Things you'll have to explain to your kids.

"What were newspapers daddy?"

"Well, see kiddo. Back before we all had phones we could carry in our pocket and before news was just assholes yelling at each other, these companies printed out books explaining what happened yesterday and sent to stores for you to buy them."

"Why?"

"Don't push it, kid."

TV's that aren't flat.

Cows with only one head.

edited 15th Mar '11 5:22:59 PM by HungryJoe

Typewriters

Record players

Cable TV you had to turn with a dial

"What's a PS 3?"

"Clean water? What is that?"

"What's a..."God"?"

Life before computers.

Life before common access to the Internet.

Life before microwaves.

Life before cell phones.

Life before Bluetooth.

Life before cordless phones.

Life before remote controls for everything.

Life before Compact Discs.

What a toaster oven is, what casette tapes are, what an LP record is, and what a carburetor is.

What snow is (we don't get that here in Hawaii).

You don't think the future will have toasters?

Life Before The Internet can be explained here.

Mobile phones used to be the size of your hand.

Mobile phones.

Buttons.

Computers and the original internet, most likely.

"What were arcades, daddy?"

"Well, back in the day before the internet people would go to these places to hang out together and play video games. It was like X-box live but more civil because you had the option to punch griefers in the face."

Why I'm actually a time paradox half brother to them. Oh, and that babies come from meteors[1].

Life before Sat Navs.

Why they were conceived, either by accident or intent.

I want Malk to be my father...

Malk?

Malkavian.

It's going to be difficult.

You see, I have a sister who is 10 years younger than me, and explaining some of the older stuffs to her these days is already hard. Especially when she is exactly what I imagined a Valley Girl would be like when she was a kid.

The likeliness is that she's asking because she needs to know and doesn't feel she can ask anyone else. It's important that we help them.

My younger brother would ask me everything about puberty, often without realising it. Usually this was fine, I'd much rather he know than not no matter how uncomfortable the topic can be. Except this one time, he asked me why when he woke up his pants were wet but that he definitely didn't wet himself - at dinner, with my parents.

I'm so happy though that I could be there for him and that he felt comfortable and trusting enough to ask me. My parents were often quite prudent when it came to such matters, my mum would often walk out the room if I asked her to avoid said conversations. As a result I was the first one to know when he had his first girlfriend, lost his virginity and tried his first spliff. It meant I could better inform him of the consequences and take care of him if there were any.

edited 16th Mar '11 12:03:25 AM by KingFriday

My mom is much closer to my sis when it comes to such things as growing up. Which is probably for the best, for I've grown up a rather unbalanced kid, by Western standard anyway.

Analog television. Adjusting the antenna to make the picture less fuzzy, getting only static on channels with no broadcast, etc.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if static/snow to denote "no signal" becomes one of those things that remains "memetic" (for lack of a better word) long after it's gone, like the idea of "dialing" a telephone.

You know this begs the question, what are the chances any hypothetical children will care about these outdated technologies? They won't interact with them outside of old fiction and would have very little reason to care.

@Alkthash - Do you mean the kind of old fiction that makes up about half this wiki? Presumably people will carry on the tradition of being interested in that.

On a more downbeat note, explaining how it took the world so long to do anything about climate change is going to be a tough one.

Why we redial a number on a keypad.