Skip Navigation
chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
star_wraith [he/him] @hexbear.net

I’m starting an “Over 40 Years Old” Hexbear club

Who wants in? We can talk about what is was like to write a letter to your grandma or having no other way to ask someone out other than by calling them on the phone. Or checking out movies at Blockbuster or whatever your national equivalent was (we usually checked out videos at the grocery store, actually).

We’re cool because we can actually remember the USSR and “East” Germany. Although not as cool, I can remember when homophobia and transphobia was so much more widely accepted and the “default” position for most Americans. Not as cool.

123 comments

  • I'm just glad there's a group of people older than me. I'll be there in a few years, but it's nice to know I'm not the oldest weirdo here.

  • i remeber the time when you would just show up at the door of your friends home unannounced and if he wasnt there you would just go to the next and when he was there you would just go with him picking up the next...

    and then once one of these friends got a console , he became the homebase.

  • Here are few old guy memories from the 80s:

    My first computer was a Commodore 64, in 1985. I had no interest in learning computing - I just wanted to play games.

    The rich kid up the street had a BMX I was in awe of. It was a Haro. I had a Huffy from a discount store.

    I think back about how shockingly everything was seemingly it's own component. Like phones or hi-fi stereos or TVs and VCRs. You had a device and it did one thing.

    Sears reigned supreme for weekend trips to the mall. We didn't have money so it was a lot of window shopping. Related: I remember when department stores had full out restaurants inside of them. When my mom felt like being fancy she'd eat at one.

    For a while in the 80s there was a push to buy American made shit. As if consumer spending could ward off the capitalists off-shoring literally everything.

    In school they taught us Russia was bad but never explained why. Like, ever. Teachers would just espouse that the communists wanted to "kill our way of life."

    Schools opened at sun up and latch key kids would come and go as they please, outside of core hours. Someone would open the ball shed and everyone would just play soccer or kickball.

    Parents seemed to just have kids out of obligation. Some 'rents seemed happy to be involved. But most seemed to just being going through the motions.

    Being poor, the next best thing to having something was having a magazine about something. I was a fan of Thrasher and Video Games & Computer Entertainment.

  • Y'all remember Yakov Smirnoff? I remember watching one of his specials as a kid and they went to his hometown or something with a camera crew and the place they showed could've been down the street from where I was living. They were treating it like a charity fundraising expedition. For just a dollar day type shit. It was very weird to me.

  • I remember that getting high paying short term jobs was kinda easy. If you luckily got in touch with someone the likelihood that they would contract stuff out to you was there, especially in terms of electronics, IT, or event organization.

    I did fly around a bit and that was quite relaxed back then. The security was virtually non existence, the food was somehow nicer (except if you were vegan, vegetarian or had trouble with lactose or didn't eat pork for religious reasons). There was little on board entertainment though that would fit your interests, so talking with your random neighbours was more common (this was true for any location really).

    When I was a kid we would re-purpose wire from construction sites to dig our own land lines between friends and used self constructed radios to stay in touch. Weekends at the scrap yard were quite common. During summer you would have some locations in parks, at the river or alike you would meet up and those were social meeting places, where you could expand your social circle or make out with persons during holidays you often wouldn't see again. A similar attitude I only found later on in live at cruising places (and some festivals with swinger/hippy vibes or left flat shares).

  • I'm not quite all the way to 40, but I do remember a time before anyone in my family owned a computer. And when asking a child in school "Have you ever used the internet?" had two correct answers: "Yes." and "No.", whereas today there is only one correct answer, which is a very concerned sounding "Are you OK? Do you need me to call someone?". I dropped my first cell phone - which I got when I turned 14 - from a third floor window unto pavement. It was fine. Or, well, it couldn't save any text messages since I already had like 60 of them that I hadn't manually deleted, so the hard drive was full, but actually damaging it physically would have required a commitment to total war by a major industrial state.

123 comments