Ask Lemmy

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 actually just became a grandfather two days ago. I'm looking forward to, "Listen, things were different back in the nineteen hundreds..."

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.

Dunno, COVID maybe?

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 when Metallica tried to kill piracy by killing Napster and in turn, created a giant market of music piracy programs.

I remember leaded gasoline (and prices under USD$1)

I saw (on TV) the Challenger explosion

On 9/11 I was staying at a friend's house, and that morning basically every news site was brought to its knees. Like serving static text only summaries. I remember going outside and seeing the newspaper on the porch and thinking "This is going to be the last normal one for a very long time". It was of course.

Some friends and I took a long road trip and in person we saw this fly the first of the two flights for the X prize (Note: that one actually had some decent reasons to use the name X)

I caught COVID-19. Twice. So far.

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.

The 2024 eclipse, even got the pics!

Assuming there will be "next generations"..

I remember borrowing CDs from friends and converting them to MP3s in the mid-late 90s. Admittedly I didn't really know what I was doing, so I couldn't really explain it to my friends, but ripping CDs with Windows CLI programs and amassing a huge (for the time) digital music collection was something I thought was super cool. Unlike wav files, I could actually (not always) fit a whole song on a floppy disc!

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.

I was there for 9/11 like many others were growing up. Many born in 2001 and after would not understand the impact it has had on America.

I was there for the Boston Red Sox finally snapping a multi-decade streak of losing or not making it to a World Series in 2004. This is significant if you're a sports fan, especially baseball.

I was there to see the rise of social media sites that many use today.

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.

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 Gandalf, in the previous millennium.

I volunteered at the occupy wall street camp in New York. Fun times.

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

Having been there for the recent solar eclipse.

Even though I can't say I fully remember it, the beginning of yt, back when the Internet was a lot healthier than it's ever been due to the Wild West lifestyle (back before 3-4 webpages became the only place you go to).

Also, there for what I would consider the absolute best game console to come out since the beginning of the 2000s: xbox360. Also got to see what I consider the most aesthetically pleasing out of the box OS ever (W*ndows Vista)

I was there when the Scranton Strangler drove past my office.

Now you take these and go buy yourself a space ship.

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 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.