The covers of computer games
were so much better. They promised so much.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 10:05, 13 replies)

Watching the last Ashes Test when my daughter wanders into the room.
"Who are we playng."

"Australians" I reply.

"Oh. We always beat them."
(Brigadier an old boot sitting on a man's face - forever, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 7:56, 19 replies)

Famous "Can you Remember where you were when?" events.
As we've grown up and as our parents grew up and as our Grannies and Grandads grew up occasionally some BIG thing would happen which lots of them/us would witness en masse.
Let me just clarify here - it was usually a bad thing and is only really relevant to the generations I've suggested because prior to radio, tv and then the net witnessing some horrible 'thing' en masse was probably confined to watching Jimmy the Village Idiot getting trampled by cows. Or something.
So lets look back shall we?

Moon landing - Didn't happen.
Two points here - how much it costs for Ariane to carry per kilo into space. Today.
Also - with the way the Merkins celebrate their heros, if Ronnie can be President & Arnie can make Governor of California then Neil Armstrong should've been KING OF THE WORLD by now.

JFK getting shot. That must have been one very crowded Grassy Knoll. Amazing with all the jostling that anyone got a shot off! And also thanks Jack Ruby for providing so many tv courtroom dramas with so many tidy but poignant endings.

John Lennon getting shot. I remember my mum crying. I really think that Mark Chapman was actually waiting to shoot Yoko. Then we would have had less to endure from The Plastic Yoko Band, 'Orange' or Julian Lennon.

Kurt Cobain spraying the ceiling with his brains. Got famous quickly and then unfortunately fucked and impregnated a fame-whore junky groupie.
If your life was mapped out being physically/emotionally/biologically connected to Courtney Love what do you think your approach might be?

Diana - I could write pages. But suffice to say - hooning down a Parisian tunnel, in a Merc driven by a drunk with your incredibly rich Arab boyfriend & being chased by members of the SAS dressed up as paparazzi probably isn't the wisest of moves.

Sept the 11th, 2001.
I guess this was our generations "watch in horror" moment. It's just that after watching planes flying into buildings and the two towers then collapsing hundreds of times got a bit... well boring. And the only channel not running anything else was ABC2 with Play School and BooBah.

The London Bombings were much the same in terms of media saturation. At least the armed services of the Met. managed to shoot a suspicious Brazilian student with a back-pack full of .... his homework.
EDIT: Since this is a mostly pommie based site I will say, no disrespect intended towards anyone affected by the bombings.
Aside from the fit bird that Albert Marshmallow gave a lift to on his scooter.

I reckon our kids haven't yet had too many events like this to deal with.
Aside from Miley Cyrus twerking some bloke at a music awards. EDIT: And maybe some Middle East dictatorship showering their not-so-thankful citizens with some "directly in contravention of several world-wide conventions (that they didn't sign)" chemical weapons.

As my daughter said - "Meh, I'll watch it on youtube later."

tl;dr? - The past just (thankfully) had less media coverage.
(s0ckpuppet logging out to reply to you if you're not careful, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 7:39, 10 replies)

Long time lurker 1st time poster...
And apologies in advance for lack of length and funnies, be gentle!

The past may have been shit for a lot of reasons; due to once being a child/teen I remember not having a disposable income, not having a car, not having any plans for the future or anything in particular to look forward to. But it was when I was over a friends house about 2 years ago that I heard the line I'll never forget. (And apologies again in advance as it wasn't the most profound or funny thing ever mentioned, it just stuck with me).

We were both bored on a slow Sunday with not much to do, no one we knew was around that weekend and we were pretty poor it being late in the month, but not late enough for Wage Fun Times. He just said "you know when we were younger we never had to sit and think of things to do involving money or anything like that. Just hanging around together was enough". And it's true. When we were younger we could waste hours trying to hit the telephone lines with stones or throwing balls (behave!) at each other in the fields or a hundred other seemingly inane activities. But as we got older it became less socially acceptable to do that and we were more inclined to spend time (and wages/dole money) in the pub.

Although that's not to say they ever stopped being fun we just, kind of, grew out of doing that all the time.

*runs away before being shouted at over the interwebs for time wasting etc*
(Panzerfaust, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 1:13, 11 replies)

Soda stream
(re-released now... or did it ever go away?)
I remember being so excited when we got it... and all the flavors tasted of shite!
Like most in the 70s/80s it sat gathering dust once the Co2 tube was empty... (and then 90% of getting "busy with the fizzy" was just done with cordial)
( tim1701 I have no board signature!!!!!, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 22:13, 4 replies)

I remember when QOTW used to have massive pictures of flabby women's tits at the top of the page.

( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 20:17, 14 replies)

"Youth is wasted on the young"
It took me a long time to realise that girls were just as interested in boys as boys were in them.

As a result, I'd say much of my late teens and early 20s.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 16:55, 7 replies)

KnightRider
I *thought* this was shit. turns out, the half hour versions were badly edited cobbled together versions of the hour long episodes the American audience experienced first time round.
(magictorch, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 15:04, 12 replies)

The Bleep Test.
Who remembers this in P.E? Straight out of Auschwitz.
You had to run from one side of the gym to the other before the 'bleep', which got incessantly faster and induced a coronary.

Them fat kids were always out n the first 4 rounds.
( GeordieJay Bummers are deaf, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 14:43, 15 replies)

A lot of Monty Python is absolute garbage.

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 14:35, 16 replies)

Programming in hex...
... because you had neither the RAM nor the cash for an assembler. See How We Programmed in the Olden Days.

Oh, the joy of it all.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 14:20, 22 replies)

Pssttt, hey you.
Yeah I mean You. If you have taken a minute to read this. The angels have seen your sharing their good news. The angels say its over now and no more blessings are coming. The angels would like you to be aware that this offer is now closed. Please don't ignore it, the test is now over. The angels have got their work cut out fixing two (big) things in the favour of, to be honest, far more people that we initially were expecting. If you believe in angels then follow your heart and stop sharing.
( tangledupinblue hairy badge with moving eyes, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 13:36, 3 replies)

Pssttt, hey you.

Yeah I mean You. If you have taken a minute to read this. The angels have seen your struggling with something. The angels say its over now and a blessing is coming your way. If you believe in angels then please send this message on to those who many need it. Please don't ignore it, you are being tested. The angels are going to fix two (big) things in your favour. If you believe in angels then follow your heart and share.
(AWESOMEB0T meddling prick, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 13:29, 2 replies)

Anyone ever listen to what was BBC7?
If the "classic comedy" is anything to go by, people must have been desperate for something to laugh at, way back when.
Even The Goon Show hasn't aged well.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 13:17, 11 replies)

Pssttt, hey you.

Yeah I mean You. If you have taken a minute to read this. The angels have seen your struggling with something. The angels say its over now and a blessing is coming your way. If you believe in angels then please send this message on to those who many need it. Please don't ignore it, you are being tested. The angels are going to fix two (big) things in your favour. If you believe in angels then follow your heart and share.
( Naked Ape call me Caitlyn, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 11:32, 19 replies)

Star Wars.
It's not actually that good.

Carrie Fisher is average-looking.

Darth Vader isn't that cool.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 8:53, 47 replies)

I remember when rhythm was a dancer.
(I'm serious! can you guess how serious I am?)
( Ghoti Fingers, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 8:49, 6 replies)

No stalge I Ayyy...
At my school we had an exchange program for the RE teachers and pastoral care members.
One year we got a young lady called Thomasina Prime. She had started out as a Jesuit priest. Then finding her beliefs changing she converted to Catholicism and finally finding The Church too confining she reverted to Anglicanism.
Having shifted the metaphysical goal posts so much none of us were sure as to how to properly address Thomasina - so we asked her one day in RE.
"Since you've been a Madame, Sister and Reverend what exactly do we call you Ma'am?" we asked.
"Well, I'm in charge of your pastoral care so why not call me Pastor." said she. Pastor Prime she was.
Whilst she had been dabbling in all these religions she had also adhering to a rigorous physical regime which meant that despite her clear mental insanity she had a smoking hot, celibate body. Which every straight, able bodied bloke at the All Boys school I attended noticed immediately.
In order to keep up her gruelling exercise stricture she joined a few of the school's extracurricular activities. Including the school's Surf Lifesaving Club. Where she would help man the watch-tower at the local beach each Saturday with other students and staff.
In her tight red swimsuit.
Suffice to say - all of a sudden many of us felt the need to head down to the beach, swim between the flags and experience difficulty when our school was rostered as Surf Lifesavers.
And there would be the lovely Pastor Prime diving into the surf, dragging the "helpless" victim back to shore and attempting to perform mouth-to-mouth on us.
And that's why the pastor was a beach hit.
(s0ckpuppet logging out to reply to you if you're not careful, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 7:32, 8 replies)

A UN Mandate.
I mean ffs!
The last one I had was inside my Wheaties packet (I can't have Corn Flakes because I need the roughage apparently).
And he was well lush.
(s0ckpuppet logging out to reply to you if you're not careful, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 6:30, 3 replies)

I remember in the mid 80's when miami vice was popular and all my male friends were wearing pink flouro tops and bleaching their hair
and listening to euro dance 12 inches and drinking white wine breezers. And I remember thinking at the time "Man, this era I'm in right now is massively gay. I can't wait 'til the world moves on." Eventually it was replaced by grunge which remains the only fashion trend that suited the way I dress. When is retro-grunge going to be in fashion once more, B3ta?
( cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 5:09, 7 replies)

Dino-SARS

( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 0:24, 4 replies)

Only Humans Carry Their Past Around, Their Past Around
As a Time Lord (or Gallifreyan at the very least), there is no such thing as the past for me. From my privileged viewpoint, all of Time and Space exists coterminously – past, present and future – in one eternal instant. The past is the present of that moment and the future of a previous moment. The present is the past of the future and the future of the past. The future is the present of that moment and the past of a future moment. The past is also the past of a future moment, and the future is also the future of a past moment, and the present doesn’t actually exist as the present moment is always passing from the past into the future (or the future into the past, depending on your point of view). That isn’t even taking into account all 93 dimensions. Wibbly wobbly, bollocky wollocky and so on and so forth.

A further problem exists when one considers the phenomenon – or phenomenomenon – of nostalgia; as a being who experiences time coterminously, I cannot experience ‘nostalgia’ as the past does not subjectively exist for me. Everything is a good or as bad as it ever was, is, or is likely to be.

Therefore, this week’s question is meaningless to me.

That won’t stop me answering it, though, if I consider ‘the past’ to be a segment of my own personal timeline existing at a reverse tangent to my present temporal juncture as a hyperplexoid polychronic interface within the time vortex yielding a magnifactoid switchback hysteresis which subtends to a gravitic accelerator linked to my Artron energy signature.

I can thus examine my memories of any segment of this ‘personal past’ and ascertain my current feelings towards it, and, if they are positive, check the veracity of said feelings by examining the segment as it actually happened through my Time/Space Visualiser, and then identify any disconnect between my memories of the segment and its actuality, and conclude if the resulting dissonance constitutes a counterbalance to the positive feeling – or ‘nostalgia’, if you will – that I now experience. I can then also examine the segment against my current node-state and identify if there are any material differences between them to ascertain if I am actually better off ‘now’ than I was ‘then.’

Okay. Running examinations now… downloading results…

Interesting!

It seems that a period of my prior personal timeline – I’ll say ‘past’ to make it simpler for you apes - that best meets the definitions of this week’s question is the five years I spent on the colony planet of Arketoria. My current feelings towards this segment are – or were until I ran this experiment – positive, as I helped a lot of people, had some great sex and made many cakes.

But the reality, as examined through my Time-Space Visualiser, was somewhat different...

Arketoria was a tough planet, with an arctic climate like northern Alaska. High velocity winds, blizzards and earthquakes were common. Precipitation was low, the soil was arid, water scarce – it really was an inhospitable shithole. Yet the colonists were tough and set about establishing a settlement in the form of a town called Destiny, basically a cluster of steel huts surrounding an atmosphere converter (you know – like the one in Aliens, in fact very similar, James Cameron got that spot on).

I arrived there ten years after the establishment of Destiny. I was fleeing from the Oabex-Mengoxtra conflict where I was acting as personal military consultant to the Feag Mengoxtra itself. Things had got pretty hairy during an Oabex bombardment of the Mengoxtran Battle Moon Foowounga, and I had become separated from my TARDIS. I escaped from Foowounga in a lifepod together with a young Mengoxtran female called Oooalaquaia, who sadly did not survive long (naughty old me!). After I’d cleaned myself up, I managed to soup up this pod to warp me halfway across the galaxy. Thus I ended up on Arketoria.

I crash-landed a hundred miles from Destiny and somehow managed to walk the entire distance, honing in on the psychospoor of the 125 surviving colonists. By the time I arrived at the settlement I was close to death and on the point of regeneration – but those good people took me in, fed and watered me despite their lack of resources, and I was soon nursed back to full health. During this incarnation, my third, I was a strikingly handsome male of about fifty years of age in appearance with short jet black hair and piercing blue eyes. I must have looked like a god to that rag-tag bunch of terraformers. They’d suffered over the last decade – disease, famine, feuds and murders had all took their toll. They’d lost almost a third of their number. They were glad of another able body to help around the place, and, feeling nothing but gratitude towards my saviours, I made myself as useful as possible. Of course, during those first days I sent the usual tesseract to the High Council requesting they locate and return my TARDIS to me. The response was immediate but abrupt: ‘Pending.’ So there I was stuck there on Arketoria with all these colonists. To take my mind off the wait I truly threw myself into my work. Firstly I sorted out their irrigation system and then constructed a more sensitive earth tremor detector to give them all ample warming to get into the shelters before quakes struck.

Then I opened a cake shop. My Battenburgs, Black Forest Gateaux and cheesecakes – made from the mini food machine I carried – took the Arketorians’ minds off their sorry plight, however briefly.

I took a wife and several lovers, of all sexes, and they were glad to give themselves to me, however sadistic my tendencies. I did not indulge myself fully in my fantasies of torture (which would come to fruition in my next incarnation) but I did slap a few of them about a bit. They seemed to enjoy it though.

One day the food machine ran out of raw material and that was a dark day for Destiny. No more cakes! Luckily, I had a fine singing voice and put on shows for the colonists singing hits from Olde Earth like We Built This City On Rock And Roll, Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, Eat Y’Self Fitter and Atmosphere (the Russ Abbott one, not the other one).

An even darker day dawned when a brace of Sontaran battle cruisers landed on the planet. We had no way of standing up to their might, so we were fucked. Fortunately, the Sontaran Commander deemed Arketoria to be of no strategic military importance, so after stomping around in the dust and shouting a bit, the potato headed clone cunts fucked off.

Worse was to come – for the Arketorians, that is. Yes, you guessed it – Daleks! Those bastards aren’t fussed about military strategy, they just want to destroy anything and everything humanoid. I woke up one morning to the sound of shrieks, screams, sizzling energy bolts and metallic cries of ‘EXTERMINATE!’ and I knew instantly that Destiny was doomed – and so was I. I must admit I sobbed and whimpered and cowered on the floor of my shack, meekly waiting for the end. Then, to my intense amazement, a familiar wheezing, groaning sound reached my disbelieving ears and my TARDIS materialised before my eyes, in the form of a giant banana with a zip down the side, and the words ‘Here you are you Shobogan tosser’ emblazoned on the banana skin in glowing neon pink tubing.

Did I hesitate, did I pause, did I think, ‘hang on, better see if I can save any of my Arketorian friends’? Did I bollocks. I unzipped that giant banana and was inside in a flash. My hearts sang with joy to see my old familiar coral-blue console room and I dematerialised the fuck out of Arketoria and deleted the banana configuration from my Chameleon Circuit, restoring the outer plasmic shell of my TARDIS to its default setting (a small Napoleonic fort).

As for the Arketorians, well, I can only conclude that they were all exterminated, each and every one. Unless, of course, that other Doctor in his ridiculous outmoded Type 40 turned up and saved them. I never checked. I could now I suppose, using my Time-Space Visualiser...

...hang on...

...no, he didn’t. They all died.

Ah well.

And so, having examined this segment of my personal past, I can conclude the following:

1. My current feelings towards this segment of my personal past are (or were) positive, as I spent the time helping people, making cakes, singing songs, having great sex and fixing irrigation systems.

2. The actuality of the segment, as examined through my Time-Space Visualiser, is that it was a stressful, arduous period of my life where I was trapped in a cheerless shithole at the mercy of Sontarans, Daleks and the weather, just twiddling my thumbs waiting for my TARDIS to turn up. The cakes, songs and sex were brief distractions, and if I am honest the sex wasn’t that great with those poor stringy undernourished Arketorians.

3. There is therefore clear dissonance between my memories of the segment and the actuality; therefore, ‘nostalgia’ has distorted my memories of this segment of my personal past.

4. Examining the material difference between this segment of my personal past and my current node state, it is plainly obvious that I am miles better off ‘now’ than I was ‘then.’

Therefore, to sum up: yes, the past (or this particular segment of my own personal timeline existing at a reverse tangent to my present temporal juncture as a hyperplexoid polychronic interface within the time vortex yielding a magnifactoid switchback hysteresis which subtends to a gravitic accelerator linked to my Artron energy signature) was a bit shit.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Mon 2 Sep 2013, 22:39, 19 replies)

1976
Everyone old enough to have been alive in the decade that fashion forgot bangs on at every opportunity about the long hot summer of 1976 when we played in the hot sun from dawn till dusk, without a care in the world.

The truth for me was that I spent most of that summer indoors, with itchy, puffy eyes and a nose that somehow managed to be both blocked and running at the same time. Oh, the joys of hayfever.

Later in the summer, once going outside was bearable, we did of course enjoy the company of a bumper crop of wasps, those winged bastards who delight in scaring perfectly rational people into acting like small children, or windmills, and then stinging anyone that looks at them a bit funny.
( Snappyuk gets BIGGER with free sample., Mon 2 Sep 2013, 22:17, 12 replies)

"Practising homosexuals" on the news

( Sheriff John Bunnell https://twitter.com/thewonderfulgam, Mon 2 Sep 2013, 21:59, 3 replies)

Decimal coins
They stopped several generations from being able to do times tables up to twelve
(lordy lordy, Mon 2 Sep 2013, 21:22, Reply)

Popbitch.
Funny for about 30 seconds, and it led me here.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Mon 2 Sep 2013, 21:01, Reply)

B3ta.

(dozers, do fuck off ur a nob m8, Mon 2 Sep 2013, 20:01, 1 reply)

Lemmings
2 player on the Amiga
( social hand grenade I was a lurker before you were a lurker, Mon 2 Sep 2013, 19:44, 9 replies)