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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1297 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Robin Sloan: Alien signals

Counterpoint: those of us who grew up in the Wasteland had to drive an hour to browse a Sam Goody and hearing the new Soundgarden required two drives, a prepayment and five weeks. New music was available from Columbia House and the Barnes & Noble catalog, which was 98% books, but which would sell you Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on tape for $9.99 which is the first time you ever heard any because you lived in a place that had Country and Western on the radio. We got desperate enough to drive nineteen fucking hours to see Jesus Jones in concert because otherwise it's all Oak Ridge Boys. Gaming? Whelp, there's a coin-op arcade permanently five years behind Arizona and Colorado (because the only thing you ever get is the machines that aren't hip anymore) and you could write away to play Mafia which awards you a block and you try to take over your neighborhood and it's three weeks between turns and oopsie looks like you found out about that right about the time it went under. Or Dungeons and Dragons vs. the exact same three other people who have ever heard of Dungeons & Dragons, of course.

Usually it played against the flashing lights of I-696, a Death Star trench of a highway near Detroit; otherworldly.

FUCK OFF. I had a bootleg of Brian Eno's Music for Airports from one of my mother's more shamanistic students from outside the Hinterlands and that was all that was available. Fashion was the Sears Catalog and the rich kids bringing back Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts from the vacations you didn't get to go on.

There's a real "things were cooler when you had to work a little harder to get what you wanted" vibe here and you know what? if your life regularly involved highways outside of Detroit you were playing teenage life on Story Mode.

I had an argument about r/atheism a while back. I was not a fan. My opponent made the point that, having grown up in rural Utah, it would have been FUCKING AMAZING to be able to communicate with other people who weren't Mormon polygamists. Changed my mind completely; it hadn't occurred to me what an absolute fucking godsend it would be to be so much as pen pals with humans who don't stop being your friend because you won't join them at YoungLife.