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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

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

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

[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?

[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.

get off my lawn

[kanemaker.livejournal.com]

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

[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."

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

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

[aiela.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

Local BBSes.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

There was a big freakout in my neck of the woods last Halloween where a bunch of concerned parent types wanted it cancelled altogether because of "how many kids were killed or injured last year."

The number for both was actually zero, mind you.

So yeah, I'd say the main thing I miss from my childhood is the comparative lack of pants-wetting, paranoid terror about largely nonexistent threats.

[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.

[eleri.livejournal.com]

This. When I was elementary school age, every May 1 we'd make little baskets at school, put flowers in them, and anonymously drop them off on doorsteps. No one would dream of doing that now... and what does that teach our kids about random acts of kindness?


And Halloween around our School-centered neighborhood was like going to the mall the week before Christmas, you needed 2 bags of candy, minimum, and most people just sat at their doors, because kids came in waves. Now, my parents have most of a bag of candy left over, and the school doesn't do a Halloween party anymore.

Nor does walking to the store 3 blocks away, kids wandering all over the neighborhood, etc.

[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

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Heh. At the age of five or six, I used to walk down the block and over to Dubiel's party store, which was situated on the Southfield freeway service drive. Mom would send me there to get her cigarettes. No question I'd be watching out for cars, no problem with the women who worked there selling me the smokes they knew could not possibly be for me.

A lot changed after the '67 riots. Over the next five years, a lot of stores that I used to bike to closed up, or replaced their windows with cinder blocks. It got pretty depressing. And they had to cut down all the trees on our street, because muggers hid behind them. (Garboo was mugged out in front of her own house.)

[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.