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What did you do when you where 8?


NSEP

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Played with Lego's, Erector Sets (Mecano was the modern equivalent), rode my bike, hit up the playgrounds, played ball, soccer, went to the matinee movies.

When I was 8:
-No computers
-No wireless phones
-No Compact Disc
-Vinyl, 8-tracks, and open reel tapes ruled. Cassettes were a newer and not super popular yet. FM was a novelty, and AM radio had the best hits.
-TV was 13 channels at best, and Saturday Morning Cartoons rocked and lasted until 1 PM.
-Star Wars "A New Hope" was only released in the movies a year or so prior. First movie I recall to have a Stereo soundtrack with Dolby B noise reduction.

Basically normal but much more active than today's 8 year old.
 

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I think I mainly played Combat Flight Simulator 3. I think I stopped playing it after that though, due to combination of discovering ksp and fufilling my ultimate goal, flying upside down through the Eiffel tower in a jet fighter. :cool:

Edited by MiffedStarfish
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Playin' with my Construx, the superior yet under-rated building toy. Seriously, Legos sucked, you could only build up. Construx had the Knot, a piece that allowed X,Y,and Z attachment, and, if you ran out of a medium piece two short pieces plus the knot would work, same for any longer pieces. It also had pullies, and my friend and I would make space ships that we would zip line down a tree and smash at the bottom. People say KSP is Lego, but the reality is that KSP is Construx! I mean, c'mon look at this awesomeness:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Shuttlecraft.jpg/800px-Shuttlecraft.jpg

Edited by Waxing_Kibbous
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12 minutes ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Construx had the Knot, a piece that allowed X,Y,and Z attachment, and, if you ran out of a medium piece two short pieces plus the knot would work, same for any longer pieces. It also had pullies...

That's what those were called!

Those were awesome for building large things, but I preferred Lego for more detailed building.

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That summer I was on the back of my cousin's dirt bike going over some small bumps of dirt when the bike stalled and somehow fell over. the exhaust landed on my ankle and got a pretty bad burn that is still faintly visible to this day. I also broke like 3 rubber band balsa wood planes by setting then down on a chair or bench, forgetting I set them there and then sitting on them.

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On 12/30/2017 at 2:28 PM, MiffedStarfish said:

fufilling my ultimate goal, flying upside down through the Eiffel tower in a jet fighter. :cool:

I bet that would be a great conversation-starter during one of those in-class 'career path' speeches

Edited by Earthlinger
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Well,

(I put it in a spoiler to prevent my wall of text from dominating the thread.)

Spoiler


I shunned toys, having a desire to be a "grown-up". This shocked my parents.

I and my family spent several months in an RV park in Loomis, California. This was my only experience with making friends and socializing. My isolated lifestyle has otherwise deprived me.

I began my obsession with computers, spending hours at a time on an old early-90's Pentium with only 32mb of ram. It had slow internet, but remarkably functional for the time, it could even play flash! I attempted to build web pages in Word and Excel 98, generally tributes to my favorite MAXIS games. I also got my first experience with the command line, which was DOS, and first discovered coding -- though it would be another four years before I started to understand it, and another two before I mastered Qbasic. And finally, I first heard of Linux. I was watching a youtube tutorial on how to run windows on an Xbox (Virtual machines were another of my early obsessions, I like things-inside-of-things.) when the video said to install 'linux' on the Xbox first (As the tutorial, like most back in 2008, was without narration, I read the word. This caused me to mis-pronounce 'Linux' as 'lie-nux'.), my underdeveloped mind didn't yet know that there were more OS's than Windows and Mac, so I assumed Linux was an emulation program for the Xbox.

I developed an increased understanding of death when one of the family cats, Deenie (I don't remember how her name was spelled), suddenly passed away of liver failure. Another cat, Graybaby, Deenie's brother, was also suffering from liver failure, but Deenie's passing made us aware of Graybaby's illness, and we were able to save him in time. From then on, he was my best friend for life. A cuddly, rambunctious teddy bear of a cat. However, he hated other cats with a passion, and did whatever he could to make them uncomfortable (usually by eating their food and commandeering their litterboxes, though sometimes he would get into outright brawls with them, which he nearly always lost. He did have a slightly chivalrous aspect, though, as he avoided picking fights with another cat, Blackberry, who was dying of kidney failure at the time, after beating her up in a single fight he seemed to realize that she was too weak to be a fair opponent, and didn't pursue her again.) Graybaby finally passed away in (I think, my memory of the time is weak as I've deliberately suppressed it.) October of 2015, I posted about it on the forum (I thank everyone here for their kindness and compassion, that was a hard moment for me.)

I attended our neighbor's 4th of July party (I'm not patriotic, I never was, but I enjoy parties.), it was a fun event. Fireworks, smores, soda, burgers and hot dogs, you name it. (I also attended the next party in 2009. However, our relationship with the neighbors broke down in 2010, and we haven't spoken with them in years. The consensus in my family is that it was their fault, I don't disagree.)

My mother's Dell laptop, which had been one of the primary computers in the household, finally kicked the bucket in this year. It would be several months before my mother got a new computer: a shiny new Toshiba with Windows 7. She refused to let any of us touch it.

I frequently commandeered the digital camera and shot videos. I've always had an obsession with filmmaking. Once I realized, however, that I couldn't make anything good with a crappy camera, no sets, and no actors, I took to making cartoons in MS Paint. I hand-drew every frame. Never once did I ever actually finish a project, I blame this on my ADD (attention deficit disorder) and over-ambitious nature, as I continually attempted to make feature-length cartoons, but never got past the first minute of choppy footage. I now understand that I should've limited myself to minute-long shorts to start with, but my ambition tends to be hard to suppress.

We got another dog, a male Pyrenees name 'Goliath', which my parents renamed 'Sam'. To be frank, I hated him. To me at the time, he seemed dopey and stupid. I greatly regret how badly I was to him then, I was an amazing person, sometimes I think I still am -- which I'm not proud of. He died in 2011. I did somewhat mellow towards him, but I never liked him; I'm not really sure I would like him now either, I don't really like dogs, but I certainly was mean to him.

Anyway, guys, that's my list of things that happened to me in 2008, those that I remember anyway. I didn't intend for this post to get this long, but sometimes once I start writing... you get the picture. Some of these memories I still cherish, others haunt me even today. I must say however, it was a decent year, probably the high point of my life so far. I still have nostalgia for my stay in the Loomis RV park.

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Physics Student said:

Now look that up and calculate my age!

Should be  24 if you mean the 1999 ecllipse.

 

If this is wrong, my second guess would be "An integer between 0 and the average life expectancy of a human in 2018".

Edited by Delay
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