things you will fully get on your old-dude "it was better back when we was kids" horse about

when me & my best bud used to sit around watching MTV, all we did was bitch about how horrible it was, but fuck you, young aerosmith & his best bud, that shit was entertaining

it was definitely better when we was kids horse imo

I stand by the sentence I wrote before the coffee was done brewing

Saturday morning cartoons -- solid 2-hr block of Bugs + Roadrunner. Thanks, CBS.

when me & my best bud used to sit around watching MTV, all we did was bitch about how horrible it was, but fuck you, young aerosmith & his best bud, that shit was entertaining

I feel the same way.

^well, when it actually played videos it was worth watching. Now it features 'Girls Gone Wild At The Mall' type fake-sociology shows 24/7, ehhh, not so much.

- adventure movies for kids (spielberg, lucas etc)

- chocolate bars

(it is possible i have just outgrown these things)

The internet was better before every corporation thought they were owed money because they had a website. Fuck you and get off my internet. If you want money, go somewhere else. This shit is free and I ain't payin!

thrift store shopping (for women's clothes, at least)

enjoy your out of shape faded sweaters from target and dirty pajamas
i'll be over here in my tailored wool jackets and '50s party dresses (not together, obvs)

xxp dude you just need some better chocolate...
http://www.greenandblacks.com/

Saturday morning cartoons

Saturday watching The A Team/Airwolf/Street Hawk/Knight Rider/Blue Thunder/Dukes of Hazzard and all those other shows that 20 year old hipsters go on and on about now even though they were all cancelled before those kids were even born.

hip-hop aka "rap music"

marijuana

rock criticism

any physical activity lasting more than 10 minutes

the art of the tackle

discovering obscure music
U.S. public education system

existence

concert ticket prices

Radio. The space program. Downtown Toronto.

Homosexuality.

concert ticket prices

^^^^^^ Also, skipping school to wait in line at Ticketron to get tickets for that band you HAD to see was cool as hell.

def radio

xxp dude you just need some better chocolate...
http://www.greenandblacks.com/

Green and Blacks was better back in the day when it wasn't run by Cadburys imo.

- everything

everything

I'll be joining you there eventually--not quite yet. I know for a fact the internet is a lot better in 2010 than it was in 1966.

Kung fu movies

internet in 2010 is also way better than it was in 1995-2005

twitter was the jump the shark moment tho

Dance music.

Animated feature films. I hate that everything is now made with computer animation; I guess it works for some stories, like Wall-E, but it feels like the indiduality and expressivity of the line is lost. Computer graphics make things more "objective" instead of a subjective way of expressing things.

nothing will ever beat hand-drawn animation for me.

1985 is the cut off for me. that's when everything started to get really bad. EVERYTHING. nothing got better. ever.

"marijuana"

no way, man, can't go back to seeds and stems and you can't make me.

wait, pot. pot is the only thing that got better.

Rents.

i don't think it counts since i can't remember a time when it was actually better, but CAR DESIGN

spin magazine

tv theme songs

Green and Blacks was better back in the day when it wasn't run by Cadburys imo.

― i find music confusing and annoying (Ned Trifle II), Saturday, 7 August 2010 20:07 (1 hour ago)

Terry's was better back in the day when it wasn't run by Kraft imo.

(and soon or maybe even right now)

Cadburys was better back in the day when it wasn't run by Kraft imo.

(seriously I am super-pissed with what Kraft have one to the Terry's Chocolate Orange)

the NBA

yeah, i'm already like this with sports, mainly because it's true, but also because I don't really care about sports anymore. "sorry, kid, it's a scientific fact: baseball reached its peak with Kirk Gibson's gamewinning homerun in game two of the 1988 playoffs. everything after that sucks."

Pre-spell check, when you actually looked a word up in the dictionary: also getting new dictionary for school & looking up the swear words immediately

TV shows had theme song that you sang along to: and they had closing credits

Friday night tv movies: Sunday matinee tv movie

Oh the radio. Calling up the AM radio Party Line on Friday night to request your favorite song: friends in the other room standing by recording you on cassette :)

Riding bike seemed like a fun, freeing adventure as a kid! And now it's just transportation. This is a one-person-level change, though.

plus, i just feel like there was less chance of being obliterated by a tank-like car when i rode my bike as a kid. or maybe this is just selective memory. there are more cars though. another reason to hate now.

Kids played outside more, I think.

xxpost, absolutely. We spent all day on our bikes!

i just think about how when i was, like, kindergarten age i would leave the house by myself in the morning on and play in my neighborhood all day and then come home for dinner. and my parents had no idea where i was for hours on end. and how there is no way in hell i would even let rufus or cyrus walk, like, three blocks by themselves.

i own two bikes and i kind of dislike riding them these days, and it has everything to do with living in los angeles and finding bike riding around here not relaxing or conducive to a pleasant journey, and it should be both.

i <3 <3 <3 riding my bike

Eisbaer, I can assure you that all the TV execs that made reality TV decisions were probably on... oh, guess.

We had a small woods and a thicket, plus marshland, near a lake, creek and golf course. We also had the run of all the yards where other kids lived, a railroad track with blackberry bushes, and a big water tower with enough hiding paces/land for 20 kids to play kick the can. There were also a pair of evil white geese in the yard of the gingerbread house next to the water tower, and leeches and crayfish in the creek, which we canoed and swam in. All of this was scant blocks from a highway and a main commercial artery a mile outside the Minneapolis city limits. My uncle the cop lived three houses away, and since he worked Vice we had a running Perp of the Week thing going - never blissfully naive about 'stranger danger' but allowed out until stupid o'clock as long as we were in groups; my mom once said she used to chafe at the curfew that used to be in effect when she was in high school and living on the very same street. Perhaps the adults around us felt OK about letting us run wild because they'd grown up in the same place, with the known local perverts and weirdos the same people they remembered, only older and avoidable.

Porn in the internet era seems way more harsher, meaner, uglier, violent and degrading than it did in the seventies, eighties and maybe even the first part of the nineties. This is weird to me because porn from those decades seemed really poorly made to me at the time, but it seems a lot less so through the haze of nostalgia.

wait, pot. pot is the only thing that got better.

stronger but not necessarily better IMHO

Trying to figure out the ways that stronger pot could not be anything but better, or conversely, what is there about weaker pot that could be better? Speaking as someone who was touched weed in over 10 years, the stuff I smoked in the nineties was miles better than the most of the stuff that I smoked in the seventies and eighties.

getting through airport security

omg yes. Flying in general.

I only flew once pre 9/11, I can't even remember what itw as like

I started flying for work back when smoking was still allowed on planes, that wasn't so good (as a non-smoker). But the airport experience was definitely better.

halloween trick-or-treating

the fact that there's now a designated, what, 3 hour window of "approved" trick-or-treating time is some bullshit

we had a trick-or-treating curfew (9 am or so, if i remember correctly). the town where my cousin lived (which is where we did the bulk of our trick-or-treating) would sound an air-raid siren about 15 minutes or so before the curfew. and this was in the late 70s/early 80s.

9 PM, i meant.

XXXXXXpost

I'm viewing this thru a nostalgic haze but the primo columbian & jamaican of the 70s provided a mellower, more subtle buzz than hydro-knockout weed.

inexact analogy: no more beer or wine available, just high-proof liquor

as for pre-9/11 flying: i think that i only flew 3-4 times max. don't remember it being particularly obnoxious. we could smoke on international flights (would've been insane if i couldn't) -- the most obnoxious thing i remember about the experience was this German tourist behind me who was too big for his seat so i couldn't recline back as far as i would've liked.

there was an encephalitis mosquito scare in like 1990 or something in various pockets of the nation, so they sent letters to parents advising that kids trick or treat on 10/27, which was a Saturday, during the afternoon.

My brother and I, still of trick or treating age, said "fuck that" in polite terms. My mom wasn't real impressed by the mosquito scare, thought the thing was stupid, and told us we could trick or treat on the real Halloween. that gave me oodles of respect for her. And some of our friends did too.

But it kinda sucked as SOME houses only gave out candy on the 27th and had nothing for us. FUCK THAT.

why didn't you go both on the 27th and the 31st

The trick-or-treating thing is kind of the same thing as being allowed to roam free in the woods or neighborhood. My parents didn't go trick-or-treating with us, we were on our own and trusted not to eat anything we got until we got back home. I feel the current attitude is not only so much super-paranoia about everyone else in the world being out to hurt your kids as it is paranoia that your kids won't recognize and respond appropriately to danger.

...nostalgic haze of pot smoke...

iatee--

A. trick or treating during the DAY was no fun
B. I played little league baseball then and had a game

my parents were hip enough to know (a) not to let us out in dark costumes; and (b) not to let my younger sisters go off on their own outside of my presence (or the presence of my cousins). the biggest fear, though, was someone tampering with the candy (poison or razor blades).

i dressed up as The Crow one year and all the adults thought I was a mime. I wanted to piss on their doorstep for that.

Suburbs used to be hella cooler IMO. Speaking from the experience of growing up in suburban Georgia in the 80s, the neighborhoods were very green, lots of overgrown trees, a few dirt roads, houses had large yards and plenty of privacy that lended to playing in. Nowadays anytime I go into a neighborhood the houses are ON TOP of each other, like seriously 10 feet away. Goddamn 'development'. Throw in disappearing general stores that are now replaced with Publix mini malls.

You guys should do a search for "free range kids" if you are worried every kid is tethered to mommy these days.

i don't really know what's going on with child-rearing in the suburbs these days, since i live in an urban environment. and while parents may be overprotective in some ways, in other ways they aren't. e.g., i'm a bit shocked about parents leaving their parents to nannies and what-not -- which i used to think of an upper-class thing or something that my mother had when she was growing up (in post-WWII UK and the British Caribbean, when her family had some money).

i mean, my GRANDMOTHERS were my nannies.

Where I live kids don't trick or treat very much, there seems to be an age limit of, like, seven years old for it and the parents are always present. A lot of kids aren't allowed to walk around outside in some of the newer suburbs unless they are in a yard. I suppose if I let my kid dress like a bulletin board or a prostitute or drug dealer I wouldn't let them just walk or play anywhere.

The worst is the office trick or treating. So boring. Proper teci or treating must be done outside.

Uh trick

Also when the kids come trick or treating they all wear those plastic ready made costumes instead of deciding on their own what they want to be. When I was a kid this was really un-cool.

Blue Angels zooming overhead here today reminded me: sonic booms

so, just throwing my two cents in— i think that the tethering of children has gotten worse, but at the same time, the movement against such tethering has been growing bigger and bigger. which is nice.

i used to play in the woods, ride my bike for hours and hours without telling my parents where i was going, walk around the city with friends all the time, take trips to NYC to meet friends all the time, etc. my parents were pretty relaxed in a lot of ways....

so, just throwing my two cents in— i think that the tethering of children has gotten worse, but at the same time, the movement against such tethering has been growing bigger and bigger. which is nice.

i used to play in the woods, ride my bike for hours and hours without telling my parents where i was going, walk around the city with friends all the time, take trips to NYC to meet friends all the time, etc. my parents were pretty relaxed in a lot of ways....

it seems to me that my generation had the worst parents— so many kids i know talk to their rents on a daily basis, and i'm just like, 'gtfo, that is stupid crazy.'

ugh, sorry for double post. comp issues.

Blue Angels zooming overhead here today reminded me: sonic booms

wow - this takes me back, primal memories of being about 5-8 y.o. and often hearing sonic booms when I played in our tiny backyard. we lived not that far from a big cold war air force base (wright-patterson in dayton o) so perhaps these really were a frequent occurrence and not an inflated memory.

They seemed so to me - at least a few every week, esp during the summer. We lived in a small town an hour or so from Grissom AFB.

it seems to me that my generation had the worst parents— so many kids i know talk to their rents on a daily basis, and i'm just like, 'gtfo, that is stupid crazy.'

― pounding beats of worship (the table is the table), Sunday, August 8, 2010 6:04 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i don't really follow the logic here?

-how dodgy Camden Town used to be
-The price of comic books

Table, how old are you? I'm 41 and I'm constantly noticing just how much more mature and focused the teenagers of today are.

Trying to figure out the ways that stronger pot could not be anything but better, or conversely, what is there about weaker pot that could be better? Speaking as someone who was touched weed in over 10 years, the stuff I smoked in the nineties was miles better than the most of the stuff that I smoked in the seventies and eighties.

yeah the thing is now that to get mildly stoned, like enough to have a pleasant conversation about music or politics or whatever, you'd need to take 1/8 of a toke, whereas before, with weaker weed, you could smoke a joint or two and hang out. obv full-time stoners have no problem being high as fuck and taking care of whatever business but if you only do it every so often, your chances of being able to hang out & have a conversation after you hit the j are like nil

however that said, the strength of the stuff around now is like HOLY FUCK THIS MUSIC SOUNDS AMAZING

-being able to watch football on normal terrestrial channels

thats true aerosmith but also it should be said that more concentrated THC = less harmful shit clogging up your lungs

oh yeah no doubt, plus now there's vaporizers et al, I'm just making the case for a continuum of experience as vs. Get As High As You Can

yeah the thing is now that to get mildly stoned, like enough to have a pleasant conversation about music or politics or whatever, you'd need to take 1/8 of a toke, whereas before, with weaker weed, you could smoke a joint or two and hang out. obv full-time stoners have no problem being high as fuck and taking care of whatever business but if you only do it every so often, your chances of being able to hang out & have a conversation after you hit the j are like nil

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, August 8, 2010 7:08 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, this. i generally prefer kinda weak sauce sprinkle-in-a-cigarette stuff, because everything else makes me sorta freak the f out

"HOLY FUCK THIS MUSIC SOUNDS AMAZING"

this is basically my one defense of the high tech stuff. it can be pretty incredible. even slightly psychedelic. but i really don't have the time to be like that all the time! i would never leave the house. i have too much to do. but, um, i do appreciate it in a fabulous furry freak brothers sense.

hahaha totally
stuff is so strong to me in the past couple of years (was never a heavy smoker anyway) that if i have more than 3 tokes, i totally forget that i'm even stoned and go out into the world and do things and then a couple hours later am like, wow how amazing was all that, when all that is actually just like eating a sandwich.

ahaha <3

horror movies. altho I will say there've been some good ones of late, but they're getting too damn stylized and slick and they've been heading that way since the late 90s

all it does for me these days is make me all tense :(

Horror movies or pot?

every aspect of modern life

It seems like when I was teenager in the late seventies / early eighties, the police were kinder and gentler. I grew up in a small town, but committed my fair share of bored, adolescent mischief at the time without the feeling that I was getting hassled too much by the police. I never got paranoid by a cop car following me back then, the way that I do now. In fact, I never recall having a cop car following me until I was in my thirties when I was doing my best to be a much more law-abiding citizen.