would if she let us. In the era before widespread cell phone ownership and dial up, she had no fucking clue where we were. Most days we would just go up the street and recruit any kid available to play soccer/football/whatever and that just doesn't happen anymore. "Stranger danger" really took off in the 2000s because of a couple high profile kidnappings and now people will call CPS on you for letting your kids go to parks unsupervised.

Going to the library.

good music on the radio

Burning CDs

Being 4 and born in the year 1990

1 800 collect

Starter jackets in the early 90s

Dial up modems. Pubes on women. CD players. Renting porn on VHS.

Dial-up

Smoking in public spaces. Or indoors.

Loyal bitches haha

Payphones, phone books, people smoking on smoke breaks, etc...

Pay phones!

Pay phones. Last used one around 2010.

Car phones, beepers, pay phones , tucking in almost every shirt, using a stock broker, bookies, roadmaps, vhs tapes, movie rental stores.

Jncos and Kickwear

People born in the 30s.

Going on a road trip and people trusting that you’re ok for hours and hours until you stop somewhere with a phone you can use to check in. Or not even having to check in…no gnus is good gnus.

A well paying job

Going to a random party a stranger invites you to. The TV guide channel, not being reachable if not near a landline, reading the local music scene paper to see what concerts will be in town.

Hearing the phone ring and answering, esp with an unrecognized number. I am very upset visibly when someone I don't know calls my number.

Telephone booths

Putting 199X on anything you’re tryna date

Paying less than 60 dollars to fill your gas tank. Okay I admit, I was a toddler during the 90’s. But sub 2 dollar gas anyone?

Surge. Battery acid green. Carbonated like a firecracker. Caffeine equivalent to cocaine.

Not having a cell phone

Paying with actual cash

Scholastic book fairs in elementary school. I would usually always end up buying a Goosebumps book, or a Garfield comic strip book.

Getting kicked offline because someone else in the house picked up the phone to make a call.

Having a local Thomas Bros map in your car so you wouldn't get lost.

Hanging out in shopping malls.

Phone Antennas that attach to the roof of your car, along with an endless list of other obsoleted consumer electronics that were visually iconic of the time period.

Pay phones

Dial-up internet

Dial-up internet, like AOL....oh and AOL too!!

VHS tapes

Trapper Keepers

Video rental places

Running out of thermal paper for the fax machine.

Dial-up internet

Baby books, the ones you write milestones in and stuff.

Dialup - get off the phone I'm on the internet!

Jincos

Pay phones in public places.

Hanging out with friends by just going to their houses and seeing if they were home.

Girls Gone Wild commercials

1-800-collect

Landlines?

Pagers/Beepers depending on what word you use for them ...

Floppy disks

Common sense

Being straight without satanic influence

Offline happiness.

Polly Pocket

Pleasant conversations between people of different political beliefs.
Multiplayer games that had friendly cooperation.
Believing what someone said online was true, until it was proven otherwise.

Driving long distance?

kmart?

Phone booths

The ability to listen to music without being interrupted by an ad!

“Generation Y”

Smoking sections at restaurants

Kmart. The one in my town just closed its doors (Hamilton MT). I believe it was the 4th or 5th of the last stores that still exist.

Pay phones.

Bedazzled cell phones

Pay phones 📞

nice fizzy drinks, no chemicals

Fax machines

Not knowing the lyrics to a song unless you bought the tape or cd and the artist put the lyrics in the sleeve. So many 90s songs I now realize I did not know the actual lyrics. Taping song off the radio and trying to figure out what they were, writing them down and rewinding the same line over and over going, wtf did they say there?

  1. Stand-up that was actually funny
  2. Wrestling gimmicks that didn’t suck the farts out of bus seats
  3. Tanning salons
  4. Neon

Used CD exchange music stores

Having all your friends phone numbers memorized.

Beepers

Payphones in public places and phone booths, not like anyone ever knew who was calling them at the time either.

Walkman

Pagers-beepers

Rollerblading

90's JAMAICAN DANCEHALL!

Arcades are what I miss most. Every mask used to have them. It was such an easy way to make friends.

Pay phones

My dad worked as a paramedic for a while, and he wore a pager when he was on call since it was before cell phones. I was actually with him a couple of times when he had to stop what we were doing and find a payphone to respond.

Smoking in bars. Ahhh the good ol days

Zubaz

Home phones

$.25 hamburger wednesdays at McDonald's. I'd search for change on my walks home from school and on lucky days I'd buy myself a burger. If I found $.35 I could get a cheeseburger.

Fast foods being good.

Smoking. Smoking in the house. Smoking in the car. Smoking sections in restaurants.

Garfield Snacks, Kudos Bars, and trips to Blockbuster.

common sense

Bright colors

Pay phones

Pagers.

Eating butterfinger BBs. God damn I would do anything to have those again

Having a phone book

Knocking on your friends door apparently and then just chilling and going out. I dont know that myself, too young. But I heard they were good times.

Now we text each other and take 7 years to meet up.

People of healthy weight.

Someone using carbon paper to copy ur credit card and charging at the end of the day or maybe even the end of the week, thus balancing checkbook necessary. Some businesses had no way to process credit cards and would go to the local business that could and just do it there. Wild times.

Thomas guides?

Scanning the local blockbuster on a Friday night. Loved those nights!

VHS tapes, VHS players, pagers, floppy disks...

men opening car doors for women

Teletext on televisions, where you could see the weather, news and even jokes on demand just by typing in a few numbers.

Phone sex.

Going to the airport gate to either send someone off or meeting them there when the plane arrives. Now you have to be a ticketed passenger.

A loving relationship where no one cheats or lies to each other

I used to have maybe 6 whole telephone numbers memorized now I barely know my wifes

Pogs.

Fuzzy line porn

dial up internet, having only 1 email address, no TSA at airports

Pogs

Going on a hike or to a park and nobody having portable speakers.

MSN

Setting recordings for shows you couldn’t watch live on VHS and if the recording screwed up, and none of your friends taped it, you’d just miss the episode.

I was going to say CPO jackets but realized they were probably already vintage in the 90's.

Anyone else here as old as I am?

Everyone smoking everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE.

House telephones

We used to need to know the exact location of the person you wanted to call. Now we call and say, “Where are you?”

Bookng time slots to use the landline

Kindness

The wars between people who wanted to talk on the phone and people who wanted to browse the internet.

Having to rewind the videotape before returning it to the video rental store.

Telephone booths

Franklin Covey day planners. Man, I loved those things. I bought a new one every year.

Calling cards for sure

Recording music off the radio on cassette tapes. Carrying around a Walkman was cool. Talking on a house phone. Hey, at least we had cordless! 2-day shipping, who dis? Back in my day it was 2 weeks ;)

Calling people retarted or gay when the weren't.

Blockbuster Video

Getting off the internet to call someone

Floppy Disks

Jnco’s

Maps

Friends.

I was going to say 'mom jeans', but dammit if they aren't coming back into fashion! 😂

My away message.

Ah come on don’t do this to me, it’s too soon man. I’m barely 30!

Orgies

Have a “smoking section” in restaurants

Burger King tasted good, Mcdonalds Nuggets and fries were awesome.

Free time.

showing up at a friends house without calling ahead, like as a kid it was freaking awesome, now im like bruh tf are you doing

Fax machines.

Shoulder pads in womens suits, stockings, and car phones.

Civility

Marijuana buds from Mexico loaded with seeds.

Whale tales…. Bring em back 👍🏼👍🏼

Phonebooths

Yo-yo, every kid had one in there pocket

Using paper printed maps to navigate.

Getting up on a summer day and hopping on my bike to ride around the neighborhood to find the pile of bikes to know where all my friends were hanging out. You literally just looked for a big pile of bikes.

Writing checks

Prank phone calls.

Pagers….. or beepers. Same thing, different names.

Smoking in restaurants and bars

Boot cut jeans

Smoking

Dial up Internet. Pay phones.

pretty predictable seasons, weather and snowfall?

Porn in magazines

Drive in movies. Like 1-2 per state now.

Optimism, common sense and terrible sitcoms.

Your mother telling you that you can’t be on the internet because she’s waiting on an important phone call.

Video Easy

Calling someone a f*ggot when they are rude or stupid. When I was growing up it was just an everyday word that most people used informally and didn't really have any meaning beyond that related to gay people.

Gay characters played for laughs on TV

Nokia phones and non cordless phones, and 90s music and clothing styles probably also phonebook

Hanging out outside all day as a kid with total freedom to go wherever I wanted until dinnertime. It was awesome.

Getting AOL cd’s in the mail. Frequently.

Blockbuster video

Address /phone number book

Baby cages haing out of windos

Radio

Pay phones.

Lack of information

Stopping at a middle of nowhere gas station and asking directions! ,"well down their yonder just passed the big red barn on the hill, take a right. If you pass a gray barn you need to take the next right, till ya see an old tractor... ohhh gottchya

Calling cards

I would wager a lot of things

Phone booths

Well made products.

Seat belts 🤷🏼‍♀️

Dallas Cowboys being good

Belief in a better tomorrow.

I miss BBSs (bulletin board systems for those that are too young or missed out). Most of our local BBS scene was single-line, meaning only one concurrent user at a time. You’d dial up, hope it wasn’t busy, connect for half an hour while you checked public channels and DMs, look for any cool new file uploads, take turns in door games, and log off for a few hours. The games were mostly text-based and turn-based. I even played a few “tabletop” RPGs this way. It was slow but fun.

The most magical part might not be that obvious— most of the users were in the same general geography. Most of my daily-dials were local free calls. This meant that I met many people that would become some of my best IRL friends long before we ever met in person. It was an amazing way to socialise for teens growing up in small-town America.

I had internet access for most of the same time period but IRC, Usenet, and the nascent web didn’t have the same intimacy. Bulletin boards were really a different category.

AOL dial up

Optimism.

Caller ID where you couldn't skip through them, you had to go through the whole thing.

VCRs

Chewy Runts candy

Sony Walkmen

Feeling hopeful about the future

Pizza hut magnet phone number on fridge.

Hypercolor shirts.

Getting a mortgage before you're 30

Common sense

Yellow Pages

Unsupervised children playing outside

WWJD bracelets

Believing HIV/AIDS was a fairly immediate death sentence.

ETA: And thinking the conditions were synonymous.

Me not being born

Having a home phone

Yellow page. People simply google numbers they need nowadays like restaurants and museum

Collect calls

Pokémon

Residential landlines. My neighbor has one.

I tried to cancel my Suddenlink cable in 2021 and it was a cluster..but the rep tried to get me to take a plan that included installing a land line phone, which somehow would make the monthly rate go down (?)….I was like…my man..nobody wants a land line anymore! It was ridiculous.

From the mid 90s to the early 2000s getting AOL cds in the mail.

Cassette tapes

page me

Going to video arcades to see who’s there

3way calling

Looking cool with a fanny pack

Payphones

Video rentals

AOL disks.

Hell, CD-ROMs in general anymore

Asking family to get off the phone so u could use dial up internet.

Straight people

Ball pits and the ability to find a lot more equipment at a playground than the usual slides and swings. You used to find sand boxes with the digging machines and monkey bars and swing bridges

Family dinner

Having civil conversations with your neighbors that had differing political beliefs and still being friends afterward

Power Rangers

Pretty much the entire external narrative of Nicholas Baker's book The Mezzanine: crisp paper shopping bags that the cashier staples a receipt onto. A coffee machine that drops a cup into place before filling it.

So much of the book when it was written was intended to be a quirky slice of life: aren't those things that you see everyday interesting when someone points them out. Now it reads as nostalgia.

Printing a bad print from map qwest for a cross country drive....10 8x10s or more

Nokia

Traditional values

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Laser tag

Those squeeze candy tubes from Hubba Bubba. Purple ketchup. Moon Shoes. How “The Backrooms” were actual places teeming with activity and fun times, and now as an adult, they’re all derelict and creepy, reminding you of a childhood innocence and ignorance you can never experience again.

Message boards

Edit: community message boards

Pay phones.

This'll get buried but take a pick of your dick and balls on your friends disposable camera and them not knowing it even happened until it's developed.

Lisa Frank merch! The folders were my favorite.

Yessss! Unicorns and rainbows. At the Hello Kitty or Sanrio store at the mall!

beepers

Belief that America is a democracy

Printing out directions

Payphones

Chicken pox

Payphones

Me being blissfully unaware, innocent, and not traumatized.

Being able to tap into your family’s phone conversations with a second phone since you typically shared one line. Teenagers would demand their own phone line at a certain age for extra privacy.

My parents spontaneously got me my own phone line when I was about 15. I was beyond shocked because..they just didn’t do stuff like that, and were fairly strict. I thought I was done pretty hot stuff though. I talked on that line until the wee hours of the morning, unless my mom came in and removed the phone and put it in her closet until the next day because I was up too late, lol.

Manners

Slap bracelets

Intelligence

Straight people

Trying to use the internet for homework/games and then some one makes a call and you lose your connection

Jokes. Having a stable of 10 or 20 jokes that you could rhyme off. Now its just explaining a meme you saw.

Burning movies and songs onto CDs. I legit spent about an hour or two chatting with friends while I burned a movie I recommended to a friend. He loved that I did that for him.

And going around with my CD player thinking I was the hot shit playing all these songs I burned myself.

Casstte tapes - making your own music mix tapes for the car or walkman

Routemaster - being able to jump on them at the traffic lights if you missed them at the bus stop!

Cheque books - last time i used one was in the 90s

Before the internet people used to argue all the time about facts. I'm not talking about controversial, politicized "facts"--just basic everyday knowledge.

You might have full on argument over whether Texas was larger than California, for example. Or who was the Mets first basemen in 1985. Things that people would never argue about now because it's trivial to look it up.

The main use of encyclopedias was to settle some argument. The Guinness book of world records was created to settle bar arguments (which is why it was made by a beer company).

Department Stores with delis, toy departments and home furnishings/electronics. I actually bought my lunch sandwich meat in the Deli in the downtown Toronto Eaton department store as well as a couch and TV for my new apartment. And that was in 1990. Since then those stores (Eaton's, Sears etc) all turned into clothing boutiques. Floor upon floor of clothes. And subsequently went out of business.

16bit computing

Having to catch TV premiers at the exact right time or alternatively record them with VCR and pray to god you didn't screw it up somehow

Social grace and manners

Universal homophobia, universal sexism

100 ft. phone cord my mom had wrapped around the house. Actual answering machine. VCR and VHS tapes. Cassette tapes. Roller blades. A/B switch if you had cable tv. Giant furniture piece TVs and giant (heavy ass) big screens. Garbage pail kids. Dangerous ass banana skateboards. Everything was neon colors like a highlighter. Could go on.

Racing into the kitchen during a commercial break and hurrying to make a snack, get a drink, and hit the bathroom before the commercial ended.

Free speech

Getting your new cat declawed because it was ruining furniture.

Quaaludes, based solely off Wolf of Wall Street

CD clubs, balancing your checkbook, phonebooks, microfiche, spending days at the library to write a paper, car window cranks, home rooftop TV antennas, buying minutes on your cell phone, carrying a map/atlas in your car.

Good pills and acid.

Roller blades!

Worrying about Y2K

The classic rock station playing Chuck Berry and doo-wop

My ‘oldies’ station is playing 80’s music now and I feel like a dinosaur.

Going outside. Ever

Making plans to chat on AIM

A lot of animals

Telephone books

Skateboarding. Still going on around today, but social media crushed the wave big time.

*Knock knock*

"Hello Misses M!

Can Adriann come out and plaaaay?"

Written messages from phone calls

Pagers

Phonebooks

The time between having a question and getting an answer. Google just makes that time inexistent. I think Pete Holmes has a bit about it

Listening to a discman

Ridiculous mentos commercials

Looking cool while smoking cigarettes.

I'm sure it's been said, but having a camera in general. I skateboarded a lot and had a video camera and just regular picture camera. Everyone loved inviting me places cause I just recorded and shot everything for fun.

Now almost literally everyone has one in their pocket that's miles better than both my old cameras : (

Getting excited about emails.

jokes

COURTESY?!?

Pogs!

Going to a social place like a bar, small arcade, the mall, and hanging out, talking to friends or strangers.

Now everyone has their heads buried into their phones. Places that were once loud, and popping are still packed how they were sometimes, but eerily more quiet.

Please Be Kind And Rewind.

Beepers

Middle class prosperity.

The scream of a modem.

White dog poo.

Saturday morning cartoons.

VHS. Also, Betamax.

Lisa Frank. For the love of god I want it back.

My sex life.

Drive-in movie theatres were lit

Pay phones

POGs

Teenagers having their own home phone line.

People born around 1920

Limited quantities of videos to rent, and if the previous renter wanted to be a jerk they could rewind to a major plot point so the movie started playing right when Vader tells Harry that Gandalf killed Hitler.

Alf

Having a street directory in your car & the street you want ALWAYS being in the fold or on the edge so you’d have to flick back and forth between pages.

Mixed tapes.

Baggy jeans.. like really big

Pay phones/phone booth.

Bananas 🍌

Saying , whatever, it’s the 90s!

Fax machines

Land lines

Landlines

“Meet at the flagpole at 5 o’clock!”

“Okay, Dad.”

Tight rolled jeans

Smoking indoors, and just people smoking more in general.

Burning music (or anything) onto CDs

My computer would take ages to burn cd’s so I would set up these huge lists to run all night and hope for the best…lol

Pay phones

Insects in the back yard

Spandex shorts.

Physical maps

Your crush calling your house phone and asking your parents if they could speak to you

Telephone booths

Integrity

Bakelite

Happiness

Pagers

Knocking on for your mates

Telephone booths.

Telephone books.

Blockbuster

Penny candy

Disk drives in computers.

Computer games in cereal boxes

pure love and joint family...

Pull-out car stereos.

Address books

Phone cords

Blockbuster

Burning CDs

selfless love...

A living wage

Payphones

Spending a nice Friday night on your own or with the family deciding on a movie or two from Blockbuster. In my case, a game to play for the weekend. Really nice activity for the evening that I miss.

Honestly, as a 90's kid, I would totally use a video rental store just for the nostalgia if there was any by me. That and drive in theaters should make a come back, particularly after COVID.

Starting a grunge band

Big ass Mother Fockin cell phones.

Pimp as fock though...

Having actual friends and not living with your face glued to your phone screen.

Answering machines

Payphones

Owning a slave

Breaking up with an ex who then became an absolute mystery, without effort you didn’t “see” them because you weren’t linked and couldn’t also Internet stalk them. There is something to be said for closure.

Toy Store

My will to live.

Hypercolor shirts

CD collections and borrowing the latest one from the one person in the group who was really spoiled hahaha

Indoor smoking

Playing outside until it’s super late with a bunch of kids from the neighborhood (even if you didn’t know them well) with your parents not having any clue where you are what you are doing or when you will be home and it’s a school night. Kids never had cell phones but most had a bike.

Beepers

Alarm clocks

Actually having to go places to get things.

Enjoying an activity without cell phones recording & people posting.

Makes me not even want to go out dancing anymore.

Haha well we actually used tree branches as pole volts it was actually a big thing when we finally got a rope because we not only swung from it but pretty much turned it into a swing

Payphones

I'm gonna say, a home phone. Who still has a home phone? Not my mum, my brothers, my cousins or any of my work colleagues.

My mom (67) still does…I’m like….

Then again, she only got a cell phone like, 2-3 years ago. Bless her heart.

Going to a location to rent movies

In movies, the main character chases their love interest all the way to the boarding gate at the airport and stops them from getting on the plane by professing their love. This was a huge cliche in the pre-9/11 world. There was no TSA screening bullshit and you really could freely move through the airport like that.

Whale oil

trading cards

Just showing up at your friends house to hang out randomly

standup comedy being allowed to be funny

It seems like people were a lot nicer, friendlier or less divided maybe. There was no social distancing and people were happier

Not being able to speak to family living oversees regularly. I grew up in the 2000s and in the earlier days, if we wanted to talk to our family back in India, we had to coordinate a time on Yahoo Messenger or if it was an emergency, make an expensive international call. Now, I can text my family and call them using WhatApp any time.

Telephone booths!

Portable cassette players

Kid Kuizines

Yellow pages and street directories. Gone!!!

TV show episodes where one character calls another character gay as an insult and everyone just goes with it.

Tv shows with like, no gay characters at all! Or even people of color! Like 90210, so on. If they did have something like that it was outrageous (at least if they had anything but straight characters) or some sort of ‘very special episode’ type thing. The first gay character I really recall was a guy on Melrose Place, but you never saw him really with a partner or anything.

Payphones

My will to continue.

I'm lazy and I'm not going to scroll forever, but how is no one speaking about waiting for someone to get off the phone to use the internet?

MTV

SEGA consoles.

Oversized jorts.

Thomas Guides. Invaluable for getting around Southern California.

And flipping to the correct page while on the road was way more dangerous than texting and driving.

Izod Lacoste, United Colors of Benetton, preppies.

Sears

The calcified dog turds everywhere.

Reading the lyrics to the songs that you unfolded from the cassette covers

Chicken pox.

Going to a store to rent movies.

Phone books and business cards

Courtesy

Leaded and unleaded gasoline

How many in you party? Smoking or non?

And smoking was just like, maybe separated by one plastic partition over a booth, other than that there was literally no difference, lol. That seems so stupid to me now.

Right? It seemed stupid to me then too. My family would always eat earlier during meal times so we could: 1. Sit as far away from smoking section as possible. 2. Be finished with our food before any smokers were, since most folks smoke after their meal. Though some do smoke before also.

My Dad was a smoker, even though my Mom made him smoke outside at home. Then, like a lot of ‘edgy teens’, I started in high school, so it was all normal to me. Now that I haven’t smoked in decades the idea repulses me! It’s so weird to me that we were all in bars and clubs just smoking away, ppl smoked in closed window cars with their kids in there..so on. Just crazy!

Decency

A fly marrying a bumblebee

Sanity

Smoking inside shopping malls, with ashtrays scattered about. Or really just smoking inside anywhere now.

The club and rave scene in NYC and Philly. Those were the times.

Wrestling watch parties!

MONDAY NIGHT RAW BABY!

1 v 1

Portable CD players

Reproductive rights

Home phones

Bob Saget hosting America's Funniest Home Videos.

Mapquest, encyclopedias, phone books, elaborate music voicemails, calling someone’s house and having to talk to a relative (or whoever picks up the phone)

Cassette Tapes

Looking in the newspaper to see what cars were for sale and not Craigslist.

Omg i know this one!! NPencil sharpeners. They used to be screwed into the wall in every house

Can we talk about Columbia House? Or do y’all still owe them money?

floppy disc.

Cd bags

People who were born in the 19th century still being alive.

Napster then limewire.

Maps in car map pockets

Trying use the thomas guide to find directions when driving/on a road trip

Dial up internet

Payphones! I don't think I've seen one in a decade. Haven't used one in over 20 years either. ( as I scroll the web on my phone)

Yahoo chat and game rooms. SNES walk through books, Freedom as a kid to go out and explore, Pokémon cards when they first came out, Furby, and Yomega yo-yo’s

Home phones

Car phone

Alternative Music

My health

I wish I could say fax machines.

Going on road trips with a pile of paper maps and map books and the Haynes guide to that shitty ‘69 Econoline.

Common sense.

White Pages and Yellow Pages. Used to get a new one every year.

Pagers.

Seeing movies where the plot isn’t lifted from a comic book.

Block Parties, Cap Guns, Limewire, Family picnics, Human connection, Danger, the list goes on

Waking up without a back ache.

My head full of hair.

A car where the throttle pedal actually moves the throttle, not a signal to a computer which then actuates the throttle.

Smoking everywhere still being a thing. It seemed like smoking sections disappeared from everywhere in the 2000’s.

Dancing at concerts. Most of the time people just stand around and bob their heads, even if they’re really enjoying it. I guess this varies based on location and genre but idk I like to think I go see a good variety of music. it’s just so rare to see someone dancing anymore

Classy afternoon talk shows like Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer.

Some one would come out and pump your gas for you.

Low gas prices.

Real sugared soda drinks.

The Bulls winning championships.

Missing people on the back of milk cartons.

Pay phones

Cheap gas

Common sense.

people letting people be who they are without making a public fuss about it.

Reading a newspaper. Printing out directions/having a printed map. Having to stop and ask for directions. Payphones. Dial up.

Fax

Portable CD players.

The dial up modem sound…

Water fountains

Dial up modems.

Going to Blockbuster or Hollywood video on a Friday night to rent movies for the weekend and then having to remember to return then rewinded in time.

Really great music.

When you pick up the phone and put disconnects the Internet

Remember we used to have to sacrifice a robot any time we wanted to go online? How we’d listen to it scream until its death finally powered our internet?

The Dial-Up Days. Good times.

Edit: typos

Privacy

True racism (although it exists today it mainly exists in the form of people assuming a person has a bad life or personality cause color or gender)

Good Charlotte

AOL

Having disposable income

LAN Parties

Woods porn

Beepers

Hanging out with priests if you were a kid.

Pagers

6 bikes laying on a front lawn for extended periods of time.

Shiiiiiiiid, my bike was a single bike, rode into my driveway after a solid hour of shredding around the neighborhood on a warm Saturday morning. Parked my orange hog right on my front porch, walked inside for a cold drink of water or something. When I came back out, 2 minutes later, my bike was gone. Never to be seen again. It was the last bike my parents ever bought me. Not because they didn't want to but because my heart was broken and I didn't want to have another one stolen from me. This was in 91 or 92.

Well I'm Canadian, and I lived in public housing. All the neighborhood kids would gather at the house with mortal Kombat, and stay til dark. Then go bike home get permission for a sleepover and then the bikes would go in the back yard. But that was it. Sucks about your bike friend. I hope it turns up!

Brother, I grew up and still live in Texas. My par nta drove around so much looking and looking. We drive around every day for at least a week but we never found it. Sounds like I missed out on one awesome childhood.

Inflation

A functional government.

"Be Kind,Please Rewind"

Also having a separate device for rewinding VHS tapes so you could watch something else at the same time.

Or just hitting stop, rewind then leaving the room to do something else.

Snow on Christmas

Aids oh wait that does still exist

Thermal chronic clothes

Not having call ID and answering the phone with whatever your local radio station wanted you to say so you could win $500. Anyone in Toronto remember "Kiss 92 plays today's hit music, now give me my money!"?

A woman's right to abortion

Dial up

Pubes

Saying hi to your neighbors or just hanging out outside your house.

boobadoop....pshhhh...bleeboop...grrrrr.....beeboop...pshhhhh...beeboop...pshhhhhhhhhhbhbhhhhhhhh

Pay phones

AOL - dial-up modem screeching - 'You got mail!'

Having to call a business you’re about to visit to ask for directions on how to get there

Blockbuster, and all other places with ball pits lol, bullying and using religion ie "Under God" in the pledge of allegiance !!! Oh and I almost forgot the most important one... Children OUTSIDE playing and using their imagination not addicted to screens etc!!!

Phone books on the doorstep, once a month

Walking into Walmart, Target, K-Mart, what-have-you and ditching your parents immediately to go to the video game section and play the demos where you had to look almost straight up to see the screens.

“19”

Filling out cover pages for fax machines

Beepers.

  • Phones with the dialing ring instead of buttons.
  • Recording mix tapes off the radio.
  • Hanging out at blockbuster with your friends for like an hour while you decide what to watch.
  • Mix lolly bags for $0.50
  • Being excited when the doorbell rang.
  • Being excited when the phone rang.
  • playgrounds being unreasonably tall
  • Being impressed by mediocre stuff. - doing a backflip on the ground, kick flip on a skateboard, 180 on a bmx. Social media didn't expose you to so much outrageous top level stuff that you could be impressed by the best person in your community even if it wasn't that impressive.
  • listening to an entire music album start to finish.
  • Music choice heavily influencing your friend group.

Publicly hitting your kids ( or just in general)

1-800-COLLECT and other similar collect calling plans and advertising.

Payphones

Payphones and pagers.

Using multiple physical keys for your car

Phoning for directions or company hours

Phonebooks. Gas that was $1/gallon, DVD’s or cable subscriptions, going to the movies, CD’s, going to the mall and shopping..

I started college in the early 90’s and my parents bought me a fancy ‘Word Processor’ which was just like, a really nice electric typewriter, lol. Very few people had their own computers, we mostly all used the university computer lab.

Mmmm, let’s see…oh….smoking indoors everywhere. So gross now that I think about it! Penny beer night at the bars…answering machines..or voicemail through your phone provider if you were lucky. Meeting ppl to date in a bar, church, school…in real life, lol. Personal ads in the back of tabloids or newspapers…actual magazine & newspaper subscriptions…

Creativity.

Peace.

Election losers would just go home.

Scrolling through all the replies I kind of miss most of these things

Really good cartoons.

Needing a separate VHS rewinder from your VCR

We never had one of these. Why did people need them?

I only remember our VCR couldn't rewind them, so we had that instead of doing it manually

Pay phones on every corner

Affordable housing

Floppy disk and CD rom drive

hating gay people

floppy

Hypercolour t-shirts, affordable housing and countries with a budget surplus.

Your parents kicking you out of the house during summer and telling you to back by dinner. Thirsty, hose, hungry, should have packed a lunch. Go home early because your hungry, they handed you a sandwich out the door and told you to go play. Slight parental neglect was pretty much the norm.

Home phones (landlines) and cell phones with a slide-out antenna.

Buying CDs

My youth

Going out and your parents having literally no way of contacting you til you stumbled in the door at 3am

Payphones

While they still exist in areas that make sense like airports, bus and ferry terminals, as well as various other locations, they aren't nearly as prevalent now as the use to be.

Though I've used one on three separate occasions for emergencies, and they would work if you had change but no phone, they're so scarce that it's easier to ask someone to use their's.

General sense of happiness and purpose.

Payphones

Watching TV with commercials and having to plan around air times.

The number 19.

Looking for movie times in the paper.

Smoking and non-smoking areas.

Physical media in general.

clothes

Really flippant use of homophobic slurs.

CD

Phone booths

Smart phones literally replaced everything people are writing in response to this.

1990's calendars

Buying TV Guide or reading the newspaper to find out what shows and movies were airing and when. I planned my watching for the week and weekend using TV Guide. I miss that magazine.

Knocking on doors just to see if a friend was home and could come hang

Y2k fears

Booking a flight over the phone.

Smoking in restaurants or having a smoking/non-smoking section.

Smoking on airplanes!

I loved gathering mates actually door knocking to hangout on our bikes and skateboards, no social media or calling mobiles and then going back home because the street lights were on.

Hubris Collaboration Compassion Respect and Understanding

Smoking in most public spaces

CD players

Common courtesy.

TV guides

Blockbuster Video.

Fax machines

VHS and renting movies !

Mechanical typewriters that were equipped with word processers that would allow you text one line at a time before physically typing it out.

Tank controls

Save icon

OK Cola! And calling the hotline.

Dropping off film for developing; having friends/family walk you to the gate at the airport.

Fights in NBA Playoff Games.

Payphones

Aye i just saw this post on YouTube shorts

This post is just making me realize technology is great but has also drove a gap in us lol :(

Stick shifts.

VCR's

Pauly Shore

Mullets

Being happy

Michael Jordan and the Bulls.

Lifestyles of the rich and famous. Waiting for the TV guide to scroll back or the actual guide. Adjusting rabbit ears to get decent signal. Jelly shoes and perms. Not sitting too close to the TV because radiation. Nick at night.

People actually calling you and speak with their voices instead of texts and voice-notes.

Video game magazines, albums or pogs (especially Pokemon-oriented).

Arcades, arcade coins and malls (although the latter is due to heavy nostalgia, my present-self actually hates malls).

Gathering with friends to play games, especially DKC for the SNES and Crash Bandicoot 2 (PS1).

Phone boxes on the street. ( nowhere for Superman to change now!😂

Pogs

Billboard ads for Newports or Camel cigarettes

Leaving your child at the mall for 11 hours while you worked.

Using the word “gay” to describe anything poor, weak, or cringy. e.g. “Dude, that’s gay as shit”.

The LGBTQ movement rallied hard through the 2000s, to cause that to change.

Pagers.

True but most doctors use them I think

Really? Interesting!

Don't take it for 100% fact! I did hear it from a doctor before, but I think it's mostly hospitals. I should have mentioned don't take it for 100% fact

Yeah, no problem! Honestly, it makes sense. Seems the most reliable and easily accessible way to reach doctors. I just didnt think about that!

Good music

I'm only 18, but I completely agree with you

Pay phones were pretty much everywhere on the streets. Now I think they are all gone.

Tying up the phone line to play Quake.

Dial up and walkman

777-FILM.

Phonebooths

Dial up Internet

Pay phones

Friday night movie nights from blockbuster

Cleaning car/motorcycle/bicycle parts in leaded gasoline with bare hands

Hey a little lead is good for the creativity

"surge" soda

i had so many BOGO bottle caps this one time i was surprised the corner deli didn't limit how many free drinks i got

Needing to watch the news in the morning to figure out if you had a snow day

Pagers/Beepers and the Zack Morris cell phone

The large phone book sitting underneath the landline phone in the kitchen to which we would use to find the number to dial up for take out pizza which would arrive in under 30 minutes or it was free.

Screen looking. The greatest sin.

Zubaz

I’m gonna say POGS….I use to love that game 😁 collected as many as I could and always went for the best slammers I could find 😜

Pizza Hut salad bar

Hmm maybe dial up internet or landlines? Dial up use to sound like two robots having very aggressive sex haha. I’ve also just realized recently I don’t even use a landline anymore. Ended up disconnecting all the phones in my house and just chucking them in our storage shed.

Hateful words like racist and gay slurs!

Having hope for humanity. Thinking things will get better because of that new "information super highway".

Smoking in restaurants

my dad

I remember going to the river every single day with just my siblings. My parents were either at home or at work. So we were walking all the way across town and swimming in a river by ourselves with no supervision. Nowadays CPS gets called when kids play in the street on their bikes. It makes me so sad that my kid will never know the freedom I did.

Walking around listening to your walkman or diskman.

Please be kind— Rewind

Home phone line.

Dial up modems

Only being reachable on landline phones.

My interest in anything at all

Rewinding a video or audio cartridge

unfortunately, platformer games

Mc hammer

I didn't go through the whole feed. But in the 90s it was normal to let my kids play alone outside. I wouldn't dream of sending my grandkids to the community park alone.

Privacy

Blockbuster

Belief in govt

Moderate politicians.

Recycling being a new concept. Having "recycling day" as a new thing, being different than trash day and being confused why we had to wash our garbage.

CDs?

Normal people riding a horse?

Driving across the country without a cell phone.

Something-ism

Being able to afford a decent sized house on one income. Or wait, were people fucked in the 90s too?

Common sense.

Calling somebody on the phone

Trash compactors

Phone books

Soundcards for pcs

Blissful ignorance

Calling somebody on the phone as a primary/normal and every day way of contacting them for any reason lol

Kids actually playing with action figures

In my neighborhood, hood-rats used to wear little belly shirts and baggy pants. Now it’s the popular style for all girls.

It’s confusing.

Smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants.

Phone booths.

Having to make your own ankle socks by sliding your sock forward and stepping on it in your shoe

JNCO jeans

Smoking inside. Whether it be public or at home. I know people who don’t smoke in their own house/apartment.

Friendly's restaurants

The little coin mechanical toys/ cars outside of Walmart . Walmart yellow smiley face stickers at the exit . Different colored ketchup ( like the green Shrek one) .

Bowl Cuts

Dialing 411 for random shit

Girlfriends.

Furbys

Blockbuster.

The notion that most people are basically good and that we can all get along if we just understand each other a little better.

HELLO AND WELCOME TO MOVIEFONE!

IF YOU ARE READING THIS IN HIS VOICE, PRESS WANNNNNN

A pencil and a cassette

Also recording music onto cassettes and shows/movies onto VRCs.
Pirating? What's that?

Being bored. Now boredom has an instant cure in the form of smart phones.

Cursive writing

And phone booths

A 240sx

Butterfly clips

Comfort

Massive yellow phone books in everyone’s house.

McDonalds Pizza!!!!

Humans with common sense

Bar soap

Asbestos

Seeing kids play outside

affordable housing

Tinted windows on my grand am.

POGS

TV guide channel

Tiny pink TV in the kitchen.

Low rise jeans

Bush

The dial up internet tone

Kids going to the local store to get their parents a pack of smokes

White dog poo

Small portable TVs with massive reception masts. 😄

Large racks of CDs and DVDs

Waiting for your TV show to come on and having to actively be home to watch it or have someone record it for you

Surge

People referring to 199x as the current year.

using a physical dictionary. also ice cream from the ice cream man used to only cost 50 cents

Pluto the planet.

Those "Got Milk?" posters and ads.

Pay phones.

Kool aid

Pagers

Years ending in 90-99

Audio Cassettes

28 cent per minute cell phone usage (plus long distance charges) so you carried a pager to decide if you needed to call back right away or wait for a land line.

Low BMI

Booking your kid out of the house and telling them not to come inside for the next hour.

It seems to me like there have been increasing expectations that kids need to be watched at all times.

New ‘90s music.

Warheads.

Pagers

Video stores.

Beepers / pagers

Passing by a K-Mart, Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Circuit City, and Toy R Us as you drive/ride around the city.

Movie rentals

Home ownership

Calling a business for directions to get there

Young homeowners... you will rarely, if at all, see homeowners below mid 30s now.

Pogs.

Blockbuster

Heinz EZ Squirt in all supermarkets

Bush

Being a man

Thankfully, parachute pants.

Smoking in a restaurant. I went to Florida and there was ashtrays and matches in the bar. I felt like I had gone back in time.

Great country music

Liquid Television on MTV

Privacy

Free range children.

Affordable housing. Has this been done already?

Oh my dear god, so many times.

Back then, if you wanted to pay your bills electronically, the vendor charged you for the privilege.

More than the cost of a stamp.

Pogs

Surge Cola

Hearing.... i didn't expect this many people to be here.

Slam books and magazine subscriptions

Tolerance of differing opinions.

being able to fix your own stuff without the manufacturer actively trying to prevent it

Pay phones

Pay phones

Printing out photos to put in a photo album

Payphones

Smoking inside.

ICQ Messenger

Land line phones

Being decent in public

Stealing a dude’s rug

Newspapers

Actually talking to ppl in the same car instead of texting everyone that's not in the car

Josta

Letting your small children run the neighborhood while nobody watched them

Richard Simmons

Openly admitting you're a fan of Kevin Smith

Asking online strangers A/S/L

Go on Omegle and do some research, still pretty commonly used

Green cars

Good soulful music.

Men acting like decent human beings. What the fuck happened

Communist russia

People showing up at your house without prior notice.

How about TV guide books. Used to sell them at the grocery store where I lived.

Pagers, JNCO, pay-phones, and Creed.

Cheap-ass airfare! $300 Chicago-Paris GDG.

Rental stores. I miss Hollywood Video and Blockbuster and Video Update

Opening the front door to stick your hand outside to check the temperature for that day.

Portable cd players with 30 seconds anti skip technology

Starter jackets

having acne that wasn’t edited out of photos

56k Modems and AOL

Blockbuster

Kids that actually play outside.

there was a push cart that came every thursday that sold taco bell bean burritos and round table personal pizzas. only thursdays. and we had a senior parking lot. i drove my kids by my old high school recently and found that to be labeled "staff" and scoffed

Liquid Paper and calling cards

Being giddy with excitement about anything because no current access 🥹

A woman's right to choose

Shame

All of the technology

Pagers

Buying cd's

Bodily autonomy for women

Channel 3

Phonebooks

MTV Singled Out , Real World, TRL.

Pants that have "baggy" size

Sea World

Pagers!

Photo albums

Tubthumbing (whatever that is)… I get knocked down,

Parachute pants , and answering the door happily without checking the peephole first

Affordable housing in the cities

Recording your favourite 10 seconds of a song from a radio/ CD to set as your ringtone on your Motorola flip phone.

Overalls

Pagers/beepers.

Tamagotchis

VHS libraries and blockbuster

Translucent inflatable furniture and transparent electronics.

Privacy

Oregon Trail

Pagers

The ability to laugh at oneself

Trapper Keepers

Zima.

(I mean, I guess it. was never really "normal", in that a lot of people drank it. But the ads for it tried really hard for a while.)

An expectation of privacy.

pogs

Netflix- when you had the DVDs delivered in the mail up to 3 at a time. And you made you movie list on their website.

privacy

Too slow high fives

Folded up paper maps in the glove compartment and Mapsco books.

Good music made with real instruments, being played on the radio.

A back bone.

The sound of dial-up internet… Also, “You’ve got mail!”

Good music

Ooooh, edgy

Get back in your mom's basement and play your Xbox

Ordering products from a catalog.

POGS

Fun

Payphones

Livable wages

Beepers

Rad futuristic looking phone booths in the mall.

Loyalty, honesty, faithfulness and innocent childhood.

Phone cards so you don’t need to use change in a pay phone.

Vhs tapes Rhodes were the best 😭 but then after you watch a movie you gotta sit a rewind it so you can watch it again later

Paper maps in the glove box.

Dropping your kids off at the mall with no phones and no worrying about what we got up to lol. Kids today will never understand the freedom of not having a phone and new parents will worry much more than our did lol

Separation of church and state

Building a large tower out of the amount of AOL CD's you got in the mail.

jnco jeans!!!

Riding your bike to your friends house only to find they are not home, then having to ride to all your local hangout spots to try and find them.

Actual freedom. Being able to leave one location, and not be expected to be instantly contactable before reaching your destination.

Having to go to the business you wanted to work for and hand in your resume in person.

Carrying around a map to know where you were going (before printing map quest directions was a thing)

Kids playing outdoors

P U R P L E K E T C H U P

MTv

Hope in the future

Civility

Hope

Oooooh, edgy

Nah man. Straight up truth.

happiness

Yo bro, you're cutting edge, you know that?

TDK 120 tapes. They were the best.

Face to face hanging out with friends ….. without screens

panicking when someone walked in with a mask

AV cables

Watching tv or listen to the radio

More so late 90s to mid-to-late 00s but… clear plastic versions of consoles and controllers. Bring them back please

Film.

If you wanted to talk to someone you had to actually talk to them. No texting, no emailing, no IMing or DMing. The only exception was writing them a letter.

I also loved playing Oragon Trail on my moms big windows computer and then it would crash.

Scrambled porn

Phone booths

Bill Clinton banging interns in the White House!

Some of the greatest snacks. 3d doritos, dunkaroos, butterfinger bb's, the list goes on and on.

3d Doritos and dunkaroos are on shelves now.

woman beating… i think

Common sense.

Jnco

Cassette tapes, vhs

Dialing 411 to get a number. Also saying, "what's the 411 on xxx?"

Video rental stores for movies and such

Randomly showing up at your friends’ houses and them being happy to see you.

Internet coffee shops

Optimism about the future

Buying a whole CD just to get the one or two songs on it you actually liked. If you were lucky, maybe realizing the rest of the album was actually good, too.

CDs

I remember early cell phones your number would get cloned and you would get huge bills. Have to fight it out with the companies. They said back then if we can get the fraud under control monthly prices wold go way down on plans. 30 years later, no fraud, prices the same or higher.

Floppy disks, manual transmissions, playing outside, Isuzu vehicles, pay phones…

Going to the video store and spending 2 hours going trough each row trying to fin the best movie.

Payphones. When your phone dies and you don't have a charger, you're pretty much screwed.

Those shoes with a air pump on them were really popular for a while.

Phone booths

A man minute or hour without internet. Or a week.

Limp Bizkits.

Commenting to get award.

Kurt Cobain.

Using phone cards to dial long distance

Cavaricci Pants

old yugioh packs

"page me!"

Talking to your neighbors.

411, What city? What listing? 3 calls a minute, 8 hours a day.

Payphones/landline, car radio antenna, renting movies at Blockbuster, and it might be because of where I live, but I haven't seen a rotary door since I was like 5.

Buying the newspaper on Fridays for the TV guide. Or buying the TV guide book, but the newspaper was $.50

Pay phones. We had one in our hospital until a few months ago.

Smoking sections in restaurants and smoking rooms at hotel in the US.

Also seatbelts that go across your lap in the backseat with those metal clips and you have to tighten the belt.

Privacy

Oh, and we don't need to give driving directions to anyone anymore.

*69

CD Players

Jean jumpers. I don't see them at all.

Having an opinion without people loosing thier shit and trying to cancel you

TV guide channel

Shell suits

Home ownership.

Audio cassettes

Dialup.

Manners

Respect

Using a physical atlas to go anywhere… Now we use GPS. I was talking to my boyfriend today, as we drove back from trip, how difficult it was before cellphones to go places. I remember printing directions from Mapquest & using an atlas to travel. Then there was always the option of asking a gas station employee for directions.

Grabbing the morning paper to see how your local team did. There was no sports stations….just news at 11.

Also, oddly remember “inter-office envelopes”. Where people would read the document inside, and then sign the outside of the envelope (saying they read the document) and passing it to the employee next to you.

vhs tapes, hastings movie rental/bookstore places, blockbusters.

Muffin shops

Callanetics

Spinning a giant antena to get TV signal

Going through the newspaper classifieds for a job

Inflatable furniture

Prank dialing with no fear of your phone number being figured out

Pagers.

Paying cash and analog communication.

Back in January bloodsplit here in KZ, maybe some of u heard about it, internet was shut down for a 4-5 days. Another next week it slow and glitchy.

So since people got used to internet banking, it was almost impossible to cash up. Some even had to borrow it, cause ATMs were empty.

Same shit with internet connection. Today, home landline is like a museum exhibit. We couldn't call our relatives, no one.

Word to the wise, dont go all virtual and cloud. Stuck some cash under matrass and keep home phone on for a rainy day. U never know.

Boredom.

me, having friends.

Fake video game cheats were common when I was a kid. You couldn’t really verify any of the false information you were receiving, so you’d end up spending several hours trying to find Mew under the truck in Pokémon Red/Blue until you gave up.

Voting for a Clinton

Mercury body thermometer

Dial up internet

56K dial tone

Actual conversation

It use to cost .50 to call 411 and get a number to a business . It may still exist today who knows but with smartphones and the internet, who would want to. It was so common back then.

“City and State Please”

“Business Name”

“Please hold”

“Here is the number who you like me to connect you?”

Payphones, and those weird huge numbers you'd have to enter for direct billing.
Beepers too.
QVC - Amazon was struggling, web was a mystery to most so QVC dominated.
Floppy disks
cassette tapes
glass packs

“I’m on the phone! Stop listening I’ll be done in 10 minutes!”

Calling 1-800-hallandoates for sweet jams

Going to blockbuster. The thrill of searching through the isles for movies you haven’t watched and then bragging to your friends that you already knew what’s going to happen

I feel like people don’t wear sweatshirts around their waists anymore.

And they never should have.

Me being happy

Pogs

Good cartoons

Giving directions to your house

TV Guide Channels… having to wait for it to restart because you got distracted.

When wrestling was actually cool to watch… WWF Attitude Era and WCW.

CDs and cassette tapes.

Bologna lunchables

"You've got mail!"

Junners

Happiness

Dine in pizza hut's with all you can eat buffets. (I'm in Australia)

affordable, fun cars

Modem noise “SshhhhhhkkkrrreeeeeeechkkkkkkkkkghfffbfbfbfjdjdbdjdfhfkfjfjdkdkdeeeEEEEEEEEEEEeeeEeeEEEEEEEEEE…”

Blockbuster with the family

Minding your own business

Weird Commercials

Like the putter mans

Friends with different political opinions

Payphones

Civility

A council house

Payphones

hot men

I wanna say porn in physical media, but I feel like that's still a market, and I'm too lazy to research it.

VHS tape rewinders 50lb TVs with glass screens

People dying from AIDS

Waterbed .

Pay Phones

Hope.

Ooooh, edgy

I'm assuming you weren't around. It really did feel like everything was heading somewhere better.

Smoking

Just wondering something and not looking up the answer.

Smoking in the IHOP

Having your windshield covered in bug guts during a road trip. Now I hardly ever get bugs that splat on my windshield. But in the 90s it would look like a war zone.

you were young and now you are old

Staying up all night waiting to record a music video from “The Box.”

Whale Tail

Common sense

Physical TV guides in book form and channel 13, having to wait a few seconds to see the next like 6 channels and what was playing if you didn't just want to surf.

Using Mapquest

Going to blockbuster on any given night to snag a movie for the weekend.

Eurodance

Public smoking

Mix tapes

HCFCs in the atmosphere.

Just waiting. No phone to entertain you. Nothing but your thoughts and whatever whatever was happening around you. I’m pretty sure if you did that today. You would have the cops called on you as someone would think you’re going to kidnap someone or rob something.

Faxing

Pogs

Joy, happiness, and sunshine.

LAN parties

Respect

Child discipline.

Renting video games or movies from blockbuster/Roger's video

Being all that and a bag of chips

Payphones. I can't remember the last time I saw one, it was within the past 10 years, but when I did see it, it wasn't operational anyway.

probably teletext, cassette, cd-rom, portable xd or tape player, VHS, pager, brick phone.

Newspapers. They used to come with our mail, and there were a good amount of newspaper stands around the city I grew up in. Haven't seen anyone read one in person in quite some time, and the stands have all seemingly vanished when I wasn't paying attention.

Pagers. 477 143

Dial-up modems.

Pager code. Or do doctors still use that??

Pagers

Waiting for an album release and actually having to physically go into a store and buy the album. On tape or cd.

Walking all the way to your friend's house just to see if they are home or ask if they want to hang out.

True acceptance of others differences.

Answering machines on voice only home phone lines. Pick up your messages when you got home from work.

Pagers

anyone got any car related ones?

Yellow pages.

Having a list of phone numbers in your wallet/pocket/purse.

Bum equipment

Beeper, pogs, and car cigarette lighters.

Beepers

Neon clothing 😂

Purchasing calling cards and paying extremely high rates for long distance phone calls to friends & family, based on the time of day.

Men who dress up as women were a joke - look at chandler Bings mum!!

Phonebooths

Video rental stores

Struggling with TV signal quality, moving the antennas non stop.

MuDs and other text based mmos.

Tactfully untangling the cord mid-phone call.

Remembering telephone numbers

Sending faxes

Not being to call too late or you get reemed by your friends parents. I’m sure kids now get there phones turned off, but I lived through the transition where parents didn’t really control my cell, and I could use it all night. Plus calling after 9pm was free!

Home ownership

waiting for the dvd sign to hit the corner

Also phone booths

Moderate temperatures in summer. Snow in Winter.

GET OFF THE PHONE, I'M TRYING TO WATCH SOME PORN

Optimism for the future

Happens with age.

10 10 321

.50c draft nights

So, there was urban development in my area, and I remember seeing houses advertised as, "FROM THE 70's, 80's, and 90's!!". As a kid I thought it was about what year they were designed after. My father and I would go and visit one of the big ones, two story, big loft, it was as far as I as a kid could fathom a mansion. My father dreamed of getting it, even fresh off his divorce with his ex. Looking back on those bits of information I remember, while having the understanding I do now, my dad was fresh thinking Reaganomics was going to work out still for him. And the appreciation for the sizes of the houses they were selling would have been up x3. I had believed when I was younger that it would have been possible.

Hope was normal.

TV static

remember when programing ended and there was nothing on but a loud ding

Old gaming systems and video games, when the only multiplayer gaming was when the person was in the room w you. Everything is online now, you have to pay for subscriptions, you can even buy games on your console and not have physical copies. I love how far gaming has come on a lot of levels but man I do miss old gaming.

Dial-up internet.

Grunge

Asbestos

Talking to each other without obssesing over tech

Looking forward to a new video game from electronic arts because you knew it was going to be good.

MSN

10-10-321

*10#

67, 69, 1010321 lol

Collecting comic books,thought they would be worth hundreds someday smh

Asking for directions

Kmart/sears but maybe thats just in my area

I scrolled through a bit and didn’t see this one but: keeping track of time for appointments and events. I wrote everything down in my calendar, but instead of a reminder popping up when it’s time to leave we needed to check the next day’s events the night before and just…remember to leave when it was time to go. Similarly, memorizing and/or hand writing out driving directions to a new location, based on looking at a paper map.

Rollerblades

Hope

Affordable housing.

Chicken Tonight and it's catchy ass TV jingle.

Y’all remember Bobby Jack and Happy Bunny?

Free speech

Having a cassette walkman to listen to music on the go, or your modern walkman CD player that didn't need rewinding in the late 90s!

Memorizing phone numbers.

Video rental store. I miss going down to mine and renting some random movie

Payphones

Zeppoli in pizza restaurants

Pencil pluck.

And when you heard the MASH song, it was time to go to bed.

Payphones

Living life in the moment

Virginia slims

Not being offended

Miss Cleo

Picking up the phone and hearing EEEEKKKWAAAAAAHGAAAAAAPSHHHHHERRRKKKK

Walkman?

Dial up internet

100% pure Colombian cocaine

Spice Girls.

yo yos

Playing capture the flag with the kids in your neighborhood, no matter who showed up

Pay phones

Musicians, specifically genuine rock stars

Reeeeally good ecstasy. Pressed pills you could only take half of at once….

And raves and underground parties that made everything since then seem like amateur hour.

Beepers

Blockbuster

Common sense

Games that breed nostalgia.

Well-written rom coms

When I say basic I mean typing prince.exe on command prompt

Payphones. And knowing which ones took incoming calls so you could page your friend from them.

Getting off the bus after school alone until 5-6pm everyday are age 7&8. And immediately beginning my chores each day completed before mom came home from work.

My life from day 1...

Dukes of Hazard Dixie Flag muscle shirts.

Meeting someone for a date or hookup on the internet without ever seeing them or being able to find some shred of digital identity.

I met a hookup in RL from a MUD in the 90's after talking to her for hours. Got real lucky with that one.

Had many hookups over the phone at work (DJ at a radio station) where I had no idea what she looked like and she had no idea about me.

So I would tell her to meet at a bar and restaurant and wear a certain color sweater or distinct item so when she walked in I knew if I had to duck out or wanted to stay around.

Harder to do all that today with digital media and being able to find someone, if they give you a correct name.

1997 calendars.

Putting tissue paper in the hole on top of a cassette tape so I could make a mixtape for my girlfriend

  • cassette tapes

  • pagers

  • cd walkman

Pay phones and yellow pages

Video rental stores like Blockbuster though I can’t say I’m too torn up by it.

Getting an abortion in the US south/midwest.

“Smoking or non smoking?” Asked when being seated in a restaurant.

Staying home to watch your favorite show when it airs

Abortion rights, politicians from different parties agreeing with each other. Budget surpluses. Triangles on clothing. Pants that function as flotation devices. Pay phones. Phone books. People born in the 1800s. VHS and cassette tapes. That's all I've got off the top of my head.

Service Merchandise having everything.

Webring sites (Usually on Geocities).

Teaching your children phone numbers and addresses.

I was literally thinking about if I was going to do that with my hypothetical children. I still have 2 phone number (one of which actually works) and 3 addresses burned into my psyche. It also brings the question of what is the right age to get a child a cellphone and if I should teach them to remember numbers anyway because if they're anything like me they'll likely lose it. As you can see I'm still having a heated debate.

AOL CDs

ipods

(edit) except it released in 2001. I are not a smart

90s?

oh lol I had my decades mixed

Sitting by the radio in the early AM listening to the local radio station to see if your school was having a snow day. The feeling of joy when they announced your school at 4am was the best thing. You'd go back to bed and wake up to snow sledding and making snow forts for snowball fights. Those days seemed to last forever.

Talking to strangers on the train...

Remembering phone numbers by heart.

CD cases that (get this) clipped onto your sun visor in your car.

Trying to go for a run with a CD player, even the one that you paid extra for that said "shock proof" but still skipped all over the place.

"TGIF" tv lineup.

Recording songs off the radio on your boom box and hearing the radio intro/outro if your didn't time it cleanly enough.

Blockbuster Video.

Pizza Hut pizza parlors with the hard red plastic cups and "Pizza Hut" stained glass lampshades.

The "Book It" reading program where you could earn a personal pan pizza for reading a certain amount of books.

Knowing that one friend that had a car phone.

True love

Playing games on Teletext

Idk but grunge style and music was so hot

Renting movies, Buying/reading newspapers, sending faxes, finding business in the yellow pages.

Men

Feeling relatively safe and having some optimism for the future of humanity. The 2000s put that shit to bed real quick.

Video tape cassettes

Good Humour w/ no bounds

Casual phone calls

Cleaning your VCR head(er?)

Thinking about payphone locations when on a trip

Respecting our elders.

Portable CD players

Common sense

Payphones

RC Cola.

Having a pager.

Optimism for the future

Me being happy.

Phone card

Telephone booths.

Good music

Branded Computers. I miss my old Shrek Desktop

Kids had real friends instead of electronic ones.

Kurt Cobain

Pagers

Bomb scares in primary schools

(North of ireland)

CDs

Mapquest directions printed out

Pagers

Cord phones

When your talking to mates and your parents pick up the phone and listen in on ur conversation

A good Adam Sandler film.

Memorizing phone numbers

Parachute pants?

common sense

The Bulls winning championships.

Actual conversation with a real person...

People showering

I honestly have so many answers to this... Lol

Oowlolllolol

White dog poop

Wholesome, non-explicit music that brings people together

Common sense

Manual transmissions in the USA. Still around for sure, and they weren’t everywhere in the 90s but they were a lot more common

My grandma

Jncos

Going out to play with your pals on your bike at the crack of dawn and not coming back until dusk, filthy, starving but happy

Oh man, I wish I could say boomers. But, this thread is atleast decade early.

VHS. Faxes. Beepers.

White dog poo.

The rock in blue jeans black turtle neck and fannipack

Going to the library and connect to the Internet when I got to desperate with Lucas Arts adventure games and needed a solution.

Has to take my bicycle to get there, because I was still a kid.

A Pager…

Using drugs

Your “butt looking big” was a ‘bad’ thing

Calling someone to talk to them..... It's all about texting now days.

At least in Greece. The busses used to have a schedule. Now we just got an app and check how long it takes for the bus to come to the stop we're waiting for

Pizza at McDonald’s

Friday night pizza & a movie. Everyone would stop at the video store to pick a movie to watch & then grab their pizza on the way home.

Polaroids! It was a really fun instantaneous way to take pictures in my childhood when my siblings and I were impatient as hell. They are still around, but definitely rare.

My girlfriend just bought an instax camera for me as an anniversary gift. (Fujifilm's small format version of a Polaroid camera) 2 problems I immediately noticed using them in modern day are it's difficult to find film for it in local shops and once you take a photo it only exists in your hands. Nostalgia is a powerful thing and I'm sure I'll make a scrap book with it, but I can see why it's not widely used these days.

Owning a home.

Not looking down at a screen constantly.

Also, offices full of desks that didn’t have a computer on them.

Seeing faces in the floor tiles while doing a poo

Being universally understood as unavailable past certain hours.

Music videos on MTV

Edit: See it was already on the list

Having to switch CDs or floppy disks when installing video games.

Going to a library

Beepers/Pagers. Making young upstanding citizens look like drug dealers since 1995.

Boredom.

Did anyone ever use Teletext, to get tv scheduling from the TV

Buying gold necklaces at kiosks in the mall.

Television aerials mounted next to the television

Downloading pornographic images as multiple binary files from a Usenet newsgroup, then assembling them in a separate application (being careful to get the order of files exactly right, e.g., 1/10, 2/10, 3/10, etc), then opening the resulting image file and hoping it came out OK.

Haha I remember a letter in Viz back in dial up days requesting porn webmasters to display their images upside to save this guy's bandwidth as he was frustrated waiting for the image to load up and he was only interested in the bottom half

Using Ceefax (UK) on the TV to book a holiday (other than a going in store) You'd sit there waiting for the screen to refresh, you'd have 1 minute to gather all the details before it moved onto the next page. If you missed something, you'd have to wait for it to cycle through all the pages again...

Catching some trout.

Pagers? I haven't seen those since the mid to late 90s.

Jell-o pudding pops Good music

Me…

I genuinely ask this; what the fuck does this mean?

Muff.

Pogs

VHS Tapes, and having to stick books or whatever you could find in the slot so that the picture would come out clearer… And CD Players, and having to hold it steady as if you were the god Atlas himself to prevent it from skipping… And the CD book cases, and the slap on bracelets, and the funny TV commercials back when they cared to try… Man I miss the 90s

VHS and cassettes. Not sure if it was mentioned

Payphones

List of phone numbers in your wallet.

Dates ending with 19XX

Long distance phone calls were free after 9pm

Dark, but... World War II veterans. Don't hurt me! They were good folk.

Just showing up at a friend's house to see what's up without calling first.

1-800-callatt

Common sense

Common sense

Payphones, people out and about more often, listening to the radio for your tunes, 80cents gasoline.

A sense of fucking decency.

Smoking in bars.

Smoking in restaurants.

This thread has made me so happy.

Seeing 1990 greeting cards

Making a phone call

Streaming media content

Common sense.

An affordable home

VHS players

My will to live. /s

Pagers

Respect for your elders

Affordable housing and college tuition here in the US

Good Real Time Strategy titles.

Using a map or printing out directions to your destination

The yearly Calendars between 90-99. Very common and normal then, very rare now!

The Internet, manners, better service, people carrying briefcases, women wearing pumps, permed hair.

Babies born in the 1990s

Pubic hair

Taking the wrong turn so you stop on the side of the road to look at the map so you can re-route.

Flash animation

Knocking on your friends door to see if they were home as a kid

Setting the VCR to record your favorite show so you could watch it when you got home.

Have people over for just a casual visit

Smoking inside restaurants.

Pay phones.

Meeting your friends at the arcade.

Having no one know where you were all the time

Meeting people at places and times where you said you would the day before

Calling Blockbuster to see if they have a copy of the VHS you wanted to rent.

Land lines

VCRs

Remembering phone numbers.

chinese jump rope

Free range kids.

Trying to bust a nut while watching scrambled porn

Where’s the Beef Wendy’s commercial. Good ole Clara.

This may not apply to all, but where I grew up, dial up internet was charged depending on how long it was connected for and not on the data consumed, so I used to open as many webpages as I could (no tabbed browsing then, so I had to open them one at a time, not sure if multiple windows were a thing then) then save them as HTML files so I could read them all at my leisure later & don't rack up a huge bill

Pagers/Beepers

Manners

"I'll call and let them know we will be there soon. Keep your eyes open for a phone booth."

Travel agencies

My friends

Those large telephones

Phone booths.

Scrunchies

Landline telephones.

Topless on the beach

CD collection! Songs, movies, games!

VHS

Hope.

hope

Affordable housing

Depending on where you were, at least in the early 90's it wasn't uncommon for restaurants to still have smoking and non-smoking sections, which almost feels a bit bizarre now.

Pagers

Indoor Shopping Malls, Kmart

almost everything has changed for the worse

affordable housing

watching the same damn porn on vhs you stole from your brother.

Relying heavily on public transport and traveling/commuting together to school, College, offices with friends and neighbours

Normalcy

Leg-warmers.

Modem noises. Tuuuriiiriturituriiii...kkkhhjjzzzzzzz...eh ehe eheh.

Tamagotchis

I'll say it, the R word was extremely normalized.

Loving a Flat ass

Dial-Up.

So, I may be a bit fucked in the head, but I genuinely miss it sometimes.

Looking up the football scores on teletext. 302

Teletext

MD Players

Living your life IN your life.

These days we live our lives ON our phones. Other than my mom and the people in my house, I could go a week without verbally speaking to another human.... BUT I email coworkers and clients all day, I group chat with my besties pretty much continually, send snaps and post stories that show everyone what I'm up to that day. Our extended relatives and alot of friends haven't seen my kids in like 2/3 years, but they all see my kids growing all the time on Facebook.

It's weird and a bittersweet change.

During the pandemic I was pregnant, on mat leave and worked from home. So I often wonder how lonely I would have been without social media.

The sense of a community near larger cities.

Affordable rent.

Beepers

Smiles, and kindness, not just between friends and family but people in general. I used to be able to smile at everyone and get a smile back from most. Now when I smile at people I usually get nasty looks, and when I am nice to people they either take me for granted, or they think I am hitting on them. WTF is wrong with people these days? Since when has being nice to people become a sin?

The middle class blue collar worker

My father going to the store for some milk that one time.

VHS

Going to a movie rental place to rent tapes to watch.

Waiting for someone to get off of the land line so you could use dial up for internet

MSN messenger.

Flip phones with no internet options and only the snake game

texting where it costed a cent per letter so you abbreviated everything you possibly could before sending.

Desktop computers with only the pin ball game and the solitaire one

Getting meals on airplanes as part of the flight as well as a kid's packet with an activity book and crayons to keep the kids occupied during the flight (also no movies or other entertainment inflight)

Here at least, a certain ethnic group doing their laundry in the river/creek either completely topless or just bra on top.

Kids playing pretend with no electronics to play with and making own doll houses out of pieces of foam or cardboard and their clothes out of scraps of cloth.

Pouring water down turantula holes to get them to come out then having them climb on a stick and chase each other with them (almost never see the holes anymore).

Using cloth diapers instead of pampers

Probably not having to shave legs and stuff

also "common sense"

Could probably keep going but I'll stop here

😁

Music that isn't "on demand," like having to wait until the radio plays it and record it to tape

Biking around the neighborhood with your friends, without smartphones, Google, texts, dm’s; completely unreachable, for a whole day.

toys in cracker jacks. now they’re just…. QR codes

Not necessarily 90s, more like pre 2000s. Children saying, "Mom! I'm going with my friends! See you later!" We used to leave and do all kinds of stuff all day then be back home for dinner. Parents were somehow fine with it. No wonder so much stuff happened to us.

Kids playing outside in the streets in droves.

Common sense and a good work ethic

dunkaroos existing

Getting paged on a beeper (or pager) and finding a pay phone to call back the number. Also using the numbers to create texts on the beeper

Virgin girls

smoking

Pay Phone Booth

Smoking cigarettes on an airplane.. yuck

Payphones and pagers son!? 😂

Writing the date by starting with “199”

1207 help number. You could call this number in Belgium to get directions or get numbers from people or stores.

Payphones

Ur dad

Meeting up with your friends by going to their house and physically knocking on their door.

Baggie raver jeans.

Dial up internet with the loud dial tone and static sounds and having to get offline when someone needs to use the phone/ having a time limit so your house phone isn’t busy for to long.

Pirated dvd’s

Rotary phones

Good new music

soap shoes

AIM (aol instant messenger) and away messages..BRB

Dialing 10288 to call long distance becsuse your parents put a code on to prevent you

So many things!!! Walkman and VHS players and the tapes that go with them. Pulling the tapes out and having to wind it back in because it got stuck. Cords or house phones. Only being allowed to v we on the internet (AOL OR AIM) at night for an hour between phone calls...and if a call comes in, being kicked off the internet. Portable CD players. Friday nights hanging out at the mall, because that was the cool place to be, not to shop, but to just walk the mall.

Printing put Map Quest directions for a road trip.

Insert unoriginal joke about a living wage/affordable college here

Kreeooerrrrrrrtzzzzzz

A more sensible housing market/ cost

TV guide magazines

Dailup internet

The rolls of the cameras?

My ability to speak to people.

Teletext

Love

Blockbuster video

Landlines

Paper prom. Its all videos now. No complaints here.

phone books

Unbiased independent media

Milli Vanilli

Hope for the future

pay phones

Floppy disks 💀😭

Pay phones

Home ownership

Rewinding things

All the weird ass commercials lmao

Cassette tapes and wired phones. Dial up internet and computers half a metre cubed. Petrol being less than $1 for a litre.

Being honest when describing people for what they are and how they look.

Riding bikes n having to be home once the streetlights came on.

Toys in cereal

Air hogs airplanes that were airplanes and powered by air

R Kelly's career

Nerds ice cream, war heads popsicles, Minute Maid juice bars, and art attack

Having secret stash of playboy magazines in a own built treehouse as a kid.

Ska

Letting your kids go out to play without supervision. Just “come home when the street lights go off”

Going to the local video rental store on a Friday or Saturday night to pick one of the "New Release" titles that were in the cinema a year ago.

Having to remember to rewind the tape to take it back.

I rewind my youtube videos so the next viewer doesn't have to

Ha. Don't forget to make sure you put it in the correct box.!

When my grandparents travelled to Brisbane, they used the RACQ service guide chauffeurs to meet up on the outskirts of the city & the guide would travel ahead of them to lead them through the suburbs to their destination. We lived in a small country town about 2hours drive to Brisbane. If family had to go there for something it was a big deal to plan a trip, take the best car (my parents or grandparents car), have a copy of the UBD map book (melway map), be home before dark in case we broke down, coins for toll booths. Things have changed a bit!

Corded phones.

Tbe brown hairs on my head. Occasional one nestles in amongst all the white ones now.

Rewinding cassette tapes.

50 cent candy bars

Minidisc players

Hanging out at the arcade.

Good music

Phone booths

Self esteem

When we as kids went outside we’d call our friends to go out by crying out loud their names standing under their windows, up to 5th floor. Either we were too lazy to go upstairs and knock or the door downstairs would be locked.

Video rental stores, vhs tapes and cassettes.

Smoking in bars.

Floppy disks.

333-FILM

Albums going platinum

Optimism

Pagers

Hope for the future.

Common sense

It's now rare and worth a lot of money.

We did lots of stupid shit in the 90s we just didn’t get recorded. Today doesn’t have a monopoly on insanity.

Answering a landline.

finding a Sega on the cheap at a garage sale

The phrase "out of order" when describing something that's broken/not working

Common sense?

Good Rappers 🤣🤣

CD or cassette players. I was born in ‘96 but I still remember bringing a CD player and headphones with me to listen to a CD I burned on the school bus. But I don’t know if my younger sister, who’s 15, has even seen a CD player.

In South Africa, racism was common among white people and apartheid still existed. It ended early 90's and Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. Now, in the 2000's a woman went to jail for calling someone black a monkey. I luckily didn't exist in the 1990's.

Being on time.

Bug covers for vehicles. Used to be almost such a necessity to everyone I knew who were of driving age then.

Flip phones

cheap weed

My childhood. 😂

Tapetown

411 *69

Occasional bipartisanship

House phones

Sanity

Scheduling plans around what times different TV shows were on

In the UK I remember...

Teletext - looking up the results for the football and finding out the latest news articles. Booking holidays from this was the norm too.

Also, tamagotchi's and pogs!

Land Lines !

Pay phones

411

memorizing friend and family phone numbers

Chocolate cigarettes

Good music in all genres !!!!

Having to share one phone line with your entire family

Rooms full of books

(But not the Lambos)

Pay phone

Pay phone on every other corner

Kids playing outside.

10-10-220

Looking at the TV guide channel and waiting to see when your favorite show was on only to look down for a second and missed it so you have to wait till it comes up again.

Phone books and working phone booths

Comedy

USSR

Payphones.

Good music?

Affordable anything.

Dis dick..... And cd's

Buying a house that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and 3 jobs

Answering the phone and it's a spam call for a fax.

Bro this thread brings tears man. I miss the late 90s/early 2000s

Beepers, Pay Phones, Paper Takeout Restaurant Menus

Glaciers

Nirvana

Those giant recycling dumpsters with a green/clear/brown separated glass one, a plastics one & most importantly the paper one in grocery store parking lots. They were a gold mine for porn mags as a teen

Floppy disks and rebooting into DOS-mode.

Tamagotchi

Lack of micro-transactions

Lesbians.

Not knowing about Covid

Renting vhs movies from a video store. Cassette tapes that play music. Pagers!

People born in 1910.

POGS

Calling subpar quality or experience "gay".

Dvds

Gas

walkie talkie

Using a beeper. My dad who was an elevator constructor had one. I remember this little black box in a fancy, small leather case with a clip for wearing it.

Phone booths

Payphones. Always call your parents collect from the park when your lost. Plus that yellow pages. It wasn't a good phone book if it didn't have at least 1 penis drawn in it.

Ur father🤣😆🤣😆😅😆😝😜😝😜(my epik humour is your father go away it very funni)

Actually calling someone instead of texting.

VCRs in the living room

Payphones, especially the old red ones.

Children going to school without parents thinking if they would come back home that day or not :(

Cat calling.

Man, this really is a millenial party up in here! I’m all for it.

Phone books. Yellow pages were for businesses phone numbers. White pages were for residential phone numbers.

Bowl Cuts, Real Dodge Balls, Smoking indoors.

Porno mags

Blockbusters.

Smoking in bars and restaurants. The DQ in my home town even had a smoking section.

This might not be one for everyone but getting excited when the sale sheet for your catalogue comes in the mail and proceeding to hand write the new prices on each page of the catalogue.

Manners

Affordable rent

Video rental places.

Landline phones in the home.

Adding in landlines were important to have because if the power went out you still had a way to contact emergency services etc. Nowadays they'd run off the internet line. Power goes out and you've got no landline. Pointless.

Checking Teletext for football scores, cinema listings, general news.

That one commercial for sears air conditioners

Dot matrix printers. Is that 80s??

High quality cartoons. Most kids tv is (dubbed) live action, or fast-paced cartoons without much flare. I especially hate the poorly 3D animated shows.

Sears catalog. American girl dolls.

I used to write URLs in a paper for when I had access to a computer with internet

Fax machines

AOL and Chatrooms.

Love

A game night with the boys

VHS's maybe?????

Payphones

Landlines in homes

checking your pager and going to the pay phone to call someone back or page someone back in code

/r/Philippines basura!

Collect calls

ITSBOBWEHADABABYITSABOY

Gen z will say it's fake but...

Removing your rib so you can suck your own dick

Common sense

Tamigotchis

Having a sense of humor

Glaciers

Seeing kids hanging out in tree tops

Surge

Visiting the tourist information office of a town you have just arrived in to get a list of hotels and bed and breakfasts and phone them to find out if they have any vacancies for the night

Pop up headlights. RIP

My sony CD Player jammin Dr. Dre the chronic album (any cd ROM player in a car, in genera)

My sony CD Player Jammin Dr. Dre the chronic album (any cd ROM player in a car, in genera)

floppy-disk and floppy disk input on P.CsL

2pac, Easy-E & Biggie

Michael Jordan playing in NBA

THE ONLY Jordan to make NBA'

Chicago Bulls Running the NBA

Home Phones

Dial-up / Slow ASS internet. with sketchy car accident sound that's iconic as it turtles to connect to Netscape or AOL (prob bankrupt) noew

Talking with humans in real-life proximity, even if not necessary. You talked in public more. Even introverts of 1990s are in completely different environments. than 2022 introverts. As for Extraverts were human interaction 100% now i doubt even 50% online min.

1990: flight in 30? Show up with 15 minutes to spare boarded in 5 .

2022: get there 4 hours before the boarding

Looking for flats to rent in loot (UK only maybe?)

Pogs.

Going to Discovery Zone for your friends’ birthday parties

parents thinking you were weird for not wanting to go outside and play all day

Betty boop

I miss phone books. Doesn't matter what year because I'm sure I'm not alone. Wish they'd bring them back...

Tupac

Pulling out a map from the glove compartment to trace down your trip lol. Phone booths and collect calls. Walkman. Mechanical cars with zero electric assists 🤦‍♂️ Recording Saturday night DJs on cassette to playback in the car lol Buying a full bag of candies hand picked for 3-4$ to share between 3-4 people. Fuel price at around 35-45cents a litre (in Canada) New affordable car was 10k and all you needed. Family dinners with actual conversations cause there was no distractions from cell or TV. Installing windows from 30-40 floppy disks took an entire day 😂 Flying in airplanes with a dress code. Everyone was clean looking. One car per household. 5-6-7 ppl fit in that same car.

This sound.

A cabinet or coffee table in the lounge with a pull out section with VHS/Cassette holders built into it.

Smoking at your table in a restaurant, like Pizza Hut.

Phones with cords

Putting tape on that little hole on the bottom of the VHS so you could record over it

Landline phones

Beanie babies

The absence of in-app purchases.

Threesomes

Written Resumé/Curriculum Vitae.

Spice girls

That sweet cut line on your ankle from a Skip-It.

using that yellow CD player to listen to music. those were the good times

This will be buried, but I need to chime in, Using Ceefax services (or Aertel, as I'm from Ireland).

Edit: they were "teletext" services.

Waiting in line to buy concert tickets and then saving the stub after the show. We even camped out one night to get Ozzy tickets. I miss those days.

Common sense

Pay phones

looking at the newspaper to see if your show was on schedule for that said day!

Calling cards

Phone books

Privacy

Mall culture

Briefcase, they actually looked cool back in the day but now they are replaced with backpacks.

Those PlayStation demo CDs that Pizza Hut used to give out.

Nintendo systems in McDonald’s

Phone booths

Fireflies

White dog poo

White dog poo

Faxmachines

Optimism about the future. That and pogs and slammers. Rollerblades.

Neon rollerblading rinks

Man I feel old, I miss the 90’s.

Using tubular as a adjective, thank god people quit using it

Pogs

Affordable cost of living. The ability to rent and live and even buy. Basically , a middle class. In the 90’s there was still hope. The “dream”, albeit small , was still attainable.

Getting your knees and elbows scraped. Not that I want kids to feel pain, but I sometimes blame how soft kids are today because they never experienced tripping on concrete and trying to hide a huge open wound from mommy.

Literally smacking your TV when the picture was fuzzy.

It didn’t have to be oldskool to be worthy of a listen…

Keeping a physical notebook with all of your friends/family’s phone numbers in it.

Teachers forcing is to learn cursive handwriting.

The real big lie: “it is an important skill you’ll need to know for middle school / high school. All your assignments must be written in cursive”. 🙄

Plastic Straws

Beige computers baby!!!

Blockbuster

Tripping over the phone cord.

Tazos and snap pants.

Turkish toilets.

Phone booths

Dial-up internet. “Waiting for the internet to warm up”

Saturday morning was film clips for me. Waiting for your favorite song was torture.

Mapquest

Public telephone booths.

It almost seems like most of the nostalgia we remember is because we didnt have a pocket computer.

CRT televisions

Mail-order anything from catalogues.

so, i remember the old cell phones had the chirp buttons on the side.

you could like, push it, and it would chirp the person you were trying to reach and then essentially use it like a walkie-talkie. 🤣

Batteries.

Floppy disks.

Pogs.

Qualudes

blockbuster

In the US, station wagons

Using the telephone book.

Pogs.

Zima

Vhs/vcr

Family trips to Blockbuster…. This thread is making me sad now

Blockbuster

Saying n-word.

Owning a house

Affordable housing.

running to the bathroom during tv commercials for fear of missing the show when it comes back on.

Libraries.

Needing directions.

Renting out DVDs to watch

Phone booths

Sending mail to friends and family

Phone booths

Fax machines

VHS/DVD rental

Using spiral-bound Daytimers to record (by handwriting) your business appointments, notes, contacts, and goals.

TV guides with Cory & Topanga on the cover

Social interaction.

Going to a friend's house and everyone watching power rangers together.

Home ownership by people in their 20s

Affordable housing

Disposable cameras

Friendships

Waiting to connect to the internet (modem)

Dialing 10-10-220 for collect calls.

Christopher Lloyd telling Americans to call collect, classic 90's.

Beepers and beeper codes to communicate messages.

Going outside to play. Physically going to your friend’s house to ask if they can come out to play. Blockbuster. Toys R Us

Paying by credit card by mail.

Phone books!

JNCOs

Pagers

Pay phones

Smoking inside my office, ash trays along the corridors, & discount smokes in the office cigarette vending machine (because they never bother keeping the prices up to date).

Letting your kids walk to school unattended.

From first grade and after, my parents let me walk half a mile to school and back on my own. Nowadays you need to be on a freaking list as a walker or a driver and if the correct car isn’t there to pick you up, there’s a process.

It’s ridiculous when I come into town and I want to pick up my niece from school and the teachers are like, “well, she’s listed as a rider but not to this car…” as my niece is yelling, “that’s my uncle Thurman!”

Payphones

Columbia House

Dine in Pizza Huts with the Kale Salad Bar decorations and red cups.

wanting to go see a really good Will Smith movie

Teletext on the TV

Spring break on MTV

Using a VHS tape or beta max. And using an actual map when driving

I can’t pick just one so here’s two:

  1. Having/using a landline with the phones attached to the wall with a super long cord...and walking as far as it could reach to get a little more privacy if you didn’t want your parents or someone else to hear what you were talking about lol

  2. Blowing air in to a Nintendo (or any consoles) game cartridge to get it to work better

Knowing all your friends and family members phone numbers by heart

Paying attention to one another.

Road Maps and Phone Books.

Mixtapes

Tamagotchis?

Not being able to use the internet if someone in the house was using the telephone. Dial up sucked

Conversations.

Pull out car stereos.

Separate colored bathrooms

Lavalamps. But still my second favorite light source

People used to actually call each other, set a date, and (this part is wild af) actually show up for the event! You used to be able to throw your kids a birthday party and not have to sit there and cry as you watch your kid's heart breaking because no one showed up. No one would miss out on a chance for free cake.

In SoCal, rain lol. It would rain for weeks

Hope. Happiness. Take your pick

Pubes

Phone booths

Humour and tolerance.

Hitting on girls like in the Fresh Prince

Manners and respect.

Having almost no information on how to play certain games. I lived in a small town with no quick access to gaming magazines. It took me 6 years to figure out the Carnaval level in Sonic The Hedgehog 3

The twin towers

Smoking in restaurants

Sense of community.

Conversation and blissful innocent ignorance of the doing of the world.

Dial up internet

Crt tv's

Lan lines

Cable TV

Bugs smashed on the windshield

VHS/DVD/CD

Purple vehicles

Good tasting KFC

Playing outside

Phone books

Magazines. Can’t believe you could sit and look through all of a magazine, catching up on celebrity news, new TV shows or movies, do quizzes about what lipgloss flavor would best suit you…

Installing windows 98 was a bitch back in the day

To find out what was on TV you had to go to channel three or four and watch the scroll and if you missed it you had to wait all over again.

Also... Spice network.

Hot girls on TV/movies.

Land lines

Answering machines and beepers

4:3 TVs

Smoking!!

Having your friend bring over his 386 and connect with your computer over a serial port to play DOOM

Street press

Watching the news to see if your school name shows up on the bottom of the screen to know if the school day was canceled.

Using yellow pages as a booster seat to see out the car window when we were little

I used to take a lot of long-exposure night city photography back then. It was very easy to get up onto roofs of buildings, either via stairwells or other means, and not be harassed by anyone. That changed after 2001, locked stairwells, alarms, guards, cops, etc. Kind of killed all my good photo spots.

Phonebooths

Payphones

Smoking in pubs. I mean I'm glad it's gone, horrible habit, but it went oh so well with a pint.

Discmans

Yo-yos

They were everywhere when I was going to school. Haven't seen one in over 20 years.

Napster on a computer

genuine fun at public gatherings, now its all for social media clout

Phones with cords. House phones, that if someone was already on the phone and someone else picked up you could listen in on/join the conversation.

Smoking in the car with kids inside

TVs that looked like wooden furniture.

I wish they were fully gone, but mullets are more rare today.

Vintage Cars

Using a payphone….

Authenticity

Black and white television with Ariel..

Topless women at the beach, although that peaked in the 1980s and was already declining in the 90s and mostly gone by the end of the decade.

Pay Phones

Telephone boots on the streets, sun tanning stores where you would go in these beds, travel agency stores with all their flyers and a little corner with toys where I used to sit as a kid when my parents were planning a trip.

Pagers. Landlines.

What was normal in the 1990s but rare or non existent now?

Blockbuster rented movies.

(No social media, cable TV was commercial free to encourage public to hook up. Few people had cable or internet connections.)

Cameras with film.

• Pogs.

• Going outside to play, sometimes for hours and with numerous friends.

• Landline phones.

• Payphones & Phonebooks.

• Going to Blockbuster to rent movies.

Pagers

As a teenager, being able to go out and just hit up a show on a whim. Concerts are absurdly expensive now and I just don't see kids doing it like they used to. They just watch stuff in the internet because they don't have rich parents to pay $300 for ticketmaster bullshit. Or, if they DO go to shows, they watch the whole thing through their phones. It's just weird to me because I loved concerts and I treasure those memories...oh and spending all class period writing long notes to your friends and folding them into those little squares before passing them

Fat nickel bags of stress weed

Not having access to a calculator at any given time.

At school summer holidays I would stay up late in my room watching tv (with headphones to keep the parents unaware). And every Sunday with the Sunday times the culture magazine would contain the week aheads tv listings

So I’d basically have my entire weeks movie and tv watching all sorted in advance

a bug graveyard on your windshield after a trip out of the city. now we don't even have that anymore, sucks for the insects that died on the windshield but it is telling of the insect population imbalance we have now.

Cinnaburst gum!

Wtf happened to that? I miss it so much.

Oh, and good music.

Smoking

Good quality tv shows and movies

Windows 95 or 98SE

Going to HMV to look for music! Browsing the different floors to check all the different categories... Asking the clerk to recommend similar artists.

... Paying $50 for a Scooter album because it was "imported" music from Europe lmfao. YouTube took over the role of all of this imo.

Padded shoulders in everything.

[deleted]

You're not wrong. I guess emails are the equivalent today but youths definitely dont email.

Rewinding the VHS tape at the end of the movie. Or at the start, if you didn't do it last time.

Getting jerked off in the movie theater.

Hitch-hiking

Being born in the 30s

Common sense.

Walkmans

great

Land-line phones.

Teletext

CDs, buying physical music

Dial up internet

Using the TV guide channel to set your home clocks

Privacy

1-800-COLLECT

Renting a movie at blockbuster.

Edit: KIDS PLAYING OUTSIDE!!

Not having access to the internet

CD players that were supposedly skip proof, but still skipped and you had to change the batteries often.

POP-CORN.

“At the tone, the current Pacific daylight time will be 12:03 AM.”

A joke

Buying your home

Making plans days in advance to meet someone somewhere and then going there and just hoping they showed up at the right time. Then sometimes waiting there for an hour, going home disappointed, and finding a voice mail saying they had to take their grandma to the hospital or something. Making plans and hoping they just work out. Plus, you couldn't just not go like people do now with last second texts with some bs reason when they really just want to watch another Netflix episode.

Simple & Quality Life.

Payphones and calling collect

Demo disks

Me being 8 years old going to the supermarket and buying a 6pack of beer and a pack of unfiltered cigarettes for my father

Happiness

Clippy

Between 1995 and maybe 2002 in France, Tatoo was the thing.

It was a pager, a small text message receptor limited to 15 numbers at first. You received 55555555551020 and you call back the 5555555555 at 10:20, or 5555555555911 and you knowed that there was an emergency and you have to call the 5555555555 as soon as possible.

Later they added text and extended the messages to 80 characters.

https://www.coup-de-vieux.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/tatoo.jpg

Manual transmissions

A year with a number ending in the 90s.

Being free to do something stupid, or to appreciate something completely beautiful, or to wonder and argue about something completely inane and inconsequential without a million cell phones around to get in the way. I went to a concert in the park a month ago and no one seemed to be listening at all. Everyone within viewing distance was taking pics, video, panoramas and posting them on social media. I’m not sure if they really heard a thing.

Smoking inside places. Everybody smoked inside bars , restaurants and other public places.

The ability to afford and buy a house.

Movie rental places

Pen pals.

Landline phone cords. The long squiggly ones you could wrap your finger in or walk round the corner of the wall with

People with nirvana shirts that actually know a song, or just a grunge look. Or people who played instruments. Lack of auto tune. I play guitar and try to find anyone who can play bass and drums and I find no one. So hard man.

Smoking indoors

Actually going out to wait in line for concert tickets. And staying out overnight to be first in line to get front row seats

Helpful police.... Oh wait.

Payphones

Maps printed on paper and carefully folded until you opened them

The twin towers

My grandpa

Transphobia in films being completely acceptable

Intermissions

At least in Mexico movies used to have a 15 minute break at the middle for people to get more food or go to the toilet.

I don't know why they are not a thing anymore.

Pogs

Affordable housing.

Fax machines and pagers.

Home ownership

Pogs

Poggs and slammers

Film cameras and getting pictures developed

Land Lines.

Video rent stores. I remember in the 2000s visiting videoland. An interesting place with a lot of VHS tapes and dvd's. It was a special experience. Renting a VHS tape felt special because they always had new stuff. Now its all boring with netflix where you scroll through hundreds of movies until you find one that you watched several times already but "its not bad to watch it again". And you have to wait for a long time until new releases or other movies are placed on netflix. In many new modern stores i see that movie stands are getting smaller and smaller. I am happy that stores like CEX exist but still. I miss being able to buy a new dvd or blue-ray physically. It's almost all online now. A big con is that you never actually know if a "new dvd" "new blue-ray" is actually new. I once worked for a place that sold dvd's exclusively online and they would just clean and repackage used dvd's and then sold it as if it was unopened/new.

Clinton’s affair with Monica .

Pet rocks

Light up trainers, every kid a pair haha

Restaurants: "2 for nonsmoking, please"

Blockbuster

Payphones. I'm not even 30 but the amount of times I've needed a payphone when my phone died before, I wish there were still a few around.

Just showing up at your friend's house or visa versa. These days everything is so scripted. Everyone expects a text or phone call before visits. I use to drive around all weekend hitting up friends houses.

Credit card imprinters. If you wanted to pay with a credit card, they would place the card on the machine, place carbon paper over it, and a roller would press the paper onto the card. The raised letters would mark the paper, and they would separate the sheets to give you a receipt for your transaction.

These came around after credit cards were getting common enough for it to take too much time to write the numbers down on a slip.

Everything, basically.

Common sense.

Genuine conversation

CDs , huge computers with a** behind, Tv clothes that are woven, no mask era ( privilege ) the lyrics of Bollywood and Hollywood songs. Theatres where you can carry your own snacks, super Mario video game, people wer good and didn’t use to run behind money they use to enjoy in every little moment.

Every restaurant had a smoking and non smoking section, even Burger King. Family Video and Mall allowed smoking too.

Not having a phone or the internet yet having fun with friends

Yo-yo’s

Twin towers?

America Online

Pay phones

Pubes on ladies

Being able to just... go out and play all day without an adult as a teen while not (very heavily) worrying about being kidnapped or drugged or raped or sold or trafficked.

Dropping in on friends unannounced because you were in the neighborhood.

Pay phones and how much and where you needed one

One thing not mentioned would be the general optimism regarding politics. The Soviet empire just collapsed, the formal "second world" just went trough the so called "year of wonders". First democratic elections in 20+ countries with no major power remaining as dictatorship.

There was a general expectations of a monopolar world order with the US as sole hegemon and liberal democacies as the norm. Yea.... it didn't happen

Listening to your portable CD player with headphones.

Dial up modems.

Asbestos

Video plus+

Civility?

Having maners and civil discussions with people on opposite political stances like yeah I don't really agree but hey this is going on wanna go to it. The came smartphones and bought and paid politicians and all this.

Making a mix tape using the radio. You would wait all day to hear coolios gangster paradise.

People not getting offended

How often you saw a snowflake

Fashion

Blockbuster, I miss those days.

House phones

A family without overweight people.

Hopes and dreams, childhood naivete and innocence.

Playing Oregon Trail in computer lab.

Being able to buy a house!

Me being able to produce a lasting erection.

Ivana trump

The sound of a dial up modem. Or the chime of AIM messenger.

Ashtrays

Good shows

Social forgetting. In the nineties and before you had the ability to fuck up as a kid, learn from it and move on with your life. Now everything is online, and if you fuck and do something stupid the entire world will know about it forever. I remember the news story about the Canadian guy who was running for political office and was doing well. He was young, ambitious and popular. Then someone pulled up some shit from when he was a stupid, edgy teenager and his career was over before it began.

Zoophilia, looking for a goal of 500 downvotes

Memorizing phone numbers

Rollerbladers

Land lines

school shootings, nary a one back then I can recall, now it's rare to not have to live in fear

Malibu Musk

Feeling shameful for masturbating.

Who can forget, try as we might, some of the '90's most iconic fashion trends? Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE me a sexy 1990's SIaker, aka skater guy just as much as the next 90's girl but can we all admit the ridiculousness of super wide Legged skater/bondage pants every skater boy worth his salt rocked in the 1990's (JNCO's anyone? Lol) Oh kids these days will never know the struggles we faced walking 5 miles to and from school in the blistering heat or cold with 30 yards of denim hanging off our hips as we fought to keep from tripping over our 5 ft Wide pant legs! Up Hill! Both ways! LOL. It was ridiculous and a trend I for one would like to forget. But what happened to low waisted jeans? Can we all agree that the"Hiphugger" and super low rise jeans were sexy af? I for one think they need to make a come back? Who's with me? Lol.

I remember the letters and they were so heartfelt if it was to someone important you would try to have the best hand writing to impress them

White dog shit, not sure wtf was going on but it used to be everywhere.

Savings

People without a smartphone

Low rise jeans.

Everyday was like a horror movie, no cell phones anywhere and the phones that were all around you, couldn’t use. Somehow we lived.

Party lines!

Furbies

The Twin Towers

VHS tapes

Having a pager

Landline phones with those LONG ASS cords so i, the teenager, coukd speak in the privacy of my room.

Hearing the click of someone pick up the other line and whining IM ON THE PHOOONE DAD!

Calling your crush and letting it ring a thousand times because voicemail was not a thing.

Calling a premium games hotline for cheats and guidance when you are stuck on a game.

Buying console magazines just for the demo disks.

Going to library to find answers to your questions. Now you can Google and find your answers in seconds.

Pay phones.

Face to face communication Staring at the sky without needing to capture it

Ozone holes. Fuck you, Thomas Midgley.

Pagers

Phone booths

Conversion therapy

Getting married in earlier your 20s... By earlier i meant the age of 20. Or 18.

Calling the bank for the weather. Or, if your power went out, you would call to see what time it was so you could reset your alarm clock.

Phonebooks

Manners

Oh!! Pagers!!

Phone booths, video rentals, smoking sections…

Not having a cellphone

Presidential blow jobs

Knocking round a mates house to see if they could come out to play and recording songs off the radio and perfectly pausing to cut out the dj talking. Buying a rubber or pencil at every museum or farm I went to. A 99 ice cream actually costing 99p. Removing your radio/cd unit from your car to stop it getting stolen and having to hide cds as they actually had value. Having to physically go out to make friends or live interests. Naff jackets, kappa trousers and brit rock.

Africa medallion.

telephones connected to the wall by wire, especially those ones that were stuck to the walls

Key Maps

Awesome music.

Skidz. Cross Colours. Djs. Merry go round. If you know you know.

Ps. Yea I know you can still get them…sorta…but have you ever seen anyone in person wearing them?

Phone booth. You almost couldn't find one nowadays thanks to everyone owning a mobile phone

Dialup!!

Mobile phones with antenna

If you reverse the question, the answer is eyebrows

Smoking in restaurants

Landlines

Pagers

CDs and compact disk players.

Common sense

Guitars

Orbits drink

Pogs

CD’s

Reading the newspaper to look for TV show and sport Channel timings

The Newspaper

Segregation

Popcorn, the phone number

Planning my weekends by using the T.V. guide

For 90s kids: Your parents fighting over map directions every single summer vacation.

Missing an exit could mean getting lost. It was clearly a stressful experience for them.

Pay phones

This might just be for the British but booking holidays, finding cinema times, and the gig guide on Ceefax. Better than the internet.

My back not hurting.

Common sense

The apocalyptic embarrassment of saying "keep the change" with a grin when you didn't actually give enough

Remembering telephone numbers of family and friends. I still have a few that I can remember.

Mixtapes

Phonebook. If you had to call someone you didn't know, you had to look up their number in the phonebook.

It's so weird no one uses them anymore.

Love

Be kind, rewind.

Phone books

Carrying change for the payphone/ having a change collection in the car for toll booths.

Pogs

"At the tone the time will be..."

Spending the entire day at the mall.

Politeness in politics

Calling 411 to get the weather.

Space shuttles

Pagers

AOL chat room.

Walkmen

Ringing doorbells!!

Aids

MC Hammer

Rolodexes (a paper based system for storing contact info)
File cabinets full of paper in hanging folders
Tractor feed paper in dot matrix printers
Cases full of floppy disks containing backups for the computer Manuals for computer programs, with other "How to X for Dummies" books along side them. Road Atlases
Phone calls every Saturday or Sunday to keep in touch with relatives
All the kids on the block together until the street lights came on, then going inside.

Fuck I miss the 90s:

-camping outside a music store to buy concert tickets and being sold them in the order you lined up. Jamming to music all night, everyone hanging out, playing cards, my uncle asleep in the car bc my cousin and i were only teens, people passing around flasks and joints, camaraderie….

-feeling really cool bc I had my own phone line, with one of those see thru phones that lit up (I paid $15 a month with my high school job money)

-having a black box

-skipping school to watch “Smells like teen spirit” when it aired on tv

-quitting a job and walking across the street getting a new job and starting the next day

-paying for my own apartment on $6.50 an hour

People showing up unannounced to your front door.

As a kid, I remember my parents' friends and family just popping in during the day and it was always fun, especially if they gathered around the table to talk. Even my friends would stop by randomly.

Now? No one ever comes by unannounced. Ever. Except door-to-door salesmen lol

I don't get to experience that randomness as an adult. Instead, I'll get a text from a friend or family member letting me know they may stop by at so and so.

But as a kid, it was always exciting when there was a knock at the door. Now? It's someone trying to sell me a home security system. Not the same!

Going to hire movies on VHS or DVD

Good music.

Calling a phone number to check the time of day.

Pulling that little antenna up when you need to make a call

a video blockbuster.

People taking a joke

Calling someone's house phone and getting interrogated by their parents before passing the phone to person you were calling

Abortion.

Arcades, rollerblades, raves and cruisin. I really miss hearing killer instinct screaming so loud or playing drop ins with people in gauntlet and hoping I got the wizard. Horror games and movies were better then. Concerts were definitely a different vibe back then when you went.

Hope

The Adidas side popper track pants

Actually getting excited for a phone call….. and 1-800 numbers with movie or comic book tie ins. There was a Terminator 2 “game” that you could play over the phone where you had to press the correct buttons on your phone at the exact correct moment. Was like, $1.99 a minute or something like that. I believe there was an X-Men one at one point as well.

Recording my favorite songs on the radio. Timing it just right to avoid recording the dj.

Heres one my dad always mentions, beepers. Before he had his first cellphone he had a beeper to notify his friends when he wanted to talk.

Or for other "nefarious things" because he was a knucklehead.

Car phones.

The IRA

TURBO buttons on your computer.

Men holding hands while walking.

Buying a new CD player

Phone booth

Debating about some trivial facts that couldn't just be settled by searching the answer whenever and wherever.

This kind of lasted until the late aughts.

Calling a phone number to hear a recording of the current time

AOL.

respect for elders

Having a landline

Pennies?

Smoking sections in restaurants, bars and airplanes.

Good roads, decently clean air, well maintained parks and public spaces. This was before the country really started seeing funding stripped away because the results of Reaganomics were kicking in. Education was good, college wasn't astronomically expensive. And in some places you could still buy a big grab of chips and a 20oz with two dollars, and still have change.

The biggest thing of was is basic human decency. If you called Com Ed or ma bell you got SERVICE. They thanked you for being their customer. None of this nipple rubbing orgasmic "yeah, you have to take our shitty treatment of you because you have no other choice.

Hyper-color teeshirts. Thought those were so cool. I still do.

Wearing Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts and thinking you were really cool.

Having hours long debates/discussions about who was right or wrong. Now we just do a quick Google and the conversation is over.

Lettuce.

The 1990s.

Phone booths.

Fish and chip shops deep frying in fat and not oils

Straight people

Affordable housing

Reading the ingredients to whatever item you can find while on the crapper to keep you entertained.....ah the simpler times

Hitting your kids if they're little cunts

Czn burak

Wall phones

Sense of humour

Vaguely livable unemployment and Austudy payments.

Pagers. Pagers everywhere hidden below baggy unbuttoned button up t's

Undercuts.

msn messenger

Downloading BonziBuddy knowing that it made your computer slow (it was spyware) only because he could sing and tell jokes…OG Alexa/Siri

Ball cooling vents in cars

Reading magazine to help you beat a video game

Disconnecting when someone uses the phone

ska

Twin towers

Pagers/beeper

Renting movies

People born in the 1910s

Good music

Telephone .

Family time

Blockbusters

Smoking inside (in the UK)

About 50% of wildlife.

Those really stereotypical high school students e.g the bully who is dating the main characters love interest

Heterosexuals

Casual homophobia

House phones and movie rentals.

Concord. That shit used to fly over my house a few times a year and everyone on the street would run outside and look up! By then of course it was too late 😂

Thomas Guides (highly detailed map books) to get around cities. I had more than one for the greater Los Angeles area.

You had to be smarter and more resourceful—and way more patient—before “smart” phones.

saying “the current year is 199_”

Land line telephone

Big budget movies without super heroes in them

Child Marriage 🙂

[deleted]

Well, it's only that trivial for those who use their cell phones exclusively for private purposes. The problem is that many jobs are geared toward constant accessibility, and you can't combat that with your individual measures.

Gameboys

Half decent music.

Receiving 150 AOL disks in the mail offering a million free hours of internet.

Chivalry and romance. It's just not the same anymore, I know time is constant and everything around us is changing but I crave the feeling of being courted and pursued by someone I like. Nowadays some can't even send a message.

Teletext

Movie voice over guy explaining the movie during its trailer.

Privacy

phone booths

Hope.

"Smoking or non-smoking?"

Hanging out a spot downtown because eventually your friends would show up. The meet up spot.

A 56k modem.

Blueprint machines in the room full of the smell of ammonia

My gran

Showcase: Fridays Without Borders

Answering machines… recording a message. Checking your messages when you get home.

Beepers

Memorized phone numbers

CD stands

The date of 12 October 1992

Compilation tapes and smoking pretty much anywhere you wanted.

Dalmatians

Cold winters

Video tapes

Reading every word of the sleeve notes on an LP or cassette, even the “special thanks to Oggy the studio assistant” or similar.

Over and over.

Receiving a page.

Calling "POP-CORN" for the time.

Mix tapes. Trying to tape the whole song off the radio without getting the DJ talking over it.

Reading the TV guide to see what you’re doing all week.

Arcades

"What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a webmaster!"

"UUUUHHHH!"

Pogs

Being free to take water and other liquids through security checks at airports without having them confiscated

Getting charged fees for failing to rewind the movies on tape you rented from a physical store and late fees for returning them late.

This was the BEST lip gloss on planet earth. I miss it.

Walkman

I remember everyone having Pagers/Beepers and Motorola Startac phones for “emergencies” only lol

Playing outside as a kid without fear of being kidnapped.

Pulling up to a gas station in a new place and asking for directions/ pulling out a map to find where you are going

Nick@Nite

Radios in the house

That rare charizard card

Smoking in restaurants and pubs. I can still remember when it was banned indoors, suddenly how aware of how the awful stench of stale tobacco had gone and it didn't leave my clothes smelling wretched after a night out.

paper maps / road atlasses.

411

Watching tom and Jerry but now bakwas cartoon's

Calling the parents on the landline when you wanted to talk to your buddies/other kids. Parents always knew who their kids were hanging out with and if they hatd manners. Plus taking calls of your first crush in the hallway were everybody could listen

Edit: spelling

True compassion for others.

Reasonable property prices

Limewire

Functional government.

Tamagochis

exploding carbide

Phone books

Saturday morning cartoons

Phone conversations

Pay phones

1-800-COLLECT

Looking through books at the hair salon to decide what look you wanted.

Ska music.

Diskettes

Smoking so publicly

MP3 player.

Orbitz.

Only lasted like a year or two.

Phone books

Tapes

Phone Booths

Plain old RESPECT. Almost non- existent.

My motivation

Kegers

Optimism

The task of picking a phone company for your long distance calls (MCI, AT&T, Etc) or even dialing a special number like 10-10-321 before making a long distance call. Then only calling friends or family in the next state after 7 pm because it's cheaper.

CD players I used to ski with mine

Having to come off MSN chat so that your Mum could use the phone

Affordable Housing

Damn

The Preview channel. And TV Guide.

Fax machines or an extra phone line at home

Tamagotchis. Killed a whole bunch in the 90's

Checking the Teletext.

Sense of humor

Dial up tone

My happiness.

20year olds buying houses.

Affordable housing

Waiting

Pooping and having only a Readers Digest/Old Farmers Almanac or shampoo bottle to read

Faxing

Pay phones and calling collect

Not asking someone where they are when you call them on the phone.

Good Super Nintendo games, apparently

Depressing the "hook" on a landline to answer another call.

Kids playing outside

Pagers which were used to receive messages

Thomas guides to use for navigation while driving. These thick books were a must while driving in CA and it was the only way I could navigate LA.

Gay jokes in movies.

White colonialist in my country 😂

1-900 phone numbers.

Outside of medical and legal practices, fax machines - and someone in the IT industry thank god for that.

1) Organising to meet up with friends on the house phone then after that there’s no communication until you’ve met up. Also memorising phone numbers

2) people selling their cars in the local newspaper

3) smoking in pubs/clubs

Walking around with a yo-yo. I would actually second look someone now and be somewhat scared, if I saw them walking around with a yo-yo.

Fax machines

Calling your friends mom to ask to come over and hangout . Overall making friends at the park with kids in the neighbourhood, school or at arcades. Fatback TVs with VHS and/or DVD players.

Body hair.

love one person for a long time

Cig ads

Morals

Me being breastfeed

Not skipping through ads

Large on the shoulder video cameras. My daughter was mortified when I used one for her first day of school (1996) 😱🤣

Jxz

Pay phones

Shell suits

Dial-up internet and AOL CD’s

Having your calendar set to a month in the 1990d

Being able to treat your date like youre part of the mafia and your mob owns the restaurant for only 50 bucks or less

Audio cassette shops that made mixtapes from list of songs that you handed to them on a sheet of paper.

Going to La Patisserie on 2nd and Couch in Old Town, Portland, spending 3 bucks on a pot of coffee and 12 or more hours on free refills, all while the entire place sang along to Violent Femmes and Cocteau Twins. Like Liz Fraser, we just made shit up as we went along with the Cocteau Twins.

Having your blank cassette all ready to go and running over to the boom box to hit record when your favorite song came on. The first few seconds were always but off or have the radio DJ talking over it.

POGS!!!!!

Inbreeding

Blockbuster

Blockbuster

Channel 3 to hook up the SNES

Looking at TV Guide magazine to see the weekly lineup

Walkmans

Not being pestered for a cellphone number by every single company or organization you ever interacted with.

Fun fact - telling people you don't use a phone when they ask for a number can make them mentally fritz in a variety of entertaining ways.

Blackface on Australian TV

Probably the name isis……

Affordable housing

Calling a phone number to get the weather forecast. I still remember that number. I would call it a dozen times a night hoping a storm wouldn't be downgraded and I would get a snow day.

Riding your bike to school

Being a man

LAN party

Checking a pager at 9, Noon & 4 each work day, and then seeking out the nearest pay phone.

Phoning the speaking clock to see what the exact time was?

Not being able to make a phone call until someone else in the house gets off the Internet

White dog poop

Paying for long distance phone calls.

Nice people

T9

Beepers

Putting 10 worth petrol in my car and lasting over a week

Regular Wal-Mart stores, before super centers

"I want to get in touch with this person I don't have contact details for, so my first port of call will of course be the physical paper phone book."

Magazine stores?

First of all it’s just the 90’s for fucks sake, it wasn’t pre lightbulb.

A thought process.

Honest grass roots policing, sans the mandatory minimum arrests that are required to keep your job

Morals

The phone book was 4 inches thick.

Beepers

My Name: when i was young it was a common name. Nowadays where I live nobody calls their kid Matthias anymore

Phone booths

Not knowing where your children are.

Ecstasy.

Hanging around xtravision on a Friday night.

Word-perfect. I preferred it over Microsoft word but sadly it didn't last.

The feeling that society was progressing.

Remembering your home phone number and atleast 5 others by heart.

Using a phone booth to call home

Going to the venue to buy your gig tickets.

A paper TV Guide

Argos catalogue!

Hardly anything has changed since the late 1990s actually. We have faster internet and phones. Not much else.

Getting the music just right on your cassette player so you can record your answering machine message

Rotary dial telephone,

Going to a locally owned television repair or hardware store.

A sense of humor did not guarantee and end to a career

TV guide channel. Waiting and waiting for it to scroll through to one channel and then something distracts you and you miss it, so you have to wait for it to come back around.

Going to illegal raves

Pay Phones. Don't think my city even has any still up

Checking payphones for quarters.

Smoking sections in restaurants

News agencies. Magazine racks, smokes and lotto. Can still remember the smell of printed paper.

Blockbuster!

Housewives.

Telephone book I guess?

Blockbuster

to see vignette illustration in the newspaper

Cassette

Getting to watch a movie was a treat reserved for Friday nights or the weekend. Driving down to the local video store and choosing a movie to watch was an experience where you didn’t know if the movie you picked was a stinker or a gem but it made watching that movie feel special since you had to work for it.

You don’t get that feeling with streaming services now. When everything is at your fingertips nothing feels special.

They may have already disappeared by the 90' s, in America, but what I do NOT MISS from the old days is: pay toilets.

Blockbuster

A thriving middle class.

Swatch watches, music videos on mtv, maps, news papers, looking for jobs in the news paper, video rentals, most playground equipment, field day at school, firecrackers, roller blades, arcades, tv guides, pay phones, peechees.... spf 8 sunscreen, hubba bubba bubble gum, monkey bars, public pools and, drive in movie theaters...

Blockbuster

Cheap housing

Tape decks

My grandad.

My hairline

Hand crank car windows, ashtrays and cigarette lighters in cars. Mom had to hide the later as me and my brothers would try to burn each other.

Pay phones.

Water fountains. Screw the bottled water industry and obsession we have now. We were told it would all be recycled, such lies.

Social interaction

House Phones

Having a pager

White dog poo

Driving around with a rifle or two hanging in the back window of your truck.

Riding around town in the box of a truck.

Demolition derbys

Retirement.

Rent movies on VHS …

Movies about hackers

Using (or even finding) a payphone.

Telephone booths

Bipartisanship

Fax

Binder full of DVDs and select movie to watch with the fam

Smoking & Non-Smoking sections

How far do I have to scroll to find Happy Pants?!

CRT Tele

Demo disks

Payphones

Ditching all your vinyl and replacing them with CDs. You could go to garage sales and charity shops and find absolute vinyl gems back then. Charity shops are fucking barren these days. You can crate dig the second hand section of a vinyl shop but don't expect a bargain.

don't answer calls from numbers they don't know.

Or using the answering machine to screen calls, if you didn't have caller ID yet.

Me being young.

Affordable housing.

Wasn't born then, but cool radio stations, apparently.

rollerskates

Grunge music, way of dreas

Collect call phone number commercials.

Vanilla Ice and his tracks

Did you ever have a friend that got a new CD, then got them to play tracks down the phone to you?

That's how I first Chop Suey by System of a Down

Blockbuster

People wearing suits.

Pogs

Checking physical maps.

normal person to person interaction

The soul crushing boredom of a Sunday afternoon

Teletext.

Politeness

hearing a parent yell "Get off the internet, I need to make a phone call!"

Respect for others.

Walking into a room with people actually conversing not staring at a phone!

People saying it’s the 1990s

Resilience.

Rotary phones, hell landlines in general!

Phone booths

Common sense

Pen pals

Good Nickelodeon Shows

People born in the 1920's

Ringing on doorbells when you were asking your friend out

White dog shit

Lyrics Binder/Book: Writing down all the my favorite songs lyrics so I could learn the song word for word.

Recording my voicemail from the radio Had to be precise & record in the closet. Sound proof & privacy

Fresh air

My will to live.

One word Boombox. Damn you smart phones!

Racism. Oh no, wait...

Just getting into bed, then hearing the ice cream truck roll up on your street, and barreling out of bed to run downstairs.

Pelicans at the beach. Love those big birds

Common sense is a big one. Also the ability to speak your opinion and have productive conversations with others without being labeled or cancelled. I also miss the simple ways of life then. Technology has taken over our world to the point where so many people can't separate reality from fantasy anymore.

Memorizing phone numbers and addresses.

Dying of AIDS related illnesses.

Teletext

Meth to as a weight loss program beating your wife and extreme racism

Yugoslavia

Cash accepted everywhere. Turns out now that "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" printed on dollar bills is nonbinding and without legal force. (Those meaningless words replaced the earlier promise to pay in silver on Silver Certificate dollar bills.)

Meeting your loved one at the gate as they get off the airplane.

The Soviet Union

Maps in a vehicle.

Jolt cola

Having to rewind a movie for it to start.

The twin towers in the NYC skyline.

I miss those buildings.

Using a pay phone

Dude, Library???

Pagers lol

Calling 1-800-COLLECT and saying things like "pick me up" instead of saying your name so you wouldn't have to pay for a phone call to your parents

Actually using the paper calendar on the fridge to schedule things instead of using your phone

Dialing a number for the time ⏰

Girls showing bellybutton

Dial-up Internet

Enjoying the Cosby Show.

People making conversation or saying hello in a public setting and not turning to their phone as a default reaction

Kids playing outside

Authenticity

casual arson

Blockbuster

Blockbuster movie rental stores

Blockbuster

Discman

Cocaine

Frosted tips

The stuff everyone is saying is how it was since the 1920s or 1930s like yellow pages and looking up movies, pay phones, etc. I guess cds is unique to 1990s. But more like the shift of pre dot com era and phones and people starting to pull away from each other in person.

Beepers

Wow! The memories!

VHS player

Goosebumps books at the grocery store

Actually disk dialing a phone number.

Pay phones

Carbon Emissions. Oh wait-

Encyclopedia and encyclopedia salesmen

Telephone boxes.

Smoking in public buildings (restaurances, hospitals, etc.) in Europe

Knocking on the door of your friends house to see if they wanna come out.

Two sexes. Male. Female. Now the left have invented stops in between to placate those with mental illness *and added nonsensical pronouns to go with that.

Edit: And then simply banning someone like me for saying the obvious. *To placate and pacify said angry minority mob.

Blockbuster.

Edit: How did I misremember it as Block Busters?

Payphones

Pogs. Those things were so useless but cool at the same time. Each one had a different design. Some were metallic.

Payphones

That little book where u write all your numbers

A home without a computer and with a landline phone.

Home ownership for people my age (30s) in Australian capital cities... Cries profusely

Parachute pants, burning CDs, VHS rentals and by extension Blockbuster, dial up internet, a life that was in no way lived online, porn magazines,

Low-effort journalism like this one

Programming the VHS to record Headbanger's Ball in the middle of the night.

Bathroom Reading ... yes a book 😂

Carburetors

LAN-parties to share files at high speed and play local multiplayer

Corded phones

Tanning with reef oil and no sunscreen 🧴 😂😂😂

Respect for fellow human beings.

Kaali peeli taxi! It’s a sight to behold now

Social skills

An alarm clock

Mini Disk

Listening to music on a cassette tape

Smoking indoors

Privacy

VHS.

Sleepovers at a friend’s house. Pizza, soda, and video games. What more could you want?

Jolt . . . So . . . Much . . . Caffeine

Dropping by family or friends unannounced used to be the most normal thing. Now, you'd be a weirdo to do that

Blockbuster

Buying game magazines that helped you solve the game when you were stuck and games that had those little booklets inside so you could read them when you were on the toilet.

Telling someone to get off the phone so you can use the internet or off the internet to use the phone.

Dial up modems for internet access.

A simple sense of decorum

Letting kids play outside. And not worrying about them.

misogynistic advertisements

Being unavailable for a while.

Nowadays we carry around this whining brick that constantly pulls us out of what we're doing and into what someone else wants you to do. No, man, I'm walking my dog. You can find your answer elsewhere and on your own, I'm sure of it.

Sitting by stereo and waiting for your song to be put on air so you can record it on tape.

Pagers.... Beepers

In 1990 I dared to wear diapers, now I don't dare

Phone booths/public phones.

Modem sounds

Worrying about being home on time to catch the evening TV programming. TGIF!

Keep an eye to your luggages when traveling to avoid stealing. Today if you leave unattended them the airport security will make them explode.

those cool fuckin watches

Hope

The right to get an abortion

Happiness.

Telephone directory book

Phone books.

Good movies

I'm disappointed that most of these are tech related, and there's less about cultural changes (reduction in gender/racial bias), or even health changes..

Public awareness of deforestation.

Hit clips

common sense

Kids playing outside unsupervised

Borders book stores.

Not being preoccupied with the threat of mass shootings while in public spaces and schools

White dug shite

Smoking in restaurants

The sound of a modem connecting to the internet provider iiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuuoooooooohkrchkrchkrchr

Pay phone

The slang terms: Jammin', Radical and Tight.

VHS. and no. ARGS DO NOT COUNT

Smoking, ashtrays, and cigarette machines everywhere in public.

Winter. Rain.

POG

The ability to just disappear. In the 90's I moved 1500 miles away to escape. Now if you google my maiden name my address pops up, along with my new name (married) and my phone number. Sorta sucks.

Pay phones.

Blockbuster

Mapbooks

Gangstar rap was so normal in the 90s and a lot of terms were. Back then, 2pac threatened The Notorious B.I.G on a track in a way that I don't think cam be done nowadays. No wonder Nas said 'Hip Hop is dead'

Letters

That bubblegum brand that packaged its gum like a tin pack of band-aids

This one: https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/82xxpt/does_anyone_remember_this_hubba_bubba_ouch_bubble/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Use of pencil for rewinding music album.

Beepers

Being able to talk to friends about Ska bands.

(They're so good now you guys!)

Mechanical internals for certain devices. Nearly everything nowadays is electronic, and that kinda makes me sad. Fuck, even cars are getting more and more electronics each year. In the 1990s there were very little electronics in cars, but now blow a fuse and cars wouldn't run.

Playing outside from morning to dusk and no one called CPS on our parents. Parents had no clue where we were either, as long as we were home when the lights came on.

During the summertime my mother would literally kick me out of the house after breakfast and tell me not to come back until supper time. I would ride my bike and visit my grandmother, hang out at the park, etc. If I had a couple of dollars I'd go to the nearby gas station to get me a drink.

Atleast in Sweden we had "club nintendo" that you could join, where you had a phone number you could call to reach support if you had problems with a certain level in any nintendo game. I remember calling as a kid regarding some level in Zelda, and the girl on the phone told me what to do. Seems so outlandish today.

(This was at approximately the same time as GameFaqs launched)

Not being offended by literally everything, all the time for no apparent reason.

(I know there were and still are a lot of things people have a right to be offended about,….but well, some take it too far.

Renting movies.

I had an entry level job that paid for a reasonable second hand car, two holidays in France, and a decent rented three bedroom house and not much financial worry. The fine neo-liberal governments that we had since then sold all the good things we had to their god of profit maximization.

Listening tales from elders-Family Time-

Affordable housing

visiting your neighbour/ ringing his doorbell to ask if he wants to play outside

Payphone

Chris Cornell & Layne Staley

Respect for elders

AFFORDABLE RENT, and good landlords, most Landlords are pieces of shit nowadays

Lack of internet in the 90s was normal and now it is unimaginable.

Money

Handwriting

Having a paper map on the dashboard of cars

VCR lmao

Haven't seen one in a while.

Attitude era

The rare purple and green Heinz squeeze ketchup.

Love

Pay phones

Pogs

Floppy disk drives

Knocking on a friend’s door and asking their mom if they can come play.

The friend, not the mom.

Im 2000s kid but I think this still applies

Going randomly to your friends house to ask them to hang out. It was so normql back then and now last year I lost a very good friendship basically because of this lmao, I went to my friends house to ask her to hang out and she lashed out on me about how its invasive just to pop up at someones house unannounced, i was like fuckkk people cant even do this anymore.

Raver pants

Rap

The sound of a Dot Matrix Printer

Rare, the game studio.

I'll see myself out.

A landline phone in the house

Relatives calling you on the home phone to wish you a happy birthday after school/dinner

Wanking to paper porn.

being able to buy your own home 😩🤣

Payphones

Renting a movie from the store

Borrowing your friend’s parent “science” DVD

Having to shut down the phone un order to use the internet and vis versa.

Radio 📻

MAPSCO

I carried one with me in every car for years.

Installation software on CDs

Looking through the TV guide booklet to see what shows and movies will be airing on cable television. Those were cozy times.

Road maps

Kids just playing outside without phones or other tech. I remember running around with a bunch of little shits younger and older than me, playing with whatever the hell we found around. Dont see much on that in the last 15 years.

Playboy magazines.

Burning bootleg games and renting video game consoles + games

Tamagoshi

Riding with no seatbelt everywhere without worrying about getting pulled over.

Actually remembering friends and families phone numbers

The Ford Sierra

Black Lotus MTG

Smoking everywhere

Smoking in restaurants

talking to eachother at table and having more genuine friendship... no selfies, no phones, no crap

Cutting it a little close, but at least in the early 90’s - no caller ID (At least not very common yet at all).

The phone would ring and you’d approach it with white/knuckled fear that it could be ANYBODY!! That cousin you can’t stand who won’t let the conversation end? Or the girl/guy you’ve been hoping would call for weeks? You JUST…DIDN’T KNOW!

And for an introverted person like me (who was a teen at the time) I look back at that era like it’s the craziest thing ever that you just had to answer it.

Of course you could call screen with messages, but a great deal of callers were too lazy or too awkward with answering machines and would just hang up and you never knew who it was.

Pagers (outside of hospitals)

Writing 199 and then adding a 4th number between 0 and 9 to signify what year it is.

Those big old maps when traveling.

Person born before first world war

Tamagotchi

The Sony Walkman

Kids playing outside

Smoking in restaurants and bars.

Beige computers

Your mom's virginity

Rollerblade's were everywhere in the 90s. I haven't seen someone riding them in years.

Noone was stuck in their phone. The world was at your fingertips but you didnt know how to access it. So instead you would play with your friends outside in the sunshine all day, or explore new areas you have never been to. Life was an adventure in the 90s

Bowl haircuts

“No fear” shirts and “stussy” brands

LAN parties with Quake3 and counter strike

Dial up internet + hoarding AOL disks for the 20 free hours of internet— because you had to pay for internet by the minute.

Paying 10 cents a minute for long distance phone calls

Your great grandparents, if you're old enough

Well this is more 2000's but I'd say shame in taking selfies. There was a time when people were genuinely ashamed of being seen as narcissistic and taking a selfie. Then the whole #shamelessselfie became a thing and now we are here.

Buying a VHS tape of a movie from a jumble-sale only to discover that the previous owners had forgotten they used the tape to record their own "home movie".

Pagers

Hope

Supporting the USA as a european..

Iddqd

(Doom -1993)

My son downloaded for me and took the piss out of it. He completed the game. Was totally disinterested in the history of graphics development for doom!

Not getting a call every 5 minutes via a handyphone buzzing in your pockets....

I miss the sweet 90s.

Common sense

Calling cards

People being more pleasant was more normal in the 90s ! It isn’t normal now

Great TV wrestling.

CDs in the massive collector packets. That we use to carry around!

America Online.

Actually using public phones.

The Discman... who's idea was it to run/work with a cd player attached to you? I always tried, I always got frustrated... at least batteries were affordable then

Teletext holidays

F.r.i.e.n.d.s

[removed]

Maybe Christians have done it to themselves. And maybe it's a good thing to see it pass.

Shell suits

Low rise jeans

Console TV’s. (Okay the 90s were the end of that era, but many ppl still had theirs as their main living room tv from the 80s).

Pay phones.

Manners

Phone books. Pay phones

Genuine human connection

Smoking cigarettes in your office or at anyplace you want

Affordable housing

CD’s.

Pay phones.

Expect that most if not all of these answers are going to be technology related

VCR

Bell bottom jeans

Hair crimping

Maps in cars

Omega zip drives.

Happiness.

Road side drive-up pay phones

Knocking on your friends door. Can _____ come out to play?

When was the last time any of us used a map?

“MumTheMovieFinishedPickMeUp”

Getting ready for the next Millennium

Writing a cheque.

Lawn darts

Rivers. Now I find only drainage.

Talking to neighbors.

managed the copy, and all of the payment.

Not having internet access at home

Pay phones

Payphones

women's pants with pockets

Dial up modems and Prodigy online service

Having to unplug the landline to use the internet.

Having to unplug the internet to make a phone call

Shell suits. In neon green and pink.

Calling it 90s

Floppy discs

Tamagotchis

basic respect for others

A pay phone

A GSOH

beat a women

Widespread Patriotism 🇺🇸

Purple Ketchup

My dad

13yr olds babysitting 2yr twins Thurs-Sunday 4:30pm til whenever (sun coming up Saturday and Sunday am) for neighbor ($2 per hr)

Beeper, Pager, Maps, Roladex, cash, loose change, catholics.

Black and white TVs

4 player couch gaming.

Seeing people smoke in movies

In the UK, the argos catalogue book

Every culture playing their stereotypes in the movies

Courtesy.

Student smoking areas in high schools. Maybe not normal but definately a thing.

Milkmen

VCR

privacy

Missing an episode of "The show" and be completely out of the loop at school/work the next few days.

The middle class

Saying "We're living in the 90s"

In scandinavia it was common for women to go topless at the beach, all ages. If you tell that to teenagers here today it would literally blow their minds.

Blockbusters, 3 movies for a tenner

Those massive shoes the Spice Girls wore.

Page 3 Girls

Limp Bizkit

Going to blockbuster :(

Pagers

romance 100%

Shoegaze Music

inflatable furniture

"Hello, and welcome to Movie Phone"

*69

Watching the TV list channel (ch. 3?) scroll all the way through to make sure you didn't miss the right time of that ONE channel you needed.

Pager codes.

The evening news coming on at 7pm and then not having any news until the next day. Just a complete void of local and world Information.

The scream of a computer modem.

The sheer terror of being crushed by a 45lb TV when attempting to move it.

PC Lan parties. (More so Xbox LAN parties in the 2000s)

waiting 30 minutes, as Anna Nicole Smith would appear, one thin line of .jpg every 20 seconds, or taking an evening to download a .midi version of a RATM or NiN song, to play in the background of Duke nukem 3d, facing the occasional interruption of "uh-oh" (said quickly in a high pitch voice) as ICQ alerted me of an incoming message from someone i connected with through a chat room, where my alias was always KoRnHoLiO, because it was VERY important to NEVER give out personal information, like your real name or the passwords strewn around the computer, written on empty cardboard AOL disk cases, which held disks that at first seemed impressively resilient and small at 3.5", this after having wrangled through 5.25" disks, and before that 8" disks that went into Tandy computers, that had less hard space than some birthday cards do today, and if your file was even moderately important, you would want it saved on 2 (or more..) disks, like the database i compiled of 1-800 numbers that could be crankcalled from payphones without even the slightest fear of being caller id-ed, which could be navigated around, according to a .txt on phreaking, that had 3 pages of ascii art at the beginning of the file, which was downloaded off someone's geocities or tripod page, where they also had a .txt of the anarchist's cookbook, nestled amongst their favorite .gif files all arranged in a single- line running down the center of the page you saw on your crt monitor, that was housed in beige plastic, a color clearly representative of cutting edge technology, the likes of which could break your mind with minesweeper or help make time dissappear with solitaire, two actions that become far more significant and imposingly ravenous as the yesterdays pile up, yesterdays i can't recall nearly as well as i can recall the days when i would pull my Ford tempo over, at the siting of a hack-circle, cranking up the discman connected to my cassette deck with a car kit, or some mix tape of skinny puppy, ace of base, Warren g, Jesus lizard, and Pantera, leaving the car running for hours so the battery wouldn't get drained from the stereo, cuz gas was only .98/gal and you could look at spending decades in prison if the pigs caught wind of marijuana cultivation (which, at least in my state, has transmuted into an industry where many went from having a list of clandestine skills to having a solid resume in a blossoming field...), and they could be counted on to lie and try to mess with your head but there was way less of a chance that they would shoot you for looking like the last 6-year old they shot because he was Aviv suspicious and resembled a person of interest, who was being watched for purchasing an excess of black pepper, cinnamon, and/or the sinus meds that in ye old '90s didn't have to be purchased in a manner akin to purchasing an automatic rifle because of a law passed in 2004 to control the meth epidemic that simply opened the floodgates for cartel meth while giving another reason for poor people to be thrown in prison, maybe even a for-profit prison, which are new on the scene since the 90s, cuz even though the crime rate has climbed and has been declining, people get incarcerated for sizable chunks of life, so they are a valuable commodity, but, i digress, as occurs when a person of my vintage begins to shift from being an old young-guy to being a young old-guy. in the 90s, there were way more nights i didn't flush down the internet.

Taking a shortcut through a neighbors yard or through their fence to get to the playground. Going to a complete stranger’s house called “the candy lady”, it was by word of mouth only.

Malls with no cell phones

Calling 1471 to see if anyone rang when you were out. The answering machine. 4 channels on TV. We technically got 5, but the picture quality was so bad and snowy it wasn't worth trying to watch! Kids TV being on for like 2 hours after school. Sitting right next to the TV because the screen was maybe 30cm across and then mum yelling that we'd get square eyes! The buzzing noise when you put your hand too close from the static. Teletext. Knowing your family's/best friends' landlines off by heart, and having to call and ask for them. I haven't memorised anyone's numbers in ages! Penny sweets. Freddos being affordable.

Fingering

Creativity and original thought.

Using an actual physical phone book to look up phone numbers

Playing outside

Teen Spirit Deodorant.

Anyone who can remembers the 90‘, hasn’t experience it. I think it’s a quote from Falco. But i’m not sure, i can’t remember

Computer modems.

Homophobia There. I said it.

Floppy disks 💾 and dial up internet.

Hope..

“the club” for anti-car theft.

Common sense

Face to face human interaction.

To hate guys. Now no one does. Unless ur in my family.

Not giving up on relationships so easily.

Waiting 2 month before a wrestling PPV would come to german freeview and not knowing the results yet.

(nowadays any sport can be spoiled in seconds)

physical toys/action figures, everything's digital, but lego and hot wheels still got it

Gay

Film cameras

Fax Machines.

Video rental libraries

Borrowing someone's VCR to record something

Feeling secure

Having random visitors or just going to someone's house to seen they're in and want company or to hang out.

Now you have to pre book 2 years in advance with many follow up texts to make sure you can go visit a friend and then one of you pulls out at the last minute

Garmin hand held.

Electronic Pagers

Mariah Carey all over the damn radio all year round instead of just during Christmas.

I mean, I love her music, and loved it growing up, so I didn't mind.

But seriously, it cannot be overstated just how incredibly prolific she was on the radio for that whole decade. A shitload of #1 hits, and a bunch of other songs that charted high and got a ton of airplay.

Asking directions from strangers and using actual maps

Jnco jeans

New music by Layne Staley and Nirvana

Butterfly clips!

Formula 1 engines that sounded good.

naked women on the TV night program I secretly tried to watch as a horny teenager

pagers.

Blockbuster.

Carbon copy printers.

Arcades

Landlines?

Maps, rewinding, saying "it's the 90s"

Taxis

Rollerblading

Leaving home to buy things

Dial up internet

Grabbing a few disposable 35mm cameras to take pictures on a trip and dropping them off at Walmart to get developed, then having to go back to pick up the pictures later.

Home ownership for under 40s.

White Rhinoceros...

I guess fucking common sense or in my grade when I was a freshman Condoms

kiosks in the store where you could make custom greeting cards.

they weren't good cards, either. lol

True friends. Nowadays people decide to be friends because of social media and who is coolest to hang out with and all that shit. Back then no one knew who you hung out with unless you actually saw them in person or talked about it. Now people post so much shit and get criticized for who and what their doing I feel like people can't be friends unless it makes them look "cooler".

Random erections

Reading the news paper or having a book with the phone number of everybody

Calendars for the years 1990-1999

High quality cars, brilliant engines, simple, but very cool design, sport cars in traffic

VHS. I had lots of it where I used to record my DB and Sailor Moon episodes x)

Liberal Democracy.

Car phones

Funny jokes

House phones

Going outside and meeting/talking to people instead of looking down at our phones

Watching what was on TV cause there was nothing else on

Calling the Lands End phone line to place an order from their catalog

People that could have an intelligent thought without consulting the Internet.

pagers

Wearing Moon Shoes and hopping over to a pals for a game of Sockem Boppers.

MORE FUN THAN A PILLOW FIGHT.

90s calendars. In the 1990s i would see them evry where.

Going out with friends with less than $5 and that being enough for a decent full day.

a Spice Girl

TSA not wanting to see my innards so badly

Getting a busy signal when calling someone. Never knowing whether it would be 2 mins or 2 hrs before you could get through.

The extra long phone cords that you would snake through at least 3 rooms and then under your bedroom door just to get privacy.

Crank calling 1-900 numbers you saw on tv and later getting grounded when your parents finally got the $200 + phone bill.

Every magazine targeted to pre teen girls saying “ learn how to kiss” on the cover. Buying them all but finding out they never tell you😆

People who are not idiots

Thin women.

Rounding the goalie in footie, just never happens

Waiting for your friend to show up at the spot and wondering how long it will take for him to arrive. Maybe stay and wait longer or leave?

To find someone Modding your Playstation 1 to Play copied Games.

Pagers.

DVD/vhs

Homophobia

Beepers

Payphones

Pogs

Calling the weather line

Flip phones

Fun and happiness?

Shoulder pads in every single women's dress that was made during that time period. Hated those fu*kers.

Renting VHS tapes

Needing to buy answer machine tapes

Modem noises.

Phonebooths number 1000 here!

Heterosexuality

Born in the 60’s. 80’s was my jam.

Affordable real estate

Pagers, remembering peoples phone numbers, MTV (& MTV2) actually playing music videos, VCR with the 12:00 flashing , RCA and Coax cable as a video input.

House phones

Being worried pf Y2K I guess. Or writing the year as 199x.

Floppy disk

Good Star Trek

Hanging up 1990s Callenders.

Dog poop turning white

Calling to ask trading hours or closing times.

Having cash. Now everyone uses debit cards

Putting a "system" in your car.

A well paying job

Omg the phone in your house ringing; you know it’s someone trying to reach your mom, she isn’t home, but you got to pick it up and tell that someone that she isn’t home.

Livable wages

Owning a first edition shiny charizard

Payphones

​

Whenever you see someone use one of the few payphones left now you assume they are up to no good!

Just general serendipity

Common courtesy. Unfortunately....

Being homeless

Playing outside all day everyday

Living in a house sealed with asbestos

Minidisk

Going outside

Being able to tell a joke without offending people

Pagers.

Or, playing outside w/friends!

Going to the toilet alone.

I don't mean that we go in groups, but you could happily shit in peace, without being bombarded by global information sources

Pay phones

The will to live

Using gay as a slur

Phone books

Using phones to call someone.

Tazos inside the Cheetos packet

having a handwritten phone book in your wallet

If you had a job interview or something important, traveling out the day before just to check you know the way and can find the place without issue.

Sincerity, kindness, feelings and more

Freedom of speech....was easier.

Blockbuster video stores. Going to the video store and renting movies to watch over the weekend.

Buying a cassette at a gas station to listen to on a road trip.

Using a large map book of the US to get to destination on vacation out of state.

Privacy

Woman having selfrespect by dressing normal and not desiring every man to look at their whole body nakedly

Incel vibe

You have no jealousy over ur loved ones

Poket organisers and pagers.

Affordable housing

Beepersp and 99¢ whoppers

Borrowing your friend's CD/VHS with a game/movie for a couple of weeks also jumps to mind...

And recording movies off TV on VHS.

more phone calls of different kinds and shapes really.

Dial-up Internet access.

"Get off the computer, I'm waiting for a phone call!"

Listening to the radio or watching local news to see if your school was shutdown for snow.

VHS

Chivalry

Putting a VHS in the VCR to find out my siblings didn't rewind it.

Smoking in restaurants

Dial up Internet. Yeah , you're hearing that sound right now.

Listening to music with a walkman. I loved it.

Twin towers🙂

Payphones

Music on MTV!

Peace

Calling the bank for time and temp

Good music

For a minute there I thought it said "1900s" and I was like "oh boy, here we go lol"

Pagers

Leaving messages on answering machines

Was that on foxtel/pay TV?

We had 2, 7, 9, 10 and SBS. In Australia in talking.

Phone boxes stinking of tramps piss

Home ownership.

The Simpsons was so normal: a 4 bedroom house with the big backyard, 2 cars, 3 kids, on 1 parent's salary.

That was so normal. Now it's gone.

The stash of AOL disks that will never be used.

Those phones that you have to twist the top on every number before you get to call the person. It was fun playing with it when I was young.

People born in 1900

Tamagachi?

Reverse charge phone calls.

Landlines

Cassette tapes for sale at petrol stations

Pay as you go tv's

Prepaid calling cards you get to use either on a phone or a payphone.

$5 subway sandwich.

Not having to dial area codes with local numbers

Thomas Guides

Kids riding bikes, block hide and go seek, basketball/baseball/football in the streets. “Ghost man on 2nd!“

Damn, I forgot about ghost runners. How else were two people supposed to play an entire game of baseball.

I try my best to live I'm in the 90s, 80s etc but still be using 21th century technology and being up-to-date.

Calling the local radio station to request a song

Randomly having a friend or family member knocking at the door without prior notice to visit especially if they just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Smoking sections in restaurants

And I've no idea how we used to travel to the seaside with parents! Paper maps, sure, they can take you far enough along a large regional highway. But then, I remember we often would stop and ask the locals where to take a certain turn and whatnot.

Taking a plane was kinda fun.

Low fuel prices

Calling a phone number to find out the time.

Picture Tube TV

Starter jackets

On Friday at school you'd say to your friends, "Let's see that movie tomorrow at 7:30." Then no one would mention it again and at 7:30 on Saturday, everyone would be there.

Being unreachable.

Having a phone case attached to your belt.

Hey, let’s see what’s new at the Blockbusters.

Pagers.

Hope for the future.

Having a living wage

Good music

Excitement at renting a movie. There was something much more satisfying about going to the video store.

The cd listening stations at music stores

Good music!

“I have to return some videotapes”

Trapper keepers - booyah!

Affordable housing

Being able to afford a house

Cal Worthington selling used Fords.

Having to use a payphone to phone a friends house when they don't show up to meet you at the spot......

Lisa Frank EVERYTHING Trapper Keeper Incredibly sour candies (Warheads, Sour Altoids) Altoids POGs Xena Warrior Princess And, though it was more at the end of an era, latchkey kids.

Waiting for your favourite tv show to come on tv. And if you were late, well you missed an episode if you didn't set up the video recorder.

Buying a cd.

Really good house music

Telephone booths/payphones (at least where i'm from. but oddly enough, i moved to another country and, despite the prevalence of cell phones, there are payphones!)

Commercials advertising long distance rates

"What? Only ten cents a minute!?! That's crazy low!"

The underlying magic of the world. The potential for the incredible and unknown to be true. The internet and cellphones stamped that out pretay pretay good.

Common sense

Birds

Tamagotchis

fly honeys

Honesty.

Referring to your friend who is a girl but more like a guy a Tomboy.

Flyers

Waiting outside concert venues to buy tickets for shows. Physical ticket copies.

Going out at 9am as a kid. Telling my parents I’ll be home by a certain time. Take my bike, roller blades, or scooter, and end up miles away from home. And not have one lip of conversation all day with my parent.

Having only one computer in the home.

Smoking on planes, mental

Dial up tones in modems

Decent music

Super NES, neogeo and Sega

Those little plastic figurines, JoJo's

Surge

Mapquest.

Rewinding cassettes with a pen to save your walkman battery

Blockbuster

CD Warehouse Subscriptions.

That’s gay.

Just showing up unannounced for a "visit"

A crime punishable by death

Landlines. Super rare for family houses

Going to raves taking ecstasy and shagging everything

Waiting for your friends and or family at their actual arrival gate. I miss that.

People saying, “Hey, it’s the 90s.” Or “I mean come on, it’s the 90s.”

Pogs

Stop-rewind

Pressed pills

Wasn’t blue lipstick a thing?

Manual crank handle for car windows

Privacy

Landlines. Rewinding tapes with a pencil. Forgetting to rewind a rented video and getting fined.

Using a Thomas Guide.

Recording an outgoing answering machine message as a household, like a skit.

Hair scrunches and banana clips. John Lennon style glasses on young people.

Encyclopedias.

Meeting travelers as they got off the plane at the gate.

Gavin Newsom married to Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Putting/reading classifieds in the actual newspaper.

Going for frozen yogurt.

Wine coolers.

The beeper

Nuanced takes with more than 140 characters of commentary. I understand the irony in that last statement but I'm trying desperately to stall in this line to make it to 140 and therefore remove the irony from the piece.

The little battery powered lights that clip on a gameboy so you can actually see it

Going outside

Your buy a new game for your computer and you had to type in ten pages of code exactly as written to install it. Or was that more the late 80’s? Either way, we would tag team it and still mess it up.

Cadbury bytes 🥹

Pagers

Call from a land line

A Walkman

Pagers

Good music

Feeling safe at school

VHS / DVD / Blueray players. Console owners might use console to watch a Blueray movies but other than that it's a very rare sight. People stick to streaming.

Candy cigs

Under $1/gal gas prices

Landlines aka "the house phone"

Waiting for the repeat at stupid oclock at night if you missed a TV show and forget to set the VCR to record.

Going to a library for information before having Google in your pocket.

Committing important phone numbers to memory. I can still to this day tell you what my parents and nans land-line numbers where back in the 90s, couldn't tell you what my parents mobile numbers are now without looking it up on my phone.

Writing things with pen and paper and needing tipex if you fucked up.

Communist parties.

Mail in music clubs... Like Columbia House, and BMG... when you ordered 3 CDs & got 10.

Homophobia

Smoking in public/indoors

Dayrunners. They were small organizers and were incredibly useful. I just found my old one from about thirty years ago.

Pagers

Snow in winter

Psychic hotlines (RIP Miss Cleo).

Being able to book a doctors appointment in advance. Being able to get a dentist appointment on the NHS. House prices being relative to wages. Spiras in every shop!

Landlines aka "the house phone"

Waiting for the repeat at stupid oclock at night if you missed a TV show and forget to set the VCR to record.

Going to a library for information before having Google in your pocket.

Committing important phone numbers to memory. I can still to this day tell you what my parents and nans land-line numbers where back in the 90s, couldn't tell you what my parents mobile numbers are now without looking it up on my phone.

Writing things with pen and paper and needing tipex if you fucked up.

Not having a cell phone.

Kids just hanging out outside.

TV guide that came as a book in the mail

I used to see blimps quite frequently over London and now the idea of it is so bizarre it almost feels like a fake memory.

AOL chat rooms. Bonus points if you still remember your screen name.

Simple letters. I found like a box of letters from my parents when they were younger and all I could think is the only time i see letters is when it’s a birthday letters can also refer to envelopes.

Also if we were to go back 100 years wax seals would work too

good music

£2.50 to see a film at the cinema

Pay phones.

Laptops that you wouldn't dare sit on your lap, unless you wanted crushed legs.

Also 2-colour screens, 8bit sound and text based everything (games, OS, WordPerfect). Woo 🙃😂

1990 calendars

No smoking sections in restaurants

Answering your home (corded) phone by repeating your phone number back to the person on the line who's just called you.

Knowing your friends’ and family’s phone numbers by memory.

Corduroy trousers

Bow ties

I can’t even go to school without getting looks as if I were naked or something, there will never be 1 week where I won’t get the question “why do you wear bow ties” because it’s honestly like “wtf do you think?” & I honestly wear it because I love flannels & jean + bow ties, I usually just like the bow the bow ties looks, matches, personally I think it gives me a post of confidence but yeah

Netscape.

Bill Clinton

Optimism

Smoking everywhere. Or well almost everywhere.

World trade centers

Salt and Vinegar Space Raiders

Biodiversity

Common sense.

Blockbuster rental shops, fax machines and cd Walkman...

Good ass new epic hip hop jams eith no auto tune or shit trap beat.

Carrying huge amounts of cash.

I was watching Seinfeld the other day and Jerry wanted to buy a watch off someone, he said he wanted $300, do you have that on you? Yeah, he carries $300 on him in the early to mid 90s which would be around $600 today.

the twin towers

Using maps and a-z and hoping for the best. Ringing mates on the landline agreeing a time and place to meet and being on time. Parents accepting their kids were going out and would see them later with no tracking or emergency contact.

Payphones

Record player. It was the best quality method to listen to music.

$2 to £1

Using a corded phone at home with an answering machine

Blockbuster

Not seeing a crowd of phones every concert / festival you go to.

1st edition charizard

Kids roaming their neighborhood unsupervised on their bikes without parents freaking out

The definition of a woman: an adult human female.

Sending and receiving letters, handwritten notes, or postcards.

A white neighborhood.

The sovjet union

Asking your girlfriend's dad if she is home over the phone and then you have to ask him to pass the phone over to her.

Being a latch key kid and sorting your own dinner out at the age of 12 was totally normal.

Hyper color shirts

A living wage

Prank calls from a payphone

Actually prank calls to a landline

Ahh the times before caller id

“Masterbaiting on an airplane. After 9/11 everyone got all sensitive.”

Payphones

Music-cd-players.

Landlines

Holy shit, it’s just a stream of nostalgia waves

Pay phones

Dial up internet. AOL. Pagers. Renting movies at the video store. The Macarena. The Spice Girls. Slap Bracelets. POGs. Beanie Babies. Furbies. Tamagotchis. Dayrunners.

Let me just google that, what's google?

T.V. Guides

Reading maps ro navigate the road.

Kids being left to play in the toy section while the parents shop.

Dial-up.

Oh, the horrors.

Having to choose either the smoking or non-smoking area at a restaurant.

Playing outside with friends at a young age. Now it's all technology ect

Cassette players

Phone box

White dog poo

World Peace

Saturday morning cartoons.

The dad man 😂

Watching Seinfeld show these well. Like while plot lines involving answering machines or waiting for payphones .

Beepers.

its obviously dial up modems

90's calendars

Unable to call due to the “dial-up Internet access”.

Walk-man

Floppy disks.

"Cyberspace"

Phones plugged into the wall, and the handset connected to the phone with a wire. You had to stay where the phone was the entire duration of the call

Video rental stores.

I’m re-watching Seinfeld and it’s a goldmine of 90s things gone by. But a big one that I noticed is the answering machine and being tied to one house phone with (for a long time) no caller ID.

Being asked for direction

E's

Using a payphone.

saying “gay”

Patience

Does anybody else remember ordering CDs through the mail? Those little promo packs with tiny stamps of the cover at that if you bought 10 you got the 11th free or something?

Beepers

personal phone book with friends and family numbers

pagers

pda's

corded landline phones

having to wait for websites to load for minutes on your dial up internet on your one family computer in the living room or family room

buying, selling and job searching in the classifieds

sending a self addressed stamped envelope

mailing an order form and a check or money order to buy something from a paper catalog

being able to go for a walk and have no one expect to be able to get ahold of you

parents leaving the number of the restraunt they are going to with the babysitter

renting a vhs tape at the video store (nicollet village video in my case, look up nicollet village video fancy ray commercial on yt)

thinking the rear projection tv your rich friend had was fancy

arcades

calling a 1-900 number

having a tv with a built in vcr

having your portable cd player hooked up to a cassette adapter so you could play it in your car

finding your way with road maps or hand written directions

making sure the picture you were about to take was worth taking because they are expensive to develop

“I’ll meet you on town hall steps at 5pm”

And you’d be one of 15 people waiting on the steps.

If your mate was late you people watched. If they didn’t turn up, you’d head home and leave a message on their home phone or with parents/flaties.

Going out when a pint cost £1.20, shots in a student bar cost £0.50 and there was zero worry about photos or videos of you being drunk/looking drunk appearing on social media.

Wearing flannel shirts to an alternative live band gig and paying $3 for a bourbon and Coke and $5 for a packet of darts. Good times!!!

Hip-hop culture without all the sell out shit , bboy'ing, mc'ing with consciousness, DJing with records and graffiti with letter styles

Empathy.

Having to rewind things.

cheap gas. around year 2005, i used to go on a joy ride. can’t do that anymore.

CDs

Healthy relationships

Phone booths

Astro Vans

Neon clothing. I know there some mild resurgence but I can confidently tell you that shit was fucking EVERYWHERE.

Besides all the usual stuff, where I was in Leeds, UK there used to be a Rag n Bone man in a horse and cart that'd come occasionally, who'd shout "Raaag n BONE EY!" collecting scrap metal.

Terrified me as a kid, but these days gypsy's in vans probably just collect it.

Adjusting the TV antenna

Patiently awaiting the next episode of your favourite show in one week's time

Below 1 dollar gasoline

Dial up tone

Pagers

Using a newspaper classifieds as an early form of facebook market place/craigslist

Using the TV guide.

Manners

Basic human decency.

Blockbuster

Bringing a controller and some games to you friends house. I really miss that

Not having a smartphone. Being social in your free time. Not knowing what the time was, since you had no smartphone. Having time for your thoughts and being unreachable, since you had no smartphone

A family doctor

Those clear cds where burned movies played on

Saturday Morning cartoons

Geo Metros

Free dial up internet through net zero, free hourly discs you could find everywhere, burning specific mix CDs labeled stuff like Party Mix #3, (kids might still do this) but we used to throw parties that weren't exactly legal, and we would text bomb the info to people who would then copy and send it out day of.

Pubic hair

In- politically correct jokes

Home stereos or boom boxes with tape players so you can record that song on the radio.

Missing a phone call and not knowing who the fuck called unless you had caller id or answering machine

Having to refer to the TV Guide to see what was on Television

Burning a mixtape / CD of songs off the radio for your friend / crush

Doom

Happiness

iPod

Happiness

Phone cards.

Top of the Pops

Those heavily detailed flower patterned carpets that you always have in your grandparents house.

Home made Cassette/CD compilations. I used to love making these. Every song had to be perfect and compliment each other. The transition between songs had to be JUST right. Kids listening to endless Spotify playlists will never appreciate the skill of making the perfect compilation.

Go to McDonalds to eat breakfast. Sit down in the “No Smoking” section. You can tell it’s no smoking, because the tables don’t have ashtrays. Eat breakfast, while the smoke from the Smoking section wafts over you, since it’s literally right next to the No Smoking section.

Nowadays every channel plays a show multiple times in a row, sometimes playing the same show all day. This was rare back then, I remember it being a big deal when Fox started showing the Simpsons 2 times in a row during the week.

Printing driving directions on Mapquest.

Reading labels on shampoo bottles whilst taking a poo.

Wraps of speed and gurning.

Phonebooth

Opening a 1st edition base-set Pokémon booster pack.

Rock Bands

NiCad rechargeable batteries

Weekly scheduled TV shows

The thrill of having your best friend ride your bus home on a Friday after school and then your mom or dad taking you guys to blockbuster to rent a few games then going back home and ordering pizza. After dinner you are staying up really late playing vidya, then trying to catch some boobs on late night HBO or Cinemax and falling back to the squiggly scrambled PPV channels if that failed. Also somewhere in there that night was building a pillow fort.

Now you can't ride a school bus you aren't assigned on, blockbuster doesn't exist, and boobs are ubiquitous on smart phones now. I guess you can still build a pillow fort and eat pizza by yourself though.

Speeches by Nelson Mandela

Pogs

Kids playing outside

  1. Meeting real friends
  2. 35 hrs working weeks (EU)
  3. Having faith in man-kind
  4. Having hope
  5. LAN-Parties with friends
  6. Friends
  7. Sex

Good music

Childeren playing outside

Writing

Highway toll booths where you had to hand the exact cash to a person

Personal playlists of songs. Which would often be traded.

People do this now too.. especially through Spotify.

Smoking inside Trains and Restaurants, here in Swiss

Damn I miss the 90s!

Payphones

Showing up a people's house and knocking on the door to see if they're home. Or, not being surprised/scared if someone knocks on your door in the middle of the day of you're home.

  1. Memorizing all your friends phone numbers
  2. Finding places without a paper map or just by recall
  3. Trusting the weathermen
  4. Trusting the newspapers
  5. Making mixed tapes
  6. Affordable rent, housing, groceries

Calling 767-2676 for the time. 🍿

Waiting 6 hrs to download one Mpeg... And losing your connection at 3/4 complete!!! AAAHHRRG!!!

10 10 220

Acid House Raves..

Pay phones

let‘s buy us an mp3 player

Riding in the bed of a truck

Car phones

In Oregon, on the coast we had "Grange Halls" or just "Granges" and on weekends really shitty punk bands or just whatever would play all night for a $5 fee... The scene was amazing... Shitty surfer bands, grunge bands, white-boy reggae bands, and wanna-be DK bands would travel from Seattle to Frisco playing the granges...

There was always rumors that folks had seen Cornell at this grange hall, or Cobain and Krist at that grange hall... You just never know whom you would see... I remember seeing the Cherry Poppin Daddies before Mtv got their hooks in them...

No more "Granges" now... and no more wondering if you were gonna bump into Jello Biafra smoking weed in the back

This thread missed the point.

Teletext

Beepers

Wtf is a beeper? (I grew up in the 90s)

Shellsuits

sy

Fist + Wife = average

Video tape recordings of your favorite movies and TV shows and then someone finds said tape and records over your favorite movies and TV shows.

Cars that lasted 30 years

? Cars last on average more miles than 90s cars now.

Thick shoulder pads.

Pay phones

Fun

Not sure if this is Australia centric or not.
"Checking the local newspaper to see if you got into university". The local newspaper for the local university/universities would have a multipage spread on a particular day. People would queue up at newsagents when they opened.
You'd see young adults pouring over the paper in the carpark/footpath. Some would be crying. Some would be celebrating.

Never happened in America

Smoking

Buying an album

Pay phones

Smoking in public spaces

Pogs! Remember pogs? They’re not back and certainly not in Alf form.

Smoking in the car with the whole family and blowing cigarette smoke all around, and getting yelled at when you complained.

Those colored poker dealer visors everyone wore for a while. Fuck those were ugly. Usually in some neon colour

Those colorered dots you put into paper and the machine lights the paper up

Beepers

Video Tapes.

90s music🗿

Our nonchalant attitude to life

Good punk rock bands.

Stuff like offspring, yellowcard, chelsea smiles, smash mouth, etc. As far as I can tell, that kind of shit simply doesn't exist anymore. Maybe I'm not searching correctly, but I haven't seen anyone new for a long time. The only one is the Offspring still makes songs once in a while. And crush 40 I guess remakes an old song once a while.

But I guess that could also count as early 2000s.

Audio cassettes

The Video Jukebox Channel. Just like it sounds, you could call a 800 or 900 number, & chose a video to play, forget How much it would cost. Sometimes it would play videos non-stop for a couple hours, sometimes you could sit there & watch the selection screen for hours. It was a godsend for a young hip hop head like myself. We didn't have a true hardcore hip hop radio station in my city. We had 1 station that was 90% R&B, & they would have a "hip hop hour" a few days a week, so this was one of the only ways l had to keep up with what was happening in the rap world l, except for mix tapes. One of the best things about it was when a song got really popular, you would see the video 10s of times per day... good times

Pagers

you were able to hit your wife, now the time has changed sadly

  • please insert boomer answer*

Respect ?

Calling the time phone number to lock up the store because corporate trusted no watches.

Surge

Traipsing around town, paying end of the month accounts... internet banking is so convenient..

Digimon

This is very region-specific and in the US, but "one day sale at the Bon Marche!" ads.

Living Ash trees. My yard. Neighbor's yard. Manistee national forest. All wiped out because of the Emerald ash borer. Very sad. The dead trees still stand in the forest like skeletons.

Making friends irl

Saying "but it's the 90s!" as if we were in the future and everything had changed..

Mowing “Nickelodeon” in the lawn to get our parents to buy us a Nickelodeon magazine subscription

Mowing* ?

Oh no! Thank you haha fixing now!

Quaaludes

Isn't that older than the 90s?

Late 80s mostly but it carried over into the 90s before getting super rare

Calling information to get the weather or time…

Recording from the radio with your boom box… I used to pretend I was a radio VJ and introduce each song haha

Something my brother and sister did a lot… they’d re-enact their favorite shows or movies and my uncle would record them and turn them into a small movie… such as Miami Vice or Nightmare on Elm street (aka Nightmare on Carey St on our end lol)

We were also always outside… swimming, riding bikes, running around town, camping under the stars.. kids don’t seem to do this stuff much any more. It’s like pulling teeth to get mine outside and it blows my mind.

Also, I remember as a kid that at family get together, the adults ALWAYS ate first. Then the small kids, then the rest of the kids/teenagers.

Talking on the house phone… my friends and I would talk for hours every night and it was always something I looked forward to. Call waiting or if you didn’t have it, getting a busy signal. House voicemail.

Prank calls… sneaking out to just hang out with your friends.. not doing bad stuff, but just getting out was always exciting.

Living World War II veterans

Dodo's

1990s b.c. right?

Disposable income

Un sleeved Black lotus

AOL

Aol keywords on advertisements

Phone booths

Paper maps

Using the dewy decimal system

American Democracy.

We also recorded every holiday with our video camera.. I dk if people still do that? I know cell phones are used now, but actually having everything on tape already was actually pretty cool.

Every Christmas at my dads side of the family we would take a Polaroid of each family sitting together. Lots of good memories and pictures from doing that

Also calling the radio to request songs. It was always neat to have someone tell you to listen to this station to hear a shout out

TGIF… we looked forward to that

Saturday morning cartoons

Kids playing outside front yard

Pagers

You have a collect call from "PracticeOverNeedARideFromSchool", would you like to accept?

Dial up Internet.

Pensions.

Blockbuster

  • No cell phones
  • No internet
  • No computer at home
  • I remember gas a few times being under $1 per gallon
  • Paper maps
  • Phone booths
  • AOL chat rooms
  • Windows 95 and 98 browser lol
  • More privacy
  • VHS tapes vs. DVD
  • People weren’t so divided on politics
  • Getting 10 CDs for $1 through Columbia House (I think that was the name)
  • More trust in what you see and hear on the news

Yes some people in the 90s had some of these things, but they were much less common then.

Music videos for songs from a movie soundtrack that cut in scenes from the movie with no audio or context and somehow this was to promote the movie (i.e. “Kiss From A Rose”, “Addams Family Groove”). But even better was “making of” videos for these types of music videos.

"Be kind, please rewind"

Payphones

1-800-Collect

Recording songs from the radio on your cassette tape.

Banners made from dot matrix printers

Amiant lol

The casual use of homophobic slurs. It still happens, but it definitely doesn't seem as acceptable as it was back then.

Talking to your friend's parents on the phone.

Going to a movie library to pick out a casset for a movie night and giving it back when you watched it.

Calling a number to rind out what time it was.

My faith in humanity (i was born 1991)

Blockbuster

Common sense

Those clear landline phones with the colorful insides.

Vhs tape...used to rewind over and over again since kids..

Pinball everywhere

Pagers

Rollerblades

JNCO jeans

Joy

  • Pagers, pretty sure very few GenZ even know what they were.
  • Public phones /Phonebooths. - they still exist in some countries, but people rarely use them
  • IRC, Gopher and Usenet (all still around, but even geeks rarely use em anymore)
  • Renting VCR to play rented movies on tape. All of that is pretty much gone
  • Going to an actual travel agent (person to person interaction) to book a trip or vacation. A good travel agent could honestly back then sometimes find really clever solutions because they could pull on contacts and their own personal knowledge about the area.

Skorts

Before we got our license we walked or rode bikes far AF to do shit.

Sitting at Denny’s on the non smoking side, while the guy on the other side of the half wall smoked a Marlboro. He ordered pancakes from a 30 something year old waitress who sounded like Patty Bouvier from all the second hand smoke consumption.

Burning CDs and downloading computer herpes on Limewire.

Limewire, think you mean Napster

Kurb ball

Home phone. I think most only have cell phones now.

Walkman

Agreeing to meet your friend at a certain time and a certain place to hang out. The place was usually by the fountain at the mall.

If they didn't show up, the only way to contact them was to go to a pay phone and call their home number, in the chance that they hadn't left home yet. Otherwise you'd just shrug and figure you'd talk to them about it later.

Denim

Not having a cellphone.

Memorising peoples phone numbers

Collect calls. All the 1010123 companies dying to save you money on collect calls.

Having 1990's calendar on the wall.

Bringing bottled water and other liquids with volume of over 100 ml on the plane 😑

Payphones.

smoking everywhere

Teletext and Ceefax

Waiting at home for a phone call.

Dallas Cowboys Super Bowls

Republicans didn’t call Democrats names like groomer or pedo as an insult, or worse yet, think it is true.

Democrats not calling every Republican a Nazi.

1990s Republicans were not embracing right wing extremism and violence nor wanted a totalitarian society. There has always been propaganda on both sides, but things have definitely changed for the worse.

Flip the lens back. 1990s Democrats weren't screaming for open borders, college debt relief, trillions in spending for programs that have no real basis and were using the term "safe, legal and rare." As for the violence, let's not get into that.

Let's face it, parts of both sides have moved into extremist views.

Trans fats

One for the people in UK:

Using Teletext!

I remember checking flight arrival times or using it for TV listings and eventually for the TV+ code to type into the VCR to make it auto record when my program came on. Wow I literally thought that was pinnacle of humanity.

Bonus: When Channel 5 was announced, holy shit was I excited 🤣

Want to rent a DVD and hit up Subway tonight?

cigarettes

News papers

👨🏻‍🦳

Happiness

Common sense

I have not seen cheap housing yet.

Sending a letter to someone

A tool concert

Raves

Checking in at the airport 30 minutes before departure.

Landlines

To listen to a CD in your car, you had a portable discman with a car cassette adapter plugged into the cassette deck and a cigarette lighter adapter to power it all. Wires everywhere.

Good forbid if you didn't have the anti-skip either.

Oh hell yeah. I had to get the 20 second anti-skip.

Arcades :(

Porn shops. Mom & Pop video stores where they had all the cool & rare stuff

CLEAR ELECTRONICS

Using phones for phonecalls

Abortion rights.

Meeting up at Becker's.

Asking a friend for help when you can't pass a level in a game.

Payphones

Young kids staying out all day without any way of contacting them. Them returning only for tea just before it got dark.

Teletext/Ceefax

Not being contactable

SOLIDARITY.

Smoking in bars. Coming home from a bar feeling of smoke.

LSD

Common sense

asking your parent for ds batteries.

Nokia

Blockbuster

Calling someone to ask for someone else’s number.

Jnco jeans

Landlines and payphones

Common sense

Ussr

VCRs

Kids playing outside without direct parental supervision.

Vapes

Unsupervised outdoor play for kids. I rode my bike, climbed over a garden wall to sneak into a neighborhood country club pool, climbed trees, threw rocks at shit, and generally had an amazing time with the neighborhood kids for hours with no adults around. My kids don’t have that and it’s really sad.

TV Guides

Happiness

House phone

Ashtrays everywhere.

White dog shit seems more rare

Landline phone and voicemail recorder

Me getting laid

Mapquest

Comedy movies

Music in major keys.

smoking in establishments like pizza hut lol that still trips me out

Beating your wife and kids, duh

Arcades?

Going to the movies and having nothing playing on screen until the trailers started.
Now it’s constant ads and 15+ minutes of ads and commercials after the movie’s start time, then the trailers begin.

Hypercolour t-shirts... Nice colour change around the armpits.

Optimism and hope for the future of humanity.

Pogs

Blockbuster

VCRs

Groupies. Now celebs are more careful about sex, they have lawyers, documents about anonymously etc. cancel culture and grooming are nowadays popular tropics.

Dial up Internet. We really didn't have phone access the whole time my brother was on the Internet

PS I can still hear the noise it would make

Skreeeeeeeeeeeee

Calling a place to get directions that you had to right down.

Loyal women

Showing Up to your friends house in the weekends without calling Them on the phone

I always remember using the phonebook

go to the libraby to rent a video game

'The computer room' a room in your house specifically designated for the computer. These days with laptops and ipads, every room is the computer room.

Pagers

A physical TV Guide

VHS

Disposable Cameras

AIM/Myspace

Dial-up.

Knowing the phone numbers of immediate family members by heart, plus your friends’ numbers, plus your parents’ work numbers.

Now I only know mine, my sister’s and my parents’ cell numbers. That’s it.

I'm sure it's been said before but bears repeating: Affordable housing.

Less security airports. Back then you could just get on

Calling people fgt like, constantly. Seriously I've been rewatching a lot of old favorite movies lately and boy did we sling that f bomb around willy nilly

When playing out with friends, having to be home when the street lights started coming on. Or when your mum shouted you name from the doorstep.

Checking the news in the morning for school closures due to winter weather.

"I can't stay up too late tonight. I have church in the morning."

Walking into a plane and stadium without having to go through security.

I remember my parents used to look in the papers to find what's on TV today. So maybe that, or just papers in general

Portable CD players.

Public masturbation

Dial-up

Acid rain.

Navigating through a city with a mapbook

Pogs metal slammers!

Wiskey when i walk through a door

Not having a cellphone

Beepers

Mapquest

Early 90s… ashtrays in cars and on planes.

Pay phones.

Good music

Pubes

Not constantly considering my actions and decisions in light of the impending collapse of human civilization.

Block buster

A rolodex and pagers

Blowing into cartridges to get your video games to function on a good old tube television.

Listening to the music and enjoying that alternative world which seems so crazy compared to ours.

Oh and mail order Wikipedia style binders. The ones for animals, jets, etc.

Walking

Getting value from the evening news

Moving away and never seeing old friends again. Now with social media you don’t really ever lose touch with friends.

Cigarettes

Pagers

Home phones

People born 1920

Brains. Manners. Tolerance.

pagers

Rewinding VHS tapes

📼

My dignity

white dog shit

Getting to the airport 15 minutes before your flight and not worrying about a giant line at security.

Carrying some coins for the public telephone in case of emergency

Rules

Table for 4? Smoking or non-smoking?

Payphones

Land lines

Papers filled with cheat codes for multiple games

Relative sanity in politics

Pay phones

Life made its way without social media and still probably can

Collect calling

Post office shootings. We even used to say “going postal” when someone lost their sh!t.

tips and tricks magazine with the dozen or so pages in the back with cheat codes for games

Smoking sections on airplanes.

Calling a phone number or watching local tv to see if school was cancelled for a snow day.

Showing people physical photographs of your holiday.

Bipartisanship

Nokia (only in memes now)

Sony Walkmans. Yellow.

Nokia 3210

Restaurant smoking

LMAO, the same shit people are talking about as being lost with the 90s is the same shit my parents used to claim to miss from the 60s, that you just couldn't do in the 90s.

Affordable housing.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Common sense

The r-word.

Payphones

The sexualisation of 16 year olds, Britney spears much?

Dial tone

Call the person you’re dating and having their parents pick up.

Haven’t seen this yet but smoking /non smoking sections in restaurants

Ringing doorbells

Snow

VCRs and movies stores

rent out VCD cassette tapes!

TLDR all posts so may have been mentioned but Waiting for your film to be developed to see what pictures you took. Sometimes a 36 exposure roll had summer and Christmas pictures at once in there.

Floppy disks and the fact that you can ruin somebody's day by sticking a magnet on those disks.

Fuck you to death Stanley from 5th grade!

Tapes, CD players, tape players, the most resistant cellphone in history - Nokia, zip drivers, BEEPERS....

6 disc CD players in your trunk, Skidz, dial up, calling cards, sooo many R n B groups

Intelligent kids

Rotary phones and payphones everywhere

Recording your a tv show on vhs

Be kind, rewind!

Rubbers and a large selection of them in shops

Saying the phrase "if only I had a camera on me!"

A living wage.

Common sense. Courtesy. Empathy. Altruism.

No TikToks of people doing dumb shit.

Dial up internet

Common sense

pagers

phone books

Owning a Filofax.

Fax machines

Vinyl records

Pantyhose and shoulder pads for any occasion

My parents sex life

dial up modem and fax machine sounds...

Talking to the parents of your friends on the land-line and asking if they are around.

Calling on household phone, and asking to talk to your friend. No one using phone anymore

good music.

Blockbusters, I was born in 2002 and there were some still kicking but not anymore

The Redskins name and winning games

Bees

Caller ID boxes

Driving with a map book in your lap trying to sneak glances while also driving in the city. Fucking don't miss that.

Wondering what my friends are doing or having for dinner but having no idea because I didn’t want to talk to their parents to get them on the phone when calling their landline.

I'm honestly a little surprised I didn't see TV Guide listed. Having to look up what shows to watch for the week from a pamphlet that came in the weekend paper. And it always had a little separation to clearly identify local/OTA channels from cable package ones, and regular cable from premium/PPV.

"Let's rent a movie from the store"

Happiness and freedom.

Walkman

The Yankees winning the World Series

MTV

Ozone holes.

Calculators

Being born in 1990 today

Any meenie miney mo catch..... I was naive and now realise how bad it was.

Dial-up internet with dial-up modems

Dot-matrix printers

Floppy Disks

AOL

No smartphones

No cell phones (the first half of the 90's, not sure how we survived

Landlines

Answering machines

3 way…calls

A 1990 calendar

Smoking or non smoking....

Playing pogs and collecting slammers

Bass boost.

CD skip protection.

The scrolling channel on television to see what was coming up to view

Going to the video shop on a Friday night and getting 5 weeklies for $10

Its gone downhill for the people born in the 19th century!

pagers

My mother had 3 separate wallets for the vacations in Europe we took, all with their own currencies in them.

Calling that girl you liked to invite her out to her home land line, knowing that the father or mother could be the ones who answered and you would be ask who you are and the reason of your call.

MSDOS video games. (Prince of Persia, Doom)

Health insurance actually paid your medical bills. No copays, no deductible, no medical debts. It was glorious.

Gumball and candy machines. All you needed were 25 cents. Barely see those anywhere, and when i do, all i can think about is how many years have those Mike and Ike’s and those gun balls been sitting there collecting dust

Asking for a non-smoking section

Picking up a phone w no idea who's on the other end

CD

Good TV shows and music

Chicken pox

Everyday disco-parties where there's always a guy with an afro

Ride my bicycle to work on the side of the road without fear of getting run over. Now with cell phones no way.

Walkman CD players

Not being able to find any information you desire within a minute.

Family vacations where no one could reach you except the grandparents (and they would only call for a TRUE emergency).

Just phoning people up, you know casual like, without checking first

Red cars.

Kids riding bikes across town an hr away from home and then heading back before the street lights cut on otherwise that's that ass when your parents catch you.

Dialup fax modems

Pubic hair

Stopping at Gas stations to ask for directions! - also, hey where is a good place to eat? - asking what time a place opens or closes. Having a Thomas Guide under your car seat to use a grid to find a location.

Yugoslavia

Trucks that didn’t start rusting after 10 years …. Newer trucks are junk when it comes to body longevity.

Waiting in line for something without having a cellphone

Kids playing outside unsupervised

Yoyos

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding

Rewinding tape

Slap bracelets

MD and MP3 players. i still use an old Walkman to save battery on long trips

CD players

Actually talking to people at bars other than the people you went there with.

Listening to music on a walkman.

Smoking and not smoking sections in a restaurant

Those CD holder sleeves you use it have on your cars Sun visor.

Renting VHS

Fireflies

90's calendar

$500 Japanese shit boxes

Smoking sections in restaurants

Payphones

Home phones.

Teletext.

Read news and weather on your TV, and smile at the garble of text that and Blockbuster.

Good or even better handwriting. I feel mine and others handwriting due to typing, texting, keyboards have gone to sh..., let's not even bring up cursive.

Smoking.. In planes

“I was in the neighborhood”

insects splattered on my windscreen

Payphones

Remembering your friends phone numbers!

A prevailing belief that Nazis were bad.

Soviet union

Floppy disks.

Just dropping in or stopping by someone's home because you were "in the area." You'd absolutely call or text now.

A similar, less common, one: Calling someone because you had traveled to their city and didn't have to pay long distance.

Needing a quarter for the payphone. Not being able to wander too far while on the phone cuz you'd run out of cord.

Cigarette and tobacco ads

K7 tapes

Butterfinger bb’s

Kurt Cobain

Land line phones

Answer: Common sense!!

Manors, respect for one another and not getting bombarded with digital wank 24/7

Racial jokes

Smoking at the mall!

Common sense?

Extreme sports. Extreme Doritos.

My hairline

Minding your business

Mark Morrison jokes.

Respect

Mcdonald birthday parties

Respect for law enforcement

Pagers

Blockbuster

Smoking everywhere you wanted to. Bus, Hospital, puplic transportation, restaurant and so on

mouse with them little balls

floppy disks, diskettes...

Civilized discussion. Now too many people get butt hurt if you don't automatically agree with them. Worse yet, you can't possibly learn anything if your mind is made up.

Nobody move! The game is loading!

We'll come back in an hour and check on its progress.

Unbleached coral reefs :(

Watching tapes on a VCR

Beepers, and on a related note, phone booths and spare change

couch coop video games

Fresh out of the factory CRT's with a clean tube. Pfew.

Using a road map for road trips, not GPS.

Elevator operators

Answering the front door

Manners

Windshields covered in bug splatters after long drives.

Pittsburgh Pirates fans.

Floppy discs

CD’s. Movies and some games are very hard to find on CD’s. And the latest laptops don’t have a CD entrance or whatever it’s called.

Smoking.

Use to be almost everyone you knew smoked, especially in night clubs. Everywhere had ashtrays, you’d see peoples packets on their tables.

I went to someone’s house the other day and they had the big retro ashtray and I was actually like “woooow haven’t seen one of these in ages” level surprised.

Yep! In the hospital I worked out in the 90’s their were ashtrays built into the bed.

Wow, that's like next level insane.

A home phone

talking face to face and keeping eye contact.

Recording the radio station on a cassette tape so you could listen to your favorite songs on your walkman.

Being a child who didn't have constant servailance.

Fun.

Using the Yellow Pages

Letting kids ride bikes or just run around outside

Or, riding in the bed of pickup trucks

Some sense of sanity

I'd wager they didn't have any then. Didn't people smoke cocaine all day long?

Tvguide

Having to scrub all the splattered insects off your windscreen every time you either stopped for fuel or got home. Some times of the year having to stop at every town to clean the windscreen between fuel refills. All the big rigs had a solid layer of insect goo all over the front.

Cigarette commercials on TV

Automatic seatbelts

Smoking in a bar.

Respectful political discourse.

1930s borns probably

Abortion rights in the US /s

Transphobic jokes in sitcoms

Great music.

pubes in porn

Leaded gas. The stuff was awful. I think it’s still used in some applications tho.

Kindness

Applying for a job by handing your resume to someone in-person.

Me and my fiancé were talking about the TV guide a few days ago. Watching an infomercial while waiting for the slow scrolling guide to see what’s coming on later. Only to look away and miss what you were waiting for and now have to wait for it to come back around.

Cha Cha or something like that. Before smart phones and Google, if you were having a drunken disagreement about the correct order of all James Bond films, you would just text Cha Cha and someone would Look up the question from their desktop and text you back the answer.

cigarette vending machines

Street Sharks. Watch it. Watch it now.

Phone booths

JDM cars from that year in good condition.

Mix Tapes

Pay phones

JNCO's (jeans)

Pogs I miss them so much but I'm happy they haven made a comeback

Being able to tell hilarious jokes about minorities.

Map books in almost every car

Privacy

Pogs

frameless glasses

CDs

Beepers/pagers

Beepers

Blockbuster

Anti police radars

Pay phones

Calling popcorn to check the time.

Birkenstocks.

My Space

Waiting in suspense for your school code to be announced over the radio on snow days.

Frosted tips

Me having fun

Playing video games with friends while on land-line phones together. I remember when we got a wireless house phone and then cradling it between my shoulder + neck while gaming

My happiness

House phone

Calling your friend's house phone

Minding your own f*n business

Dial up internet, I still remember that tune when we try to connect

Payphones. Calling collect to get picked up. You would call collect home and when just say where you where so you don't have to accept the charges. " you have a collect call from: 'Mom pick me up from school! ' do you accept the charges?

Music on MTV

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Good music.

Having everything on CDs and VCRs.

Blockbuster

Throwing hands and walking away

Pogs

Blockbuster

Argos catalogue Christmas lists.

Smoking inside a mom n' pop breakfast joint.

Yo-yos

Not telling everyone your political affiliation or just not being into politics at all.

Pagers.

Missing your channel on TV Guide channel and having to wait for it to scroll back around.

Making a living.

Payphones.

Waking up on a lazy summer day and knowing just whose house your friends were at by locating the bikes, some upright... others on their side. Also clothespinning a baseball card to the spokes!

Free time...

Memorising phone numbers.

Calling COLLECT

I miss my Sony MiniDisk player. It could fit so many songs! The tech was super cool.

It wouldn't jump or skip when I was moving about, the sound quality was amazing. Just so much fun to use, make new MiniDisks.

Plus it was yellow, my favourite colour. I used it into the 00's until I left my coat in a pub one night. Went back the next day and both the coat and the MiniDisk player were gone.

Still gutted.

Heinz purple ketchup!

Feeling safe in public spaces/schools.

Children going out in the morning to play and only coming home for meals

Staying focused on the road when driving.

White dog poop!

A functional democracy in the US

Pay phones!, Blockbusters, home phones, phone books,

Common sense

Privacy

Billboards for Cigarettes

Dial tones

Playing outside with friends

Smoking in restaraunts and other indoor spaces (United States)

I miss free ice-cream treat by Nirulas when you scored more than 95% in your exams.

The person who topped the class used to be a celebrity during those times. Engineer, Doctors were respected a lot.

Calling into the phone line that told you exactly what time it was so you could go around & reset your clocks to the proper time after a power outage.

Manners

writing your own walkthrough/moveslist.

House prices

My skid marks. Apparently not so normal anymore

DVDs.

Pagers

Columbia House

6 cd's for 1 plus S+H, if iirc

Patience.

People who were born in the 1920’s

Floppy discs

Printing out game guides on gamefaqs.

Music videos on MTV

Child marriage 🙊

Kurt Cobain. What? Too soon?

90s japanese cars

Dial up

Backstreet Boys

Phone boxes

Internet, tv, pretty much anything in life not infected by non-stop ads.

Common sense!

Cassettes. I used to watch cartoons on video players when I was a child. Am I that old??

Blockbuster

Tower Records was a place people would go to hang out.

Calling the theater to get movie times

Nokia and Motorola phones

Phone booth

Home phones.

Floppy disks.

Blockbuster.

The American Dream.

Kids playing outside riding bikes, nowadays they are stuck to their phones, tablets and videogames

Comfortable pants

Swingers party, shitload of roofies and booze.

You think swingers parties stopped?

The quality of the toys in McDonald’s. I still get them here and there for nostalgia and they are AWFUL now

Pay phones 😞

Affordable video games and consoles.

Having an old laserdisc that nobody used.

Landline and an answering machine for your home.

Seeing kids just hanging out sitting on big electrical boxes.

Riding your bike across town just to knock on the door and see if your friend was home so you could ride to your next friend’s house and do the same thing.

Three Jim Carrey hit movies in one year (1994- Dumb & Dumber, The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective).

Learning cursive.

Singing along to the dial up modem sounds.

Dancing to La Macarena.

Going to a restaurant and seeing that they randomly make a Chinese chicken salad.

I see people mentioning Blockbuster a lot, but do y’all remember those little black boxes that would ONLY rewind VHS tapes?

Actually having real fun. No cell phones, no social media. Life was good

Payphones

White dog shit

Catalog mail orders. I would tell my parents what I wanted for Christmas/birthdays by circling things in the magazine, then leaving it on their bed haha

Also, having to mail a check to pay for things

This thread is surprisingly non political. Rare to see these days. Love it

Yeah, this was actually something that occurred all the time in the 1990’s (politics rarely if ever came up in day to day conversation). So it seems strangely appropriate.

Street directories were a pain.

Looking up the nights' sequence of television shows in the TV Guide

I would have said Fax, but in my country it's still pretty common because we seem to be at least 20 years behind the rest of the world regarding IT...

Cassette tapes, vcr’s, using *69 to find out what number just called you, pay phones, Nintendo w/Super Mario Bros

phone booths. They took the last one down just a few weeks ago here in NY

Playing Gameboy after hours in the dark and having to squint it towards the light from the streetlamp outside your window to play.

Sneaking Walkman/Discman, other brands were available, into school and feeding the earphone down your sleeve so you could listen in class.

Lads mags

Calling someone's pager

Payphones

Manners.

Dialing popcorn

Common sense.. social compromise.. working hard for the common good.. voting for candidates because you liked their ideas and no their party..privacy.

Smoking inside pretty much anywhere all the time.

Not being a sellout.

Social security

Rotary dial phones, probably most of them gone by the 90s but I remember a lot of my relatives still had one. It was the best thing ever, it took 2 minutes just to dial the number 😂

walking with a straight chin-up, now we always look at our smartphones while walking

Smoking indoors. I can't believe anyone was ever okay with that, especially around children and non-smokers.

I could be of by a decade, but 256k modems?

Baba booey

Great music

Pagers/beepers.

Wholesome relationships with the opposite sex

Wearing luminous Lycra cycling shorts, usually in bright radioactive green, or hot pink 😂 or recording a mix tape from songs that came on the radio! Some tapes you weren't meant to be able to use like official tapes that you bought from HMV (nostalgia right there!) but you could find a way around it by putting sticky tape on each side to cover the wee holes 😂

Weekly (or daily) trips to the Library to get school work done. You had to look up stuff for papers and what not, and all your friends were there. It was a unique experience that I doubt is replicated anywhere now.

Everyone having somewhat of a unique accent. If you go watch videos from the early 1990s you can hear it in news story interviews

Good music.

Going to a restaurant and the Hostess asking "smoking or non"?

People born in the 1920s

I was going to say hardwire internet but that’s made a huge comeback for gaming.

Beepers.

Smokers everywhere. In the cinema, restaurants, bars, clubs... everywhere. The non smoking sections were just tables without ashtrays in the same area.

I used my nails to etch a cock and balls in every tinfoil McDonalds ashtray within my grasp.

Common sense

Pagers

Buying a house

Dirty magazines

Fearlessness.

And those lame shirts which mention so.

A normal life

White dog shit!

Those map books you used to see at every gas station. They were in s a spiral binding, and heavily laminated.

Low airport security

Really dark lipliner and super thin eyebrows. Ladies, what were we thinking...

Jimmy Savile

being happy

Parents that are together

The non-carbonated but still fizzy all sport drinks you would get after baseball practice as a kid. Where did those go lol

having a slave

Good music.

Having to talk to your dates’ parents because home phone

Hooking up the phone line to the tv to order a movie.

Physical encyclopedias and using them to do homework!

Today we all mostly do research through the internet since all information is there and many book/articles are available online.

Baggy clothes

Internet was like:

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding

Expressing your love with a mix tape

Using America Online (also Prodigy, CompuServe, eWorld) to get online. (With your dialup modem!)

Transparent electronics.

Strange that no one said "10 year olds with no supervision in the streets of a suburb"

Freedom

Phonebooks

Buying sports cards from the neighborhood ice cream man.

Pay phones. We used to have one in the front lobby of my school and I remember using them to call home after play practice to tell my dad to get me. Being dumb kids we used to mess with them and try calling random numbers to see if we could reach sex and psychic lines and giggling like idiots when we occasionally succeeded.

Ska

It’s kind of sad but seeing kids just ride their bikes all over. Growing up my friends and I would ride all day.

You could even say the thought of just being home by street lights is gone.

Pogs

Faxing

Look in the TV guide magazine

Hit Clips, 20 seconds of today's hottest songs

Me acting like an infant

Polio

White dog poop

Pay phones

Pay phones.

Disket

Common sense

VCR players

Free AOL cd's that came in the mail so you could try for free

Reading a magazine.

coming to someones house and ask them to play outside (as kids) and overall knowing the adress of ur friends if u came to someones house just like that today u would be considered as a creep probably

Missing a tv show or part of a tv show because you weren’t home or went to the bathroom. Just watching a concert, no cell phones in the air recording blocking the view. Kids all over the neighborhood riding bikes, walking around.

Teletext, the jokes pages.

People smoking cigarettes everywhere.

Wishing I could do well enough in life to one day afford a cell phone

Tee shirts and shorts that changed colour in the sun. Damn I looked fly.

since I live in Russia , and the skinhead culture came much later here , they were widespread in the 90s and 00s ,I myself communicated with a group of skinheads, I am 17 years old, they are my age, and at concerts we sometimes met old representatives of subcultures, and they warmly welcomed us and told us about their youth, and I understand that now a different culture than 25-30 years ago

Today I realized I really want to go back to the nineties.. It was all so harmless…floppy disks…calling a house phone after looking in the phone book…in the Netherlands we had a host for certain channels that would announce all programs and shows that were on that evening..it was so dorky and yet when they would say: “Grab a seat and enjoy this family movie!” We knew that something good was about come on :) mind you I was born in 87 so I wasn’t allowed anything other than “family” ;-)

Play CDs or tapes, Hitting star 69, Having a caller ID box connected to the phone

grunge 😔

I remember watching an uncensored version of Total Recall on broadcast TV in Korea when I was about 5, so maybe it was 1999. Remember the scene where the guy wishes he had 3 hands? Yeah, I remember that scene specifically.

Landline

Name calling has changed

Being punctual to a non-job related date that's been set sometimes weeks in advance.

Baggy pants for men.

Orange Julius esp at the Mall. I kno they still exist but rare now. Coming home from school alone. Kids Running around the neighborhood till dark. Cutting class to smoke ciggies. Zines. Making mix tapes (playlists not really the same effort). Pubic hair. Raves. Old beater car with tape deck and manual windows. VCR’s & taping a movie or show on VHS. Using Pen/paper regularly. Boys/men who viewed girls/women as human beings. Ppl being able to have an actual conversation/talk to each other.
Hope.

In my neck of the woods…getting up, doing chores then calling your friends to see who is doing what. Next hopping in your bike and being out til later afternoon…come grab food then run back out til dinner….after that either evening chores or it was family time (this was in my area of western , PA

Phone books

Computer rooms, damn near every house had one

Trolling for mall ass.

Joke tolerance

Land lines.

I really thought woods porn would be the top answer.

Being virtually unreachable the moment you step outside your home. Good news, bad news, questions, answers... Everything had to wait till you got home.

Beepers.

Shame.

Trip tips triple a

Public pay phones

Cassette Walkman.

Manners

likely already mentioned, but this thread is waaaay too long to read through it to check:

phone booths

Asking directions.

Knowing how to navigate the Dewey decimal system.

Frosted tips

Full Motion Video cutscenes in video games. Now they're pretty much in engine.

Leg warmers

I'm a little nostalgic for how, when someone had a cockamamie story about ghosts or aliens or the like-- and most everyone has 'em-- even if you didn't believe it per se, you were open to the possibility. With the internet and camera phones, the existence of such things seems more ludicrous than ever. That's good in some ways, but, I miss thinking someone at a party claiming to have been followed around by ghosts or abducted by aliens was sort of a crackpot, as opposed to today when they come odd as total crackpot.

People have become so judgmental and selective... another nail in the coffin of the social-life!

Phone booths

Being a kid and ending up in the house of a random stranger without your parents having any idea, and then not really worrying about it later on.

I spent Christmas watching Zorro on the floor of a total stranger's apartment once with about 5 other kids. I don't know who they were or if they were related. I vaguely remember they were Christmas Carolers, and I followed them and sang with them and ended up following them home?

I went home later on by myself long after dark at night in the winter. I was probably 10 or 11.

To be kind and rewind.

Slap bracelets, beepers, payphones, remembering phone numbers.

Game Consuls come with a game.

Landlines in the house, and with answering machines

Car companies spending billions just to one-up each other on the race track. Sports cars in general

Inflatable furniture

pay phones

The news/politics being limited to a 15 minute segment on a 32" CRT TV at 6:30pm, or sitting lifeless in a rolled up newspaper on an end table... and that's it.

These days, it's injected into everything, 24/7. There is no avoiding it unless you turn off every device and avoid the outside world entirely.

Answering a phone that was attached to the wall and having no idea who was on the other end of the line.

TV Guide

Printing directions off mapquest.

Downloading songs and burning them on a CD

Downloading anime music videos off limewire based on title alone.

Chat rooms (well I guess there’s still those just in the form of discord and the like)

Two days ago I found 4 of those candles that have colors inside and drip over a bottle. My kids and their friends had a BLAST watching them burn on a 100-degree afternoon. Flashback city!

Owning your home

Affordable housing...

Reading more news about North America than your own continent

Charge your phone on weekends.

Mixed tapes.

Tiny backbacks

"That's fuckin GAY!"

Sweeping dead insects of the car

Phonebooks.

When you bought a video game and they had those booklets inside the cases

Blockbusters?

Logic

Connecting to the internet.

Payphones every where

If your video game didn't work, you just blow into it hard enough and it fixes itself.

Home ownership by anyone not born to rich boomer parents.

Wall phones!

Quality children toys that lasted more than a few weeks/months of use. The vast majority of today's toys were either designed for the garbage or are so boring the kids lose interest after mere minutes.

Not meeting up with your friends because none of you had cellphones and you just failed to all get together at the same time.

Yo-yos

Writing letters.

Car phones

The AOL noise 😅

Common decency

Radios. My days used to start and end with radio.

Dine in pizza hut

Phonebooks

Discman

Pay phones

The feeling of being bored. Every minute of every day is filled with "filler" screen time on the phone.

Blockbusters, and game or movie rental in general.

Wide vertical stripes of various colors on a long sleeve shirt with a collar. Idk but I feel like there was a kid wearing it on every textbook

Respect. For authority, teachers, parents, the President...

Beepers.

Parachute pants

Fruit stripe gum. Its around but harder to find. My absolute favorite gum even in 2022.

MOVIEPHONE!

Waiting 3 minutes for a picture to load, pay phones, and famous people dying of AIDS

Global Hypercolour T-Shirts.

Changed colour with body heat, made folk look like a sweaty mess.

Dates that start with 199.

Windshield getting absolutely peppered with bugs damn near every drive.

Renting movies and video games at BlockBusters

layers.

?

layering shirts, i remember seeing ppl wearing 3 shirts like it was nothing

Yeah, damn!

Green or purple ketchup.
Probably other colors.

I should say that the other day I arrived at home and though "I have to check my voice mail".

  1. I don't have line telephone
  2. People don't use or have now line telephone
  3. Neither they leave messages on the line telephone
  4. I used to call from my house to my house and leave voice mail singing and making beat box.

Um Jerry springer?also amyl nitrite in a small bottle from Ann Summers. Also, those weighing scales made from brass with the little weights, that screws into the velvet covered box it comes in

“What’s your ASL?” in chat rooms.

Living in studio by myself that was walking distance to a ferry that took me to downtown Seattle for $500 a month. Meanwhile I worked as a overnight security job for $12 a hour. Where I did absolutely nothing.

Today that studio is going for close to $3,000 a month and security guards are being paid $15 a hour.

Pay phones

Video store's.

AOL Instant Messenger. I still know a handful of people I know to this day that I’ve met in person from there and it’s essentially changed my life by knowing them.

Pay phones

Landlines

Smoking indoors

Blow up videogame's cartridges.

1) video games like video game player 2) mp3/mv4/mv5 3) vcr/dvd player 🤣

Shared experiences in terms of general culture

The last time I remember it happening recently were Game of Thrones and Pokemon Go (even though I never played).

Now we have an explosion of music, movie, and show options. It's rare that something is SO big that everyone has seen it.

Beepers aka Pagers

“You have a collect call from mommoviesoverpickmeup, do you accept charges?”

Actual telephones

McDonald's ash trays.

Shell suits in the UK.

CDs

VHS cassettes

Pay phones.

Specifically, making collect calls on the pay phones with all of your info in the “name” section when you didn’t have money. I.e. “this is a collect call from ‘mom pick me up at the movies’

Talking to people in public. Only asking out people you actually met in real life. Not being judged solely by a small set of still images and a couple of paragraphs. Bold and funny people really won out back then.

Rock music

straight people

Boredom

Friends ringing your doorbell without announcing it via text first

Calling 411 to get the correct time

Good music

Manners

Kids playing outdoors

Radio I guess

Public payphones/ phone booths

Landlines

The dallas cowboys winning playoff games

Meeting someone and losing contact with them. Maybe they were another kid you met playing at a hotel pool. Maybe they were a friend who moved away. For a long time, you could just lose contact with someone.

Pagers and payphones

Knowing where all your friends are by the bikes on the front lawn

Pogs

Wrote 10 sheets of letter to my russian penpal, add little gift to the envelope. Radio with tape Cheap internet cafe full of kids playing game

Nokia phones

Fireflies

Eye contact

Cassette players

A wall phone in the kitchen

Pagers

Pride in your work …there simply is no more “give a damn” and consequently “work ethic”

AOL

Blockbuster

Respect

Take a few minutes to download ONE SONG fron napster or whatever.

Using collect from a pay phone to call when practice was over. Parents denied the charges then came to pick you up.

1990s cars. Thanks, Cash for Clunkers!

Landlines

Fax machines

The line between being online and offlline

Kids being able to play outside without a parent standing watch over them because the world is so dangerous now or because someone will call CPS on you for letting your 8 and 10 year old ride bikes in front of the house unattended.

JNCOs

Analog TV broadcasts

We could dial POPCORN and get the weather

there's a lot actually outfit, movies, hairstyle and many more

Wicked kids toys that were slightly dangerous.

Discs but specifically CDs. A lot of cars have CD players only and now you can't really find them in stores anymore unless you burn the music on a blank disc with a computer.

Butt cuts and JNCOs

Take-out menus

My youth.

Looking up library books by pulling open mini drawers. It’s all on computer now

Blockbuster

1) In a pub: "Hey mate, can you settle an argument?"

Now it's: "I'll Google it"

2) Finding your dad's porn stash

Restaurant dinner entrees under $10

Talk to people!

VHS Casettes.

  • Sitting in front of the TV on a snowy morning waiting for the name of your school to go by on the list of closures and delays at the bottom and some absolute IDIOT in your family walking by and blocking the screen so you had to wait through the WHOLE list again.

  • The absolute anguish of getting ready to watch a video only to find someone else in your family had watched it and NOT REWOUND THE TAPE.

  • The phone cord being too short to reach somewhere private.

  • Your parents banning from the house until the street lights came on.

  • Notes folded with oragami like precision that had 4 UR 👀 s ONLY!!!!!!!!!!!! written on the outside in bubble script.

My Parents bought me a Mapsco book when I finally got to drive at 17.

@aol.com

A sense of comfort and security

$1.00/gallon gas

Bull* news stories, urban myths and rumours

Pagers

VCR's and VHS Tapes.

People not being offended by comedians.

Oversensitive crybabies today smh

Garbage Pail Kids.

Kids playing outside.

Ring on someones door to ask if he has time.

Chalky dog poop

Being able to afford a two bedroom apartment by yourself on a 40 hour work week.

Fax machines.

Smoking in public, specifically inside

Political ambiguity. “Back then” very few people wore their politics on their sleeve or had entire personalities based around their political leanings. It was very much in the background of society at large.

Prank calling people from a payphone

People nonchalantly sneaking in giant ass video recorders into movie theaters. Also bootlegged vhs tapes with people walking in front.

POGs, CrazyBones

Parenting by sending the kids outside for the day, not having a clue where they were or what doing, feeding them when they came home. More the 80s tho, I guess.

Listening to the radio or sum idk

Pay phones on the street!

Telephone booths

Aggressive indie rock on the pop charts.

Thomas Guide- that giant guide of detailed local maps. My mom was a real estate agent. She had just started to go to work in the early 90s, working with a bank on repos, and I was like, 12? Acting as her copilot with a Thomas guide in her lap, directing her to houses she needed to list, from a Thomas guide. It was always insane when a new housing development wasn’t in there yet, and we’d just drive around and around, looking for some street that wasn’t listed.

Lisa Frank

Land lines and pay phones. Collect calling.

Beepers

VHS

Home phones

pagers.. and blackberry's

Pager’s

Civility

walkman

My junk-wax-era baseball card collection.

Kids playing in the park

Tamagotchi

Female pubic hair

Good music.

Did anyone say privacy yet?

Be kind and rewind.

Collect calls.

You have a call from " mom pick me up"

just showing up to a friend's house.

a knock on the door/phone call was exciting and non-intrusive.

1) Awek kilang. Now mostly foreigners.

2) cyber cafe

3) getting lost ( now got gps, so its very unlikely )

4) blind dates, i mean real blind date. Not knowing what the other side looks like.

5) gayut at public phone

6) internet connection got connected when someone use phone

7) internet bill

8) jaring internet topup

9) music cd

10) camera roll

11) point and shoot camera

Corded home phones

Casual homophobic slurs.

Dunkaroos.

Phone Booths. At every gas station, grocery store, mall.....

Work ethic

Rollerblades

Manners

Maybe in wrong, but backwards ball caps. It used to be every kid in school I feel!

Reasonably sized trucks. Just a cab with 2 seats and a standard length bed. Now it’s an SUV with a bed attached with 2 extra wheels. I just wanna haul some wood okay?

Tamagotchi Pets and chia pets (that plant thing). Pogs

Roller blades

Turning off your phone to use the interwebs.

Would you like smoking or non?

VCRs

This sort of relates to a lot of comments, but: feeling bad when spending “too much” time staring at a screen/using technology. You could feel guilty, like you’re being lazy, or spoiled, if you used a computer or video games more than an hour or two. Felt like it was more unnatural, in the past. I hope to perpetuate that mindset to my future family haha - I do feel like most things (like Reddit) purposelessly burn up your time.

Calling a phone number for tutoring help

Dial up.

Walking over to a friends house and knocking on their door just to see if they wanted to do something

Map quest

1-555-1212

Properties for Sale details by Estates Agents in the local newspapers. Ours used to have a huge section with pages and pages of house photos and details for each agent.

Token peep shows in the back of adult book stores where the girlies do unspeakable acts for a dolla even if ur like 16.

Neon colored windbreakers.

Everyone had one in the 90's, haven't seen one since.

Pay Phones

Dropping in on friends or family unannounced. Like, for cups of tea etc.

Waiting in general. I remember waiting for friends for hours sometimes. Now you’d send a text after 5 min and change your plans

The computer being in the kitchen where the landline was

Cheap gas price!

Common sense.

body hair, maybe?

[deleted]

Methaqualone went out of production in 1983 and were banned outright in the U.S. by Reagan in 1984. Ludes were long gone by the time the 90's got here.

Integrity

Going to Toys R Us, getting a slip for the videogame you wanted than bringing it up to cashier pay for it than going in back to get game

Public payphones

Flip phones....

Yea, I know there are SOME out there but, most people have smartphones these days..

Collect calls.

Waiting outside Toys R Us on black Friday.

Common sense. But maybe I was too young to realize the lack of it then.

Pogs

Not dating a person because they were outside of your free local call area.

Pay phones, phone books, movie stores

The years 1990 through 1999.

Internet bars

Dude, happiness

Hope

Wire hangers. Everything's plastic now.

"Paper or plastic?"

Pirate radio stations

^^oh yeah, this for sure! taping the antenna and a wire coat hanger on a window, while warning anyone from touching it once u got the station in. specifically for me was CFNY 102.1 sigh

Pay phones .

Answering machines

Pay phones

Tv Guide books/Phone books

Pogs have been replaced with pawgs

Fast forwarding through the FBI Warning, commercials, and previews at the beginning of a VHS tape.

Then DVDs and Blu-rays tried to make those unskippable.

Call popcorn for the current time to set your clocks. “At the tone, the time will be, 5:36 BEEEP”.

In the UK roller skating rinks

Phone booths

Beepers.

Car phones.

Pay phones

dunder mifflin paper companies

an affordable home

Teachers smoking and drinking in schools...well, they did at my high school.

I had to go to a teachers office to pick something up when I was 13, the room reeked of cigs and there was a whisky bottle openly displayed on a shelf.

Owning a camera

Trying to remember the name of a band or actor and blanking hard. Then a week/month/year later seeing the name and yelling out “That’s it!”

Bonus points if you’re around people who looked at you like you’re losing it.

Pro-tip: if this happens to you now, resist the urge to Google it. Just let time run it’s course. When the name finally comes to you it’s an awesome wave of relief and celebration.

Dial-up internet

Creativity and a Normal BMI.

Fidgeting with the aerial to avoid static while recording a song on the radio to a cassette tape.

Hope.

Sense of humour

Dial-up noises. You know you just heard that sentence.

My grandparents scolding me for calling them long-distance before 5pm on a weekday. “Don’t call us during the day, it’s expensive!”. I could only call them after 5pm or on the weekends.

Having your birthday party at McDonalds or Burger King.

Dial up

City bus schedules printed on paper brochures.

Pubic hair

Goth bars

Less restricted DRM for video games. 4:3 resolution ratio.

Oh and

Phone Booth.

Having hope for the future.

Living in a rural area and having to give explicit directions on how to get to your house.

Visiting Sydney by myself for the first time and using a map. Actually, just driving anywhere and having a whole bunch of maps that I had to memorise directions.

having social interaction with an actual human

Fluoride mouthwashes in elementary school.

*69

Little black leather bound address book that moved with you from place to place and had names, addresses and phone numbers (and if you’re cool like me, birthdays) of everyone you ever met

Not taking offense to most things

Having to arrange meeting with a friend or a date ahead of time and just hoping they would be there because there was no way to call them if they weren't home. Actually, even in the early 2000s, a lot of teens didn't have phones. If you got stood up by dates it was a massive waste of time and money.

Freedom of speech and/or having an opinion.

Play outside, there is no many people with all the technologie

lighting bugs

I could totally be wrong but I remember lighting bugs everywhere during the summer as a kid. Now, I've not seen one in many years.

still here, out in the country where they don’t have to compete with light pollution . Drop by Ontario Canada and the kids will catch u a jar full for a night light:) gotta let them go in the morning though….

Blockbuster

A livable wage

Quaaludes

Good music…

School closings being scrolled across the bottom of the local news, or read as a list on the local radio station. You can your siblings standing there, half crouched, fists balled, as the list SLOWLY revealed itself until...

Home Phones

Pay phones

Dime pay phones in movie theaters.... mortal Kombat in movie theaters as well....

Blockbuster

7 digit phone numbers. Didn't have to dial an area code back then

Yup….didn’t need even that; small town Ontario we used 5 last numbers of seven digit phone numbers (372-1234 was 2-1234) My grandparents had a party line: one number shared by a few houses/farms. Each line had a special ring, and you could hear everyone’s conversations, tho we’d get smacked if we got caught cuz that was rude. 📞

Going to school and not dying

Not having to worry as much about elementary school kids getting decapitated by assault rifles when they go to school.

Calling local number for time date and weather

Pay phones and phone booths

Phonebooths

Transparent technology

Pagers

Common sense 😂

Releasing story-driven single-player games on physical media.

It used to be, the only expiration date on a game was computer hardware getting too fast and even then there were ways around that.

Mid-level budget action movies

Kmart

Beepers. All the “cool” kids when I was in high school in the 90s had one lol

Non-straightened hair, adidas popper tracksuits. Oh, and no one got quite as offended in those times.

MSN

Beepers.

Privacy

My hardon

Corded phones.

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias on your shelf.

Payphones or pagers

Payphones

Asking your sister to update her DP

Mapquest.

Getting a personal organiser for Christmas.

Answering machine tapes.

Burning CDs, aux cords, not being able to be on the phone & the internet

Walk to your friend's house just to see how is doing.. no cell phones hahaha..

Calling 1194 (in Australia) to check the time…

“At the third stroke, it will be 10.57 precisely. Beep, beep, beep.”

Calling your mom collect and when the operator says to state your name you say, “I’m at the roller rink please pick me up”

Phil Collins, the guy was everywhere.

Sad he retired, but he had a good run!

Grunge rock

Beepers

Disket. Kite

Phone books.

Smoking/Non-smoking sections of restaurants

Smoking in public places. (Netherlands)

Social skills

Answering machines

Normal lives. I don't know much about the 90's but I don't think people were wearing masks to save their lives.

Video games with no micro transactions

Wind up windows and non power steered cars.

Blockbuster

Gameboys

Smoking sections in restaurants and airplanes

Not talking about one’s political affiliation

Gameboys

Hyper color shirts

Humor

aol floppies and cds

Brightly coloured transparent plastic dummies as necklaces.

Rollerblading

It was normal to not frequently be anxious, now that’s definitely rare

Frosted tips on men

No seat belts required. Oh and dad drinking a beer while he drives us to dinner at the Sizzlers. 😂

That was the 80's.

Oh well I to the 90s.

Smoking was still fairly popular in the 90s

Sanity

Happiness.

Showing up at someone's door to hang out

Common sense?

Asking for the smoking section in a diner or restaurant.

Idc

Landline phones

Freedom

Smoking sections in restaurants

Roll-on body glitter

Hope for the future

In England, Ceefax or Teletext.

Smoking in pubs.

Baby formula

I have a working corded phone in my house still.

Just in case you're interested, the line can be used as a weak emergency power source.

Blockbuster

Affordable housing.

Knocking on doors

CDs

beepers (pagers) and phone booths. i had a roommate a year or two after college (95). he had a phone booth business with 20-30 phones. he made good money providing the service, maintaining the phones, etc. cell phones really didn't exist at the time as they do today, so you would get paged, and then have to call someone on a pay phone. i think it took about a year or two after that where pagers / phone booths were no more...

Common sense and values

Computer game stores and computer game packaging with art work and a manual.

Women's nipples in any media

Fruit roll Ups that were yellow, green, and blue. I don’t think they make them anymore. It’s only red and tie dye now

Beepers

Someone in my household picking up the downstairs landline while I am secretly talking to my girlfriend on the upstairs landline

Payphones

Payphones.

Chat rooms full of strangers with nicknames like sexy_cat_20

Good music.

An original English or Japanese base set of pokemon cards from the mid to late 1990s or a working copy of pokemon Gold or Silver ad those batteries are LONG dead now

Going to the bank to do anything. Remember having to stand in line to cash a check or move money around? Drive thru’s had a tube system.

Now most banks have smart ATMs where you can deposit checks and take out money. Even better, just do a mobile check deposit from your smartphone.

Flip phones

Beepers

Having to apply for a job/fill out an application in person

Boy bands

Hearing strangers talk during a phone call due to a crossed connection...

Staying on the line with a friend for hours waiting for someone to accidentally tap in, then proceed to spam them with profanity. I would've been so pissed if some kids did this to my phone call nowadays.

Public Phone cards. Pre paid cards for public phones. They even had nice artwork so they could be collected like stamps.

Payphones

The TV Guide Channel.. to see when your favorite show was gonna be on. having to wait for it to scroll all the way through incase you missed it

Respect

Getting paged and having to pull over to use the payphone to see who hit you up lol.

Blockbuster

Blockbuster

Pagers

Getting your tonsils removed as a kid. Almost everyone in my class had their tonsil removed 5th grade. Shit is crazy lol

Keeping a Thomas Guide in the car.

I heard acid rain isn’t a thing anymore

Find me a good Sit-N-Spin

Cordless phones

Subscribing to or buying TV Guide to get a physical guide so you know what's playing on which channels.

Shoes with a little air pump on the tongue.

Pagers

Paying with cash.

Telephone booth on the streets that you insert a $1 coin and let you talk for 5 minutes, those were the days......

TV. Shows came on a scheduled day and time. If you didn’t set your vcr, or plant yourself on a couch, you missed it. Also talking about the show everybody saw the next day at school or work. Also TV guide.

Using a map to navigate to someplace

Payohones

Physical movie rental

Being happy, having a decent life....

I think that before people could buy drugs and use them to calm downthe pain, now, only the doctors can give you small amounts

Pagers, pay phones, aol cd’s

Spending the day at the mall with your friends.

House phones and answering machines

8 track

Separation of church and state in the US

Walkman.

Roller skating

playing doom multiplayer with my friend through dos.

Pogs

VHS machines and standalone rewinders that look like cars

Overhead projectors in class

The fact that you referenced a goosebumps book and we were all like cool cool totally get it hahaha

Midwestern AGs prosecuting doctors for helping ten year old rape victims get abortions.

Payphones

Pay phones

Having to use a phonebook. At some point, attempting to tear said phonebook in half to exhibit one’s shear strength. 💪

House phones

Telling a joke and having no one getting offended

Calling 1-800-COLLECT and when prompted for your name, saying "mom it's me come pick me up" as fast as possible.

Shells on the beach! When I was a child, I collected them! Miss that.

A society outside of cable news and the internet.

Not using the phone when someone was using the internet.

Pogs

Using those little plastic tube camera film holders for your school lunch / pocket money

Not feeling like you have to be a model to date. I feel like people were a lot more realistic about relationships back then. Dating now is not fun, not interesting, chaps my ass.

CRT

Sanity, togetherness, caring about your neighbor.

Polio

Cash

payphones

Talking to random people and trying to dress and be different most people kind of look alike now most people look airbrushed and actors look alike

Affordable housing

smoking indoors

4 TV channels (UK)

Meaningfull conversations in public transport. Cause everyone is glued to their phone now.

I know that isn't an US of A thing because most public transport was killed off there but had many nice conversations with all kinds of people then.

Beepers!

Reading the entire air freshener label while sitting on the toilet.

Not being able to select multiple races on a questionnaire form for school or something. Biracial people exist, we’re all over the place, and there are so many of us now lol

Being middle class in America

People being born in the 1990s

Meeting a friend for lunch at the airport when they happened to have a layover in your city!

AOL

Common sense...

My mum being pregnant

A down payment for a single-family home

So much nostalgia..

Smoking section in restaurants

Rewinding movies after you finish them

Common sense.

Cheap, fun cars. (Toyota MR2, Honda Del-Sol, Chevrolet Camaro Z/28).

Cars with airbags

I think tv shows genuinely had more exposition in the 90s because it was more likely that you’d missed a week, or had to walk out of the room for a moment, and you pretty much just had to figure out what was going on from context clues. So, they’d give more context clues.

People reading the newspaper on the bus or train.

TV Guides

Pagers and phone booths

Smoking in restaurants

Jorts (jean shorts)

Joe Biden forming coherent sentences

WAP pages on mobile phones using T9 keypads lol. Took ages to load any useful content.

Pagers.

Happiness.

VHS

Payphones

Phone booth

Happiness

Kurt cobain blood pumping😂 rip tho

JNCO jeans

Playing army with toy guns that looked very real but no one batted an eye.

Boomboxes

Car alarms going off at random. Every time you were in a large parking lot, at least one alarm was going off. They started becoming mainstream at the time, and you could trigger them really easily. You can probably hear the sound as you're reading this.

They started toning down how easy it was to trigger the alarms, and you almost never hear one now.

For some reason, blaster pistol toys had the exact same sounds.

Car alarms still go off for no good reason pretty frequently though to the point where, if one goes off, I don’t think I’d bother looking in that direction

Not here. It’s pretty rare. And the noise is different. Now it’s just your car horn repeated. Before it had a distinct noise.

Being a millennial

Blockbuster

Wide clothes. In Austria at least. I have to order everything online because stores just have skinny, slim fit, super skinny and ultra skinny stuff.

And real boxer shorts. And no, trunks are not boxer shorts.

Street Sharks

Republicans tethered to reality

Access to abortions

Decent people.

Spanking kids. I’m sure it still happens but much less normal. -speaking from the receiving end, not as a parent that spanks.

Pogs

SUPER MARIO BROS FOR NES, Wrestling Specials

Chat groups on AOL. I miss some of those.

Smoking inside restaurants

Walking over to a friend’s house and ask him/her to come outside to play

Good music

Smoking in the car while your kids are sitting in it. Smoking everywhere...

Good cocaine

People in the UK. Teletext. Ceefax. The Bamboozle Quiz, pressing the different coloured buttons. Going through all the numbered pages on different subjects, sport, entertainment etc…

Keeping your cell phone in the car - we used a landline at home.

“Smoking or non?”

Owning a house in your 20s

The F and R words

Reading this makes me miss growing up in the 90s

Super baggy jeans!

Gas for 70 cents

Pagers, phone books, maps, busy signals, floppy disks, answering machines, tape players, vcrs

Comedy

Paying with a check.

Dial up modems

The cigarette lighter that used to come in cars.

Thick skin. I swear to f*cking god that y'all get offended by every single thing these days. I miss the thick skin and banter of the 90s. People are so weak and offended now

An actual photograph of boobs. Sitting at the bottom of a desk drawer.

My friends thinking I was a nerd because I had an email address and used IRC. I truly wasn’t a nerd, I was just fascinated by being about to chat with people from all over the world. (As long as my family didn’t need the landline.)

Common sense

Phone booths, landlines, pagers, fax machines, and diskettes. Also, JNCO jeans.

Answering a phone call blind. Unknown numbers and whatnot.

My will to live

Knocking on someone's door for them to come out and chill

Beeper

TELEPHONE BANKING

Those cool little metal clips museums gave you to wear so they knew you'd paid admission. I used to have a decent collection of those but don't remember what happened to them.

Pay phones!!!

Pagers and public telephones

Compassion

Game rentals, every other weekend if I behaved..

Good times.

AOL Instant Messenger

I'm not sure if it was nationwide, but Pizza Hut used to give out dvds when you ordered a pizza.

1 hour photo

Typewriters

Showing up unannounced at someone’s house.

Blockbuster

Having real - offline - friend/friends that you share life experiences with, on a daily basis.

Like online is unreal people.

If anything, I share more with my friends nowadays then I used to 20 years ago. Why? Because now it's so much easier and I can totally bail once I'm tired and nobody takes this personally.

Woman not having rights

Sunday morning cartoons.

Parenting.

A physical edition of the TV Guide 😌💕😍

Legal abortions in the south

Pay phones and slow internet.

Also, air travel was less of a hassle.

Blockbuster Movies : )

Pagers

Kids that would cut the bloody grass!

Using rollerblades as a form of non-motorized transportation, in places where ice skating isn't popular.

In line skating outside of the North is dead. It's pretty much done up here because everybody up here dreams of becoming the next Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid.

Cash.

grown adults drinking full glasses of milk.

Elephant pants

True love

Not knowing where your kids were, and not caring/worrying, because it wasn't dinnertime yet.

Driving around with a open beer...

I remember driving around back in the early 90's.... 4 people in my car, I was 21, my brother was 18, his friend was 16 and my girlfriend was 17. We had a case of bud in the back seat. We all had open beers. We stopped by cop. The cop just said "be careful guys" and let us go. He was very nice about it.

Today, if this happened, I would be in jail (with DWI and giving beer to a minor) if anyone got stopped.

It's a whole different world today....

Slightly safer too

Having to yell to your family that the commercial break was over and the show was back on!

Collect calling

Pay phones.

Parachute pants

1990 year time

Watching the news in the morning before school to see if you got a snow day by watching the schools scroll along the bottom. Then missing your alphabetical order letter and needing to watch the whole thing scroll again.

Pagers

Having to stay home for fear of missing an important phone call.

ITT: things that are popular except in each persons area.

Dial up internet that woke the entire household

Pee-wee-wee-DANN-dee-DANN

Encyclopedias- the printed version

Believe it not used to be able to just smoke anywhere. You could smoke in doctor's offices you could smoke in airports airplanes, malls etc. I remember the local downtown mall that sadly isn't there anymore that had ashtrays. It's also crazy to think that we used to smoke in restaurants....the non-smoking and smoking would be divided by simply a sign.

Modern media sometimes uses this by showing a person smoke on an airplane to highlight the era. I can name BioShock and Stranger Things 4 OTMH.

Carrot Top commercials for 1-800-CALL-ATT

"At the tone, the time will be..."

Hand written grammatical correct letters

My dad would travel for work in the 90s and home phones weren't widely available in India so he'd write my mom letter

It's written like the old Colonel Andrew Luck Twitter account tweets

Not having peanut allergies

Pagers

Dial up internet.

Getting a page and finding a pay phone

Jorts.

Going to music or video stores. I used to love this. Movies were especially fun-reading the back of the case and deciding if it was worth renting or buying. $1 for not rewinding!

I also discovered a lot of great bands by thier album covers too.

Address/calendar book to keep track of your contacts and appointments.

Reading the news on text tv

Public telephones, video rental stores

“Coming soon to VHS”

Looking in the newspaper to see the TV schedule for the night. In the Sunday paper they would have a TV guide for the entire week. You would read it and get excited for upcoming shows.

VHS rewinder machines

I'd say VHS for home use in general.

Looking for a pay phone.

Skippy peanutbutter bars. I think they were discontinued in the early 2000's

Truck stops all had a phone room, a room with 10-15 payphones where drivers could call their families or dispatchers.

Filling up the gas tank without having to take out a second mortgage

Atlas Maps

Common sense.

Faxing your resume to get a job.

Privacy

Using radio box

Home ownership for the working class.

Maps- a Thomas Guide

Asking an elderly person for advice / solution to a problem

ESP

Knocking on friends door asking if they can come out to play. Ok… that was early 70’s.

My daughter's friends come by all the time asking if she can come out and play. Why would this change?

Doesn’t happen where I live unfortunately.

I heard dogs used to have balls once

Using a dictionnary

Lightbulbs going out.

Openly degrading women.

Spring and fall

Smoking. Everywhere.

Bugs on car windshields

Whipping naughty kids in school or at home.

Clothing was more of a thought.

Renting physical video games at a video store.

Smoking sections at restaurants.

Nirvana/Grunge Rock

Blockbuster

OverSized/Overbagging wearing of clothes

People being able to smoke inside public spaces such as restaurants and cafes

Good punk rock

Teletext

Kids going out and coming home late, with no phones

Not having internet

CD-ROM’s! I remember being so excited when I got a new CD, popping it in my computer and seeing if it had any extra content. I specifically remember the Romeo + Juliet disc was awesome.

Gas cans that worked.

Cassette players.

Going to your friends' houses and knocking on the door to see if they were in/wanted to come out to play

Stogs everywhere

Masculinity

In person bullying. It's definitely leaned more towards Cyber-Bullying now

Calling your friends instead of texting.

Joy.

Using a road atlas to go on trips. My first band’s first ever tour was done entire by using an enormous road atlas of the country. Told my 12 year old nephew about it and he didn’t believe me.

Send letters. I feel like everytime someone has a thing to say to someone, they either send a message or an e-mail.

Ceefax

Giving someone your home phone number and your pager.

Fingering.

House phones

Boomer humor, like how much they hate their spouse

My hair. I used to rock a full grunge inspired mane back then. It is now somewhere between rare and non existent now.

Classic horseshoe pattern, but I’ve still got pretty good coverage, the enemy has not advanced beyond the perimeter. According to George I still have 12-14 months…

White dog eggs!

Không có vayne đi top, thật đấy :>

Maybe not rare or non-existent, but smoking was still a thing in the 1990s.

For me, It was sex.

I miss the ‘90s

The Beastie Boys

Payphones

The Soviet Union

Good manners.....

Internet Minutes in the mail.

Yellow Pages

Dial up internet

10-10-321

Trips to Radio Shack to find parts to repair your electronics

Twins winning playoff baseball

"Can you tell me what time is it? I do not have any watch"

Nobody being mad at me because I Irish goodbyed and didn't text them I was home okay.

Golden pages. Just big ass books with the phone number of random people and sometimes businesses. I used to love it for some reason and used to sit on it, still no clue why.

Fun

My grandparents :(

Placing a phone order. I feel like 70% of people do it online now..

Pay phones

Pay phones everywhere

Mapsco.. I had several in my car for Texas, nothing like getting to the end of the road on the end of the page, and having to flip to another page to find it and continue

Catalogue shopping, and Colombia House 10 CD’s for a “penny”

Your music for the week was the cd you’d just purchased for your Walkman..

Chicken pox

A sense of safety and security. 9/11 increased fear exponentially within the US which persists today.

Having a pager.

Blades at a skatepark

Make sure to hang up the phone when you’re done!

“Hang it where?”

Hopping on the “home computer” to play pinball (:

streetlight curfews

the ice cream man

I think typewriters were still around back then.

Haven't seen one for 2 decades now.

Social interaction with strangers…

being a pool rat all summer

Wearing a pager

Reading the newspaper and the comics section every morning during breakfast! Sundays had all big colored comics too :)!

Miss Cloe - CALLLL Me NOOOOW

Payphones and pagers

Home phones, landlines anywhere other than businesses

Being excited about a dELIA*s catalog

Good tv cartoon

Picking up the phone and having a conversation.

JNCO Jeans

Affordable house prices. Our generation will never be able to buy a house.

morals

Use of windows vista or xp

Phone booths? Idk I wasn’t alive in the 90s

I don't know about normal, but drive-ins we're still a thing. Was a really nice experience.

Payphones, exits out of the matrix started vanishing after that movie..

Actually remembering everyone's phone number

Disposable cameras, and developing the film would always be an adventure!

Pay phones

drinking fountains

Cigarette machines

Affordable housing

memorising directions, cab drivers helping you with your luggage / bags, smoking in bars (the first half of the 90s at least), making friends while backpacking and then never seeing them again, until you write a letter or end up back in their country and call them from a payphone

I think just described Before Sunrise .

Intermission at the movies. Time to get an ice cream.

Telling jokes without someone getting offended.

Split screen multiplayer

Playboy Magazines

Smoking EVERYWHERE, especially indoors.

A sense of neighborhood community

Phone booths.

People talked much, much more with each other..

Leaving a message on a machine and having someone answer the phone half way through.

Personal ads in the newspaper

Pay phones

90s calendars

Pay phones.

Taking a bottle of water or your own drink on a plane.

Pagers.

Fax machines.

Typewriters

Cassette tapes

CRT TVs and computer monitors

Using a pay phone

Walkmans

Using the phone book to find phone numbers and addresses.

Taking your kids to the pub in the evening - most had a play area outside and we were given a Coke and allowed to play until it was time to go home with our tipsy parents.

Paying extra, and even using phone cards, to call people out of state. I remember I had to do this when my best friend moved to New Jersey for a few months. It was a big deal to make the phone call in my house

Your CD Walkman skipping on track when your tried to take it out on a walk (if it would even fit in your pocket)

Freedom of speech..

MTV

Common sense

Phonebooks

Soda with 8x the caffeine

Using an encyclopedia to find answers instead of Reddit 😂

When the Wiggles created the first flower laugh from Undertale.

Being humorous without offending anyone.

Home ownership

Floppy disks

Discmans

AIM

Zimas

freecell without advertisements 🫣

Not being aware of everything going on in the world. Pure bliss!

Pagers, payphones

Everyone had a beeper, and cell phones were the size of a cinder block.

School shootings were unheard of until Columbine. But there were some bombings... I remember the OKC bombing distinctly, and the Atlanta Olympics bombing in '96... Oh and the Unabomber.

Ice Ice Baby was my Jam in the early 90s. Late 90s my family was in a cult and the only secular music that was allowed was classical, so I was really into Beethoven.

Smoking sections restaurants.....separated by a chest high divider....

VCR players

Microwave ads

In high school in the late 90s, skaters used to wear jeans shorts that were hugely oversized and baggy and went down past your knees. Called JNCOs.

Most comfortable thing ever on a hot sumner day. Huge open pant leg for ventilation. Long enough to cover your knees sitting down so they prevented sunburn. And just not nerdy like skin tight cargo pocket shorts or whatever shit passes for normal men's shorts in any fashion era before or since the 90s.

God I miss them. I still have some. But to wear them outside makes you look like a psychopath.

Smoking everywhere!

Dial-up internet.

Keypad phones

VHS

Furbies

Pagers

Pagers

Having to watch the same TV shows at prime time with the entire family.

Heroin lmao

Pay phones.

I visited my parents in my hometown last weekend and only the phone at the local Wendy's remains. Every other pay phone was gone. I guess we have the ubiquity of smart phones and wifi to blame for that.

Pay phones.

Mapquest

Umbro Shorts

Girbaud jeans

Job offerings in the classifieds that said "good map reading skills".

Dialup modem noises.

I could only think of "spanking children" im sorry I rarely see it nowadays, parents are more talkative and dont educate their sons that way now

Pubic hair.

Dog shit

Kids running around town, riding their bikes, and general unsupervised tom-foolery until the streetlights came on.

Not having a cell phone.

People in their 20's buying houses.

Manners

White dog shit

Office phones

Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader … if you know, you know.

I have 8 of these books in my bathroom still. Oh i know alright. Lol

Pubic hair

Tommy Guides

Dial-up internet

This is going to end up in a tik tok subway surfer video, isn't it?

Thinking people were crazy when they appears to be talking to themselves

Knocking on people's door to see if they're home

Happiness

Smokers. Everywhere

Old classic cars

People talking to there girlfriends on the phone all night long

Rolodex!

Kurt Cobain

Having a set of street maps in your car of the local metropolitan area.

Pagers, vhs, cassettes, beige colored computers…my car that I drive

Being outside and having fun as a person

As apposed to being outside and having fun as a horse or something

Privacy and anonymity

PB crisps - rip childhood

My happiness.

AOL instant messenger

Someone knocking on your door unannounced

Phoneless shitting sessions.

Not one a miss tbh

Good jobs with a pension

Payphone Booths

Smoking indoors

Action man

Manners!

Pay as you go phone plan :)

Not sure in other countries, but this happens in the US

Touching grass

I’m late here but beepers! All of my friends had beepers in the 90s

The smell of teen spirit.

The large amount of homophobia in movies

Comedies specifically I meant to say

Ace ventura pet detective. Reprehensible 🤣

[deleted]

Lol… no that has happened for all time.

For me? Fireflies :(

Im sorry but its the opposite for me. It was mad rare that id see one when i was a kid. Only in the campground woods. Nowadays every night my yard is lit up with them. Same town same neighborhood. Just 20 some years later.

Common sense

Asking directions from locals/strangers after you have arrived somewhere in your destination town.

“Be kind, rewind” stickers

Smoking sections and non-smoking sections

Have general human decency, politicians having civil discourse

Home phones. Every house had one, now it’s very rare to see home phones

YO-YOs

calling the actual restaurant to place an order for delivery and paying cash. Like they just trusted that you'll pay for that shit upon delivery.

Having a pager as your means to communicate when leaving the house.

being a human being

Watching the tv guide on the tv

Manners and politeness it seems...

Talking politics without worrying about losing your job, or going to prison.

Me in 1998 “I’m sorry, I don’t own a computer” Flash forward to 2022 “I’m sorry, I don’t own a computer”

Floppy disks

A republican having a laugh at his best friend’s place. His friend being a democrat. Same goes for politicians.

Pay phone.

Yellow pages -

Phone books and smoking on airplanes

The big boxy radios with casette players

The excitement of finding guitar tablature libraries (OLGA anyone?). I felt like I was part of a secret club. I remember it being a process to log into the ftp area every time and it would take forever to print on the dot matrix printers.

Ashtrays on tables in pubs and caffs. Good times.

indoor smoking

smoking

Chivalry

one hour photo kiosks

Rewinding VCR before returning them

Checking a printed TV guide for what to watch

Videogames only worked on channel 3

Greasy long hair like grunge

Cassette Tapes and Recorders

Music on MTV

Beepers. Those things were everywhere in the 90's.

Festivals where everybody enjoyed without phones

Letting your kids play outside for hours on end with no supervision or communication

Good JDM cars

Now: talking about Bullying

Then: I was bullied in middle school something terrible! I even had the know-how and courage to seek help from my guidance counselor and on multiple occasions. The last occasion? Even the principal sat in on it. Their advice? Just ride it out till graduation.

Shell suit tracksuits. Thank you so much for moving on.

Pagers. Hot shit back then

Payphones

Crack

DuckTales

Abortion

Smoking in bars, clubs, concerts, etc.

The noise of kids playing outside throughout the warm months.

Going to your friend’s house without calling or texting just to see if they want to hang out.

Coffee Time

Affordable rent in most cities.

Optimism

Landlines in the home

Kids playing in the streets

Dude, pagers. They had stores dedicated to beepers, everywhere. Blockbuster is a thing of the past now, too.

Decency and civility. We went morally bankrupt the last 30 years

Dragon ball Z shirts

I wouldnt even say this is rare now tbh. Primitive did a DBZ collab that might blow your mind if your craving some nostalgia.

Phone booths/pay phones

Drive In Theatres

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Rock Bands

quaaludes

Manors.

Pay phones

Blockbuster Video

Pay phones were all over the streets in the 80s...now try to find one.

Smoking/non-smoking sections in restaurants.

Text TV and hoping the Friday prime time movie wouldn't be a rerun.

TRL and Carson Daly.

Phone booths

Proper Pop songs

Pay phones.

Meeting people who survived WW2.

Lobster tanks at walmart

Leaded fuel, at least in my country.

Split screen games, children who ride their bikes all over the neighborhood, abortion rights, car ash trays on the arm rest of the doors.

If it was a House being built or for sale and no one working on it….it’s a clubhouse/ place for you and your friends to chill or smoke weed.

pay phones

Internet cafe.

Pagers.

Smoking at restaurants

Landline Phone

Pagers

"Smoking or non-smoking?"

Renting PC games from the public library and burning them to an empty disc before returning.

Buying a house for the first time

Monochromatic outfits and braided belts

Watching movies from VHS tapes. You can still find them and watch them but it no where near as common. :)

House phones.

Casios.

PC game demo discs in cereal boxes.

Smoking inside

Pagers.

Pogs

Video rental places. Back when I lived in Illinois it was sad watching the Family Video near my house close.

Pay phones. They are pretty much gone.

Patience.

Downtime

Beepers

Blockbuster Video, renting a stack of VHS tapes!

Buying TV guide or sometimes a newspaper to know when shows on tv were scheduled. We did this because you had to watch something when it was scheduled. If you were really fancy you could schedule a vhs to record it. This was like a netflix box with a thing called a tape that held shows and movies.

Being nice to strangers.

Disposable cameras

Modem sound. Peeep poooop beee booom pooop poomm.. tuuuthh tuuut...tuttt. Still not connected. Still didn't load my urgent educational websites.

CD’s. People had CD cases and towers, 5-disc players, Walkman’s, CD cleaners and scratch removers. The CD aisle in stores was huge and you had to flip through them alphabetically. We burned our own CD’s, made labels for them. Used them for art, sometimes as a coaster 😜

Zubaz khed!

Pay Phones

when you saw some walking and talking you knew that they were NUTS, now they have bluetooth.

Baby formula

money left over from your paycheck after paying bills, buying gas & groceries

news that isn't depressing

In the UK at least, payphones.

The Thomas Guide

Pay phones.

Malls

Phone Booths in the US.

United States surplus.

Picking up the house telephone to listen in on someone else's conversation.

DVD's for films, now we have amazon prime or netflix

Printing mapquest directions as your navigation..

Pagers

Concert tickets! Like real ones! Maybe they're not the /most/ rare thing. But nowadays they're usually on my phone. And for a little bit before that, they were all becoming print-at-home tickets, so you'd have this big piece of copy paper instead of the sleak thicker card stock tickets. But that's just how it is now that you buy most tickets online and not at the box office.

A busy signal when trying to call someone for something important

Having a big fold up map in the car and highlighting directions/route for a road trip.

Television 800 number phone psychic’s lol

I’ve had to revamp my vocabulary of insults

CDs and cd player, walkman

Block parties.

pagers

Phone books

Kids playing around their neighborhood

Pagers

CDs

Dial-Up Internet

Pay phones.

Better human decency.

3% savings accounts

Smoking indoors.

Kids playing outside unsupervised

renting videogames (made so much sense)

Pay phones.

Checking the newspaper for movie times.

Freedom

Lol Reggie weed

Privacy

Having a landline phone at home

TV guides!

Bug deflectors on cars.

Really goes to show how the insect population has declined over the years so incredibly drastically.

For me it was listening to Cardinal baseball games on KMOX on my AM/FM capable Discman while mowing the lawn for my dad

Graffiti art.

Home phone lines, home phones of any sort.

Rewinding things. Tapes. VHS. Etc now rewinding a video on YouTube you're more likely to say " go back" rather than rewind...

Will Smith it's rewind time voice activated.

They’re not winding anything now, so no rewinding is necessary.

Good bands

Sexism?

VHS tapes & tape decks in cars

Hearing the phrase "You got mail!"

Magazines for everything.

I remember waking up after an overnight snowstorm to listen to the school closing announcements over AM radio. They would announce it alphabetically every 15 minutes or so and if you missed your town you'd just have to wait. Eventually it would be on the tv but otherwise that was the only way to find out.

A walkman!

For you kiddos, it was a portable cassette player.

Anyone mentioned home phones, I haven't seen a home phone in years now

Blockbuster (or video rental places) there is one in every other strip mall within a city suburb

Optimisim

Syncing my Palmpilot via the RS-232 port.

Mapsco city map books

Fanfold paper in our dot-matrix printer.

Luggage without wheels

Tollbooths on the single toll road in Dallas

Car radios with controls you could operate by feel while driving

Bookstores

1-800- I feel ok

In the 90s, hot girls wore baggy cargo pants. It was dark times for us young dudes (now old dudes).

I loved those cargo pants and carpenter jeans

NO COVID

Landline phone

Using many words as pejoratives 🤐, spanking your kids, wandering the video store, buying game walk-through magazines, remembering phone numbers off by heart.

Street Sharks

Car phones - more specifically, bag phones

Landlines

For women to be topless on the beach.

Public Telephones

Going to Blockbuster to rent a movie

Man, y'all need to stop making me feel old.

Bugs covering the windshield after every summer evening drive

I remember when they had smoking sections inside restaurants.

Trying to tape music from the radio!

Phonebooths

7 year olds in the 1990s

or the 1990s

Sending/receiving a fax. "Just the FAX, Ma'am"

People not having computers/tvs in their homes. Though that could just been the country area I lived lol

The glass souvenir cups from places like McDonald's and the jelly jars

People and kids below high school level not having cell phones.

one or two land line phones in a home (the mid 90's were the beginning of the cellphone revolution). phone booths. film cameras and photomats that developed that film. public hangouts (now it's all loitering). playing outside all day till the sun set. a lot of the same stuff from the 80's but better, game systems and early computers were thrown into the mix. Arcades. Cruising up and down towns in vehicles (mostly illegal now). music CD's (still available, but being phased out for digital services. gather ye physical media while ye can). the last of comic books being sold in grocery stores and markets before they became the sole pervue of direct market specialty comic stores. mall culture was at it's peak before the decline in the early 00"s. month or week long music festivals (now it's mostly weekends if any at all) there was a lot that is no longer available as a bonus feature of society.

on the social front, straight people hanging out in gay clubs, gay people hanging out in straight clubs and everyone was mostly chill with it..most 90's young adults didn't really give a flying feck about someone's particulars back then. we were too busy trying to shake off the yokes of our parents biases, predjudices, and oppressons and getting along with everyone as long as they were not being arseholes about everything. non-existent now is the tolerance and respect the 90's generation built over that decade as it was destroyed piecemeal from the 2010's till present. we were The last truly free generation, self sufficcient, and fearless. everything after that has been a slow degenerative crawl into the abyss, and as a member of Gen X, i know Gen Z and beyond is going to rebel extremely hard against millenials and the aughts when the majority of them reach their mid 20's and 30's. you reap what you sow.

Yeah I know it wasn’t this way everywhere or with everyone, but it wasn’t an issue among people my age when people came out. If you remember, Ellen’s sitcom got canceled because she came out as gay, and tons of other people came out in that time frame. The Matthew Shepard beating and murder happened in the 90s, too. Maybe we’re just more easygoing and accepting in general, as a group, than our parents.

Having a fax machine in your home

10-10-321

Phone booth

Affordable concert tickets

My youth.

Basic Cable

Free paper maps from the gas station.

Being stress free!

Not non existent but smoking in public is incredibly less common

Being able to afford a house.

Answering machines

Cheap gas, cheap houses. In fact, cheap anything.

Common sense

Home phones.

Being stuck in a video game and not being able to do anything about it unless it was talked about in a gaming magazine.

in my country? finding a house for under 700K

Waiting up late at night when radio towers increased their power, waiting until your new hot song came on, and then recording it to tape to listen to later.

Falling asleep to Tom Snyder

Pay phones

Shopping catalogues

Blockbuster

Affordable gas and being able to rent a place on $6.50/hour.

Blockbuster

Actual lyrics in Hip-Hop. Not to say we don't currently have some but the growth of mumble and trap music is just whack. In the 90s we had Gangster Rap but even it was lyrical.

I think what I'm really saying is the over-commercialization of Hip-Hop to steer it as a medium to generate even more profits and keep the people who listen to it acting hood. No longer about the message of struggle.

Pay phones

Affording to buy a home

Public Masterbation

Having to sign on and dial up just to access the internet.

VHS tapes and players

Free meals on airplanes.

Mapquest printed directions on the passenger seat

Masturbating on planes

Gift Cards that have expiration dates.

Going to a CD store to buy some music.

liveable wages!!

AOL

TV schedule in the Newspaper.

Ah every morning I would check what's playing on Cartoon Network and the likes. Good Times

Drinking and driving. Could buy a six pack and drink it in your car while police look at you.

Playground parties.

I used to be able to go to the local community playspace, or drive by at least, and see a birthday party all the time.

From the time I was 15, not a peep. They're empty all hours of the day.

Anything. When smartphones became a thing 90% of what was in the 90's became obsolete.

Having a dedicated "computer room" in the house.

Now with laptops and just PCs being more common in general, its not unusual to have multiple in the house.

Being bored.

“The Rachael”.

Vanilla Ice

Cheap gas. .98 in Houston when I lived there in the 90’s. I could fill my tank with $10. 🥲🥲🥲

Developing storylines that don't have to compete with a cellular device/vanity every 30 seconds. Epiphany enduced boomer mode commenced : 3, 2,..

Showing up to someone’s house unannounced to see if they were doing anything.

PAGERS.

No one uses pagers anymore.

Blockbusters

Pay phones

Smoking or non?

Pagers or beepers

Channel 3. If you know you know

Happiness

Enjoying a live concert without a cell phone blocking your view!

Prank phone calls!

My parents had two phone lines and I would call one number, put it on hold, call another random number on the other line then put both calls on conference and sit there listening and dying from laughter as two angry people, both fully convinced they're being pranked by the other argue about who called who 😆😆😆

Cassette tapes.

Pussy hair

Internet Forums

People didn’t freak out if they could get ahold of you right away. That was nice.

Payphones for sure!

Being considered a nerd for knowing what the WWW is.

Blockbuster

Beating your kids was standard

Fax machines

At subway instead of slicing the bun they cut a deep v chunk out of the bread.

When I was a kid, we were given a pamphlet containing our classmates’ addresses and home phone numbers

I have thought about making a photo collection of phone booth remnants.

Beepers

Telephone booth and house phones. Bygone era

Good heavy metal.

My sanity and/or patience

Going on a hike and not gasping for air.

Insects

Slaves

Riding around with a gun in the back window and not worry about police over reactions

CD's and cd players, especially handheld ones.

PDA’s, they’ve for the most part been replaced with smart tablets and phones

Pagers, faxes, and yellow pages

I think the thing that changed us the most are smartphones. Now, everybody has one, and spend a lot of time with it, back then it didn't exist.

Rewinding movies

Public phones

Pay phone booths

Payphones, ads 8n newspaper (i.e. jobs, items for sale.,etc). Video rental stores.

Newspaper comics page in color on Sunday, do they still have that?

I don't know. Haven't read a printed paper in ages. Everything is digital now.

Dial up?

Getting cheat codes from a fruit by the foot wrapper

Is it true that Hinckleys older brother was friends with the Bush’s, and Hinckley Sr was friends with president bush?

Those random numbers you punched in before dialing long distance… Idk if anyone remembers that.

Mtv actually playing music videos

Roller blading with a cd player the skipped often

Nudie magazines

Encyclopedias and having to go to the library to do research for school work. Video arcades, landlines, civil discourse, making collect calls, WWE being called WWF, good music.

Shame that kept people from saying and doing stupid, nasty things.

Fax machines, answering machines, pay phones

Blockbuster, dvd rental shops

Payphones. I don't see them as much as I used to.

Homophobia.

Big pants and tiny skateboard wheels.

And all of the popular singers could actually sing.

Beepers

smoking or non smoking section?

My grandparents…

Owning a home in your late 20s

Mtv (music television) actually playing music!

A sense of optimism and care-free-ness in general everyday life.

Pulling a chair out for a lady. (I've seen some dudes try; proud of em. Practice makes perfect.)

Fax machines, cameras with a roll of film, a cell phone that was just a phone, a cell phone smaller than a brick, a car without power windows....

Ceefax

Ceefax/teletext

Payphones

Slapping the new girl at work on the ass

Smoking everywhere. Even on planes, cinema, etc.

White dog poo

Gay tolerance

Smoking everywhere. You could buy cheap train- and flight tickets for the smoking area. There was a curtain that separated the smoking and non smoking areas. Like the porn corner at a VHS rental.

Pay phones

Smoking in restaurants

Video stores

Long distance phone company and getting calls from them to switch

Blockbuster / Movie Gallery

Bumblebee beehive

Pagers

Racist/sexist/homophobic jokes in Tv Shows

Public Payphones.

Pay phone

Renting movies

Disposable cameras

Floppy discs

Landlines. Memorizing your buddy’s family phone numbers, speaking to their parents while they wait for them to come to the phone.

being on the phone when you mom or dad picks it up and starts dialing...

Rom-Coms

Rumble paks sold separately for controllers

Blockbuster, & video rental stores in general. Hell, even video tapes don't really exist anymore.

Casual homophobic slurs in movies and TV shows.

Dustbuster Minivans!!!! And minivans in general, they used to be the primary family hauler, and now it is all crossovers.

Non Awful Politics

Recording shows so you didn't miss them.

Playing outside

the soviet union

In the uk the police calling the talking clock for accurate times in their reports.

Never seeing the ending of a really hard video game you played as a kid bc there was no YouTube

Tubthumping.

pagers

Homophobia.

Tamogatchis the original. None of that neo pet shit

Your vacation photos only being viewable to immediate family or visitors

Snow

Casually calling everything you disagree with "gay".

Dial-up internet. I know it still exists but it's rare.

Video stores

Being inside once the streetlights came on.

Pagers

Good cartoons

Answering machines with physical tapes.

Answering machines.

Landline phones.

Was just thinking about this earlier. Being stuck somewhere because you don’t have a ride! Or your ride doesn’t want to leave. Now with a cell phone and Uber you can always call somebody.

Playing street ball til the sun went down and when you got thirsty you’d drink outta the water spigot

Tamagochi

Great Rap songs

Calling the speaking Clock

Shops being closed on Sundays

Me and 4 friends sitting in front of a computer screen for 25 minutes eagerly anticipatibg what Pamela Anderson is gonna look like naked while the pic loaded...so worth the wait

Cool toys from McDonald's. Happy meals used to do brand deals for toys such as tamagotchi, sonic, Nintendo, Sega etc even small electronic games. Now toys are mostly $store or 3d printer quality pocket figures

Dial-up internet and hearing the sounds it made

Saturday morning cartoons. I know they were just tying to sell us toys, but I was in front of the TV every Saturday with a big bowl of cereal.

Payphones

Public pay phones

Payphones

CRTs

My car still has a cassette player, but damn is it hard to find actual cassettes, let alone good ones

Having hope.

Online multiplayer FPS with LPB vs HPB drama.

Coming home, seeing the flashing light on the answering machine, checking your messages.

TV Guide

Payphones

Fanny packs. I know some people are trying to bring it back but let's be honest...

Let's just try original movie ideas!

Guys in crop tops.

get married at 14, and have children at 16. Ah although people do this now ..

Pagers

Blockbuster

The hair on my head.

Slap bracelet.

Owning a home ?

Kids playing outside...

Traditional centers in the NBA

If you own a pager in 2022, you're either hospital staff on call or a drug dealer

Leisurely bike rides with nowhere in particular to go. Maybe end up grabbing an ice cream from the gas station. Maybe not.

Jogging on unfenced high school running tracks.

Pogs? Or are they nfts now idk

Kids playing outside.

It was perfectly acceptable to never ask where the person you called is currently - and if you had, they'd think you were a moron.

Smoking in pubs.

Dialing 10 10 220 on a pay phone.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DMTRlwBD9lrc&ved=2ahUKEwiy1Mz2l_v4AhXVD0QIHaOMAYgQjjh6BAgLEAI&usg=AOvVaw0Nrdpd61PTV-GfcR-NKI7V

Watching The Cosby Show.

public ashtrays.

Not wearing a seatbelt while driving and piling as many people as you can into the car.

Pagers

Visiting the Twin Towers in New York City

Public telephones, transparent tech gizmos, Prince Philip

Cable

Walkman

pagers

Blockbuster

Caller ID

Hitting your kids.

Typewriters

Candy cigarettes

Writing cheques to pay the bills!

The ability to afford a home in America.

Paper TV guides that came in the mail

Having to pay per minute for long-distance phone calls

The game of pogs

Someone who doesn't have a phone on them at least 80% of the time.

At least I would imagine.

Anyone else remember Cleo the tv psychic from way back?

Tamagotchis

Yikes pencils

A normal living space with a son and daughter. Now it's a son being you're daughter. And you're daughter being you're son. And then thay have mixed feelings and date the opposite sex still. Ending up to be your second cousin

Pay phones.

The Holy dialup internet noise.

Ringing the bell when showing up at someone's house.

The TV guide channel

Using a pay phone

My youthful exuberance and enthusiasm for the world

Paying for long distance calls

pay phones

Being happy lmao

Walking around the kitchen with the super long phone cord

The question: "do you now what time it is?"

Cassettes and vcrs

Floppy disc's!

Violent kids cartoons and I mean like the original Tom and Jerry or Looney Toons.

AIM (aol instant message)

Buying a house for less than 100k lol

kids playing with airsoft guns on playgrounds

at least where i'm from we would play with airsoft guns on the playground in the early 2000s

Good games without trash dlc and micro transaction

TV guide magazine those small ones

FOLD OUT MAPS

common sense, morals, sense of right and wrong, ability to understand dangers without needing a warning sign

Having money and being happy and relaxed because the economy was decent.

Good music

Pagers

VHS

Wondering what happened to your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend who you haven’t seen in decades. This never happened to me as I didn’t really start dating until 1999, but I remember older people saying “I wonder what ever happened to him/her.”

Calling for the time. VHS Landlines Block parties

Pagers

Manual Transmissions

Checking my pager and finding a pay phone

Smoking on airplanes

Compact Disks

A business that requires you to fax documents rather than email. Some small towns in Canada are far behind. Not because they can't get their hands on the technology, but they're too stubborn to change

900 numbers

Being able to buy a house and have a good paying job right out of high-school

Rewinding media

Funny movies, before hollywood became woke

Dial-up internet.

Tamagotchis?

Calling something "Gay" threat word was thrown around like it meant nothing. We were taught different =/

Running

Cassette tapes

Moderate dems

They're all moderate now

Lol, I wish

I really wish some besides the ridiculously small 'squad' actually stood for something

I do too. Would be a great gift to republicans of you could get one of them to run for president or something

I mean the only reason that Trump won in 2016 (and almost in 2020) is that the Dems merged their own best candidate [Bernie] for the status quo neo liberal.

Nonsense. Hillary was an awful candidate, but progressives always do worse than Obama Romney type candidates in generals.

BS. Bernie was polling 15+ points over Trump in 2016. When was the last time we actually had a progressive nominee to test your theory?

Oh that's right, we will never, since the DNC will do everything in its power to make sure the only Dems on the national ticket are Neo Libs, so we will never see what real democracy looks like.

2020 is the last time you has a progressive Nominee test your theory. Bernie got crushed by biden. It wasn't even close. And that was by the voters, had nothing to do with DNC.

Bernie polls about 1-3 points lower than biden vs Trump in 2020 if you use polling averages and don't cherry pick one poll

I said Nominee, not candidate.

Lol. Bernie was winning and firmly in the lead up until Biden won South Carolina, and in one day Obama called every other single candidate, told them to drop out and endorse Biden.

If you think that that's a fairly won contest, you have no idea what democracy really means.

He was winning until he had to deal with more than the first 5 states. He underperformed even in progressive states like CA. Barely won states that he was expected to have +10 margins in.

It was a spectacular failure

If you don't think media bias, and the rigging had anything to do with it - then you are far more ignorant and naive than I had even imagined.

No sense in continuing this conversation if you are just going to continue to spout BS without evidence.

Regardless, this is a moot point unless the DNC will actually allow a progressive candidate to win the nomination or the two corporate-owned party actually allows some competition rather than the assholes in red or blue that we get a 'choice' between every 4 years.

Conspiracies are fun, but the simple fact was that the top progressive got absolutely crushed by a sub par moderate.

The evidence is in the votes.

Right, ignoring the fact of what Hillary did to the DNC in 2015-2016, and the manipulation Obama did of the candidate Field in 2020. You're really good at just refusing to listen to any of the evidence you disagree with. The only curb stomping that went on, has been of any truly democratic ideals.

But hey, democracy is been dead in this country since Bush V Gore 2000

I was talking about 2020, which is the most recent example of a progressive being crushed in a general

BOREDOM

Peace of mind?

Land lines, phone books, encyclopedias

Celebrities were actually cool people with talent who produced quality entertainment. The public sought celebrities out, not the other way around with self-promotion via social media. There were more quality people in real life as well.

Good movies

JNCO jeans.

The bank of pay phones at the local shopping mall

Smoking inside. It was starting to go out during the 90's but I knew multiple people as a kid who still did. Now none.

Translucent electronics

Going to Blockbuster to rent a video

Asking for directions

Trying to keep your portable CD player still, because if you moved it too much, the disc would jump.

Having no Tattoos

garbage camcorders

A what now?

those low quality cameras they used to record things

Oh! I thought you were talking about some weird type of camera that kept an eye on your garbage 😂

Waterbeds

Wall phones

A home phone line

keeping magazines next to the toilet

Wife swapping was normal at that time, but now it's totally changed into Cuckolding. Me and my wife are into Cuckolding.

[deleted]

Had a very horrible experience with the bull we found on reddit. I deeply suggest not to look for a bull on reddit.

Ecto coolers by hi-c

Playing outside in the street or like being able to go a couple blocks away as a kid without your parents going to prison

Kindness

Calling POP-CORN on the phone to reset your clocks when the power went out.

Phone cards Basically a credit card only for pay phone calls

Newspapers. Especially Sunday editions with coupons and color comics

Gun control.

10-10-321

Video store rentals

Radio cassettes, Big ass televisions

Privacy

T1 Internet connections, Free AOL discs at the store checkout, cars that get under 20 mpg from factory, big gulps for 25 cents at 7Eleven, Butterflies, Bees, I could go on and on.

Pay phones

Mix tapes 😂

Having to ask your mom if she was expecting any phone calls so you could use the Internet.

1990's calendars

Young men with testosterone.

In 1990 expressions of physical interest wasn't a sex crime. The ladies are solely to blame for that.

Humility

digital watches

checkbooks

LAN parties

Neopets!

Making stupid mistakes while you're growing up and NOT having social media cause them to haunt you for the rest of your life. Yeah, family and classmates would give you shit, but then we would all grow up and move on.

I also feel that our friend circles were more diverse. Since it was more work to find like people, you interacted with more people. Now so many people get lost in their echo chambers that our social circles feel more like an extension of ourselves than something that adds to our experience. But that's me being a cynical Gen Xer shaking their walker and chasing them kids off my virtual lawn. XD

wide leg jeans

Collect calls “1-800-C.O.L.L.E.C.T. It’s free for you, and cheap for them.” I can still hear carrot tops voice in those commercials

Actually hanging up the phone.

Owning a house

Six disc Cd changers that you are listening to otw to the mall. When you arrive are going to the music store, hell I forget the name of the two retailers, to see what was in the top 10 of whatever genre you were looking for, buy a couple CDs. Then hit up the food court for whatever you were in the mood for, and maybe watch a movie.

mentally stable/well people

I believe these things were called a “Diskman”

Smoking cigarettes?

defragging hard drives

I wasn't alive then but.. Yea no idk

One way 📟 pagers. You called a land line, leave a message with an operator, and waited for a response… next to your phone

Home phones, I remember calling home to friends but today the thought just doesn’t exist.

Calling Nintendo customer service to help plug your N64 into your tv. Yes it's true. I remember my dad yelling at them on the phone, and grew up and thought "wtf, the A/V shit is color coded how did he not get this"

If you had asked me this in the 90's I would have said, "racism" ... But here we are

Home phones with the whole family on the answering machine

Not being able to use the internet on your computer and using the phone at the same time. Film cameras. We had pagers and had big CRT televisions

Dinning in a Pizza Hut

Pager

Cyberwear being cool.

Printing the directions from Map Quest for my parents.

Hypercolor shirts.

Gay jokes in movies, used to be everywhere, looking back they feel so incredibly dated and harsh

Satellite dishes

Tube Tvs and PCs

Video cassette tape rewinders

Kurt Cobain

"Hey remember X"

"Not really"

"Fuck it"

Having a childhood without phones

Cassette tapes

Having fringe extremely weird and creepy/freak ideals was extremly rare and properly shamed out of communities. Now it festers and rosts on the internet and seen as the "new norm". Tldr, death of good mental health and community.

the TV guide channel where you'd have to wait until it scrolled to the channel you wanted to check. and if you missed it, you'd just have to wait until it came all the way back around

Parents smoking in car with children in the back.

common sense and respect for others

Overtly racist people. By this I mean actually racist and not just "I'm a different race and you disagree so you're racist". This and actual homophobia.

Being able to buy an actually-inexpensive economy car.

Enormous denim shorts and pants.

Beepers/pagers! I tried to tell my niece about those, and she just said something along the lines of, "ew, I don't want to know the horrible old stuff you had to use". LOL

Talking to the person sitting next to you on an airplane

Pubic hair

Snap bracelets as fashion

Good cfi movies?

Pogs

Those totally separate machines strictly reserved for rewinding video tapes.

Gulfstream

The hand- and custom-made slingshot, I always used to shove in my pocket as a kid before I go go.

landlines

Kids playing outdoor games

Happiness #deep

Pagers and pay phones

Hand written letters

CDs

Stopped school shootings

Reasonably priced concert tickets. and camping out for tickets.

Text TV

A functional America.

Frosted tips

Walking to your friend's house to ask if they're home and able to come out and play.

People having meaningful conversations.

Tamagotchi

Good afternoon. At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be: Two. Twenty Eight. and. Six seconds.

Floppy disks

Polio

Playing in the woods as a kid

month/day/90s or day/month/90s

Kids today will never understand the amount of fun and disappointment you could have on a Friday night heading to blockbuster to get the newest movie rental, only to find out all 100 copies are rented, so you stand by the returns hoping one is returned in the next 15 minutes before mom and dad make you choose a different movie

Modesty

Respect?

A single phone line for everyone in the house. And it's attached to the wall.

Having a home phone.

Using a pay phone.

Cassette tapes.

Pagers.

Overhead projectors and chalkboards in classrooms, and that "movie screen" that never wanted to stay down when you needed it.

Having a parking lot or even a mall where everyone would meet up at or hung out at on weekend nights. I have teenagers now and because of social media there's no place to just show up and see who's hanging out.

Junk food commercials airing alongside children’s programming.

“On the 8s” local updates on The Weather Channel.

Saturday morning cartoons and after-school cartoons. Also, actual physical animation. Nearly every "cartoon" is cheap CGI now. Even 2d cartoons are now digitally drafted with none of the organic qualities you could find due to uneven paint application, hand-drawn shapes, or reflective foil materials. Just go back to the 1st season of the Simpsons and compare it to current season of the Simpsons.

Watching what was Channel 13 for me to see what shows were about to start on tv. You had to wait till it scrolled through. I also would look at the paper for what specials would play. :) It was kind of fun!

water shortages

Having an entire TV channel to figure out what's coming on other channels for the next 3 hours. We called it "the scroll."

Most of the comments are basically things our phones do now and way better

Film for a camera

I cant find the comment anymore but someone said "white dog shit" and im blown away by that....never thought of it but 100% true. So weird? Did dog food get better or what causes that lol

Being punctual 😒

Open house party with John Garabedian

10-10-xxx before you dial to save on long distance. And long distance lol

Having a landline phone

Watching the news on a snowy day to see if your school is closed

happiness

a certain wall in germany

Not knowing who is calling you, prior to answering, caller Id did exist but it wasn't as prevalent till the 2000s

Calling Pizza Hut to make delivery order, by referring to the menu from pamphlets

Sending a fax.

Clear plastic phones, memorizing phone numbers, pagers, VHS, newspapers, good Nickelodeon and good MTV, Buffy, Real World, Payphones

TV stations just stopping programming at like 1 AM. They'd play the national anthem with a flag on screen and then colored bars until 7 AM.

WWI Soldiers

Catching a bus to go to the library to do a research assignment.

Pay phones

well-made clothing at regular stores.

Navigation was so wildly different. It was very normal to have a map in the car and use it. Gas stations sold these books that were like a collection of zoomed in maps of different cities in their area (sort of like if someone printed a Google map of every town within 50 miles, created a table of contents, and stapled them together to sell for $8). It was normal to have the driver focused on driving while the passenger acted as navigator. Asking strangers for directions or being asked for directions was very normal, and it wasn't unusual to know which of your friends was good at directions in case you had to stop at a payphone and ask for help getting somewhere. Stopping at a gas station for the sole purpose of asking the cashier how to get to place XYZ was normal.

People super underestimate how much human time has been saved by having a GPS with nav in every person's pocket.

Affordable cars

T tops on cars

Memorizing all of the phone numbers important to you.

Better not get distracted while watching the TV guide channel.

Whole days/weeks without mass shootings

Netscape.

Having to pull over on long road trips to change the CDs in your 6 disc changer in your trunk!

“Who forgot to rewind the tape!”

Printing directions from mapquest

The IPhone 1

Wind-up non-electric windows in cars. Also the lack of automotive electronics and driver aids in general. No traction control, no ABS, no nanny-state warning lights and beeps to tell you a seatbelt isn't being worn or you're going over the speed limit or it's cold or you should change gear. No remote central locking. Basic cars might not even have a radio.

Long distance phone minute cards

Casual racism on tv. “Ancient Chinese secret.”

Bipartisan dialogue

Radioshack

Treating each other with curtsy

Years that began 199

Memorizing phone numbers

Toys R Us, Radio Shack, Circuit City, pagers, cassette tapes…

Ferbies those toys that talked

Pagers....

Knowing everyone’s phone number.

A room dedicated to a computer

Mother fucking pagers 😂

I feel like dog shit on the pavement used to be a lot more common in the nineties and you don't see much these days

Advertisement intended for the 'male' gaze.

67 , 69

If you know you know

Batman.

Getting the first like third of a video game as a free demo. Man, that shit was rad.

The word rare by itself.

Smoking sections

Well-portioned food (grocery or restaurant) at decent prices.

Parachute pants

Common sense.

Moderation.

Thick-skin.

Actual food. I.E. Not the fast kind.

CDs.

Sending your kids to school with PB&J's

Beepers

Soviet Union.

Those AOL CDs that were literally everywhere. Thank goodness.

Floppy disk

Pagers/beepers

Polly pockets 😭

Video rental stores

Waiting for porn to download

Great comedy.

1990s calendars

Roller skating rinks!!

Sam Goodys.

Looking up the tv schedule in the paper

Only gay people went to the gym

Not asking annoying Family Feud-like questions on askreddit.

Paging someone with "911" bc you need a quick call back

Tomagotchies. And Furbies.

That and ultimately we are also to blame for being dooped and giving up ground areslefs.

Idk i was alive back then

I used to make video mix tapes when MTV actually played music whenever my fav video/song came on.just hit record on the ole vcr Now I have 5 tapes worth of 80s videos and no way to play them. Vcr gave out years ago dad and tragic.

Blockbuster

people stopping by other peoples' houses unannounced to say hello.

one word: Blockbuster

smoking sections indoors

Pogobalz

Walkmans!

Phone books!

Decent human beings

To not be fat.

Cassettes.

Kinda specific, but…

The Metallica shirt that had the 4 band members’ faces with their arms crossed similar to a skull and crossbones (“Birth, School, Metallica, Death” on the back) that came out when the Black album was released. I swear… EVERYONE that had a Metallica shirt (even if it was just 1 shirt) had THAT shirt

cigarette ads

Phone chat lines. Pay phones. Boom boxes. AV adapter cables. TVs with a built in DVD player.

DVDs didn't really start to hit off until 1999.

Whatever you say player.

Malls

Ice cream trucks with actual soft serve ice cream cones.

Hosting a website from your personal computer and giving zero fucks about web security.

Good movies.

Maybe there are many I’m not aware of, but new music groups actively criticizing our governments actions and capitalism in general. KGLW has some songs about climate change and social issues but I don’t know of many else, please share if you do

Using a map for directions on road-trips.

Limp Bizkit

Sometimes, when I had something after school, but didn't know when I'd need my parents to pick me up, I would find that I didn't have access to a free phone. There were pay phones in the school, but sometimes I didn't have any change.

I would dial down the center with 1-800-CALL-ATT, or just use 1-800-COLLECT. Either way, they were automated collect call services. It would ask my name, and I'd say "Firstname Comegetme" like it was a name. My parents would hear a automated message that there was a collect call and hear the recording. They'd reject the charges and pick me up.

I had a friend whose parents had caller ID. They knew the phone number for the payphone at school. He'd call, let it ring a couple times and hang up. He'd get his quarter back, and they'd see the number and know to come get him.

Printers in homes… I think? I used to have one but don’t anymore. Not sure about the general population.

About 60% of households in the UK and the US still have one. I think it makes sense to have one just in case even if we don't print things that much these days as printers are relatively inexpensive and it's really only the ink that makes it costly.

Chicken pox due to the huge push to vaccinate chicken pox it's all but non existent now at least here in the us I'm unsure how it is in other places.

XxSk8t3rB0y42069xX

General public smoking, indoors. Everywhere. (US)

Finally building up the courage to call your crush and her fucking dad answers and your courage falls out your butt while stuttering through the convo.

10-10-220

Save those you call at least a buck or two!

The phone

Gushers

Selling and buying things from the newspaper classifieds.

Never being concerned your dumbest will be shown to the world.

Smoking in restaurants.

Happiness?

Republicans who didn’t have rabies

  • Stick shift cars
  • common sense
  • happiness

Landline telephones. I still have one. But more and more people are ditching theirs.

Horse breeding for chariots.

Cigarette machines and pay phones.

Blockbusters, Family Videos, etc.

My happiness.

Crystal Pepsi

Busy signals.

People doing blackface (thank god people aren't doing it anymore)

Calling Nintendo because you are stuck in a game and need help.

Checks? Like instead of a credit card (or Apple Pay) you would pay with a slip being basically a letter of debt with a refund in the bank.

Teletext on your TV

Women’s rights.

Rocky horror picture show

CD's

i'm a zoomer and i still prefer to use CD's

Partylines

Kindness

Big, famous video games taking very little time to make. Wolfenstein 3D took 6 months from idea to launch!!

Smoking.
Everybody smoked, everywhere.

Smoking in the mall. Sports headlines at the back of newspapers (nowadays it's just full page ads)

No facemask

Taking lsd and shrooms

Wendy's Salad Bar

Gas being under $1

aol emails

10-10-321

Newspapers

Truth in particular The More You Know.

Compassion, respect for authority, parents who did not coddle us, and peace within our communities and we know sadly have hate all over just the truth 😢 😞

bipartisanship

Dial-up modem

Classifieds in the paper. Or a paper in general. A lot of newspapers are only and the ones that are printed usually don’t have classifieds in them.

Pagers and fax machines

More common sense

Having to wait till after 7pm to be able to use my cell phone talk/text for free.

Mixtapes

Physical movie rental

Drive in movie theaters

Blockbuster

Children playing on the streets with minimal adult supervision

affordable housing

VCR

my grandpa

Smoking.

Tv guides

Pre-paid calling cards for international phone calls

TV Guide. Can’t believe how much we relied on it

Not having a cell phone. Screening calls on your answering machine!

Glamor shots in malls

Being male or female

Picking out a movie to watch in the theater by looking in the news paper.

They might still do it now, but it's not very common

Dial up Internet that was slow AF

The TV Guide mailed to you with show times for TV shows for the week

BBS systems. I wonder what happened the the Open Mind BBS in southern Ontario.

Smoking inside buildings.

The dulcet tones of dial up modems

Smoking in bars and restaurants

IRC chatrooms.

Hey Ess from #asd on Undernet, hope you’re well. You were a good friend to a weird kid.

Buying CD’s

Using gay people as punchlines in movies and tv shows was so common.

Good music coming from heroin addicts

Using paper maps or getting hand written directions

Newspaper like fr I never see those anymore

Pagers

Phone books

A hairy bush

waiting for a friend to be home to call them. Or calling before they went out so we could plan correctly a meeting.

Quick conversations in line someplace. Pre cell phones.

Teletext. It was the most convenient news source in the 90's but got replaced by the internet in the early '00.

Pay phones and phone books.

Acid wash jeans

Patriotism in the US

Perms

Great movies and great music!

Smoking sections in restaurants

Smoking and non-smoking sections in public places like restaurants

Dial up Internet

Still common sadly

Disposable cameras

sitting in a room with your family and talking to them

Bloop blieeeeeggg prrrrrrrrhhhhtbhthttt

If you know, you know

heavy-metal music in toy commercials. 😏

Encyclopedias

Due Process

Drinking water from a hose

Calling the bar for my mom, to ask if I could use the stove to make popcorn. The old fashion way - had a special pan and everything, had to shake the shit out of it LOL - PLUS it always embarrassed my mom when they shouted out her name while she is trying to play pool

Having to memorize phone numbers

Faxing

Womens rights.

holy fuck dude when i was aroubd 15 my momma was hammered and she told me, i almost didnt have you, back then i had a whole bunch of abortions.

pagers, vcr, walkman, cd players, dial-up internet, AOL, AIM, going to the library because you had to look up information, pogs, Blockbuster Video, arcades everywhere (video stores, donut shops, liquor stores, movie theaters, etc.), going to develop pictures at photo shops... there's too many to list.

Hedgehogs

writing or printing directions from mapquest

People getting surprised when someone comes out

Homeownership

Answering machines

Happiness.

Good cartoons

Pagers

Blockbuster.

Relationships being taken serious and meaningful.

And cocaine

Teletext.

Common sense.

Common sense

peace of mind

Translucent electronics.

Columbia house and BMG mail in music club... buy one CD and get 7 free, yeah right.

Rollerblading

Throwaway cameras

Carrying quarters around just in case you needed to use a payphone.

The Wendy’s salad bar 😢

Landlines / home phones

Yoyos

Cold hard 💰Cash. Credit cards were for large purchases only and even then it was rare.

Sexist jokes on TV shows or movies

phone books

The 'bloop, beep, scram, scrip, anhhhhhh' of dial up internet modems when connecting

Sex lines.

Having few thousand songs for like 60mb . Also pictures like 3k pics 100mb ... Now my phone gallery is worth 220gbs and Music about 25gbs

First off, unless you were using WAV files… you are talking 00s. MP3s didn’t get popular till 98-99. Napster was in 2000.

As for pictures, if you weren’t scanning them with a scanner from paper photos… again you are taking 00s.

Hearing a good new song from a commercial or in a concert on a morning show or some other extremely mainstream place. Now you usually have to dig through the. Others of the net to find the good stuff.

Pay phones.

Checking the weekly TV guide you got with the newspaper

CRT televisions.

Original ideas for big Hollywood movies.

Comedy.

Committing dozens of phone numbers to memory.

A will to live.

Are you male or female options.

Affordable housing

The Soviet Union

Beepers

Going to Blockbuster to rent movies

Pensions, pagers, calling cards, phone books, corded phones, pay phones, leaving written notes on paper, paper maps, map books, interoffice mail, memo's typed on a typewriter, engineering drawings drawn on a drafting table, fax machines, book cases full of manuals, drinking at lunch.

Smoking sections in restaurants.

Pogs

Printing directions to someplace off of mapquest

Landlines

Pagers

Frosted tips

planes flied by arabs :troll:

Motorcycles on the street... not really "rare" but the streets were just crawling with them back in the day

VCR

Home phones, land lines, and answering machines. Can’t forget the pay phones either.

Adequate affordable healthcare.

Landlines. Everyone just has a cellphone now.

AOL free trial discs in the mail

EDIT because I suck at spelling apparently :)

AOL free trail

Oregon free trail?

In Ireland, going to church every Sunday and if you were gay, staying in the closet...Ok well neither of those are non-existant or rare these days but certainly a lot less common.

Once upon a time a video game would require several floppy disks and later, several compact discs (CD's) to install or play.

Computer video games.

I still remember installing a game that took my whole 300 MB hard drive. I think it was called lands of lore. Great game.

Clothes worn backwards.

Car phones.

Affordable housing

Car stereo installation services

VHS and cassette tapes

XM radio, DMX radio, amazing music coming out daily…

Hope for the future, thinking there was a future worth looking forward to.

Affordable housing

Good music, in particular hip-hop

Happiness

2 foot thick televisions that weighed as much as a small child

1st edition Charizard PSA 10

Recording songs off the radio to make your own mix tape

Listening to a song, over and over, pausing after every few words, trying to write the lyrics to it, found out how wrong I was about some of the lyrics when you could google them!

Paper telephone directory in a coin operated phone booth

Being able to have visitors at a hospital. My grandpa had a stroke early this month and he's allowed TWO visitors per day. This is in total, not in the room at one time.

People in the family really duked it out for spots because (as it should be) my grandmother would be one of the visitors every day.

Smoking v non-smoking sections of restaurants

Reporters in the field using reading from papers or a notebook.

Slavery

Not being able to fact check in the moment.

“You know Mew is under that truck near the SS Anne?”

“What?? Prove it?”

“It was a secret in a special edition of Nintendo Power.”

“Really?”

My sex lufe

Smoking inside public places

Using a phone book

That dialup internet sound. Going to Canada / Mexico without a passport from the US. Pay phones. Rat tail hair styles.

Pay phones

Smoking and gambling in the grocery store… this is in Nevada obviously

Video Tapes

Phone books

Smoking inside public places

Phone books

Public payphones

Pubic hair.

Prestel and Teletext. You want the info on the first page but when you switch to the text channel, you find you’re on page 2 of 14 and will either have to wait fucking ages or try and time it so you won’t miss page one while making a cuppa.

Smoking cigs inside… walking through the smoking section to get to the non smoking section…

AOL

Passing paper notes in school. (I assume this is done digitally now)

Good music videos and watching them for hours at a time.

Road trips where you had to stare out the window for entertainment.

Tomagatchis or how ever spell it

Video game consoles from the 90’s.

People of all ethnicities being able to make fun of each other.

People still went outside

Men

People taking a joke.

Listening the shit outta one entire album and becoming intimately acquainted with it on a level that doesn’t happen these days because

  • back then you had to buy entire CDs or cassette and you did not know if you picked a winner or a dud (I’m looking at you Sugar Ray. )
  • you could only afford one album with your allowance and so if you wanted to listen to multiple albums then you had to hope that your friends had some of the other albums that couldn’t afford currently.
  • Before the era of CD burning software and mp3, making mixtapes was a ton of work and required a full cassette deck and more importantly, carrying around multiple cassettes and/or CDs to school was burden some. At most you’d pick 2-3 cassette / CDs.

Now with streaming we have a buffet of music and we do not need to learn to love an album we are not immediately drawn to.

This does not bode well for albums that take many listens to appreciate. Especially albums that are concept albums meant to be experienced as a whole.

Kids with manners…!!

Sincere love

[deleted]

I assure you, that was not particularly common in the 1990 either lol

Good writing in WWE. Compared to the Attitude Era, the current product kinda sucks.

Modems

Floppy disks

Black musicians who didn't use auto-tune.

Pay phones

TV Guide and store ad inserts in Sunday papers

Overalls with only one strap connected.

...happiness?

restaurants asking if you want smoking or non-smoking section

White, crusty dog poop

Manners

Bluckbuster

TV guide books at checkout lines.

Teenage boys with spiky hair and dyed bonde tips...because they were cool

Optional long black shorts with red flames at the bottom

1-800-Collect ads.

¢50 gas

Furby’s and Toys R Us

Condoms being a nonegotiable aspect of sexual health and safety with a new partner.

Looking up numbers in the phone book

Hearing a real person answer the phone when calling businesses.

Pay phones.

Search Engines that aren't Google

Blockbuster video stores

A big publicly accessible book of everyone's name, phone number and and address. Very creepy to think about now.

Watches for telling time, not for fashion

Breast implants

Everything was fried in beef tallow

Those little slappy bracelets you'd hit everyone with that hurt like a bitch

Getting so many junk Faxes that your machine runs out of paper

Indoor smoking

Fairly affordable NYC buildings.

Going home when the street lights turn on

Beepers

Pay phones. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen one. All through the 90’s I’d go to a pay phone dial 1-800-collect and tell my mother to come pick me up as the message for who was calling.

Telephone booths

Blockbusters

Love letters

Video stores

Politeness.

movies starring macaulay culkin

democracy

Melatonin production in my body

Millennial self-esteem.

Low-rise jeans

those furniture tables chairs etc made out of straw material

Anyone remember walking past cars with super sensitive alarms? Not just alarms, a voice would sound super loud whenever you were within 10 feet of it saying “STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE!!!”

My first job was a paper route in a ritzy neighborhood. Never forget the time I tossed a paper bit it landed on the curb so I had to get out and pick it up. Bending down when I heard”HALT! STEP AWAY FROM THE CAR!” Must have remakes a few years off my life.

Bush

Landlines

People wearing wristwatches.

Fred Durst

My brain producing its own serotonin

Manual car window levers

Pay phones.

Rewinding a tape before returning it to the physical store.

Corded phones

Pagers

Having to be home the time a tv show aired.

Buying a house/apartment 🤦

affordable homes....

Dial up

Hotlines for " hot babes " on TV.

Pagers

Good music

Seinfeld references. Not a lot of those anymore.

Phone Booth

Undivided attention during conversation

Calendar from the 1990s

Getting 10 CDs or cassette tapes for pennies mailed to you by Columbia House.

​

Also 1-800-music-now

A system that you would call and get 15 second snippets of any album that was out. I remember calling and staying on it for hours just listening to new music.

calling collect and quickly saying 'HEYMOMITSMEWEAREREADYFORPICKUP'

Real Hip hop

I’m 26 years old and reading these comments makes me wish I was a decade or so older so I could partake in these in the comments about what life was actually like back then.

Smoking sections in restaurants

Getting film developed. The wondering do you get blank negatives or pictures.

Dial up internet and someone in the house making a phone call.

Pen pals. When you had to think of a subject and wrote about it not just 2 words reply to text messages

Tv guide booklets.

Flintstones vitamins

Topless sunbathing, both men and women.

Dial-up internet. I can still hear the sound that comes with it too. Then logging into AOL instant messenger.

Indie bookstores.

The ability to turn off the news and celebrity gossip. It’s everywhere and rarely positive or neutral. I’m not a fan of being plugged in/on/constantly available/tethered and it’s harder to resist as more and more becomes normalized although it’s detrimental in the long run

The shrill sound of dial-up

Hair mousse

Life before broadband internet..... Dial up modem, took 12 hours to download a 400 pixel jpg image. Usenet chat boards were the closest thing to global connections.

Oh.... No such thing as text messages until 1999.

No mobile phones until 1996.... You had to always have change on you to use payphones.

Hand written love letters.

Johnny Depp wasn't a triple A list mega star, but just someone I had a major crush on.

Life felt free: full of possibilities -- education was free in the UK until 1997. A whole generation (mine) skipped university as we waited to see if fees would be removed. Now you have to pay for even A-Levels or access courses, if it's your second shot at them.

The assumption of free healthcare in the UK, and security of welfare state to support you. Without doubt nor investigation at every turn. We were trusted to be telling the truth.

Just going to some ones house no calling just going and nocking on there door

Coin operated public telephones on the corners near stores,gas stations and in every bar in town,also smoking cigarettes in restaurants,bars and malls.

Magic Johnson's aids.

Stealing music via Napster!

A two weeks holiday abroad and not phoning home.

Civil discourse.

Hipsters In USA or Nokia's

Reebok Pump and the Grunge look

Pennysaver

My dad

411

Honestly.

Cheap fuel prices.

Previewing albums at the record store

White dudes dancing all night up in the club.

Cookies in McDonalds Happy Meals.

A morally decent republican.

Killing presidents

Dog houses. I aint never seen a person with a dog house past 2000.

Serial killers

Teletext.

Extremely oversized pants.

Oh..... Record labels signed you easily and still have out £100,000 advances to virtually unknown acts, who lived in a cloud of the white nose candy in the studio..... Now an act has to prove they have X number of fans/views/album sales, before a record company will give them just a £3000 advance, and has major pressure to either have the album produced and mastered before the record company accepts, or they're hounded daily into writing to the point of artists being traumatised.

AOL/ AIM chats and awesome screen names 😂

Giving credit card details over the phone when ordering a pizza

  • Being totally incommunicado when you were away from home, except for payphones.
  • Payphones.
  • Not being able to quickly access a carefully curated, detailed, illustrated list about why someone else's life is better than yours.

Yoyos

Rollerblades.

Recording your music from the radio to a cassette

My brain making the happy chemicals

Playing outside

T9

tupac

Dialing a rotary phone... then releasing the last digit too early and having to hang up and start over!

Using “gay” as an insult (and other less pleasant euphemisms).

Born in 1987 in Midwestern Suburbia, I grew up as the straight guy in theatre, surrounded by wonderful young gay male friends (and a few straight ones (and a few “straight” ones - we were young 😘)) and it always bothered me deeply how common this was in the public vernacular.

I know it isn’t entirely gone (and probably never will be) but kids are far less likely to use this language than they were 25 years ago when I was 10. While there are surely many contributing factors to this, the largest of which being the nationwide push for Gay Rights (since what, 2007ish?), I think the inclusion of LGBTQ characters and especially LGBTQ relationships in films and television has played a large part in normalizing something that is, and has always been, normal.

Just like with race, visibility matters, and it’s something I can promise as an ally I will always include in my work as a screenwriter/director/artist-at-large.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🎭🎞🎥🎬🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

Pagers.

People born in the 1930s

Huge CRT monitors. CRT TV's. Projection TV's.

spending 3 hours to download a movie trailer over a 2400 baud modem

VHS

Paid 900 and 976 etc "telephone hotlines"...

"Talk to hot singles in your area!"

FiveDollarsForTheFirstThreeMinutesOneDollarNinetyNineEachSubsequentMinute....

Blowing your SNS cartridges to make them work

having someone give you directions to their house if you haven't been there before

see also: a card with directions to the venue included in wedding invitations

. Going to Blockbuster & always getting the popcorn and a drink combo
. Playing N64 and thinking goldeneye was the peak of a first person shooter
. Hesitating of ever entering your debit card info on any website even well known ones
. Oasis being a band
. The bulls being competitive for the championship in the NBA
. Arsenal FC being competitive for the premiership title
. Being able to name the majority of the original 150 Pokemon.

Sharing your porn stash with you friends.

Difficult to even explain why this would be a thing to younger folks these days

Edgy skit shows that broke social etiquette and boundaries.

This is a comment on him jacking with your calls

Not 90s and maybe just me but calling your friends on that interphone thing at the entry to the apartment building and going:

  • Yo X you coming down?

  • Who's there now?

  • Y, Z and Q

  • Ok I'm coming

Smoking inside restaurants. Eat and smoke baby.

Random sexy scenes in movies. Especially female actors getting naked at random times.

Respect

aids!

Ask Jeeves. Poor guy was the first Google.

Fast food ballpits

Phone booths

Land line phones, pagers

Smart people

Remembering phone numbers because you had to punch in the numbers each time you called and couldn’t just touch the phone book (which is made of papers).

Having a separate opinion than others

Using a physical encyclopedia to research a school paper.

vhs tapes

Payphones

Happyness?

Radar detectors and car dash mats

Abortions

White dog poo

Dial up internet connection!

AoL diskettes reformatted to store personal files, and also to make boot diskettes.

Floppy Disk

Communism

Liquid Paper

Like, literally everything.

Pagers. Beepers. Hitters.

Stacks and stacks of maps in the car.

Worrying about what would happen with Y2K

Emos

Buying a house

Meaningful lyricism in music.

TV Guide was in the News Paper....OR, if you were fancy, you could subscribe to it.

Dial-up internet

not quite normal but people born in the 1800’s because i really doubt they exist now

Calling a help line when you were stuck in a video game

The Catholic Church using slave labour in Ireland.

I mean - they probably do it somewhere else in the world these days, but not in Ireland anymore.

Real food

Dialing a long string of digits to save a few bucks on a long distance call.

Hypercolor tshirts

At least on tv: Fat jokes. Gay jokes.

Calling the building you thought your parent might be in if you needed to talk to them.

Memorizing phone numbers.

Payphones

A big fat book that has everyone’s phone number and home address

Analog devices.

I feel like Link running around and discovering long-dead memories reading this thread.

Home phones and VCRs

An actual good plot for The Simpsons

Pagers 📟

Blockbuster

Local stand up comedy, laughter, happiness, a general sense if purpose

I worked at a comedy club in the early 90’s. Man that was a blast!

Pay phones. My dad even bought a plan we could use them to call home with just a pin code if we didn't have money.

Payphones

This might be regional, but moving your car from the gas pump to a parking spot by the building before going in to pay. Now if you move your car they freak out. Back then there were so many fewer pumps and everyone had to go inside, so you shuffled cars to keep from holding everyone up.

To be fair though, if you drove off then, you were driving off with less than $15 worth of gas.

Homeownership.

Saturday morning cartoons.

Walk-in job apply, interview, and hire at one time for a living wage without any experience

I seemed a lot smarter before smart phones. When I believe something is true, I speak with a lot of conviction and can be very convincing and persuasive. Since smartphones hit the scene, people are just like, “Hold up…tappa tappa tappa…you’re an idiot.”

Shell suits

Heelies

Fucking JNCOs man, what the fuck were they.

I didn’t know anyone personally with autism.

My mother being a OBGYN used to give us peppermint schnapps as babies for teething. Not drinking it but rubbing it on our gums and swooshing it around as well.

Phone books

working in the world trade centres

Dial up

Dial up internet.

The absence of myself.

Black rhinos

Privacy

Playing outside, esp outside the view of parents

"Did you know that this commonly accepted fact is actually a myth?

- I didn't, are you sure?

- No, but I think I read it somewhere.

- I guess we'll never really know."

People being assholes outside of the internet

Pay phones

My parents

Manners

Masculine men 👀

Real friendship.

Buying and reading video game strategy guides or even magazines to know what the hottest titles are coming into the pipeline from Japan.

Livable wages for the working class even without really any schooling after high school in the USA

common sense

Spice girls

Operators on phone lines

Just driving around town and/or hanging out with friends on 'Main Street' and not getting yelled at.

Some of my most treasured memories is sitting shotgun in my best friend's car, driving up and down 'Public Ave,' and then pulling into a parking spot to hand out with 'the older kids' at the deli... then turning INTO 'the older kids.' Town cops would just drive by and wave. Business owners didn't care as long at you didn't block the door or harass the other customers.

I also feel like school dances (other than Homecoming and Proms) are a thing of the past now.

A phone booth!

Not everyone having a cell phone

Calling in emergency breakthroughs to the operator because your friend’s phone is busy and three-way calling.

Peace (compared to now)

blockbuster

Being unreachable.

Poppers! (The trousers, not the variety you inhale)

Smoking cigarettes inside restaurants and other public places

This may be my fave post I've seen in this sub! There are SO many to choose from... but I'll go with calling a radio station to request a song, waiting for it to play, and pressing the record/Play button to record it on cassette tape. Good times haha

Access to reproductive healthcare

Driving around with a local street atlas.

Soviet Union? However, I'm happy that it doesn't exist now. I'm from Ukraine, so was shocked when saw things frrom comments

Mailing bills.

Checking your answering machine as soon as you got home, or even calling your own number to check it from a friend's house

Dial up internet being interrupted by a phone call. Dial up noises. Fax machines.

Street directories and phonebook's

Common sense

Using a paper tv guide.

Rave parties.

Cheap gas

Class and dignity lmao

MTV played music videos back in the day...

Going to a video store to rent a movie. Before DVD players, there were VHS tapes and you always had to rewind the tape before returning it.

My stepdaughter just said yesterday “what was that place that you guys had to go to to get movies?” …”you mean blockbuster?” “Yeah.. what was it like having to drive somewhere to rent a movie?” “We went on Fridays every week and if they didn’t have what we wanted we were out of luck and my dad wouldn’t take us another day of the week so we were stuck with what we got” “Ew.. what?”

Blockbuster Movie Nights.

smoking being allowed literally everywhere (enclosed public spaces specifically)

Many slang terms.

Blockbuster

Just normal face to face conversations maybe. Not just chats, stories and other unsocial stuff.

Thick skin

People wanting to have jobs and not live off handouts and believed entitlement

Being wildly optimistic about the future.

K-Mart

Pogs

Playing outside with friends. I miss that

When you went to Del Taco and asked for Macho fires it would be in a macho cup. Now they have the usual fry basket underwear things everywhere already had

Travel agents

90s/early 00s: VHS tapes, camcorders, blockbuster, radio shack, going outside, passing notes instead of texts, calling someone from the house phone, going to a travel agency to book a flight

Pagers

Race jokes in Hollywood

Kids playing outside unsupervised.

Pagers.

Pay phones

Dates with "199x"

Pagers

Common sense

Land Lines.

Ash trays / designated smoking areas. They were in cars, airplanes, airports, restaurants, hotels, etc

Smoking or non?

Pokemon yellow

Paying w acc money today days there only cards

Floppy disks

Metal shows and mosh pits

“ it is now safe to turn off your computer. “

Small talk. Everyone looks at their phone now.

Telephone booths, public pay phones!

POGs, if you know you know

Having a library card and actually using it.

Directory Assistance...

"What city, please?"

Music on MTV lol

Renting dvd's

Phone books, mall culture, pop up headlights. Styrofoam cups

Music videos on MTV.

Traveler's Checks

“Smoking or non smoking?” When you walked in to a restaurant

"Be kind, rewind!"

Truly valuing an album - Making a trip into the music store, browsing for hours, purchasing an album, leafing through the insert. Listening to it start to finish for weeks.

Not having a cell phone on you & not staring at your cell phone’s screen.

Pagers…..

Overalls

Smoking in restaurants and bars.

When I briefly picked up the nasty habit I was pissed when they took it away from bars, but so happy now and can’t even picture it to be honest.

Blockbuster - One left

Pay phones.

Blockbuster movies

Music.

Fapping with your imagination.

Obviously gay characters in children cartoons and manly movies while everyone was completely ignorant about it (He-Man, Top Gun, wrestling…) And special mention for Rob Halford

Smoking sections

Video game arcades.

Landlines, my parents had their phone on a long cord so it could be carried to the top of the stairs just outside their bedroom. It was a weird feeling of safety to me knowing the phone was always close enough to wake them if I ever had an emergency.

beepers

concerts without mobile phones!

Smoking in planes.

Buying a calling card to talk to my Palace Chat lover in Canada

Teletext.

Free thinkers

Just breathing in secondhand smoke all the time - bars, restaurants, malls, wherever

sense of humor

Abortions

Phone booths.

Eye contact and more social interaction with strangers.

Kindness

Common sense. I mean, its apparently a good idea for tiktok girls to randomly sit on men's laps when if the roles were reversed the man would be in jail.

Like wtf. This is why i appreciated the 1970s-1980s. It was just better. I mean, im not complaining about the fact we have minecraft now, but definitely would wish that we had the same amount of braincells as in the 70s and 80s.

Cameras. Not phones with cameras, just cameras. Some develop pictures right away while some would need a visit from photo studios.

Zima

AFL forwards kicking big bags of goals..

Civility.

Riding in the back of pickup trucks down main street.

Payphones.

Dial-up internet.

Good movies with raunchy humor and no one batted an eye. Now you say anything and people get offended. It’s absolutely ridiculous and downright a shame.

LAN multiplayer games

Teletext and phone boxes.

At the risk of sounding like a boomer ...

Having respect or consideration, "loving thy neighbor", family friendly environments/media.

Bringing beverages you bought before check-in onto the airplane.

My dad

Your nan

Slavery

my great grandpa

VHS tapes, Walkman

Kindness

1-900 sex chat phone numbers

VHS tapes. Titanic came on 2 separate ones. I still have a VHS player but it's not plugged in

Having 2 land lines at home, 1 for calling & 1 for dialup Internet

good style

Hanging out with the neighborhood homies. Pulling up to the crib directly.

Plaid edit(long sleeve unbuttoned) shirts!

Being able to date one person and not be called a simp

Calling 1411 for info

Mapquest.

Taking a joke, being a decent human and not having a glowing screen contraption by your face 24/7.

Pagers.

Baggy pants

Taking Acid and going to a Rave

Convincing a family member to help pay for a Wrestling Pay Per View event.

toys r us birthday phone calls

Ringing someone's doorbell to see if they can hang out

Optimism.

Proper Saturday morning cartoon blocks.

Those cargo pants that had zippers at the knees to turn them into cargo shorts.

Seeing kids walking around town or riding their bikes.

Conversations with friends in a pub

Good music :7

Bugs hitting your windshield while driving.

free toy or game in cereal

Good music :7

Pay phones, blockbuster video, modems, VHS, pagers, and sanity.

Pagers

Using a pencil to wind up tape that got pulled out of the cassette in the player.

VHS tapes, VHS players

A knock at the door. Used to mean friends, or neighbors. Now, it's fear

Playing outside until dinner with all the kids in the neighborhood.

raves, fun, youth

Saying "we are currently living in the 90's"

Common sense

Knowing several phone numbers by heart.

Dialing down the center.

The 90's

Those button phones

Take your bike and go search for your friends at a "very" young age.

Payphone

Beepers, TV guide, Low Rider mini trucks

Feeling safe in schools.

Weird flannel vests and skater/undercut hair-dos. Rock on the radio. The 90s rock.

Jncos

Brick sized mobile phones

R-E-S-P-E-K!!!!!!

I fee like I’m living my childhood reading these comments

Simplicity

Freedom of speech

Teletext.

Having to make all your plans before you leave the house. If you're meeting with a group, it made things even more difficult. And forbid plans changed on the way. There waa absolutely no way to get ahold of anyone once you left home. You get in a car accident, you now have to find the nearest pay phone to call the cops, or have to ask the nearest house or store if there wasn't a pay phone.

Also this is internet, but pretty much nobody does this since web 2.0 instant chat and web circles. I used to spend hours in chat rooms, talking to random people and friends. Now it's text or twitter. Web circles (they may have been called something else) was how you found different websites. Especially for niches like Buffy fan pages or crafting blogs, ect. Someone had a main page just filled with links and each page linked back to the main. Man, coding back then too was so different. No css, not much java. Every line had to be typed out in html.

The Houston Oilers, Seattle SuperSonics, and Hartford Whalers

Good woman

Good music

Dial up Internet

Finding discarded copies of fiesta in the woods

Ashtrays in restaurants

Postcards

Good movies.

The USSR

Untill It comes back

Free speech

Movie actors were mainly in movies are were top dogs in the acting world. TV stars mainly acted im TV and were class B actors and then you had Radio DJs who were in class C and were mostly local to your market. Now actors move from TV to Movies and it’s no big thing and DJs, well they are pretty much non existent or no where near as popular or influential as they used to be.

Cars without abs.

Idk I wasn’t there. I’m assuming paging 📟

Pubes

username checks out.

Moon shoes.

q nl

Serotonin

How quick time moves was much slower back then 🥲

Smoking in restaurants

Kids smoking cigarettes

People could check different boxes on voting ballots and not automatically hate each other for it...

Probably saying "we are currently in the 1990s"

Smoking sections at restaurants

It was nice when everyone had a sense of humor

What? Is that some kind joke?

Playing pogs and marbles at school, or trading comic books and sports cards.

After school specials.

JNCOs

Kids still play outside?

Phone cards

They were in every convenience shop and you would use them to make international calls without going broke.

You have a collect call from “mum can you pick me up from the mall”

A Charizard

Ren and stimpy

The car brand Saturn.

Renting DVDs from blockbuster or Netflix

Telegrams

Dvds by post

Dial up internet, making mixed cds

Keeping your car stereo safe by sliding the whole unit out, then walking around with it in the super cool carry bag. I have a feeling more stereos were lost by being dropped than were saved by theft.

https://imgur.com/rFfoh7U

Later they took that concept and made it better by just popping off the detachable face plate.

DARE commercials. Shirts with horizontal stripes. Crash Bandicoot eating his pizza crust first.

Being able to afford a home

If you wanted to use the wifi you couldn't use the phone

Payphones.

the telephone booths

leaving the house

Thomas Guides

Me having friends lmao

Pay phones and those bone white dog turds.

not using reddit

Floppy Disk

Asking people out irl

Common Sense.

Walking through the park and finding an old porno mag in the bushes on the way home from school

Trying to find the perfect amount of lighting to play your gameboy

"Do you know where children are?" "Date and time numbers" "Fantastic music"

Looking through magazines to see what movies will be throughout the week

pagers

Knowing people's phone numbers by heart.

aMT

Drinking radiated water as a miracle elixir

Heroin

Pay Phones

Has to be payphones, or just the act of knocking on your friends door when they weren't expecting you.

A Nirvana song.

Beepers

Blockbuster 😔

MERCURY VAPOR AND LOW PRESSURE SODIUM LAMPS

INCANDESCENT LAMPS

Livable wages for the majority of Americans and not absurd job responsibilities to go along with it….oh and affordable housing, higher education, food, healthcare, real estate investments, a stable and growing stock market…….. among a few other things

Smoking inside (depending on what country we’re talking about).

VHS, CD's, tapes, CRT monitors, Compaq computers, Circuit City, Napster, playing outside, loving UK royal family.

Connecting to the internet whenever you needed to do something on the internet instead of just being automatically connected all the time.

Also not being able to go online because someone else in the house needs to use the phone

Blockbuster

Memorizing your friends home phone numbers.

800 numbers for businesses, answering machines, and thin eyebrows :)

Smoking section at restaurants

OK Soda. Coca-cola released it only in a few markets but cans had cool pop artwork and you could call 1-800-I-FEEL-OK and hear some cool stories. Tasted like 3 parts cola and 1 part orange soda.

Using Payphones, dial up internet, arcades in the tradational sense, buying CDs, using a walkman are just to name a few simple activities.

The coat closet stuffed full of old phone books. Mostly used as booster seats and step stools. Don't burn them because what if we need an edition from 5 years ago!?

In Poland we had a hotline to check current time and date. it was played from pre recorded tape

Teletext

Ceefax

Calling my friends on mobile when they just appeared and only talk in the first 3 seconds that were free of charge.

What a great question. Feels like a time machine

Remembering peoples phones numbers

Dial-up modems...YOU'VE GOT MAIL!

Landlines

Women's Rights

Dial up Internet cringe

Pagers

Loyalty

Playing outdoors

Teletext

Good music on the radio

Payphones

My 20s, Cobain, fun, prosperity, and compared to today it was relatively a lot more peaceful world. Those are a few.

Asking for directions or preparing directions before leaving.

People from older times still out here trying to give directions. Don’t give me directions, give me the exact address or name of the place. We all have direction giving machines now.

Computer lab in school

Triptiks from AAA, and the tour guides listing sights, hotels and restaurants along the way.

A man with proper and good manner.

Making mix tapes of radio recordings on my boombox

My mental health

people who died in the 1990s

Call waiting

Having to choose between a working phone line or the internet

TV antenna on the roof. Landline telephones.

Cowabunga

Arranging a first date and waiting hours for them , making increasingly fanciful reasons why they might still be coming, before eventually accepting you were stood up.

Public Masturbation

AOL.

the curtains hair

I don’t know if anyone has said this or not but kids just roaming around by themselves. When I was little my grandpa used to let me just roam around the stores or let me go take walks by myself around the neighborhood when I was around 8. When I first started doing this I would always get scared because I thought he would yell at me if I go to far or would be back late. But he said when my mom was a kid in the 90s he used to let her go wherever she wanted and he curfew was always when the street lights came on. Now it’s been nearly 10 years since I was 8 and now I’m mostly on my own for whenever I do stuff. My mom has chilled out with me. Like she doesn’t even have life 360 or anything my friends have from there parents. I just tell her where I’m headed when I’ll be back and for the most part she’s saids “okay have a good time” “ or text me when your get there”.

Pay phones

Waiting for weed in a parking lot for 2 hours because your buddy who packs smokes a joint with every customer

  • I live in Canada and it’s legal here, dispensary’s all over the place I can get weed easier then alcohol.

Roll up windows

That wonderful feeling of slamming the phone back onto the receiver when you were angrily hanging up. The clang and ding lol.

The 20th century

Limewire and downloading YouTube music video audio for a song lol

I used to use iMesh myself but it got weird around the 2010's. I think it's mainly just music now days.

I use YT1's to download YouTube vids. Though I think it has NSFW adds if you don't use add block.

Pennies

Mp3 players

hum? I use my phone as an MP3 player all the time. also as an audio book player too.

But the actual little flash with a screen thing

If I could find an mp3 player that can manage bookmarks for audiobooks I would buy one in a heart beat.

Geocities.

I feel like massive, massive numbers of dead bugs on the windshield was common back then and much less so now.

Still available in northwestern Oklahoma.

Came cartridges or other physical software you could own..

Using toll calls to send short messages when you have no money for a pay phone

https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs

a bit of a hazy memory, but I remember there was a telephone number you could dial in the UK and you would connect to random people in different countries from a payphone, also ringing a number in the payphone and asking for someone to tell you the time*

*it was the BT talking clock if you dialed 123 a robot voice would tell you the time.. (for 50p a minute)

Janko jeans

racism, at least where I live (Ukraine) it was a frequent occurrence. But now racism is quite rare, and only manifests itself among the older generation.

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcchdingdingding

Video renting stores like blockbuster

Floppy disks

Smoking/nonsmoking sections in restaurants

People weren't stuck on their phones/electronics 24/7. I dont even think payphones are a thing now.

Common sense.

16bit, blast processing... No kid cared what it meant, we just knew it was cool.

Cool cheesy one liners in action movies, " How bout a light" burns enemy with flamethrower lol

Arcades

My youth

My hair.

Duck Hunt - Nintendo

Welcome! You've got mail!

People with morals.

AOL- remember getting AOL trial CD's on cereal boxes? AOL Instant messenger too for sure

Picking up the phone to talk to one of your friends, parents and sometimes siblings picking up another phone in the house to tune in on what you were talking about.

Fanny pack

Dial up internet service

Typing out the whole URL address in the search bar

- The quality of the music, i.e inspired and original music.
For every today's (the last 10 years) song you thing is great, I can give you 10 equal or better ones from that era, or so.

The same applies to the movies.
There is simply no comparison in inspiration between the decade of the 90's vs the 00's , 10's and 20's (so far).

That's because society is in an exponential decline, which is inevitably reflected in art. Until we do something about it.

I don’t know I was born in like 2020 or some shit

A quarter bag of C

Affordable housing… And the TV guide!

- You always had to go to a physical shop to buy anything, or order anything special eg from abroad.

Smoking

Good music.

Good rap music and rnb, video shops, music shops, video arcades, and Cheers/family matters/step by step

Commercials that had a pro social message. 'This is your brain on drugs'

Common sense

Answering machines.

Using gay as an insult

Air riffles

Blockbuster

Pagers

Real mixtapes on real cassettes. Taping radio shows. Letting your friends tape your records. Inviting your friends over to listen to your records.

Meeting a girl in public somewhere and asking out on a date then going out, now its swipe to date, or some other thing if you talk to a woman in public now they think you are a creep.

Also common sense, you go threw a door, someone right behind you and you do not hold the door open, or going shopping and someone leaving the cart in the middle of the isle while they walk away from it to get something

Wholesome movies (and also in real life) wherein people act and get treated according to their age. Nowadays, Teens (13-19) are sadly portrayed to be sexualized too early. During 1990s, rarely I saw any teens who already wear revealing adult-like outfits (in contrast to casual adult outfits), goes to gym to be "hot" and "sexy" so early, private parts enhancements, wannabe porn stars (Hello TikTok!), Premarital, get drunk, smoke, use drugs, etc. If only José Rizal is still alive today. I don't really get offended anymore if some people call me KJ or boring just because I don't adhere to peer pressure. I've just used my stubbornness and introversion into good use. I also commit mistakes, so I don't get why some people accuse me of being "clean".

I loved renting games from the video store. That fact you could try out everything was just so useful. I remember hiring fallout 3 maybe 4 times untill I figured out what to do, as I was a complete open world noob. Then I bought it.

Independent news. It used to be that NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox were all their own companies, and their news was completely unbiased and fair, but since each news outlet got bought out by sprawling megacorporations, it seems like the news is now just so much product to be sold in juicy soundbites for greater ratings instead of actual news stories meant to keep everyone informed.

I'm not saying there's a left- or right-wing political bias in most news outlets these days; if anything, it's more of a green(back) bias, with stories that the news agencies' parent megacorps don't want getting buried or killed.

Max Headroom, thou art avenged!

Only receiving news updates about twice a day rather than being constantly deluged with new information about current events, particularly if you only got local channels and didn't have cable.

beepers-only doctors and drug dealers had them though-lol!! Televisions that were 2 feet thick! Video Arcades -used to go at least once a week with a pocketful of quarters that I would trade in for tokens!

Money... The correct answer is money

Brick phones?

freedom of speech!

Land lines

Floppy disk.

Britpop, free Uni education, cassette walkmans, CD walkmans, Ourprice, Woolworth stores, HMV stores, Virgin Megaprice stores, cfc deoderants (being phased out though!) bad quality (diseased) beef, heeled jelly shoes (please no one tell me those things have come back- I think I'll have nightmares!)

Pagers

Decency

Floppy Discs

Human Genome Project

A.k.a. the Craig Venter's Genome Project. His team first sequenced a certain DNA of the human genome and made a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics and the Institute for Genomic Research. Guess what human being's DNA was selected to be sequenced. Naturally the healthiest, finest specimen of a human being that scientists could locate: Craig Venter's own DNA! (Not a Black Andamanese jungle woman...)

I know I’m late but demo discs for music and games.

Pay phones

Not exactly non existent but gameboys, I don’t have the original but I do have a gba that my grandpa had and gave to me and eventually bought some old Pokémon games for (leaf green and emerald not because I like green but because I just found them I’m old video game stores I have a thing for old Nintendo stuff)

Ambivalence.

Normal people

The Yellow pages

2-door pickup trucks only. Back then, the only 4-door pickup trucks were "crew cab" trucks that belonged to large ranches or to railroads. They literally delivered crews of workers to remote places. Now, every other pickup seems to be 4-door "crew cab," in every working stiff's driveway. A sign of a rich country.

Serious drinking with work colleagues (in American tech companies). Now, if you get even a little tipsy or slightly drunk, colleagues will remark that you have a "control problem".

You're also looked down upon if you smoke cigarettes and are neither A. foreign, or B. over 65.

Walkmans

Or boom box

Probably that the ice cream machine worked back then (And yeah, ik McDonald's opened in 1995)

Vinal

Being thin

In China, the 四个现代化, the "Si ge xian dai hua", the "Four Modernizations" urged: Improve agriculture! Improve industry! Improve defense! and Improve science!

Government slogan of olden days.

im not an oldie but probably "gay=happy"

That hasn't worked since about 1968.

thanks for informing me but maybe another one is normalizing selling black people? too much stereotypes

Smoking sections

Buses where the driver had to physically turn a lever to wind through and display it's destination. This might just be a UK thing, I'm not sure.

MSN and everything bit of culture of it.

Online/offline status fights

Nudging

And way more.

Raising up a hand 30 degrees

Privacy 🙃

Potato cannons

Waking up for school early to watch the morning cartoons

Landline telephones and answering machines instead of smart phones and text messages for regular basic comms.

Payphones

Drive in movie theatres. Maybe it’s just in australia, but I cannot find one to save my life

Since the 1960's they became extremely rare in the USA, but a few have been revived recently. It's something to do in a car with jumpy kids aboard.

What state were you in? I could’ve sworn they were everywhere in the 80s

They're coming back, post Pandemic.

Women wearing nylons and stockings. The legs so beautiful. Now, tattoos.

The last landline telephones.

Travel Agencies, althought they still exist but not as much as the use too.

The whaletail thong

Video stores

I don't know because I was not alive in the 1990s

Smart people

The 1990s

Christian Riese Lassen and Lisa Frank notebooks/folders/school supplies.

I can't remember the brand lol, but these reallllly cool erasers that were two different colors and twisted together kinda like a unicorns horn. You were a cool kid if you had one of those!!

Someone else said payphones so lmao.

Mello Yello (okay okay, I know it's not non-existent now...but this was my favorite soda for freaking ever and then one day it just.....disappeared. And, now that it's back and has been for a while, I prefer mountain dew)

Toy Stores. Like KB Toys or uh...Toys R' Us. I'm talking physical stores not online shit.

Non Super-Center Wal-Mart

Not having to lock up baby formula or pregnancy tests, among other things.

Pizza Hut Delivery vehicles - I'm meaning the company pick-up trucks, I think they were like little Chevy S-10's or such, with all the signage and such on them. Not someone's personal vehicle.

Bookmobiles

Book It!

Best Buy - even if they still exist, they suck, sorry.

When MTV was mostly about music and less about reality TV shit. What the fuck does the "M" even stand for anymore? Misc?

When cable tv didn't cost an arm and a leg and you got "more" for less.....

AOL cd's! At one point I started collecting some of the unique cd holders they sent these out in. My favorite was the wooden one! But god they were annoying at the same time...

Probably more stuff but...

Navigation by memory, context clues or instinct.

Bleeeeeeep..... bidddiddiddidididiidid.

​

Beeeeeedideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeediddiiididiidmdudmd.

​

Bitttiddiddiddiiiuoooooooooooopbadddedad.

Saying that their gay. The word gay back then meant happy.

No way dude, my friends and I said "that's gay" all the time in the 90's and so did everyone else as it was a common saying, and we weren't using it to describe happy things. "that's gay" meant that's stupid back then. It never had any homophobia or sexual orientation discrimination tied to it, it was just a saying. I still say it quite often as old habits die hard, but I don't think that anyone should be offended as when it's used in it's context, it's not meant to be discriminatory.

I understand that it could be seen as discriminatory, but I guarantee 95% of people that say it are not using it in that way.

If you're referring to the 1890s through the 1970s then yes, it's primary meaning was "happy" or "joyful". Unfortunately by the time the 1990s rolled around that was rarely the case.

Manned, courtesy, amiable disagreement

May all of the last twenty years, but I’d really love to have real conversations again,

Being present and not having your head stuck in your phone when hanging out with other people.

Knowing where all your friends were hanging out due to the number of bikes on the front yard.

The satisfying click of the film advance lever.

Goddam delicious McDonalds Pizza.

Trick or treating without parents

Dropping the kids off at the pool

Those books with a bunch of cheat codes for video games

Slam dancing

Beep screech whine... Eelcome

Sega Genesis hockey fights I’MA MAKE YOU BLEED, BITCH

People not engrossed on their technologies.

Back then smartphones werent invented yet. The way people played, read books, communicated etc was way different

VCR's they were everywhere back then, but the only place you can find one now is in an old pawnshop.

Phone booth

Common sense

Homophobia. Super prevalent in the 90's. Not AS much in the 2020's.

Old white computers, doom

Getting 17 CDs for a penny from Columbia House.

Payphones and blockbusters

Handwriting. I have the envelope my late father mailed my degree certificates to me in. His handwriting was exquisite, and just seeing that reminds me of so much about him. Nobody at all has good handwriting nowadays, and every thing delivered just has some janky printed out label on it

Hit Clips

Blackberry Brickbreaker

got milk?

Typewriters, and I do wish they would make a comeback.

Myspace, Napster, AOL dial-up, Blockbusters, ripping on Hanson, Jones soda, the word “Phat”, independent coffee shops, Internet cafes, bungee jumping, driving a car, and the Oxford comma.

Not having to take your shoes off at the airport.

Comedy

Assembler!

Common sense. Respect for others. Kids going to school and being almost 100% positive that they will be safe

This is not related. But hear me out. I was born on 98. Okay. When I was in six grade my parents had cell phones. This was kind of before iPhones broke out and everyone had an iPhone like today. My parent disposed the home landline because why did we need it. I remember clearly that my sixth grade teacher got bothered or mad that I told her the only phone numbers that are “callable” in case of an a emergency are my parents cellphone numbers. Theirs were flip phones. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t have a landline at home. I was like well it is what it is. I was terrified because she made a big deal. I was little when we had a landline and it was normal up until we had the world in our hands-Smart phones.

Anyone remember long distance phone cards?

Memorizing phone numbers. Also, making collect calls (on a pay phone).

Blockbuster

Annual neighborhood summer block parties

Memorizing your friends phone numbers. I still remember their numbers 20+ years later.

CDs, Floppy Disks, Cassettes Tapes, VHS, 1/4 Inch Jack Headphones, CRTs, Local Multiplayer

Home ownership I guess

Hope for the future.

Phone booths(operable) and Superman would have trouble finding a place to change clothes

Pagers.

Accurate, relevant , unbiased news. Just the facts, man

Todays “news” is all about gossip, rumor, hearsay, argumentative garbage. Or the latest “celebrity” nonsense. It’s more rumor or opinion than fact

Riding our bikes all day long in the street, jumping off wooden ramps. Kids today wouldn’t even BEGIN to understand that

Being gone from dawn till dusk, no helicopter parenting

Having to KNOW something about computers. You couldn’t just plug it in and login

Playing Dave computer game

Calling popcorn for the time, calling 411 for a business telephone number (but not too much, they cost $$$)

Calling radio stations to use as Shazam…and when finally getting through: “what’s the name of the song that you played 3 days ago, the one that goes like ‘do do do da do’”

early marriage

Calling/Dialing POPCORN to verify the time after a power outage and/or just to set your clocks/watches.

Automatic video tape rewinders. Having to rewind the video tapes before returning them to the rental store.

telephone chairs. wireless landlines were starting to become a thing, but most families had the wired handsets. one phone in the house with a range of 10ft meant a long conversation would stick you in one place for a while.

the nicest chair in the house was usually parked right by the phone. didn't see that really go away until the 2000s

Smoking vs non smoking areas at restaurants

K-Mart

Rock 'n' Roll

R.I.P.

Cursive script. I have had people stare at my writing like I'm carving hieroglyphs or some ancient writing not seen for over a thousand years.

Saturday morning cartoons.

Remember those? You'd get up at like 6am on a damn Saturday, grab a bowl of some sugar coated cereal in your pajamas and watch hours of cartoons on a major network like ABC, NBC and such.

Not just those, but the Friday previews the night before they debuted on Saturday morning!

Having to pull over at a phone booth to make a phone call.

Pretending you were interested in Rom-Coms at the video store so you can try to sneak a peek at Adults Only Section.

Hoping none of your family members change the channel while you're recording an episode of Friends on TV while you're out because otherwise you're screwed and will never see that episode again (well... Until decades later).

Payphones

A little late to the party, but I've scrolled a while and have yet to see someone say this.

TV Guide. Having to go to a certain channel that scrolled through all the networks and gave a 2 hour block of what was on TV. Alternatively, grabbing the little TV guide book at the store so you could see what the week's schedule was. It's nonexistent where I live, but I traveled recently and the hotels I stayed at had a TV guide channel because you couldn't pull up a directory. Gave me a wave of nostalgia.

On that same note, being absolutely screwed if you missed an episode you wanted to watch. Who knows if or when they'd play reruns, and you couldn't watch it online or on demand like you can today.

Not having to worry about getting gun down at school, the mall, and public events.

Thomas Guides

Punk music

Being able to buy comic books at grocery stores/Walmart at the check out line.

*Napster

*Laptops with storage space that was counted in Megabytes rather than Gigabytes (or Terabytes)

*CD burners to play your favorite mix "tape" in your car. Of course it could only carry roughly 12 to 15 songs as it had to be burned onto the disc in WAV format as most CD players in cars weren't able to play anything digital. And a WAV file would turn a standard 5 MB song into anywhere from 50 to 90 MB per song while blank discs could hold usually no more than 700 MB.

Oh, I also had a zip drive which was considered the height of tech for all of one minute but in reality we're completely useless

Porn that you actually had to pay for on most sites. The exception being each site had a free preview button which would take you to a page that had 3 mpeg video's lasting around 2 minutes each...

A system which nobody mentions that certainly helped along the popularity of Napster. Although the vids on Napster we're limited and pretty soon everyone knew the porn stars from those vidz instantly recognize. While those old school Napster videos became the cult classics of today's "porn world".

And another 90s thing being the wait for a single web page to load and that sweet sound a computer would make right as it was about to finish loading and present itself on the site

MTV actually playing music videos

Calling a radio station to make a song request, then waiting around for them to play it and record it on your mix tape. (The OG playlist)

Renting music and movies from the library.

Calling your parents collect then trying to rush through an apology that you'll be home soon when it asks for your name. And just payphones in general.

Fighting over use of the phone line. Which was made even worse with dial up internet.

Parents not catering to special diets, like being vegan. If you didn't eat what they put in front of you, you didn't eat.

Being forced to play with friends or cousins who had chickenpox so you'd get it too.

People being able to get some place without GPS telling them what to do every step of the way.

Burning CD mixes for friends. That always felt like you made your own version of a NOW CD. But with all the cursing and Korn or Manson songs. I also miss having to race home before missing TRL and 'N SYNC or Sisqo perform. Because it never replayed that day (actual shows before 8 hours of Ridiculousness on MTV).

Not having text messages, so you wrote in notebooks, or wrote notes with Gelly Roll pens. They still exist, on Amazon. I just bought them a year ago. Oh, the nostalgia.

The backstreet boys

Getting a computer and installing windows on 9 floppy disks, it taking all day

My dad had these descrambler things that hooked up to the cable boxes and it would allow us to get every channel

White dog shit

Smoking in restaurants, colleges, universities.

Never having to ask the person you called "Are you home?"

A truck drivers paper logs. Today, they use electronic log books.

Pay phones

Good music lol

Having a booklet of CDs that you keep in the car.

Having to wait for websites to load.

Channel surfing

Respect for one another

@hotmail.com

Grit

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Oh god yeah all the men are gone, how have they gotten down to only being approximately half the population?! Back in my day all the people I acknowledged as human were men!

/s

So you're not a man?

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white people are rare?

We're all over the god damn place.

Speaking freely on the internet.

Vegetarians.

Work ethic and common sense

Two parent family

Being able to tell a joke and not worry about getting buried for it.

Being a sensible weight. People still cared about their appearance and their health.

Good music.

TL:DR casual racism was more acceptable in the 90's, thankfully we've progressed and its not OK anymore.

Bear with me this may he long winded. But relevant. Casual Racism was more socially acceptable in the 90's and as a testament to (at least the greater northwest, I can't speak for the rest) societal progress, it's far less "ok" than 10/20/30 years ago. So here's the back story, rewind to 1999 when the movie boondocks saints dropped. There is a scene which "the funny man" is trying to get in good with a mob boss. So tye boss says "they say you're the funny man, tell me a joke." So the funny man goes on-

FM- OK a white guy a black guy and a Mexican guy find a genie in a bottle. The genie says you all get in wish. So the black guy... Boss- Nger!! FM- yeah yeah so the uh.... the nger says "I wish ally African people were back in Africa and prospering and happy. Poof, they're all back. FM- so then the Mexican guy... Boss interrupts again - Spc! FM- right, so the spc says I wish all my people were back in Mexico happy and prospering too. Poof they're all back and happy. FM- so the white comes to the genie and says "so all the n*gers and spcs are back outta here? Genie says "yup" white guy says "I'll have a coke."

So back in the day, people thought that joke was hilarious. Even though it was supposed to showcase how bad this mob boss was, kids in my high school that were white black Asian you name it, all thought it was gold.

Fast forward to 2021 and I'm watching the movie again for the first time in like 10 years, that joke drops and I legit felt uncomfortable in my own living room. As a teenager I didn't know any better that what was presented to me. But as an adult and having met and befriended all walks of life, learned more about the world, and in the wake up the last several years of pendulum swing society becoming unnecessarily (out of balance to the other extreme) woke to the extreme, I now have much better perspective and society (again, where I am and have traveled to around the country) has evolved to be.... not perfect, but at least much more aware and educated and accepting of people.

Another example is that back in the day everyone made fun of gays, like they were lesser humans. Now as an adult I realize how small minded that perspective was. And it all stemmed from fear of the unknown. I didn't know a ton of gay or various races etc other than what Seattle had to offer but as I grew and made many many friends I came to realize that everyone are just people walking different paths. A shitty person will be shitty no matter what. A good person will be good. Over the years I've been welcomed with open arms into countless more homes of people that racism targets than those of the propagators. And I believe that it all stems from fear of the unknown. Because when racist people (from ANY color, white brown yellow red take your pic. They all exist.) Become more familiar with others, they tend to break down their own walls and become OK with that group.

So in a nutshell, I'm happy that people ate more chill with each other now, and more aware than they have been in the 90's.

Sane people who don't get their feelings hurt over every little thing!

More people were reasonable back then, not woke cry babies

No cell phones well there was if you could afford them

Good comedy without offending anyone

Satanists openly practicing and the Elites being involved in it.

Kids that played outside and ice cream trucks that actually served ice cream and not pre packaged popsicles.

Junk mail

Pensions

I am so stoked I actually have one of those if I live that long.

Banks with real live tellers.

Smashmouth

Happines

Blockbuster, now give me my fucking karma!

Using asbestos in house's

I had a landlord who told me he missed asbestos and DDT and taught it was it was bullshit we couldn't use it anymore.

Slavery

Spending all day hanging out at the mall.

Physically rolling up/down windows

A sense of humor.

Common sense!!! Definitely not common anymore/non existent. It’s more like a super power!!

Freedom

Respect and spankings

Sex with 18 years old girls.

Women

Anti gay and Trans jokes

Transvestites were rare back then, but nowadays their everywhere!

A man identifying as a man

Paulie Shore.

Pagers

Being kind and rewinding.

Quaaludes

Think you are off by about 20 years?

Socker Boppers (yes ik “but aren’t they sockem boppers?” While I agree it’s a much better name, this was another cause of the Mandela affect)

Smoking.

A Living.

Common sense, as my parents tell me…

Saddam Hussein

A sense of hope and optimism for the future

Being able to afford a house

Seeing people born at 40's

Regular people being able to buy a house without sinking into lifelong debt

Going to a Michael Jackson concert

Different opinions, democracy, the only way to find someone was if they had a land-line or by knocking on their door.

People making eye to eye and more people socialising

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You must not have lived during the 90s

I did and we weren't stupid enough to eat cleaners when we're in our late teens/early 20s.

The same dumb shit happened then too. You just didn’t hear about it because the internet wasn’t as big

Earths ice caps

Racism

Assuming a gender

U didn’t have to assume in the 90’s

But we did

50/50 chance back then. Like those odds

Looking anorexic

According to 90’s kids, literally fucking everything.

JNCOs. And let’s keep it like that

Good manners

Being optimistic about the future.

We’re fucked big time.

The 1990's... wow! So long ago, lol.

US Abortion rights

Actual toys in cereal boxes

A livable wage in Canada

Jokes about LGBTQ people. The Family Guy variety at least.

Bill Nye

Teenage innocence

Kids playing outside without prenatal supervision.

True genuine love and compassion

I was an employee at Sam Goody in a shopping mall 1995-1997. “Uhhhh what the song? I can’t remember the lyrics and don’t know who it’s by but it goes “ahhhhh piranha!”

Rollerblades

The idea of home ownership amongst people in their 20s and 30s

Free plastic bags in the supermarket

HIV and AIDS, or at least all the discussion of them. It’s mostly because they’ve developed antivirals that make it not a death sentence and really lower the likelihood of spreading it, but in the 90s, er heard about it all the time and it was part of all the tv shows, especially teen shows. Now it is hardly ever mentioned.

Climate change in 10 yrs

I guess you are saying it will be irrelevant soon? I don’t really know what you are trying to say honestly. But I’m not really giving an opinion on this. I’m just saying we used to hear about it a lot and now rarely hear about it, in response to the question. We do hear about climate change though, and sadly don’t seem to be as driven or willing to take the steps to deal with it the way we were with HIV and AIDS.

Having to lookup someone’s address or phone number from a phone book.

Crabs

Colorful coral in the Great Barrier Reef ):

Good news! https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans-idUSL2N2XI1NV

Really liking R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, Tom Cruise, Kevin Spacey, Gweneth Paltrow, Mel Gibson, etc etc etc

411

Elephants, rhinos, tigers, lions, clean air, fresh water, affordable housing....

all still exist

"What was normal in the 1990's but is rare or nonexistent now"

Reading the post explains the post

all not rare or nonexistent

Yeah your right none of those animals have gone extinct or are endangered. Housing prices totally haven't gone up proportional to income since the 90's. Nah, you're totally right dude. Stay safe out there dude, dont put forks in outlets and find out what happens.

Phone books

Nerf

Chevy Cavaliers, Sunfires, Neons. Traffic was full of these but I assume they all died lol

The idea that if you work hard and don't cause trouble you'll be able to own a home someday

The TVGuide being in the newspaper

Checking time on wristwatch when waiting to meet someone.

Looking for someone’s phone number in a phone book.

[deleted]

I still see this on a routine basis.

Dialing *69 to see who called your phone

A man couldn't get pregnant

[deleted]

People can still do that. Actually, they’re way fucking better at it than they were in the 90s, because people have far more nuanced and well thought out ideas about sex and gender identity now

Kids played outside

Manners.

Rock Music

Humor and gender identities you could understand

Babies that were born in the 90s ..

Actual parenting

Smart people, even I don't know Obama's last name

Men

Wives

Respect for the law

Optimism about the future.

Nonpartisan politics

World Order

Appealing models, now we have Hairy legged fat ugly beasts.

Oh, and real men. Now we have effeminate men.

The Space Shuttle Challenger. Too soon?

Back then republicans were not as evil…

Shirts over T-shirts

Landlines

Magas...

Simply knowing the difference between a penis and a vagina a.k.a. a man and a woman🤔

Perfectly contoured butts among white women.

Abortion…. Too soon?

Normal people and a lovely life enjoyment

Straight people

Racism, I will not elaborate further.

knowing you could commit a crime without cameras everywhere

oh and keeping my shoes on as i said goodbye to a person at the gate to the plane

Why are your shoes still off all the way at the gate lol

Asking a woman to do women things Now we have these "strong independent women" who won't do their job act like u harassing them or using them while they just lazy I support that anyone can do anything but come on know your role

Kids that have two, married, opposite sex parents.

ave two, married, opposite sex parents.

That's rare now huh?

Very much so, it seems!

I don't think that is right, I rarely if ever see married couples of the same sex with children (I don't even think I know any), but I know a ton of opposite-sex married couples with children. I think you are pretty far off by saying this is uncommon.

You could just easily pull some statistics to prove your claim.

Straight People

Monkey bars at the park

scrunchies

A brain

We have an edge lord!

Women's rights

Normal in the 90s: Not worrying about a shooter showing up at your school

wow. while shootings existed in the 80's and 90's shit's gotten really bad in the last decade or two.

Is it because people don't have fist fights any more, or more likely that society is broken?

Two-door cars.

Manual transmissions in cars

In Europe, Asia and Africa, manual (stick-shift) car transmissions are still common. If you haven't learned to drive with a manual transmission, yet, you'll be in trouble in those lands.

I love driving stick. I just know they make up less than 2% of new auto sales in the IS

US

I think you can still get a Jeep Wrangler with a 6-speed stick shift in the US.

Common courtesy and common sense

Disliking lgbtq