I missed a flight once due to delayed connections. I went to the help desk, and in front of me, a rich guy was arguing with the company employee. He was rude and frustrated and left angry, having failed to get the upgrade or whatever he’d wanted. I was next in the queue and offered an empathetic smile and rolling of eyes, then politely explained my situation.

The clerk was clearly still pissed at the previous interaction and didn’t crack a smile but simply listened, then slid me over a new ticket for the next flight and winked. I thanked him and scuttled off. I decided to find a place to charge my phone and only then inspected the ticket to confirm how long I had until boarding.

It turns out he’d upgraded me to business class and given me full access to the lounge area where I could charge my phone in comfort and have all the free booze and snacks I want.

Definitely. I’m pushing 50 and know that, had games been more sophisticated, realistic, and able to be played online in my teens, I’d have struggled not to let that consume me. However, as it happened, the allure of gigs, beer, nights out, and girls didn’t really have much competition with the likes of Street Fighter 2.

On one hand, I definitely feel I’ve missed out on that gaming experience and to this day don’t have that shared interest that my younger colleagues have with each other. On the other, I see younger guys at work who are just regular dudes but have no family, friends, or partners outside work or their online world. And by younger, I mean pushing 40. We’re talking about decades where their free time has been spent mostly gaming.

To each their own—please don’t get prickly if you feel seen or think I’m being condescending. I can absolutely see how that can happen, and if you’re cool with that, then that’s all that matters. It’s just not the way I personally would want to live from my current perspective, although I know that had I been born a decade later, I’d probably be in the same boat.

I take your point. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that a lot of games were either straight-up arcade conversions or derivatives. There are a few decent YouTube channels from former artists and coders that talk about the dev process. By today’s standards it was insanely restrictive and the teams were comparatively tiny. True game development was just at such an early stage then, which I guess is partly the point you’re making.

You’re spot on, although, to be fair Autistic traits aren’t quite the enigma they once were. These days it feels like being neurotypical is the outlier.

I mean, they took the ST as far as it could go graphically. To this day there are people trying to mod fully expanded STEs so it’ll run something close to Doom, but really I feel they just couldn’t cut it. 8mhz and a display limited to 16 colours (without special sync tricks) from a pallette of 512/4096 (depending on which machine you had) was a bit of a bottleneck. There’s proto-open world games like Hunter, but in general side/vertical scrolling shot-em-ups was pretty much it’s bag, and games like Turrican, Killing Gameshow and Xenon 2 all pushed the limits of what could be done as far as I recall.

Yep, £20.05 in my local shop for 20 Regal King-size.

Regarding lawns, I think it’s the feeling of accomplishment when you’ve mowed them that’s the kicker. A wild garden can look better, but there’s something about the smugness of having a freshly cut lawn that gives you a slightly virtuous buzz.

I had an Atari ST and, in a childish and tribalistic way, hated the Amiga - although looking back it was clearly superior by almost every metric! I betrayed my childhood self and got one a few years back. The games are generally smoother and sound better, but the nostalgia itch is only truly scratched when I power up the ST.

Cigarettes. Of course, there were other more pressing reasons to quit, but saving nearly £20 a packet helped.

Haha

Doubtful, I’m 49!

Eh… What?! Certainly remember pre-optical mice, but replacing the balls with eggs was surely not a thing?

She was an alcoholic with border-line personality disorder, and as a naive and lonely young Scotsman I foolishly mistook her for a bright girl with a quirky personality who liked a drink and had occasional violent moodswings. Took way too long to realise what the gravity of her condition meant. I was emotionally inexperienced and trusting. And I paid the price.

On the bright side, when i came out of that relationship and healed I met someone well-balanced and kind, who is now my wife. I’m so grateful for the love i now have and the relative stability of my life, and in a weird way I’m glad I went through what I did with my ex, as it makes me appreciate what I now have.

That’s wild. So you don’t particularly care for the show, but it was presumably the theme for your wedding as well? Or was this a previous marriage?

Theres a guy on insta who dresses in a Union Jack suit and goes to right-wing areas in the UK and proceeds to gently explains to bigots how ridiculous their beliefs are. They think he’s an ally and he talks like them, but slowly drops truth bombs on them. You can see them blue-screening in real-time. It’s wonderful.

Probably the wrong place to ask, mate. Take the advice here and you’ll likely be stuck tinkering with a Linux distro while your friends are online having fun. I’m kidding, but even as a non-gamer, it seems a £400–£500 PS5 is a better gaming machine than a new PC at the same price. You just plug it in and play, without worrying about Windows, drivers, graphics settings, or fixing things when they go wrong.

A PC is brilliant if you want to learn coding, make games, or play heavily modded Minecraft, but if the main goal is just to have fun playing games, the PS5 is the better value.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing a PC if that’s what you want, but people on the internet often recommend what they enjoy rather than what’s the best fit for the person asking.

It really has, hasn’t it? Also, people seem a bit shittier than when I joined a few years back. Inevitable, I guess, but despite the low numbers I liked the fact that people mostly behaved liked grown-ups.

I’d actually like to, even though it’s awful. There were still some niche subs I enjoyed, but like many, I got randomly banned from a sub, and my naive assumption that I could just use another old throwaway account, like back in the day, apparently made things worse, and now I’m permabanned.

At first, I played cat-and-mouse with VPNs, private browsing, etc., but they’re weirdly sophisticated once their bots and mods have marked your card, it seems, and each new account would always get banned for ‘ban evasion’.

Its a tool, thats frequently wrong and I’m pretty much against it… but no, I don’t disregard people who use it and I have used it plenty at work for menial tasks.

Being immune to the vagaries of pop culture and being pleasantly baffled when celebs make the news and you have no fucking idea who they are.

It’s also kind of wild because a lot of the really, really famous young people look entirely the opposite of the super-good-looking A-listers of the past. Guess its great that the younger generation seem less superficial than we were, but my programming struggles to process it when I see some pasty, odd looking dweeb and find out they’re outstreamng the Beatles or whatever.