Thread 82122358

What were the people age16-22 doing in 80s/90s in their free time before internet access was widespread/they just didn't use it?
>Hobbies
Compared to a modern person, especially a 4chan loser that's HOURS of bonus time during the day to do anything instead of sitting in front of your PC so what kind of hobby could possibly take up 3-8 out of your day?

>>82122358 (OP)
Hangout with friends and fuck around. Meet girls, have sex. Go to arcades, go bowling, go to bars, go to concerts. Basically just do things where you spend time around other people. The internet fucked everything up.

>>82122373
pre-2010+ internet was literally one of the best things to happen to the world

>>82122378
It was pretty good. I guess maybe social media and smartphones ruined everything.

in jr high i looked at a comic about lolis graduating highschool and killing themselves on a stage in graduation

CAPTCHA thawr

>>82122358 (OP)
>so what kind of hobby could possibly take up 3-8 out of your day?
Sitting in front of the television obviously.

>>82122358 (OP)
My dad loved to go fishing with his friends as a teen and build electronics stuff

>>82122396
What was the name of that comic?

>>82122358 (OP)
Shopping malls. Movie theaters. Skate parks. Cruising. Video games. Local punk techno shows. House parties. Watch TV. Read a book. Go record diving. Listen to a couple records in the store. Buy a couple albums, bring em home, listen to them some more. Cocaine, poppers, weed. It was pretty easy to keep yourself entertained in the 90s.

>>82122358 (OP)
>What were the people age16-22 doing in 80s/90s in their free time before internet access was widespread
Well I was what was known as a nerd, so I had nerdy hobbies like painting Dungeons & Dragons miniatures and building model kits. I also read a lot more, and I'd spend a lot of time in used bookstores, browsing through stacks of old paperbacks, mostly science fiction and sword and sorcery stuff.

In the 80s gaming consoles sucked and were outrageously expensive, so if you wanted to play videogames you had to get on your bicycle and ride down to the arcade. The games cost a quarter, which coincidentally was the same price as a chocolate bar or a bag of chips. These games were designed to kill you off as quickly as possible so you had to put in another quarter and start over. I always ran out of money before I got any good at these games, and I didn't master any of them until decades later when MAME was a thing and I could play them for free on my computer often using cheat codes like Infinite Lives.

To fill up the rest of our free time we had this thing called "hanging out", which was where you were with a group of your friends but you weren't actually doing anything. Popular places to hang out included the food court at the mall, the arcade, and the parking lot at 7-11. We also used to hang out in parks sometimes, but only after dark. Sometimes we'd all hang out at a friend's house, usually the friend who's parents house had a rec room in the basement. A popular thing to do in rec rooms was rent a bunch of movies on VHS tapes from the local video store and watch them together. Even nerds hung out together, because before the internet it was unbearably lonely and boring to sit at home by yourself for too long. Like really, you have no idea how awful that was.

>>82122358 (OP)
>people age16-22 doing in 80s/90s
I'm not that old, those are proper gen X but we didn't get internet at home until 2002 and we weren't exactly super late adopters of it either. Early adopters of the internet or even of home computers was usually people who worked in STEM, usually as proper licensed engineers.
Around 1999 where I lived there was maybe 1 in 5 kids who had the internet at home.

Anyways in no particular order
>sports (either organized or just kids playing whatever on a field or on the streets)
>reading, lots of going to malls and bookstores just to read the monthly magazines without having to pay for them. Lots of time spent in libraries as well obviously, certainly for me. Re-reading old comic books, collecting new and old comic books, buying magazines about comic book collection, etc.
>lots of time spent in front of the TV as besides the radio it was the only way to get real-time news. Also because if you missed a TV when it aired it was gone until rerun season or it was gone for good. TV was a lot more of a weekly ritual
>card games, starting with of course MtG it spiraled out to anime series like pokemon yu gi oh sakura cardcaptor
>RPG board games, like the classic Dungeons & Dragons though I never got into that.
>Watching other people play video games at arcades after you ran out of quarters
>lots of wandering around on bikes and trying to kill boredom in the worst ways like throwing apples at cars, dropping things off over highway overpasses, setting fires here and there, pushing your friend in a shopping cart down a hill, etc.
>drugs; weed still being illegal and le cool rebel thing to do, every other gamer dude and RPG nerd and music autist having shrooms, not having to worry about if ecstasy pills had fentanyl in them
>small comfy but chaotic punk shows, happy hardcore raves, giant mainstream nu-metal bands fresh off of MTV, goth stores everywhere
>building plastic models

>>82122373
>>82122378
>>82122391
you could still go to bowling alleys and arcades and all that while still meeting girls on myspace and chat rooms, we had very early rudimentary social media back in the day but because The Internet was this thing that lived on The Computer and nowhere else we had the best of both worlds and knew how to keep that and our IRL lives separated well enough

>>82122603
>The games cost a quarter, which coincidentally was the same price as a chocolate bar or a bag of chips.
One of the most fun things as a kid was going to the movies for exactly $4.50 and having two quarters leftover to play at their arcade cabinets for 15 minutes or whatever until the movie started.