Get Off My Lawn!!!

[andrewducker]

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning ... Uphill ...barefoot ...BOTH ways...IN THE SNOW... Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn utopia!

And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves! In the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter, with a pen! ...Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or iPods! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

Stolen from drjon

Comments

[alcippe.livejournal.com]

Lol, all very true!

But we got fresh air and we weren't obese; our mothers let us ride our bikes clear across town with no supervision! Me and the neighborhood kids roamed and went on adventures, and used our imaginations and dreamed big dreams. I loved being a kid back then.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Of course on the flip side:-

They will never have an England football friendly or qulifying match scheduled and KNOW it will be broadcast on TV for free. Nor will they ever be able to watch Division 1 football on BBC1 or the England Cricket team lose horribly and with regularity on BBC2.

They will never know the genius of Knightmare before tea and then Gamesmaster shortly afterward to get your weekly dose of Dominic Diamond's sarcastic put downs.

They will never have typed 10 Print "Hello"; 20 Goto 10 followed by Run and felt like a computer programmer. They will never know their peeks and pokes from their gosubs and returns.

They will never have watched the emergence of computers and consoles, the frustration of Dizzy, the puzzles of Zelda, the competition of Street Fighter 2 or the joy of taking Brutal Deluxe to champions of Speedball 2. Nor will they have gone to an arcade machine with 10 and 20 pence pieces and been able to play for hours with a couple of quid.

They will never watch The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Dungeons and Dragons, Danger Mouse, The Pink Panther or Jason and the Wheeled Warriors.

They will never be able to copy music and not be told by the RIAA that you are a criminal at a young age and try to sue you for $30,000 a track. They will never have a medium where the film they want to watch, legitimately owned, allows them to skip past advertising and anti-piracy commercials.


They missed out on so much culture that we take for granted and will always give technology a context and a solid base and we are better for it.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

They will never know their peeks and pokes from their gosubs and returns.

They will never have got completely stuck in a game and had to wait a month for a magazine to publish some hints or perhaps even a POKE to obtain invincibility or infinite lives. Ah happy days!

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

God, I loved Dizzy! I spent hours in front of my Amstrad CPC464 trying to beat those games. Or recreate them by typing in 6000 lines of code. Usually to find that a semi-colon was in the wrong place and the damned thing wouldn't run. *lol*

They'll never watch the Adventure Game either...

Re: Dear Over 30 Crowd

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Ah... Input Magazine, how I miss you so...

The Adventure Game. Yes. And The Interceptor. And Treasure Hunt back when it was good. Games shows are so unimaginative these days.

Re: Dear Over 30 Crowd

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

The Equaliser was also top TV drama back in those days. Edward Woodward was the epitomy of menace.

Re: Dear Over 30 Crowd

[chuma.livejournal.com]

And Comedy. Alexi Sayle, Bottom, Red Dwarf, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Spitting Image, In Bed with Me Dinner, Inside Victor Lewis Smith, Sean's Show, The Fast Show... Okay we also had Hale and Pace, but no era is perfect!

Re: Dear Over 30 Crowd

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

*lol*

Unfortunately didn't we also have The Chuckle Brothers? ;)

Re: Dear Over 30 Crowd

[chuma.livejournal.com]

I prefer to think of that as torturing small children.

You mean that doesn't make me a programmer?

[intemporaliter.livejournal.com]

"They will never have typed 10 Print "Hello"; 20 Goto 10 followed by Run and felt like a computer programmer."

It's years since I thought about that...

Re: You mean that doesn't make me a programmer?

[alpha-c3ntaur.livejournal.com]

Yes, then once you had improved your programming skills you could make the ext appear in different colours (and you were then a programming God, in your on head anyway). Remember the ZX that had the buttons that did the commands for you and the games in the magazines THAT NEVER WORKED.

Ahh them were the days *sigh*

[e-halmac.livejournal.com]

I had never actaully considered any of the above, but now I have, I think I may have to join the Club (two years early).

Dear Over 30 Crowd

[accordingly.livejournal.com]

You're just jealous that you didn't have all this cool shit when you were young too.

Regards,
People Born In The Late 1980s

Re: Dear Over 30 Crowd

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Sorry? What's that? I didn't hear you over my Commodore 64 and my ZX Spectrum +

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

It's so true. *lol*

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

I was thinking this doesn't just apply to the over 30's.... It also applied to the mid 20 somethings as well...

I hated and yet played a frustrating game like Spacewar where you control this erratic space ship that has to shoot asteorids and things or die. I died alot.

Also, Drakkhen.

Although, I tried to watch Nightmare a few months ago, I believe it can be found on Sky TV (and what else do people do then they visit family) and OMG it was SO SLOW!

Also - I cannot delete MP3s, I have the mentality that 4MBs take AT LEAST an hour to download and thus something requiring that much time should be protected and savoured.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

"Although, I tried to watch Nightmare a few months ago, I believe it can be found on Sky TV (and what else do people do then they visit family) and OMG it was SO SLOW!"

Yes but these days the kids get to watch 'Raven'... poor sods.

[alpha-c3ntaur.livejournal.com]

Oi don't knock the old games they rocked... Infact I'm now away to boot up my atari emulater and play asteroids.

Regards,

The not quite thirty crowd