Millenials what other odd things did you used to do or that you remember when you were younger

    
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The cool S is peak though.
- And now classroom laptops have robbed the younger generations the enjoyment of notebook doodles.
- It's called a fumking STUSSY
- you what now?
one of the most ridiculous but most poignant bonding experiences: draw the parallel lines on your notebook, then slide it to your neighbor to complete
will we be friends?!?! we will know if they complete the drawing ❤️

There used to be a phone number you would call to find out what time it was

"Time and temp"
- Woah AND temperature where you lived? You lived in the future!
Such services still exist in most countries. They're not too popular, I suppose.
basically how i learned to use the phone as a wee child. my grandparents loved showing me all these unknown social services floating around out there
"At the tone, the time will be 7:23 pm...... Ding"
did you all have the thing before 411? it was like (area code)-555-1212 that you could call to find out things that weren't in the yellow pages
- I don't know, if I did I never had anyone clue me in. If it wasn't word of mouth or some radio commercial it may well have not existed
  that one feels like: man, maybe if I were cooler as a kid I would have had the hook up on this municipal service phone line

that's an ad nobody really did that

Eh...I def did this with Ring Pops when I was candy rich. Felt like royalty.
Edit: Also push pops low key sucked, if you tried to close them half the time they'd become permanently stuck to the side and you'd lose half your pop.
I wadded fruit roll up onto my thumb till it looked like a red gorey mess then sucked it
- TMI
I liked those candies, but i would only eat one at a time because they were imported and expensive AF.

My grandparents used to save the newspapers up for like a month at a time. Don't remember why exactly. I used to go over there and cut all the Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield strips out of the comics and glue or staple them to sheets of paper and make my own comic books.

When I was like 7-8ish I used to go catch monarch caterpillars in this vacant lot that was full of milkweed.

When I was about 10 I taped a cassette walkman with built in radio to my handlebars and would ride my bike around for hours listening to tunes.

Between 6-10 my friend and I would flood the sandbox with the garden hose and make little cityscapes with canals and stuff. We also collected acorns, nuts, berries and stuff like that and made little stashes "for emergencies". We eventually realized nobody was going to eat that stuff and started hoarding real snacks.

We used to be heavy into rock collecting. I still am.

Nobody I knew ever had a full set of one type of action figure so we made up our own games with what we had and just pooled the batmobile with Gargoyles and GI Joes.

Legos. Fucking Legos.

We would ride our bikes to the little army/navy surplus store and buy a bunch of camo and other crap. They would sell you anything. Butterfly knives, tripwire, you name it. We would go rig the patch of woods in the neighborhood like we were planning some special ops and lie in wait wearing the camo and ambush the other kids. Nothing actually violent. We just got off on being sneaky.

Street hockey was huge

Yoyos, pokemon, pogs, toy guns..

When we got a little older, we would raid our parents garages and build weird shit. We made crossbows out of PVC, rubber bands and wood. We tried making potato guns. We all went through a serious phase of lighting things on fire or melting stuff. The dollar store would just sell us lighter fluid when we were 12.

I remember one of the first times I ever had money and was allowed to ride to a real store. Me and the neighbor girl were like "we are gonna go nuts and treat ourselves to some yummy stuff that our parents wouldn't let us get". She got a huge thing of flavored coffee creamer and I bought a brick of ungrated parmesan cheese since I loved the grated stuff so much. We figured out really quick why you don't just chug coffee creamer or take a huge bite of parmesan cheese. It's just too much!

Then we got heavy into rock and roll and the occult around 13.

Awful webpage designs with autoplay MIDIs and animated GIFs everywhere

neocities has you covered
- desperately wish I could remember the / stuff for my old geocities
  I know it was /SouthBeach or something, there was some kinda beach in it
visit counter at the bottom of the page
- web circles! "if you like my site, check out ..."

I remember a drug dealing simulator that ran on graphing calculators in the early 2000s. That was a fun distraction in high school math classes.

Edit: Simple google search - Drug Wars (I played on the TI-86). What a time.

Why yes I'd like 23$ worth of acid
Creepin up on some fools with my forklift
I knew a kid that had Zelda A Link to the Past on his graphing calculator.
- I had GTA on a graphing calculator at one point
- Sounds like the rich kid with the TI-92
Drug Wars was so great. Best part of math class.
- Good way to learn fractions and supply and demand
I remember other kids playing it, but I couldn't afford a link cable so I had to write my own little games
TI-86
big spender, i think i got by on a TI-83 plus

Just how boring weekends at home were. No internet yet, dog shit tv programming (hope you like Golf, MASH, or Land of the Lost). Stare at the walls or read a book. My family was anti vidya.

Pagers ushering in the age of always being online. Mom could send a page to Dad and then he knew to find a phone and give her a call.

Rewinding the VHS before returning it to the rental store

Memorizing the CCS skate catalog

Being able to buy realistic looking toy guns and brandishing them everywhere

Those shirts made of towel material

Switching to the other "real alternative ROCK" radio station whenever one goes to commercial to catch "Livin on a prayer" for the fourth time today

(A bit later) Calling home to have Mom look up MapQuest directions because I got lost

We had a cabinet with like 50 VHS tapes in it and I'm pretty sure I watched all of them at least 3 times.
At my first job as a delivery driver (late 00s, early 10s), I remember being able to text google to get turn by turn directions before I had a smart phone
- I didn't know that was a thing, that's wild. I do remember the text services that would basically just google stuff for you, but I had never thought they would work for directions
Rewinding the VHS before returning it to the rental store
did you know anybody with one of the quick-rewind boxes? I remember my (much older!) sister had one that was shaped like a race car, and you just put the VHS tape in and closed it and it would super fast rewind it to the beginning
(to make it easier to return videos, "be kind, rewind" etc)
- Oh of course. My parents thought the racecar one was tacky so ours was just a rectangle but I do remember enjoying the eject mechanism
I did like MA*SH though
- maturing was learning to love mash instead of freaking out when the theme started
  actually maturing was realising how fucked up half of mash was and how far we've come

Making collect calls (reverse charge calls) and using the name prompt to tell my mom where I was and if I needed a ride home. This would avoid her having to accept the charges just for me to tell her where I was and if I needed a ride home.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs Critical support to Geico for teaching us this one weird trick

❤️❤️❤️ eternally with you, dissociating in the feathered darkness

I worry about the connection between generations. With youtube and tiktok, kids aren't really getting a lot of experience with the older generations' media. I feel like cross-generation references are a big way of forming connections. But then again, I'm a millennial, and we love our reference humor.

Simpsons references alone are how I still make half my friendships today. I don't know how to communicate if not through shared media
- Real "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" hours
Yeah it does feel kind of weird.
I mean thinking about it, Millennials had connections to Gen-Xers who made references and connections to Boomers who made references and connections to original Hollywood stuff from the 30s-50s in a pretty much unbroken line. Is that being broken with things like unscripted internet slop made by amateurs and AI instead of media lovers and people deeply steeped in written and screen classics and connections to that world which they deliberately weave with craftsmanship into their content? I worry what the AI slop in particular means though I feel like it was already a bit of a trend. That or we get stuck forever in the 90s/2000s in terms of shared references because what references there are become things like "biggest Simpsons moment clips compilations" and people just repeat the same stuff that was a thing back then before the end of a kind of shared media atmosphere with the rise of streaming and cable that was more than a couple channels of stuff.
- just want to offer you a ray of hope from my kid's friend circle: they are not isolated, they are super in touch with what is happening in the world, and they are very concerned.
  this is just some queer kids from southern Ohio, make of that what you will, but hopefully it gives you some peace to know that even the youth here give all the fucks ❤️

my friends and I used to call up a local radio live talk show hosted by a douche and try to get on the air through subterfuge (fake name, interest in current topic) to say preplanned phrases.

when I was maybe 10-ish, I used to buy shitloads of Bazooka gum at the convenience store and read the enclosed the Bazooka Joke comics. in the 90s, they were 5¢ and that only amounted to a 1¢ sales tax if you tried to buy more than 3 in a single transaction. I would cram so much of that stale gum in my mouth I could barely even chew it. I remember when my friend and I discovered we could ride our bikes to a 7-11 by taking a dangerous shortcut and make the trip there in like 10 mins easy instead of 35 minutes of hills. prior to that, our ability to spend our bullshit little savings was controlled by trips to the store with parents who would veto candy.

I remember blowing like $5 on a ton of shit. like a giant slurpee, a huge pouch of purple "big league chew", and 6 feet of hubba bubba bubble tape, a video game magazine. I remember riding back with a bag of complete garbage and thinking I had conquered the world. I think we sort of got in trouble once they realized our shortcut involved this sketchy as fuck section along a 2 lane highway with a 50 mph limit with no sidewalk or shoulder. real "why don't kids play outside - this is the outside they built for us" times.

I used to also read the daily comics section of the local newspaper every day before school, even though it was mostly "Family Circus" type of unfunny garbage. like I would go out to the street in the early dawn and bring in the paper so I could read those shitty comics.

I am deeply bored by those "[insert generation here] is so weird!" type takes, and beyond bored of generationalism in general.

No, someone being born like 5 years before/after you does not make them someone you can't relate to. Go watch fuckin' Salad Fingers and then come back and tell me how bizarre skibidi toilet is.

Anyway to answer the question in the title I guess, uhhh... the game Heart of Darkness for the PS1 had some weird and cool visuals but also some very disturbingly uncanny cutscenes. I didn't like it, because it made me uncomfortable and also because the game was way too hard, but it certainly stuck with me. I guess that makes it effective art.

omg salad fingers....why did I watch that over and over again?

I feel like yo-yos were a real thing. I thought it was so cool when I learned how to "walk the dog". Actually I remember a really skilled adult yo-yo dude showing up at the scholastic book fair to presumably sell us yo-yos? Fun times.

oh fuck yeah
i spent way too much time getting good at yo-yo tricks
i think i still have my yomega fireball somewhere
I wished I could get good at yo-yos, but I never learned more than a few simple tricks like sleeper and walk the dog.
I was thinking about the yo-yo fads. I wouldn't mind buying one and getting back into it.
yo-yos were totally a thing and I was one of those nerds who loved a yo-yo guy ❤️ genuinely impressive dexterity

Use pay phones to bother 411(information hotline or whatever) operators. Ok also 911 but I'm not proud of that.

Wasting cops' time is cool though
- Not ambulances and fire fighters though
Ok also 911 but I'm not proud of that.
I did once and felt so bad immediately. On a field trip in second grade I went up to a payphone in a museum and dialled 911 because it was the only number I knew other than my own. And wouldn't you know it that it is the only number you can dial on a payphone without putting change in
- Yeah that was 411 too here. The time we actually called in a fake emergency and the ambulance showed up was when it became real and i stopped

Listening to Aaron Carter’s shaq rap on the radio

Live in ignorance of the genocidal empire and the oncoming collapse of the biosphere. We were wacky kids.

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION

So many tokens.

"You see, when I was a child, we played Vidya games with our feet!"

House of the Dead
I went to high school with a kid who was suuuuper overweight and he lost it playing DDR. He now holds a world record for a Speedrun on some game according to someone else I know.
Edit: just looked him up and he's like a semi famous twitch streamer with a few records now
DDR lives on! Not just with Stepmania, but my local arcade has a proper DDR machine it's so awesome.
even though i didn't hit them up too much as a kid, as an adult now i unironically think arcades are goated
DDR, Taiko no Tatsujin, Point Blank, Daytona. Actually getting out, with your friends or randoms. god, it rules
Straight up the best times
- Wowwwwww, that's an old one! But is that DDR? I thought DDR had their pads in plus shapes
- I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

Weird gender roles. Girls had easy bake ovens, boys had bug and monster factories. And the idea was that boys would make these little latex abominations and terrorize their sisters or mother with them. Like that was part of the selling point. You couldn't even eat them at first. I think the candy versions came later. Just a weird dichotomy. Cakes vs genetic experiments used for terrorism.

terrorize their sisters or mother with them
this was totally a genre of toys!! ugh that existed to gross me out

Pogs

Fuckin pogs

Pogs were so much fun tho I had a really good metal slammer I got at a pog store in Seattle that would always flip whole stacks. My poisons collection was admirable since there was a vending machine at a pizza parlor that always had them nobody else knew about.
- I was just a collector, don't think I ever really understood the actual game
  Which is kind of funny because I also played Magic The Gathering at the time and I understood that plenty fine
I had pogs but I was late to the party in getting them by that time the kids my age moved onto video games and comic books.

Kid one: I'm hungry what's for lunch?

Kid two: Rubber buns and liquor nipples!

(both laugh)

A staple from my elementary school.

what does this even mean, am i too old or too young
edit: oh my god its worse - i am stupid
- it's okay, I have no idea what any of this means, you're far ahead of me

Before the OKC bombings we used to buy chemicals to make explosives/fireworks from a catalogue and set them off in the backyard, with minimal parental supervision. The same catalog sold bulk red phosphorus and extra strength pseusoephedrine tablets were available by the hundreds at any grocery store. We never made meth but it would have been trivially easy. After OKC the fun chemicals got much harder to find and we had to content ourselves with whatever our kin smuggled in from someplace fireworks were legal.

There was a period of about 18 months where e-commerce had just begun but no one verified credit card numbers beyond ensuring that the number had the right checksum. Someone I knew found a credit card number generator on a BBS and we'd buy whatever we wanted and have it delivered to a vacant lot. Gas station receipts still had people's entire credit card numbers printed on them, you could use those once they started verifying zip codes. None of our parents asked how a couple of barely-teenage kids were able to afford to build out custom PCs or where all the recording equipment, CDs, and books we very suddenly had came from.

The police didn't know what the internet was. The FBI knew but didn't understand or care about the internet. The level of surveillance we were subjected to was minimal and easily evaded as long as you kept your nose clean. It's all relative, but compared to the panopticon we live in today it felt a lot less pervasive. If there were cameras anywhere they were so blurry it didn't really matter.

We were a bunch of suburban delinquent shitasses but the opportunities to be a delinquent shitass have been foreclosed on in so many ways. The spaces we had to exist in, in public, no longer exist, or are heavily policed. The world seems to be in general, a lot more hostile to young people existing in public.

Everything children do today, and I've seen this with the kids I've been responsible for myself as well as more generally, is being logged somewhere. Time is much more regimented. If my kid skips class I get a text message from the school about it as soon as they're marked tardy or absent. I see other parents monitoring their children's location via cellphone in real time all the time. It seems absolutely suffocating. It feels suffocating as an adult having to navigate a world where everything you do is going into a database somewhere, and that's with the memory of a time before the panopticon was so fully developed.

Are Kids Today strange or are they just doing their best to exist in a world that doesn't have a place for them? The human experience, at its most basic, is the same as it's always been. The conditions in which people live have changed.

Yep.

Bubble gum cigarettes are pretty fucked up from today’s perspective, but back then we all thought it was completely normal to condition children to become smokers.

did you ever have the hollow ones that blew candy "smoke" you exhaled through them??
- One my cousins had one of those once. But I don’t remember whether it was made of bubble gum or a plastic one.
  He handed it to me for a draw and I tried to inhale it like a dumbass and couldn’t understand why there was no smoke.
in australia they weren't even gum, they were like musk stick lollies
they were also literally named the f slur due to the british colloquialism for cigarettes, until they were changed to "fads"
- Musk stick lollies? Uhhh... Are you okay down there?

POGs are super weird, when you think about it.

The origin makes a lot of sense because people will find ways to entertain themselves. It is interesting that people figured out you could sell kids little cardboard circles with flaming 8 balls on them.
The weird ones were when you would get a pog that had like an ad for The Pelican Brief on it or something else kids wouldn't care about.
they were always weird
I was deeply skeptical of the "game" as a child and am even more so as an adult

Buy the wcw and wwf ppvs when they went to tape because we couldn't afford the ppv's.

Well, that was until we got the black box for the tv.

Also just taoe trading in general, i must've been scammed like a dozen times as a teenager because i just trusted the people that it actually was an FMW best of compilation and not just a garbage copy on a blank tape.

God I made so much money as a kid from selling tapes
I was the only kid in town with a dual-head VCR and my grandpa had a ton of blank tapes from his job. I'd copy movies and sell them for like $3. I bought a Dreamcast with that money.
i think i was too young for tape trading (and too australian, so prob isolated from trading networks), but good lord i can only imagine how frustrating it would be to buy an AJPW tape from some dude at a market, drive home, pop it in and finding that he just ran a magnet over a home tape of wheel of fortune and charged you a mint for it
- Yeah, i only really got into it in the absolute tail end of its popularity, and even that was because i had a older family member who was doing it as a hobby. I remember it was around the time Cary Silkin took over ROH. I still occasionally trade tapes, but now i mostly just buy the old tapes to scan them to digital, and the tapes get to stay on my bookshelf to get played on my garage crt every once in a while.

all the weird, niche activities that were 90s-only have already been mentioned, so I'll just admit that the weirdest thing I did back in the day, I still do:

trust strangers online with the personal details of my life

why do I tell any of you what is actually going on with me? why have I trusted a few of you with my actual contact information that allows you to know who I am irl?

idfk. the promise of the internet, I guess: that you can find friends far away from your location that can deeply relate to the things that you're going through.

that makes the risk worth it.

There used to be a single HUGE gummy candy you could sometimes buy at places. Sometimes it would be shaped like a foot or skull. If you forgot a package of gummy bears or gummy worms on the dashboard in the sun, you'd get pretty much the same thing.

Sleepovers where you'd rent a video game that wouldn't have any instruction manual and both "the internet" and "gamefaqs.com" weren't really a thing yet. Spend all weekend not getting more than a level or two into a game.

Flintstones branded "Push Pops" in Orange Sherbert flavor.

Choco-Tacos...

Micro-machines, Monsters in My Pocket, Beanie Babies, Slap Bracelets... seemed like there was a whole-ass cottage industry making novelty #2 pencils. In my 30's I found a box with a sizable collection from middle/high school.

flintstones pushpops and chocotacos were fucking delicious
Micro-machines, Monsters in My Pocket, Beanie Babies, Slap Bracelets...
and polly pocket and tamagotchi!

Newgrounds. Stickdeath. Rejected. Flash games. Waiting 4 minutes to download a single jpeg.

When Napster first popped up starting downloads before I went to bed so a song might be finished downloading before I woke up. Then burning as many songs as I could fit onto a CD.

we grew up being into Invader Zim, Charlie the Unicorn, YouTube Poop, Gmod machinima... we have zero room to judge "weird" roflmao

edit: also Newgrounds animations, e.g. Homestar Runner

My partner has a gen Z brother. Recently her insta and tiktok handles were blasted on a throwaway tiktok account along with her brother's. She didn't even know until the person contacted her directly, saying her brother was a predator etc..

My partner, having dealt with predatory behaviour herself; obviously wanted to hear her out.

Anyway the issue was he'd apparently hypnotised her over discord chat (not voice/video) into calling herself a different name and buying heels instead of vans. That was the most coherent version of events we could get, as she just kept reiterating that he "stole her mind". She lives in the USA around 2,500m away from where we are, and they've never met in person.

Ultimately it was left advising the poor girl to speak to a professional, as it seemed like she was having a bit of a breakdown, as well as advising her to speak to authorities if she felt predatory behaviour had been committed, rather than attempting to doxx his unknowing family members online.

Honestly it's the most 'much ado about nothing' situation I've heard in a long time; and brought back not so fond memories of being an emotionally unstable teenager myself.

Hang in there gen Z. Brain juice levels out soon, and you'll be picking up old people hobbies like fishing or pottery instead of feeling everything at once in no time.

a truck literally used to drive around the streets slowly and sell crates of soft drink (soda) to you.

putting milk in those uh. tablets. you put them in water, they fizz and become a fizzy sugar drink. they curdled the milk.
using a wine cork puller thing to carve holes in chocolate bars before eating them.
having serious kindergarten arguments about whether to mix the toppings into the semolina pudding or not (i am team mix and i have always been, and i truly believe this was my first introduction to the concept of heresy).

remembered more:

we once snorted those fizzy drink tablets in math class. they fizzed in our nose. it was funny.
using a tv that had no remote
no seatbelts in the back

We used to snort Pixie Stix, which were just straws filled with sour, flavored sugar. Really surprised we didn't fuck up our sinuses doing that or causing nosebleeds.
I once bit a whipper-snapper and popped it in my mouth. I was unhamed but the explosives tasted terrible
- what
  where I'm from, "whippersnappers" are children 😂
  what do you use that word for???
That makes me think of those microwavable candy molds that made what I guess were dyed white chocolate.
semolina pudding
is this what your folk call cream of wheat?
- something similar anyway

Anyone remember ytmnd?

Patrick Pacard