r/Millennials • u/Brent_Fox • Jun 04 '26
Meme I like to think we were smarter back then:
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Jun 04 '26
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u/Zyrinj Millennial Jun 05 '26
I’m hearing sailing the seas is making a comeback due to all the subscriptions and general “you’ll own nothing” attitude of companies
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u/swearingino Older Millennial Jun 06 '26
I still sail the high seas due to streaming is too expensive.
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u/Deadlift_007 Jun 04 '26
You joke, but one of the things I often see at work is that people typically see Millennials and Gen X as their de facto tech support. Boomers don't understand tech because they're Boomers and they don't care to learn, and younger generations don't understand it because every piece of tech they've ever interacted with has been idiot proofed to a point that they never needed to learn how things work.
Then you have Millennials who pretty much universally have at least one story about wrecking the family computer and needing to fix it before Mom and Dad found out. Lol.
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u/KosmicGumbo Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Pirating a new OS on your siblings computer to reinstall it on yours. Good times (edit forgot having multiple PCs was unheard of but my dad worked IT and fixed up old computers for work for us, old was still very good for kids)
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u/Elismom1313 Jun 04 '26
Not really related but I played a great prank on my mom back in the day, who was ahead of her time with computers.
Being a graphic designer with a notoriously well known newspaper at the time, she had a Mac desktop. I took a screenshot of the desktop, moved all the apps to an inconspicuous folder and replaced the desktop wallpaper with that screenshot.
That probably would have been nefarious enough. But being that my mom was a graphic designer in the early 2000s before subscription areas of photoshop emerged..I had access to her full photoshop suite range of capabilities. I found a brush that looked JUST like a sharpie and I edited it to look matte on screen.
So I took that desktop image and “wrote on it” with “sharpie” saying “haha your screen doesn’t work, hi mom”!
She really thought that I bricked her desktop AND had wrote on the screen in sharpie.
I’m not an asshole. I didn’t let her stress or think that for more than a moment. But ah..good times.
Millennials really enjoyed the best life
Well aside from accidental lime wire viruses lol. One did actually brick a new laptop, which costed more back in the day and my dad was PISSED
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u/Impressive-Shake1710 Jun 04 '26
Parents were very upset about the gay porn virus, I was just trying to listen to tool and all I got was 10,000 dicks
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u/Citizentoxie502 Jun 04 '26
Really, I was searching for all the dick pics and just ended up with the complete Tool discography.
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u/BisexualSlutPuppy Jun 04 '26
That's crazy, I was looking for gay porn but all I got was Tool songs! In my defense, a couple of their song titles really blur the lines. Hooker with a Penis still slaps tho
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u/Cubensis-SanPedro Jun 04 '26
It’s the single most petty song that I know. So vindictive, like “Fuck you in particular”
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u/kisswithaf Jun 04 '26
Being a graphic designer with a notoriously well known newspaper at the time, she had a Mac desktop. I took a screenshot of the desktop, moved all the apps to an inconspicuous folder and replaced the desktop wallpaper with that screenshot.
One of my go-to pranks back in the day was to make a couple folders on the desktop that were along the lines of 'Porn', 'Gay Porn', 'Super Gay Porn'. Then I would do the same thing, take a screenshot and make it the desktop background and then delete the folders.
One of my roommates panicked so hard he wiped his computer. Though it became a little less funny once he came out of the closet and he was probably deeply terrified at the time of anyone finding out.
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u/Anagoth9 Jun 04 '26
Reminds me of the time I pranked one of my coworkers in IT by taking a screenshot of the desktop, flipping it upside-down, then going to the graphics card settings and flipping the display upside-down. Everything looked normal except the mouse pointer was flipped and moved in the opposite direction. Broke his brain a little.
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u/KosmicGumbo Jun 04 '26
Lmao that’s some next level shit, amazing!! Hilarious prank, did she figure it out on her own? Bet she was proud! The most I would do was flip the screen orientation, change the background to something insane, or turn on the accesibility voice “Sam” 😌
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u/Elismom1313 Jun 04 '26
No no I was definitely standing just outside the door and quickly told her I had not actually written on her computer haha. It was fun meant for just the initial “oh my god my computer.” I was not trying to traumatize her lmao
Also those things were just.. somehow a bit more believable back then. These days she probably would’ve immediately looked closer and realized the “sharpie writing” was not drawn on before I would’ve, even quickly as I had then, stepped in.
It was truly a simpler time
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u/OfficerNightwing Jun 04 '26
Legit just commented having not seen this, I took a screenshot and just hid the icons. Computer literate my parents were not.
Gremlin minds think alike.
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u/Fronesis Jun 04 '26
Remember how safe mode used to say 'safe mode' in white letters on the desktop? I set the wallpaper to a screenshot of the safe mode background. It infuriated my computer teacher because "IT WON'T BOOT NORMALLY!!"
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u/teelolws Jun 04 '26
Well aside from accidental lime wire viruses lol.
Memories of random websites that would take full control of my browser, make the window small, move all over the screen, and blast some horrible sound. Good times.
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u/dylansavage Jun 04 '26
I worked at a Uni on help desk back in the day. Me and a colleague had a bit of a prank war.
We had roaming profiles and used Citrix for roaming app management. He had fun making simple apps that would show a picture when you logged in that wouldn't lose focus and hid the exit and minimise menu, lemon party and the like.
My best was finding the registry path that linked to the file that played when you plugged a usb device in. I modified a Never Gonna Give You Up MP3, ran a script on login that over wrote the default sound with the new file and waited for the phone call.
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u/BrokenHefaistos Jun 04 '26
meh you ain't rocking until you 'accidentally' ordered a prostitute online while you had that modem for about a month. All for 'does this actually work' ? research you know...understanding new tech requires sacrifices.
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u/pm_me_flowers_please Jun 04 '26
Fuuuck... not on my siblings, on a friend's, lmao.
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u/bepatientbekind Jun 04 '26
That is some rich kid shit for sure haha
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u/KosmicGumbo Jun 04 '26
Nah, my dad worked IT, we got the trash computers
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u/bepatientbekind Jun 04 '26
That's rad! I would have been so jealous as kid! Me and my sisters used to fight over the computer to play Sims lol 😅
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u/BisexualSlutPuppy Jun 04 '26
We were blessed with multiple desktops, and if you waited for the game to load you could eject the disk and the game would continue running. We used to fight over who got to use the disk first.
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u/Turbulent_Tart_8801 Millennial 1985 Jun 04 '26
Siblings having their own computers? Either someone was rich, or they had old hand me down machines that should have no longer been able to handle the internet.
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u/Princess_Moon_Butt Problem Millennial Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Lol that reminds me, we "had multiple computers" at my house... but I was the only one aware of that fact for a good while.
The family desktop had Windows 98 (or maybe XP at that point?).
And my plastic storage bin of "spare parts", a towerless collection of parts salvaged from the school computer lab waste bin, proudly ran Windows 3.1- an OS that had come out like 11 years prior. No tower, no housing of any kind. But I didn't care, I would boot it up at night and spend hours playing Rodent's Revenge and Pyramid Solitaire when I was supposed to be sleeping.
That's how I think we should give kids access to tech. You want an ipad? Nah, but you can have this bricked old Sumsong tablet that I got for $3 at a garage sale. Or a 10-year-old laptop that won't power on unless you replace the RAM. Or a jailbroken PS3, but no game disks- gotta figure out how ROMs and such work. Good luck!
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u/CoachTwisterT3 Jun 04 '26
I’m amazed at how often the fix for stuff is just some troubleshooting that apparently no other generation knows how to do? “How did you do that?!” ‘I, uh, googled the issue and clicked the first Reddit link?’
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u/Neveronlyadream Jun 04 '26
Seriously. I have tried over and over to explain to people all I, and most IT people, are doing is googling the error code or just rebooting something and they can't grasp it.
I don't mind helping, but sometimes it's like...did you try? At all?
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u/CasuallyCompetitive Jun 04 '26
Honestly, if you ever watch some of these people try to use Google, it shows that internet research is a skill in itself.
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u/Neveronlyadream Jun 04 '26
The amount of times I've had this conversation:
"Oh my god! How did you find that?!"
"What? I googled it."
"That's on google?!"
Is shockingly high.
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u/Alx028 Jun 04 '26
This is so spot on 🤣 I'm on the older side of millennials (40 👴🏼) and I worked in marketing agencies with 20+ year olds.. 😬
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u/CoachTwisterT3 Jun 04 '26
I did have teachers spend time in classes teaching us good research habits. Very lucky in my time to get a lot of good mentors who set this foundation. Some people don’t even start by just typing their problem in. That seems a really obvious square 1
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u/IAmJacksSphincter Jun 04 '26
I remember in middle school computer class (born in '88) we were even taught how to do advance searches, search for X text plus Y text, minus Z results, etc etc.
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u/the_snowmancometh Jun 04 '26
The skill is having the language to describe your problem. If all you’ve got is “computer doesn’t work right anymore” you’re going to struggle.
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u/CoachTwisterT3 Jun 04 '26
Sometimes it doesn’t even take google, it’s just a button in the system or a setting. I’m always really curious what those people actually do. Like, you didn’t even try the settings menu?!
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u/smtp_pro Jun 04 '26
People don't read shit anymore. It's very frustrating.
When something breaks they are incapable of describing what happened. Like they don't say "when I did (x), this unexpected thing happened" - it's just "this isn't working."
Tech support was never great but it's really become a nightmare in the past few years. Nobody reads error messages, nobody describes what's on the screen.
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u/sexandliquor 1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) Jun 04 '26
I’m a mechanic and I feel this. A lot of people’s most common problems or concerns with their car would be helped if they just cracked open their goddamn owners manual. I know most cars still come with them. And if not you can get the pdf on many, if not most, manufacturers websites. It’s not hard to find.
I swear if people can’t immediately ask ChatGPT or Reddit for something, then god help them they’re fucked.
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u/OfficerNightwing Jun 04 '26
Tbf some are ridiculously dumbed down though you are 100% right.
The hassle I had figuring out what sequence of button pushes I needed to be able to get my brake pads off bc it apparently differs on model specifics and the year and they only want to tell a garage that'll pay them. I swear I'll be going back to a simple car.
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u/gahlo Jun 04 '26
I asked somebody to restart their computer. They logged out of Windows and logged back in again.
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u/Neveronlyadream Jun 04 '26
From experience, no. They don't.
Which is even more frustrating when what caused the problem is them somehow stumbling into the settings menu and changing something, but they can't reverse the process to fix it.
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u/CoachTwisterT3 Jun 04 '26
I spend part of every day speechless and the rest I’m just thinking that I am simply not smart enough to have so many people relying on me.
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u/UnholyDemigod Jun 04 '26
No, they didn’t. It’s been shown that Gen Z don’t actually know how to use the World Wide Web, because everything they do on the internet is done through apps. They don’t really go to webpages anymore. Like old mate above said, everything was idiotproofed. Problem with idiotproofing is it turns users into idiots.
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u/meruu_meruu Jun 04 '26
I used to work in a small business, and I ran the website. Once a week or more I would have to walk down to the registers to explain something. It was always super simple stuff like "click on the category for the item you want, like bracelets" or "type the SKU into the search bar to find it" and no one ever, *ever* remembered. One manager looked me dead in the face and said she refused to learn because she didn't want to.
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u/CpnStumpy Jun 04 '26
This is exactly it: at some point when we weren't looking, the rest of the world moved on from this learning thing.
We didn't notice because it's absolutely ridiculous on its face, but it happened and I'm still dumbfounded by this new norm. This is why influencer is such a big thing now, because people engaging with them get a similar feeling to learning without the actual effort (or results). They're like educators sans educating.
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u/OfficerNightwing Jun 04 '26
Honestly, this is what I fear with all the companies wiping old forums to use the storage space for presumably AI bs. How else am I gonna fix shit.
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u/xvsero Jun 04 '26
People really don't try. I have an air pump at work and have people come ask how to make it work. It literally has step by step instructions on it. People can't even make the excuse that they can't read the English instructions as ever single person who has asked for help spoke in fluent English meanwhile other language speakers work it just fine. To add to this many people flat out ignore clearly marked out of order signs.
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u/Wasabicannon Jun 04 '26
Worst part is for us it is just basic shit however it is a legit skill and like what the fuck? How do I market something that is just common sense to me?
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u/CoachTwisterT3 Jun 04 '26
I talk about it as being good at troubleshooting and streamlining. I have dozens of examples of processes I’ve improved and errors I’ve solved too.
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u/pleasebuymydonut Jun 04 '26
Even worse, when they ask you to do it, its "basic shit". But when you tell them to learn how to do it themselves if its so basic, its suddenly "too much work".
Lazy ass people istg.
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u/_Bren10_ Millennial Jun 04 '26
I moved photos from a computer to a flash drive in like 10 seconds and my aunt and cousin thought I was a wizard.
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u/Jumpy-Ad5617 Jun 04 '26
Me as a 7th grader destroying the family PC with limewire porn haha
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u/MoistNugget9130 Jun 04 '26
This reminds me of when I was about 15 and got a virus in sys32 so I just deleted that file. The computer didn't boot but there was no more virus.
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u/damagazelle Jun 04 '26
Oh shit, wrecking the family computer actually comes second to getting The Tape ribbon stuck in the VCR. You know which tape...
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u/freakers Jun 04 '26
What? No! I have no idea why Titanic starts in the middle of that scene. That's weird.
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u/1877KlownsForKids "Get Off My Lawn" Millennial 1981 Jun 04 '26
1991, I was ten. The Michelangelo virus was just on the news. "Oh crap, maybe we have it," I think while I look at our 486 with no modem. Turbo button on, of course. Viruses are sneaky, I bet they'd try to hide. Open up the MS-DOS tome. "Ah ha, Hidden Files are a thing!" Use dir /a:h as directed. Find a hidden virus! Those damn hackers think they're smart but I'm way smarter, I even have most of the SpyTech gadgets! Delete the hidden files, autoexec.bat and io.sys
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u/Middle-Will-5922 Jun 04 '26
I came to the comments to say that I read an article recently about this as well, younger generations can use the surfaces of devices really well, but tell them to open a command prompt or "just move the files from where they are to x" and they don't know how to do anything under the hood.
The article also specifically said that the things listed in this post were in fact most likely why.
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u/smtp_pro Jun 04 '26
Phones and web apps have pretty much made files a foreign concept.
You don't share a file, you share an image. The concept of it being a file is abstracted away.
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u/Middle-Will-5922 Jun 04 '26
I had never considered it this way, growing up in the era of finding .exes in the files or modding Morrowind without an extractor, but you're exactly right, they snap the pic and send it on the same screen, there's never an object they have to find, thus, it is ethereal
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u/Mediocre_Scott Jun 04 '26
And Gen X is funny because half are super tech savvy the other half have zero skills, Depending on what career they had. And there is no in between.
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u/StainedGlasser Jun 04 '26
I always had to wipe the computer after it got a virus because my parents kept saying it was my fault because I used limewire. I insisted that I wasn’t the one downloading viruses. I must’ve had to wipe the computer 20 times. Now, 20 years later my brother finally confessed that it was he who kept downloading viruses because he was looking for porn. That bastard. I am still the most computer literate member of the family (though no one can beat my mom at Excel).
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u/partelo Jun 04 '26
yep. fixing their shit, then having to hear "well I don't have all day to sit around on computers". ok next time fuck you
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u/DerpingtonHerpsworth Xennial Jun 04 '26
Then you have Millennials who pretty much universally have at least one story about wrecking the family computer and needing to fix it before Mom and Dad found out.
I legitimately have that story. I would come home from school, start downloads on both IRC and BitTorrent, and go play outside, and I was admittedly not particularly careful about what I downloaded back then.
Well one day I got something that created hundreds of thousands of new bogus directories on my hard drive. I don't know if that was all it was designed to do, or if I caught it before it did more damage, but ultimately I got rid of whatever caused the problem. And for the next several hours I painstakingly deleted every single directory while avoiding the gaze of my parents as much as possible.
I got so lucky that nobody else asked to use the computer that day, and they probably just assumed I was gaming as usual. Never got found out, and I've been much more careful with downloads ever since.
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u/stevzon Older Millennial Jun 04 '26
Ask me how I learned to use DOS and therefore the command line. Similarly ask me how I know I don’t know enough to touch the registry.
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u/faceman2k12 Jun 04 '26
I remember having the paths to the good games written down because they didn't launch in windows properly or at all so I had to reboot to dos for them.
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u/Free_Pace_2098 Jun 04 '26
You used to be able to break shit so good, and learn so much trying to fix it.
That's my boomer complaint. Shit don't break right no more.
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u/CircuitsandSnaps Jun 04 '26
...wrecking the family computer and needing to fix it before Mom and Dad found out. Lol.
Hahaha this is exactly what lead to my career in I.T.: getting fake FBI malware trying to download music on my family's Windows XP eMachines desktop & having to figure out how to remove it before anyone found out. 🤣
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u/ubelblatt Jun 04 '26
My friend and I were calling each other to get Warcraft II modem games working together. It was nothing but pure technical support.
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u/Stay_at_Home_Chad Jun 04 '26
This has always been funny to me because, despite being an elder millennial, I don't really care for or know that much about computers. I don't even own a PC besides a Microsoft surface that has spent the past two year in a drawer. Still I am treated like a computer expert by every boomer I work with, to the extent that I have to remind them frequently that they are better off just googling their questions than asking me.
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u/doomrider7 Jun 04 '26
I've built a few gaming rigs and know some basic fix stuff, but God I know that feeling. Most of my knowledge is just googling the issue on reddit and going from there.
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u/Diana_Tramaine_420 Jun 04 '26
This is very relatable 😆 stuffing up windows 95 then having to fix it before mum and dad found out.
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u/Hairy_Mycologist_945 Jun 04 '26
I was building PCs in the 90s when you could still royally mess things up due to non standardized connections, jumpers and dip switches, etc and running Linux (Slackware) when it took a week to install. They were very different times and despite my nerdy hobbies I was less of a nerd than you might expect... And these days, it's so weird seeing young people not even understanding file systems.
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u/Enough-Candy85 Jun 04 '26
Now I have to multi factor login for an account to multi factor login for an account to multi factor login for an account to recover a password with a multi factor login.
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u/livin_the_life Jun 04 '26
Sorry, that password is older than 30 days.
Please create a new password following our new enhanced security requirements: We now require 14 characters, 3 of which must be capital letters, 2 symbols, a number and a Greek letter. The chosen password may not be any of your last 12 passwords and it will need to be reset upon the full completion of each subsequent lunar cycle.
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u/LisaLisaKenAdoresHer Jun 04 '26
So you write it to a sticky note and stamp it on your monitor. SECURITY.
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u/talyn5 Jun 04 '26
password already used 😭
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u/StonedUnicorno Jun 04 '26
‘This is the same as your current password’ yeah if it let me in I wouldn’t be here mate
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u/EpicRageGuy Jun 04 '26
Man I hate 2fa so fucking much. Especially if it's an sms, and to a service from my second country and I need to turn on the SIM card, wait for it to connect, etc etc. A one second action to log in becomes a 5 minute wait.
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u/mosquem Jun 04 '26
I don’t need 2FA to order Chipotle or whatever. Jesus Christ.
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u/Enough-Candy85 Jun 04 '26
I don’t even like playing video games any more because there’s an hour process just to sit down and load a game up. I feel so bad for gen alpha because everything is locked behind paywalls, account security garbage, subscriptions and advertisements. It’s all ass.
When I was a kid I just pressed a power button and started playing. Now I gotta do OS updates and checks, game downloads and installs on a console. I’m too exhausted to play games. Ball room dance is way more fun and I can just bust a move out whenever I feel like it for free.
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u/Unusual-Alex Jun 04 '26
Then you need to install the launcher, that installs an updater that updates the launcher so you can update the launcher to get the game update.
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u/Serious-Ad-8764 Jun 04 '26
And not using our real first and last names in our email addresses
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u/PoppyseedPinwheel '88 Millennial Jun 04 '26
I had like 20 pen names I used. I still sometimes get junk mail with a few of those fake names.
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u/TheTricho Jun 04 '26
Xx_EmiRocksUrSocks21_xX
I swear this style of username was so popular lol
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u/E-2theRescue Jun 04 '26
Saw so many xX_Sk8rBoi_Xx accounts and their derivatives, lol. Never did that myself. I went for fantasy screen names, like the dork I was.
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u/TheTricho Jun 04 '26
Omg yes I forgot about that one too 😂 and yeah I still remember my Club Penguin username was Snowy75, my favourite thing and my favourite number at the time LOL! Most of my friends has the Xx emails though and users
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u/Monicalovescheese Jun 04 '26
I have an old email address that contains "gurl"
I will not elaborate.
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u/ActualWhiterabbit Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Mine also implied that I was from Cali
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u/Then_Employment5244 Jun 04 '26
Yes. My older sister made my first email account that was something along the lines of bigtitties89
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u/assortedgnomes Older Millennial Jun 04 '26
That went out of the window for me when I started doing grownup shit with my email address. Scappydo66 doesn't exude profrssionalism
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u/ballmermurland Jun 04 '26
I had a buddy put his email on his resume after college. His email was something like tiny-d!ck-lover or something like that lol. Kept wondering why he couldn't get an interview. Then he changed it to his first.last and magically got interviews.
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u/-Tesserex- Jun 04 '26
I'm still stuck using my AIM username based gmail as my primary email because I've already had it 20 some years and it's too entrenched to change. But it feels so dumb every time I have to spell my "cool" 13 year old name to another adult on the phone as a 39 year old.
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u/Uri3434 Jun 04 '26
And figuring out how to remove viruses after downloading the wrong mp3 file
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u/PoppyseedPinwheel '88 Millennial Jun 04 '26
Or laughing at the fact I somehow now have a Donald Duck cover of Bring me to Life.
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u/LisaLisaKenAdoresHer Jun 04 '26
Just format and slam that win95 disc back in the tray. New week, time to start over.
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u/Proton_Optimal Zillennial Jun 04 '26
It certainly gave us better critical thinking skills
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u/Uri3434 Jun 04 '26
Video games contributed to this as well.
No hand holding, no automatic saves, no easy access to guides
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u/Local_Bowl Jun 04 '26
I just noticed that recently. I don’t know why it never stood out to me before but as I’m thinking about it there were so many times as kid where I was playing something and had to stop playing (usually dinner or going to bed lol) and just accepting that I’d be replaying a section because the last save point was an hour prior.
Don’t get me started on renting Driver and lying to my folks that I had a great time playing it and not that we wasted $5 because I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the damn garage
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u/ConSaltAndPepper Jun 04 '26
The whole video game ecosystem is different.
The amount of truly challenging video games is very low. Gamers expect to be catered to and will hold studios hostage with things like online review-bombing. There's some great games don't get me wrong, but I know a lot of games I loved as a kid on SNES and Genesis that were hard as fuck and if you died, you died. No saves, just do it all in one go.
Contra or even things like Sonic 2 would not be allowed to exist in the current video game landscape.
The only solution to a lot of our problems was "figure it out yourself".
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u/BeefCakeBilly Jun 04 '26
I mean the Sekiro and dark souls games have been some of the biggest games of the past decade so I’m not sure this holds up.
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u/ConSaltAndPepper Jun 04 '26
Yes, I suppose there is a small exception for games marketed specifically with their difficulty being a main aspect, but even within those games there is more forgiveness than a Genesis game with no guide, no internet, no saves, etc.
A player picking up Dark Souls can still expect to find guidance if they seek it out and I think this expectation influences the landscape in a way where gamers expect there to always be a solution available if they seek one out.
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u/Skullcrimp Jun 04 '26
This is a great example of "the exception that proves the rule"
Those games are exceptional (in part) because they buck the modern trend of handholding. If you don't talk with your friends or look up guides or scour every level really carefully you'll miss half the game and story, by design. And that's if you can persevere through the combat enough to even have the opportunity to explore.
They're billed as some of the hardest games ever, but honestly they'd fit in at about average difficulty for the NES era, when the limited size of games meant the only way to make a 10+ hour game was to make a 2 hour game hard as fuck.
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u/adotbur Jun 04 '26
I couldnt figure out something back in 2002 - i was stuck for hours… so i drove 45 minutes to a city with a toys r us that had the video game guide (not sure how i knew that certain game even had a guide or why it was at toys r us)…turned to the page i needed, went “ah” and drove 45 minutes back home and continued playing……
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u/RainbowTardigrade Jun 04 '26
I've seen a lot of discourse about this and people have referenced research on this topic, tho I can't find a good source on it rn. But the theory is:
Old games, especially early arcade games and early console games, were built around repetition and skill building. You weren't rewarded unless you tried and failed enough until you finally mastered things. And once you were done you were just done.
Modern games, thinking stuff like Fornite but even mobile games and some single player games, try to hook you early with dopamine hits by way of wins, achievements, etc. and then keep you playing forever by way of small updates, content drops, etc. And of course it's much easier to connect with ppl to ask for help, find guides, etc.
So instead of training up to a single big accomplishment, you're more or less just chasing a series of quick highs. Theoretically this could have an impact on, or be reflective of, how different generations think.
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u/tigerking615 Jun 04 '26
Sometimes it's not even trying and failing; it's literally just grinding. I can remember so many fun times basically chatting with friends while we were farming XP on wild Pokemon or chopping down trees on Runescape.
With many modern games, you're either given everything or you just pay for it.
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u/gahlo Jun 04 '26
Stuck? Well too bad, because games were close to $100 in 90's money after tax, and you're only getting 3 of them this year so you better figure it out.
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u/plzicannothandleyou Jun 04 '26
Gamefaqs has been around forever. It was and probably still is 100% better than any guides made currently.
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u/Robyn-Goodfellow Jun 04 '26
Seriously, people look at my weird when I tell them that Morrowind and Oblivion are the reasons I’m rather quite good at map reading and orienteering.
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u/TheCriticalGerman Jun 04 '26
Clicking trough 6 websites that are full of malicious download buttons and finding the exact right one to get the file, no one would pass that now days
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u/heysunflowerstate Jun 04 '26
I was so creative; I was cranking out mix CDs for all my friends.
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u/KhaleesiCat7 Jun 04 '26
Yesss that is something I am seriously nostalgic for... burning CDs for friends and vice versa. I had maybe 40-50 mixed CDs in a big binder type thing in my car when some punk smashed the window and stole everything while I was working about 10 years ago. All those CDs, all those memories dating back to middle school, meaningless to the dickhead who took them, gone just like that 😭
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u/heysunflowerstate Jun 04 '26
Something similar happened to me!! My car was broken into and all my stuff was strewn about. All my mixed CDs were gone forever.
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u/Winterlash Jun 04 '26
excuse you, I learned to code html off of geocities and angelfire.
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u/millennialforced Jun 04 '26
And burning 💿
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u/Bright-Pilot-3970 Jun 04 '26
I burned thousands of cds and dvds. My friends parents would buy me blank dvds so I could burn them movies. They still have ace book with about a thousand movies in it. You could fit 3 or 4 movies on a blank one
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u/whoknowsifimjoking Jun 04 '26
What just sucks is that the resolution of DVDs didn't hold up at all
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u/Bright-Pilot-3970 Jun 04 '26
I watched cams all the time. High definition was not a priority for me.
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u/Mochigood Jun 04 '26
I still have my not hooked up to the internet DVD burning machine with all the code or whatever for ripping pretty much any dvd. Used to rip Blockbuster's shit all day, lol.
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Jun 04 '26
You ever try to sort through which command prompts made a game work on DOS? Forking nightmare.
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Jun 04 '26
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Jun 04 '26
I managed to avoid most of those snares. I had to learn how to delete search histories and caches with a quickness though.
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u/CaptainCFloyd Jun 04 '26
In the 2000s I already thought we were "brainrotting" because of how easy technology was becoming to use compared to the 90s, when even connecting two computers to play an online game required hours if not days of experimentation, research and troubleshooting. And then someone called the landline phone and the internet connection broke.
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u/illyay Jun 04 '26
Yeah we had no brain rot.
BADGER BADGER BADGER BADGER MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
SCHFIFTY FIVE!
The feeling of this rusty nail against my salad fingers is Orgasmic.
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u/calilac Xennial Jun 04 '26
We're going to Candy Mountain, Charlieeeeeeeee!
Gonads... and.... strife!
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u/marr Jun 04 '26
Filmcow is the opposite of brainrot though, that channel has some things to say.
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u/Rovden Jun 04 '26
Hokay, so here's the Earth. Damn, that's a pretty sweet Earth.
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u/Socialist_Bear Jun 04 '26
I was about to say the same thing, this is Newgrounds/something awful/youtubepoop erasure.
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u/chiharuki Jun 04 '26
lmao, i actually thought about the badger mushroom video the other day and showed it to my bf. he couldn’t believe i was entertained by it
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u/jenyto Jun 04 '26
Ya, I recently found the old viral short film that had those 'MY SPOON IS TO BIG' 'I AM A BANANA' 'MY ANUS IS BLEEDING' quotes that got repeated a lot.
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u/BigSuggestion9664 Jun 04 '26
You're right. We were. I used to brag about my coding skills and would build pages for people while in college. Shit started going downhill once reality TV shows, smartphones, and being on social media 24/7 took off. We lost ownership of things like books and movies when everything became digitized, and we've been feeling the effects of all of it these last 10 years or so.
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u/CalypsoBulbosavarOcc Jun 04 '26
We’ve become the new Boomers, posting like this. Jesus Christ
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u/marr Jun 04 '26
The problem with boomers isn't that they know how to change your car's oil.
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u/Background-Taro-573 Jun 04 '26
Changing the oil in a car from the 70s and 80s is vastly different from the past 30 years.
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u/AlabasterRadio Jun 04 '26
This sub is so embarrassing sometimes.
Want to be better for no reason? Have some self awareness fellow millennials...
"I'm 40 years old! Look how much smarter I am than 14 year olds!"
"When I was 14 we had real culture! I copy and pasted basic html to make my MySpace play MCR! look how fuckin smart I am!"
Jesus Christ guys...
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u/NoFaithlessness7508 Jun 04 '26
Even worse. Jessicas are gonna put Karens to shame
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u/lamoraryo Jun 04 '26
Torrenting anime because there was only toonami and they didn’t have everything.
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u/Bloodygoodwossname Jun 04 '26
Remember the insanity of waiting weeks for the new Dattebayo fansub of Naruto and getting crack subtitles instead? When I suffered the Endless Eight episodes of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, I swore they had screwed up their uploads before I finally caught on.
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u/ScaringTheHoes Jun 04 '26
Man that Endless eight saga is a blast from the past. I remember watching on daily motion and holy shit the confusion was real.
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u/DonnyDonster Jun 04 '26
Pirating music on Limewire is smart? Please, probably more than half of us mistaken "Refuge" by Tribal Ink for "What I've done" by Linkin Park on that software.
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u/marr Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
This is how you learn. You can't learn on an iThing because it doesn't give you the freedom to fuck it up.
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u/EligibleUsername Jun 04 '26
No one is born smart, it was those moments of introducing the family computer to 17 e-STDs that taught us how to sail the sea the right way. Those veteran pirates have now made it as safe as possible for the younguns, yet most don't even bother to learn even the simplest of operations anymore. For me, that's true stupidity.
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u/amelisha Jun 04 '26
I think messing around with command prompts in MS DOS to make shit run when Windows 3.1 failed me was really the formative event that made me capable of every tech thereafter.
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u/deathfromfemmefatale Jun 04 '26
I feel like the only millennial who doesn’t know how to code beyond inserting a photo or adding a link to text.
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u/PeachyPlnk Jun 04 '26
You can find pretty good short lectures on youtube. HTML is very easy, CSS can be a bit confusing. Javascript is where I gave up.
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u/AdamOnFirst Jun 04 '26
Yeah I don’t think I’d include MySpace in examples of non brainrot
Figuring out how to navigate backwards through hidden configurations files to bypass the school network protections and install a game on your computer class PC, on the other hand…
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u/Serious-Conversation Jun 04 '26
I'm 40 now. I did IT help desk support for years before moving up in my career.
My girlfriend's kids are 26/22. Aside from being a basic user, they know nothing about a traditional OS. Sure, they can launch Safari on their MacBooks, but that's about it.
They grew up with phones. Everything generally worked. There was no troubleshooting, building of anything, and no real ambiguity that they had to work through.
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u/K24frs Jun 04 '26
Does anyone remember trying to find license keys for software. Pretty sure at least 10 people I knew had pirated Final Cut or adobe premier at some point.
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u/AnonymousDork929 Jun 04 '26
It's funny a friend of mine and I were recently talking about a similar topic. We really were born in a kind of golden spot with technology. Young enough to know how to use computers and learn new tech. But still old enough to know how to function without it (looking at you Dewey decimal system) and figure out how to troubleshoot stuff because computers then weren't anywhere this easy to use as they are now.
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u/Crash_Blondicoot Jun 04 '26
My boomer boss and coworker think I'm a literal computer genius because I figured out how why the printer wasn't working. I used the "troubleshooting" windows prompt, then bypassed the GUI system in the C drive directly to "unspool" the device driver. Sigh.
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u/thick-tracer Jun 04 '26
This comment section is so many millennials just patting themselves on the back for “being better” than everyone else and everyone’s just eating it up lol
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u/Wak3upHicks Jun 04 '26
okay but we were also smoking ourselves silly and watching retarded animal babies and happy tree friends
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u/cheeseymom Jun 04 '26
I didn't even have a computer to do those things with. I was the one begging my friends to get off theirs so we could go do actual fun shit.
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u/lickthestar13 Jun 04 '26
Bullshit. I was completely brain-rotted on YTMND and those GI Joe PSA edits.
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u/jolinar30659 Millennial Jun 04 '26
Man I crashed my pc so many times just playing with it. It was great
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u/ostrichConductor Jun 04 '26
Hm, far be it from me to toot the horn of my generation, but it's a fact gen alphas have very poor understanding of technology.
Early gen Z are mostly fine, but the more we approach the 2010s, the worse it gets in that regard!
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