What are you a curmudgeon about?

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What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Crossroads Inc. »

We all have those little things that, despit our own age, can make us go:
"Damn whipper snapers don't know how good they have it, why back in MY DAY!"
Those little things that irk us to no end to see how they are 'these days'.

For me, I am a self admitted "Architect Curmudgeon", poo-pooing virtually all styles past WWII and think that bricks, stone and art-deco are the pinnacle of style.
I am also a bit of a Curmudgeon on Video games, recalling how "Back in my day" we didn't have all these fancy graphics, and how much work you had to do, why we didn't have an internet to read a walkthrough, we had to make our own!

So what are YOU a Curmudgeon about?
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by tim31 »

When I got home earlier I walked back up the drive to check the mailbox. A person was coming down the street at about 50km/h(posted limit) and I guestured for them to slow down. I get sick of seeing roadkill because retards aren't actively scanning as they drive in a rural area. These chucklefucks will sit on the speed limit as a minimum on a road that has no footpaths off the side for pedestrians. If they're in such a hurry to get home, they should live closer to fucking town.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by PeZook »

And back in your day people drove slowly and carefully? :D

I don't think you get what the OP is saying :P

Now, for myself...it's surprisingly difficult to think of anything, actually. I love the future.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Eleas »

Computers. Specifically, the Amiga. Damned x86 WIntel bastards...
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Col. Crackpot »

In my day you had to configure an autoexec.bat file to get enough goddamn virtual memory to play a decent video game. Also you had to listen to a couple seconds of techno music when you connected to a BBS with your 2400 bps external modem.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Eleas »

Col. Crackpot wrote:In my day you had to configure an autoexec.bat file to get enough goddamn virtual memory to play a decent video game. Also you had to listen to a couple seconds of techno music when you connected to a BBS with your 2400 bps external modem.
You think that's old school, do you? I remember it when people mocked "swappers" for being "the Postal Service's best customer" and when "floppy disks" truly were floppy. :P
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Alferd Packer »

I remember when cars didn't have CD players. You needed to hook up your discman to an adapter that went into your tapedeck. And God help you if your discman didn't have anti-skip buffering. You'd never be able to listen to the music except at stoplights.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Col. Crackpot »

Eleas wrote:
Col. Crackpot wrote:In my day you had to configure an autoexec.bat file to get enough goddamn virtual memory to play a decent video game. Also you had to listen to a couple seconds of techno music when you connected to a BBS with your 2400 bps external modem.
You think that's old school, do you? I remember it when people mocked "swappers" for being "the Postal Service's best customer" and when "floppy disks" truly were floppy. :P
Singled sided, single density 5 1/4 inch floppy with a whopping 360 k of memory... oh memories.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Sinewmire »

Music in TV shows. Back in the day it was to accompany dialogueless scenes, or just to add a little ambience.

Nowadays it's slathered over everything like gravy, trying to tell you what to feel. Grr. NuWho (admittedly I've only watched a few episodes) is a prime example of this.

It's usually synthesized crap too.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

Video games. I am vaguely nostalgic for the days when I needed 30 floppy disks to install "Tie Fighter." Hell, the golden age of PC gaming was something else. Anyone else remember "Rebel Assault"? That game was sweet.

In general, I feel like video games these days are much shorter and don't have as much replay value. Not that there aren't games I really like ... for example, the "Uncharted" trilogy is awesome, but each game can be beaten in a day or two, really.

Books are another one. I really feel like a lot of the books coming out these days are absolute crap. I feel like the only genre that is doing well is pop-sci and pop-history writing, but I have my own problems with the way they distill things down.



EDIT: Also, kid's television. I realize this is probably just bias and nostalgia coloring me, but I feel like cartoons from the 90s were just that much better. I can still watch and really enjoy "Rocko's Modern Life" or "Angry Beavers" or "X-Men" or whatever, but what the hell is this "Yu-Gi-Oh" bullcrap?
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by madd0ct0r »

fucking students. I didn't like them much when i was one, but jesus - does everyone have a blind spot at that age where they don't realise how stupid they look?
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Zaune »

Video games as well for me, though for slightly different reasons. Anyone else feel that as graphics have become more and more advanced, it's become much easier to rely on visual spectacle to distract from wooden and repetitive gameplay?
Also, now that video games are big money, the A-list studios are no longer owned or run by people who want to make really good video games; they're owned and run by people who just want to make money. I'm not saying it's inherently bad to have some people on hand who aren't obsessed with creating True Art in videogame form at any cost -look how that ended for John Romero!- but a lot of the big names are getting really unwilling to take a chance on something that's genuinely new and innovative.

Or maybe it was always like this and I just forgot about all the crap follow-the-leader shovelware that came out when I was a kid, I dunno.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by PeZook »

Gameplay in the Ancient Past was wooden and repetitive. Seriously, consider the two "great old games" mentioned in this thread: TIE Fighter? "Memorize the mission or lose" TIE Fighter?

And of course Rebel Assault. Come on :D

Modern games are way more refined graphically, but it's not just that. Gameplay is often no better or worse than ancient titles, except for two major improvements:

1) Interface. interfaces have advanced TREMENDOUSLY. Just try playing Dune 2 some time. This seems to make things easier or cheaper to some people, but in actuality you're just not fighting the interface anymore, and thus can concentrate on the gameplay. No more writing down information on paper lest you be unable to proceed ; No more clicking five times to accomplish routine tasks ; No more having to look up essential numbers in hard to find tables, or guestimate input/output of resources.

2) Multiplayer. Not only gone are the days of figuring out mutual network protocols and IP adresses (do you use IPX? Oh, yeah, TCP...okay, where do I find my external IP...but wait, are you on a moden or...) ; But more and more games now have interesting and unique multiplayer and co-op modes. Voice comms are actually feasible to accomplish now with increasing bandwith, etc.

-------------------------

But as I wrote, I love the future and have no regrets about living in it :D

EDIT: Also I have to point out to the explosion in indie projects with the addition of easy to set up payment/security systems (which allows the "buy in while the game develops" model to function), digital distribution and Kickstarter. Innovative and interesting games are coming back, even though most Indie projects are, of course, total crap.
Or maybe it was always like this and I just forgot about all the crap follow-the-leader shovelware that came out when I was a kid, I dunno.
You also had more free time to use trying to beat a TIE Fighter mission. I recently attempted to play X-Wing: Alliance and just gave up, because I really don't have the time to go through a mission's opening sequence fifteen times because in the middle I have to stay docked to the space station and TIE fighters can just gank me if they fly a bit to the side.
Last edited by PeZook on 2012-08-17 03:48am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Jub »

My thing is music. I simply liked music better when metal/hard rock was what was popular and I often dig out metal albums older than I am because I enjoy the hell out of them. This isn't to say I dislike modern music, but I can't bear to turn on a radio.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Eleas »

Ziggy Stardust wrote:Video games. I am vaguely nostalgic for the days when I needed 30 floppy disks to install "Tie Fighter." Hell, the golden age of PC gaming was something else. Anyone else remember "Rebel Assault"? That game was sweet.
Rebel Assault was newfangled FMV nonsense. TIE Fighter at least had the excuse of a smidgin of depth. None are worthy of nostalgia, hell they're practically last week.

Last Ninja on the c64? Elite on the Amiga? Space Emperor on the BBS? That's nostalgia. :)
PeZook wrote:Gameplay in the Ancient Past was wooden and repetitive. [..]
Not always, and I'd argue it's a simplification. It was also a time when you couldn't just slather by-the-numbers glitz over everything to disguise a mediocre product. Truly innovative games, like Another World, truly were innovative due to pushing the machine beyond what anyone thought was possible.
PeZook wrote:1) Interface. interfaces have advanced TREMENDOUSLY. Just try playing Dune 2 some time.
Yeah, I agree. Interface changes have really made a difference.
PeZook wrote:2) Multiplayer. Not only gone are the days of figuring out mutual network protocols and IP adresses (do you use IPX? Oh, yeah, TCP...okay, where do I find my external IP...but wait, are you on a moden or...) ;
Why don't you just plug in a null modem like the rest of us? =)
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Skylon »

You guys would have enjoyed a question I got in my economics class last year. The topic was entrepreneurship and we got on a talk about Bill Gates as an example, and the smart-asses in the class started to shift the talk to "What's the big deal about Windows? Anybody could make Windows."

I then wrote "C:\>" - evoking more than a few "What's that?" and asked them "Okay, what do you do when you turn a computer on and this is what you see? How do you get to your programs?"

Think anyone knew?

And for the record, to make more of you feel old, I was never totally comfortable in DOS commands - my first computer sported Windows 3.1. DOS was a vehicle for installing X-Wing and TIE Fighter. :D
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Eleas »

Skylon wrote:You guys would have enjoyed a question I got in my economics class last year. The topic was entrepreneurship and we got on a talk about Bill Gates as an example, and the smart-asses in the class started to shift the talk to "What's the big deal about Windows? Anybody could make Windows."

<snip>

And for the record, to make more of you feel old, I was never totally comfortable in DOS commands - my first computer sported Windows 3.1. DOS was a vehicle for installing X-Wing and TIE Fighter. :D
Few people were. The first run of Windows (in fact up to '95) were miserable piles of shit mocked by all and sundry for being inferior to a number of systems on competing platforms (not just the Mac OS and Workbench on the Amiga, but even on the x86 platform in the form of OS2). The reason we used to hate Bill Gates back in the day was his constant success in foisting x86/DOS/Windows on the business world, while immensely superior machines slowly got overtaken and left in the dust.

Hailing Gates as an entrepreneur par excellence is quite fair. The man did a spectacular job of securing the home computer market for MS-DOS and Windows. To suggest this means Bill Gates somehow by himself created a good product in Windows is, I'd argue, wrong in a number of ways.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

PeZook wrote:Gameplay in the Ancient Past was wooden and repetitive. Seriously, consider the two "great old games" mentioned in this thread: TIE Fighter? "Memorize the mission or lose" TIE Fighter?

And of course Rebel Assault. Come on :D4
Hey, nobody said that curmudgeonly things have to be LOGICAL, did they?
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

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Crossroads Inc. wrote:We all have those little things that, despit our own age, can make us go:
"Damn whipper snapers don't know how good they have it, why back in MY DAY!"
Those little things that irk us to no end to see how they are 'these days'.

For me, I am a self admitted "Architect Curmudgeon", poo-pooing virtually all styles past WWII and think that bricks, stone and art-deco are the pinnacle of style.
I am also a bit of a Curmudgeon on Video games, recalling how "Back in my day" we didn't have all these fancy graphics, and how much work you had to do, why we didn't have an internet to read a walkthrough, we had to make our own!

So what are YOU a Curmudgeon about?
I'm a curmudgeon about pussy education systems and how they're making it easier and easier to graduate with increasingly worthless diplomas and degrees. By the time I have grandkids, a high school education will mean that you can dress yourself, and a bachelor's degree will mean that you can sign your own name.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Flagg »

I can't stand kids that play in the street and don't move when they see you driving their way. Fucking kids.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

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Alferd Packer wrote:I remember when cars didn't have CD players. You needed to hook up your discman to an adapter that went into your tapedeck. And God help you if your discman didn't have anti-skip buffering. You'd never be able to listen to the music except at stoplights.
Remembering old shit doesn't make you a curmudgeon. Thinking that those old things were better is what makes you a curmudgeon. Unless you're too young to have experienced the old days directly and are feeling nostalgic for them anyway, in which case you'd be a hipster.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Flagg »

Music was better in the 80's. Does that make me a hipster? Say yes only if you want me to kill myself. :lol:
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Col. Crackpot »

Flagg wrote:Music was better in the 80's. Does that make me a hipster? Say yes only if you want me to kill myself. :lol:
Only if you are listening to The Pet Shop Boys and Devo.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

Post by Flagg »

No. I like New Wave alot, but that's what I grew up listening to and I like it. That's not to say there aren't contemporary artists I like, especially The Strokes, but for the most part I like 80's and early 90's New Wave.
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Re: What are you a curmudgeon about?

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Ziggy Stardust wrote:Video games. I am vaguely nostalgic for the days when I needed 30 floppy disks to install "Tie Fighter." Hell, the golden age of PC gaming was something else. Anyone else remember "Rebel Assault"? That game was sweet.

In general, I feel like video games these days are much shorter and don't have as much replay value. Not that there aren't games I really like ... for example, the "Uncharted" trilogy is awesome, but each game can be beaten in a day or two, really.
Games have gotten longer, if anything. You were just awful at playing them.
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