f13.net

I miss being able to say, "I swear I've seen that actor in something before" followed by a spirited fifteen minute discussion with everyone else who is watching with you, usually involving comparing various obscure shows or films or trying to remember what you were doing when you saw that person last.

For example, watching Game of Thrones, I could have sworn I'd seen (or heard) Thomas Brodie-Sangster before (plays Jojen Reed) and of course I had, a couple of times--he was in the Doctor Who episode Family of Blood/Human Nature, he's Ferb's relatively-infrequently-heard voice in Phineas and Ferb, he was in Nanny McPhee, etc. IMDB ended the discussion on Sunday night within a few seconds.

I miss good arcades.

Getting a five dollar roll of quarters, picking nightcrawler on a 4-man x-men game and beating the thing no matter the cost(As long as the cost was less than five dollars).

Good pinball machines, 25 cent Cokes, Playing Joust or Defender with a roll of quarters, and playing trackball football until my hands bled.

(http://www.empire-of-the-claw.com/images/External_use/HAAGExpo2005/Arcade-006AtariFootball.jpg)

Edit: I just realized that this game was popular in 19-FUCKING-79.  Where did the years go?

You Wasted Them.

These small old-school boutique arcade/bars are becoming VERY popular in the cities.  Places like "Flynn's" essentially.  I actually thought of opening my own up someday (part of the reason I'm doing what I'm doing in school).
I also had the luck of living a few blocks from the largest arcade in the world (in the 80's), with the largest banked go-cart track as well.  God I miss those days.  Fuckin SNES killed it.

This is something I have fond memories of, know I can't have back (and have accepted), but am bummed that kids today can't really do:

-Have an off-campus lunch allowed in high school.
-Not have to wear an ID at school.
-Be able to actually carry my bookbag between classes instead of going to a locker.
-Actually be able to go where in the school you felt like during lunch periods or if you skipped convos.

I graduated high school in 2001 which is about when the real fascist shit kicked in.

It just sucks being a kid anymore.

I had none of those things in High School in the early 80's.  I went to an inner-city school where we had armed guards and walking in the wrong bathroom resulted in a stabbing.

Wish I had gone to your high school.


Some, yes... I spent too many of them in school to be sure.

Oh right, I forgot this was just inner-city school stuff catching up to the 'burbs. But yeah I went to a decent high school that served a weird constituency of 50% rural/redneck kids and 50% upper-middle class/university faculty kids. Had a winning quizbowl team every year...

...and a day where the farm kids could drive their farm vehicles into school.

I went to a research High School (early 90's) where all the teachers were hippies, taught class in a circle, and we had New Math.  Then other parents at other schools got jealous and as they say "the real fascist shit kicked in."  And that was that.

We started getting some of that in Clear Lake between '90 and '91.  No "all black" clothes because that made you a gang member or something came shortly after I graduated but had already hit some surrounding districts.

I know I was such a threat going to the library after finishing lunch.  I'm not sure I wouldn't have walked had I been forced to endure more pointless safety measures (those two years were already emotionally troublesome), so I'm thankful I graduated when I did.

This place (https://www.facebook.com/pages/8-bit-Arcade-Bar/434005613350903?ref=stream) is opening about 5 miles away. Hopefully it isn't a dollar per game and $5 a beer. I also hope my beer is served by a live unicorn.

I miss New York Seltzers (http://www.bevnet.com/reviews/nyseltzer). And Godfather's Pizza (http://www.godfathers.com/) in its heyday. And Flakey Jake's Burgers (although Teddy's Bigger Burgers are a decent analog now). I miss exploration games like

 (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Seven_Cities_of_Gold_game_cover.jpg) and (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/62/Heart_of_Africa_cover.png).

 I miss our old family vacation spot (http://www.southwhidbeyrecord.com/news/21578594.html).

Highschool in Canada in the late eighties:

- Chem/Physics teacher who would give us chemicals out of the back room to experiment with. He knew we were making explosives
- Drafting teacher that would send students on McDonald's runs for the class
- Accounting teacher who considered "going golfing" as a perfectly acceptable excuse for missing class

There was zero security of any form in our school. You could buy nearly anything out of a at least some student's locker.

The cafeteria sold crappy pizza and hot dogs and was completely optional. Only thing I ever bought there was ice cream sandwiches.
Oh, and if you were absent (and the teacher bothered reporting it), they had this high tech system that would call home to notify your parents. Of course we all knew exactly what time of day it called, and cell phones didn't exist, so my parents were never actually aware that system existed.

I miss my Cook Brothers BMX bike (http://bmxmuseum.com/bikes/cooks_brothers/30646), complete with the Cook Brothers CNC cranks.   :awesome_for_real:

My parents gave me a Honda XR 80 mini bike when I was 10.  I loved it.  If I suggested doing the same for my kids to my wife, the smack would be heard around the world.  Same with BB guns.

I miss going to see a new release in the theatre for $3.50

I miss the old sycamore tree in the public park where some dude used to store his porn that every 14-year old boy in the neighborhood knew about. It was kind of like our library.

I miss running rampant throughout the neighborhood block with my friends till you heard your mother's voice bellowing in the wind to go home right after dusk.

I also miss summers where we used 6 backyards to play hours-long games of ghost in the graveyard or kick the can or hide 'n seek - and not one neighbor gave a shit.

This was basically my childhood.  The good old days.

I miss the woods near where I grew up.  ~200 acres of trails forged by kids littered with wildlife and dewberry bushes.

I miss the thrill of getting away with sex in the GF's house.

I miss days that started at 8:00 and ended at 3:00.

I miss being able to just pick-up and go someplace for 2-3 days with no prior planning.

I miss long car rides where you didn't have to have some form of electronic stimulation for yourself and the kids if it was over an hour.  Or hell, considering "listen to the radio" enough for a 6-hour car ride.

I miss neighbors who weren't asswipes and didn't hover over their children like some predator who lived only a few houses away was going to snatch them at any moment. (If you feel the neighborhood's that unsafe, why move there?)

I miss the joy that came with a new car and the sense of freedom that came with it that's now been replaced by the dread of maintenance, insurance and worrying that some asshole's going to ding you in the parking lot.

I miss being able to pack all my worldly possessions into a single car and being able to move to a new place in a day's notice.

I miss size 30 pants.

Yep, same with me growing up.

We didn't have an open campus for my HS (early 80s) but that was more because we were a private Catholic HS.  However, we were allowed to carry backpacks to classes and there were no guards.  Seniors got more freedom to leave campus at lunch, etc.  I still remember fondly the "study hall" I had with a few other classmates where the drama teacher would appropriate us and we'd sit around BSing in her classroom.  We spent an entire session once learning to forge her signature (it was very distinctive) under her direction.

I miss porn being hard to get (oh come on you we're all thinking it)

I miss raiding my parents coin jars for 20 cent coins, or if lucky a gold one and having enough for potato scallops and several rounds of UN squadron at the local fish and chip shop.

I miss going halves with a friend on ''curse of the Azure bonds" from a mail order (military simulations!) and sharing the code wheel and journal.

I miss meeting a new friend who had games I didn't have and heading over to is house with a stack of floppies.

I second the IMDB thing (and Wikipedia, for that matter).

My friends and I used to actually talk when we'd hang out. Pop culture, mostly... things we'd seen on TV, bits we'd read in the news, funny stories we'd heard. Now, unless somebody has a burning issue to discuss, we just sit around watching Youtube and Netflix like we do at home.

Also, at home everybody sticks to their own computer rather than huddling around one screen like my family did when we were a kid.

I miss the rains down in Africa.

I miss BASIC.  There, I said it.

Also, geez, how long have backpacks been banned from classrooms?  My school was not giant but it was a several minute walk to get to your locker - having to go there between every class would have been a tremendous pain in the ass.  

We also had a closed campus, but there was basically nowhere interesting to go anyway, and it was probably more to keep kids from getting run over on the highway or by a train than anything else.

- scheduling all my classes in college between the hours of 12 and 4, Monday through Thursday, and spending the rest of my time on music, drinking, and playing games.
- the way airports used to be
- being in shape (working on that at least)
- my friends not having kids
- proudft actually running a D&D game

Oh yeah:

-Literally not being obligated to do a goddamn thing during the summer if I didn't feel like it.

I really miss this a lot.  We tried to pare down when we moved from Ohio, but we accumulated stuff after moving.  I'm not sure how it happens.  

I miss learning, even though I'm in school.  

Good god, why? 

In my case, it was because people gave me shit when they moved, in their effort to pare down. I can't turn down a free couch.

Step away from the grown-up table. 

Damn kids.

Cars I could work on myself.

The old style phone receiver you could balance on your shoulder.

Drivers who weren't on the phone.

Being able to be away from a phone.

Having an answering machine full of women trying to get into my pants every day.

We appreciated it more when it was rare. Who doesn't remember the first time you found your father's stash of porn in the back of the bathroom cupboard? Next generations are going to miss out on that.

Not knowing how bad fatty foods were for me.

The one lb steak at Vista Pizza in Blaine for $6.

Gas at $0.39 per litre.

My 30" waistline.

There's not too much I honestly miss other than free time, but there are things that I am disappointed that my kids won't be able to experience to the same level I did.

1. Normal weather.  Tolerable hot in Summer, nice Snow in Dec for holidays.  Not the seasonal apocalypses we have now.

2. Inflation I could see.  Not statistical lies.  Not stuff that's hidden and that I only find in my grocery store bill, my toddler's new clothes, or my wife's college tuition.

3. Being able to ride my bike in safety around the neighborhood.  This one really bothers me for my son.  I want him to be able to explore without risk of abduction or road accident.

4. Games that weren't serious but just fun.   All games everywhere are now serious business.

5. Music that didn't include sampling, auto-tuning, or were basically just three chord copies or "homages" of a previous demographic marketing campaign.

I could go on about career stability, and the financialization of everything, but that's enough.

I miss the previous version of Facebook.  It worked great and was intuitive.  Now there's all this double column timeline bullshit and lots of ad's.  I mean, what gives?

 :awesome_for_real:

I don't think has changed, just our perception of it has

I miss arcades too. Trying to beat the high score on Off Road.
I miss summers where nights were spent BBQing and chasing fireflys. That was every weekend.
I miss my parents being younger (but they're not that old now).

I miss not having to worry about my place in life.
I miss life before the internet. I don't really, but there is a nostalgic feel to just worrying about school, saturday morning cartoons, and getting home before dark.
I miss when the internet was really just the local BBS I dialed up to to play Tele-Arena and send (E)lectronic Mail to people.

I miss being able to eat and drink whatever I wanted (damn acid reflux).

However, I'm soon to be a father for the first time and I look forward to reliving a lot of this all over again through my daughter's eyes.  *tear*

(7000th post yay)

Omeprazole, man. It's a goddamn miracle drug.

I'm on some generic purple pill and the only thing I can't do is drink a lot of coffee or eat a lot of raw tomato. Sometimes soda does me in as well.

My acid reflux laughs at omeprazole's attempts to halt reflux from alcohol.  One drink and I'll enjoy the taste of bile for the rest of the night.

I don't really miss drinking.  I never had any tolerance.  

I don't really miss a whole lot. 

Arcades maybe.  I was decent at fighting games.  
Sleeping in.  
My rib that was removed.

Are we going to need a Recommended Medications (AKA the Old Fart Thread)?   :oh_i_see:

Man, I ate a package of Rolaids every day since leaving college but discovered Pantoprazole a couple of years ago and haven't taken a Rolaid since.  It's miracle drug.

fake edit: Hah probably. feel free to move my post there if it actually gets created.

I miss being able to stay out until 3, roll out of (hopefully someone else's) bed at 7, go out and do it again another two nights in a row, then show up for work Monday without skipping a beat.  Now if I party on Friday, I'm lucky if I feel 80% by Monday morning (the someone else's bed hasn't happened in a long time, but between being married and then effectively homeless....) and two nights in a row can wreck me for a week.  I'm on the last narrow window of middle age where I can still do pretty much everything I used to, I just pay a higher price for it.

--Dave

I miss playing in the hose on a hot summer day in the backyard.
...      waking up on a really snowy day, pinned to the radio listening for the school closings. (then celebrating when I heard my school, or being completely outraged other schools were off but mine wasn't)
...      candybars were a quarter at the corner store.
...      hot summer nights spent at the neighborhood ice cream stand with the rest of the neighborhood kids who just happened to be there.
...      riding bikes down to the city park just to go tearing through the trails down by the river, then stopping to catch crayfish in the rocks.
...      big wheels + piece of plywood + rocks = ramps for flying
...      tree climbing with friends.

I miss being a kid and mostly irresponsible.  Other than that, not a god damn thing.  I remember being fucking bored.  All the time.

What ?
What ?   :uhrr:

Yeah, these are both a thing now in most high schools in the US.  The latest version has an RFID chip in the ID, so they can track every student as they move around the school.

--Dave

I miss my hair. :heartbreak:

For a lot of people it has, particularly those living in mid sized towns that have had all the modern neighborhoods crop up.  It's tough for kids to play anywhere but in the street now.  Thirty years ago there was a lot more green space planned into neighborhoods.  The houses were on bigger lots and there were fewer fences.  Now everyone has their own private castle with a fence in the backyard.  Good luck finding woods to play in.

As a person who taught for a few years very recently in a high school I can vouch for the ID thing, but we still allowed backpacks.  I haven't heard of any ISDs around here banning them.

Bigger portions at fast food places.
I don't know where you live, but stuff are shrinking and prices are increasing.
Burger King used to be kinda big - but now... it's pitiful.

Oh wait.  I do remember something I miss.  Lawn Darts.  Fucking whiners with lobotomized kids ruin everything.

I never saw a Lawn Dart, but BB gun wars were all the rage.  By "we", I don't mean me and my brother specifically, since we only had one BB gun, but many of our schoolmates did during that highly dangerous junior-high period, and the bruises were often shown off at school, and the small punctures from when the pump-limits were violated. 

Also, put me in for the 'it's actually way safer now, it's just national news that frightens people' camp.  Though I can't say I'm fond of hearing shrieking children running around, it's better than having them drop dead at 35 from diabetes complications and/or become terrified shutins that fear everything in the world except their own physical deterioration.

Also, get off my lawn.

I miss the feeling that the world was getting better.

I know it was just naivety but when I was a kid people genuinely believed that technology was improving our lives and making the world a better place. When the first home computers started coming out it was revelatory and people felt they were living in incredible times.

Now the technology had become commonplace and I have realised that technological and scientific achievements will always play second fiddle to social & political ones.

In all truth, I miss the 90's.  Not just because I was in my twenties and having fun, but because it truly was a golden age in so many ways.  It was like in1989, sanity broke out all over the world, and for a little more than a decade, things were great.  And then we got over it.

--Dave

I do miss all the drugs and nightclubs and bands in the 90s, but I also miss being physically able to do that stuff.

Old people miss being young, who'd a thought?  :why_so_serious:

- I miss walking into a bar and being one of the young dogs (and I'm not old or gray enough yet to be one of the wise geezers and get my drinks bought for me).
- I miss being somewhere, anywhere and no one at any point pulling out a phone.

I miss sitting down in a pub for a drink and to smoke a pipe (with good pipe tobacco)

I miss looking up at the moon and thinking about the people up there and what they're doing.

I miss mechanical devices that were built to work for more than a few years at most. I also miss stuff like film projectors that you could actually figure out how the "magic" happened with a bit of observation and curiosity.

I also miss not having a bald spot :(

You can still get those mechanical devices. You just have to be willing to pay an arm and a leg because the companies are few and far between and need to make money on the few they sell.

Care and maintenance also matter.  Something I note most of my generation is lacking in thanks to absentee parents never teaching them how.   When's the last time you cleaned out the coils on your fridge, for example?

I'll third the I miss having hair...
 :heartbreak:

I took a lawn dart in the hand when I was 10 after the douchebag neighbor kid threw it at me. God I hated Florida.

I miss being irresponsible and there being no serious consequences.

As others have said, I miss predictable weather.

I miss the naivete of my youth, where I thought everything was going to turn out fine for everybody.

I miss playing video games on my college campus while all the New Order I'd queued up played on the Jukebox.

I miss being able to swim 10,000 yards a day and then eat like food was going out of style.

I miss the feeling that summer was full of endless possibilities.

I miss not getting hung over.

I miss not having the internet everywhere.

I don't miss being single. Which is something I never thought I'd say. So, there's that.

I miss Transformers that were made of metal (mostly Lead).
I miss calling my BBS and yelling that my (mom's) phone bill was too high after playing an all-nighter of Realms.
I miss the secret-ink hint-books that got me through a lot of those damned Sierra games.
I miss Blockbuster nights on my parent's giant wooden rear-screen projection TV and teh Dolby surrounds!
I miss going on neighborhood adventures with my brother. "I DARE you to knock on that creepy house's door!"
I miss watching Reading Rainbow and then promptly riding off to the library on my Beachcruiser.
I miss music that was more positive, lively, intelligent, and hopeful.  (queue 80's-early 90's music)

But my lawn darts are in it...

Ours aren't accessible, they're fully enclosed.

I miss Taco Flavored Doritos. They came back last summer and I gorged, but now then they disappeared again.

Taco Doritos never go away around here, they're just hard to find.  If they're not in your area it means they weren't selling so the retailer dropped them.  They're only in 2 stores locally, the Meijer and the Kroger in the 'poor' part of town.   If you really get a jonsing you can always pick them up on Amazon from folks.

Your fridge still has a motor, etc that get dusty and need cleaning.

How about greasing the garage door opener bar?

I am getting kind of depressed because I can't really think of much I miss.  Problem is I don't really like things now either.  So I guess I pretty much wasted my life.

Actually I miss bike rides.  I miss convincing my parents to extend the boundries I was allowed to bike in and then being all excited and in awe as I explored the new foreign areas.

I miss being on the phone talking to the new special someone... about nothing at all, for HOURS into the night.

(not having kids, does this happen anymore?)

Is that what kids are calling it these days?

I miss:
a world without AIDS.  
Freddie Mercury & John Lennon.
Being able to afford popcorn and a drink at the movies
Drive-ins
12" GI Joes
Muscle cars EVERYWHERE
Kids playing outside
The middle class
All in the Family
All night poker games in my mom's basement
Collecting car hood ornaments (don't ask)
My Mura Hi Stepper
Vibrating football games
Avalon Hill games
White Castle at 2am
Marathon candy bars and a coke
Going trick or treating
Playing pickup football games
How excited I was to get my first calculator and digital watch
Replacing my tape drive with a 5 1/4" drive
Skipping class to play Oregon Trail on teletype in the library

Sooooo many things.

I'm 32, and I'm just starting to hit that point and realize that I can't drink like I used too, even 2-3 years ago. I used to be able to drink 2-3 days in a row and be fine. Then it turned into 1-2 days. Then it was drink all night and be find the next day but couldn't go for round 2. Now one big night of drinking can put me out of commission the next day if it was a heavy night.

Just came back from visiting my parents and all I really seem to miss is being a kid and my grandma.

Nestle's Alpine white chocolate bars.  God i can still taste the last one i had.

This situation is such shit. You would think your body would have a coping mechanism by the time you got older and did this stuff. But yeah, I noticed this too, not drinking, but the other weekend warrior activities. I could leave Friday evening and go on a full 2 day bender, come home Sunday morning - take Sunday afternoon to come down and jump right back to work on Monday. Now, I can't really even get through a full Friday night without being tied to my bed the rest of the weekend. Damn biology.

Yes, but you're ancient so it's okay.   :grin:

Only thing I really miss is the family that is no longer with me.  :heartbreak:

This didn't hit me until my last Captain and Pepsi marathon a couple months back. Over 20 hours of drinking (which started at the breakfast table in some fucked up restaraunt that I'm still not sure where it is) and included playing a 12+ hour game of asshole.  I stayed the whole time while other players pussies cycled in and out while drinking shitty beers. Didn't move the next day, but it was worth it after being mostly responsible for getting two much younger people to puke and pass out within 3 hours of starting due to them trying to keep up.



Off-road, TMNT: Turtles in Time, Gauntlet, and Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter. Fuck yes. Also, Galaga when I was younger


I'm willing to bet having sex in that same house would be even more thrilling, no need to miss it :why_so_serious:.
That's how I ended up in four different places in four years, good times.
Good thing about being single with no kids - I can still fit all my shit in a 5x7 u-haul. If it doesn't fit then it is not important enough to bring with


Same with all of these. In addition to hood ornaments, there were always chrome caps on tire valve stems


For me;
-Drunk BBQ in the parking lot during summer school.
-Biking everywhere without fear and road rules, because when you're that young you can take on any traffic with your trusty schwinn/huffy/murray/whatever bike you had
-Working certain jobs because they were fun, not because you needed shitloads of money for rent. Best job in the world was working in a before and after school day care. Go to work and get breakfast watching cartoons or doing arts and crafts with kids before they start classes, and getting snack before playing dodgeball, soccer, or making more arts and crafts after school. Meanwhile I had a shortened school day in high school because I was "working." I was the master with fuse beads and macaroni art back then ;D
-Bonfires and a fresh keg every night. Whether it was 4 or 20 people, the keg was emptied before anyone could leave while the argument of moderation vs being wasteful would take place.
-I miss playing baseball as I used to have scholarship level 1st baseman and hitting ability
-Playing football. Not that soccer junk.
-Installing car stereos in cars that were more expensive than the car
-Lack of consequences for causing trouble. I even went to court in someone's place while they were out of town, that was fucking dumb but a great memory now.
-Hitchhiking to and from concerts. One time getting dropped off a couple miles from home with a buddy, stopping at Taco Bell, and he convinced them to sell him an empty cheese cup for the fountain drinks. We took turns pushing the lever while the other one would use a straw to drink what made it into the cup. All because it was the last of our money. Until walking home and throwing a packet of hot sauce in the street ended with a car running over the packet and hot sauce going into the eyes, not fun.
-Speaking of money - I miss allowances and $5 being amazing.

Lastly - The mother fucking Tick. SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNN!!!

This thread is bringing back so many memories for me.

Being able to drink - I miss hitting the bar up during happy hour with my friends. Start drinking at 4:00 and pound beers all night until bar close. Wake up the next day feeling like shit, but doing it all over again. One night of moderate drinking now will knock me out for a day. Kids really screw things up, I tried having a heavy drinking night and got woken up at 4:00 AM to change a diaper. Changing a diaper when you are transitioning from drunk to hungover is not fun. Last time I did that.

I miss the last day of school before summer. My family would always take a camping trip as soon as school got out. I knew when I got off the bus, the camper would be ready and we would be off. Also knowing that as soon as we got back from camping, it was going to be all Nintendo all the time for the rest of the summer.

I miss all of the free time I used to have, summers off, home by 3:30 the rest of the year, all free time was pretty much me time.  Unfortunately the only way to get all of these things back would be to abandon what I have now, I am certain if I did that I would miss my current life (even with all of it's inconvenient obligations) the most of all.

Most of all, I miss my mom.

Slightly less heavy but weighing more on my mind each day, I miss having a 'job' instead of a 'career', with all that entails.

I do slightly miss my old family members, but they weren't that nice to me so I don't exactly have loads of fond memories of them anyways.

Arcade games I miss, but arcades themselves were dimly lit and smelled bad so I didn't spend too much time there.

I still have my first car and drive it around daily, so that hasn't changed too much.

I mostly hated my life when I was younger and only recently has it approached getting better so I'm not too much for nostalgia of the "good ol' days" because when you're doing slow suicide for 10-15 years the good ol' days weren't really that good.

Perhaps the thing I miss most was listening to a CD or tape on my headphones while playing gold box TSR games until 11:30 at night while no one bothered me because no one was interested in what I was doing because I was being quiet.  Now I have a hard time even sitting in the chair for a WoW session for more than 45 minutes or so.

I miss separation of life and work. It used to be that being employed meant 8 hours + lunch +2 breaks (at least it was like that for me). These days it seems standard to give everyone a smart phone and demand that they be available at all times whether you're management, sales, IT, whatever. If you're salaried then your time is company time. Are you on vacation? Better watch your email and answer your phone or else you'll have an insurmountable backlog of work when you return because there's no redundancy and no one is going to do your job while you're gone.

I miss smaller game controllers. The SNES was perfect.

I miss with a sniper rifle and a shaky arm.

I must get that sorted.

Wow, Seven Cities of Gold, that brought back some good memories.  I still have the disks for that out in my garage out lost in a box with my Atari 800.  I also miss the text/graphics hybrid type games of that era, i.e. Sands of Egypt, Wizard and the Princess.  Also Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.  Good times.

Reduce your caffeine and remember to squeeze on the exhale.

That reminds me.  I also miss Star Raiders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders).  God I loved that game. 

Racing Destruction Set (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw3R-_flF4Y)
Leaderboard Golf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQEk4iIw4ds)
Summer Games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw31Eocnie8)


Many a Saturday night sitting around the TV playing these multiplayer C64 games with my skating buddy and his older brother + friends. And we'd filch the older guys' beers and they'd pretend not to notice.

Racing Destruction Set was awesome.

I miss my c64.

I miss the smell of brand new Magic cards. I also miss the smell of my 1st Edition D&D manuals.

I miss all night gaming sessions at the university computer labs....Netrek in the UNIX labs and whatever game took our fancy in the PC labs...(Civ 1, Warlords, the first? football manager)...also the epic MtG games..

Totally agree.  Also loved Re-Volt, Hardball! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HardBall!), and Reach for the Stars. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reach_for_the_Stars_%28video_game%29)

Soooooo many hours spent playing games during the long Minnesota winters.

I loved Re-Volt.  Tried to install it a few years ago and I couldn't get it to work. :sad:

Fucking hardball!

Was it me or was that game almost impossible to get a hit in? I remember losing a  lot of games 1-0...or on the rare occurance I actually got a run the computer would promptly score 2 the next inning. Fucking cheating computer.

This is probably the game of my childhood I miss the most:

(http://i.imgur.com/anXJ5XY.jpg)

That looks totally amazing.  Too bad I grew up in rural CDN we had no access to such wonders.   Really cool for 1985.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set

It was super amazing and awesome, yes.

Some screenshots:

(http://i.imgur.com/KpCwRQm.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/BSr68wv.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/lO9OrcG.gif)

(http://creatools.gameclassification.com/files/creatools/Adventure-Construction-Set.png)

I just found one of those vibrating football table football players on my floor the other day. I have no idea from which dark corner it managed to escape but it is now sitting proudly by my random video game collector editions figures.

OMG ACS and RDS- literally hundreds of hours spent with those two. Nothing better than making a track with huge jumps and moon gravity  :grin:

And Rivers of Light..I can't remember if I ever finished the whole thing, but I played it a million times. Also used to play the (mostly crappy) randomly generated adventures, as well as crafting plenty of my own. God, to have that kind of time and imagination again... :heartbreak:

I miss having more than one or two short decades before I turn into you guys.

I miss playing hockey in the street and moving the goal for cars.

I miss neighborhood pick up games of wiffleball - and when not having enough players, playing with ghostmen on the bases.

I miss Cinnamon Chachos.  KEEBLER WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME.

I miss an arcade with an entire room of pinball machines.

I miss being ignorant and not worrying about all the crazy assholes out there that seem to vote every time they can, while us "normal" folks just go about our merry way.

I'm sure I could keep at this forever, but a few things that resonate strongly with me, in vaguely chronological order.

Riding a bike everywhere. In the street if you want, on the sidewalk if there's traffic. (No one had yet had the "brilliant" idea to make laws that bikes should travel among the high-speed multi-ton death machines instead of among the slow, easily avoided pedestrians.) No bike helmets or pads.

Games on the Apple IIs in elementary school.

Being taught metric.

Phones with actual bells. Walking to the bedroom or kitchen to answer the phone. Phone cords.

Writing batshit insane stories in sixth grade that made my class laugh. I started writing before I even learned that you have to start a new paragraph when switching to another speaker.

Reading a lot. Literally hundreds of books a year. Kid-length books, but still.

Spending an entire day at the library and going home with a pile of books. All of which I'd finish. Even the ones that sucked.

TV shows I planned to watch all week. The A-Team, the Dukes of Hazzard, and Knight Rider. Robotech, Voltron, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Saturday morning cartoons in general. Rudolph, Frosty, and Charlie Brown at Christmas.

Big Damn Christmases. I was an only child, and my dad was Navy, so we got housing, school, and medical gratis courtesy of the American taxpayers. Christmas was piles of GI Joes, Transformers, Matchbox and Hot Wheels, Legos, Go-Bots, and so on. I always look on what I can give my own boys with dissatisfaction.

Speaking of Legos, Lego sets that were just a bunch of bricks, or maybe a generic space rocket or police station, and not some IP tie-in.

Swivel-arm battle grip. I could never play with Star Wars figures afterwards.

For that matter, spending a whole day playing GI Joes or Transformers or toy cars. For the cars, digging roads and using the hose to make rivers. Spending the whole day drawing the interior of the Autobot Ark on long scrolls of paper my dad would bring home from work.

Trading toys. This may have been unique to the culture in my area, but kids swapped toys all the time.

Watching MASH and Star Trek in syndicated reruns during dinner. That's "Star Trek," with no suffix.

My dad was a space enthusiast. Our house was full of books and pictures of Saturn Vs, the moon, and later space shuttles. I grew up thinking that I'd be able to raise my own kids on the moon. Now I don't expect they'll have the option of raising their own kids on the moon. I still can't watch footage of the Challenger explosion without dissolving into tears, much to the alarm of my children.

The miracle of the VCR.

The necessity of encyclopedias, phone books, and maps.

Sweating buckets while playing Atari 2600 games until my legs went numb - which took a lot longer in those days. Flipping the score in Asteroids. All-day Adventure marathons.

In junior high, spending hours on the Commodore-64 playing SSI and SSG wargames or building sprawling, never-completed Adventure Construction Set modules. For that matter, games in general that required neither internet nor graphics cards. The weird Epyx 500XJ ergonomic joystick I used for years and years. Portable computers that weighed 20-30 pounds. The novelty of modems.

My first cat, Sneakers. Our only dog, Chuk.

Crushes. They always turned out unpleasantly for me, but there's no emotion as intense and all-encompassing as a high-school crush.

Weighing 155 pounds for 15 years straight. Having a 32-inch waist. Being able to eat and drink whatever. I can drink more now than I could before, but it all goes straight to my gut.

Hah.  I think you're my spiritual sibling.

So I was raised in Spain, so this is an interesting thread to me. The only thing I have that I'd say is an irretrievable part of the past is being able to spy on prostitutes from the tree tops of the field where taxi drivers would park for their mid-afternoon blow jobs. I'm pretty sure that is not a common childhood experience.

I see one big common experience; care-free bike riding. What changed? Are the suburban streets that more dangerous, or is it a societal change in the perception of danger? I know that when I was growing up, we never even thought about pedophiles, yet nowadays, it seems that that's the first thought in anyone's head when they see a stranger even so much as glancing at child.

It seems that the world hasn't changed, its just that we're now victims of our own media.

Change by perception.  It's as safe as it was, but with all the sex offender registries and media saturation most parents don't let their kids even leave their yards in my neighborhood.

I wonder how much of it is about knowing neighbors too.  I feel like with all the social media/internet there is little reason to actually KNOW the people in your community.  It is a lot less scary to let your kid play in old man Bob's yard when you actually know old man Bob.  Hell, I'm guilty of this myself (although I don't have kids).  I know barely anyone that lives in this neighborhood, but when I was a kid, there was nothing to do inside, so you went out and met people.

I miss my family.  I have so few left.  I desperately miss my husband.  Not the one who cheated, the one I married and was happy with for the best part of two decades.  I miss Portsmouth, Hants, and zipping around all over England and Scotland in the TVR.  I miss cheap weed.

Sadly I grew up in a neighborhood that had a child molester/murder stalking it, so I really never had that freedom to explore freely until I hit my teens. Years later I understood why my mother was so strict about knowing where I was, but I sure didn't understand it at the time.

You're right though, today everyone knows about every incident - I would expect most parents in urban settings to be pretty paranoid now a days. Back then, we only really knew that Olsen was out there because my mother's best friend knew one of the victims.

Add me to the list of people who miss riding a bike, everywhere all the time, everybody seemed to have a bike.  I can remember seeing 20 bikes laying around the edge of the 4 backyards we used for football and whiffle ball games.  I was so jealous of my cousin when he got a Schwinn Manta Ray 5 speed in Kool Orange.  http://theselvedgeyard.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/2087334202_a94becb58d_b.jpg

Look at the City/Creator/Technic lines.  They're mostly as you remember them, though they're surrendering more and more space to Star Wars/LotR and whatever in-house TV tie-in nonsense they're doing this year (Chima/Ninjago, etc.).  I really like the City stuff, in particular:

(http://i.imgur.com/0XZom49.jpg)

I had a schwinn manta ray -in Spain-. The jealousy was off the damned charts. Best bike EVAR.

My childhood bike.  Eat your heart out!

(http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS62psZFMjaCCOL2Wt2rbMnozOdevLw2vEDzAtLD3OBYcVXB7RN)

That's right.  A FIVE speed!

It's very pretty!  It looks brand new!

Dudes riding bikes with banana seats had gone out of fashion by the time I owned a bike.

My childhood bike was better!

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LR0N5IUS83w/UMKdQ5FblgI/AAAAAAAAANo/ZOu_vQdjQog/s1600/big-wheel.jpg)

Mine was better...

(http://i.imgur.com/QZBHqyd.jpg)

This was my pride and joy till it got demolished by my dad plowing the driveway. Lesson learned, don't leave your shit out in the driveway...ever.

Is it weird when you still get phone calls when you're 30 from mom who tells you to go to bed early before 11 and whether you've brushed your teeth or not?
Cause that is a bi-weekly thing going on for me.

Especially since she could just open the door to the basement and shout it down to you.  :why_so_serious:

They still make those Green Machines.  I never had one, but one of the neighborhood kids did and it was AWESOME BEYOND COMPARE.  I tried to get both of my kids to believe they needed to have one, but they just looked at me like I was stupid.

Also:  Banana seats were for the lame kids.  Might as well have rainbow tassles hanging down from your curved handlebars, Ralph Wiggum.

I miss thinking about what I was going to be when I "grew up', and wondering just how awesome it would be. As opposed to being (sort of) there, and finding out that it doesn't quite rock as much.

I also miss the pre-wikipedia days, as much as I love it. I miss my best friend and I getting into a huge argument about WWII (because we were nerds), then going over to my place to settle the dispute by looking for the answer in my father's extensive WWII encyclopedia.

I miss being in a house with one phone, which was right in the kitchen, which made talking to girls really challenging.

I miss going to the local game store to pick up a new game, then sitting in the food court of the mall for like 3 hours looking over the cool maps, and booklets, and tech tress, and other printed paraphernalia that came with it.

I miss when the world, myself included, had an attention span.

I miss sneaking into concerts, and when the mosh pit was still around (yeah that thing was fun as hell for a 16 year old).


Haha, yeah.

Certain moms just never think of their children as grown-up.  I still get that plus 'don't swear' (she says "oh, shit" and "damnit" all the time) and tips on how we should be cooking and inquiries about if I've had the car checked.  I know there's a lot more that I can't think of because my siblings and I are immune to it, but it drives my wife and brother-in-law up a wall because they receive the same treatment.

I have had a few, "Damnit, Mom, I'm almost 40. I know how to take care of myself." breaks in the last year though.  The last was when she was on me about doing taxes.. when I'd done them in March.  :awesome_for_real:

Still; I'd rather have her nag me than not be around to do so like Dad.

I had the one that looked like it was from a 70's motorcycle, the long padded rectangle. And I needed that, because I use to jump the heck out of that bike. The local playground had excavated the side of a hill to fit in the basketball court, so you could ride down the road (which was a hill) to gather speed, hop the curb and ride across the half court and then up the back wall of the excavated hill. Massive air, it was basically a half pipe back when almost nobody knew what they were (I didn't see a wooden half pipe until a Tony Hawk video tape a few years later).

I was the running champ for the obstacle course at that park for years. Stuff we used to get away with (coordinating with the park summer staff) there's no WAY you could do today. Yay litigation.

This thread mostly makes me glad I was a kid in the 70s. I don't miss a lot but I'm glad I was there then.

I miss Christmas Eve 1982. 8 years old me had been dreaming about getting an Intellivision for months, and I knew it was in that big rectangular box under the tree, teasing me, waiting for the clock to finally hit December 25th. I think I've never wanted anything else that bad in my life.

At least it wasn't a Colecovision?

Thanks for reminding me of my age.... I was playing Intellivision with friends in high school.  It was, without a doubt, my fondest memory of console gaming. Ship combat and baseball were  :drill:

This is what I got in 1982:

(http://i.imgur.com/kIzjBDn.jpg)

Video games (at home) were still several years off in the future for me.

Hey wait, I liked my step-brother's coleco.

In 82 I had been playing D&D for a few years already (78 or 79), but my first video game was a few years earlier than even that. My grandfather was president of a regional road construction firm (they built a lot of the NYS Thruway) and he'd take me into work and plop me down in front of a terminal. I learned to use the command line and navigate to the games directory and play stuff like ADVENT and some Star Trek game with ascii graphics and a couple others. I loved me some ADVENT, though. It was a pretty amazing thing to discover in 75 or 76. Dumping the buffer to the large-format printer, not so amazing :p

Pong console, atari and then the C-64 that began my pc gaming snobbery. Summer camp for BASIC programming around 83?

I had a Colecovision , I traded an Atari 800 computer for one plus 10 or so games.

I had an intellivision and it was great but that E.T. game on my friends colecovision rocked.

I remember ordering the Dragon Warriors books (lite RPG system) from my local book store and waiting about 4 months for them to arrive because they were on back order. I don't really miss it but ordering stuff that way makes you appreciate it more.

I also went on a ww2 minitaures kick when I was about 15 (again pre internet) and since my town had basically no really hobby stores I literally went down to the local library , found yellow pages for various Australian cities and starting calling up hobby stores asking them if they had things like '4 Sherman tanks in 1/76th scale' (fuck 1/72th you clumsy oaf) then I'd ask them to hold em for me and mail a check. Then it was come home from school everyday to check the mailbox if we'd gotten a missed package notice from the post office.

That was my Christmas present when I was 12. Little did I know it wasn't the same as AD&D but it still rocked so much ass. Keep on the Borderlands, which later led to the "Expert" set and the Isle of Death (think that's what that module was called).

Close - Isle of Dread. Still have my original, though at some point along the way I lost a couple of the tear-out maps in the middle.

Keep on the Borderlands was great.  I remember running that module twice.  They recently made a 4th edition adaptation, but it'd never work in my Ptolus campaign.

I loved my coleco vision. I got mine towards the end when the company was pretty much out of business or going that way so KB toys had the games on sale for like 1 or 2 dollars. So every time we went to the mall mom would give me and my brother a few bucks and we would pick up like 2 or 3 games. We wound up owning just about every game ever made for coleco and played the heck out of all of them. It really is the only system I have ever owned that I wound up actually owning most of the games available for it. My nintendos I owned maybe 2 or 3 games and just rented everything else.

'Utopia' changed my... mind. Did you play it? Somehow, one of the first real time strategy games ever made. From the same author of Intellivision Baseball actually, Don Daglow, who managed to keep making games for a good 25 years including possibly the first MMORPG, the original Nevewinter Nights.

But back then I knew nothing, I just went crazy over NASL Soccer, Skiing, Astrosmash, Triple Action and later Shark! Shark!, Frog Bog, Atlantis, Bomber X, Pitfall, AD&D, Tron and too many more...

Life was so simple.

That Star Trek game is legend (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(script_game)). Not that I had any chance to try it, In fact I am quite envious of your story.
Interestingly (for me) enough, Don Daglow himself programmed another one in 1972 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(script_game)), with even less graphics, which became super popular (  :why_so_serious: ) at the time.

I remember playing Utopia with my brother when we were in grade school.  Had to share with my father who was beastly at Nightstalker, Burgertime, and Tron Deadly Disks.  That AD&D game for the Intellivision blew my mind as well.

Similar for me - Utopia was the best multiplayer game of its time. After I went to bed, my dad would stay up and try to beat Night Stalker. I think that was when I realized the fundamental difference between me and my dad. I'd play 7 different games in one sitting, my dad would sit and play the same game for 7 hours. Its still the same with us today.

It was actually this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(text_game)). I believe the FORTRAN version. If I had known it was a BASIC program I'd probably have written it for the C64. Hell, it's too bad I gave up programming. I had written a slew of text adventures, mostly ripping AD&D modules and Michael Moorcock.

Oh yeah I fucked up the links, that's what I actually thought you were playing. Damn you!

ADDENDUM: I also miss the days pre-Internet when bootlegs and sharing stuff meant something.  Now everything is on Youtube.  I miss collecting rare media. 

I miss having a Role Playing Group.

And yet the internet, even in gaming form, just has never, ever, ever replaced it.  Ever.

Shame.

Some guys just started an rpg group at the library. I'm kind of interested (especially to hock commission work painting minis) but two things stand out. 1. Monday night. That's our free night to just veg out, so it sucks having to leave the house (waah). 2. (the important one) When I was talking to two of the guys they kept going on about their pet projects they wrote in d20 and how they wanted to find a group for them. I'm not interested in furry faerie anime skulls or whatever the fucking fanfic they've brewed up. Start out on modules with a script written by someone who does it professionally, kids. Tertiary, they kept obsessing over some girl who might join the group who may or may not be 21 (insert leering dorks).

Ye gods. Nerds make it tough to hang out with them.

I lived on a farm from age 12 or so to 18 so I pretty much had to order everything since trips into a town big enough to sport a hobby shop were few and far between.  I spent several summer's worth of hay bailing money on Avalon Hill games (Panzer Blitz, Squad Leader, Luftwaffe, 3rd Reich, etc.)  plus subscriptions to SPI and Avalon Hill's magazines.  I remember the 2-4 week wait between ordering and getting a game was excruciating.

+1 shannow on the hard to find porn, talking to girls / girlfriends about nothing at all for hours, crushes, and telling your friends in high school about that hot encounter you (never really) had at the park on the weekend.  And them all pretending to believe you!!

I miss my dogs, most recently Tigger, but Elsa and Scorch were irreplaceable friends when I was a kid.  My wife hates dogs, I'm hoping the (coming soon) kids wear her down   :grin:

I miss getting a new game and reading the manuals, poring over the maps, reading the lore and tips as you waited for the install bar to finish and telling mum/dad about all the cool stuff you can't wait to see.  Teaching my little brother about the best ways to play, and fighting over who's turn it was (which usually escalated to a full on brawl).

I miss the illusion that many of you were much closer to my age.

 :awesome_for_real:

Hah, I`m actually comforted that I seem to be a lot closer in age to people here than I thought I was.  I`m sure I`m still one of the older guys but at least I`m from the same pre-cell phone, bike riding, C64 gaming world as many of you.  :awesome_for_real:

It's a reflection of how long the community has been around. We didn't start out old.

I too miss pen and paper RPGs, though my tastes ran to RQ and CoC. I look casually every once in a while, but I don't think I can deal with kids and I don't want to be the only woman playing. What I really miss is pen and paper RPGs being a big deal at the same time they were so accessible and most companies were still semi-pro at best. Ah that crappy paper the Judge's Guild used to print on. Try selling that today.

Oh yeah.

I miss groupies. I did high school right. So to speak.

Anyway, I was still in my twenties when I was posting on LtM!  :oh_i_see:

I have PMs in my inbox from 2004. I was 28 then.
Mothersuck.

Some of us were old then.....like myself.  And I'll throw Nebu under the old timer bus too.

Where is the Old cut-off line?  What about Ancient?

Don't be ridiculous.  You are just a boy!  Dammit.

It should be 41.   :awesome_for_real:

Missed it by that much.

I, however, landed directly on the line but my balance is off so I'm leaning one way or the other. Old age will do that to you knees.

I miss an old very pixelated late 90s bi-plane based team war game called Flying Circus. That game was so awesome.

I am so lucky that my original D&D campaign from freshman year of college in 1977 is still running.  We play 3 times a year and most of us have kids the same age as when we first discovered the game.

Good old AD&D. Back when high level mages were gods and everyone else in the party existed just to keep us out of melee.  :awesome_for_real:

Is that it?  Noobs!

Well, we know where the Ancient line is. ;D

I just realized I was 24 when I found LTM. Thanks.  :oh_i_see:

High school, bitches.   :awesome_for_real:

I stumbled upon these sets of a forums due to a really bad internship where the only thing that wasn't blocked on the internet was WT.o

25ish when I found LtM.

Working shift work at my first IT job.

33ish when I found LTM.  I've only been following one other community longer, but I'm much more of a lurker here.

19 and in college at first reading of LtM (from a U-Hauler's Stratics link of all places)...

Newbies.  I can't remember exactly when I found LtM, but he was still hand-coding the HTML to do updates during the UO beta, I think (we still wrote html in ALL CAPS back then).  So I was 26-27, I think.

--Dave

I think I found Lum's in 1999 or maybe 2000.  I won't say what age I was as you're all making me feel old again, damn you.

He's watching us, you know.  He's always watching.  I once saw Lum's face staring back at me from inside a glass of cheap gin.  Srsly.

Found another thing I miss.  Getting a sore hand from this thing...

(http://spookyshobbyshop.com/TEMPLATE%20super%20jock%20football%20box%201976%20VG.JPG)

And jumping Tonka trucks with....

(http://ironfiremen.com/files/2013/02/evel-knievel-stunt-cycle.jpg)

I browsed Lum's back in the day, but people scared me and I don't think I ever posted until WT.

We're going there, Nebu? Okeedoke!

(http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpdkeg759m1qlxdqt.jpg)
(http://www.robotroom.com/BigTrak/BigTrak.jpg)

Holy shit I had that tower... my cousins had the other three items. Luckily for me, my mother had to dump me off over their house everyday while she was at work.

Aye Dark Tower was fucking awesome.

But we've done this here before.  I know it.

That's the Mako... :-o

Micronauts, man. Micronauts.

 :cry:

I miss when Taco Bell use to only fold one side of the burrito and left the other side open.

Sky! I was going to post Dark Tower myself!

Well to that end...

Styrofoam McDonalds sandwich containers. I used to make many a boat out of those along with a straw and a napkin for a mast and sail. 

Checking in on this bicycle lovefest. I used to go biking 5-10 miles with my friends on a warm spring/summer day to the nearest 7-11 and drink Slurpees under the old rail bridge. We must've done this a few dozen times over the course of a couple years.

One time, shortly after New York State passed its first helmet laws, some Deputy Dawg decided he didn't want to see kids having fun, so he "pulled over" our little cycling group on the way for frozen cherry goodness and gave us a twenty-minute lecture about how dangerous it was to be cycling without helmets, and how lucky we were that he was in a good mood and was gonna leave off with just a warning, but damn it, if he saw us coming up "his road" again, he was gonna take our bikes and haul us home to our parents and fine them for letting us run around without helmets.

A few weeks later I got my license and we never biked to 7-11 again. Thanks, Officer Buzzkill.

--

I grew up next to a big old piece of poorly-managed public land, basically a meadow/forest that mostly got used by the local landscaping firms for illegal dumping. There were a lot of thickets in the meadowy area, with seas of chest-high grass between them.

Being fucked up kids, my friends and I used to take all kinds of junk from the dumping sites and build forts in the thickets. We made stone tools, paved pathways through the grass with all sorts of crap (2-by-4s, stone slabs, gravel), built skylines between trees and burned stuff in rusted-out 55 gallon drums. (Why burn things? Because we were kids and shit was flammable, duh.) We played factory and soldier and all kinds of other silly kid imagination games.

Then the local school district decided they needed a new set of soccer fields and bulldozed the whole thing, fenced it off, and kept it locked up when it wasn't game/practice time. Thanks, school district.

--

I miss selling shitty Country Time lemonade on the roadside, just chilling on the front law with a buddy or two while we dispensed sugarpiss to strangers at a quarter a cup. Proceeds went to buying comics, Magic cards and whatever other bullshit we wanted.

--

I miss going into the City on the LIRR with a buddy or two and hanging around Chinatown, just a couple of 15-year-olds chillin' in Giuliani's Manhattan unsupervised, eating cheap pork buns and browsing the 50-cent knockoff crap in all the little stores. I got into anime shortly thereafter and started buying shitty bootlegs out of those little Chinatown shops a few years later, way before you could actually buy most of this stuff in a real store.

--

A friend of mine had the most awesome basement, with all kinds of broken electronic junk. In the mid-90s, he still had an acoustic-coupled 4800-baud American Bell phone-and-modem combo unit. I miss hanging out all night on weekends, playing with busted junk and shooting the shit, making up absurd business ideas around some horrifying chimera we'd cook up with a soldering iron.

--

I miss sitting through dark nights in the glow of a shitty 11" SVGA CRT, dialing up to the early days of the internet at 9600 bps, when all your content came off of BBSes, mailing lists and usenet groups. I played my first MUD in 1993 and it got me hooked on what we now call MMO gaming. I remember my parents being furious at the first $300 monthly bill I racked up and having to meter my time from then on.

I remember my folks being blown away when I showed them a game of Heroes of Might & Magic 2 multiplayer that I was playing over the internet with a bunch of random roleplayers I met online: a Swedish DJ, a Thai chef, two British university students and me. They hadn't quite grasped the idea that the internet was global. They thought I was just dialing up to somewhere near the county seat and talking to locals.

So many old gaming memories I could bring up. Playing a Troll's Tale and walking in circles for hours because I was like 7 and didn't think to map it out, but it was so wondrous that I didn't give a shit. Connecting my first modem-to-modem Command & Conquer game with my friend Kim, and then sitting in a corner of the lunchroom the next day furiously debating the units we'd put in the RTS video game we were totally gonna make, with ourselves as units, of course. Becoming an admin on my first MUD, then writing my first areas and coding my first modules in C and then, later on, LPC.

UO on launch day. The innocence of it all, and the wonder.

I miss my Commodore 64. I still possess it but it needs repaired.

Up n' Down, Space Taxi (which still owns to this day), Jumpman, Impossible Mission, Boulder Dash, Pole Position, Law of the West, Qix, Racing Destruction Set, Radar Rat Race, Bruce Lee, PaperBoy, California Games, etc.

 :heart:

Wizards of Wor
Bounty Bob Strikes Back

Bike helmets are actually law in NYS now? Ye gods. After we moved into the country, the only way we got around was bikes. Most of my friends were about 7-10 miles away, so I pretty much rode a minimum of 14 miles a day, plus time spent riding between houses or out on trails doing jumps.

9600 baud? I remember being the hotness with a 1200bps modem that ran my BBS. Began as a skateboarding BBS but started selling Ultima 4 hints and made some decent dough doing that for a while. Hints I extracted from using a Fast Load cartridge in my C64 to hex edit the game.

To add to the C64 nostalgia, I liked Montezuma's Revenge. One of the few platformers I've enjoyed.

Internet says that the first NYS statewide bike helmet law was passed in 1994 and applied to riders 14 and under. That would've applied to me in the first year or two, but we rode without incident despite the law. By the time the Good Officer pulled us over, we were 17, though he would hear none of it.

I'd share some stories but I'd have to look up Statutes of Limitation first...

Commodore 64 was ok, but us Euro kids go the ZX Spectrum. Twas the bomb. Way nicer to program with and had a huge amount of games. Somehow far less fussy than the 64.

Some of us got both.  And then people wonder why I work in IT.

Amstrad CPC464 was the best!  :drill:

If I had to boil it down to one thing, I miss being able to see. I mean seriously, glasses suck. And being able to eat anything I liked wasn't bad either.

If you think glasses suck now, imaging having had to wear them since primary school.  No sympathy here.

Hours of playing Master of Magic. I probably put more time into that game than any other before or since.

Got my first pair in 2nd grade. Promptly broke them a week later taking a football to the face. Got another pair with spring loaded arms and 'unbreakable' frames...that were too big for my face. Luckily, I was raised in a polish family from Cleveland so our skin was as thick as buffalo hide.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't miss being able to see without glasses, because I can't remember it.  I got my first pair in 1st grade (with cool little sci-fi style rocket ships on the temples!) and still remember the wonder of being able to see leaves on trees without having to be too close to see the tree.  So I am grateful beyond words for the fact that I actually can see pretty darn well with glasses, and can still even read without them if I hold the book close enough. I used to also be able to read if I held the book far enough, but my arms have gotten too short, so I kinda miss that!  :why_so_serious:

I kind of miss the innocence of childhood - but the helplessness and extremely limited agency of childhood kinda sucked.  And the early bedtimes.

I miss the smell of the ocean mixed with eucalyptus on the breeze, from the year I lived in Sydney.  I've been moving farther and farther inland ever since.  I'm getting near the middle of the continent now so if I go too much farther I'll start getting nearer an ocean again!  But the continent being North America (and the direction I'm heading being toward the Arctic!) and I'm not in California, there's no eucalyptus either.

I miss the days when politics was dominated by sane and wise debate among statesmen instead of pandering, lying, self-enriching, corrupt politicians.  Like back in the days of Clinton Reagan Nixon George Wallace (I'm scarred by my childhood in Alabama) oh never mind.

I don't miss air pollution so thick I thought we were crashing in the desert when we were actually landing at LAX.   :ye_gods:  Or leaded gasoline for 25 cents a gallon but you could literally get lead poisoning from eating too many blackberries picked on the side of the highway.

I do miss movies without half an hour of ads at the beginning.

I miss the ability to eat a donut or pizza without getting sick for a week.

I miss being served an actual meal on an airplane, even if it did taste like cardboard.  I can't even get peanuts on an airplane now, everything is gluten.

I miss being able to understand and even repair most of the things under the hood of my car.  Now I don't even recognize what most of the lumps of metal and plastic in there are/do!

And my hair.  I definitely miss having hair on top of my head, and not in my nose, on the backs of my fingers and toes, etc.

I'm pretty sure politics was always this way, just the volume has been turned up a lot higher. That's for another thread though.

The gas thing reminds me of the last time I saw gas for less than $1/gallon. I remember where I was, what gas station I was at, and the time of day. It was 18 years ago. I just calculated that out and I felt kind of sad when I determined it was 18 years ago.

Chevron station on the corner of University and 19th street, December 18th, 1998.  I filled my Lincoln up with ~16 gallons for 14.00.  The absolute last time I saw gas anywhere for less than $1.00.  It was like $0.89/gallon then.  I remember thinking at the time that it was neat I was putting more gallons in than dollars as locally gas had been hovering between $1.09 and $1.19 for a good 6 months or so.

Yes! They were great fun to build and interchange and had a goofy story but was fun!