This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

Not there yet myself dude. You might have to wait a while, wait for the return of Martin Skeedmore, who can out-[Controversial Moderator Edit] them all, whatever his age.

"ilxors in the '50s" would be a fun photoshop thread

ned at the sockhop

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

huh

I got it, it wasn't hard to follow it was a simple piece of business.

i just want to see abbott as a sexy cold war scientist is all

I am a 53 year old ILXor in the Naughties. Does that count? My only time in the 50's occured when I was aged 0-5, from November, 1954 until Dec. 31, 1959.

did you see ned at the sockhop

NO

The sockhop ended some time before I entered high school in Sept. 1968. I was not inconsolable over this happenstance. I was a rotten dancer.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

u cursed by the stars aimless

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM

yep -- that's where my pops was in '68 -- sent there two weeks after i got borned! booh hooh.

--a sometime ilxor in his 40s

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM WAS NOT ME, BY ANY STRETCH OF IMAGINATION! Skinny, geeky 13 year old, I'm just sayin'.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

aimless serious q did you at least smoke a lot of pot? and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

if not you have destroyed any reason i have to respect actual early 70s HS kids

I am 10 years shy of 50 but this thread is making me feel old.

momus is almost 50

There's a Guided By Voices song about this.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

I really, really don't know how to react to this.

weve all reacted by blotting it out

Well I know that you're in love with him,
Because I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your Keds.
Oh, I dig that rhythm and Ned!

(I thought JBR's suggestion at first was an age progression of ILXors into their fifties and was thinking "oh it won't take much to imagine some of that.")

Ned, all you have to do is put on the socks. That's all. And we need a hardwood floor, and XTC's "Life Begins At The Hop". Now who will film this????

did you at least smoke a lot of pot?

I think the first time I smoked pot was roughly summer of 1970. Didn't do much for me. My friends included several 'heads', but I was just a dabbler. My older brother was into it pretty far by 1971. He still tokes up now.

I didn't really get launched as a pot smoker until college, where I spent most of 1974 stoned. Made my own bong from a glass lab beaker. I quit entirely around 1977 or so. I can't say I miss it.

and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

Hard to say, because I don't have a clue who trip fontaine is. I did know a lot of druggies and hippies in the 70s. They were as common as daisies back then.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3Pgo2kaznFU/RqsBjrRCKMI/AAAAAAAAARs/7wAJzhaYC3A/s1600/964.jpg

that link 404'ed me

(xxpost) Trip Fontaine is a character from the book/film "The Virgin Suicides"

Start at about 3:30 here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_smJP8oRnE

Btw, Frank Kogan, who posts to a couple of the rolling genre threads on ILM, is 54.

Also:
Most of the time I dwell in a state of unreality, where I have amazing superpowers. And I am 50 years old.

-- Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Monday, February 5, 2007 12:29 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

Our cohort is few, but mighty.

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

OH MY GOD WHY WAS I NEVER THAT

I remember Howdy Doody.

and i thought i was old for remembering leaded gasoline!

madonna, michael jackson, prince and ME -- i am now 50 and 1/2.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

there is truth lurking here -- people in our sub-generation have a complicated relationship w/our older sibs, the 60s baby boomers. this usage of "gay" is uhm, anachronisitic, or something. (I entered HS in 72 FWIW.)

anachronistic! edgy, you mean!!1!

so is bimble part of this exclusive club?

I didn't expect to get shoulder and back hair this late in the game.

ha was wondering what you meant in the 40s thread

what's up y'all

had a cardiologist call me at 7am to cancel my appointment (snow)

this morning the dentist said that my teeth with metal fillings will all eventually need crowns; seems legit, the youngest of those fillings is 40+ years old

i went to the dentist for lots of work this past year, first time since forever, and it was all space aged nano whatever shit and i think the dentist and his assistant were legit smirking at my one old iron ore filling from when i was a teenager, fifty years ago, in an eastern bloc nation

oh hi, I'm 54 now

peeing takes a long time

backache is a thing

(knocks on wood)

As hinted above, I have a cardiologist now! My primary doctor, who has pretty amazing raw skills -- like hearing -- apparently, thought he heard a murmur in my heartbeat last month. GREAT!

It turns out I have an "unconcerning" prolapse which is a "2" (not a 3 or a 4), so it just has to be checked every year from now on.

Aging is a motherfucker.

"can you remember in precise, minute detail what she did", i absolutely fucking cannot, all i know is that i panic every time i hear a woman with a smoker's cough

it sure wasn't for lack of trying, i just wasn't hearing it. i had no one to compare notes with so i have to trust myself.

an friend's older brother a few years ago accosted me about a childhood event that was deeply traumatic for him that he blames on me (he was getting chased by bullies and asked me to let him into my house and I wouldn't, he was subsequently beat up) and I just have zero recollection of it at all. not a whit. don't feel too sorry for him, I got plenty of beatings from him and his friends which was probably why I wouldn't let him in, I suspected trickery of some sort. but I honestly can't remember it happening.

a friend's

I seriously remember very little about my childhood that isn’t a memory of documentation of a memory, like the annual 1st day of school photos. It was not particularly good or horrible. I think my brain has just emptied or archived in some compressed folder almost every experiential memory in my life before the age of 13?

I was screamin let me outta here before I was even born, it's such a gamble when you get a face

this is less of an early memory thing and more of a generational observation: my after school babysitter's husband was a World War One vet, probably the only one I've even met... I would watch him tinker in his shop all the time, fixing fishing reels and things. He showed me a small chest that had his service revolver and some medals and bric-a-brac from the Great War

Oh one of my few memories was afterschool daycare when I was in kindergarten … there were forced naps. I was never tired. The room I was confined to had limited reading material: back issues of Good Housekeeping and an illustrated bible for kids … I wasn’t raised Christian so it was basically a storybook with corny pictures like Hanna Barbera cartoons.

it sure wasn't for lack of trying, i just wasn't hearing it. i had no one to compare notes with so i have to trust myself.

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Thursday, April 30, 2026 2:21 PM (twenty minutes ago)

yeah unfortunately my trauma response manifested as bpd so i don't believe everything i think :)

an friend's older brother a few years ago accosted me about a childhood event that was deeply traumatic for him that he blames on me (he was getting chased by bullies and asked me to let him into my house and I wouldn't, he was subsequently beat up) and I just have zero recollection of it at all. not a whit. don't feel too sorry for him, I got plenty of beatings from him and his friends which was probably why I wouldn't let him in, I suspected trickery of some sort. but I honestly can't remember it happening.

― fluffy tufts university (f. hazel), Thursday, April 30, 2026 2:28 PM (thirteen minutes ago)

oh yeah that's pretty common. i mean that's another thing, all kinds of fucked up shit happened when i was a kid that i just didn't notice and don't remember. it didn't seem significant to me, because it wasn't happening to me. i think you're right to not feel bad about it, even if it went down like he said it did, feeling guilt and shame isn't gonna serve any positive purpose now imo. i know that it doesn't benefit me to have survivor's guilt.

this is less of an early memory thing and more of a generational observation: my after school babysitter's husband was a World War One vet, probably the only one I've even met... I would watch him tinker in his shop all the time, fixing fishing reels and things. He showed me a small chest that had his service revolver and some medals and bric-a-brac from the Great War

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, April 30, 2026 2:35 PM (six minutes ago)

the janitor at my catholic primary school when i was a kid was a world war i vet. he slept in the boiler room and maintained the grounds. looking back on it i guess that was weird, most janitors don't literally sleep at the school, but it was fine probably.

he way things feel now - Trumpy, Musky, anxious - just makes me sad by contrast with my red-white-and-blue 1976 memories.

Yeah, 6-year-old me was very taken with the bicentennial. I was sort of obsessed with Paul Revere, I loved the Longfellow poem. I had a big puzzle I put together over and over with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy as colonial soldiers. A few years later I bought Johnny Tremain at a school book fair and devoured it.

I've also thought about how grim the 250th feels in comparison. And not ONLY because I'm 50 years older. Altho to a mature American of 1976, post Vietnam and Watergate, I'm sure the hoopla felt a bit dismal too.

This was the image on that puzzle.

https://abcdvdvideo.myshopify.com/cdn/shop/products/35m-12574_1024x1024.jpg

All of my earliest memories are of being afraid of something or witnessing violence (usually enacted by other kids). I'm having fun sitting here trying to conjure up the earliest good memory. So far the best I can do is around 3rd grade when my friend showed up with what seemed like an entire shopping cart full of Return of the Jedi action Hasbro action figures. Was prior to the very-anticipated movie coming out, so we didn't know who 3/4 of the characters were. In retrospect, I think this was around the time this kid's dad disappeared (insofar as I never knew where he went and never asked). I'm in a weird mood today.

xp in my memory, the Bicentennial shit felt more pure back then, we weren't really talking about Sally Hemmings and slavery and also we just peacefully traded wampum with the native tribes who welcomed us and helped us fight the bloody British

There's a photo of me, a month shy of my seventh birthday, on a bike on the Bicentennial, with flags and all that, back when flags and all that weren't Flags and All That.

i was born in '76, so mostly what i remember is the hangover - all the bicentennial crap that stuck around for years like a bad penny. i loved the 70s specifically _because_ it seemed like a hangover decade, where everything was brown and people wore awful polyester and cars got five miles to the gallon and exploded if you so much as looked at them the wrong way and television was crammed full of lousy variety shows and endless reports on the Iran Crisis. where i grew up everyone was reagan-pilled and thought that america was going to be great again or something, except for my parents, who hated reagan and hated each other and were generally miserable. that was kind of what i figured the seventies were like.

All of my earliest memories are of being afraid of something or witnessing violence (usually enacted by other kids). I'm having fun sitting here trying to conjure up the earliest good memory.

― beard papa, Thursday, April 30, 2026 3:24 PM (three hours ago)

yeah some of us just had shitty childhoods; sounds like you were one of them. if it helps at all, you're not the only one.

i think this is, under capitalism, inevitably what happens when experience of the actual horrors of fascism pass out of living memory

― mookieproof, Thursday, April 30, 2026

how so?

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 30, 2026

the united states is running out of people who actually experienced the great depression, or total war, or jim crow. remember how batshit everyone was for war in 1914? they thought it would be fantastic and rejuvenate the manly vigorousness of the polity.

it is in the interest of money to reassure everyone that everything is okay, no need to panic, until it becomes too late to resist (the nullification of the voting rights act). also that the nation pay trillions of dollars (to whom, exactly?) to engage in a ridiculous war at the behest of an idiot.

not that it would even matter, but there is no one today who can ask 'have you no decency' because a) few have the authority to do so, and b) no one in a position to even consider asking has experienced what the lack of decency entails

on the bright(?) side, a number of white americans have recently learned that maybe it's not just the coloreds who are at risk

mookieproof, i do think there is something to what you're saying, something about things being within living memory, that beyond a lifetime one can read the words without understanding the meaning behind them. for what it's worth, i also believe, based on what i've seen, that history doesn't repeat, it iterates. i was walking with a friend my age to get a burger and there was a white guy driving by on a bike playing some music on a speaker, and my friend said, you know, people complain about those things today, like it's some new thing that didn't exist before, and you know what it reminds me of? the boomboxes people used to walk around with when i was young. well, people complained about the "ghetto blasters" too. mostly when i think of boomboxes i think of star trek iv: the voyage home.

idk. my family has a lot of generational trauma, cycles of violence, cycles of abuse, and when i look at the world, i kinda look at it through a similar lens, right or wrong. i'm not really sure how to explain it, but there's this whole thing with, like, estranged parents, where they don't understand why their kids don't talk to them, and sometimes they'll say, god, i was a better parent to them than my folks were to me, they were way worse than i was, and i read somewhere once that yeah a lot of times that's _true_. that they're good enough parents that their kids have an opportunity to break away from the cycle of abuse and codependence that has come down through the family. cuz something else that's passed out of living memory, a lot of us don't remember just how fucking shitty and awful a lot of these boomers' parents _were_. because they're all dead now. absolutely a lot of that so-called "greatest generation", the once we think of as the ones who beat the nazis the _last_ time around, lots of them were terrible fucking people. and now our parents are the nazis, except my parents aren't and weren't. they're on the right side of history, my parents are, basically good people, and, i mean, they were fucking awful parents. and i _can_ hold both of those truths in my mind at the same time, without one cancelling out the other.

idk if that has anything to do with anything. i just kinda feel like, well, we got shared experiences, those of us in this thread, and fascism, well, fascism seems like more of a universal, these days.

i understand that you mean well and are a good person but what the fuck are you even talking about

my family has a lot of generational trauma, cycles of violence, cycles of abuse, and when i look at the world, i kinda look at it through a similar lens, right or wrong. i'm not really sure how to explain it, but there's this whole thing with, like, estranged parents, where they don't understand why their kids don't talk to them, and sometimes they'll say, god, i was a better parent to them than my folks were to me, they were way worse than i was, and i read somewhere once that yeah a lot of times that's _true_. that they're good enough parents that their kids have an opportunity to break away from the cycle of abuse and codependence that has come down through the family

i mean i shan't argue with this, but also that's no reason to post it to any random thread

(i am sorry for going ott tho)

lol mookieproof is this your first time encountering the poster rushomancy

remember how batshit everyone was for war in 1914? they thought it would be fantastic and rejuvenate the manly vigorousness of the polity.

“Everyone”? Uh, no, definitely not in the US…which is strongly backed up by the fact we didn’t enter the war for a few years after it had been going on? Anti-war sentiment was found on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Yup. The Wilson administration spent millions ginning up interest with propaganda, censorship, and threats of arrest.

mostly when i think of boomboxes i think of star trek iv: the voyage home.

I read this week that the actor who played the guy with the boombox in that movie wrote and recorded his own song for that scene because he didn’t think the song the producers had picked was punk enough.

xxxxxp

THREAD COPS ARE COPS
ACAB

Happy May Day comrades!

a lot of us don't remember just how fucking shitty and awful a lot of these boomers' parents _were_.

My paternal grandmother once chopped through her daughter's bedroom door with a fire axe; eventually my dad went no-contact with her to protect us, his family. So in our case I think there is more concrete memory of how horrible the previous generation was, but I still take your point. :)

(i am sorry for going ott tho)

― mookieproof, Friday, May 1, 2026 12:49 AM (six hours ago)

lol no worries you're not the first person to get frustrated with me, i try really hard to communicate "normal" but it just don't seem to take sometimes. there's only so much i can do with this weird brain of mine haha. some people dig it and some people don't and i post here because there are some people who really dig it. i may be a good person but it's still totally fine to get frustrated or irritated with me when i say shit that don't seem to make any sense, when y'all are having a conversation and i keep interrupting with "i am the walrus". i don't take it personal.

I read this week that the actor who played the guy with the boombox in that movie wrote and recorded his own song for that scene because he didn’t think the song the producers had picked was punk enough.

― wipes chooser (unperson), Friday, May 1, 2026 5:09 AM (two hours ago)

brando-level method acting tbh, that is punk as fuck

Happy May Day comrades!

― sarahell, Friday, May 1, 2026 7:06 AM (thirty-seven minutes ago)

everyone here is like "let's have a rally" and we do those every day anyway! which i think is cool, every day should be may day.

i try really hard to communicate "normal" but it just don't seem to take sometimes.

and to be fair to me, my normal social group are a bunch of autistic puppygirls, most of my social time is me trying to exist in community with people who often literally don't speak human. so i get where you're coming from mookieproof because i _do_ find myself in your position pretty often.

...when y'all are having a conversation and i keep interrupting with "i am the walrus". i don't take it personal.

I laughed out loud at this.

Kate, you are being unnecessarily apologetic, mookie & tracer were being dicks.

I read this week that the actor who played the guy with the boombox in that movie wrote and recorded his own song for that scene because he didn’t think the song the producers had picked was punk enough.

at least “played the guy with the boombox” is correct

A begrudging Happy May Day from this merry band of sullen teens.

https://www.ncpedia.org/sites/default/files/Flora_macdonald.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Walter_Crane_-_A_Garland_for_May_Day_1895%2C_original_relief_print.jpg/500px-Walter_Crane_-_A_Garland_for_May_Day_1895%2C_original_relief_print.jpg?_=20250504195009

people i bumped not one but two may day threads
what is happening

#onethread

people i bumped not one but two may day threads
what is happening

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Friday, May 1, 2026 9:36 AM (nine minutes ago)

the dictatorship of the proletariat, hopefully

Kate, you are being unnecessarily apologetic, mookie & tracer were being dicks.

― sarahell, Friday, May 1, 2026 9:14 AM (thirty-one minutes ago)

i mean it's fuckin' ilx, one of the things a treasure about our generation is that we _can_ be dicks sometimes.

in fact, i'll, honestly, take mookie's post as a license to go off

i'm fifty years old, i can't get a job, i've had thirty years of damn near every sort of mental health treatment and i still can't focus enough to watch movies or read books or listen to music or even _think_ most of the time, i've been through insane amounts of shit that i've learned to not talk about because when i do people start acting like there's something wrong with _me_, my friend group consists mostly of people who never leave their homes and who center their lives around robot anime and furry cannibal porn and i can't talk about _that_ either because people will be like "i thought trans people were normal just like the rest of us", every time i read the news some powerful organization has issued an official ruling that we're subhuman or, possibly, for a change, that we're _human_, and i'm supposed to take this as "good news". i'm chronically depressed, i want to cry all the time but i know if i do that nobody will talk to me because i'm a "downer", never mind that i have _good fucking reason_ to cry, never mind that there's no way i can cry all the tears i'd need to if i want to truly grieve and heal from all the suffering i've experienced. i haven't slept a full night's sleep in three years. i'd complain about the nightmares except that waking life is actually _worse_, in fact. i just want to be able to talk about my life, which is _not_ a normal life, and not have everything fucking center around _me_. i want to _feel_ like a fucking adult human female, which is what i am.

remember how batshit everyone was for war in 1914? they thought it would be fantastic and rejuvenate the manly vigorousness of the polity.

“Everyone”? Uh, no, definitely not in the US…which is strongly backed up by the fact we didn’t enter the war for a few years after it had been going on? Anti-war sentiment was found on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

this was clearly an exaggeration based on responses in europe; i was not claiming that costa ricans were itching for war in 1914. come on

The context was American politics and your post implied that everyone in America felt that way, which Alfred and I pointed out the inaccuracy of.

I would hope that you are mature enough not to do the absurd goalpost moving that brought lols to the Ludicris thread, but would be more tedious here.

i'm only in my 50s, i'm too young to have any memory of 1914

I would hope that you are mature enough not to do the absurd goalpost moving

I understood mookieproof's context shift. The start of WWI was an entirely European affair with no connection to American politics at that time and his use of "everyone" works fine in that implied context. He just didn't signal his context shift clearly enough. For him to clarify that shift retroactively is hardly grounds for calling him out as immature and absurd.

fine? let the record show that i've been set straight about history by sarahell, literalist

Congratulations viking!

Technically I am now in my fifties, but I like to think that ages are like centuries. You aren't really in your fifties until you're fifty-one. And you can't say that you're an experienced fifty-something until you're in your late fifties, because if you're only fifty-two (for example) you only have two years' experience of being fifty, which isn't enough to pass judgement.

So I am philosophically still in my late forties, even though I am technically fifty. I am now half the age of David Attenborough. By coincidence he started filming Life on Earth the same year I was born, 1976 - they took their time, back then - so I am as old as Attenborough's nature programmes. Although I actually grew up with The Living Planet, which was broadcast in 1984. I'm too young to remember Earth, which would have been broadcast when I was three years old. I wonder if that affected my outlook. I can't stand animals, but I do love rocks. Volcanic, metamorphic, oleaginous. Those are the three kinds of rock.

I still remember the theme tune. It was composed by Elizabeth Parker, who appears to have been asked to "do a Vangelis" but on a lower budget:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYQp5BP9cb0

There's some hot vocoder action at 02:01. I think the lesson is that if you want to make the soundtrack to a nature documentary, all you have to do is lock an intense, plummy-voiced woman into a room with some reel-to-reel tape decks, a mixing desk, and some synthesisers, and within a few weeks you'll have a set of ambient soundscapes that evoke the sound of a desert. It worked for the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. It can work today.

It strikes me that the CGI BBC globe from the 1980s - the "Computer Originated World" - is basically a recreation of the opening titles of Life on Earth. It's hard not to think of David Attenborough without getting nervous, because he isn't quite 100. There are still four days to go. Four days in which Attenborough might die or the world might be obliterated in nuclear fire, and I'm not sure which of those two events would be sadder. On the one hand most of the creatures in Life on Earth are dead now, and a lot of them are extinct, but with AI we're reaching a point where the entire animal kingdom is obsolete, so there is that. If this was a Youtube show there would now be a scene break.

I'm going to tell you a true story about being old. This is actually true. I'm going to share it with you. Strangers on the internet that I've never met. And the hundred or so random lurkers who aren't logged in. And the one person who is reading this forty years from now because they're writing a history of the 2020s and they're curious to know what fifty-something former hipsters got up to. I'm going to put the story into the next paragraph because this paragraph is too long.

As mentioned passim I am a fully-qualified motorcyclist. There's a saying in the motorcycling community. "All the gear, all the time", often abbreviated ATTA... ATGA... ATTAG... I can't remember the abbreviation. AT... it's confusing. All the gear, all the time. ATTG... I keeping thinking about the AT-ATs from Star Wars. ATAG. All the gear, all the time. The idea is that you're supposed to wear full motorcycle leathers even when you're just riding to the shops, not just when you're riding at high speed or through twisty roads or trapped in a fully-equipped sex dungeon.

But I mostly use my motorcycle for commuting, or going to Lidl, and I feel absurd striding into Lidl with leather gear, so I bought a thick denim jacket. A thick, black, denim jacket. It probably won't save me from impact injuries, but it might prevent abrasion. It's also light enough to wear all the time.

Now, here's the thing. Here's the punchline. It's coming. A couple of weeks ago I bought a pair of jeans. Primark. Relaxed fit. Thankfully jeans for men are only available in a few different styles. Unlike jeans for women. Do you know how many styles of jeans there are for women? Ten styles. That's a lot of styles. No wonder women are so confused. In addition to all the expectations society thrusts upon them they can't even buy jeans without being made to feel inadequate. By jeans.

I can't remember where this is going. Oh, yes. Jeans. I bought a pair of denim jeans. And a couple of days ago I saw my reflection in a window whilst out shopping. I was wearing a denim jacket, and denim jeans. Double denim. I was, without thinking about it, wearing double denim. That's the punchline.

And then I had my fiftieth birthday. To paraphrase the classic internet story, "John plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up, but then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill. "No! I must kill the demons," he shouted. The radio said "No, John. You are the demons." And then, John was a fifty year old man."

I'm the same age as Mark E Smith when he wrote "Fifty Year Old Man". A sobering thought, because he died only ten years later. A pretty horrible way to go. Do I lead a more healthy life than Mark E Smith? Will that help? Who knows.

I mean tbf I think everyone in the universe leads a more healthy life than MES but you know.

ashley—on our planet on the North American continent we call double denim a “Canadian Tuxedo”

I’m think I’m detecting more possible influence of Ronnie Corbett on Ashley than David Attenborough or MES tbh.

Sadly Attenborough has never gotten around to studying the ecosystems of Internet message boards.

That’s goodnight from me & goodnight from him

genuine Q: how many of the countries on the continent use a term invented by a US company to leverage a US millionaire into bullying a Canadian service worker as a publicity stunt to describe double denim