A time when screen savers were white pixels accelerating towards your face. When all computers were the color of dingy pit stains. When de-crumbing your ball mouse was common practice. A time when Netscape chaperoned you through your web journeys.
As a miscreant, whenever I was taken to an office supply store I would scuttle off to the computer section. Grinning wildly, hands barely reaching the keyboard, I would change the display computers' screen savers. Lord knows how many possible computer sales were botched when, in the middle of a sales pitch, the proclamation of "FARTS!!!" began to glide across the screen.
Unbeknownst to most students at the time, Mrs. Barnett's fourth grade class was the world leader in illegal poaching. Every day from 11:30 - 12:45 countless animals had their dwellings encroached upon by settlers, only to be greeted by a swift death. Crouched over my canoe, staring into the murky waters of the mighty Amazon, I waited with trident in hand. Unable to resist, Joey went for what was assuredly a lazy moving Garr. It was a soggy log. I caught a wild jungle carp. Sara, her body falling into the river, had stabbed an electric eel.
One thing is fore sure, if you stab it, you gotta eat it.
Meanwhile, 5,000 miles northwest, Timothy had just killed the last remaining Bison at Chimney Rock as he desperately tried to feed his daughter "Butt" who was slowly dying of dysentery. Next time he knew not to go with meager portions and grueling pace.
Fun fact, the lead gamer designer at MECC (the studio behind Amazon, Oregon and Yukon Trail) was actually the mustached guy from Jumanji.
In the school you must be, from the hours of eight til' three!
As a preteen, when I got home from school, only one noise could satisfy my insatiable social lust.
Good luck trying to sneak online at night.
The reason that our generation has retained so very little of their junior high education is to be blamed on AOL instant messenger. My buddy list took up half my hard drive. Directly after school it was just the kids who got picked up by their parents and conversations were stale. Four thirty had the kids who rode the bus signing on. And by five o'clock the athletes and after school kids showed up. Come dinner time I had so many chat windows open, that the blend of slamming doors, bells chiming and hundreds of blinking blue tabs resembled Apollo 13's cockpit.
Uhhh Houston... ASL?
Between consuming pink syrup, being exposed to Magic Cards and staring at a computer screen for 3/4 of my adolescence it's no wonder that my brain constantly plays the theme song to Crash Bandicoot.
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