This is why video games are important.
This is what happens when you cancel Doctor Who, BBC.
slightly (or absolutely) unrelated story, but I remember we built cross tracks in the forest for ourselves and our crappy bikes (I’m talking early-mid 80s on the other side of the Iron Courtain; the best bike I had was a rusty Csepel BMX, then my father’s Sputnik race bike). once we decided fuck it why don’t we do the same in our own street (a mud/gravel street at that time), and took shovels and stuff and destroyed the street. when the first adult residents got home, they were very pissed for some reason and commandeered us to restore the street. I remember the feeling of betrayal / injustice to this day! :-D
ah, the British Space Program of the eighties!..
No wonder they didn’t get to the moon, using mattresses instead of trampolines.
I miss being indestructible.
I think I just put my back out seeing that jpeg
I feel like I left it all on the field. I wasn’t even a dare devil, but I broke more than a few bones. Ribs, wrist, ankle, several fingers. Tearing ACLs is where I drew the line. Some stuff doesn’t heal.
It’s still good to have a sense of what is possible if necessary.
No parents. No Internet. Very limited home entertainment. Full boredom.
Growing up Gen-X was like a perpetual episode of Jackass starring The Goonies.
Elder millennial, youngest sibling here:
A gen x older brother was a master class in being a crash test dummy
libraries, arcades, malls, bowling alleys, pool halls, swimming pools, console game systems, video rental stores, bikes, parks, dungeons and dragons. There was a bit of things to occupy time.
The city guy just showed up!
You guys ever just throw pinecones at each other?
Well, not exactly "pine"cones, but let’s call it the Mayan version of pinecones.
I’ve stepped barefoot on a lychee before and I don’t think I’d like having one thrown in my face
That’s the fun thing! (For a kid that just wouldn’t think about it.)
EDIT: also, these are guasima fruits, not lychees, just in case you are mixing them up.
Yeah I don’t know much about fruits. They look like they’d hurt more than lychees because they’re pointier
Brother we used to have brick fights at the derelict hospital and my mum had zero clue where I was all day
Y’all better watch out, I just picked up one of those pinecones that hasn’t opened up yet
Suddenly, I’m transported and hear the sounds of Billy Ray Cyrus singing Achy Breaky Heart live on TNN emanating from the open trailer door. Also, I’m a fraud. I’ve never even been to England.
definitely. its in my blood. My wife and I grew up on sorta the two extremes of the metro area. me close and her far. we each prefer to go further. me to the city and her to the country so we live the middle. Just close enough for me to take public trans to work downtown.
libraries,
arcades, malls,bowling alleys, pool halls,public swimming pools,console game systems, video rental stores,bikes, parks,dungeons and dragons.Not every kid had money growing up and most home entertainment was expensive.
dungeons and dragons manuals were at my library and arcades had 10 tokens for a dollar. I was able to make enough collecting aluminum cans. libraries also had movies but yeah you neede a friend with a console or vcr which I had. bowling and pool were more high school things when I was able to make that sweet sweet minimum wage. Also when out of funds it was still fun to watch people play at arcades and sometimes you might find an errant token on the ground.
I moved from a 10c per can state to a 0c per can state. It drastically affected my income as a kid.
we did not have a per can thing but you could get money per pound. it was a lot of cans. likely made as much finding coins on the ground while looking for cans. newspaperstands and payphones were good for a quarter fairly often.
Thatcher was PM, if you were a kid then you’d be throwing yourself off a building too.
You say that as if it’s got any better.
Now we’ve got Thatcher wearing a tie and running the labour party…
For a second time…
And then after playing head inside and watch ma’s Corrie and make her a proper cuppa I remember these days I do
Ah yes, back in the good ol’ days when natural selection was still a thing
It still is! It’s just now those kids also film themselves doing it on YouTube.
You say that but remarkably few of us died and in retrospect I wonder how.
With the emphasis on ‘few’
Well shit, 80s kid here and we kinda did this. We had a pile of old mattresses and cushions. The mattresses were the super cheap and crappy kind with no springs so were actually really good for landing on. The ground floor of our house was maybe 6ft higher than the back garden and we had a kinda small raised patio at the back door with steps down into the garden. We piled up the mattresses on the lawn, beyond the flower bed. And threw ourselves off the wall at the edge of the patio down onto the mattresses. Lots of fun.
My siblings and I used those same mattresses to slide down our stairs, crashing into them at the bottom. That was fun too.
I also remember finding these long smooth metal sheets somewhere and using them to make a slide down our garden steps. Then using a sledge sliding down it and crashing into the mattresses.
I miss those days.
Did you ever jump apparently 5+ stories up, trying to hit a 3ft/1m-wide target?
Oh all the time. Sometimes while riding a tiger. It was the style at the time.
We jumped off buoys and navigation markers as a kid.
Sure it was water below but under the water … the supports and ladders of the buoys, mangled barnacle mess.
And the ospreys.
Goddamn did an angry osprey make jumping off the buoy that much more exciting, a little bit of “and maybe we’ll get attacked by a raptor” excitement….
Comrade here jumping into an ocean full of sharks and is worried about being attacked by birds…
Veeeeery few sharks in the bay I was jumping into.
Osprey on the other hand will actively rip your face off for getting too close to their nest.
Very few sharks implies some sharks which are way too many for this guy.
I don’t fuck with apex predators.
Comrade over here forgetting that birds descended from dinosaurs.
Comrade here forgetting that not only do sharks predate dinosaurs, but - unlike birds - have hardly changed.
Orcas are still kings of the oceans, and it seems they’ve finally decided they’ve had enough of our shenanigans, so maybe we should be more worried about them that either of the others.
not only do sharks predate dinosaurs, but - unlike birds - have hardly changed.
They at least lost their armor. Imagine a shark with one of these covering its head!
Oooh, what’s best about Dunkleosteus is that modern theory is that this was just their skull, and that they had skin over it:
Less bizarre looking than earlier renditions, which made them look a bit like turtles, but still… bad ass!
modern theory is that this was just their skull, and that they had skin over it:
I was curious about that! My recent trip to the field museum in Chicago indicated that they believed the armor to be external but it would make more sense for it to be beneath the skin if there’s not evidence to suggest otherwise
Edit: Also turtles are fucking badass. You do not want to meet a snapping turtle on the Riverwalk!
There’s so much media representing Dunk with external armor, it’s going to take forever and cost a lot to clean everything up. AFAIK, the “internal” theory only became dominant recently, and I think it might have been because they found evidence of skin patterning in a recent fossil? I might be conflating that with the (also recent) Ankylosaurus find, which had spectacular preservation of skin patterns.
I too was a bay child. We’d use the barnacle covered chains holding the buoys in their place to pull ourselves down to the bottom for whatever reason
I have a scar on my left leg from where I slipped on the ladder abd sliced my calf open on barnacles.
It bled till it didn’t. And I survived.
I’m pretty sure I’d die of some terrible infection if it had happened today.
Completely off-topic, but apparently in UK English they pronounce buoy like “boy”, which, like, phonetically is fine but it’s definitely wrong. Or feels wrong. "We jumped off boys. " Utter madness
How the fuck do you say buoy then?
Boo-ee, rhymes with bluey. Before you say anything about that word not being phonetic, one, I already said that, and, two, Lieutenant.
Absolute bastards, idk how the English could ruin English so much….
That would be a hard pass for me.
Bless single payer healthcare.
What’s “single payer healthcare”?
It’s a form of socialised healthcare where the government negotiates the prices with medical companies. The government of an entire country negotiating prices carries way more bargaining power than individuals so it means the prices are much lower. Combine that with taxes paying for healthcare and you have a nice healthcare system
Edit: in some cases it’s just one guy paying, in this case it’s Alan: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2017/08/poll-canadians-love-single-payer-healthcare-except-alan-single-payer/
Apparently it allows you jump out of windows onto a pile of mattresses.
Can you elaborate more on what “it” is though?
Single payer is a system where healthcare is paid for a single public authority, not private and not a combination of both.
We used to jump off the roof into a snowbank. Then when the snow got deep enough we would just sled off the roof onto the snowbank.
