...can you remember when you went with your parent into the VHS rental section of your local supermarket?
Hell I remember going to the rental store and it was only VHS tapes :chomsky-yes-honey:
The bumfuck no where town my aunt lived in had one in the local market basket way longer than you’d think it would have
Actually now that I think of it the Randall’s near me as a kid May have had one but I can’t remember very clearly
holy shit Market Basket lol. The inferior HEB.
I used to work at one of those. I still have my worker prize token things in a drawer somewhere. I was saving up for the duffel bag.
Nah you are right I'm like very early gen z and I'm technology illiterate.
Don't think for a second this wasn't intentional. The powers of the status quo do not want regular people to have control over their media, and the tech-saviness of the younger generations was absolutely seen as a threat that had to be curtailed by taking the end-user power and control over the operation of their product back out of their hands and solely into an elite few who bequeathed it to them as if by magic. There was a renaissance that had to be dumbed back down, and they succeeded in doing just that.
Edit: And now instead of usenet, and how decentralized it was and how great it could have become we have..... :reddit-logo:
while millennials remember breaking their computer 5000 times with napster and kazaa if they had any chutzpah.
10000% false. The majority of Millennials were pretty much as useless 15 years ago as Zoomers are.
What's changed imo are:
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More kids in CS programs in college for $$$, which means more kids who know jack shit and makes teachers think "kids are useless with computers".
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Companies locking things down for profit, which means the learning curve to "mess around" is higher.
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Eh, most of Gen Z is apparently fucking useless with technology (ipad generation, if you will)
Apple and its consequences...
you’re either Internet Generation or you’re a Boomer
https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
it's us and Xers in a big boomer sandwich
as a X-millenial cusper with a background in like end user commercial and home tech support, you have just blown my mind. is this for real? it would explain something disconnects i've had in explaining how i organize digital resource collaborations to young people, who i just assume are like more on top of shit than i am so i try and solicit ideas. and like, straight up, they know the front end of apps, how to use them, when they're appropriate for a task (unlike boomers).... but like custom config stuff is kinda a crap shoot.
my mind palace for computers literally is a series of filing cabinets. i could not operate if all that was waiting for me in the conceptualization of my cloud and harddrive storage was just a search box reliant on indexing services.
anyway, this is crazy and Big If True.
everybody just uses smartphones.
the amount of custom config you can do on a smartphone is...well yea
t. almost 30
I'm on the younger end of the millennials, I remember video rental well but it disappeared from the grocery store years before the Blockbusters closed. I think I've got a few of the tapes that were retired from the grocery store. I do know the struggle with dust well as a hobbyist photographer.
This only works on people from podunk nowhere. Most of us had rental stores, not a rental section of the supermarket. I'm gen z but I remember renting tapes and dvds from blockbuster, and Netflix rising to prominence. I also remember streaming shows over iTunes or something on one of my parent's laptops with incredibly bad quality. Sometimes I miss just going to my friends house to "use the computer" and just do weird stuff online for a few hours before we got bored and started shooting nerf guns. I also remember blockbuster closing and my family buying a ton of discs as they were cleaning out.
Respectfully disagree. I grew up in a top-25 MSA and all our grocery stores had these. When we visited family in another very large city their grocery stores had them too.
I spent most of my life in the burbs which only had stand-alone rental places but when my mom moved to a small city they had a rental place in the grocery store too
See I grew up in the middle of nowhere and we didn’t have this. We just had to drive into town and go to blockbuster if we wanted to rent movies
We had VHS rentals at Longs (what are now all CVS/Walgreens) in the Bay Area as late like 2004 IIRC
I kinda disagree. Big historical events can sometimes have little immediate impact on people especially if they aren't directly affected, but the cultural reverberations that may tie into those events can make a massive difference in people's lives. To the VHS hobbyist or the video rental clerk who got fired and lost their livelihood, the death knell of video rental may well have played a bigger role in shifting the era of their lives than yet another big event on TV, which is what 9/11 was largely sold to us as. I'm not disagreeing that 9/11 was a defining moment in delineating the false golden age of neoliberalism from it's subsequent gradual erosion, but I think for a lot of people, it really was the tertiary things that actually marked the material differences in their lives. So it's not folly to recognize that, and see it as a far more complicated set of cultural realities than just a single historical event, no matter how "defining" it may have been on the world stage. Or I don't know, maybe I'm full of shit.
Anything else that tries to separate two generations of people based on an arbitrary year rather than historically significant events is just nonsense.
I'd say Anything else that tries to separate two generations of people based on
an arbitrary year rather than historically significantevents is just nonsense. Everything has fuzzy edges. Everything cultural has extremely fuzzy edges. Generations have fuzzy edges, and tying them down to specific events doesn't take that well enough into account. And yes, I think this is true of world wars as well. That's not to say events don't play a defining role, it's just there's so much overlap and so much other context (usually cultural) that it's an oversimplification to draw the hard lines between 'before' and 'after.' Or again, maybe I'm just being stupid, nitpicky, and pedantic, but it really is how I see things when I try to draw lines between my own and my sisters generations, for example. And when I try to draw a line between her generation and my mom's (who was very young when she had my sister). And when I try to draw a line between my mom and my dad's generation, who were clearly a generation apart. I just mean it gets messy, and big historical events are not necessarily the be-all and end-all markers we should be using for making meaningful distinctions.I agree, this is the line. And I feel like there’s a noticeable difference between people I know born anywhere between 95 and 98 that do or don’t remember. I don’t remember 9/11, which is the biggest thing that makes me consider myself a zoomer and not a millennial.
I used to tie up my horse to the hitching post out front and exchange my gold nuggets from panning in the river for a copy of blazing saddles to watch at home all weekend.
I used to rent sega genesis games for the WHOLE WEEKEND (only if I got 100 on that weeks spelling test)
What the fuck, I forgot about those. Goddamn those are some good memories, but also I'm bitter about the inevitable march of time? Not sure what this emotion is.
I think it's called bittersweet nostalgia. At least that's the label I slap on it when I experience it, which is becoming increasingly more common.
I think it's something that just pops up by itself as you get older. I try to be aware of it and try to challenge it (stuff sucked back then as well) as it is possible for you to get caught in a maze of bitterness and longing for a glorified past. The most miserable old people I know are the ones who always go on about how good things were back when they were young whereas the happier older people I know are those who still engage with the present.
Oh yeah, for sure. But experiencing nostalgia doesn't necessarily mean you're seeing the past through the proverbial rose-colored glasses. I'd like to think I'm fully aware of how shit things were in the past too, but it doesn't change that fact that there were some beautiful points, some sometimes painful but meaningful experiences, and there's nothing wrong with looking back wistfully at them, recognizing them for what they were. And as you get older, there are bound to be more of those moments collected. I totally agree about not getting stuck there, though... getting lost in a past that is gone and never coming back, and crippling yourself from being able to live in the present is just pain and calcification. The happiest older people I know (and the few friends I have irl are mostly elderly) are the ones who can look back and recall with joy their past and share that joy with the people around them in their present.
Maybe so. For me personally though, nostalgia comes in many flavors. Sometimes it's a lot more sweet than bitter, sometimes the other way around. Somestimes it's even tinged with anger or regret.
Yeah although it quickly started offering DVDs during my childhood. And then you could rent playstation and xbox games too!
I remember renting KOTOR 2 for Xbox when I was very young and being completely confused by it and not even making it out of the first area
This doesn't work if, like me, you come from a very poor and old town in a rural underdeveloped region of a country which was slow to modernize. I'm pretty sure there was still a VHS rental shop in 2010 or something in my hometown. I'm not sure exactly when it closed but I certainly remember VHS tapes, and I am certainly not a millennial
Not the grocery store, but me and my mom went pretty frequently to the neighborhood Blockbuster for a good while.
The video store in my home town is still open, they just also sell guns now too? And corn.
If you can remember this but with DVDs and video game rentals instead you're in between millenial and gen z/older gen z
