chapotraphouse

40-something here: I hope to live to see the day I am hanged for being cringe and not based.

Not old enough to fit in with the oldheads, not young enough to fit in with the zoomers. This is my burden to bear

• i used to have like 6 or 7 phone numbers memorized, besides the house line.
• i remember when we got the caller ID box, i thought it was like being in the CIA to know who is calling.
• "Get off the computer, I need to use the phone!"
• blockbuster was a big deal movie night, but we also had impulse grocery store rental nights. i used to love looking at the VHS tape boxes, the artwork etc. especially horror/sci fi. i was the youngest, so nobody gave a shit what i wanted to watch and if they did, no one ever wanted to watch what i wanted to watch, which was entirely based on box cover art.

Walking into a hexbear meetup only to find out all these power posters are actually 20 years older than me

late 90s kids (youngest millennials/oldest zoomers) where u at

I watched the first moon landing live in college.

not 40 yet but they taught us how to use the dewey decimal system and played oregon trail on apple IIe computers with floppy disks so waddup

I'm not quite 40, but I am definitely well over 40 in spirit lol

 How do you do, fellow Gen-Xers and X-ennials? Which Seattle grunge band's vinyl albums are you spinning on this lovely day while decked out in your finest flannels? I am partial to Stone Temple Pilots' Core, particularly side B track 4, "man"

I remember rotary phones.

Going to the video store was a nice little weekly ritual. It's objectively more convenient to have streaming services pumping everything into our eyeballs instantly, but the extra friction of a trip out and the slight chance that something might not be available made the movies and games themselves seem more valuable. Oh god I just read back through that and spontaneously dislocated my hip

Yeah go ahead and add me to the list of leftists bound for the glue factory

Adding to the nostalgia pile BECAUSE memory unlocked: used to be obsessed with talking on the phone in middle school. The LANDLINE phone. 3 way calling the homies to watch old Van Damme movies and Iron Chef and prank call people. I'd be on the phone for like 4 hours at a time. 10pm was the cut off but you bet your ass I snuck the corded phone into my bedroom...then my dad would wake up to go to the bathroom and see the phone cable trailing into my bedroom. Never got grounded buy boy did I get a talkin' to.

I'm just glad there's a group of people older than me. I'll be there in a few years, but it's nice to know I'm not the oldest weirdo here.

i remeber the time when you would just show up at the door of your friends home unannounced and if he wasnt there you would just go to the next and when he was there you would just go with him picking up the next...

and then once one of these friends got a console , he became the homebase.


Y'all remember Yakov Smirnoff? I remember watching one of his specials as a kid and they went to his hometown or something with a camera crew and the place they showed could've been down the street from where I was living. They were treating it like a charity fundraising expedition. For just a dollar day type shit. It was very weird to me.

If you haven’t been through Checkpoint Charlie and shopped at GUM, you’re not really an oldhead.

Here are few old guy memories from the 80s:

My first computer was a Commodore 64, in 1985. I had no interest in learning computing - I just wanted to play games.

The rich kid up the street had a BMX I was in awe of. It was a Haro. I had a Huffy from a discount store.

I think back about how shockingly everything was seemingly it's own component. Like phones or hi-fi stereos or TVs and VCRs. You had a device and it did one thing.

Sears reigned supreme for weekend trips to the mall. We didn't have money so it was a lot of window shopping. Related: I remember when department stores had full out restaurants inside of them. When my mom felt like being fancy she'd eat at one.

For a while in the 80s there was a push to buy American made shit. As if consumer spending could ward off the capitalists off-shoring literally everything.

In school they taught us Russia was bad but never explained why. Like, ever. Teachers would just espouse that the communists wanted to "kill our way of life."

Schools opened at sun up and latch key kids would come and go as they please, outside of core hours. Someone would open the ball shed and everyone would just play soccer or kickball.

Parents seemed to just have kids out of obligation. Some 'rents seemed happy to be involved. But most seemed to just being going through the motions.

Being poor, the next best thing to having something was having a magazine about something. I was a fan of Thrasher and Video Games & Computer Entertainment.

I would be in but I'm worried that a reminiscing club is a bit too boomer energy.

Video rental stores were great. Recording songs off the radio onto cassette tapes. Trading PC games on 5 1/4 floppies. Dot matrix printers