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Back in the day the struggle was real
- Thread starter Pilgrimzero
- Start date
Look at this guy with his mp3's. I remember trying to record stuff to a tape off the radio and hoping the DJ or some commercial didn't cut into it lol. Or if the song had a swear in it you'd get the radio edited version.
Weren't no forrest porn out there man. Forrest porn when your nearest neighbor is a mile away is like el Dorado. Best you could get was the occasional video game magazine when you mom took to into town for coupon cash-ins at Big Lots.
Sometimes I find myself thinking this as well, in two contexts:
A) it's mind blowing to think of a time where whole fields of information could just be lost, forever, because they were scarce, guarded, or esoteric rather than decentralized and readily accessible
B) it's so laughably easy to find basic information it's kind of crazy there are still a lot of ignorant people with zero sense of curiosity
Not just renting videos, but my local shop charged a £1 fine if you didn't rewind them before returning them. Oh and having to play portable game devices without any sort of inbuilt light.
Also an era where if you were confident enough you were simply right.
B) the basis of this is the proliferation of disinformation operates at a faster rate than information. Information entropy.
If you missed something on TV.. It was gone. You just prayed that they would replay it sometime during the week.
Couldn't tell you how many show's I missed cause my parents wanted to sit at the restaurant longer than needed
Couldn't tell you how many show's I missed cause my parents wanted to sit at the restaurant longer than needed
Also also ripping stuff from vinyl, especially if you only had one giant hifi system. Had to go to tape or nothing, because none of those hifis could burn discs, and the computer was all the way over on the other side of the house and no less cumbersome to move around.
Same deal here in the US. This was how every video store operated to my recollection.
I'm in the electric typewriter club too.
If I changed the settings on my TV just right, scrambled Showtime and The Movie Channel would be clear enough to watch for latenight T&A. HBO and Cinemax never worked, though.
Renting games every weekend was a huge one, too.
If I changed the settings on my TV just right, scrambled Showtime and The Movie Channel would be clear enough to watch for latenight T&A. HBO and Cinemax never worked, though.
Renting games every weekend was a huge one, too.
- Needing change for payphones.
- Having to use a map for directions.
- Having to rewind VHS tapes.
- Blowing in Nintendo cartridges and getting your saved games deleted.
- Limited internet access. It was like having a non-unlimited cell phone. If you went over your alotted AOL hours you were charged up the ass.
- Playing online with dial-up versus broadband users.
lol
- Having to use a map for directions.
- Having to rewind VHS tapes.
- Blowing in Nintendo cartridges and getting your saved games deleted.
- Limited internet access. It was like having a non-unlimited cell phone. If you went over your alotted AOL hours you were charged up the ass.
- Playing online with dial-up versus broadband users.
lol
Jesus, you just reminded me of probably the biggest struggle.
Back then you'd get school rumors of certain turn dial channels that are always static actually being porn that is messed up so you can't see it until you pay. The rumor was that if you stared at it long enough you could start seeing the porn hidden in the static. Like a fuckin magic eye poster. This may be the actual source of my natural surreal imagination, hours staring at static and mentally manifesting non-existent porn.
Being really into a tv show. Missing it for whatever reason and then being fucked unless you caught it on reruns.
OR trying to record something on the VCR (took some big ass brains to do this) and your sister changing the channel or fucking up your plans and not know what happened with the Borg invasion.
That shit suuuuuuuuuucked.
OR trying to record something on the VCR (took some big ass brains to do this) and your sister changing the channel or fucking up your plans and not know what happened with the Borg invasion.
That shit suuuuuuuuuucked.
It's a double edged sword.
"Hmm I want to learn more about the world and space"
"hmm this flat earth guy makes some interesting points"
"I want to know more about childcare"
"these vaccines seem really dangerous"
"I want to eat a balanced diet"
"gluten is literally poisonous cancer"
Lots of information out there.
Also lots of really bad information.
In that aspect, the information age I think backfired. It was much harder to find reading material on bullshit than it is to find stuff on the internet
You know what really sucked? Missing serialized TV when it aired. Better hope to god the reruns are a thing half a year from now!!
Haha I remember this. Trying to get those signals for premium channels. Also cable descramblers.
These two especially. I remember my brothers and I scrambling everytime D-12 came on the Radio with them Blue and Yellow Purple Hills trying desperately to record that shit for our mixtape. And fucking missing an absolutely crucial episode of DBZ and knowing that was fucking it. It was gone. After, you pled feebly for a re-rerun.
I remember playing Tetris on a word processor.
I remember setting the AOL to get on the internet and opening solitaire to play a game while I waited for all the beeping and dialing, and my dad raged out 'cuz I was slowing the computer down with all them cards.
The internet was happening around the time I learned to drive. I already had a good idea how to read a map from childhood road trips. With the advent of MapQuest, I remember we had to look up a destination and then print it out, or if the toner cartridge was empty, write all the steps down on some paper.
I remember setting the AOL to get on the internet and opening solitaire to play a game while I waited for all the beeping and dialing, and my dad raged out 'cuz I was slowing the computer down with all them cards.
The internet was happening around the time I learned to drive. I already had a good idea how to read a map from childhood road trips. With the advent of MapQuest, I remember we had to look up a destination and then print it out, or if the toner cartridge was empty, write all the steps down on some paper.
I missed the Reboot finale because of this. I was devastated.
If you were getting cable through a sufficiently old box it didn't produce static, let's put it that way
Having to record music to a tape cassette if I didn't want to go buy it. Had to wait for that shit to play on the radio and hit the tape deck with a quickness.
Oh yes I definitely found some forest porn, I was maybe in 2nd or 3rd grade. Found it in the woods behind the school playground.
It was just the centerfold poster from some magazine. I eventually felt super guilty about it and threw it away in the grocery store trash can (so my parents wouldn't find it).
Needing to buy music. Sometimes now I'll discover some artist I deemed unworthy of paying for albums from was actually amazing the whole time. Even after piracy became huge, I was one of those weirdos that still bought CDs often. Even buying like 3 albums a month you still miss a lot. Being able to just stream an album to see if you like it is great. I pay for Spotify premium now, but a few years ago I us d the free version to try out albums then bought the ones I liked. I had a cheap phone and cheap plan so I'd still rip CDs or buy digital versions and put them on my iPod Classic (still did this often in like 2015, I'll do it occasionally now but it's like 1-2 times a year).
Another one was not knowing when games were coming out. Internet gaming coverage was already decent in the 90s, but I didn't have internet at home until 2001. My internet time was basically a few minutes a week at school. I think Tips and Tricks had a release calendar in the back, so if I happened to have a recent issue I might have some idea. But you might not know if a game got cancelled or delayed. Going to Toys R Us or Blockbuster you'd often be genuinely surprised to see a sequel to a game you loved already on the shelf.
Another one was not knowing when games were coming out. Internet gaming coverage was already decent in the 90s, but I didn't have internet at home until 2001. My internet time was basically a few minutes a week at school. I think Tips and Tricks had a release calendar in the back, so if I happened to have a recent issue I might have some idea. But you might not know if a game got cancelled or delayed. Going to Toys R Us or Blockbuster you'd often be genuinely surprised to see a sequel to a game you loved already on the shelf.
The lack of information also led to amazing, fun rumors, especially with video games.
"Did you know there is a way to play as Gray Fox in MGS1 by beating the game twice and getting both endings on a single save?"
"Did you know there was a way to play a Super Sonic?"
"You can get [Insert hidden character] in Mortal Kombat but doing some absurd thing?"
"Super, ultra unreleased Pokemon can be caught by doing equally absurd thing."
We believed all of that and tried and failed many a times without ever knowing if it was real.
"Did you know there is a way to play as Gray Fox in MGS1 by beating the game twice and getting both endings on a single save?"
"Did you know there was a way to play a Super Sonic?"
"You can get [Insert hidden character] in Mortal Kombat but doing some absurd thing?"
"Super, ultra unreleased Pokemon can be caught by doing equally absurd thing."
We believed all of that and tried and failed many a times without ever knowing if it was real.
To be fair, it wasn't a great neighborhood (or town lol).
I can imagine the debates about that movie with that one actor. you might just give up and still not know to this day.
my cousin and i would split the cost of dragon ball z tapes at suncoast. it was during the cell saga and we had to know what happened next.
Imagine spending all of that money on a VHS tape just to see somebody else pilot Wing Gundam.
Yup, I usually didnt make it much past the tits loading in.
OP
OP
Oh oh recording tv shows. Some people already mentioned it. Like you'd record a tv series and you'd have to decide if you wanted the adverts or not. And it was always a very odd thing when one pisode went into another.
Oh gosh yes this. I spent so much time spreading rumors about Mortal Kombat 2 secrets I started making stuff up about it. Helped that the local arcade unit was being updated now and then so I used that to 'prove' my point. I remember Pokemon rumors being hot too. I was a little shithead about making up fake videogame secrets and trying to get people to believe me.
I was paid back years later after trying to grind out Sonic overnight in Smash to freak my friends out. Damn EGM....
Hahaha that was also part of the problem, I could only learn these tricks through rumors in a back wood school in the countryside. By the time info like that reached us it was 9th generation telephone where shit would never work.
For example, out where we were people still didn't have the internet when the 64 was out so game rumors like yoshi in mario 64 morphed into "if you stretch mario's face to make his mustache look like he is wearing sunglasses a four wheeler with mounted shotguns will be on the roof of the castle". I can't tell you how many hours I spent on that one. For that reason missingno in pokemon was like magic, especially when there were a bunch of missing steps or extra steps so it took a lot of trial and error to figure it out. Also many ruined saves. Jesus, the underground world of Mortal Kombat fatalities.
I spent countless hours trying to get blood and gore to work in Mortal Kombat for the SNES, just like the Genesis had. It was like "hit these three button combos while doing a fatality with Sub-Zero and then hold the select button until the screen goes black"
I was born in '92, so am not an old fart just yet. but i do remember using the 56k modem and shitposting in AOL chats which were creepy as all hell when i look back at it. the world sure felt a lot larger back then, when everything did not feel as connected. almost reminds me about how i feel when replaying a game. it feels so much smaller the second go around.
I was inevitably missing out on half of an arc of every anime ever. It's like, they the Digidestined meet Etemon, and then then next thing I know they're in Tokyo fighting ghosts and shit.
It's part of the reason that I fell off of DBZ crazy fast, because when you can't tell when in the series you are you immediately realize that every plot is basically the same thing.
Fucking mew.... It took me nearly a year to find someone outside of school that would trade a pokemon that knew surf, one that knew cut, and one that knew strength for the start of a fresh game so I could try to strength push the truck at the SS Anne. The surf pokemon was a Gyarados named "DickEater" that I got grounded for having even though I couldn't rename it. All that for nothing...
Bet my parents still have a sizable DBZ VHS collection still in their basement. DBZ was the only one I had a bunch of VHS for though. Everything was shifting to DVD when I got my first job, so I stopped buying VHS. And suncoast was the place to get anime. The worker's there were cool, they were into anime as well. Then the mall I frequented ousted suncoast because FYE had some exclusive DVD sales in their contract. No other video stores allowed.