1995 I would just be getting home from night shift.
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Probably play some Crash Bandicoot, or go to my nine o clock lecture.
That really depends on if I'm my now age or my then age. Though either way, I'm looking for my mom
Chill
Play with hot wheels and Transformers. Maybe take the afternoon and fold an entire ream of paper into airplanes, one design only, looking for small improvements on every crease, corner and pleat to create the perfect expression of that design.
Listen to my mixtape, duh.
See DJ Heather and silicon soul live.
Start prepping for some strategic tech investments.
Take my routine morning shit. But instead of my phone I’m reading the label on the back of any bottle I can reach from the throne.
Do I wake up at 6 years old? Or as I am now, but in '95?
Doesn't matter, I'm watching fuckin POWER RANGERS.
What was I doing in 1995?
I would wake up, pour some Frosted Flakes and play Donkey Kong Country.
What would I do now?
Go outside and take a slow walk through my old neighborhood and probably cry.
Two chicks at the same time
"That's what you'd do if you had a million dollars?"
"Hell yeah man, always wanted to do that."
Your comment reminded me that many times this was my go to activity. GF was BI and enjoyed me interacting with her and her various girlfriends.
Cell phones existed in 1995. They were expensive and just used for making phone calls, tho.
Had the internet too. I'd be playing Doom or checking out Usenet forums.
Making actual phone calls‽ The horror!
OOOH Look at Mister FANCY PANTS with his dial up internet. You must be rich, Mister Fancy Pants.
I think I had AOL at the time...
AOL was dial-up.
Of course it was. I had it.
Apologies, I misread the tone of your comment. I thought you were jokingly saying dial up was fancy while you had to deal with AOL. I didn't read it as two different statements as I should have.
Boot up my dad's computer and play some shareware off the magazine cover disk I got months ago.
Or go to the library I guess.
Am i the only person who is driven insane by the insinuation that WiFi is synonomous with 'having the internet'?
No. It's the Chromebook/iPad generation. I feel like they don't truly understand the Internet or computers. Having used Windows 98 and onward, my friends and I had to really learn to troubleshoot and learn the innards of the system. Nowadays, everyone is in a protective shell like Chrome OS, iOS or Android. It's all dumbed down now. Simplicity isn't always good imo
Edit: Windows was a gateway drug into Linux
I'd hug my mom. Then I'd go ask the pretty next door girl for a date; I lesrned later in life that she also had a crush on me at the time, but since I was plain looking and slightly overweight nerd I never thought I'd hsve any chance with her.
After getting that out of my system I'd do the obligatory investing.
You got a dog? Still smoke?
1995...
I was 10 years old and in the 5th grade.
And I remember everything, huh? Hoo boy. Hoooo boyyyyy.
First thing I do is write this list while it's still fresh in my mind:
- ADHD is real and it will ruin my potential if I don't face it head on. The medication won't work on me yet, though, so tell Mom and Dad I NEED to get back on medication when my brain is more developed in a couple years.
- Also, for future reference: it isn't actually a deficit of ATTENTION at all--it's really stupidly named by neurotypicals who don't fucking get it--it's TIME BLINDNESS and a deficit of IMPULSE CONTROL and EXECUTIVE FUNCTION.
- Sugar is going to make me extremely sick and all my weight and fitness issues come directly from carbohydrate overdose. STOP drinking soda, and avoid refined/homogenized starch!
- I'm about to enter the most painful and traumatizing stage of my formative years. The middle school I'll be attending starting 6th grade will be hell on earth. I need to keep my FUCKING mouth shut and not talk to ANYONE unless they talk to me. I also need to practice the skill of mindful dissociation and compartmentalization. Stoicism will be my only shelter.
- Yes the adults around me are morons and don't know what they're talking about, but broken clocks can be right twice a day. In this case, they're correct about homework and studying being important for the wrong reasons: It is NOT about satisfying the expectations of teachers, but rather it is entirely for practicing the skill of internalizing and recalling information. I will not regret time I spend on it.
- Mom and Dad are struggling financially right now. Dad's racking up debt while Mom is the only reliable source of income. That's why they would "hold onto" my birthday and xmas money "for safekeeping". it is neither kept nor safe; it's gone. All of it. HIDE ANY MONEY I RECEIVE... and tell grandpa to buy stock in Apple.
- Express early interest in nuclear energy and pursue it with everything I've got. Approach via Mechanical Engineering. I'll enjoy Computer Aided Drafting in High School.
- Remember the major incidents to come: Columbine and zero tolerance policy in 1999, also dotcom bubble crash, Al Gore will lose in 2000, WTC will be destroyed by a terrorist attack 2001-09-11, Bush Jr administration will cause the housing market to crash as well by 2008, America succumbs to Fascism in 2016, and there will be a global plague in 2020.
- I'm a furry and I am not actually a boy despite being assigned male at birth. Embrace androgyny. Get online. Find my tribe. Draw a lot.
Middle school CANNOT be THAT traumatizing 😭😭
[Exactly how traumatizing it was--Caution: NSFL]
I was sexually assaulted in the locker room by other students. No one believed me. I subsequently experienced a psychological breakdown. The traumagenic dissociation plunged me through egodeath and I stopped being a person for a year. I was literally not myself again until 2009. I am still slightly messed up to this day, but the two decades that followed immediately after the incident were especially rough.
Edit: this is not a dunk and I don't hold it against you. By all accounts, in a better world, middle school shouldn't be traumatizing. But unfortunately, this is not the better world.
Omg :o sorry to hear, was not expecting that
...truly i'm grateful you listened. What I experienced cannot be un-experienced, but ... the only way there's any chance of people doing something about this kind of terrible event, taking preventative measures against it, etc, is if they know it happens.
A peaceful existence comes from understanding conflict and how to address it.
Fire up my PC and hit the dial up to check my email and BBS's.
ascii nudes art
BBS's
You can still do that, if you want.
- SDF (shameless plug) is still around
- Tildeverse, a loose association of pubnixes exists
- Gopher and Gemini (a protocol inspired by Gopher) have had some minor resurgence.
Buy AAPL
Go online, just like I did back then. I've been online before the web. And it was more fun. And no ads.
I didn't go online when I first woke up. I often though would check see how my downloads did overnight. In 95 I was still using the local collage dial in.
At least, we had a leased line of 38400 bits per second for the whole department. ;-)
For a time around 1998-2000 I ran the internet connection for a multi county agency on one 56k dial up and squid proxy server. It worked and it worked pretty well. We did however love it when the local cable company finally rolled out two way cable internet.
Super Nintendo
Invest in Apple.
Am I a grown adult that wakes up in a foster care home and the child that was there previously is gone?
Do I have to spend the rest of my life without an identity, or clinging to the “delusion” that I was this child that mysteriously disappeared?
Am I a child with 40 years of life experience?
Not long after, When I was 14, my first consensual sexual experience involved an 18-year-old. We got caught, and folks widely regard/regarded her as being inappropriate/in the wrong. Huh. First girlfriend, high school dances/romances. College. Jesus - every relationship basically forever.
If I proceed down the same path, does that mean I’m the creep now?
Envious of your first experience with an 18 year old
It was weird times. I mean, great. But weird and great to my half-cooked, traumatized, and hormone-addled teenage brain.
She was my sister’s best friend at the time and, well, physically she was like the girl who’d molested me as a child, which definitely had (and still has) an impact on my physical preferences.
I don’t exactly know what her deal was, but I think it was that any male attention just short-circuited her. I recall her telling me she loved me after a few weekends of sneaking around, and after about a month, spinning a yarn as pretext to try to move in with us.
It’s probably a good thing we got caught a day or so after she moved in. Stupid football game. It pushed some TV show back, and my mom/sisters stayed up late to watch it. My sister (her best friend) came downstairs to check in on her and caught us in bed.
As for the how - I don’t know. I was an awkward gangly teenager, and she was honestly a pretty attractive girl. She had some self-confidence issues, I think.
It was like the first day she’d come over for a sleepover. I had never met her - my sister befriended her when we were in foster care, so this was not unusual - and I was instantly into her. I have no idea if she picked up on that or not. We were watching movies (me, 2 of my sisters, and her). The couches were occupied, and so I had a pallet on the floor. So did she. Our feet were under the big couch, hidden by the little skirt that all couches had back then, heads pointing toward the TV. I thought I felt her foot touch mine (but it was probably wishful thinking). I edged my foot over, discovering the distance between us was way too far for her to have accidentally touched me, and sort of bonked her foot with mine while awkwardly exploring. I pulled back just slightly and she immediately pressed her foot against mine. Footsie lead some sneaky suggestive glances, then surreptitiously bridging our blankets together and doing our best to conceal our roving hands. At one point during a bathroom break everyone had left the room, she told me her intentions, and I was very okay with them. We made a plan - I was going to go to bed, and she was going to find me after everyone was asleep. (She was sleeping in a guest room that was conveniently located - my bedroom was in the basement.) And that was that.
She used to page me with “143” (code for I love you - which I don’t think either of us could know what that actually meant) and I used to page her back with same. We were so dumb and teenager-y. It was fun, but unhealthy. I didn’t get enough positive attention, and this sort of reinforced a belief that I could only be of service to someone sexually. If I wasn’t serving someone sexually, I wasn’t of value emotionally - another formative belief that was maybe not the best and is still hard to shake.
Great story. You mentioned that this encounter was your first experience. Did she work with you to show you how to do it or was it hormones flying and you jumped on top of her? If you sister interrupted, did you at least finish?
First consensual experience. My usage of the word molested earlier downplays things a bit – we had full penetrative sex, but I was 6 years old. It’s something that occurred dozens of times. It’s not the only time I was sexually abused as a kid by someone older, but it’s the one I’ll mention.
Not very much later than that very first experience, I had a rather thorough introduction to pornography. My parents split up, my mom moved far away, taking us with her. After she kicked her drug habit, she became a workaholic and put in 80-hour workweeks. Another kid at our apartment complex had a “cool mom” who figured that her preteen was going to get his hands on porn, so she had some available that I guess was okay by her. He then showed it to everyone - including my then 8-or 9-year-old self.
Honestly - I think I did alright in this first consensual encounter. We had several multi-hour long trysts, usually one to two a weekend for at least a month (probably more like 2 months) until she moved in/we got caught. I don’t know if I knew what I was doing, skill wise, but she did, and I’m able to have multiple orgasms/erections, so like if one pops off (and they did with way less control back then), it wasn’t a mood killer. Plus, I think I lead off that initial encounter by trying to eat her out. I’m sure we talked and found stuff that worked for her. But maybe not? I don’t know. She kept coming back and wanted more. I assumed that was satisfaction - although it could have been whatever her emotional damage was.
A lot of it for both of us may have been the completely open embrace of each other without any kind of guile or awareness that we were, you know, being gigantic emotionally destructive idiots. As well as being fairly risky on contraception. Woof. Rhythm method most of the time. I’m sure she grew up to be a lovely person, but man, what a mess we could have made of our lives.
First thing? Honestly, probably curl into the fetal position and start bawling for a while as I fully relax for the first time since circa 2007.
1995? Springer and the price is right in the morning (Bob Barker baby!) then Aladdin, Batman/Superman, Animaniacs and the Simpsons in the afternoon.
In-between all that we get 90s commercials!
I buy relevant stocks to make me rich and revel in the fact that there is no internet again. I am 68 and have been there and done that already.
Buy a cellphone. We already had them in the late 80's.
Try to find that cool looking Beavis and Butthead site I saw my brother browsing in the earliest days of our internet access. I had asked him where he found it and he couldn't remember, so I searched and searched and searched to no avail. I never found that Beavis and Butthead site. I just remember there was a lot of yellow.
Apparently there was an official Beavis and Butt-Head site hosted by MTV in the 90's. I didn't find any archives but there is a screenshot of it on the Web Design Museum. Not sure if it's the same one because there isn't a whole lot of yellow though.
Am I stupid or is this sentence unparseable?
Does it have to be one or the other?
[Imagine] you wake up in 1995. [There's] no wifi [and] no cell phones. [What's] the first thing you do?
you've omitted "just." If "just" were not in the sentence I would have instinctively filled it in with the missing words you've suggested. But I can't reconcile "just" with any parse.
True. English isn't my native language and I thought about this, but it somehow just makes sense in my head. The way the "just" is used reminds me of the Modalpartikel we have in German. They're basically filler words that add nuance, emphasis or expectation to a sentence.
Sometimes people ask "Just why?", and that's a bit different than only "Why?", because it adds a sense of confusion or urgency to the question.
That makes sense, and "just" is a filler word in English. I can see why in another language like German this would work fine. But in English, at least to me, this seems exceptionally clunky. The simplest explanation is simply that "just" isn't generally used in a context where "what" is been elided, but maybe there's a deeper reason why it sounds odd to me.
Do you wake up as you are now, or as you were back then? I didn’t exist in 1995.
Log on to BBS, play LORD and post to forums with local users, maybe chat a bit. Fire up sirdoom, waste a few bozos with a BFG. Drive to my buddies house maybe smoke some weed..
Boot up my 486, call over my friends and play MK1
Alternatively make some new M:TG decks using my new Ice Age booster packs and head to the FLGS
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