things you remember from your childhood that zoomers will not get to have

I recall using a typewriter. it was an electric one with a backspace feature but still
Someone gave me a typewriter in 2nd grade or so, telling me that I'll need it for college. I learned to type on it, writing whatever a 2nd grader would write. A year later, I got my first computer as a hand-me-down from a local school that upgraded their computer lab. Good stuff.

I was just talking to someone the other day about this. I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to have unmonitored, unlimited internet access as a kid, while still being poor. I had a best online friend for years. I mention being poor because we had to use a prepaid phone card to call out (landline, no cells yet), and chatting over mic online wasn't really a thing yet. My online friend's parents had $$$ though. Which means they could call me with their parents unlimited long-distance phone plan. Awww yeah.
 
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My parents practically screamed at me when I made exactly one post on Nick.com when I was 10. I told them how strict the site was about people's ages. It didn't allow anyone over 18 and reviewed every post before it could go public. Now that I think about it, that age limit was kinda suspicious.

Managed to negotiate my way into playing Runescape. The rules were turning chat off and not burying bones or using the prayer spells. All other magic was fine, they just didn't like the idea of interacting with a made up religion in video games.
 
Snail mail correspondence. Like if I met someone cool on summer vacation in another state and we wanted to keep in touch we would exchange addresses and send each other mail. It was so exciting wait for the mail to come to see if you got a new letter.

Now people can just exchange numbers and text or follow each other on social media. In theory this should make keeping in touch easier, but I dunno, something about it feels less personal and creative.

I'm sure some people are keeping the traditional alive, but I don't think trading a physical mixtape is as big as it used to be, people mostly just exchange playlists, which again, doesn't feel as personal.
 
New music discovery via MTV. You watched videos. You went to record stores and purchased albums based on the videos you liked. Being on MTV meant your band hit the big time. You might even get your own Rockumentary with an accompanying video block. You might get to host an hour of music videos. The more exposure you got the more people learned who you were and bought your album. MTV made you a household name and made your face known.

I was way more tolerant of genres I wasn't in to because MTV would have designated genre blocks in addition to mixed genre blocks. These blocks might turn you on to music you may not normally listen to. You watched it when you were bored. You used it as background noise and you learned about new music without even realising it.

I think one of the reasons zoomers have such bad one note taste is that they are not really exposed to the potpourri style mixes. The rap and pop they listen to is bottom rung trash and they just don't know any better. They have no guitar heroes like people of my generation did. So we see fewer young people wanting to be the next Eddie Van Halen. But they do want to be the next low effort SoundCloud rapper no one will remember five years from now (and who will probably get shot anyway).
 
Ok, here's something many kids in more rural areas who recently moved into urban areas would know. Kids then when walking outside don't have to worry about strangers morally corrupted by porn and lolicon wanting to (or struggling not to) violate them. I know that is only true for some areas in the past and for others, it was always an issue. However as more people are moving into urban areas and even suburban areas are getting dangerous. This is something that had to be said.

Yes, many people who have been exposed to Porn and Lolicon have been open to their brains tempting to perceive children and many other things as sex objects and are afraid to be around them because of it. Others are so morally corrupted that they don't even care and would rig the country's legal system to enforce political correctness banning discussion on it so they can continue raping children.
 
I recall using a typewriter. it was an electric one with a backspace feature but still
I think they used to call those, "word processors".

On a related note, I miss how there used to be no real distinction between older media and newer media. When I was a kid and watching the Adam West Batman, I had no concept that it was a show made decades before I was born, or that Chronicles of Narnia was from the 1950s. It was just another show, another book. Cartoons with that UPA art style were just a different kind of cartoon.
Same. My mother would play these tapes full of cartoons for me when I was 3-6. It was all old cartoons of Donald Duck, chip and dale, mickey, goofy, etc. At the time, I thought they were all current year, modern cartoons that just came out. I had no idea some of them were made in the 1940s and that the "newest" ones were at least 45 years old.
 
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I think they used to call those, "word processors".
They had some 'normal typewriters' with a fancy ribbon which could pick the previous character back up off the page.

I didn't have one of those, so backspace just went back one space so you could X out the character. Type it again to make it bold or underline manually or use these fancy whiteout strips that would just white-out the character you typed.
 
I think they used to call those, "word processors".


Same. My mother would play these tapes full of cartoons for me when I was 3-6. It was all old cartoons of Donald Duck, chip and dale, mickey, goofy, etc. At the time, I thought they were all current year, modern cartoons that just came out. I had no idea some of them were made in the 1940s and that the "newest" ones were at least 45 years old.
Oh my goodness, we had a couple of those. I thought I had imagined or mis-remembered it because it's a long time ago now. Some of them were really dark and messed up. I can remember one of the tapes being what felt like hours long, but maybe that's just because of how your perception of time is skewed as a child?

Also: Going to the library to complete an assignment for school and having to look up not only the required information in books, but the necessary books in the index card stack, using the Dewey Decimal System.
 
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Man, that guy was so rude. He was a gamer with a bad attitude. And he played the worst games you ever did see.

My parents practically screamed at me when I made exactly one post on Nick.com when I was 10. I told them how strict the site was about people's ages. It didn't allow anyone over 18 and reviewed every post before it could go public. Now that I think about it, that age limit was kinda suspicious.
Gonna add.... I miss when not everything automatically screamed "pedophile" and a cigar could just be a cigar.

.... Sorry if this has already been said, but I also miss when, if you wanted something, you had to either find it at a store, have it special ordered for you, or buy it from a catalog. I've recently come around to thinking that having any and all media literally at my fingertips (note that I'm including less-than-legal means in that) isn't a good thing.

Back then, the feeling was: "this store has that video game I've been looking for! YES!" Then I'd take it home and play it for weeks. Nowadays the experience is you buy (or otherwise acquire) 100 games at a time, don't even know what you have, and most of them just sit rotting on a hard drive or in an account somewhere, never even turned on except maybe once.

The only thing close to this nowadays is when you find a rare vintage game at a flea market that some old lady is selling for only ten bucks because she doesn't know its real value. Not a common experience, but maybe its for the best that it doesn't happen so often.
 
When i was a kid, i hung around the neighborhood boys because they were more fun and did cooler shit. There were a few other tomboys that added to the mix but we used to be able to have actual fun outside. Im talking adventures bordering on autism quests. Two deeply rooted memories are when we hopped the fence running from a neighbor's dog and i ripped my windbreaker pants and cut myself and bruising my ass/tailbone falling on a solid wooden plank trying to surf down a hill in my backyard.

I miss exploring without having someone ring you every second to see where you are. Kids will never understand the fun of exploring open drainage ditches with friends. Catching bugs and frogs just because, and my most missed--

THE NEIGHBORHOOD CANDY LADY.

I grew up in a respectful and respectable middle class black neighborhood where everything looked nice and well kept. Even by renters. I miss the self respect people had for themselves and others. I wouldnt have to look at shitty yards with shitbulls barking at anything that moved. My grandmother's neighborhood used to be great and same for my neighborhood now. Now im hesitant working outside after sunset and for my grandmother working past the same time.

Time does a number on us all, friends. The security of knowing your neighbors and relying on them. Mostly gone.
 
Getting in physical fights with your sibling over the one computer in the household (with dial-up internet) b/c they want to play solitaire and are too retarded to learn how to do it with a deck of cards.

Having to delete hundreds of nearly identical selfies off the one digital camera in the family any time you wanted to take pics of your art/toys/etc.
 
Buying nigger brown boot polish:
niggerbrownshoepolish.jpg
OK, I'm not that old. But I guarantee zoomers won't get to have this.
 
Blind cruelty and honest playfulness, insouciance.

Anything goes, whether it's words or fists, and there is nobody to cry to who will listen if you're being a pussy.

  • Funny jokes are funny, unfunny ones just make you look retarded. They don't ruin your character to thousands of people.
  • Same with behaving like a tard when drunk, or on social medias.
  • You can say to people what you think, what you believe in when it comes to basic facts without fear of unreasonable and over the top repercussion
  • You can beat up the black kid attacking you without everybody calling you a racist. Or make fun of him when he insults you in what barely qualifies as English.
  • You can mock freaks when they inevitably behave like freaks.
I am sure I could find others examples, but what it boils down to is that zoomers will not get to know what it is to live in a world where the tyranny of the righteous is not prevalent. No matter how delusional this righteousness might be.

We live in a world where disagreeing with anything will lead to some insane gaslighting like : Why are you against X degens being happy? Why do you hate them so much? And that's not even considering the social media aspect of it. Young people partake in it, because that's the new blood drawing sacrifice everyone can agree is humane and acceptable. No matter the way you want to look at it, people love to smell blood on the water, especially teens, and they will jump in at any occasion if somehow they feel they have a greenlight. I mean, look at us, I think we all get this.

In a way, I feel very concerned about this. Because I know that it would be difficult for me to prevent my child from falling for these fallacies and easy gratification patterns. They would just hate me for it and become some trans rapist or something (I know, pleonasm).
 
Zoomers will also not remember a time being healthy enough to not sleep like a rape victim for 24 hours.
 
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