Get Offa My Lawn

[filkertom]

Every once in awhile, there has to be one of the really stupid articles out there, listing all the stuff that's obsolete now because technology has moved on.

You guys know I'm as much a nostalgia buff as anybody, and I've got books from when I was in single digits. But I'm always amused when someone publishes something like this as if it's A Vital Part Of Our Heritage that kids remember NCSA Mosaic or how the writer opened a Kit-Kat bar. I'm more amused when they say things like shortwave radio and printed magazines are becoming obsolete -- the entire world is not as well-wired as, well, Wired. And it's amazing how you forget that, the more sophisticated stuff is, the more spectacular and difficult-to-fix it is when it breaks. Whatever else it may do, a printed book or magazine won't crash.

What do you really miss from your childhood, that you're worried future generations will never enjoy in the same way you did? I think kite-flying can be pretty cool. I miss watching Sir Graves Ghastly on Saturdays -- nowadays he would be considered high camp at absolute best, and it's not like I thought he was a real vampire or anything, but that kinda shtick simply won't fly these days, except as comedy. (Yeah, I know, it was, but still. You know what I mean.) And I actually enjoy fishing -- well, not the fishing part, but the sitting on the pier with a cold Pepsi and listening to the water lap and watching things go by part.

Comments

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

It really bothers me how few kids actually go trick-or-treating nowadays. And the ones who do are often supposed to be home by dark. Or the town tries to "schedule" it for a weekend night rather than the actual date.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

There's also "controlled location" trick-or-treating.

("Come down to the commercial district, and get stuff from the local merchants!")

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

What do you really miss from your childhood, that you're worried future generations will never enjoy in the same way you did?

Wilderness.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Lots of wilderness still here in Texas.

In fact, quite a few towns are shrinking or withering away, and the wilderness is reclaiming its own.

[bronzite.livejournal.com]

My favorite?

When I was your age, we could fly from New York to London in 3 hours. Can't do that anymore.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

I'll miss the space shuttle.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Mm, not me. The space shuttle was a bloody bad idea almost from the inception. I'm glad that the Ares rockets take on board the single most important lesson from the shuttle: never put the crew compartment anyplace else other than the top of the stack.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

My kid still plays with my 20 year old NES, so she's fully aware of the "blowing out the dust"

She noticed that Super Mario 3 was available for download on the Wii, and she's like "Why? We have it already in the other room!"

Muah. :)

[a-steep-hill.livejournal.com]

What future generations will not enjoy in the same way we did?

1) Readily available, cheap and abundant energy.
2) Adequate food supplies.

#2 is a fear. #1 is a certainty. #1 will tend to imply #2 unless we get real smart, real fast.

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

Add 3) Abundant clean fresh water. Already a memory in too many parts of the world.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

My childhood years are subject to a whole lot of nostalgia kitch. Frankly, I could use to have more of it stay only a memory.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

Trusting the news on television to be news, and not having to un-spin or fact-check it.

SchoolHouse Rock.

Saturday morning cartoon station breaks.

"The thrill of victory...and the agony of defeat."

The freedom to spend a summer day going anywhere, as long as I got back in time for dinner.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

Thanks to the DVDs, lots of today's kids are enjoying the heck out of Schoolhouse Rock.

[blake-reitz.livejournal.com]

What I like about lists like these (and this list in particular) are the technologies or cultural artifacts that have lasted MAYBE a whole generation. VCR's had a good 20 run, but MiniDisc? Really?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Really. Most people didn't know what a minidisc was, even when it was at its peak. It was mostly reserved for people recording live shows.

[briansiano.livejournal.com]

Littering
Going trick or treating WITHOUT the parents or curfews
Mischief Night
Polish cannons
Polish Jokes
Going someplace without a cell phone
Saturday morning cartoon lineups
Pulling in very remote TV signals on the UHF band
Watching obscure cult movies-- projected from a 16mm print onto a bedsheet.
Revival cinemas, like Philadelphia's old TLA.
Wacky Packs and Mad Magazine
Utopian expectations for the future
Buying things without having to take into account my carbon footprint
Getting into R-rated movies
Using ball-bearings to play Beatles albums backward
The possibility that the Beatles might get back together
Being the only person around who knew about Philip K. Dick.
Watching fantasy and SF films and working out how the special effects were done.

[briansiano.livejournal.com]

Oh, and "being able to regard religious TV shows as silly, idiotic, poorly-made cheap garbage for white trash rural fuckheads" instead of "the main information source for the most powerful bloc of voters in a major political party."

get off my lawn

[kanemaker.livejournal.com]

shortwave radio is alive and well,just that they call it world band radio these days.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, we had NINE planets.. and we liked it just fine.

[devospice.livejournal.com]

My kids will never miss it but I sure as hell miss Saturday morning cartoons. Remember when Saturday mornings were filled with good shows? On all the channels? And you had to pick and choose which ones you were going to watch? TRY finding any cartoons on Saturday morning these days (at least on the major networks). They are few and far between and the ones that are there are either geared towards the really little kids, or just suck.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhhh yeah. Remember the preview shows they had in freakin' prime time, to tell you about what was gonna be on Saturday morning? It mattered, man.

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

Local BBSes.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Muppets.

That's the only thing. I didn't have abusive parents, but I had no money, no privacy, no real ability to make decisions. The TV was horrible. School was a series of pointless, useless tasks one after another, moderated only by extracurricular activities. And, above all, I had little in common with my age group at school- hated hunting, hated fishing, was no good whatever at athletics, was practically the only pleasure-reader in the whole district.

Oh, I loved kite-flying... but I lived (and live) in dense forest with a distinct lack of clearings suitable for flying said kites.

And having no money to speak of, everything I had (if I had it) was obsolete. I was still playing the Atari 2600 up to about, oh, 1989 because of lack of money for Nintendo. I played both Atari and Nintendo on a tiny black-and-white TV. I never bought a CD until after my one year of college- and I took my Commodore 64 to college, by the way, with a golf tee stuck in the hole where the broken I key used to be.

Right now, about the only dying tech I lament is Usenet- essentially, a decentralized message board system. LJ, Facebook and MySpace just aren't the same- they're much more, well, narcissistic than groups based on common interests instead of identity.

And I first found Usenet in 1994- when I was twenty.

[zellion.livejournal.com]

I do miss my late night IRC chat sessions with the folks in #drwhochat. Despite the fact that the cleveland PBS station played old Dr. Who eps for YEARS, I was apparently the only one in y small town who watched it. Then I found the internet and there were other fans!

They stopped running Dr. Who when I was about 12 or so and I went through sci-fi withdrawl until a friend of the family suggested I try this Star Trek thing. And the rest is history.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

Cheap comic books
Skill awards in the Boy Scouts that you could slip on your belt
SSI AD&D 8-bit computer games
Video arcades
Ad-free Mad Magazines
Mix tapes

[sdelmonte]

With you on the cheap comics.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

Muppets
A-team (and other cheesy TV shows when no one got hurt no matter what kind of violence was happening)
Intellivision with their voice box
Making your own home page without "cheats" like Dreamweave, Frontpage, MySpace, etc

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio bork this concept.)

I do that all the time now while I'm trying to find a clear station for my iPod-Radio adapter.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

Also, we were lucky growing up in Detroit, cause we got 4 TV channels, before UHF came along (Thanks, Canada)

And even we got more channels, you had to watch a show when it aired, period or maybe wait till summer for reruns.

When AM radio was it. FM was something alien.

Things you can't do anymore:

When I was eight. On numerous Saturday afternoons, my Dad drove me and my buddy Denny down the Woods Theater on Mack Ave in Grosse Point, handed me $5 and dropped us off. We bought our tickets, popcorn and Coke, watched the movie ("Fantastic Voyage") and then picked us up outside the theater when it was over. You do that today and the cops would be waiting for you.

Heck, my first Con, was Starcon, downtown Detroit. I was twelve. My buddy Kevin's older brother (older.. he was 16) take the two of us to the con and he pretty much let us loose and collected us later. We spent all day and into the night at Cobo Hall, two 12 year olds on our own.

[zellion.livejournal.com]

My first con my 7th grade English teacher took me too. Heck *that* would probably be a big no-no today as well =/

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

My kids will never know a world without dozens of computers around the house. Me, my first computer was archaic, and cost as much as my quad-core beast decked out to the max did today.

What do I miss the most? Radio stations that played the music the DJ's chose and not what some corporate office in Atlanta chose because the label paid them for airplay. When I was growing up you could listen to the radio station and hear a new record, then rush out to the mall and get a copy. Back then the radio scene gave us Led Zeppelin, ZZtop, Styx, Genesis, Yes and other bands that even today's kids rock out to. But today's radio won't play good music by bands like the Samples because the independents can't pay their way to airtime. Instead, we have a self-filling garbage heap where crap-artists and Brittany Spears get lots of airplay, which pushes their numbers on the charts, which means more albums through the years, lather rinse and repeat.

I miss being able to listen to the king biscuit flour hour and hear some music I never heard before instead of the same 20 songs the radio station has been playing for the last year and a half.

[jjfmi.livejournal.com]

I miss the thrill of buying a new record - as in the vinyl variety. We had Korvette's not far from our house, and I'm old enough to remember them having $3.99 albums. In honesty, I don't always miss the sound quality (as it seemed like anyone other than myself who even looked at my albums the wrong way caused scratches or static), but I miss the cool (and larger) artwork - as well as the goodies that came in some of them (think 1970-74 Elton John albums with their magnificent gatefold covers with lyrics, posters, and such).

On the other hand, digital downloads are causing the resurgence of something from my youth - the single. :-)

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

Korvette's! Grew up in NE MD and still recall Korvette's very fondly. :)

Even at those prices, I couldn't afford that many albums: my family was not exactly "poor", but def lower-middle class with a very small budget for luxury items. Then I went to college which made it worse. Mind you, that lack then made it far easier for me to jump to the CD format in 1983 -- I never had the "gee, but I already have this on vinyl" problem that so many of my contemporaries had. :P

But yeah, if I'd never bought "albums" [be they black or silver], I would never have discovered so many of my favorite songs that weren't The Hit Single...

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Horror movie show hosts on local channels. Vampira birthed a thousand copies, not the least of which was Elvira, and a hillarious facet of television history was struck. Don't see those anymore, and I call it a shame.

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

Oh man...this so hard! I grew up with Bob Wilkins' Creature Features (http://www.uhfnocturne.com/KTVU_CreatureFeatures.html).

See also, Dialing for Dollars (http://www.uhfnocturne.com/KTVU_DialingForDollars.html) and LaBrie's Night Comfort Theatre with your host Tom LaBrie (http://www.uhfnocturne.com/KTXL_NightComfortTheater.html)

[jeffr23.livejournal.com]

Model Rocketry. (I seem to recall that things are getting a little better right now on that front, but I can't help but think the trend is in the other direction long-term.)

Text Adventures

Home Computers that came with a programming language, standard.

Peanut Butter Sandwiches at school.

Fidonet.

Fiction, set in the present day, that uses any of the many plots and plot devices derailed by cell phones.

Sunday comics of a reasonable size and quantity.

Coca-Cola with real sugar (Available in some places and times still, sure, but not such that tomorrow's kids are going to see much.)

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

Jones cola is made with cane sugar. More expensive but it's sssoooo tasty. :)

Just to let you know.

[yaspis.livejournal.com]

I see fewer and fewer kids playing around the neighborhood; sure, they are allowed supervised play and hobbies in their or their friends' yards or out on playdates and organised outings in the specified kiddie playgrounds permanently overseen by the Mom Brigade. I remember running and riding my bike and ski's all over the town, playing in rundown houses and the most wonderful overgrown savage gardens, scaling rocks and collecting frogs and building huts and treehouses and raising all sorts of hell and having a freaking blast, and that wasn't even twenty years ago. These days, it seems everything must be educational, shop manufactured, supervised and scheduled - I pity the kids of today because it seems to me they aren't allowed to be just kids, to skin their knees and steal apples from the grouchy old bastard down the road, not allowed to find and make their own fun and bear the consequences of fucking up and getting caught (which I, for one, find far more educational than any plastic piece of crap from Fisher-Price)...

Also, no one makes or flies kites anymore here. This sucks. Summer days used to be full of squealing and squabbling over the best spots and the skies dotted with all sorts of kites... I miss sitting on the balcony, wagering ice-creams with my friends over which kid fell into the bush of nettles while walking backwards to a better spot their eyes on the kite. :)

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

Books.
No doubt I will think of other things, but that's the biggie.