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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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You definitely aren't.
I really do feel terribly for Gen Z and A.
I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.
The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.
When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can't afford it any more due to economic depression...
A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.
Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!
Untill that service is no longer available in your area.
I'm old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad's truck. Didn't have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.
I don't think there's any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I'd like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn't make it.
"We can't rewind, we've gone too far..."
I wanna poke fun at you for actually having an 8 track, but at this point, culture is auto-cannibalizing, so I think we should just mostly celebrate, and maybe personally archive, what was once good.
8-tracks and 45s. I even remember early day modems where you actually had to pick up a landline, dial the number and then place the receiver in a specially built cradle that used analogue noise to communicate. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 that used cassette tapes to save data.
Best days of life if you ask me. Well actually maybe the mid to later 90s, when the Internet first started coming home for everyone. Watching live concerts and Napster and all of that. Instant messaging people, and being able to download every Nintendo game in existence, on demand. When computer games went from here to THERE, like Carmaggedon and games like that. Those were the magic days. When I discovered Napster I think we legit skipped school for almost the entire week.
Thanks for a trip through the memories!
Hey any time man!
Yeah I am a bit younger, but I dove head first into all things computer at a young age, so I completely agree with you that the mid to late 90s were... yeah, magic, just... incredible leaps and bounds being made by tech, there was a real optimism back then.
I was losing games of Starcraft in 98/99 because mom or dad picks up the phone, 56k modem now earrapes them and i get connection lost lol.
Trying to play Half Life 2, a few years later, on the same shitty eMachine... the computer could not handle the scene with Alyx being teleported in the intro / first level.
The uh, screen negative effect, plus the streaking emmisive particle blurs, every time it would crash so hard I would have to repair windows/defrag the drive.
What worked, was to stare at the floor that whole scene. That way you only get the screen negative flash effect, without the particles on top.
But yeah like, the leap from HL1 and like, Goldeneye style graphics, to HL2... fucking mind blowing.
Nowadays its all unoptimized UE5 garbage that actually looks worse in many instances than better optimized and more cleverly rendered games from 5 to 10 years ago.