💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~oldernow › 2023-11-27-07-08-11.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 17:17:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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My wife repurposed the bulk of the Thanksgiving leftovers as "turkey pot pies", now frozen, ready for future ease and joy of consumption.
I plowed through a bunch of "ctrl-c" gemlogs yesterday. It was the usual exploration of pretty much nothing, mostly "hello-world"-grade half-assedness.
In a way I get it because writing seems to be rocket science for most people. But I admit wanting to discover gobs of younger people way smarter than me expressing themselves in new and exciting plethoric ways as some sort of reassurance an apocalypse isn't imminent.
But, no. When it wasn't "hello world", it was brief expressions of cluelessness a la "coming soon", "what is this place?", "okay so I made a page, now what?", "this is so cool", a single link back to the same page, etc.
But then I started wondering whether I'd have made much of such an opportunity at a much younger age?
Hard to say. There was absolutely nothing like this in the days of my youth. There were newspapers, of which I mostly examined the "comics" and "sports" sections. There were magazines, but I really didn't have enough money to spring for those - although I think someone got me a "Popular Science" subscription as a gift. Thank you, whoever that was!
We had six local TV stations: three corresponding to the major "networks" of the time (ABC, CBS, NBC), one "unaffiliated"/"independent" station that provided most of the reruns action, and then a couple PBS-ish stations.
I'd occasionally fiddle with antennas to pick up stations from larger cities to the north and south.
And then, of course, there was radio. Those were some pretty good days for radio, especially when popular music stations got to competin'.
Oh, and the library! We had a pretty good one. I still remember "graduating" from the kids level downstairs to the adult level upstairs.
I'm also remembering that, for whatever biological reason, that downstairs section never failed to provoke my "having gas" such that I'd be zig-zagging through the stacks on "release" missions.... <winces>
The upstairs had the "music room", where one could thumb through 33 1/3 RPM albums kept mostly vertical (slight slant) in whatever the containers/shelving was called. I think there were a couple record players with headphones as well.
Drug and grocery stores had fairly significant magazine racks.
Of course there were bookstores, but none of significances in my smallish town. It wasn't until I could drive that I could get to a "real" bookstore.
But, anyway, that was basically the sum total of available media slash content. Pretty minimal by today's standards.
And you wanna talk "smol"? Holy fucking shit. It took what seemed like 150% of forever for a next month's magazine issue to become available. And of *course* newspapers had "yesterday's news" at best.
Heh... speeding ahead to my mid to late 20's, fully employed, already an, um, accidental family in progress, I'm still remembering the moment I first encountered a "zine" section in the magazine section of the local Barnes and Noble. That seemed significant.
But I suspect I'd already experienced "local BBSes" by then, not to mention ssh'ing into "SDF" by then, so I couldn't see popping for any of them. They seemed rather expensive for what they provided. And why would I bother with, again, yesterday's "whatever" when I could maybe possibly I'm-sure-it's-going-to-be-any-day-now encounter massively interesting people like me exploring online places?
<winces hard remembering his full-of-himself naivete>
But I'm suddenly remembering the one thing I did in those days that I guess is a little like what I'm doing here: I enjoyed leaving anonymous messages in places. I'm talking handwritten pieces of paper covertly placed in books, magazines, between cereal boxes - that sort of thing.
It was a "posting" (as a verb) of sorts.
So I've no idea why I wasted so many years of my life upset that it seemed hardly anyone online wanted to interact with me, because I should have been pretty gosh danged used to that given my anonymous messages phase, in which there was absolutely no hope of interaction, because of course I wasn't going to include my parents' phone number and/or address in such a thing. I suppose I could have added something to the effect of "meet me at <place> at <date/time>", but that might have been a little eerie given my age at the time.. and of course the chances of someone chancing upon such a message in time to fulfill the <date/time> requirement were probably essentially zero.