I don’t want to change back, but I still thought it added a sense of adventure, and having to be actively involved with the navigation gave you more awareness of where you were and where you were going. Now you just slavishly follow instructions and then some hours later you are there.

Like, we drove to Austria last summer and when we came back my dad asked me: so did you drive over Stuttgart or Nuremberg? And I honestly didn’t know.

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Its a shame because it is something I am actually really good at, and now it’s a completely useless skill!

I remember this vivedly and I’m straight.

In high school, I was very awkward socially (decades later I could find out that it’s autism, but at that point it was just called “he’s shy and awkward”). I had a group of bullies who would follow me around taunting me.

Usually, they’d leave me alone if they were alone with me, but there was one exception. One of my bullies loved pretending to come onto me in the locker room. As if being in your underpants changing in front of other guys wasn’t embarrassing enough as a teen, this guy would pretend that he was gay (he definitely wasn’t) and that he was attracted to me.

I remember feeling ashamed of being identified by someone as possibly being gay. (A feeling that present day me realizes wasn’t right, but I was a teenager and being gay wasn’t widely accepted then.) I wanted desperately to prove that I was straight, but had no way of doing that. (See above about being extremely awkward socially - I didn’t have my first date until about a decade later.)

Yeah because by that point, men weren’t allowed to have feelings. Men had to be…Men who did MAN things. Working on cars - MAN thing. Drinking beers - MAN thing. Doing lumberjack or other fields of intensive labor - MAN thing. There was no room for these things called emotions because that made you a BOY and we need to separate the boys from the men! That was the kind of rhetoric that was instilled in male society for decades up to that point.

And it took someone like an animated character like Kenshiro from an anime to show people that it’s actually okay for guys to have feelings. In a show where he does an awful lot of manly things.

It was pretty popular into the early 2000s as well as far as I’m concerned. Just not in media as much.

Options for word choices have diminished and aren’t as edgy, but I still see men call each other cupcakes and removed in lieu of using more classical words.

Edit: Guess there’s some pretty strong word filters here. It was the b-word in case anyone was wondering. Feel like I’m in elementary school…

In my area of the world where queerness is still criminalised, people still use those terms openly.

I grew up in the 90’s being called fag/faggot a lot and I wasn’t even queer until like, my junior year of highschool when I discovered yaoi.

It was glorified then, before that is what normalized which it much worse.

I still remember passing by “the pit.” That was the section where the high school kids were allowed to smoke. It was outdoors, but they always left the doors open. I needed to pass by to get to class and hated the stench. So I’d hold my breath. But the crowds were always slow so it was a game of “will I be forced to breathe the stench, will I get by in time, or will I pass out?”

I don’t miss it at all, but I couldn’t afford to do it today! The government is obviously trying to price people out of doing it. That’s not why I quit, but it would certainly make me if I still was.

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Yeah. If someone could give me $10 million, but I had to relive my 4 years of high school, I wouldn’t take the money.

Younger me would have been kind blown about a 500mb hard drive.

I wish I could not work in an office

When COVID hit and I was going to work from home, I was convinced that I’d hate it. I assured myself that it was okay because COVID would only last a few weeks and then the world would get back to normal. (Oh how naive I was!)

Once I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. My commutes weren’t that bad before, but now it’s just “walk up the stairs.” I don’t need to worry about traffic or parking spaces at all. I also don’t need to worry about people stopping by to chat when I’m in the zone. Yes, people can message me on Teams, but it’s easy to switch over and postpone dealing with them if it’s not important.

Even meetings are nicer. Most of mine aren’t on camera so I can get up and walk around my work area during my meetings.

I’m even healthier working from home. Previously, I’d bring a bunch of food to work to make sure I’d have enough and then snack all day. Now, I don’t bother going back downstairs except for lunch and for that I can take time to make a healthy lunch (salad or something).

My current job is now permanently work from home (my “home base” was moved and is now a 10 hour drive away so I’m DEFINITELY not commuting in). I’m not going back if I can help it. (If I were to ever leave this job, I’d make working from home a priority.)

Almost everyone I see mowing is still using gas. Not sure that’s out of style/can be considered something that people could have nostalgia for.

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I have a cabled electric mower. I have to whip the cord all over like Indiana Jones when I change directions. I’d take gas over it in a heartbeat

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I don’t miss constantly running around changing incandescent light bulbs! It seemed like there was always one burned out in the house somewhere. In my experience the newer bulbs don’t necessarily last the length of time that’s advertised, but they sure as heck last longer than the old style.

Wow. I feel the same. For me school was always a place of competition. There was just studying and rarely did we get the time to play together with classmates. It was full of fucking idiot teachers who lacked basic humanity and would start beating you up if you failed to solve the questions they asked or make you kneel down for 40+ minutes on the floor. So yeah school was nothing to long for. Btw this was in India.

I always loved the school part of school (well, except for gym class). It’s everything else I hated. Especially between classes when a group of bullies would follow me making my life a living hell. If I had been able to compress my school day into just classes without gym class or any “between class” time, I would have enjoyed it more.

Instead, I mainly remember getting more and more paranoid that anyone who was laughing was laughing at me - all because my bullies thought it was fun to torment me.

I would love to have relived my high school days again, it wasn’t too too bad. Might’ve have had a rough start for the first few months of freshman year, but that was to be expected. The rest of the years was fine, all things considered.

It was my middle school years that I honestly am better off forgetting, aside from a few good childhood highlights that everyone else would remember. Things like how decorated for the holidays the school got, halloween parties, special activities and other things. But I don’t miss the humiliating points and the struggles of having to put up with antagonizing people.

But you need a whole second desk to fit them and they make that awful buzzing sound!

Ugh, I basically never watched any show that closely before DVDs. Mind you, I was also pretty young at the time, but that worked even more against me as it was much less of an option to record anything when it was entirely on my parents’ devices. Plus only one TV had satellite and my dad basically monopolized it.

I basically only watched things sporadically, as I was able to. Which also meant story heavy serials weren’t viable. Everything had to be at least decently episodic so that I wouldn’t feel lost due to missing half the episodes and watching reruns out of order.

I’m genuinely glad kids these days have it so much better. How many times as a kid did I beg my parents to let me watch some popular kids show and it wasn’t an option? And if I ever did get to see something I liked, it could be months before the stars aligned to get to see another episode.

Ahh, the beloved VCR! Also while recording, pressing pause to leave out the tv commercials, forgetting to unpause, the station interrupting news breaks, a low-flying airplane messing up the tv reception, someone changing the channel while you went to go to the bathroom. And my all-time favorite… dad placing his big brand new stereo speakers right next to the little videotape shelf!