I missed a flight once due to delayed connections. I went to the help desk, and in front of me, a rich guy was arguing with the company employee. He was rude and frustrated and left angry, having failed to get the upgrade or whatever he’d wanted. I was next in the queue and offered an empathetic smile and rolling of eyes, then politely explained my situation.

The clerk was clearly still pissed at the previous interaction and didn’t crack a smile but simply listened, then slid me over a new ticket for the next flight and winked. I thanked him and scuttled off. I decided to find a place to charge my phone and only then inspected the ticket to confirm how long I had until boarding.

It turns out he’d upgraded me to business class and given me full access to the lounge area where I could charge my phone in comfort and have all the free booze and snacks I want.

No idea what’s happening. Permanently banned after 14 years of contribution due to some inconsequential mod-gripe, and a subsequent “ban evasion” (using another old account on a different, un-related sub).

Yeah, never do it on actual social media, but around these part it’s occasionally useful.

Love a pint, personally. Drinking with friends trumps most other activities. Currently on my way to see The Prodigy with some old friends I’m meeting in Edinburgh. Looking forward to the pubs and merry laughs as much as the gig, in fact more so.

During the World Cup, I got frustrated with switching between BBC iPlayer and ITV’s app. I usually use IPTV, and it’s great, but for some of the matches, it was kinda flaky.

Anyway, we used to have Sky years ago, and I ditched that for various subscriptions and IPTV, but never bothered getting Freeview as we had a shoddy old aerial and poor signal.

However, after speaking to a guy at work, I picked up a new USB-powered aerial on Amazon for £29 and gave Freeview a try. I ended up watching all the games in HD, with no buffering and without the 30-second delay all the streaming services had. I was delighted!

I had an itchy scalp and would try various menthol shampoos and treatments throughout my teens. It was a nightmare. Then I read an article on just washing your hair with warm water every day. I shower daily anyway, and I’m a pretty hygienic guy, but this felt wrong and somehow uncleanly, but I gave it a shot.

Anyway, to this day, some 30 years later, I have a full head of clean hair. It’s something my former partners and my wife have complimented me on.

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Definitely. I’m pushing 50 and know that, had games been more sophisticated, realistic, and able to be played online in my teens, I’d have struggled not to let that consume me. However, as it happened, the allure of gigs, beer, nights out, and girls didn’t really have much competition with the likes of Street Fighter 2.

On one hand, I definitely feel I’ve missed out on that gaming experience and to this day don’t have that shared interest that my younger colleagues have with each other. On the other, I see younger guys at work who are just regular dudes but have no family, friends, or partners outside work or their online world. And by younger, I mean pushing 40. We’re talking about decades where their free time has been spent mostly gaming.

To each their own—please don’t get prickly if you feel seen or think I’m being condescending. I can absolutely see how that can happen, and if you’re cool with that, then that’s all that matters. It’s just not the way I personally would want to live from my current perspective, although I know that had I been born a decade later, I’d probably be in the same boat.

I take your point. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that a lot of games were either straight-up arcade conversions or derivatives. There are a few decent YouTube channels from former artists and coders that talk about the dev process. By today’s standards it was insanely restrictive and the teams were comparatively tiny. True game development was just at such an early stage then, which I guess is partly the point you’re making.

You’re spot on, although, to be fair Autistic traits aren’t quite the enigma they once were. These days it feels like being neurotypical is the outlier.

I mean, they took the ST as far as it could go graphically. To this day there are people trying to mod fully expanded STEs so it’ll run something close to Doom, but really I feel they just couldn’t cut it. 8mhz and a display limited to 16 colours (without special sync tricks) from a pallette of 512/4096 (depending on which machine you had) was a bit of a bottleneck. There’s proto-open world games like Hunter, but in general side/vertical scrolling shot-em-ups was pretty much it’s bag, and games like Turrican, Killing Gameshow and Xenon 2 all pushed the limits of what could be done as far as I recall.

Yep, £20.05 in my local shop for 20 Regal King-size.

Regarding lawns, I think it’s the feeling of accomplishment when you’ve mowed them that’s the kicker. A wild garden can look better, but there’s something about the smugness of having a freshly cut lawn that gives you a slightly virtuous buzz.

I had an Atari ST and, in a childish and tribalistic way, hated the Amiga - although looking back it was clearly superior by almost every metric! I betrayed my childhood self and got one a few years back. The games are generally smoother and sound better, but the nostalgia itch is only truly scratched when I power up the ST.

Cigarettes. Of course, there were other more pressing reasons to quit, but saving nearly £20 a packet helped.

While, to be honest, I don’t really agree with you, I think there’s definitely a biological element around fertility and maturity that’s worth discussing.

However, it’s difficult to discuss this stuff in generalities. Plus, there’s a tendency to overcorrect when discussing age gaps as a natural reaction to the countless scandals regarding old, powerful men exploiting young, vulnerable people.

It feels like there’s an instinctive reaction, especially online, to any perceived imbalance in age, and that generally the senior figure is viewed with suspicion.

I find it slightly hypocritical that some of those who fall over themselves to rightly defend the freedom of consenting adults to identify how they like, and encourage people to embrace all facets of their sexuality, baulk at any significant age discrepancies between heterosexual couples like puritans clutching pearls.

Haha

Doubtful, I’m 49!

Eh… What?! Certainly remember pre-optical mice, but replacing the balls with eggs was surely not a thing?

Wild how they made a dino look weirdly handsome.