Things that featured prominantly in your childhood but which pretty much disappear without trace from your adult existence?

i dont even know the numberplate of my parents car, today

"ice cream trucks"

Oh yes! I remember buying an icecream every single frigging day during the summer. No wonder I was dragging too much weight around.

I collected fancy pens and bags.

..I wish I was still a kid sometimes. A lot of times. I miss my imagination telling me the stuff I did was ACTUAL AND REAL. *sigh*

something to do with chalk, says the urban myth...

i used to be able to identify cars, models of cars, very easily. i can't even drive at 24, and couldn't identify a car if it... erm, you get the picture.

When I was young there was a real fad for fancy notepaper and girls would trade sheets of the stuff and keep it in fancy folders. It seemed really stupid to me for years afterwards, and now that I'm involved with collectors and dealers and ephemera in a small way I'm really sorry I don't still have my collection of notepaper. In fifty years or so it would be worth cash money.

Other things I no longer do:
Tape things off the radio
Care about the number one single
Crave a pony (in fact I now find it bizarre to own an animal that can't even live at your house and you only see for a few hours a week, unless you're really, really lucky)
Put unframed posters on my wall
Read comics
Wear socks with sandals
Write my name on my books
Get excited about the day the grocery shopping happens. This used to be a huge deal when we were small. Mam would bring us to the supermarket and we would buy the food for the week, including biscuits and sweets and Coke (or Coke substitute), and then, as the week progressed, the Viscounts would disappear and all you'd be left with were digestive biscuits with Panda chocolate spread on them. Nowadays I can just buy sweets if I want them. Which is why I am a Fat Ass.

Which makes me think of those labels with your name stitched on. My god, I felt really dorky about that.

Also, pulling your socks up even if they would reach just under the knee. Somehow this became a really uncool thing to do from the age of about ten. (You had to leave'em around your ankles.) This is still the case, but only in my town, in all the other towns (in Belgium) the old custom remains. Very strange.

Are you me?

Other things:
Radiator grilles
Record players (something magical and nostalgic in a childlike way about playing records and not tapes or cds)
Automatic locking on car doors

An interest in the British Formula 3 championship is, oddly, what springs to my mind.

white dog poo (i used to see it all the time- disapeared from existence entirely)

ballet shoes

jodphurs

my cabin bed

hiding places

blankie

dolls with no hair/clothes/heads... dolls altogether

tree climbing

no fear

transformers

and

http://www.tomas-katz.com/images/HappyEater.jpg

(the badges, specifically)

(and everything accentmonkey said)

I took out a kayak on a lake in the Lake District this morning, and it reminded me of family vacations where we would take a canoe and kayaks and go to a lake and camp, and so I would spend a lot of time just floating around in a kayak in the middle of a lake, reading a book. I think I read Middlemarch that way.

just seemingly endless time to fuck about and not feel guilty about it

I don't know what I was reading but I feel like the hourglass figure and proportions (38-24-36?) came up a lot in my childhood, in adulthood... not at all.

― Lulu and Stormzy live back to back (ledge), Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

36-24-36

― Posts That Witness Madness (Tom D.), Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

... I think?

― Posts That Witness Madness (Tom D.), Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

― henry s, Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:28 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think you mean 42-39-56:

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Sunday, July 20, 2025 4:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Also, in Motley Crue's Bad Boy Boogie

We're innocent in every way
Like apple pie and Chevrolet
Sweeter pies with different shapes
38, 28, 38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBHpOQVLoTo

I was so obsessed with this game that I played it non-stop for almost an entire summer. My mother got so pissed she yanked it out of the shelf, took the console outside, and smashed it to pieces in front of me with a hammer.

i have now reached a life stage where i find your mom's behaviour highly relatable

I have never swum in a lake because (a) I have a beach not too far away (that I never use); and (b) swimming in freshwater lakes in Florida exposes you to brain-eating bacteria and to gators.

Polk Salad Annie
The brain eating bacteria got your granny

isn't that a Little Richard song

Depends on what you emphasize

read that as "fanny"

pre-internet, jokes and urban legends were spread by long distance truck drivers. the original information superhighway.

― fetter, Saturday, July 19, 2025 11:58 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

CB radio (not part of my childhood, but perhaps that of an older cohort) apparently was an unmoderated medium for this sort of communication. Then the internet opened to the wider public, and much of this chatter was preserved for the ages. Or at least until the server failed.

just seemingly endless time to fuck about and not feel guilty about it

Seriously the thing I miss the most about childhood.

read that as "fanny"

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, July 21, 2025 10:16 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

GARU G WAZ HERE

_just seemingly endless time to fuck about and not feel guilty about it_

Seriously the thing I miss the most about childhood.

the purpose of life imo

car conversations

Definitely video games. Used to play quite a lot and then after 16 or so completely stopped.

I would say TV too. I do v little streaming, but that way of consuming TV, just hours sat in front of the box watching news, soaps, just anything, all gone.

years on coins

speaking of coins, having to make change and counting coins.

Video games for me to.
Tab soda

I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you anything different. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Orange soda for me. While I played games on my computer, slowly going through that 2L. So much time.

Speaking of computer games, all those weird tricks you had to go through to get some games working under DOS in the early 90s (boot disks which loaded just the bare minimum of drivers into memory so you had enough of the 640k available for whatever game you wanted to play, setting up either EMS or XMS memory, etc.). How I somehow became an expert at this pre-internet seems inexplicable to me now.

Haven't had Findus Crispy Pancakes in a while, I'll have to get some in.

Sainsbury's didn't have any, even though they had plenty of their woeful Stamford Street microwave meals. I'll try the Co-Op tomorrow.

The last time I found them it was in Morrison, but unless anything has changed since then (about 5 years ago) they were garbage - barely any fillings.

That's how I remember them being in the 80s.

Coors Cutter

your body know the difference but your mouth don't know

gag and joke shop items... rubber chickens, arrow-thru-the-head, switchblade combs

God, yes. I used to get the Johnson Smith Catalog in the mail. Ordering from there was always a big event in my life. Of course many gags/tricks turned out not to be quite as amazing in real life as they looked in the catalog, but it never stopped me from getting my hopes up just as much the next time.

Planets in our solar system
Ancient Rome
Buying and raising Sea Monkeys
Making a point of seeing particular rock videos
Keeping/breaking commandments
Wondering about sexual orientation

Buying MAD magazines monthly (largely quit age 15-16)

black light posters - they used to have a big selection at Spencer's in my local mall (1980s edition)

Anticipating when MTV becomes AlTV for a day

incredibly horny television commercials

Did adults sing along to TV theme songs in the past? Now there are fewer to see if they do.

I have zealously hoarded the big nerdy picture books I liked when I was a child. Like Doring-Kindersley "If you lived in ancient Mesopotamia" type shiz.

Whenever I see them in the library's used book sale I snag them.

https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images3/1/0613/30/lot-30-dk-eyewitness-book-dorling_1_5431c865c207fab67c3013c110e23b0d.jpg.

These ^ plus the Biesty cross-section books, all of David Macaulay (Pyramid, Castle, Cathedral). I have like nine atlases and a concise encyclopedia from 1988.

I had earnestly hoped that my children would love them as I did, and neither has the slightest interest. Because internet, duh. Kids these days can get all their urgently needed facts about the mound-builders of Cahokia from Wikipedia. Hmph.

The concept of counting sheep in your sleep

Travelers checks
VHS release dates
Airphones
Call waiting

Kids these days can get all their urgently needed facts about the mound-builders of Cahokia from Wikipedia.

Heh as I'd said upthread reading encyclopedias was one of mine, but tbh now I just go down wikipedia rabbit holes so I guess it hasnt really gone away!

Encarta

a bicycle

Magic Fingers

Water Beds, for that matter

Kids these days can get all their urgently needed facts about the mound-builders of Cahokia from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia demolished whole genres of books. I used to have a bunch of official and unofficial X-Files episode guides that gave summaries and behind-the-scenes info. Or all those books that simply compiled Billboard chart positions. The magazine I read about collectible card games used to devote a third of the back pages to simply listing the text and prices of Magic the Gathering cards.

Did adults sing along to TV theme songs in the past? Now there are fewer to see if they do.

I'm struggling to think of any show I've watched in the last decade or so whose theme isn't an instrumental or needle drop. It's standard still in anime to have an original opening song that pertains to the premise or theme of the show, but I don't know of any live action Western show with a relevant original song akin to Welcome Back, Kotter or Gilligan's Island.

many xxxps but holy shit ENBB thank you for validating me regarding freshwater weeds.

When I was 9 or 10, my older brother and I went out on a tiny pond in lifejackets, and he rocked the boat and I fell into the very shallow pond, rife with weeds. I turned into a ball and started screaming. I couldn’t stop screaming, I was so afraid! People pulled their cars over, my mom came to get us, and when they yelled at me if I was OK I could only yell “THE WEEDS! THE WEEDS!” and all adults and my brother abandoned me in embarrassment and disgust. Eventually I swam to shore, wading through a tonne of disgusting green growth, and was roundly mocked for years afterward. Fuck freshwater weeds.

I can and do swim in lakes, but I still am afraid of weeds, and also unseen rocks jutting out (I’m terrified of banging my ankle against a knifey rock and losing a foot to subsequent amputation), so generally I just book it out to the deep water before enjoying myself.

Just last April I swam in Waikiki, and there were beautiful turtles, and I put on my goggles to peek, and saw a harmless round rock mere inches away from where I’d been treading water, and I screamed in horror and swam to shore. Water is weird! I’m a strong swimmer and have spent much of my life in the ocean, idk, some strange phobias still persist

I would be 100% onboard with having theme songs with premise-recapping lyrics for prestige tv.

Imagine Breaking Bad like "Here's the story... of a man named Walter..."

"It's Westworld, where nothing can go worng..."

I swam in a lake an hour ago, as part of this wild swimming trip I signed up for. As it was the first day, they kept us in the shallows to get us used to the water and assess our abilities. Can confirm it was very weedy and sort of muddy-smelling.

I'll try the Co-Op tomorrow.

They didn't have them in there either. So I guess that's an indicator of (lack of) quality.

I don't miss the shadow of nuclear war, but I do miss the shadow of World War II. It still suffused so much of seventies childhood, before the reckoning with Vietnam took hold. Building models of Sherman tanks and spitfires, playing with surplus gear, watching Midway, Bridge Too Far, Hogan's Hero's, trying to understand the older generations' desire for peace and quiet and their suspicion of VW's and Hondas. Not even noticing the tighter Overton Window. The doc Marwencol really captured how that shadow played out in Gen X subconscious.

Caring a lot about various award shows, and seeing them as dominant arbiters of both quality and importance

Trading belongings with other people

Thinking about people in a social hierarchy of how cool they are

In the spirit of the original post, scorpions

I would be 100% onboard with having theme songs with premise-recapping lyrics for prestige tv.

Imagine Breaking Bad like "Here's the story... of a man named Walter..."

"It's Westworld, where nothing can go worng..."

― je ne sequoia (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, July 22, 2025 11:00 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

there is one guy who tried to re-do a bunch of TV themes this way, all original music too

https://hotdad.bandcamp.com/album/tv

of course the joke is very few of the lyrics are accurate, I think he admitted he would just read the wikipedia summary once and tried to recall the premise through memory, still the songs are remarkably catchy

always enjoyed this sort of thing:

https://i.redd.it/yukwhvu6ol4f1.gif