Not having all the silly teenager / young adult bits of their lives documented in videos for all to see.
I said/did/wrote (in my personal journal) so much cringe shit as a teen. I am GLAD it’s not out there on permanent record. I got my Facebook account when I was like 17. Well after all the other kids my age did (I’m 31 now). I stopped using it by 23. I usually just made witty quips about life in general on Facebook, never aired my dirty laundry or spilled my guts or called a girl a bitch for not wanting to go out with me. I did go through a tough breakup during this time in my life, but the most I ever did was quote Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You.”
Facebook being problematic for kids is nothing new, but now many adults are intimately aware of how bad it is because we were those kids.
I really feel for kids these days.
Back in the day personal blogs were pretty popular. Most of my friends had one, and we pretty much all treated it like a personal journal. So we aired our dirty laundry, for all to see, and it’s still in the internet archive to cringe at there too. We were blogger people, but LiveJournal was hugely popular for the same purpose.
Don’t forget about DeadJournal for the emo/edgy kids!
Doing stuff with friends, undocumented.
It’s really a bad time to be young and stupid.
So a bad time to be young
If you survive, it does make for some good stories
Bugs hitting the front windshield in extraordinary numbers.
This is a sad one once you notice it. The outdoors feel emptier
Fireflies/Lightning bugs. I remember there were so many in backyards in the summer, even in the suburbs.
Then they just kinda went away. Feel like I’m lucky if I even see a few a year.
what happened to the bugs?
It’s two things, one personal vehicles are designed to bend air around them rather than slice through or just brute force through air resistance. This means that more bugs are pushed out of the way with newer vehicles now, compared to older vehicles which just had the bug hit the windshield. The second and much more impactful reason is because the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
Why has that happened?
Accelerating climate change and an increase in consumer car culture (more cars on road to kill bugs = less bugs)
Pesticides
Pesticides
Climate change
Less flowers
fluid dynamics simulated on computers helped air-bending, that’s cool. i knew about the bees disappearing, but bugs in general too?
Unfortunately yes. This story by NPR isn’t an academic source but it’s definitely worth listening to. On average bug populations have declined by 2% a year for decades or more in some areas, less in others. It’s an average.
Now truthfully, whether or not a declining bug population is the main cause of fewer bugs on our windshields or if it’s better aerodynamics I don’t know. What I do know is a more aerodynamic vehicle isn’t something I need to worry about, a declining bug population is.
we need our bugs! although I was never convinced in that all insectizoid parasites are necessary, like any that affect Me, or Me-Kind
Bees are just cute. Its insects in general, and all are important. I mean insecticides, fungicides and herbicides are there for a reason.
Our soil is completely dead often, without animals, fungi and herbs. And so is the ecosystem
We managed to kill off a third of the entire bug population during the last 25 years or so.
Car design change? I’d assume that more aerodynamic cars airflow that sweeps more bugs away rather than smacking them into the glass. I can assure you that they still hit motorcycle visors.
I mean, I see way less bugs when outside even a decade ago.
Not all, but most don’t seem to have adventures. When I was a kid I’d go off into the woods and build a den or climb a tree, we once spent a whole week trying to dam a stream, god knows why. None of my friends kids go anywhere by themselves, a lot of them do ‘forest school’ where they’ll be taken by adults to a sanitised woodland and taught how to build a teepee with pre cut wood, and it’s just not the same thing.
A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.
The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you’re in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren’t in a kid’s head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent’s. The safety risks are high. Always were, that’s not new. But the legal risks are new.
And yeah, it’s not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn’t happen back in, say, my dad’s childhood. But I’d wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they’re old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren’t.
Woods aren’t often ‘owned’ here.
I never see kids playing outside. There are parks, fields, forests around where I live.
Over time I learned there are actually kids living in my apartment building but I have no clue what they do all day. It’s kind of depressing.
A building down the street from where I live has like 3 families with kids renting and they are always outside in a big gaggle. Like is the weather close to halfway decent? They are out.
I think because their parents are never around supervising them. But that’s about the only place with obvious kids. There must be more, but I have no idea where.
That’s a good point, latch key kids is what we were
The town I live in renovated a park to have a gigantic playground, and every nice weekend day I’ve been there there’s tons of kids and parents there. On Halloween there were tons of kids out despite it being around 0F out that night. But random weeknights? I don’t see kids playing in yards much. I don’t see kids riding their bikes to convenience stores to get snacks. I think the risk acceptance of parents has shifted a lot plus kids are more able to occupy themselves with fondleslabs so they have multiple reasons to not go outside
Playgrounds are fenced off and parents constantly stay within 2 steps of their helmet wearing kids here in Czech Republic. When those kids are older than toddler age, they disappear from public life.
It’s not like that in my home country where maybe they just sit around playing with their phones, but at least they’re outside with friends.
the world is much less welcoming to broke kids
“fondleslabs” nice.
Same. There are a few kids in my road that will play directly outside their houses, but when I say ‘kids’, definitely 12+. One kid about 15 sets up skateboard ramps and does jumps which I love to see, but actual kids? Never see them without their parents. Kids are taken to school into their teens, I’d have been mortified if my parents came to school past like 9 or 10.
I read an article recently about kids not spending much time outdoors anymore. One of the main reasons not mentioned here seems to be that the majority has nice rooms for themselves at home, and they enjoy the time they spend there.
Kids rooms are a lot nicer nowadays, and often they don’t need to share it with a sibling as they might have 30 years ago. Also the amount of toys has risen, I suppose.
Not that this is entirely a good thing. Children need to spend more time outdoors. But let them enjoy their indoor time if they want to.
I’d be so scared to let a kid do that now. Barbed wire is everywhere, everyone wants to brandish a gun at strangers, and truck drivers can’t even see pedestrians anymore.
I don’t have kids though, because I couldn’t force a kid to hide indoors all day, either.
We used to scramble over barbed wire fences like it was nothing. My dad actually speared his leg on a fence spike as a kid, at least barbed wire just cuts you up a bit. None of our parents had any idea we were doing that though, we’d come home if we needed a plaster and say we fell off a bike or something.
Or more likely, they knew nut didn’t care, because they did all the same tbings.
Nah, we definitely got in trouble if they found out we were doing stupid shit.
If we were inside before dark the assumption was we were ill
Haha, yes. “What are you doing here?” the parents ask of the child in their own house where they live.
sometimes it was, “don’t knock on the bedroom door unless the house is afire”
Setting up your computer before you go to bed to download a demo for a game that’s… 20 MB large! Waking up in the morning to inevitably discover the download failed part way through.
I remember using a program called Go!Zilla to accellerate and manage my downloads, you could even pause downloads!
Remember download managers?
Getright was my choice for years, until it decided to scrap an entire 600MB iso I had downloaded over 56k, and start over. Getright pissing me off was thebmain reason why I got pretty good at perl 25 years ago - I decided to write my own download manager.
Sounds like a villain origin story
I’m not denying anything
Where my download accelerator plus gang at
Waiting for a single image to load on the screen from top to bottom, one line at a time and being charged per minute for the privilege.
I mean change mb to gb and it’s the same story today.
Getting static shocked by the TV screen.
Reminds me of the time I had fun screwing up our CRT TV with magnets.
Adjusting the tracking on a VCR.
Getting your finger stuck in the VCR because the videotape would not eject. You had to stick your finger in and poke the tape while mashing the eject button. Worked everytime. Also pushing rewind on a tape and walking away because someone forgot to rewind and you don’t want to watch the video in reverse.
I think my family may have had a later generation VCR then yours, because I don’t remember ever getting my hand stuck, and if you pressed the rewind button while playback was stopped (not paused) it would rewind at like 10x the regular playback speed.
Cleaning out a ball mouse.
My 14 year old son recently picked one up out of this big pile of old computer treasure I was given by a client and said “What’s up with this mouse?”
Pfft, cleaning it out. Just hard boil an egg and take the yolk.
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Privacy
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Peace & Quiet
- Easy access to dark skies for stargazing.
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The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen, and mainstream multiplayer games without anticheat rootkits
Edit: mainstream
Blowing into cartridges before putting them into the console and optionally pushing them to the side or some other voodoo hoping the game would start.
The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen
To be fair, PS2’s are so damn rock-solid new generations can experience this for many years to come. They just gotta get one.
Yes! Why can’t I play every game like I played Runscape?
Regular police officers not wearing full body armor and tactical gear.
Just let some years pass, when the control of the water reserves come in full swing they will have their chance.
Maybe even before if trump do run for this next elections, i expect nothing less than another capitol riot.
Livable planet :)
Burning themselves on a light bulb!
or a car lighter
How many minds are going to be blown by ‘The Blues Brothers’ when the young folks realize there used to be cigarette lighters in police cars?
Waking up early to catch your cartoons. Or as an adult, having to be at the tv at 7 to watch the new episode. Everything will be streamed, thats fine i guess you wont have to worry about missing it. But it takes away the urgency to keep up.
Agreed, especially with the urgency part.
There’s a whole bucketload of TV series/anime I’ve not kept up with because “I’ll just catch up later”, and I still have yet to watch the latest “final season” part of AoT lmaooo
I cannot reply to a previous comment, due to it not federating here, but the children of 2020s will literally be online from day one!
There are countless parents that are posting pictures of their newborns on social media, on Instagram or Facebook, straight to a server in California, so imagine that every single person whose parents are like oh, I don’t care about privacy, I got nothing to hide bro will have at least one photo there.
And it’s not only that. They’ll just never get to experience how life goes with no computer in sight, with no smartphones, not even cellphones at all. No computer, and more importantly, no internet, just cartoons on TV such as Life with Louie or Courage the Cowardly Dog or the Looney Tunes series. And even more importantly, no social media. None at all. Nothing to distract you from actually living.
I worked at a young familie’s home. By yound i mean she had her first kids pretty young i assume, she was around 40, and he oldest maybe 18. She probably had in total 6 kids in their houshold. There were a lot of pictures of her, her boyfriend and children in the house. It super reminded me of my best friends house when i grew up. They had a lot of children and a lot of fotos, most of them very formal and some hand painted, because that was a thing back then, most of them very nice and framed.
The weird thing i found about her houshold was, all oft the pictures there where heavy filtered. Not just beauty filters, also the dog filters and all that instagram stuff. Something about it was so odd. Some pictures even had instagram handles on it, even the youngest had her own Instagram and he couldn’t even write yet. Apparently it was really important to her to get them “good” handles as soon as possible. I dunno, i’m glad i don’t have social media and non of my family is into it as well.I would say that not only the children’s lives are documented on the internet (that was the case in 2010’) but also their parents.
e.g. pewdiepie had a child recently and basically his whole life is documented in a video form. All his highs and lows.
Not contacting a person until you meet them again at a location you planned the day before.
Not knowing where you are, locating using literal maps.
It boggles my mind how much safety we have today.
