Being solidly GenX I agree in part, but you’d be surprised on how long Apple ]['s lasted in schools. They weren’t uncommon in the late 1980s and even the early 1990s, despite being over ten years old.
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A lot of it depends on WHERE you were born. I was born in 1964 in the conservative Deepest South, so my peers and I identify much more with the Boomers than people in say New York or California probably do. We also died of dysentry and watched that first Buggles video, but we had more preachers and great aunts bitching about them. We saw more Andy Griffith and Gunsmoke than All In The Family or Maude as kids. More of us started families early, went to trade school and still go to church…but our parents and grandparents still wonder how we got to be so liberal.
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It was 1995 when my high school (and probably the rest of the school board) dropped the Apple ]['s. If they had lasted a little longer, I might have been able to take the BASIC-centered computer science course; instead, I wound up spending a couple of months with Hypercard on the Mac Classic. So it goes.
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Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn encourage members to provide information about non-members. Think less “peer pressure” and more “Stasi informant”.
As ActionAbe, points out, if your peers are on social media, uploading your contact info, tagging you in photos, etc, your voluntary choice to not participate in social media is rendered moot. Facebook builds your “shadow profile”, a social graph of your connections and activities, and does with it what they like. Your cooperation is not necessary.
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1974 reporting. What the hell is with these screencaps of Oregon Trail in color? We loaded it from a cassette drive onto a green-and-black-screened Commodore PET. It took forever and the lag on the shotgun was like a minute-and-a-half. But I still played it gladly.
The joint was Miner. Does anyone remember this game? It loaded a lot quicker and it was a lot more visceral due to a more direct type of play.
shit, I wish that campaign was operational thru the 90s. all these jackasses blowing up our scenes so they can sell us Subarus that are like punk rock is what fucked everything up. We had our own thing until the square community subverted it. I wish the ignorance had remained total.
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(Sorry - I chopped that up, but I don’t think I messed with the meaning of anything.)
I do, and I do. ActionAbe and ACE have already made the points I wanted to make in response to this. I do feel like I’m missing out on things because I refuse to join facebook etc. and I just wish my abstinence was having some affect on the information conglomerators as well as my ability to use these types of services for my own benefit.
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It is possible avoid social media, I’ve managed to avoid getting a facebook account, but it’s not easy.
For starters I still miss out on some things (invitations to social events, news of births/marriages/deaths etc.). Secondly, Facebook presumably still know quite a bit about me from all the information they have from my friends.
The biggest thing is though, that I’m in my thirties, and I don’t care much about peer pressure, being a teenager makes it entirely different.
I imagine that not having some access to the same social media as your peers as a teenager now would be something like not sharing a language with them, you’d just be missing out on so much communication between all the people around you.
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It’s the nature of the beast, I’m afraid. Anything that can be commodified and resold will be.
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This… not being on FB has a kind of high social cost. Most people won’t even think to look outside FB to communicate. It’s highly irritating at the least, but can be somewhat alienating, even for grown-ass adults like you and me. For teenagers… man. I was just saying the other day how glad I am I didn’t have this sort of stuff as a teen.
I’m waffling on joining some sort of social media (other than google +). It might be helpful going forward for my career, but how annoying is that…
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Nah, you’d hate Facebook. .GIFs don’t work there 
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Plus your relatives are there. That is a big reason MrsTobinL left it.
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What’s she got against his relatives?
Yet anther example of bad parenting!
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crazy drinking the republican kool-aid relatives… or lets start a xtian flamewar on a post with each other when it was requested no comments. note she didn’t participate, just the relatives with each other. sigh.
und zo weiter
The Sorrows of Young Werther was Goethe’s first major success, turning him from an unknown into a celebrated author practically overnight. Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature. He thought so highly of it that he wrote a soliloquy in Goethe’s style in his youth and carried Werther with him on his campaigning to Egypt. It also started the phenomenon known as the Werther-Fieber (“Werther Fever”) which caused young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel.[5][6] It reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide.
As a result of this tremendous effect, the “Werther Fever” was watched with concern by the authorities and fellow authors. One of the latter, Friedrich Nicolai, decided to create a satiric—and happier—ending called Die Freuden des jungen Werthers (“The Joys of Young Werther”), in which Albert, having realized what Werther is up to, had loaded chicken blood into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther’s suicide, and happily concedes Lotte to him. After some initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen.[7]
Goethe, however, was not pleased with the Freuden and started a literary war with Nicolai (which lasted all his life) by writing a poem titled “Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe” in which Nicolai (here a passing nameless pedestrian) defecates on Werther’s grave,[8] thus desecrating the memory of Werther from which Goethe had distanced himself in the meantime (as he had from the Sturm und Drang). This argument was continued in his collection of short and critical poems, the Xenien, and his play Faust.
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Couldn’t they just do a piece on kid’s games from the early 80s, without having to name a “generation”?
It’s not even pop sociology anymore, just lame efforts at market segmentation.
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No, you were making it sound like she was annoyed that GilbertWham’s relatives were on FB.
I was born in 87, but I still recall Apple IIes in the computer lab. At least up until 5th or 6th grade.
The games I remember playing were Oregon Trail, Number Munchers and Carmen Sandiego.
I remember the arrows keys were all in one row instead of splayed into an upside down ‘T’ formation. That always annoyed the hell out of me when I was hunting.
oh yeah, thats what i get for posting and trying to tidy up a what server has what application spreadsheet at the same time.
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Work + BBS = Spreadheets with inappropriately pasted cells.
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