Welcome to the Melbourne Community Daily Discussion Thread.
Ok let’s play a game.
I am old enough to remember when…(you fill in the blank. You can have as many goes as you like coz it’s Friday and it’s hot)
The only eggs in the carton were white. Occasionally there was a brown one, which got left last because it was scary.
America’s Cup… Each “level” was one leg of the triangular course, and took a few minutes to load.
Games were so much simpler then. I had one called pyramid, which was entirely text based and you typed commands like “walk left” or “pickup torch” to navigate through the pyramid. It was a fairly short and simple puzzle game, but because there was no internet with walkthroughs if you got stuck it took literally years before I figured it out. (stuck in a maze of twisting passages, all alike).
I remember when public transport was divided into local neighbourhoods, and the bus driver would use a hole punch to mark the date and time. Sometimes they’d punch the wrong place and you’d get an extra day free.
I feel like I’m going to be one of the youngest ones here, but I am old enough to remember when installing things on your computer the window would be full screen and have a blue background.
(I was going to mention dial up, or renting from Video Ezy/Blockbuster, but they’re too easy and also my local Blockbuster went out in like 2016 or 2017?)
I remember renting from video shops and if you didn’t have your card you couldn’t borrow. Then towards the end it was “ah just give us your name and the password and that should do it”.
I remember when bogong moths were around in huge numbers and would swarm street lights every year.
There used to be lots of cool modernist architecture in the city.
There was very little litter in the streets.
Ok here’s my story of moths. My mum has this rule. Do not leave clothes on the line overnight. No exceptions. Why, because black clothes attract moths. When I moved out of home, l left my clothes out thinking my mum was just paranoid. The very first item I pick off, a dirty big fucking moth flew right into my face. Never again.
I’m old enough to remember going to my friend’s place in Dubai (where I grew up) and her mum would take us to the Laser Disc rental store to borrow movies. Or I guess I’m old enough to remember Dubai when it was pretty much mostly sand!
Hiring out a Sega Mega drive from the local with a few games for the weekend.
I ended up getting my first job in a video store. A friend of mine had a hook up for the mod chip. Used to take the ps1 games home and burn them, bring them back the next day.
I remember when Healesville Sanctuary had way too many emus. They were really scary, and one stole my lunch.
I also remember when Healesville Sancuary had way too many ibis. I didn’t have my lunch stolen, but they would swarm anyone eating and it was a very near thing.
I remember when kids made their own way to school. Most rode, some caught busses or walked. Very few were dropped off.
I think of this often, as my kids either ride or catch the bus and this is considered weird today. When I was a kid, there were hundreds of bikes in the racks. Today, there might be 20, usually fewer. Maybe a dozen kids are on the bus. But try and get a car near the school and you’ll be in a queue. They all get dropped off/picked up these days.
Can confirm this. During primary school we walked or rode our bikes (4 sibs). Getting dropped off in a car meant you had a broken leg/foot. Secondary school I was at a boarding school. On weekends we’d pick up a sandwich lunch from the school kitchen and get on our bikes and go for a long ride. Had to be back by sunset for rollcall. No supervision. The miracle was that we didn’t get in trouble - not even close. Couldn’t do that nowadays - the school authorities would be screaming and so would the parents. We’d also take one of the school dinghies and go fishing all day - the kitchen took the loot and served it up for breakfast the next day.
The need to supervise children every waking minute of their lives has reached fairly absurd proportions. I while ago I was reading about a “walking school bus” program designed to get kids walking to school instead of being driven. It was facing closure because of lack of funding. The idea that walking to school is something that needs both a special program and funding is just wrong in so many ways.
I don’t know how we managed to get from children being able to run around mostly unsupervised to a society in which people will call 000 because they see a teenager sitting in a car without an adult, but we have.
I was dropped off in the morning, but would either catch the bus or walk home. Mostly I walked, as spending money on lollies on the way home seemed a better option than spending it on bus fare.
That was in the days you could choose your lollies individually - prices at that time ranged from 2 for one cent for things like chocolate freckles up to 2c a lollie for some fancy things. Or you could just let them choose by ordering mixed lollies - 20c of mixed lollies was a pretty standard amount.
When Kylie Minogue was on Neighbours and I met her at my dad’s work’s fancy Xmas party where she arrived and left by helicopter.
Couldn’t on public where I grew up, but you most definitely could at bus stops and in restaurants. Seeing a smoking section in an indoor cafe in Japan back in 2012 was a bit mind blowing
I’m a little late to this today due to things but I still remember the Commodore 64 and making my own mix music tapes with the good old cassette player.
Fancy. We had a Tandy 16k. Which was upgraded to 64k. We had fancy acessories though - namely a good old cassette player. Before we got that we had a book of programs we would hand type, but if you turned it off or lost power everything was lost. The tape player was a game changer, you could save programs you had typed out, and get copies of things other people had done - the birth of illegal sharing right there.
