Nostalgia

I can't even remember much of it but I have a baby and this book just sprang to mind

I used to be SO excited to get my new Highlights magazine in the mail each month! I loved the stickers I got with it, and I loved playing the fun games and reading the new stories and comics.

I used to also get their "Puzzle Buzz" magazines, which was their books full of fun different puzzles and games.

Fun fact: Highlights will be 80 this year.

Did you used to get or read the Highlights magazines? Or what magazine subscription did you have as a kid?

I seek them out as one might a hash dealer or a chapel or a walk-in clinic

An excerpt:

The Bay—where I sat on Santa’s knee, was fitted for my first expensive bra by Mrs. V (an actual corsetiere), and eye-rolled my way through a summer job at a pop-up estate silver counter—was dead. The department store was dead. E-commerce and the big-box store reign supreme.

I am, however, a bloody-minded woman, and I have cleaved unto my secret love of department stores with all the tenacity of a sticker on the bottom of a remaindered soap dispenser at Winners. It began, around 1975, with outings to Eaton’s in downtown Vancouver. There, I would watch glamorous women in uniforms (suits with gold buttons or ludicrous white lab coats) cosmetically transform my mother into a Terminal City Bianca Jagger before she handed over her Chargex to be rammed through a small, fierce machine. There were milliners and shoe salons and hairdressers and (Oh God) toys. And there were cafes for the occasional special lunch; in the modular, faux-nautical splendour of the Marine Room, even a bowl of mushroom soup tasted extravagant.

The department store was, to my idealistic child brain, the way the world should be: a technicolour organism made up of co-operative parts. When you were in one, the chaos beyond faded into a Muzak-sweet nothingness. In June 1976, on a trip to London, my parents dragged me to Harrods to try on duffle coats. Beyond the store’s hallowed walls, the city was both wilting in a heat wave and writhing with tourists and locals. I may as well have been on a space station.

cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/44600780

Nostalgia lane is a new board I made a few days a go for talking about childhood nostalgia. It can be about any subject that's personally nostalgic to you, the more obscure the better! Could even bring back a memory for someone else! I'm still working on adding new content to this page, but I'm looking forward to sharing in that vibe!

The glow-in-the-dark Wacky Wallwalker from Froot Loops. You’d throw it on the wall and it would slowly crawl down.

We’d eat straight sugar, turn off the lights, and throw sticky spiders at the wall.

And you probably have the song stuck in your head now.

Right now for me, and this may sound weird, but it is the Build A Bear strawberry scent you can get put in your plushie.

Not because I frequently went to the Build A Bear Workshop as a kid. I only recently discovered their strawberry scent as an adult. But the scent reminds me of when I was a kid and I would play with my Strawberry Shortcake toys and it had that sweet strawberry scent.

Also, vanilla is always a classic nostalgic for me as well.

But what about you? What's your favorite nostalgic scent?

From Tom Scott's newsletter:

"When stick figures fought" is the history of the Flash-based stick-fight animations that I remember from 20+ years ago. And I never knew this history! They were just a thing on the internet, an artifact passed by email or instant messenger.

An excerpt from the blog post:

For people of a certain age, who grew up online, Xiao Xiao and its clones were part of life. The series isn’t deep and has little to say: it’s just kung fu, firefights, blood and chaos. But it was the height of cool to its (mostly young) audience. It was also a gateway to Flash animation for many.