I remember watching the Berlin Wall come down on TV

a tv that had no remote, turn knob channel changers, and a UHF knob

kids were the remote!

yep ... the pain of trying to manipulate those annoying twisty things around each knob too, haha

I remember that! And the Challenger.

i was a little too young to remember that, but i know I watched it.

I do remember watching Paul Simon's Graceland concert live on one of the main tv stations, though

my first movie in the theater was The Little Mermaid -- I was a second grader

I wrote a book report on how awesome George Bush senior was when I was in kindergarten lmao

Current President GB senior, even

I remember being super pissed throughout watching Bill's inauguration as a 4th grader, which is hilarious now and even then because I knew fuckall about politics

we spent a lot of 7th grade watching the OJ simpson trial, too

That was early high school for me, but yeah, OJ was a big one here.

I remember them ushering in literally everyone in my tiny christian school to the choir hall to watch the verdict

so many people were so mad, but I remember my immediate thought was 'well, god knows and he'll take care of him in the end' -- see: christian school

We were all shocked, the kids who wanted him released and the kids who thought he was guilty both. Nobody thought he'd get off.

yeah it was pretty stunning

I asked my mom to take me up to join the freemen l m a o

unrelated but woooooow

The who?

Twenty Years Ago Today, the Montana Freemen Started ...

I literally just thought they were cool, I think

Oh shit, I remember that!

I think I was a freshman in high school

like as a whole I'm so so so so so glad I turned out to be a very different person from what my younger self was gearing towards

yeeeeeeeah me too

I basically changed as soon as I got the internet

I like you much better not being a survivalist sister wife.

LMAO RIGHT

but I think it's very much a demonstration of how rural life can be -- I had no interest or opportunity to form my own opinions, I just saw what was going on around me and mirrored that

Yup.

speaking of the internet, when I was a young high schooler I discovered fan fiction, and because we didn't have it at home I would load a couple of disks with it and take it home to read on our old tandy

I had a couple of the old huge-ass real floppy discs too, but they were too outdated for the school computers

When Anne Rice announced that she was going to write a 5th VampChron book, the fan response was to immediately write their own epicly long versions of what they thought her book would be... which I still don't understand, but I had several 5.25" floppies full of text files of terrible fanfic all with the same title.

hahaha god

(They were all better than the bullshit she ended up writing, too.)

I killed that computer when I tried to delete enough files to install Final Fantasy VII on it

Ha!

I think it needed like 64mb of ram, and this computer only had 32

you are so young....

we had a betamax! we used it regularly!

I think some of this stuff is really hard to date because we were poor af and were generally using outdated stuff as a whole

like when I was struggling with that ancient beast, our school had shiny new candy colored bubble macs lmao

our dialup when we finally got it was garbage, too; I used to watch the download speeds on napster and only once in like 3 years did it break 1kbps

it usually sat around a comfortable 425 bytes per second

at that point I was one of the cool kids though because I did get a new, modern computer that had two cd drives you guys

my classmates would go wild giving me CDs to copy for other friends

my high school science teacher introduced me to beta google; it was the only search engine he'd use

ah when fanfics were rated via citrus fruits

lemons and limes

and people understood the differences between squicks and triggers

but we also were little assholes who loved a good MST-ing of someone else's fic

I was an avid egroups user way back in the day

/sporks

/creaky voice
now that's a word I haven't heard in a long, long time