When I was a kid adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But....

Now that I've reached the ripe old age of thirty-nine, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You've got it so flippin' easy!

I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a goddamned Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet--we wanted to know something, we had to go to the goddamned library and look it up ourselves! And there was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter--with a pen!--and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the stinkin' mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

And there were no MP3s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the goddamned record store and shoplift it yourself! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the begining and mess it all up!

You want to hear about hardship?

You couldn't just download porn! You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! It was either that or jackoff to the lingere section of the JC Penney catalog! Those were your options!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either!

When the the phone rang, you had no idea who it was it could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't know!!!

You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

And we didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square! You had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win, the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died!

Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! A tall guy sat in front of you, you were screwed!

And sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no onscreen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on!

And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning... ...D'ya hear what the hell I'm saying!?!

We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy You're spoiled, I swear to God! You guys wouldn't last five minutes back in 1984!

:D Got me smiling, cheers [img]smile.gif[/img]

He he he... a another blast from the past. [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

And you try tellin young people that t'day an they wooooon't believe ya ;) .

LOL, lots of memories. :D

But, I think youth today have it harder in some respects. For one, you gotta start working at age 12 if you want to go to college - and you have to make the best grade, be an officer in every frikin club, score 1200+ on the SATs and write a novella by the time you graduate high school or you just get to be one of the herd. Not to mention the fact that once you get your college degree, big deal everyone's got one - so go to the bottom of the ladder.

It ain't all peaches & cream.

Rokenn, I read the excatly same post from harmony central forums a while ago. Did you steal that from someone or are you a musician..? [img]smile.gif[/img]

It's all hilarious, but this really broke me up. [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

OMG! I so love the 80's, but now I remember why now is nice, too. True, my kids will never believe it.

Got it via email from a friend [img]smile.gif[/img]

Yes, I agree. Although, as Timber Loftis said, kids today have to learn MUCH more than we did. I'm teaching 10th graders biology today that I didn't learn until my freshman-sophomore year of college, and that's just the beginning! They do have zero patience and even less of a work ethic, not to mention no remorse (they actually get mad at you for yelling at them).

Just think how bad our parents and grandparents had it!

[ 01-10-2003, 03:41 PM: Message edited by: Gammit ]

20 channels [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img] When I grew up, I had to make due with three channels - one danish [img]smile.gif[/img] - and two swedish [img]graemlins/1puke.gif[/img] ;)

[img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/laugh2.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/crying.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/laugh3.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

ROTFL Rokenn! Yes the youths of today... *snicker*

What ages are you talking about? I'm in my first year of high school. Who'd want to buy porno at my age-or younger. ~sigh~ Americans.

well seeing as come 1985 that was when the first 3D video game came out, as well as the MPEG, Movies playable on Computers Via Quicktime, CNN was aired, along with all of the Turner Networks including Cartoon Network, world wide, and the CD was just starting to become popular... and the Atari was going to be replaced by Nintendo in a few years... I think I had it quite good being born in 1985 :D But already i'm looking around, and kids ARE getting it better, but they're also missing out on alot. Mario 3 is a game that every kid should play just to have that learning experience... and yet I see them playing these weird games on Playstation that nobody cares about, watching HORRID disney films with no magic in them like Lilo and Stitch, and knowing Starwars Episode 1 and 2 before Return of the Jedi and the other GREAT classics likes "1984" the book and LOTR will always be a movie to them before a book... and when they actually did something Descent like Harry potter it was went and made into a movie like 10 times faster than LOTR! What the heck is with that? And imported Anime will forever be screwed up for them, they wont know the original Dragon ball, or Samurai Pizza Cats, they wont experience the Power rangers like we did, they wont know of GI-Joe or Mask or Tom and Jerry, it'll all be about Ed, Edd, and Eddy and Spong Bob! It makes me SICK! -_- I can see it already happening in my cousins, so i went and did them a favor: I sent them an Atari 2600, mint condition... Hopefully when I see them again the boy will have a red-dyed mohawk will be wearing parachute pants and be listening to Grunge Rock bands like Malice Mitzer...

we can only hope...

I already had another young cousin of mine (the age of 8) receive a nintendo Gamecube...

and guess what...

he doesnt know who Mario is... Or Louigi or Donkey Kong or anyone! infact the only game he had when I saw him was STAR wars! So I went and bought him Smash Brothers, only to have my uncle call and say it contained the Satanic Pokemon!

i then had to give him a long lecture about the history of a VERY WELL-THOUGHT-OUT and INNOVATE Role Playing Game for the Gameboy and how we can't look to Japanese scape goats to blame outselves for poor parenting like SOME PASTORS...

kids these days...

THEY WONT EVEN KNOW A WORLD OF P&P D&D... OR WARHAMMER since it's gone now!

and they won't know battletech or Asteroids or Laser Disks or Vynill Records T_T

its saaaad *crys*

http://www.stopstart.fsnet.co.uk/mica/Cartangry.gif
Durn punks!

Durn right. Now where did i leave my walking stick so that i can roll over in my wheelchair and give 'em the what for. :D

Well done! I just passed that on to a few friends! :D

Excuze me, there youngin, that's What'fer, and I oughta show you what'fer fer not knowin' yer durned vocabulary! Seriously folks. I'm 16, and I remember as early as George Bush saying how we can't slack with Saddam. Considering that was our president's dad, you must understand this is a very strange time for me. I remember the Atari 5200, where all the games didn't actually have ends, just paradigms and endless loops that carried into infinity. Back before Borland and his crazy C++. NES is still a fond memory, and a fond present, as I still play it from time to time. I remember before the internet and before these here new fangled computers took over everything. Had to search through card catalogs and find the book you wanted in the library. Had to write letters and know phone numbers. Had to kill our own game... Actually that last one might be a past-race memory, not sure... :D

20 channels [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img] When I grew up, I had to make due with three channels - one danish [img]smile.gif[/img] - and two swedish [img]graemlins/1puke.gif[/img] ;) </font>[/QUOTE]Three channels? Bejeezus, but you had it easy. I only had 1 channel. There wasn't any CABLE thingy. We had this mile high antenna (not really, but it was tall to me when I was growing up) and we were so far from the tv stations that were broadcasting (local ones at that, nothing like those cable ones you could get from some other city let alone another state) that we only got one station. Even so, the station didn't always come in too good and I was used to "ghost" images. When the VCR's came out, I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread (Couldn't afford one though, but did have a friend that had one.) There wasn't any ghost images with that. It was several years before I saw the Atari 2600 and it was pretty cool. I got one when I was 17. There was no internet back then, heck, there wasn't any computers back then unless you were a business or were military. Calculators were these big adding machines that didn't have a display like they do today. I remember when I was a junior in high school, they came out with these large bulky calculators that could only add/subtract/multiply/divide. There wasn't any memory features on them. As for libraries, I remember it was a half day affair to look up even the simplest thing because when you went there, there was a whole bunch of other kids looking up the same/similar thing. We had to wait until they were done with the book so we could look up the same stuff.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and phone calls. If you wanted to call someone, you had to dial with a rotary phone, because they didn't have a tone dial phone. God help you if you messed it up, cause then you had to start all back over again from the beginning.

[ 01-12-2003, 07:25 AM: Message edited by: Tobbin ]

whoa heh heh since I read this topic I guess I appreciate how good things we punk younsters have.