No parents. No Internet. Very limited home entertainment. Full boredom.
Growing up Gen-X was like a perpetual episode of Jackass starring The Goonies.
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!
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.
Nah, I get it. I live in the city now. But growing up, as a kid, you just have to have fun in some way or the other. The suburbs and the rural areas dreamed about those things you listed, but the more open spaces can also offer fun activities with as little as a ball or a day of rain. But you had to live in the season, I guess.
where I lived would be called the suburbs but it was close to the metro area. Guess its far burbs vs close burbs things. Honestly feels like nowadays the burbs never end and it drives me crazy how far you have to be to see cornfields now.
Hell, even if you lived in the burbs a lot of those things are still premium priced.
You guys ever just throw pinecones at each other?
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.
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
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.
Holy shit, you had public swimming pools? Everything in my area… Accounting for inflation… Would be like 70 bucks a month
Elder millennial, youngest sibling here:
A gen x older brother was a master class in being a crash test dummy
What’s the spring situation like here? Did mattresses not have them back then? Have they been removed?
My mattresses were just stuffing. The spring board under it had the springs. Do you have springs in your mattress now. I went memory foam and air combo decades ago so im not sure what a typical one has now.
Personally mine (which I got from a local mattress manufacturer) has springs in it and sits on a “box spring” which as far as I can tell is just a platform for the mattress to sit upon and contains no actual springs
Maybe it is just the angle, but why are the kids jumping out those windows and not the ones that seem to be directly over the mattresses? I guess this shows my age: my first reaction was to ensure these kiddos were safe! It does look wicked fun!!
They aren’t falling straight down.
Those windows seem easier (even safer) to climb than the others where they would have to support themselves on the frame.
See? You are the one I want to have around when I’m doing these kind of things. You are completely right, those other windows aren’t as easy or safe! I just didn’t notice and would have fallen to my death with the sash most likely. Having smart friends who think more clearly than “yes, let me do something dangerous for fun!” is awesome and the reason I have to still alive.
What about the kid who is actively falling straight down?
You say that based on Doppler effect or you have more frames?
He’s clearly facing a diagonal that will lead to the mattresses. People usually jump on the direction they are facing, but there isn’t enough information on the image to tell if he’s doing the things people do most of the time or if he’s laughing after jumping to his death in a very unusual position.
I don’t know what’s going on haha but it looks to me like the kid is jumping beside the mattresses which is kinda funny.
Maybe it is just the angle,
I suspect they jumped from one more floor up and pushed off hard toward the landing zone. Ballsy maneuver either way, you slip wrong on that jump probably your last.
They might be trying to do a roll on impact, so horizontal momentum might be intended.
Yeah! That’s even more fun!
Good, clean fun.
This is why video games are important.
That would be a hard pass for me.
I did this in the 70s!!! good old days :)
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
I miss being indestructible.
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.
I think I just put my back out seeing that jpeg
This is what happens when you cancel Doctor Who, BBC.
And then after playing head inside and watch ma’s Corrie and make her a proper cuppa I remember these days I do
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.
ah, the British Space Program of the eighties!..
No wonder they didn’t get to the moon, using mattresses instead of trampolines.
Bless single payer healthcare.
What’s “single payer healthcare”?
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.
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/
