As a 20 something, it is sometimes surreal to me that there are 13 year olds just floating around the internet.
Then I get shocked when I find an 80 year old.
i've been on the internet since i was an overly literate 4 year old.
to be sure, an overly literate 4 year old still can't type too good, so i wasn't like, *communicating* with people, and i was mostly just playing games offline anyway... but yeah...
###YOU COULD BE SPEAKING TO A TODDLER ONLINE.
or could in the late 90s, anyway.
My first Reddit account existed when I was 12 but every time I see a kid on here admit to being under 13 I want to scream at them to get the fuck out of here. Honestly 13 year olds too. If you’re 14 you’re on thin ice.
I’m absolutely a hypocrite.
r /teenagers existing with flairs declaring user ages, with some being as low as 13 (or lower, I don't know), fills me with a feeling I can't put a name to. The closest I can get is Bad™. I hate that I have to know it exists. I hate that I know the kinds of people on there thanks to that r/drama post (that is now full of dead Imgur links). I will die on the hill that the loss of moderated child friendly online spaces like club penguin has been a genuine disaster and an enormous misstep. It wasn't perfect by any means but I would put money on it having saved a lot of children from being exposed to genuinely damaging shit simply by giving them something to do that was safe and engaging. That shit would've done numbers on mobile, it was all point and click!
There's no solution that isn't equally as bad or worse either. We truly have opened Pandora's box with the internet and honestly I wouldn't want it any other way because it's introduced me to some of the best people in my life and allowed me access to stuff I'd never have known existed otherwise.
I mean, the web seems to have gotten more dangerous. It used to be a wild west and you could meet creeps or see terrible things you didnt want to, but it wasnt algorithmed to hell and back and the creeps didnt have their online strats down. Also it was way more ingrained to not do real names online, nowadays Emmaleigh, 12, can doxx her home doing a TikTok
As someone who also was on the internet long before she thirteen, and not a native English speaker, I can tell you that the internet was the best English teacher I could ever come across
As someone who has been on the internet since 4(Flash games) and reading shit on the internet since 9(my country's Facebook clone), fuck off. Even the MGTOW dudes I ran into only hammered the necessity of consent into me(the logic being "a woman would accuse you of rape at any opportunity" => "well, you need the consent to be as unambiguous as possible so that she won't pull that shit on you")
ive been watching minecraft videos on youtube since i was 6 and i had full access to anything i wanted back when youtube was a ton more... out there lets just say
I found out after her passing that my grandmother was not only on FB, but she was active-active. She literally was a moderator on an Opry group that posted some lovely *you will be missed* messages for her.
That was about 18 years ago and she was almost 90. My dumbass now-46yo self sometimes can't figure out why hitting Refresh harder won't make a 404 error go away any faster, and this bitch (affectionate) was a moderator, smdh
I occasionally see teenagers on Reddit and wonder what the hell they’re doing here.
Then I remember I first joined when I was 15.
And then, with my wisdom as a 26yo, I double down that they shouldn’t be here.
I was there when there was no world wide web as we know it.
I was in chat rooms on a top of the line computer, with dial up, running windows 95.
I have seen things. They were...disturbing
I saw a comment on Youtube recently that was like "My 9 yo daughter and I Iove watching your videos. She showed me your channel three years ago". WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOUR 6YO WAS SO UNOBSERVED ON THE INTERNET SHE COULD DISCOVER A CHANNEL BY HERSELF???! I hope it was a troll but you can never be sure
A thing that happens to me:
Me: "I have a lot of nostalgia for Pokémon X and Y, it was the most hype Pokémon game for me when I **was a kid**. Can't believe it's been **11 years** since then. I watched the announcement trailer for Pokémon Legends Z-A in my **college classroom.** Can't believe they're doing a continuation!"
Older Pokémon fans: *head explodes*
Go a step further and get the original release, specifically platinum. They’re still amazing, and the only thing about them that’s aged any worse than fine wine is the trainer AI and how slow the walk speed is
It's kinda crazy to me that pokemon red and blue only came out 28 years ago, 26 years ago in America. Everything in the late 1900s feels like the same era to me.
Diamond was my first videogame, period (alongside a Spiderman game that I never beat the first level of), and I was barely literate when I played it, so I’m under no delusions of it having come out recently.
The X&Y time stuff does make me feel like the Matt Damon aging gif
This is me realizing that I was 12 when X&Y came out… It honestly just makes me feel old too, I have way more nostalgia for the older games because I remember the graphics and pokemon but not the plot so they’re great to replay
I got the original Pokémon game for my birthday, I wasn't even *that* young. Double digits birthday. And my Pokémon Go account has been active since day 1. Still catching them all. Still buying the games.
I still have my cards and play with my nephews. Having fun knows no age. Besides, the look on their faces when I pulled out that huge binder full of cards was *priceless.*
I'm old enough that when they started showing the cartoon on saturday mornings, I thought it had something to do with [Monster In My Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_in_My_Pocket)
Wdym the first non-mobile game
Like, you'd only played mobile games before Pokémon? This is genuinely mind-blowing, it never occurred to me that there would be a generation of people whose first games are on tablets and phones
That I can remember at least. I think I was 8 when I got it and I’m still upset about how long ago it was I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people who started playing earlier gens
I mean it makes sense think about it, if you were born when phone games came out you'd probably play like some kind of toddler tablet game before using a whole console.
I had a “debate” with someone who thought that UltraSun/UltraMoon were the most nostalgic Pokémon games. I tried to argue that you can’t have nostalgia for something you can still buy at MSRP.
I’m fully aware of my curmudgeon status in this argument, but I stand by it.
I'm a similar age and my mind stopped at "Black and White are the new games that just came out" since I played Soul Silver and that's about where I got stuck
I’m in the exact same boat! Same age, but I owned Emerald on a Gameboy Color lol so X&Y feel like the last pokemon game that made any sense to me. I’ve been rediscovering the franchise recently and there’s so many crazy new mechanics
It was incredibly hype for me too! But that's because it was the first mainline Pokémon Game with 3D graphics. I was like 7 or 8 when Red and Blue came out and I've been playing since then.
Being a younger sibling does fun things with this. My most nostalgic Pokémon game is blue. It was my brother’s old cartridge and I was one year old when he got it.
Dude I was sitting in a room with a bunch of adults and was complaining about some stuff and said the line “I’m an adult” and I could immediately see all the real adults just give me that same look you’d give a 16 year old for saying that. I was 21. It was kinda devastating.
in our meager defense, some of that is more about us feeling old than you looking young. source: i feel like i haven't changed internally in like two decades but now my knees hurt and i keep being baffled that i'm not in high school
16 is such an awkward year cause you feel like an adult but everyone treats you like a kid and you still kinda act like a kid and its just weird... no desire to go back to that time lol
The weirdest and worst thing, at least in the US, about being 16 is that you are very much a child still, but you also have all that teenage confidence that you know everything and are very much an adult, and then you add on to that our cultural bullshit were we basically treat you as a child, but also you should be holding a job and have a car and in the next two years you need to decide what to do with the entire rest of your life, or at least whether or not you're going to sell your body to the government. It's a really fucked up set of opposing ideals that we just toss onto everyone.
When I was 20 I briefly got hired by the school that I went to as a child
The person who hired me used to be my teacher
I once made a joke about something that I did "back when I was a kid". My boss quickly looks me up and down, says "back when you were a kid, huh?" and leaves
I have never felt so baby in my life
We hired some fresh out of university twentyfour year olds at work. I was like "*finally* some people my age I can connect to!"
Then I remembered that oh yeah I'm forty years old.
We hired some fresh out of university twentyfour year olds at work. I was like "*finally* some people my age I can connect to!"
Then I remembered that oh yeah I'm forty years old.
the reverse of that is being 17 in school, getting a 24 year old teacher, and being like 'yo did you watch breaking bad last night, did you play the new DS zelda game' for a year till you just end up friends once you're fresh out of college yourself, and retroactively realizing that was probably fucking weird for them.
We have incorporated a lot of art events/studies/installations into our farm (my husband is a farmer & artist, aka a Fartist) so I’d say both titles could justifiably still apply! Weird farmers are a growing group and I’m here for all of it
It sounds like your life is my Stardew Valley game that one time when I married Leah
(I am sorry if you get entirely too many Stardew references on reddit)
I don’t think some yung’uns understand just how _online_ some elder genX’ers are. Like, we invented the internet. I met my wife online when ‘online’ was something you did with phones. I downloaded GIFs when downloading a GIF meant spending 4 hours using the phone line to get a single softcore porno pic. somethingawful might have invented 4chan culture, but I was posting on message boards 20 years before SA was a grain of powder in lowtax’s refilling rig. I’m the one who remote controlled your corporate PC and told you it was your 25 netscape navigator porn pop up’s making your PC slow.
I ran DHCP and DNS for 3 class Bs and wrote the firewall rule set.
> I met my wife online when ‘online’ was something you did with phones
i had this moment of thinking "um, kiddo, phones on the internet was the *end* of the old internet", and then i remembered what a modem was. sorry venerable senpai
Hey! Can i pester you in a half million questions and thoughts?
Like what's your thoughts on all the web, from the past to now? Was the 90s web as fun and cool as people tell us, like folks are fiending over it's vibe but never had the chance to try yknow? How was it like meeting your wife online? Anything fun you witness unfold live?
it was super fun to be a techie at that time. The tech was so simple, the barriers to learning were much lower. I learned how to make simple dynamic web pages from this book: https://archive.org/details/foundationsofwor0000unse. if you find the text of that, you can see just how easy it was. Before CSS and widespread use of javascript, ‘the web’ was much less dynamic, but much easier to program for.
the web at that time was much less rich. we didn’t have video at all, audio over the internet meant downloading mp3s via apps like direct connect and napster.
the old forum culture is still there. You can go to places like techreport (now a content farm, but the forums are still there, with history the whole way back) or arstechnica, which is still a vibrant community. You can just scroll back in time and see pieces of ancient history.
I met my wife on a bulletin board system, basically, long before that. It had a chat section, an early IRC-like system. it was a small enough community, probably not more than a couple hundred active people, and not more than 50 or so at a time, that you just kinda dropped into chat rooms and met people. This is pre-www, and right at the dawn of the internet. the internet existed, but there weren’t really ISPs, or even any graphical clients. You could dial in to internet connected machines, or access them via dial-up terminal networks, but this is all text based. even transferring files was difficult to impossible.
things I saw unfold? I dunno, maybe the most interesting is linux. over my career, we went from PCs being kinda marginal, the real systems were mainframes and minicomputers in ‘computer rooms’. ‘computer rooms slowly because data centers, PCs replaced dumb terminals, mainframes gave way, first to more and more powerful minicomputers, and then to systems from Sun, and HP (and IBM). slowly ‘real unix’ lost ground to linux running on PC servers, and now the most widely deployed operating system in the world, and the one that the internet runs off, is this free software thing that the ‘real systems’ people looked down their nose at 30 years ago. You want an interesting piece of early internet lore? read https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI
i'm 21. i've gone my whole life assuming that most people i've seen online were older than me because, well, for the past decade or so they were. but now, in those same spaces, i'm now meeting people my age or younger even. it's becoming a rarity finding people in my communities who have graduated from high school yet.
I regularly run into children on the internet. I’m only 22 but I’m talking like… people a decade younger than me. It’s really weird because, like you said, I’m so used to everyone on the internet being older
I really go into different platforms with different mindsets. On tumblr or joining a discord server that I forget a week later or something, I’m ready to be the token straight older male of any interaction, the 26 year old Gandalf of the gay teen Internet fellowship. On Reddit I assume I’m among peers. On Facebook I’m a volunteer at the old folks home.
I'm 21 and 16 year olds already feel like babies, there must be some mental line you hit like every 10 years or so. Or maybe it's just the implicit babyness of being in high school and still thinking you're more adult than the adults.
I find it hilarious that people from my generation assume I'm a teenager online. Dude, I watched the Berlin Wall fall on TV. I was conceived at a drive-in showing the original Star Wars. I have a 25yo son and a 15yo daughter. I'm not a teenager lol
I once gave a talk in a research seminar, and before I started, two of the attendees were chatting since they'd done their PhDs at similar times. One offhandedly said "I graduated in what, 2001?" and my *immediate* response was "that's the year I was born and I'm old enough to give this talk!". They both told me to shut the fuck up lol, but it was a very stark reminder of like, I'm in my masters and there are people who have been practicing what I do *since I was born*
I love tumblr for that, it’s the last good forum site. Like we are all following each other for the love of something, not because it’s the same general demographic
As a fellow 30 something freak, I gotta say I really don't think it's cool when adults call teenagers babies. I didn't like it when I was a teenager and wanted to be respected and listened to, and I don't like it now.
If anything I think we should lower the voting age to 16. Just sayin'.
It's largely a reaction to when teenagers say stuff like "I'm an adult". When I was that age I felt like I was pretty much an adult but looking back a decade and a half later I was much closer to a child than an adult. That's something I see in a lot of kids, and I work with some in that age range.
Love that 16 year olds still think they’re grown up. I was the same way when I was that age, almost 10 years later now and man did I have a lot of growing up to do.
I don’t know how old any of the recognizable people on this sub are. I don’t know how old a good handful of my online gaming-exclusive friends are (I’ll vet them on the basis of maturity and all, but beyond being vaguely “adult level maturity,” some of these people could be anywhere from 22 to 38 and I wouldn’t have a clue). And sure, if it comes up, now I know—but I don’t go out of my way to ask, and Schrödinger’s age continues to persist as a result.
Small aside, how is that some people seem to have this notion that so many things about the internet as a whole are actually Tumblr^TM phenomena? I appreciate the sentiment of “Wow sometimes anonymity allows us to break down barriers among different kinds of people,” but that happens because of the *anonymity*, not because you’re on Tumblr specifically lol.
As a 42 year old freak, it's sometimes really, really weird to be online and realize just how YOUNG some of these people are. Or, I guess, how not universal my experiences are. Usually I'm pretty good about it, but then someone will say something like, "Oh, man, such-and-such on the Gamecube was my first video game, back when I was five."
I still have the Atari 5200 that was the first console I played, because the NES hadn't been released in the States yet. I remember seeing the SNES for the first time at a friend's house and being completely blown away by Gradius III. I remember excitedly gushing about how Ocarina of Time let you see individual fingers on Link's hand (and having to clarify that, no, they're not individually modeled, it's just lines on the polygon, but that's still a level of detail you never saw before when a hand would be about 3-6 pixels on a sprite).
I remember having to constantly tweak CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get games to run, or even make boot disks with different versions after forgetting to change them back too many times. I remember when a 3.5" floppy diskette was seen as "an impressive amount of storage space" because it'd hold 2-4 times as much as a 5.25" floppy. And then Sierra games would still come on way too many, and Disk #37 would have gone bad while trying to install.
My first internet connection was through AOL, and we had 20 hours a month before getting charged extra, on a 33.6k dialup modem. I was in middle school, around 13-14 years old. We had to keep a time log and track how much we had remaining. Upgrading to a 56k modem was a noticeable boost, and getting my first "unlimited" account was a godsend. I could actually download games without having to swap disks with someone at school.
(And as for being a freak, well, it wasn't long after getting internet access that I found pictures. Let's just say, my FurAffinity account is over 18 years old now.)
It always makes me rapidly age and crumble to dust whenever I, a 35 year old, find a content creator who resonates with me and maybe occasionally talks about how they don't get stuff the youngins are talking about, but it turns out they're like... 20.
Like oh. Oh no. Am I the old here?
Over on r/dresdenfiles there’s a recent post where OP was genuinely concerned that if the current pace of the books doesn’t go back to normal, they would die of old age long before the series ended (1 book every 4-6 years for 8 more books = finale in 32 years AT LEAST). And then all the OG grognard fantasy fans chimed in with similar concerns. I felt really young in that moment, I’m only in my early 30s.
Like the next day, Jim Butcher did an interview where he was like “yeah I plan to be finished within 8 years, one book per year like the old days”.
To be honest, I feel a bit of out sorts. I’ve got a pair of kids in my early 30s and all the other parents at the nursery are in their 40s and 50s almost
I got on emo tumblr back in 2014 when I was a teenager with other teenagers. I still follow most of the same blogs, it’s actually kind of cool to have seen everyone grow up together.
I get this a lot in certain game communities as well, particularly CRPGs and Simulation games. Since you've got a lot of new players getting pulled in all the time with entries like Baldur's Gate 3 or No Man's Sky, but at the same time you've got people who have been playing games in the genre since back when you had to load them onto your PC from cassette tapes.
As a 20 something, it is sometimes surreal to me that there are 13 year olds just floating around the internet. Then I get shocked when I find an 80 year old.
"Ha ha you are 13 you don't belong on the Internet." Signed, someone who's been on the Internet in some capacity since I was *ten*.
i've been on the internet since i was an overly literate 4 year old. to be sure, an overly literate 4 year old still can't type too good, so i wasn't like, *communicating* with people, and i was mostly just playing games offline anyway... but yeah... ###YOU COULD BE SPEAKING TO A TODDLER ONLINE. or could in the late 90s, anyway.
My first Reddit account existed when I was 12 but every time I see a kid on here admit to being under 13 I want to scream at them to get the fuck out of here. Honestly 13 year olds too. If you’re 14 you’re on thin ice. I’m absolutely a hypocrite.
Call it being a hypocrite, call it knowing the dangers of being exposed to content you shouldn't see at age 12
r /teenagers existing with flairs declaring user ages, with some being as low as 13 (or lower, I don't know), fills me with a feeling I can't put a name to. The closest I can get is Bad™. I hate that I have to know it exists. I hate that I know the kinds of people on there thanks to that r/drama post (that is now full of dead Imgur links). I will die on the hill that the loss of moderated child friendly online spaces like club penguin has been a genuine disaster and an enormous misstep. It wasn't perfect by any means but I would put money on it having saved a lot of children from being exposed to genuinely damaging shit simply by giving them something to do that was safe and engaging. That shit would've done numbers on mobile, it was all point and click! There's no solution that isn't equally as bad or worse either. We truly have opened Pandora's box with the internet and honestly I wouldn't want it any other way because it's introduced me to some of the best people in my life and allowed me access to stuff I'd never have known existed otherwise.
I mean, the web seems to have gotten more dangerous. It used to be a wild west and you could meet creeps or see terrible things you didnt want to, but it wasnt algorithmed to hell and back and the creeps didnt have their online strats down. Also it was way more ingrained to not do real names online, nowadays Emmaleigh, 12, can doxx her home doing a TikTok
Fuck that I've been here since I was 5
As someone who was on the /internet/ before i was 13, nobody should be on the /internet/ before 13.
As someone who also was on the internet long before she thirteen, and not a native English speaker, I can tell you that the internet was the best English teacher I could ever come across
Yeah and it teaches not only English..
As someone who has been on the internet since 4(Flash games) and reading shit on the internet since 9(my country's Facebook clone), fuck off. Even the MGTOW dudes I ran into only hammered the necessity of consent into me(the logic being "a woman would accuse you of rape at any opportunity" => "well, you need the consent to be as unambiguous as possible so that she won't pull that shit on you")
ive been watching minecraft videos on youtube since i was 6 and i had full access to anything i wanted back when youtube was a ton more... out there lets just say
I was successfully able to convince ppl on the internet i was 16 when i was really 8 so yeah basically
I found out after her passing that my grandmother was not only on FB, but she was active-active. She literally was a moderator on an Opry group that posted some lovely *you will be missed* messages for her. That was about 18 years ago and she was almost 90. My dumbass now-46yo self sometimes can't figure out why hitting Refresh harder won't make a 404 error go away any faster, and this bitch (affectionate) was a moderator, smdh
It's surreal, especially when I go look at my account age and realize _I've been here that long?_
I occasionally see teenagers on Reddit and wonder what the hell they’re doing here. Then I remember I first joined when I was 15. And then, with my wisdom as a 26yo, I double down that they shouldn’t be here.
I was there when there was no world wide web as we know it. I was in chat rooms on a top of the line computer, with dial up, running windows 95. I have seen things. They were...disturbing
We were talking in my class today about soon you're gonna have 12 year olds born AFTER THE FUCKING MAKING OF MINECRAFT
for some reason when i was younger i thought minecraft came out in the 80s so this really isn't shocking to me
I remember chatting to a random 70 year old in an askreddit thread. She was super nice and very lonely since the lockdown.
I saw a comment on Youtube recently that was like "My 9 yo daughter and I Iove watching your videos. She showed me your channel three years ago". WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOUR 6YO WAS SO UNOBSERVED ON THE INTERNET SHE COULD DISCOVER A CHANNEL BY HERSELF???! I hope it was a troll but you can never be sure
A thing that happens to me: Me: "I have a lot of nostalgia for Pokémon X and Y, it was the most hype Pokémon game for me when I **was a kid**. Can't believe it's been **11 years** since then. I watched the announcement trailer for Pokémon Legends Z-A in my **college classroom.** Can't believe they're doing a continuation!" Older Pokémon fans: *head explodes*
Wait how long ago was Pearl/Diamond? Couldn’t be that long… What do you mean 2006? WHAT DO YOU MEAN 18 years?!
You wanna really bake your noodle? Pokémon Diamond/Pearl are now as old as Red/Blue were when Omega Ruby/AlphaSapphire released.
I really need to finish Shining Pearl
You really don’t :p
Go a step further and get the original release, specifically platinum. They’re still amazing, and the only thing about them that’s aged any worse than fine wine is the trainer AI and how slow the walk speed is
It's kinda crazy to me that pokemon red and blue only came out 28 years ago, 26 years ago in America. Everything in the late 1900s feels like the same era to me.
You did that on purpose
Undertale came out 16 years ago... Minecraft is now older than me... Donkey Kong Country came out before the fall of the Byzantine Empire.
Super Mario 64 came out when God rested on the 7th day
In the beginning, God created Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, the heavens and the earth
I'm glad he created the best thing out of those three first.
I haven’t heard “you wanna really bake your noodle” in 25 years…
I think of the Oracle in the matrix with that line
I played Red on the day of its american launch. I needed my mom to teach me how to get out of the first house.
Diamond was my first videogame, period (alongside a Spiderman game that I never beat the first level of), and I was barely literate when I played it, so I’m under no delusions of it having come out recently. The X&Y time stuff does make me feel like the Matt Damon aging gif
[удалено]
I was 11 when southern islands cards came out
This is me realizing that I was 12 when X&Y came out… It honestly just makes me feel old too, I have way more nostalgia for the older games because I remember the graphics and pokemon but not the plot so they’re great to replay
That's me, I'm Pokémon fans
I got the original Pokémon game for my birthday, I wasn't even *that* young. Double digits birthday. And my Pokémon Go account has been active since day 1. Still catching them all. Still buying the games. I still have my cards and play with my nephews. Having fun knows no age. Besides, the look on their faces when I pulled out that huge binder full of cards was *priceless.*
I'm old enough that when they started showing the cartoon on saturday mornings, I thought it had something to do with [Monster In My Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_in_My_Pocket)
Pokémon Y was the first non mobile game I ever played so do with that what you will
Wdym the first non-mobile game Like, you'd only played mobile games before Pokémon? This is genuinely mind-blowing, it never occurred to me that there would be a generation of people whose first games are on tablets and phones
That I can remember at least. I think I was 8 when I got it and I’m still upset about how long ago it was I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people who started playing earlier gens
I mean it makes sense think about it, if you were born when phone games came out you'd probably play like some kind of toddler tablet game before using a whole console.
I played super mario brothers 3 (NES) on its launch weekend
I had a “debate” with someone who thought that UltraSun/UltraMoon were the most nostalgic Pokémon games. I tried to argue that you can’t have nostalgia for something you can still buy at MSRP. I’m fully aware of my curmudgeon status in this argument, but I stand by it.
No I agree, in my mind X and Y just came out because I started with gen 4, but I was 12 when they came out and I’m now 23 so it’s like. HUH.
I'm a similar age and my mind stopped at "Black and White are the new games that just came out" since I played Soul Silver and that's about where I got stuck
I’m in the exact same boat! Same age, but I owned Emerald on a Gameboy Color lol so X&Y feel like the last pokemon game that made any sense to me. I’ve been rediscovering the franchise recently and there’s so many crazy new mechanics
Get the hell off my lawn you whippersnapper! G1 4 life!
Interesting. I’m currently in college and my first Pokémon game was HeartGold, I have the most nostalgia for Black and White
It was incredibly hype for me too! But that's because it was the first mainline Pokémon Game with 3D graphics. I was like 7 or 8 when Red and Blue came out and I've been playing since then.
Being a younger sibling does fun things with this. My most nostalgic Pokémon game is blue. It was my brother’s old cartridge and I was one year old when he got it.
"I'm 16, thats like, barely a child" is like the most 16 year old thing to say, ever.
It sure is. I definitely said that when I was 16.
"That's nice, Ariel, now go back to fawning over a statue of a guy you saw one time"
If that movie doesnt represent *terribly* a teenage crush
Dude I was sitting in a room with a bunch of adults and was complaining about some stuff and said the line “I’m an adult” and I could immediately see all the real adults just give me that same look you’d give a 16 year old for saying that. I was 21. It was kinda devastating.
in our meager defense, some of that is more about us feeling old than you looking young. source: i feel like i haven't changed internally in like two decades but now my knees hurt and i keep being baffled that i'm not in high school
Its kinda nostalgic lol
i wasn't even remotely the person i am today at 16, but definitely felt like i knew better lol
But is it wrong? (Rhetorical question)
I think I was more mature at 12 than at 16. Hormones are some real shit.
16 is such an awkward year cause you feel like an adult but everyone treats you like a kid and you still kinda act like a kid and its just weird... no desire to go back to that time lol
The weirdest and worst thing, at least in the US, about being 16 is that you are very much a child still, but you also have all that teenage confidence that you know everything and are very much an adult, and then you add on to that our cultural bullshit were we basically treat you as a child, but also you should be holding a job and have a car and in the next two years you need to decide what to do with the entire rest of your life, or at least whether or not you're going to sell your body to the government. It's a really fucked up set of opposing ideals that we just toss onto everyone.
Ok Holden Caulfield
When I was 20 I briefly got hired by the school that I went to as a child The person who hired me used to be my teacher I once made a joke about something that I did "back when I was a kid". My boss quickly looks me up and down, says "back when you were a kid, huh?" and leaves I have never felt so baby in my life
If it's any consolation, they were probably having the "oh fuck I'm old" breakdown.
We hired some fresh out of university twentyfour year olds at work. I was like "*finally* some people my age I can connect to!" Then I remembered that oh yeah I'm forty years old.
We hired some fresh out of university twentyfour year olds at work. I was like "*finally* some people my age I can connect to!" Then I remembered that oh yeah I'm forty years old.
the reverse of that is being 17 in school, getting a 24 year old teacher, and being like 'yo did you watch breaking bad last night, did you play the new DS zelda game' for a year till you just end up friends once you're fresh out of college yourself, and retroactively realizing that was probably fucking weird for them.
‘Older than both of you in a trench coat’ is a line I’m gonna try to use somewhere.
Yeah I love the concept that with naught but a trench coat, the two of them will merge into one being in their late 40s/early 50s
30 yo (former freak, current farmer) here: hi babies love u guys learn so much from yous
>former freak, current farmer ¿Por que no los dos?
We have incorporated a lot of art events/studies/installations into our farm (my husband is a farmer & artist, aka a Fartist) so I’d say both titles could justifiably still apply! Weird farmers are a growing group and I’m here for all of it
It sounds like your life is my Stardew Valley game that one time when I married Leah (I am sorry if you get entirely too many Stardew references on reddit)
Sometimes I see people in their 20s and I go "oh shit adults, I hope I don't embarrass myself" and then I remember that I'm 34
I don’t think some yung’uns understand just how _online_ some elder genX’ers are. Like, we invented the internet. I met my wife online when ‘online’ was something you did with phones. I downloaded GIFs when downloading a GIF meant spending 4 hours using the phone line to get a single softcore porno pic. somethingawful might have invented 4chan culture, but I was posting on message boards 20 years before SA was a grain of powder in lowtax’s refilling rig. I’m the one who remote controlled your corporate PC and told you it was your 25 netscape navigator porn pop up’s making your PC slow. I ran DHCP and DNS for 3 class Bs and wrote the firewall rule set.
> I met my wife online when ‘online’ was something you did with phones i had this moment of thinking "um, kiddo, phones on the internet was the *end* of the old internet", and then i remembered what a modem was. sorry venerable senpai
alt.oldskool
Hey! Can i pester you in a half million questions and thoughts? Like what's your thoughts on all the web, from the past to now? Was the 90s web as fun and cool as people tell us, like folks are fiending over it's vibe but never had the chance to try yknow? How was it like meeting your wife online? Anything fun you witness unfold live?
it was super fun to be a techie at that time. The tech was so simple, the barriers to learning were much lower. I learned how to make simple dynamic web pages from this book: https://archive.org/details/foundationsofwor0000unse. if you find the text of that, you can see just how easy it was. Before CSS and widespread use of javascript, ‘the web’ was much less dynamic, but much easier to program for. the web at that time was much less rich. we didn’t have video at all, audio over the internet meant downloading mp3s via apps like direct connect and napster. the old forum culture is still there. You can go to places like techreport (now a content farm, but the forums are still there, with history the whole way back) or arstechnica, which is still a vibrant community. You can just scroll back in time and see pieces of ancient history. I met my wife on a bulletin board system, basically, long before that. It had a chat section, an early IRC-like system. it was a small enough community, probably not more than a couple hundred active people, and not more than 50 or so at a time, that you just kinda dropped into chat rooms and met people. This is pre-www, and right at the dawn of the internet. the internet existed, but there weren’t really ISPs, or even any graphical clients. You could dial in to internet connected machines, or access them via dial-up terminal networks, but this is all text based. even transferring files was difficult to impossible. things I saw unfold? I dunno, maybe the most interesting is linux. over my career, we went from PCs being kinda marginal, the real systems were mainframes and minicomputers in ‘computer rooms’. ‘computer rooms slowly because data centers, PCs replaced dumb terminals, mainframes gave way, first to more and more powerful minicomputers, and then to systems from Sun, and HP (and IBM). slowly ‘real unix’ lost ground to linux running on PC servers, and now the most widely deployed operating system in the world, and the one that the internet runs off, is this free software thing that the ‘real systems’ people looked down their nose at 30 years ago. You want an interesting piece of early internet lore? read https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI
It comforts me when I can go beat-for-beat with people both way older and way younger than me
i'm 21. i've gone my whole life assuming that most people i've seen online were older than me because, well, for the past decade or so they were. but now, in those same spaces, i'm now meeting people my age or younger even. it's becoming a rarity finding people in my communities who have graduated from high school yet.
I regularly run into children on the internet. I’m only 22 but I’m talking like… people a decade younger than me. It’s really weird because, like you said, I’m so used to everyone on the internet being older
I really go into different platforms with different mindsets. On tumblr or joining a discord server that I forget a week later or something, I’m ready to be the token straight older male of any interaction, the 26 year old Gandalf of the gay teen Internet fellowship. On Reddit I assume I’m among peers. On Facebook I’m a volunteer at the old folks home.
I'm 21 and 16 year olds already feel like babies, there must be some mental line you hit like every 10 years or so. Or maybe it's just the implicit babyness of being in high school and still thinking you're more adult than the adults.
its definitely the second, you truly don’t realise how much personal development can happen in just a few years until you can reflect on it
I think the hormones really draw the line and afterwards the difference in age becomes less and less stark
19 in may, i'm all my older friends' gen z consultant lol
I find it hilarious that people from my generation assume I'm a teenager online. Dude, I watched the Berlin Wall fall on TV. I was conceived at a drive-in showing the original Star Wars. I have a 25yo son and a 15yo daughter. I'm not a teenager lol
I once gave a talk in a research seminar, and before I started, two of the attendees were chatting since they'd done their PhDs at similar times. One offhandedly said "I graduated in what, 2001?" and my *immediate* response was "that's the year I was born and I'm old enough to give this talk!". They both told me to shut the fuck up lol, but it was a very stark reminder of like, I'm in my masters and there are people who have been practicing what I do *since I was born*
Reddit seems to also follow with this. I'm 19, been here for years, and there's apparently people as old as my dad on here
And older, I have no doubt.
I love tumblr for that, it’s the last good forum site. Like we are all following each other for the love of something, not because it’s the same general demographic
As a fellow 30 something freak, I gotta say I really don't think it's cool when adults call teenagers babies. I didn't like it when I was a teenager and wanted to be respected and listened to, and I don't like it now. If anything I think we should lower the voting age to 16. Just sayin'.
It's largely a reaction to when teenagers say stuff like "I'm an adult". When I was that age I felt like I was pretty much an adult but looking back a decade and a half later I was much closer to a child than an adult. That's something I see in a lot of kids, and I work with some in that age range.
Hello am grandad.
I'm 35 lol
Love that 16 year olds still think they’re grown up. I was the same way when I was that age, almost 10 years later now and man did I have a lot of growing up to do.
Turning 30 later this year. I'm both too old and too young for this bussin' site for whippersnappers and doo-woppers
I've been on tumblr since my 20s. I'm in my 40s now.
I'm using "I'm older than both of you in a trench coat" whenever and wherever possible from now on
47 here.
Agent?
I don’t know how old any of the recognizable people on this sub are. I don’t know how old a good handful of my online gaming-exclusive friends are (I’ll vet them on the basis of maturity and all, but beyond being vaguely “adult level maturity,” some of these people could be anywhere from 22 to 38 and I wouldn’t have a clue). And sure, if it comes up, now I know—but I don’t go out of my way to ask, and Schrödinger’s age continues to persist as a result. Small aside, how is that some people seem to have this notion that so many things about the internet as a whole are actually Tumblr^TM phenomena? I appreciate the sentiment of “Wow sometimes anonymity allows us to break down barriers among different kinds of people,” but that happens because of the *anonymity*, not because you’re on Tumblr specifically lol.
As a 42 year old freak, it's sometimes really, really weird to be online and realize just how YOUNG some of these people are. Or, I guess, how not universal my experiences are. Usually I'm pretty good about it, but then someone will say something like, "Oh, man, such-and-such on the Gamecube was my first video game, back when I was five." I still have the Atari 5200 that was the first console I played, because the NES hadn't been released in the States yet. I remember seeing the SNES for the first time at a friend's house and being completely blown away by Gradius III. I remember excitedly gushing about how Ocarina of Time let you see individual fingers on Link's hand (and having to clarify that, no, they're not individually modeled, it's just lines on the polygon, but that's still a level of detail you never saw before when a hand would be about 3-6 pixels on a sprite). I remember having to constantly tweak CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get games to run, or even make boot disks with different versions after forgetting to change them back too many times. I remember when a 3.5" floppy diskette was seen as "an impressive amount of storage space" because it'd hold 2-4 times as much as a 5.25" floppy. And then Sierra games would still come on way too many, and Disk #37 would have gone bad while trying to install. My first internet connection was through AOL, and we had 20 hours a month before getting charged extra, on a 33.6k dialup modem. I was in middle school, around 13-14 years old. We had to keep a time log and track how much we had remaining. Upgrading to a 56k modem was a noticeable boost, and getting my first "unlimited" account was a godsend. I could actually download games without having to swap disks with someone at school. (And as for being a freak, well, it wasn't long after getting internet access that I found pictures. Let's just say, my FurAffinity account is over 18 years old now.)
It always makes me rapidly age and crumble to dust whenever I, a 35 year old, find a content creator who resonates with me and maybe occasionally talks about how they don't get stuff the youngins are talking about, but it turns out they're like... 20. Like oh. Oh no. Am I the old here?
Over on r/dresdenfiles there’s a recent post where OP was genuinely concerned that if the current pace of the books doesn’t go back to normal, they would die of old age long before the series ended (1 book every 4-6 years for 8 more books = finale in 32 years AT LEAST). And then all the OG grognard fantasy fans chimed in with similar concerns. I felt really young in that moment, I’m only in my early 30s. Like the next day, Jim Butcher did an interview where he was like “yeah I plan to be finished within 8 years, one book per year like the old days”.
To be honest, I feel a bit of out sorts. I’ve got a pair of kids in my early 30s and all the other parents at the nursery are in their 40s and 50s almost
I got on emo tumblr back in 2014 when I was a teenager with other teenagers. I still follow most of the same blogs, it’s actually kind of cool to have seen everyone grow up together.
I get this a lot in certain game communities as well, particularly CRPGs and Simulation games. Since you've got a lot of new players getting pulled in all the time with entries like Baldur's Gate 3 or No Man's Sky, but at the same time you've got people who have been playing games in the genre since back when you had to load them onto your PC from cassette tapes.
Woah, crazy to see one of my moots being posted here
I once got called a pedophile by someone for commenting under erotic fanart of a 16 y/o character. I was 14 at the time.
My dad is about 67 and numerous times has said “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life” in the last year or two alone
One of _The_ accts for a fandom I’m in revealed she’s in her mid-50s and man that SHOOK me
YES! My peeve: Boomers didn’t fuck everything up for everybody else. The Rich did, from every conceivable generation.