It’s always sad when someone who clearly cares so much gives up or resorts to irrational methods to fight against what he perceived as an insurmountable threat.

The world has always been run by self-interested bastards who will gladly sacrifice thousands and millions of people to enrich themselves. This is nothing new to anyone who has studied any history.

You think he knows those are two different people? He probably thinks “Hunter” is one of Joe’s nicknames.

Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.

I used to get up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons, and remember being really bummed when they weren’t on because Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait.

And I can sort of mentally mark when I started to sleep in later because by the time I got up all I managed to catch was Saved By the Bell before the broadcast switched to a golf tournament or a fishing show.

And ATMs charge fees, which you don’t pay if you use the teller.

“Real old heads”? Blu-rays are older than Silly Bandz.

My bluetooth headphones still do this when I use the microwave at work. I have learned to stand back from it when it’s in use.

Apple IIe’s in the computer lab at school, magazines with whole programs in basic that you could type in to make the computer draw something.

Road trips with Prairie Home Companion on tape, Dad was at the wheel, and Mom flipped the tapes. I didn’t quite grok that there was a big plastic case full of cassettes, so hearing “turn to side eight” mystified me, because surely tapes could only have two sides, right?

That smell is Christmas to me. That was the only time we typically got new NES or Super NES games, and lord I loved that smell of fresh print and plastic.

I remember always resenting Prince Valiant for taking up valuable page space that could have gone to Calvin and Hobbes or something else that didn’t suck. Good lord, Prince Valiant was fucking terrible.

One of my first vehicles came with an aftermarket ten-disc cd-changer someone had installed in the back and hooked into the sound system, with a separate control panel up front. It was such a pain to use (and would skip constantly) that I usually just listened to the radio anyway.

And you didn’t have to update it constantly with patches that might change its functionality.

It was channel 4 for us, because channel 3 was the local CBS affiliate and it would interfere with the signal from the NES. There was a switch on the console to flip between 3 and 4, because it varied depending on location which channel was optimal.

Channel 3 was CBS, 5 was ABC, 12 was NBC, and that was it.

The ABC affiliate would also broadcast Sesame Street because for most of my childhood, we didn’t have a local public television station. When we finally did get one, you had to get cable to pick it up where I lived. I have vague memories of having cable in the house for a brief time around the time the ABC station stopped carrying the show, but my parents dropped it pretty soon afterward when we started to want to watch exclusively Nickelodeon. At least I always assumed that was the cause, but the cost of cable was probably a bigger factor. They compensated for that by recording movies that came on network TV with the VCR, and we happily rewatched those constantly instead of whatever we were missing on cable. We had whole shelves full of just VHS tapes full of movies recorded off the TV.

If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t in the same location as me, I had to know the ten digit number assigned to them.

That’s a good one. Love the art style of all their videos.

This certainly has the ring of truthiness to it.

Now kith.

I don’t!

My wife does it for me, lol.

I have a group text with my immediate family so we can coordinate semi-regular get-togethers, and I do the same with my own kids, but that’s it.

(There’s no way I’d be able to get my parents to learn how use anything more complicated anyhow, and just getting everyone in my own household to use a shared calendar was a whole thing. Simpler is better.)

My wife, however, likes staying informed, if not always in touch, and so dutifully does all the obligatory proud parent posting on facebook. She lets me know if anything important comes up from one of the relatives on there.

Distant family stays distant, which is how I like it, because most of them are pretty right wing anyway and the less I have to engage with their gibberish the better. Otherwise I only visit facebook occasionally to browse a shitposting page for a podcast I listen to. It’s better this way.

2 feet of snow is no joke, especially in an area without a sufficient fleet of plows.