Comment

Comment on Cable and movie rentals was probably the optimal amount of digital media for a functional society. Get rid of commercials and that was probably peak.

DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

My pre-internet days:

-Dialing random numbers that I think had some weird mini-games or something… on the landline that cost money

-downloading games on my dad’s motorola feature cell phone that gets charged to the phone bill

(my older brother dared me to do it so he got most of the blame for it xD)

-accidentally triggered the SIM PIN Lockout and my dad had to go to the phone store to get a new sim

-Also my older brother pouring a whole ass bottle of white-out and igniting it on fire… WHILE WE ARE LOCKED INSIDE THE APARTMENT WITH NO ADULTS HOME (luckily the fire just fizzled out after the fuel (the white-out) burned out)

Okay, but there are also normal stuff like:

-Board games? Most kids in China of my generation didn’t have siblings so I guess some would call that “lucky” to have a playmate (but he was also abusive to me 😕)

-Bootleg Video Games on a CD/DVD disc inserted into a portable DVD player (sometimes hooked up to the tv) and you plug in controllers and you can play games on it… you can plug in two controllers and play 2player games… I think I played that with my older brother sometimes… he always made me 2nd player with the controller that had the mushy buttons 😕 (it’s what I get for being the 2nd born i guess)

-A windows computer with a bunch of music files but zero internet…

-I remember Yu-Gi-Oh Cards…

-Rubic’s cube I think? But there was no internet to look up how to solve it so it’s never solved (until way later into my teens when I got internet) so I just took it apart and reassemble it…

-Cartoon stuff… that I never really paid attention to probably because it’s boring af so I don’t have much memories of it except like a few faint images that I’m not sure of.

-Mostly just locked in the apartment when parent’s aren’t available

Feel free to ask questions… I wanna see if I can jog some memories…

source

Sort:hotnew top

MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You pretty much just described my typical lower class American upbringing in the early 90s. Except the Rubik’s cube thing. Internet or not, somebody knew how to solve that thing. If you got bored enough, you played with it until it made sense

source
- ugandan_airways@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Just like learning guitar without lessons. Eventually it just clicked
  
  source
- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  somebody knew how to solve that thing
  
  I didn’t get to meet many people because my parents think the there are kidnappers everywhere so I just got stuck at home beside school time…
  
  I think during breaks, they sometimes take us back to one of the parent’s village, and there I remember we were allowed to run around since I assume everyone in the village knew each other and I remember hopping on to other people’s roofs with my older brother… I took a peek down the sky-window thing and saw spiderwebs in one of the houses… could be abandoned… idk…
  
  source
whaleross@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Games on a DVD player?

source
- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  On a DVD Disc, Yes.
  
  I guess they put a program on a disc that the dvd player was able to read off of it. Idk how that shit works, don’t have it anymore. Like its not a normal dvd player… it has a ports for 2 controllers… and it being a portable dvd means it had an internal battery and a screen.
  
  I think it had a lot of Nintendo games on the discs.
  
  I remember there was a Kirby… I remember we brought it with us to the US, and I remember playing a Kirby game for a while but like you know… electronics eventually wear out… I think it stopped working within 4 years…
  
  My most memorable game is probably Tank 1990
  
  Like I remember we had 2 discs, one was a normal size dvd, the other one was a smaller dvd… like it’s half the normal diameter… idk why those “tiny dvds discs” even exist lol…
  
  I think they had like over 100 games probably
  
  I did a quick search and the DVD thing looked like this:
  
  Image
  
  Example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JzkQzl6qc (you can skip forward to see it in action)
  
  The one we had, you can rotate the screen left and right like this:
  
  Image
  
  (Besides the “DVD Player” thing, I also remember game cartridges… I remember my brother blowing into the connectors to clear the dust… but I can’t remember what the machine looked like… maybe the dvd thing has a slot for cartridges? or maybe rhat was a separate thing… idk cant remember)
  
  This was in 2002-2010 btw
  
  source
  - whaleross@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Oh, I see. It has a built in Nintendo emulator, that’s how it works.
    
    source