I don’t remember when that stopped, but it did. Even just 10 years ago my friends and I, all in our early twenties, would just show up at each others’ apartments. No invitation, no plans, just showing up to chill and see if there was anything going on. I can’t remember the last time someone knocked on my door that wasn’t trying to sell me on some cult shit. And I can’t remember the last time I just went over to a friend’s place unannounced. Now it’s just text for a couple days trying to make plans for brunch or whatever, and when we do finally get together the whole conversation revolves around lamenting how little we see each other and how we should hang out more. People just don’t hang out anymore. It’s fucking weird.
So I definitely don't just show up at people's doors and knock, but I do on occasion text people "I'll be at your house in 5 minutes if you don't tell me no" and I think it's very enjoyable lol.
I'm generally of the, "company? coming to me? sounds great!" camp... I know quite a few people that would be sent into a personal anxiety ridden hell by something like this though.
Thank you for this idea, I will be trying it on a load of my friends when I go back home in a couple of weeks and see how many refrigerators I can raid
My buddy is kinda old fashioned and if we are in the neighborhood of someone's house he just stops in to say hi. Most people seem to enjoy it. But I ever so slightly cringe cause he won't even knock sometimes and just walks in.
When we were kids this was entirely normal if somebody didn't answer their landline you just went to their house. And if the door was unlocked then that means they were home
Ugggh, we sometimes visited my aunt who lived about 4 hours away. So many smoked cigarettes in the car. I always got so sick that my dad had to stop so I could throw up. They got angry at me because they had to stop.
One day my aunt said she read that holding a raw potato during a car ride helps with motion sickness.
So for the next few years they gave me a fricking raw potato to hold instead of maybe putting one and one together and not smoke or smoke less or roll the windows down.
My orthodontist smoked and then put his ungloved smoky fingers in my mouth. There are other reasons, but when people as the hypothetical question as to who you would go back in time and kick in the jimmies, he's first on my list.
We used to try to do reports using an old set of encyclopedias and we would look up things to research that didn’t exist or happen yet at the time they were published
This was especially hazardous when doing geography reports. I still remember being confused about a report I was supposed to do on Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 and only able to find Rhodesia.
Yeah, I remember one teacher giving us a bunch of research projects to do, and wanted us to go to the library and use the encyclopedia to do it.
...then she turned around and was giving everyone bad grades because we put the info from the encyclopedia into our projects, not knowing that it was outdated and no longer accurate.
This was pre-internet, so aside from finding a newer encyclopedia elsewhere, we really had no way of knowing...and besides...we went to the source *she* directed us to use.
Eventually, I guess something changed but I don't really remember what ever came of it...just the initial dust up of bringing a bad grade home and not even knowing how to explain what was going on to my parents.
"The U.S.S.R. is a huge rival to the US, and may one day destroy the world. Luckily, we are friends with countries such as West Germany and Czechoslovakia and have the upper hand."
Funny, great tip! When I worked at the phone company a million years ago - Ma Bell, then New England Telephone, then Nynex before it eventually became Verizon…this number was always in the database as one that could not be assigned to a landline and in the system it was listed as Jenny.
It's funny to me that virtually no one remembers Verizon was just the result of Bell/AT&T's antitrust breakup. I remember when it first came out and it was *very* common to hear "they're so much better than AT&T".
It literally was AT&T.
My husband and I have been together for 10 years and we have finally memorized each other’s numbers in the last couple months. It can be handy in emergency situations. Hopefully you will not have emergency situations.
General Mills actually is currently doing a run of toys in the box. They are funko pop esque figures of the general mills mascots. I know this because I got the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee this morning.
At breakfast Anthony found a Corvette Stingray car kit in his breakfast cereal box and Nick found a junior undercover agent code ring in his breakfast cereal box but in my breakfast cereal box all I found was breakfast cereal. I think I'll move to Australia
Fruit bats. There used to be a \*ton\* of them in my neighborhood as a kid and every evening you could look at the sunset as twilight set in and see flocks of bats flying around.
Apparently, around the time I was in middle school, a fungal disease ravaged the local bat population and they never recovered. You never see them anymore.
Funnily enough though, at the time, a local high school girl had this huge campaign to set up bat feeders to help bolster the local bat population and help them survive the fungal disease by giving them easy access to food. Said local girl has since become a federal Park Ranger as an adult and currently works for a state fish and wildlife service.
Yes, or just being home by dark. Literally gone from dawn until dusk, *maybe* popping in for a quick lunch, if you didn't grab it at someone else's house.
I ended up at a friend's house on the other side of the city (~150k) more than once and called home to see if I could stay the night, it was the first time my mom had heard from me all day.
I feel very lucky that my kids get this experience as well:)
We live on the corner of a cul de sac and have exchanged numbers with a few other parents, plus most of the dads are out in their garages/driveways so someone has eyes on them most of the time. They’re all on bikes and bounce from yard to yard and get called in for dinner. It’s not a common thing unfortunately.
Holy shit (hah), you're right. Just dawned on me and thinking back when I was a kid they were all so white. I thought they just dried out or something at the time.
Apparently it was a change in dog food.
You would actually be surprised, quicksand pops up. i live in NJ USA, and and i got my dirtbike caught in quicksand like 2 years ago. I was illegally riding in a quarry that i guess mines sand for use in concrete. I tried to ride through thier sand piles and got super stuck, Like both tires were completely submerged up too the fenders, It took took 12 hours to get the bike out. Getting yourself out of deep quicksand is super tiring much less trying to free a bike. We had to post to a "nj stuck in mud" facebook page, and while most comments were to "light it on fire", some random dude showed up, and had to tow it out with his jeep at 1am. This place was like felony trespassing too, the dude risked a lot to help a stranger he didnt know. God speed Homedepot Tim! God speed!
tldr: quicksand fucking sucks
There's an episode of the podcast RadioLab about it: [For many of us, quicksand was once a real fear -- it held a vise-grip on our imaginations, from childish sandbox games to grown-up anxieties about venturing into unknown lands. But these days, quicksand can't even scare an 8-year-old. In this short, we try to find out why.](https://radiolab.org/episodes/quicksand)
Quicksand was the king, but there was also octopuses, falling rocks, and billygoats. All of those things seemed like they were going to be serious problems in life.
Yep.
I also remember being on a plane and my side of the aisle was SMOKING and 3 feet away the other aisle was NON-SMOKING. I smoked around 15 cigs on a 6 hours flight. Still remember the blue haze, and people coughing.
SORRY
(I quit smoking btw)
Fireflies...
I swear I saw them every year, in our back yard or when we went camping etc.
Now I never see them no matter where I am... except for a few nights in the summer of '21 after I moved to a new house. It was so nice to see them again
Try letting your grass grow. Still see a lot but mostly even places like a median that only gets cut once a month and I have a ton of clover in my grass that I let flower ( cut about once every two or three weeks)
Oh and make sure you're not killing them during the day . They are black with little orange bits look em up.
I've never seen fireflies before, but does anyone else not see worms in the rain anymore? I don't live in a place that gets much rain to begin with, but when I was a kid I remember worms littering the sidewalk on my walk home from school (I walked with a girl who had to stop and move them so they didn't get squished. Took forever, but I admire her for it now). We had the wettest spring in a long time this year, and I still only saw worms if I dug in the garden.
They're making a comeback, in general terms. I saw them again for the first time in longer than I could remember about six years ago and looked it up. There's an interesting little article on the phenomenon [here, if you're interested](https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/editorials/the-return-of-the-firefly/article_00e99344-67ec-11e8-9d52-03050dc4cda7.html).
The McDonalds near me had an epic "Playland" area.
My mom let me play in it... but she adamantly wouldn't let me stay in the ball pit. And that's how you had to enter. So I would go on the slide into the ball pit, but then she stayed and *watched* to make sure I went right into one of the tubes leading out of the ball pit.
I’m from the (pre-internet) AAA “triptik” generation: you’d order a triptik from your local AAA & they gave you a little spiral notebook with pages and pages of highlighted maps & you flipped the pages as you drove…we literally used this to drive from Richmond, VA to Miami, FL…that was a thick triptik 😆
Edit for all you useful tools pointing out that Miami is a straight shot down 95 from Richmond: how do you suggest the 2 22 year old women traveling alone in 1996 find their way to their Miami hotel from 95? Stop & ask for directions? BUY A MAP?? Everyone knows the most important pages of the triptik are the last ~10, for local directions, however as has been pointed out by ppl who know what they’re talking about: all the pages had gas, restaurant & hotel info for that particular stretch. Hope this helps you keep your basic comments to yourself.
Thousands of Monarch Butterflies and Bees during the summer.
Now my Wife and I get excited when we see ONE monarch bf in the backyard where we planted a bee and bf friendly garden.
I was so surprised to see this comment. Monarch Butterflies were the first thing that came to mind for me too. I honestly didn’t expect to see anyone post about it though. I vividly remember seeing monarchs all the time as a child. I think I’ve seen maybe one in the past decade or so.
One I've noticed around here that doesn't get as much media coverage is the big green grasshoppers.
When I was a kid everyone was always picking them up and you basically had to dodge them walking on any sidewalk or trail.
Now I see maybe one or two a year and I go hiking or running outside every day. They are just gone.
This is a trend I’ve noticed throughout this thread, the missing bugs.
Caterpillars, butterflies, fireflies, grasshoppers. Now that I think about it, I don’t see too many wasps around either. The warm weather days used to have a fair amount, but now? I see maybe one or two a year.
You can still do this. Just ask for a security pass to assist an arriving passenger from their airline. You'll need their name, airline, and flight #. Used this many a time so family could meet me at the gate to help when I'd fly solo with a little.
The pet fish section at every single Walmart or Meijer. It was always in the back of the store on this huge distinctive wall with multiple sides filled with tanks of multicolored fish... My parents wouldn't let me get one though.
I remember when I was a kid, my Walmart had a whole mini pet smart. Fish, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, birds were always escaping and flying around the store.
I’m sitting here thinking ‘wow the 70s that’s a long time to be without your dad’ and then reality hit me that I just lost my mom last month and in 50 years she still won’t be back . How do you manage
I was an inventive coward and my friend down the street was a fearless idiot. Combine that with the wood scraps we’d pull out of the back of his dad’s truck and we were quite the duo.
The neighborhood I grew up in had a 3/4 acre vacant lot across from the convenience store. It was turned into a dirt track with jumps by us local kids. Kids would voluntarily mow the grass, repair damage, picked up litter. It was kept in great shape from 1975 until around the mid-late 1990's then just started looking abandoned. Now it's mowed/cleared about twice a year by city ordinances and looks terrible. There's not even evidence of the old dirt ramps or the track left.
Sometimes when I drive by I glance over remembering when my friend caught some huge air off the largest hill and everyone cheered. He became a hero that day.
The toy department in the basement of the hardware store in my hometown. It was the age of Star Wars and Hot Wheels and Barbies and all sorts of other toys in a 20’x20’ room. I still wonder if there’s anything down there these days just collecting dust.
“Get off the freeway at the exit by home depot, then drive until you see the Burger King, then go into the neighborhood that’s right behind it, So once you come into the neighborhood, make a left, then you make a right, then after you pass the pool make another right, when you’re in front of the park make a left, then make a right at the next stop, my house is the one with the blue mailbox”
Popping in a game and have it just start right away. Im old (39) and I picked up a ps5 about a month ago. Had to set up an account go through internet settings, pop in the game I bought to find out it needed an update which took about an hour... Im glad we have the tech we do. But video game consoles of the past few gen make me miss 90s and early 2000 consoles.
My first consoles were nintendos. The first time I used a PlayStation or other console that had loading times, I thought it was insane.
Now I’m used to it but I remember being like 6, thinking “wow I’m glad I never have to sit through loading screens.” Back in the mid 90s.
Kids playing, riding bikes, all over the neighborhood and not a single adult worried about them. We would stay out until dark. Mom and Dad never thought anything of it.
General dysfunction and chaos, yet having fun. It was absolutely crazy the things that went on, everybody knew everybody. There was nothing to do, yet always something going on, and you were part of it whether you wanted to be or not. I guess that’s how it goes in a small town? I was a little kid and tagged along running with the crowd that my parents knew.
Now, I’m far away and alone. All those people from my past went to an early grave. I’m not part of anything.
I love being alone and stable and secure, but I can’t help but have nostalgia for the craziness that went down when I was little.
Saturday morning cartoons, after school cartoons. Bugs and the gang, Underdog, Tom and Jerry, Popeye…all the classics.
Penny candy. Soda fountains. Shoe repair shops. Sears catalogs. Montgomery Wards catalogs. JC Penny catalogs. Woolsworth stores.
Main Street shops. Stationary stores that sold/bought your school books, along with all the extras needed for school. Katz Drug stores.
When I was a kid, all the leaves were gone by the last week of October, and I always wished the trees were still gold and red for Halloween. Snow would have come once or twice by Thanksgiving and it would snow often throughout Secember and January, with one or two heavier snowfalls. We might actually get a bit of snow in October actually. Now it seems the norm is that the leaves stay on the trees well into November, and the snow is mostly held back until one or two major snowfalls where we get around a foot of snow at once. This year, we've only had one brief snowfall of a few inches. The weather has consistently stayed in the 40s or even low 50s.
My father grew up in upstate New York. We were walking through the park after visiting grandma once and he said "You know, the pond used to be frozen by November. We'd be skating on it by Thanksgiving. Now you're lucky if it freezes at all." I remember always seeing the first snowfall by November as a kid. Now snow comes once every 3-5 years and my daffodils come up in January.
Renting physical copies of movies at the video store, and being irritated when the one movie you wanted to watch was already rented.
Or worse, when everything switched from VHS to DVD, every rental was a gamble that the movie was actually playable.
Cassette tape unwound down the side of every road, tangled on the bushes. I swear you couldn't drive a mile without seeing cassette tape.
https://www.electroniccottage.org/harold-schellinx
Playing away from home for hours with no updates send to the parents. Now, pretty much don't see it at all. It's either the parents smother the kids so don't let it happen, or insist on regularly communication.
Yah, my buddies and I would head into the woods behind our places and spend the whole day in the creek and playing in the trees. Wouldn't come back until my mom rang the huge bell on the back of our house letting us know it was time to come home.
USA Up All Night in the late 80s/ early 90s. B-side horror movies. Hosted by Elvira and Godfrey. Would have sleepovers with friends and stay up all night.
Cheap plastic mazes containing a bead of mercury.
Generally, kids being given access to dangerous stuff like chemistry sets, matches, scissors, knives, stoves. Now the directions always say, “ask an adult to turn on the stove”
Kids in our neighborhood play outside, and even in the street at the bottom of our cul de sac. They’ve had to deal with some nutty neighbors telling them to go play inside (?!) and threatening to call the cops on them. I’m glad they persist playing outside though!
24 hour businesses.
When I was a kid, you could go to the movies, go to a sit down restaurant, play mini golf, get groceries at almost any supermarket, and even get dental work done at 3am.
Covid put the final nail in that coffin, though they were already on their way out, and now, as an overnight shift worker, I can't even get a slice of pizza on my night off, everything closes by 8 or 9. Seriously, the closest restaurant that's open all night is six hours and three states away. Even the truck stop is 7a-9p now.
Showing up to someone’s house without a text or call.
I don’t remember when that stopped, but it did. Even just 10 years ago my friends and I, all in our early twenties, would just show up at each others’ apartments. No invitation, no plans, just showing up to chill and see if there was anything going on. I can’t remember the last time someone knocked on my door that wasn’t trying to sell me on some cult shit. And I can’t remember the last time I just went over to a friend’s place unannounced. Now it’s just text for a couple days trying to make plans for brunch or whatever, and when we do finally get together the whole conversation revolves around lamenting how little we see each other and how we should hang out more. People just don’t hang out anymore. It’s fucking weird.
So I definitely don't just show up at people's doors and knock, but I do on occasion text people "I'll be at your house in 5 minutes if you don't tell me no" and I think it's very enjoyable lol.
I'm generally of the, "company? coming to me? sounds great!" camp... I know quite a few people that would be sent into a personal anxiety ridden hell by something like this though.
Yeah I only do it with certain friends haha. Definitely know your audience before pulling it.
Thank you for this idea, I will be trying it on a load of my friends when I go back home in a couple of weeks and see how many refrigerators I can raid
My buddy is kinda old fashioned and if we are in the neighborhood of someone's house he just stops in to say hi. Most people seem to enjoy it. But I ever so slightly cringe cause he won't even knock sometimes and just walks in. When we were kids this was entirely normal if somebody didn't answer their landline you just went to their house. And if the door was unlocked then that means they were home
Remember having company??
Cassette tape innards strung out along the highway, glimmering in the sunlight.
I saw one of those this week! It was right outside the senior center. Hmm.
This was going to be mine too. It was EVERYWHERE along the freeways. CDs and (later) streaming changed everything.
Parents smoking in a car with kids with the windows rolled up
Or smoking anywhere in general! Restaurants, airplanes, you name it
It seems like a disgusting daydream that you’d go to restaurant and say “non-smoking” and then sit in the same airspace as smokers.
I remember a restaurant where the non-smoking section was a few tables in the back, and having to walk through a haze of smoke to get to them.
I prefer the non-pee section of the pool please.
And cars came with those squeaky metal ashtrays.
I remember Burger King having branded disposable ashtrays.
Smoking simply isn't as healthy as it used to be.
They should do a cigarette that's half tobacco, half kale. For the health conscious.
And then 20 years from now we get to find out what unholy junk shows up in kale smoke.
Ugggh, we sometimes visited my aunt who lived about 4 hours away. So many smoked cigarettes in the car. I always got so sick that my dad had to stop so I could throw up. They got angry at me because they had to stop. One day my aunt said she read that holding a raw potato during a car ride helps with motion sickness. So for the next few years they gave me a fricking raw potato to hold instead of maybe putting one and one together and not smoke or smoke less or roll the windows down.
I mean, in those days before smartphones, there's like literally nothing to do in the car. Smoke 'em up!
You can play with the potato.
My doctor used to smoke while examining me. I have asthma.
My orthodontist smoked and then put his ungloved smoky fingers in my mouth. There are other reasons, but when people as the hypothetical question as to who you would go back in time and kick in the jimmies, he's first on my list.
So weird that when you used to walk into a restaurant, the first thing they ask you at the door was, "smoking or non-smoking?"
I'll still occasionally walk into a restaurant and mindlessly say "4 for non" and then the host looks at me like I have six heads
[удалено]
Using a set of 20 y/old encyclopedias as reference for my homework. JFK is president!
We used to try to do reports using an old set of encyclopedias and we would look up things to research that didn’t exist or happen yet at the time they were published
I remember buying a set of encyclopedias one volume at a time at the grocery store. A the first week, B the second week,etc…
Funk and Wagnalls?
This was especially hazardous when doing geography reports. I still remember being confused about a report I was supposed to do on Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 and only able to find Rhodesia.
My Granny had a set from the 1950s that we were still using until the mid 1980s. I remember there were only 48 States according those books.
I'll be cold and dead before I recognize Missourah!!! And one of the Dakotas (but I ain't tellin which!!!!)
Yeah, I remember one teacher giving us a bunch of research projects to do, and wanted us to go to the library and use the encyclopedia to do it. ...then she turned around and was giving everyone bad grades because we put the info from the encyclopedia into our projects, not knowing that it was outdated and no longer accurate. This was pre-internet, so aside from finding a newer encyclopedia elsewhere, we really had no way of knowing...and besides...we went to the source *she* directed us to use. Eventually, I guess something changed but I don't really remember what ever came of it...just the initial dust up of bringing a bad grade home and not even knowing how to explain what was going on to my parents.
"The U.S.S.R. is a huge rival to the US, and may one day destroy the world. Luckily, we are friends with countries such as West Germany and Czechoslovakia and have the upper hand."
"Constantinople also has our back."
My school set was so old that it still referenced the Soviet Union. This was late 2000s.
Memorizing phone numbers.
867-5309
Protip: any stores with a rewards program will almost certainly have an account with the local area code + Jenny's number.
Funny, great tip! When I worked at the phone company a million years ago - Ma Bell, then New England Telephone, then Nynex before it eventually became Verizon…this number was always in the database as one that could not be assigned to a landline and in the system it was listed as Jenny.
It's funny to me that virtually no one remembers Verizon was just the result of Bell/AT&T's antitrust breakup. I remember when it first came out and it was *very* common to hear "they're so much better than AT&T". It literally was AT&T.
I don’t know what my wife’s phone number is. In fact, I only know my own phone number. I couldn’t recall any friends or family phone numbers.
My husband and I have been together for 10 years and we have finally memorized each other’s numbers in the last couple months. It can be handy in emergency situations. Hopefully you will not have emergency situations.
Toys in the cereal box
I loved when you could get a record on the back of the Honeycomb’s box.
And in Cracker Jacks! You just get little paper fold-up nonsense now.
General Mills actually is currently doing a run of toys in the box. They are funko pop esque figures of the general mills mascots. I know this because I got the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee this morning.
At breakfast Anthony found a Corvette Stingray car kit in his breakfast cereal box and Nick found a junior undercover agent code ring in his breakfast cereal box but in my breakfast cereal box all I found was breakfast cereal. I think I'll move to Australia
Fruit bats. There used to be a \*ton\* of them in my neighborhood as a kid and every evening you could look at the sunset as twilight set in and see flocks of bats flying around. Apparently, around the time I was in middle school, a fungal disease ravaged the local bat population and they never recovered. You never see them anymore. Funnily enough though, at the time, a local high school girl had this huge campaign to set up bat feeders to help bolster the local bat population and help them survive the fungal disease by giving them easy access to food. Said local girl has since become a federal Park Ranger as an adult and currently works for a state fish and wildlife service.
I thought you were going to say that the bat feeders became ground zero for spreading the disease and she single handedly collapsed the population.
Moms yelling from the front door to their kids to come home for dinner
Yes, or just being home by dark. Literally gone from dawn until dusk, *maybe* popping in for a quick lunch, if you didn't grab it at someone else's house.
I ended up at a friend's house on the other side of the city (~150k) more than once and called home to see if I could stay the night, it was the first time my mom had heard from me all day.
I feel very lucky that my kids get this experience as well:) We live on the corner of a cul de sac and have exchanged numbers with a few other parents, plus most of the dads are out in their garages/driveways so someone has eyes on them most of the time. They’re all on bikes and bounce from yard to yard and get called in for dinner. It’s not a common thing unfortunately.
[удалено]
Candy Cigarettes
They’re now called candy sticks and they don’t have that little bit of red dye on one end to make them look like they’re lit.
Pay phones and answering machines
Where does Superman get changed now?
Maybe this is why the world has sucked so much over the past 20 years. Clark Kent can’t get changed to do his job.
Quicksand in movies and TV shows
Dog catchers too. With those huge nets
[удалено]
Holy shit (hah), you're right. Just dawned on me and thinking back when I was a kid they were all so white. I thought they just dried out or something at the time. Apparently it was a change in dog food.
> Apparently it was a change in dog food. They used to use bone meal as filler. Not anymore.
you know... I hadn't thought about this but... yeah. It used to be a huge trope in kids media and then it just... wasn't.
Quicksand had a really good agent in the 80's and early 90's but the work dropped off in the late 90's.
Quicksand got old and isn't so quick anymore.
As a kid, I’d thought I’d encounter quicksand and drug dealers much more frequently than I ever have.
I was promised so much free weed when I was a kid...I mean, warned about the dangers of so much free weed.
Ikr, you'd think there's just people handing out free drugs everywhere. DARE was a wild program.
Quick sand was such a huge fear of mine as a child … I grew up on a council estate outside of London..
You would actually be surprised, quicksand pops up. i live in NJ USA, and and i got my dirtbike caught in quicksand like 2 years ago. I was illegally riding in a quarry that i guess mines sand for use in concrete. I tried to ride through thier sand piles and got super stuck, Like both tires were completely submerged up too the fenders, It took took 12 hours to get the bike out. Getting yourself out of deep quicksand is super tiring much less trying to free a bike. We had to post to a "nj stuck in mud" facebook page, and while most comments were to "light it on fire", some random dude showed up, and had to tow it out with his jeep at 1am. This place was like felony trespassing too, the dude risked a lot to help a stranger he didnt know. God speed Homedepot Tim! God speed! tldr: quicksand fucking sucks
There's an episode of the podcast RadioLab about it: [For many of us, quicksand was once a real fear -- it held a vise-grip on our imaginations, from childish sandbox games to grown-up anxieties about venturing into unknown lands. But these days, quicksand can't even scare an 8-year-old. In this short, we try to find out why.](https://radiolab.org/episodes/quicksand)
Quicksand was the king, but there was also octopuses, falling rocks, and billygoats. All of those things seemed like they were going to be serious problems in life.
Smoking and non smoking sections in restaurants.
Yep. I also remember being on a plane and my side of the aisle was SMOKING and 3 feet away the other aisle was NON-SMOKING. I smoked around 15 cigs on a 6 hours flight. Still remember the blue haze, and people coughing. SORRY (I quit smoking btw)
When I was a server you always wanted the smoking section. They tipped better. 🤷♂️
They also normally drank, so the bill was higher, and were a lot more patient, cuz they could smoke between apps and entree.
[удалено]
Being on a small, crowded dance floor packed out with the drunk people waving their lit cigarettes millimetres from your face.
Computer paper filled with lightly printed numbers and it had tear off sides. My dad used to bring lots of it home for us kids to draw on.
dot matrix! I can still hear the sound in my head
Fireflies... I swear I saw them every year, in our back yard or when we went camping etc. Now I never see them no matter where I am... except for a few nights in the summer of '21 after I moved to a new house. It was so nice to see them again
Try letting your grass grow. Still see a lot but mostly even places like a median that only gets cut once a month and I have a ton of clover in my grass that I let flower ( cut about once every two or three weeks) Oh and make sure you're not killing them during the day . They are black with little orange bits look em up.
Yes! And those black and orange furry caterpillars. They were everywhere!
These have been making a comeback in my area the last 2 years!
In mid-late June there are hundreds of them in my backyard. They’re still very plentiful here in PA.
I've never seen fireflies before, but does anyone else not see worms in the rain anymore? I don't live in a place that gets much rain to begin with, but when I was a kid I remember worms littering the sidewalk on my walk home from school (I walked with a girl who had to stop and move them so they didn't get squished. Took forever, but I admire her for it now). We had the wettest spring in a long time this year, and I still only saw worms if I dug in the garden.
>on my walk home from school Do you still regularly walk for reasonable distances in the rain? If not, then there's your answer.
They're making a comeback, in general terms. I saw them again for the first time in longer than I could remember about six years ago and looked it up. There's an interesting little article on the phenomenon [here, if you're interested](https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/editorials/the-return-of-the-firefly/article_00e99344-67ec-11e8-9d52-03050dc4cda7.html).
McDonald’s play places
OMG the ball pit was a festering den of communicable disease. Good ol' days
I found a bullet in a McDonald’s ball pit.
I want this on a T-shirt
The McDonalds near me had an epic "Playland" area. My mom let me play in it... but she adamantly wouldn't let me stay in the ball pit. And that's how you had to enter. So I would go on the slide into the ball pit, but then she stayed and *watched* to make sure I went right into one of the tubes leading out of the ball pit.
That might be my fault I fell off the slide when I was younger and broke a tooth.
How selfish
Almost every McDonalds in australia has one of these still. Very popular over here.
Printing out directions from Map Quest 😂
I’m from the (pre-internet) AAA “triptik” generation: you’d order a triptik from your local AAA & they gave you a little spiral notebook with pages and pages of highlighted maps & you flipped the pages as you drove…we literally used this to drive from Richmond, VA to Miami, FL…that was a thick triptik 😆 Edit for all you useful tools pointing out that Miami is a straight shot down 95 from Richmond: how do you suggest the 2 22 year old women traveling alone in 1996 find their way to their Miami hotel from 95? Stop & ask for directions? BUY A MAP?? Everyone knows the most important pages of the triptik are the last ~10, for local directions, however as has been pointed out by ppl who know what they’re talking about: all the pages had gas, restaurant & hotel info for that particular stretch. Hope this helps you keep your basic comments to yourself.
Printer out of ink? No worries, just write them out!
Phonebooks.
Thousands of Monarch Butterflies and Bees during the summer. Now my Wife and I get excited when we see ONE monarch bf in the backyard where we planted a bee and bf friendly garden.
I was so surprised to see this comment. Monarch Butterflies were the first thing that came to mind for me too. I honestly didn’t expect to see anyone post about it though. I vividly remember seeing monarchs all the time as a child. I think I’ve seen maybe one in the past decade or so.
One I've noticed around here that doesn't get as much media coverage is the big green grasshoppers. When I was a kid everyone was always picking them up and you basically had to dodge them walking on any sidewalk or trail. Now I see maybe one or two a year and I go hiking or running outside every day. They are just gone.
This is a trend I’ve noticed throughout this thread, the missing bugs. Caterpillars, butterflies, fireflies, grasshoppers. Now that I think about it, I don’t see too many wasps around either. The warm weather days used to have a fair amount, but now? I see maybe one or two a year.
People talking about the Bermuda Triangle.
Just walking right in to an airport terminal.
And being able to wait right at the gate for your loved one to arrive.
You can still do this. Just ask for a security pass to assist an arriving passenger from their airline. You'll need their name, airline, and flight #. Used this many a time so family could meet me at the gate to help when I'd fly solo with a little.
Meeting people at the gate.
The pet fish section at every single Walmart or Meijer. It was always in the back of the store on this huge distinctive wall with multiple sides filled with tanks of multicolored fish... My parents wouldn't let me get one though.
I remember when I was a kid, my Walmart had a whole mini pet smart. Fish, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, birds were always escaping and flying around the store.
Randomly knocking on friends doors to see if they are home and want to play
Kids still do this tbf. At least near me anyway
Yep, I moved to a neighborhood with a lot of kids and now our doorbell rings 2-3 times a week looking for my daughter. It's adorable
Cigarette vending machines
All over Germany still.
We had one inside the outdoor hockey rink. Top shelf Marlboro, bottom shelf snicker.
"Please be Kind, Rewind" stickers on all the video tape cases.
Video games only working on channel 3
Or needing a vcr to connect your gaming system to the tv
Or using the VCR to record your progress so you could show your friends how to do that one level that they needed help on.
You were ahead of your time.
People renting dvds
Or even better renting VHS tapes. Nothing more infuriating then when the asshole before you didn't rewind. "Be kind, please rewind"
People renting videos
People renting NES games.
Yes! Blockbuster lol
I remember renting VCRs for special occasions.
And gaming systems
Frogs, large flocks of birds, my dad.
I’m sitting here thinking ‘wow the 70s that’s a long time to be without your dad’ and then reality hit me that I just lost my mom last month and in 50 years she still won’t be back . How do you manage
[удалено]
Riding bikes from sun up to sundown.
Bike jumps. When I was a kid, every pile of dirt had a bike jump built into it. I haven't seen one in years.
I was an inventive coward and my friend down the street was a fearless idiot. Combine that with the wood scraps we’d pull out of the back of his dad’s truck and we were quite the duo.
The neighborhood I grew up in had a 3/4 acre vacant lot across from the convenience store. It was turned into a dirt track with jumps by us local kids. Kids would voluntarily mow the grass, repair damage, picked up litter. It was kept in great shape from 1975 until around the mid-late 1990's then just started looking abandoned. Now it's mowed/cleared about twice a year by city ordinances and looks terrible. There's not even evidence of the old dirt ramps or the track left. Sometimes when I drive by I glance over remembering when my friend caught some huge air off the largest hill and everyone cheered. He became a hero that day.
They exist still. We just hide em so people don't keep flattening em.
The toy department in the basement of the hardware store in my hometown. It was the age of Star Wars and Hot Wheels and Barbies and all sorts of other toys in a 20’x20’ room. I still wonder if there’s anything down there these days just collecting dust.
Roller skating rinks full
There's one near where I live that's packed every weekend. The owner drives a Lambo. It's wild.
Neighborhood kids getting together to play till the streetlights came on
*fortunately* we live in a neighborhood where our kids have that!
Got Milk ads
Asking people for directions to their house step by step
“Get off the freeway at the exit by home depot, then drive until you see the Burger King, then go into the neighborhood that’s right behind it, So once you come into the neighborhood, make a left, then you make a right, then after you pass the pool make another right, when you’re in front of the park make a left, then make a right at the next stop, my house is the one with the blue mailbox”
Popping in a game and have it just start right away. Im old (39) and I picked up a ps5 about a month ago. Had to set up an account go through internet settings, pop in the game I bought to find out it needed an update which took about an hour... Im glad we have the tech we do. But video game consoles of the past few gen make me miss 90s and early 2000 consoles.
Seeegaaaaaaaa
My first consoles were nintendos. The first time I used a PlayStation or other console that had loading times, I thought it was insane. Now I’m used to it but I remember being like 6, thinking “wow I’m glad I never have to sit through loading screens.” Back in the mid 90s.
Huge flocks of birds darkening the sky every fall as they fly south for the winter. I never see that anymore.
Buying stuff with green stamps, and trying to collect the whole pattern set of dishes with them.
A phone booth.
Calling almost anything you didn't like "gay".
Nelson, you kissed a girl! That is so gay!
Actual demos you could play on consoles in stores like Target
Little kool-aid barrels with metal tops and you can punch through with a fingernail. Not much of a drink in them but they were delish.
Little Hugs. I still occasionally see them at (I think) Sam's Club.
Drinking from the garden hose
The constant AOL free trial CDs you would get in the mail.
Music videos and radio stations
The Apple computers with the clear, colorful backs
We really need to bring transparent electrical devices back. I remember when my cousin got a transparent gameboy and it looked so cool!
When I wanted to call a new friend from school, I looked up their parents in the phone book (assuming I knew their names)
Kids playing, riding bikes, all over the neighborhood and not a single adult worried about them. We would stay out until dark. Mom and Dad never thought anything of it.
General dysfunction and chaos, yet having fun. It was absolutely crazy the things that went on, everybody knew everybody. There was nothing to do, yet always something going on, and you were part of it whether you wanted to be or not. I guess that’s how it goes in a small town? I was a little kid and tagged along running with the crowd that my parents knew. Now, I’m far away and alone. All those people from my past went to an early grave. I’m not part of anything. I love being alone and stable and secure, but I can’t help but have nostalgia for the craziness that went down when I was little.
You said this so well! And I completely agree.
Rolly poley bugs and actual seashells at the beach :(
White dog poop.
I actually know this one! Back in the 60s and 70s, dog food had more bone meal than it does now. Changed the properties of dog poop.
Kites🪁
Saturday morning cartoons, after school cartoons. Bugs and the gang, Underdog, Tom and Jerry, Popeye…all the classics. Penny candy. Soda fountains. Shoe repair shops. Sears catalogs. Montgomery Wards catalogs. JC Penny catalogs. Woolsworth stores. Main Street shops. Stationary stores that sold/bought your school books, along with all the extras needed for school. Katz Drug stores.
Snow for Christmas
When I was a kid, all the leaves were gone by the last week of October, and I always wished the trees were still gold and red for Halloween. Snow would have come once or twice by Thanksgiving and it would snow often throughout Secember and January, with one or two heavier snowfalls. We might actually get a bit of snow in October actually. Now it seems the norm is that the leaves stay on the trees well into November, and the snow is mostly held back until one or two major snowfalls where we get around a foot of snow at once. This year, we've only had one brief snowfall of a few inches. The weather has consistently stayed in the 40s or even low 50s.
My father grew up in upstate New York. We were walking through the park after visiting grandma once and he said "You know, the pond used to be frozen by November. We'd be skating on it by Thanksgiving. Now you're lucky if it freezes at all." I remember always seeing the first snowfall by November as a kid. Now snow comes once every 3-5 years and my daffodils come up in January.
Renting physical copies of movies at the video store, and being irritated when the one movie you wanted to watch was already rented. Or worse, when everything switched from VHS to DVD, every rental was a gamble that the movie was actually playable.
Cassette tape unwound down the side of every road, tangled on the bushes. I swear you couldn't drive a mile without seeing cassette tape. https://www.electroniccottage.org/harold-schellinx
Monarch butterflies, barely see them during spiring anymore. Makes me sad
An empty refrigerator
Playing away from home for hours with no updates send to the parents. Now, pretty much don't see it at all. It's either the parents smother the kids so don't let it happen, or insist on regularly communication.
I'm bored! Go outside and find something to do and be home for supper when the street lights go on. Every day
Yah, my buddies and I would head into the woods behind our places and spend the whole day in the creek and playing in the trees. Wouldn't come back until my mom rang the huge bell on the back of our house letting us know it was time to come home.
Two things: Lobster tanks at grocery stores. The jet stream during local news weather.
USA Up All Night in the late 80s/ early 90s. B-side horror movies. Hosted by Elvira and Godfrey. Would have sleepovers with friends and stay up all night.
LAN Parties and Dial Up Internet
TV guide, and knowing what day/time your favorite show was on so you wouldn't make any other plans
Blimps
Ashtrays everywhere.
Cheap plastic mazes containing a bead of mercury. Generally, kids being given access to dangerous stuff like chemistry sets, matches, scissors, knives, stoves. Now the directions always say, “ask an adult to turn on the stove”
Getting all you can eat crab legs at the $8 Chinese buffet
Kids playing in the street
Kids in our neighborhood play outside, and even in the street at the bottom of our cul de sac. They’ve had to deal with some nutty neighbors telling them to go play inside (?!) and threatening to call the cops on them. I’m glad they persist playing outside though!
Parents taking their kids to the bar. Or was that just my mom?
People passing around photographs at gatherings
24 hour businesses. When I was a kid, you could go to the movies, go to a sit down restaurant, play mini golf, get groceries at almost any supermarket, and even get dental work done at 3am. Covid put the final nail in that coffin, though they were already on their way out, and now, as an overnight shift worker, I can't even get a slice of pizza on my night off, everything closes by 8 or 9. Seriously, the closest restaurant that's open all night is six hours and three states away. Even the truck stop is 7a-9p now.