LEADED. FUCKING. GASOLINE. And paint! And pipes! And air pollution. Kids it was SO MUCH GODDAMN WORSE back then. Every other day my town was *drowned* in the smell of chemicals from the local paper mill. It literally no fucking kidding smelled like the world was coated in shit.
Yeah, but Nash. "Back to the Future," though.
Light bulbs not only made your house hotter in the summer they barely lasted. Outdoor lighting was ASS, awash in the rust-colored glow of arc sodium. Your options for music were expensive cassettes or vinyl and they both sounded terrible compared to lossless digital, fucking fight me.
Getting p[aid by cheque, but the bank is closed
At 3:15 on a Wednesday afternoon. Maybe you can get away at lunchtime if the line isn't too long.
I once got paid by cheque, in a foreign port at 5 Friday afternoon before a long weekend I was very poor that weekend
SMOKING. FUCKING. EVERYWHERE. On the planes, in the restaurants, IN THE GODDAMN HOSPITALS. McDonald's had fucking ashtrays, and everything EVERYTHING had nicotine film on it.
You want to know what passed for humor in the 80s? Force yourself to sit through Revenge of the Nerds. Try not to vomit. And sure, we had Saturday morning cartoons but all they ever wanted to do was sell you shit. "Drink your Ovaltine" indeed.
Oh man, ROTN aged so horribly! A lot of those comedies just played off sexual harrowing and even assault as just a silly joke.
*harassment
Hey, I saw HOWARD THE DUCK five times in the theater!
What a lot of people forget is how dire the early 80s was for cartoons.
Oooh yeah. For every 30 shows, maybe one was worth keeping around for merch or nostalgia purposes. As a Hanna-Barbera archivist, I can personally attest to this.
So many Scooby Doo copies…
Shows in context: Gary Coleman was about a kid who is an angel based on a bad TV movie starring Coleman. Shirt Tales was a licensed stuffy line from Hallmark that knocked off Care Bears. Where’s Huddles was a Flintstones/Jetsons sitcom but about football players… And the last one was an acid trip.
I'm pretty sure Shirt Tales had one episode where the bad guy was a robot or an electronic toy or something, and it died! Just broke to pieces. This was like 40 years ago and it still haunts some back corner of my mind.
Yeah this era of cartoons was largely run over by glorified product placements, and Disney was going through a complicated period so animation in theatres wasn’t doing better. And don’t even bother for animations in other countries, japanese animations was hardly a thing in the US.
And Trump is horrible, no mistake. Worst President in history and somehow we elected him twice. But Reagan? The man dismantled society in real fucking time and bribed the population with tax cuts to allow him to do it. Corrupt (Iran-Contra), bigoted, demented blight on the world.
AIDS
The whole reason Trump got elected is because Boomers are still chasing that "FUCK THE WORLD GOT MINE" high that the Reagan Years provided...
I thought Gen x love the 80s!
It's very easy to argue that Reagan is the REASON we have Trump! Not only cause of all the dismantling & corrupt things but also the "Republicans don't fight Republicans" bullshit that made them ALL fall lockstep into whatever shithead gets the nomination! IE: TRUMP!!
Oh, and did you want to talk to your friends? For any reason, however important? Well, good luck with that, schmucko, if anyone else in either household got to the one (1) phone line first, you good and goddamned well waited, and as often as not, never managed it.
Having a phone on your room was uncommon so any conversations were often in the kitchen or somewhere else every one could hear
Plus long distance charges if you wanted to call someone who moved away!
But that's what phreaking was for.
Always fun to spot the point on a graph where all the US quality of life indicators fall off the cliff and just *know* it is pointing to the Reagan years.
There was nothing like online shopping. Mail order was ridiculous, and tracking numbers? LOL. If your local store didn't have it and didn't know how to order it, then you didn't get it. The end. Ebay? Try garage sales and flea markets. Good luck finding what you want!
I am nostalgic for that thick Sears catalog that came out for the Christmas season.
"allow six to eight weeks for delivery"
You fuckers whining about trying to write a paper for school when you have access to the ENTIRE INTERNET in your pocket? ALL WE HAD WAS THE LIBRARY AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS, MOTHERFUCKER. AND GOOD LUCK AFFORDING AN ELECTRIC TYPEWRITER, MUCH LESS A WORD PROCESSOR. But oh no you need "AI" you weaklings
Donovan Freberg was once the most hated teen in America because of encyclopedias...
And Chilton manuals if you wanted to work on your car :-)
I still call them Chiltons, even though it's Hayes now...
MOM GET OFF THE LINE I'M ON THE PHONE
*Dialup Modem Screeching*
And your entire friend circle was the place where you lived. Thirty mile radius, if you were lucky. Why? Arranging travel was expensive, no GPS, long distance charges on phone calls could *bankrupt* your ass, and even trying to find out about an out-of-state con was like seeking the Holy Grail.
You could get an extension to your local calling area for a small fee. (And the BBSs that got into networking took advantage of it.)
All y'all dipshits nostalgic over the first Atari and Nintendo consoles can jump right up my ass because they sucked. THEY. SUCKED. Games were expensive and they looked and played for shit. YES EVEN ON THE NINTENDO. Online play? What's that, some kind of sex thing?
Just had a flashback to the Atari Pac-Man game. Where Pac-Man could only look left or right, not up or down.
You bought a game, you played the shit out of it no matter how bad it was because you likely weren't getting another one for MONTHS at best. Imagine paying $39.99 in 198X money for NES Burgertime. *Burgertime*.
in what way does mario bros 3 look or play like shit
Thing is, while there were good games back then, another major issue was actually finding out which ones those were. Without the internet or even access to the gaming magazines of the day, you were stuck relying on word of mouth and taking wild guesses as to what ones were actually decent.
My family had the DOS version of the first TMNT game where they screwed up the gap in the sewer stage when porting it, rendering it actually unbeatable.
I think about the cost every time I see people complain now about game prices. They've barely moved in forty years! In some respects, they're actually cheaper!
You think finding new music is hard today? Try finding new music when we had a centralized homogenized collective culture. Oh sure, you could get lucky back then and have one *really cool* local radio station or record store, but in general it was Billboard or nothing.
Don't forget the part where you'd have to gaslight yourself into liking the awful game you bought because of the cool cover. Fuck, I was born in 94 and still had that shit happen!
I'll agree that the Atari lineup is mostly dated, only good for what it pioneered as opposed to being actually good. With Nintendo it depended on what dev you had. First party or even someone like Sunsoft/Capcom? Usually good. But you'd get someone like LJN and remember, "oh right, these are shit."
I took a long ass bus trip this summer and will be doing a longer Amtrak trip in a couple weeks. There is no way I would have gotten through either of them without my phone/computer. To any nostalgic boomers, try taking even a 2 hour bus trip without looking at your phone or listening to music.
This is total erasure of this near unplayable game.
There’s a reason games workshop become a hobby giant. Most miniatures of the 80s were poorly sculpted with cheap molds that would deteriorate. You had to determine which detail was what and hope you file off flash instead of detail. Also they were made of lead with one pose.
I remember my family had lawn darts. Somehow none of us got impaled.
"We're going to the amusement park the next state over. Time to break out multiple paper maps and chart a course like we're Magellan.
And phone companies. They were such monopolies “long distance phone calls” could break you
People confuse going to a garage or yard sale now, where one doesn't really have an objective beyond finding something cool with how things were back then where you were more likely to find yourself NEEDING something.
Good luck buying second hand or collectible anything. Want to know how much something costs? Hope your niche interest is large enough to justify a price guide magazine or you just get to hope the local comic shop/game store/swap meet booth/convention table/etc. wasn't price gouging you.
It’s one of the reasons why I am such a hardcore garage sale / thrift store / antique store person. My grandparents baked that into me on road trips with them in the 1990s. Still before the internet made shit easy, never knew what you could find!
Mail order ? I remember them commercials. "Please allow three to six weeks for delivery." I mean I was like WTF even then !
And worst of all: condiments counting as vegetables.
It's funny to see someone post a graph of something that's fucked up like pay discrepancy or pollution levels or union membership or cost of living and you can see precisely when the dip/spike is and it's between 1981 and 1989.
Also Reagan had the veneer of "legitimacy" to him, very loose use of legitimacy tbh, Trump doesn't even have that. Oh sure the upper crust of society are trying to force everyone to bend the knee to Trump but it doesn't seem to be working.
I'll see your "Revenge of the Nerds" and raise you "Little Monsters", and fucking "Howard the Duck". :)
He straight up raped that woman!
We made ashtrays as Father’s day presents when I was in grade school
And every place had their own matchbooks! Retailers, restaurants, motels, door to door salesmen...
I've said before... These two people are the same age, 41. One easily passed as 10 years older. The removal of mass public smoking, and improving food and medicine and car emissions have done a whole lot!
I remember smoking everywhere. Sadly I don't remember fucking everywhere...
Smoke Stain Shit Brown, the famous colour most plastics became within a month.
Not to mention fucking Reagan, lol
Or his regional variant Thatcher
Sodium vapor outdoor lighting does have a *couple* perks to my personal taste None, absolutely none, pertain to actually being able to see a goddamn thing, of course
But 8-track tapes sounded AWESOME.
Don’t forget SMOKING SECTIONS in all public locations! I have *vivid* memories of the local Denny’s having such a section (half the building of course) and the entire place stunk of smoke.
"smoking or non?" Like it made a fucking difference
Soon after California passed a law that there had to be non-smoking sections in restaurants, one restaurant decided the non-smoking "section" was any table scattered around that didn't have an ash tray.
ACID RAIN. Remember how acid rain used to be a big concern in the 80s? That went away because the world got together and fixed the goddamn problem.
Then we had the hole in the ozone layer! Which, well, we solved the same way as acid rain.
I'm not sure that the chemicals were *all* that smelled like shit--the pulped wood itself reeks. I've confirmed this by leaving cardboard boxes in my car in humid weather. Smelled just like Salem-Albany from the 5.
This is the one I (as a boomer, and originally from Los Angeles) feel really strongly.
It’s a little hard to overstate the damage from knowingly giving the entire planet mild brain damage. Pretty sure it’s a contributing factor to our current hellscape.
