Things I Miss (AKA the Old Fart Thread)

[Signe]

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.

[Nebu]

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



And jumping Tonka trucks with....

[Numtini]

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

[Sky]

We're going there, Nebu? Okeedoke!

[01101010]

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.

[Ironwood]

Aye Dark Tower was fucking awesome.

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

[Lantyssa]

That's the Mako...

[Khaldun]

Micronauts, man. Micronauts.

 

[Krakrok]

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

[Falconeer]

Sky! I was going to post Dark Tower myself!

[01101010]

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

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. 

[Yoru]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Shannow]

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

 Impossible Mission, Boulder Dash, Pole Position, , Radar Rat Race, , PaperBoy, California Games, etc.

 

Wizards of Wor
Bounty Bob Strikes Back

[Sky]

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.

[Yoru]

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.

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.

[Sky]

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

[Engels]

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.

[Ironwood]

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

[satael]

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.

Amstrad CPC464 was the best! 

[Baldrake]

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.

[Merusk]

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

[Mithas]

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

[01101010]

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

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. 

[Count Nerfedalot]

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! 

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.     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.

[Mithas]

I miss the days when politics was dominated by sane and wise debate among statesmen instead of pandering, lying, self-enriching, corrupt politicians. 

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.

[Selby]

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.

[Jimbo]

Micronauts, man. Micronauts.

 

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