I’ve been thinking a lot about how old I am in technology years lately so here’s a bit of reminiscing for you kids in the form of stuff you’ll thankfully never know the pain of
having to rewind cassette tapes. you want to hear your favourite song again? no just clicking <<. nope, you gotta manually rewind that shit and keep hitting play to see if you’re at the beginning again.
like listening to your own music in the car? back in my day we had to bring a bag full of CDs and swap them out in our portable CD players. if the car went over a bump, the CD would jump in the player and the music would skip. eventually the CDs would get wrecked. I killed so many CDs thanks to all the moving around I did as a kid.
stifling the dialup tone when your parents were in bed. want to sneak online? good luck. I had the modem squeezed between my legs, with two pillows pressed on top of it, and still. crrrrrRRRSSSHHHHHHHHHHH
fucking. homepage wars. hacking was a lot easier back in the day thanks to no one knowing shit about security and nerds like my generation quickly learning more than the web developers did. this resulted in carnage if you owned your own webpage. it was commonplace for different groups to have wars and constantly hack each other’s pages and deface them. you could trust no one. you leave for five seconds and suddenly your state of the art homepage and all its lit wordart graphics has been replaced with a plain text message insinuating something about your mother.
an entire room in your house was dedicated to the computer. it was called the computer room. it was filled with wires you were constantly tripping over, and thanks to the fact you were on a desktop, there was no battery life. you better get used to tripping over your power cord or rolling back in your chair and ripping it out of the wall, therefore instantly shutting off your computer, because it’s going to happen multiple times a week my guy.
“get off the internet, I need to use the phone” “how long will you be?” “only a couple of minutes” *two hours later*
I’m pretty sure it was messenger that had this, but basically if someone ignored your message for too long you could send them graphics that would hijack their entire browser and pop up on the screen. they were huge and would sometimes make the screen shake and I heard rumours that some of them could even make noise.
this is one that’s near and dear to me because I spent like 60% of my childhood in a car but handheld game consoles didn’t have built in lights. I remember playing Pokemon on my big purple GameBoy as it got dark, holding the screen closer and closer to my face, and eventually having to resort to quickly jamming the buttons when we passed under a streetlight. I remember when the GameBoy Advance SP came out with a built in back light and I lost my fucking mind.
*is two seconds away from finally downloading a picture online that’s been downloading for 15 minutes* *someone picks up the phone downstairs* *internet disconnects* *download fails* *why must you hurt me in this way*
writing everything you wanted to say online in the raw html code because it didn’t do it automatically. fine if you just wanted to make things bold or underlined, a lot more annoying when you wanted to add an image or bullet points or something. no such thing as a quick rant.
this is really long already so I’ll stop here but long story short it was a dark time and you all should grab every technological advancement you can with both hands and never let them go. for the sake of my childhood self, nose-to-screen with a GameBoy. do not let them go.
See also:
Having to tape episodes of your favourite late-night TV show on a blank VHS because some jackass decided 10pm on a Thursday was the ideal time to air Buffy and then drowning in a pit of despair when the record failed because YOU WILL NEVER SEE THAT EPISODE — it aired once and was gone — no passing go, no collecting 200 dollars
Hovering over the record button on the radio to try and tape a copy of your favourite songs. It’s this or Limewire, and you’d rather not have to ritually set your desktop on fire to purge those demons again.
Microsoft. Fucking. Encarta.
Drafting texts by hitting number keys multiple times. You need an ‘S’. How long have you been hitting the 7 key? You’ve lost count. Your grandchildren are grown. A plant is president now.
“Don’t call anyone on your mobile, it’s for emergencies only.” Jokes on you, mum, none of my friends have a mobile anyway.
Ok so I’ve covered why you should not actually clone your pet. But to be honest, I’m not sure how many of you were actually considering dropping 50 G’s for the procedure. Still, maybe you want some sort of memory of a pet who passed away. So let me tell you about CUDDLE CLONES
Basically it’s this company that will make a PLUSH replica of your pet. A cat, dog or horse is $249, and smaller animals like rabbits and guinea pigs are $179.
In addition to being much cheaper than actual cloning, it doesn’t require any invasive surgery on innocent surrogate ovum donors and mom dogs! Note that this isn’t the only company that does something like plush replicas, for example Feltpets will make your animal out of felt.
But OK Cuddle Clones look particularly quality to me, look at how close they look to the original
they also do figurines
Furthermore, they’ll do any animal you like
cat? dog? horse? gerbil? donkey? it don’t matter to cuddle clones, they will MAKE YOU THAT PLUSH
Also, they donate money to animal-related charities Did I mention they will do any animal? it doesn’t even have to be real. it can be the fursona you made when you were 14 for deviantart
hell, they’ll make your How to Train Your Dragon OC if you want it
Cuddle Clones is there for you, and i need one of my blob monster please
