Before the OKC bombings we used to buy chemicals to make explosives/fireworks from a catalogue and set them off in the backyard, with minimal parental supervision. The same catalog sold bulk red phosphorus and extra strength pseusoephedrine tablets were available by the hundreds at any grocery store. We never made meth but it would have been trivially easy. After OKC the fun chemicals got much harder to find and we had to content ourselves with whatever our kin smuggled in from someplace fireworks were legal.

There was a period of about 18 months where e-commerce had just begun but no one verified credit card numbers beyond ensuring that the number had the right checksum. Someone I knew found a credit card number generator on a BBS and we’d buy whatever we wanted and have it delivered to a vacant lot. Gas station receipts still had people’s entire credit card numbers printed on them, you could use those once they started verifying zip codes. None of our parents asked how a couple of barely-teenage kids were able to afford to build out custom PCs or where all the recording equipment, CDs, and books we very suddenly had came from.

The police didn’t know what the internet was. The FBI knew but didn’t understand or care about the internet. The level of surveillance we were subjected to was minimal and easily evaded as long as you kept your nose clean. It’s all relative, but compared to the panopticon we live in today it felt a lot less pervasive. If there were cameras anywhere they were so blurry it didn’t really matter.

We were a bunch of suburban delinquent shitasses but the opportunities to be a delinquent shitass have been foreclosed on in so many ways. The spaces we had to exist in, in public, no longer exist, or are heavily policed. The world seems to be in general, a lot more hostile to young people existing in public.

Everything children do today, and I’ve seen this with the kids I’ve been responsible for myself as well as more generally, is being logged somewhere. Time is much more regimented. If my kid skips class I get a text message from the school about it as soon as they’re marked tardy or absent. I see other parents monitoring their children’s location via cellphone in real time all the time. It seems absolutely suffocating. It feels suffocating as an adult having to navigate a world where everything you do is going into a database somewhere, and that’s with the memory of a time before the panopticon was so fully developed.

Are Kids Today strange or are they just doing their best to exist in a world that doesn’t have a place for them? The human experience, at its most basic, is the same as it’s always been. The conditions in which people live have changed.

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My grandparents used to save the newspapers up for like a month at a time. Don’t remember why exactly. I used to go over there and cut all the Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield strips out of the comics and glue or staple them to sheets of paper and make my own comic books.

When I was like 7-8ish I used to go catch monarch caterpillars in this vacant lot that was full of milkweed.

When I was about 10 I taped a cassette walkman with built in radio to my handlebars and would ride my bike around for hours listening to tunes.

Between 6-10 my friend and I would flood the sandbox with the garden hose and make little cityscapes with canals and stuff. We also collected acorns, nuts, berries and stuff like that and made little stashes “for emergencies”. We eventually realized nobody was going to eat that stuff and started hoarding real snacks.

We used to be heavy into rock collecting. I still am.

Nobody I knew ever had a full set of one type of action figure so we made up our own games with what we had and just pooled the batmobile with Gargoyles and GI Joes.

Legos. Fucking Legos.

We would ride our bikes to the little army/navy surplus store and buy a bunch of camo and other crap. They would sell you anything. Butterfly knives, tripwire, you name it. We would go rig the patch of woods in the neighborhood like we were planning some special ops and lie in wait wearing the camo and ambush the other kids. Nothing actually violent. We just got off on being sneaky.

Street hockey was huge

Yoyos, pokemon, pogs, toy guns…

When we got a little older, we would raid our parents garages and build weird shit. We made crossbows out of PVC, rubber bands and wood. We tried making potato guns. We all went through a serious phase of lighting things on fire or melting stuff. The dollar store would just sell us lighter fluid when we were 12.

I remember one of the first times I ever had money and was allowed to ride to a real store. Me and the neighbor girl were like “we are gonna go nuts and treat ourselves to some yummy stuff that our parents wouldn’t let us get”. She got a huge thing of flavored coffee creamer and I bought a brick of ungrated parmesan cheese since I loved the grated stuff so much. We figured out really quick why you don’t just chug coffee creamer or take a huge bite of parmesan cheese. It’s just too much!

Then we got heavy into rock and roll and the occult around 13.

There used to be a phone number you would call to find out what time it was

Awful webpage designs with autoplay MIDIs and animated GIFs everywhere

that’s an ad nobody really did that

I remember a drug dealing simulator that ran on graphing calculators in the early 2000s. That was a fun distraction in high school math classes.

Edit: Simple google search - Drug Wars (I played on the TI-86). What a time.

Weird gender roles. Girls had easy bake ovens, boys had bug and monster factories. And the idea was that boys would make these little latex abominations and terrorize their sisters or mother with them. Like that was part of the selling point. You couldn’t even eat them at first. I think the candy versions came later. Just a weird dichotomy. Cakes vs genetic experiments used for terrorism.

Making collect calls (reverse charge calls) and using the name prompt to tell my mom where I was and if I needed a ride home. This would avoid her having to accept the charges just for me to tell her where I was and if I needed a ride home.

Just how boring weekends at home were. No internet yet, dog shit tv programming (hope you like Golf, MASH, or Land of the Lost). Stare at the walls or read a book. My family was anti vidya.

Pagers ushering in the age of always being online. Mom could send a page to Dad and then he knew to find a phone and give her a call.

Rewinding the VHS before returning it to the rental store

Memorizing the CCS skate catalog

Being able to buy realistic looking toy guns and brandishing them everywhere

Those shirts made of towel material

Switching to the other “real alternative ROCK” radio station whenever one goes to commercial to catch “Livin on a prayer” for the fourth time today

(A bit later) Calling home to have Mom look up MapQuest directions because I got lost

My partner has a gen Z brother. Recently her insta and tiktok handles were blasted on a throwaway tiktok account along with her brother’s. She didn’t even know until the person contacted her directly, saying her brother was a predator etc…

My partner, having dealt with predatory behaviour herself; obviously wanted to hear her out.

Anyway the issue was he’d apparently hypnotised her over discord chat (not voice/video) into calling herself a different name and buying heels instead of vans. That was the most coherent version of events we could get, as she just kept reiterating that he “stole her mind”. She lives in the USA around 2,500m away from where we are, and they’ve never met in person.

Ultimately it was left advising the poor girl to speak to a professional, as it seemed like she was having a bit of a breakdown, as well as advising her to speak to authorities if she felt predatory behaviour had been committed, rather than attempting to doxx his unknowing family members online.

Honestly it’s the most ‘much ado about nothing’ situation I’ve heard in a long time; and brought back not so fond memories of being an emotionally unstable teenager myself.

Hang in there gen Z. Brain juice levels out soon, and you’ll be picking up old people hobbies like fishing or pottery instead of feeling everything at once in no time.

I worry about the connection between generations. With youtube and tiktok, kids aren’t really getting a lot of experience with the older generations’ media. I feel like cross-generation references are a big way of forming connections. But then again, I’m a millennial, and we love our reference humor.

my friends and I used to call up a local radio live talk show hosted by a douche and try to get on the air through subterfuge (fake name, interest in current topic) to say preplanned phrases.

when I was maybe 10-ish, I used to buy shitloads of Bazooka gum at the convenience store and read the enclosed the Bazooka Joke comics. in the 90s, they were 5¢ and that only amounted to a 1¢ sales tax if you tried to buy more than 3 in a single transaction. I would cram so much of that stale gum in my mouth I could barely even chew it. I remember when my friend and I discovered we could ride our bikes to a 7-11 by taking a dangerous shortcut and make the trip there in like 10 mins easy instead of 35 minutes of hills. prior to that, our ability to spend our bullshit little savings was controlled by trips to the store with parents who would veto candy.

I remember blowing like $5 on a ton of shit. like a giant slurpee, a huge pouch of purple “big league chew”, and 6 feet of hubba bubba bubble tape, a video game magazine. I remember riding back with a bag of complete garbage and thinking I had conquered the world. I think we sort of got in trouble once they realized our shortcut involved this sketchy as fuck section along a 2 lane highway with a 50 mph limit with no sidewalk or shoulder. real “why don’t kids play outside - this is the outside they built for us” times.

I used to also read the daily comics section of the local newspaper every day before school, even though it was mostly “Family Circus” type of unfunny garbage. like I would go out to the street in the early dawn and bring in the paper so I could read those shitty comics.

I am deeply bored by those “[insert generation here] is so weird!” type takes, and beyond bored of generationalism in general.

No, someone being born like 5 years before/after you does not make them someone you can’t relate to. Go watch fuckin’ Salad Fingers and then come back and tell me how bizarre skibidi toilet is.

Anyway to answer the question in the title I guess, uhhh… the game Heart of Darkness for the PS1 had some weird and cool visuals but also some very disturbingly uncanny cutscenes. I didn’t like it, because it made me uncomfortable and also because the game was way too hard, but it certainly stuck with me. I guess that makes it effective art.

all the weird, niche activities that were 90s-only have already been mentioned, so I’ll just admit that the weirdest thing I did back in the day, I still do:

trust strangers online with the personal details of my life

why do I tell any of you what is actually going on with me? why have I trusted a few of you with my actual contact information that allows you to know who I am irl?

idfk. the promise of the internet, I guess: that you can find friends far away from your location that can deeply relate to the things that you’re going through.

that makes the risk worth it.