Jump to content

The Old Folks Home


Starlord

Recommended Posts

55 minutes ago, death tribble said:

The football season starting in September when the kids went back to school 


   Kids in schools......no wait, that’s something the next generation will remember that their kids will make fun of.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Draft was formally ended in '73, altho largely effectively over in '71.  So I was never close.  My brother was, tho.

 

THAC0, I don't miss, but it wasn't as bad as the hodge-podge ability score --> bonus mappings.  3rd Ed wasn't perfect by any means, but simplifying the mechanics was a big improvement in my book.  An aspect of that period, too, was how WIDE open it was.  I spent far too much time on system authors' boards...Andy Collins, Monte Cook (both 3E and AU/AE) and somewhat intermittently, Sean Reynolds.  The interaction was dynamic and occasionally even excellent.  Then came 4E and its issues, and the sharp decline in tabletop anyway.  

 

So even for...gee, a 20something...the days when D&D led the gaming world, and arguably helped drive ALL systems, are before their time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

Draft was formally ended in '73, altho largely effectively over in '71.  So I was never close.  My brother was, tho.

 

Yeah, I had to register for the old draft when I turned 18 in the summer of 1974, but I was never at risk.  You still had to carry the card to show you were in compliance with the law, though.  Even that ended when the old draft was formally abolished, and I took the card out of my wallet and put it among my mementos in my bedroom.  Which was where the fire broke out a couple of years later.  So while it's literally correct that the card was burned, it wasn't burned in the social/legal anti-war defiance sense when that sort of thing mattered.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Cancer said:

Glass Coca-Cola bottles with city names molded into the bottom.

 

Horror stories about what people found in their Cokes which were bottled in recycled bottles which hadn't been properly emptied.

 

" Yeah, some guy actually drank a rusty nail that was in his Coke."

 

"I still think that sounds better than the guy who found the dead rat in his Coke."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, archer said:

 

At least there's online videos these days so you can actually see amazing things rather than just hearing about them. 

 

That's one thing kids nowadays might never understand--that there was once a time when information simply was not available.  When your source of information was three channels on TV, newspapers, and the local library (indexed by card catalog).  I recently overheard an interesting song, whipped out my phone, did a google search on the lyrics, and owned that song in less than five minutes.  In the seventies, if you overheard an interesting song and the DJ didn't tell you who it was, too bad.  Likewise, we all have the sum total knowledge of mankind literally at our fingertips, all we have to do is search for it and filter out the noise.  In the seventies, if I wanted to learn about airfoils, or DNA, or royal titles, or battles in 16th century Poland, or surface to air missile systems, or immunology, or gray reef sharks, or the topography of Taiwan, or how many times Frodo got stabbed, I was SOL unless I was standing in a really good university library and it would still have taken hours.

 

Those are just some of the internet searches I've made so far this week.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Old Man said:

 

That's one thing kids nowadays might never understand--that there was once a time when information simply was not available.  When your source of information was three channels on TV, newspapers, and the local library (indexed by card catalog).  I recently overheard an interesting song, whipped out my phone, did a google search on the lyrics, and owned that song in less than five minutes.  In the seventies, if you overheard an interesting song and the DJ didn't tell you who it was, too bad.  Likewise, we all have the sum total knowledge of mankind literally at our fingertips, all we have to do is search for it and filter out the noise.  In the seventies, if I wanted to learn about airfoils, or DNA, or royal titles, or battles in 16th century Poland, or surface to air missile systems, or immunology, or gray reef sharks, or the topography of Taiwan, or how many times Frodo got stabbed, I was SOL unless I was standing in a really good university library and it would still have taken hours.

 

Those are just some of the internet searches I've made so far this week.

 

Your internet searches sound suspiciously similar to my internet searches.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Cancer said:

My HP-33s is literally within 30 cm of my left hand, and with it I never need no d****d parentheses.

 

 

ohhh...now there's something no one remembers...RPN.  Then again, even in HP's heyday, only a minority of tech-minded geeks knew what it was...or how to organize things to use it.

 

Along those lines...COBOL.  Apparently there's still an enormous amount of legacy COBOL code but by and large, it's being replaced, and I seriously doubt any new code is being developed...except for tweaking those legacy systems.  But one of the great nightmares in software is trying to convert older, unstructured, atomic code into streamlined classes and procedures.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, Old Man said:

 

I use google for that, as well as unit and currency conversions.

 

I don't use Google search directly because I think it's important to have competition to the monster.

 

I used to use StartPage but my current browser won't let me use that as a default option. So instead I get to see the duck.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

34 minutes ago, tkdguy said:

How about when Hong Kong was owned by the UK?

 

I would have let every person in Hong Kong emigrate directly to my basement if that's what it took to keep them from being unwillingly stuck there.

 

How can you have a freaking British passport, be a British citizen, and be denied the right to move to other parts of Great Britain? And not be allowed to emigrate in huge numbers to other NATO countries, Commonwealth countries, and other allies?

 

These days, starting less than 20 years later, we've had literally millions of people relocate themselves from Syria and central Africa and the EU countries (and others) are like, "Okay, come in I guess."

 

< /rant >

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...