I was there for the shot heard 'round the world. The day a hero died and it’s all been wrong ever since.
I was at the Cincinnati Zoo The day Harambee was murdered.
Dicks out.
I actually just became a grandfather two days ago. I’m looking forward to, “Listen, things were different back in the nineteen hundreds…”
I had to walk 7 miles up hill in the snow…just to get my shoes!!!
Seriously, we had snow back then. Lots of. But the world has moved on
I could tell my kids about snow days, school bus sliding into the ditch, walking home when no one could get up our hill. I could talk how anything not cleared quickly, icier over and remained for the winter. My kids will be able to tell stories about me jokingly wishing to get enough snow to try out my new snow blower. They’ll tell about the arguments about clearing the driveway in case we need to go out, vs waiting a couple days for it to melt
I have a buddy in his late 30s who just became a grandpa. He had his kid in high school when he was like 17. His son is now like 19 and just had a kid of his own. That shit is crazy
Oh, the Boebert way of life.
I actually just became a grandfather two days ago
Have they asked you in advance if you even want that?
;-)
I was there when smart phones came out.
When Y2K didn’t happen
When the internet was a useful tool and not monetized to shit
When the thread of sanity broke and society began to transition into some Lordranesque nightmare of tribes.
When Y2K didn’t happen
*When tens of thousands of people spent years of their lives making sure Y2K wouldn’t happen.
Y2K happened, just not how everyone thought.
Instead it was a huge marketing ploy. Everyone spent money to be protected and safe. We all listened to Prince as the ball dropped.
IT really wasn’t. Sure, it had way too much hype, but a lot of the saner predictions really could have happened, except for the huge amount of work so many of us went through.
I was working at an investment management company at the time, one of the first “quant shops”, and there was an unimaginably vast flood of money coming through that could have ground to a halt, with ear splitting squeals and shrieks. Our stuff wasn’t retail, but you bet people would have suffered with any disruption of business, retirement plans of millions in jeopardy, investments of the wealthy, corporate wealth of all types would have been hit hard. And there were so many companies in similar condition. I was on remediation projects for a couple of years, along with most of my team and consultants when we could, and we came through with no glitches!
And yes that was the first time I was tempted to be a consultant, to get a bigger share of the money being spent. And yes I did celebrate New Years with by far the most expensive trip I had gone on to that point - included tickets for three headliner concerts, expensive suites, and unlimited margaritas
I was still up for Portillo, back in 1997.
What an amazing night. I had never known anything but Conservative government, so to see those corrupt, selfish bastards swept away was absolutely joyous in a way that’s hard to fully capture in words.
Obviously the Blair government eventually completely fucked things up with Iraq, but at the time it felt like genuine liberation after years and years of sleaze and hatred.
And IMO things genuinely did change for the better in the UK with the Blair government, whether or not you agreed with every policy they had. Then Sept 11 happened, and Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world started going inexorably to shit, and it’s never really recovered.
I was arrested at a G8 summit while I was helping block the road Putin’s motorcade was about to use, but police had to let me go cause they didn’t have the manpower to process all the protestors.
I still remember the Toronto g20. Police assigned a park as a free speech zone, surrounded it, put on masks, took off their name tags and went in to beat the shit out of everyone in sight. Men, women, children, the disabled. Hundreds of people tossed into coed massive cells with a shared bucket for a toilet, sexual assaults happened etc. That day Canadian police proved without a doubt that they’re every bit as bad as American cops, and I’ve hated them ever since.
I was once personally responsible for making Red jump off the long ledge in front of the elite 4 in the very first Twitch Plays Pokémon. it happened a lot but I know I caused it once. sometimes it’s so easy to be a villain.
The world before the Internet.
I was there. We had to go to the library if we wanted information. The magazine aisle at the grocery store is where you got your up to date info that you couldn’t always get on TV. TV was like 5 channels. A few more local ones if you were lucky.
They’re was nothing on TV after a certain hour. Just static, or colored bars and a buzzer. You had to wait till morning for TV broadcasts to start again.
No one had cell phones. You had to go to your friends house to see if they were home, and yell for them at their window.
Fun times.
Remember when there was the morning News, and then the 6pm and 11pm news. That’s it. Now it’s news channels running 24/7
My mom ran away from home to see Elvis in a high school auditorium, and was in Little Rock when it was being integrated, I always thought that was cool.
I saw Nirvana before they were famous, in a crowd of about 30 people in a club here, and barely missed being blown up over Lockerbie, but the moment that stands out most in my mind is: I was getting frisked (felt up ) by a cop on a US city street when, no shit, the English punk band GBH were walking by and they started shouting at the cops, oh my God I have never felt so cool.
I was there when Metallica tried to kill piracy by killing Napster and in turn, created a giant market of music piracy programs.
To counter Metallica, Nine Inch Nails at about the same time then went on and very publicly said to steal his music because the label was overcharging his fans and he would rather they listen to it than he get paid. He then started releasing his albums for free where you pay what you want on his website. And this is just one reason I am a life long NIN fan and stopped listening to Metallica after middle school.
Fire bad!
T shirts good!
I watched the Challenger explode on live TV from my school classroom. The teachers were all ecstatic about the mission because NASA was sending a teacher into space. It took a minute for us to realize what happened, even though we literally watched it explode in front of our eyes.
Dunno, COVID maybe?
We were all there!
I (well, supposedly) knew the guy who unleashed SQL Slammer and a small group of friends (into Ragnarok Online hacking/botting) sat around on IRC watching backbone router pings go apeshit until ISPs started blocking it. It was also amusing checking firewall logs to see whose servers were vulnerable.
I have piracy accounts older than my niece and nephew.
Had to call rackspace and get new credentials for a friend in Iraq after that massive raid.
I was waiting tables at the Eat N Park across the street from the bank where the “Pizza Bomber” exploded. We couldn’t tell what was happening from where we were, but I was there.
I was there for the beginning of the internet …
Al Gore was instrumental in passing legislation that set the foundation for commercialized internet … and all us old-timers hated it.
Nope, I was there as serial cables and token ring coalesced toward Ethernet, various telemetry and others built toward a common internet, individual well-known servers gave way to a vast directory of dozens.
Much later on, there was this minor invention of Tim Berners-Lee that brought everything together, and I was one of the coders for what may have been the first 401k management web site
I had to deal with this. It was not satisfying at all.
I was part of my city’s biggest indoor crowd “WrestleMania 18” and was part of my city’s largest outdoor crowd “Toronto rocks SARS benefit”. There’s really nothing like being front row while AC/DC belts out Thunderstruck, with over 600,000+ jumping and singing along. The crowd at Skydome when the Rock and Hulk Hogan wrestled was insane too, the whole building shook
I have never been in a concert in my life, and I actually want to now because this seems fun (unless politics are involved)
The worst part about my best concert story is that it was a Kid Rock concert. Imagine being 16, getting right into the middle of the crowd thinking “Im totally up for this” right before he opens up with Bawitaba…
You felt the anticipation build with the intro, like the whole growd just simultaneously shotgunned a whole pot of espresso. he started screaming his name. Some big ass dude behind me leaned over and shouted “Kid, when he says “Rock” jump for your fucking life.” and grabbed a fistful of the back of my hoodie. That dude kept me on my feet the whole song, Ive never been more scared or filled with adrenalin my whole life.
He might be a right wing asshat now, but 24 years ago his show was epic.
Sigh, Kid Rock.
