I’m going to start saying that when asked about my birth year. “The late 1900s”
“Before the dawn of the millennium, when the Earth was young.”
In the before before times…
Before the before times (given that the before times are 2019 and earlier
Ah that’s what you wrote
Mid 80s for me, fuck, im old
Better than the mid 1900’s.
I come from a time when our telephones were teathered to the wall and had no screens or apps at all. Later on, there were machines that would answer the phone and let someone record a message if no one was home.
If you wanted to watch something that wasn’t a movie or recording, you had to pick one of the options someone else had picked, and if you missed the time, you just missed it until someone decided it was time to play it again (at a different specific time you could miss).
And if you did record something, you’d have to seek through the recording to find the start of it.
Movie rentals involved going to a physical store and grabbing physical media with the content on it. If too many people wanted to rent it at a time, there just wouldn’t be enough and the later ones would have to pick something else to watch. Just going to one of these rental places was a borderline magical experience full of wonder and possibility. Oh and it was considered very rude if you rented a movie but didn’t seek it back to the beginning for the next person (which you’d have to physically return to the place with the physical media or you’d get charged late fees).
And even though everyone’s name, address, and phone number were published in regional “phone books”, the closest thing to phone scams you’d (normally) see were prank phone calls, which were done for laughs rather than profit (albeit sometimes maliciously).
Christians actually cared about being good people rather than thinking they can somehow be victims of an apocalypse they are trying to make happen and teleport to heaven because they’ve said the required amount of hail Marys and took advantage of the “just confess the horrible shit before it die and you’re forgiven” loophole (and probably not thinking about what happens if the rapture ends up happening too quickly for them to confess their latest batch of sins). Actually, the crazy ones might have been around then, too, they just weren’t so fucking loud back then.
That second millennium was something else, I tell you what. You third millennium kids won’t ever understand.
God damn it… Just reading this feels like a gut punch!
A few years ago, I started a sentence in my class with “When I was born”. A student instantly chimed in and said “What in the 19’s?” And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19’s. It still haunts me.
The scary part is that this comic is 15 years old.
Updated hover text: “I’m teaching every 22-year-old relative to say this, and every 28-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US two and a half decades ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 32 next year.”
It does depend what we’re talking about. The geology of Himalaya or computer technology? One of these things didn’t change much in the last forty years.
Thete are som good stuff from before 1990s comcerning computers.
I mean, tbf that was admittedly last millennium.
Over a quarter century ago!
God I feel old.
TBF, the veracity of the information is relatively field dependent. Structural engineering? Yeah, probably still as relevant as the day it was published… Quantum computing or astrobiology theory? Far more likely to be superseded or debunked.
I want to see AI papers compared to today, we basically tore the guts out of everything, I don’t even think most of Minsky is applicable anymore (perceptrons particularly have been replaced with vector meshes from word2vec).
Statistical modeling and machine learning theory goes back several decades. I’m not sure LLM’s even use new algorithms. They may just apply various techniques that improve the performance and accuracy of pre-existing algorithms.
I have a backpack that’s over a quarter of a century old. Which I got new, and have been using actively for that time. Great fucking backpack.
Not yet, it won’t be over a quarter century ago for 2 more years.
My dad told me recently, when he started practicing medicine the old people with heart failures he was treating were often born in the late 1800s, but now those are all dead, and the people he’s treating are more likely to have a birth years that are around 1940-1950. Which is also starting to become uncomfortably close to his own, 1960.
Pro Tip for GenXer’s: There is a point in life when you need to pick a Doctor that you like enough to die on. That will be the doctor that will take you through the last years of your life. And treat all those little miserable ailments like high blood pressure or urinary issues. Long term medical care, while it’s often something that might not kill you outright, It will demand a lot of monitoring and medication to treat.
A given person’s definition of “old” is usually about 15 years older than they are. My boss is 65 and calls 70 year olds “young”.
Cause as you get older, you realize that a lot of the hype about people being “old” is manufactured. I’m closing in on 30 and I’m squarely in a zone I thought was “old” when I was 18. But I feel like I still have my whole life ahead of me. And despite a lot of fear mongering, I still feel healthy and ready for anything.
And although I definitely feel like 45 is pretty old, I know that when my parents were that age they were scoffing and telling me “45 is not that old”. I’m sure when I’m 60 I’ll be looking at retirement and think about how it’s actually not too bad to be 60 and it’s the 80 year olds that are really old.
around 30 is the first time I felt like an adult. a person of my own. gave me great confidence to realize hey, I’m 30, I don’t have to deal with bullshit anymore. it’s a huge weight off my shoulders.
I think 60 is the point when you realize you are actually starting to get old. You begin to realize that you really can’t do the things you used to do. And the things you still do - you do slower and for not as long. Your hair is grey or starts falling out quite noticeably. Your body actually hurts just getting up in the morning. You go to bed earlier. Maybe you fall down because your balance wasn’t as good anymore. Possibly a friend or peer dies from a heat attack. A Grandchild or two happens. AARP, (American Association of Retired People), starts sending you letters.
You are now truly and officially old.
i mean my parents are 50 at this point and they don’t feel that old, they’re starting to get grey hairs but other than that? meh
we live in an era where people are still working and feeling fairly energetic at 70, it’s kind of insane to think about
Being 30 myself all I can say is: you poor fool
When I started using dating apps I found 24 year olds too old. I still have that impression memorized but it’s wild.
Used to be a rule of thumb that the lower limit for dating was half your age + 7. Dunno if that’s still a thing.
Welp, I don’t know when from the memory is, but I do vividly remember thinking about how damn old those 14/15 year old 9th graders are. Could be 1st grade.
Basically as if the life ended at 20, and they were soon to retire.
I remember fearing high school kids. I wasn’t even sure how old they were, just that high school was a jungle and any kid who went to high school was dangerous.
Oh yeah. There were these 2 older neighbours 2 grades above me in primary school who once protected me from bullying in school. They were practically adults in my head, but actually I was 6-7 and they were 8-9.
Somehow it really ended…
With one parent who turned 80 this year and the second in their late 70s, I’ve realized there’s a difference between “elderly” and “old.” A lot of people equate the two. I think “old” always started in one’s 70s to me, even as a kid. “Elderly,” however, is not based on a number but on a physical state of being.
My dad is elderly. He’s frail and struggling to move around much. It’s hard to watch and it’s been going on and worsening for a few years now. My mom, despite being only 3 years younger, is not at all elderly. She has more energy and vivacity than many people over 20 years her junior (hell I’m in my 30s and she can do loops around me, but I got the chronic illness genes that she didn’t have). Technically, she’s old. But no one who knows her would think of her as “elderly.”
i honestly feel like a lot of people just have this idea of “old = elderly” so ingrained in their minds that when they reach 50 they simply give up, they’re supposed to be getting elderly so they can’t try to stay active any longer.
Yeah sure, everybody has different definitions and all but calling 70 year olds as young is straight up lunatic.
I would of freaked him out. I had a heart attack when I was 36.
You always have folks who just wanna show off 😊
From the last millennium
I mean, sure, fair, it IS late 1900’s, but…
late 1900s*
This is just intentionally phrased poorly to create a rise out of people. It’s like referring to water as “dihydrogen monoxide”.
How so? I would certainly call something from 1894 to be from the "late 1800s’ or late 19th century. I mean, we’re a quarter of the way through this century, at some point it turns into history.
late 1800s*
Because people don’t use that terminology when referring to a time period within a majority of living people’s lifetime.
Sure they do. I’m sure the century cutoff helps too.
If someone one would refer to the 1920s as “the early 1900s” cause it’s over 100 years ago it follows logically to call other parts of the 1900s the mid and late period.
Just because people can doesn’t mean people do. We have terminology for the time periods through the 1900s that have been in use for so long that people just don’t use that type of terminology. Particularly because it paints it in a misleading light, as if it were ancient history. People typically just refer to those periods as “the 80s” or “the 90s”.
Referring to those time periods with terminology we use for ancient history when we have far more frequently used terminology is a deliberate choice to make the time periods feel like ancient history. (Barring language barriers, of course)
It feels like you’re just trying to be contrarian. If you honestly believe it’s commonly used to refer to something so recent, then please provide evidence of people using that to refer to the 90s often. Otherwise you’re just relying on “I can imagine it, so it must be true”.
This may be a “loanword” from the student’s native language. In Swedish, they use “1900-talet” (1900s) instead of “twentieth century”
I put this on an unlabeled squirt bottle once at work. It was wrong to do because technically it’s an OSHA violation for being improperly labeled because it was just in sharpie and not a standard label. But it was night shift I was bored and the bottle was already unlabeled so it was already out of compliance. Why not write on it?
A week or so later I heard people talking about this squirt bottle that said dihydrogen monoxide. Two safety guys were there so I didn’t take credit for my shenanigans based on the reception not being great.
I said I think it’s just water, but the chemical name. Ya know? Nope, they didn’t get it. The kind of doubled down and started talking about things in that link because they “researched the name” and it was actually harmful.
It was a strange experience.
The deadliest chemical
It seems awkward to me to refer to the previous century that way until you’re at least halfway through the next century. Even then, that’s pushing it. Basically I think that way of referring to an era implies you’re over, or at least fairly close to, 100 years away from it.
Students are often awkward
Not to mention they could be on the spectrum. I could see a buddy of mine phrasing this question in this exact manner
Early 2000’s doesn’t sound odd at all though.
Because that’s referring the 2000’s decade. In terms of centuries, I would say we are still in the early 2000’s and that does feel odd to say.
I rather meant how it sounds. It’s in the “hundreds”.
Two thousands.
Twenty hundreds.“Early twenty hundreds” does kind of make it sound like we live in 2224 instead while “early two thousands” sounds like 2002.
I could have written it better.Well you also wouldn’t say ten hundreds for the 1000’s. I think it’s just a quirk of the being the first century in a millennia.
the 2000s* decade
early 2000s*
Early 2000s*
I mean if your life started in 2005 and you didnt live through any of the 20th century, calling it the late 1900s seems totally reasonablr. You werent there when people were living through the “90s”, to you its just another bygone era that people speak about in waya you’ll never be able to relate to.
I feel old and I wasn’t even born on the 1900s
Get off my lawn, young’n.
What a strange and dumb question.
Or, you know, not real.
This is a perfectly acceptable question in a science course. Just because you don’t have the experience, knowledge, or, barring those two, even just the imagination to understand how a question might apply doesn’t make it strange or dumb. It does speak volumes about you, though.
Is it though? I definitely had teachers in middle/high school with oddball requirements like “only physical books more than 10 years old are valid sources”. Total nonsense but it does happen. College is a place where you are meant to have these bad assumptions challenged and corrected. Presumably after a response they’ll be better for it.
Nothing ever happens.
Isn’t this an actual thing? Pretty sure I was told by some instructor not to use references older than a decade or two. Unless the subject is very elementary older sources are more likely to be obsolete
Depends on the subject. Historians use a lot older materials more regularly for obvious reasons.
And even then it’s probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.
If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.
Well said. :)
Ofc
OOoooooOOOOOoooOOO time keeps moving FOOOooooOOOooOOORWARD!
OMG
i dont take much stock in calendars these days. too painful
