Goodbye Vox! *sniff, sniff*

NOTE: This was a post over on Vox that I’ve exported over since the service is shutting down.

Tomorrow’s the last day you are allowed to post anything on Vox, but this will be my final post here.  I’m planning to keep up my writing over at http://rossotron.com and hope folks will continue to stop by over there.  Everyone who has sent me posts or comments with their new blog addresses have had their new sites bookmarked and I’m adding everyone to my RSS feeds, WordPress Subscriptions, and whatnot.

I started a blog back in March 2002 on a site called Diaryland, after a friend of mine started writing there [edit: wow, I just checked and the content is still over there! Crazy…] When I transferred my blog to a self-hosted MovableType installation in 2004, I hand-copied and pasted all my entries over to the new blog.  That was fun for a time, but I didn’t really have anyone reading my blog there, since it wasn’t publicized in any way and I didn’t really go through any effort to spread the word.

Things got a whole lot easier and a whole lot more fun when I joined Vox in early 2007, and started adding people to my Vox neighborhood.  Suddenly there was a whole community of people who were warm, kind, thoughtful and thought-provoking, all of whom seemed ready to extend a welcoming embrace to new Vox members.  I posted 370 entries in the last 10 months of 2007 (about 8 posts a week), and made some lasting friendships that I value dearly.  Although my posting activity declined in the following years, I became a more active participant in other people’s blogs and comment-threads, and love that even years later, I can go back and read some of those threads and get as much enjoyment and entertainment out of them as I did the first time I participated in those dialogues.  One of my favorites, looking back, is “If Real Life Were Like Vox” – definitely brings back memories of all the good times the folks in my ‘hood had here.

I’m more than a little sad about the Vox Diaspora that has taken place.  My neighborhood has been scattered to the ends of the internet.  Some folks ended up over on TypePad, some on WordPress, and others chose different routes, including LiveCloud and self-hosted blogs.  I hope to be able to keep following everyone, but in my heart I worry that some of the bonds we’ve formed over the years will be weakened, or even broken.  I am not sure there’ll be another Vox in our future, but we’ll all cherish the fun times we had as a Neighborhood, and I know that I’m going to use this as an impetus to get writing again, and hopefully move forward.  It won’t be the same, but hopefully it’ll be just as good.

Goodbye Vox.  I’ll miss you.

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You Kids Today Have Things Too Good

Alright, listen up you whippersnappers.  You don't know how nice you've got things nowadays.  Your lives are too easy, too good, too plentiful.  Let me tell you, when I was your age:

• We didn't have any of this "motion-controlled video game system" crap.  When we jerked our controllers up to make Mario jump just a little bit higher on the screen, did he jump higher?  No sir-ee bob, he did not.  If you didn't hit that A button, Mario would get bit by that turtle and you'd lose a life, simple as that.  Oh yes, we'd be waving that damn controller all over the place, but good luck having it do anything more than give you a psychological benefit in the game!

Sometimes it felt like this…

• Ketchup packets were just that – packets of ketchup that always contained too little ketchup and were damn hard to open.  None of this "Dip & Squeeze" crap that Heinz is coming out with now.  You bit your ketchup packets to open them because your hands were too greasy to tear open that serrated edge of the packet and that was that!  And if you were in the car, good luck keeping ketchup on your food and out of your lap!

Squeeze

• Forget about cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging, email, twitter, facebook or skype.  When you wanted to get in touch with your friends, you picked up the house phone and called their house!  Or more often, you got on your bike or walked over to their house, rang the doorbell, and asked if they were home and could come play!

Ok, it wasn’t quite THIS primitive…

• When we had to do a report for school, the first place we went was the CARD CATALOG in the LIBRARY.  Then you'd have to find BOOKS in the stacks and READ through them to find information!  Google and Wikipedia searches didn't exist. If you wanted to find out when Picasso painted Guernica, you had to look it up the hard way.  It built character, and ruined our eyesight.  That's why we all wear reading glasses now, dontcha know?

I actually loved looking things up in the catalog…

I could go on and on about all the ways you kids have it too easy today, but it's time for me to go watch some Olympics on the DVR.  Then I have to go read some of my feeds on Google Reader and follow it up with a "dance party" with my kids to the custom Pandora music stream I set up specifically for when we want to boogie on down.  But hear me on this: you kids are SPOILED.  Appreciate what you've got, because the next generation certainly will take it for granted…

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Classic Saturday Morning: The Retaliation

Genevieve nailed the Saturday morning lineup with her awesome post…but I thought of a few more that definitely belong in there…

Gummi Bears Opening Theme

Mister T

The Snorks

Super Friends Intro

Fat Albert cartoon opening theme

The Jetsons intro

Conjunction Junction

M.A.S.K. cartoon intro

GI Joe intro

I'd go on, but I'm getting all misty from the nostalgia….

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QotD: Recess!

    "What was your favorite game to play at recess in grade school?"

    Submitted by Elisheva Chana.

Kindergarten – Sandbox
1st Grade – Swings
2nd Grade – Chasing girls
3rd Grade – Getting chased by girls
4th Grade – Kickball / Presidential Physical Fitness Test
5th Grade – Soccer
6th Grade – Soccer / 5-Card Draw Poker (when we were allowed to go do what we wanted)
7th Grade – Baseball (resulting in broken leg, ouch)
8th Grade – Dodgeball
9th Grade – Cross Country
10th Grade – Cross Country / Indoor Track
11th Grade – Cross Country / Outdoor Track
12th Grade – Cross Country / Ultimate Frisbee

Notice a pattern?

[Note: I know this went past "grade school" like was listed in the qotd, but I thought it was more fun this way.  I wish I still had a daily recess….]

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Vox Hunt: Dancing Machine

    Video: Show us some great dancing.

Not only can this car move, but it can transform…

Car Funk Dance

When I was a kid, I LOVED transformers.  I must have had 20 or 30 different cars, trucks, and assorted other robots that transformed into household objects. 

My favorite was Soundwave, the robot-turned-cassette player, who of course, came with three cassette tapes, each of which transformed into a much smaller transformer (a bird, a tiger/cat, and a little robot that might or might not have been called Ravage.) 

My next favorite was Bumblebee, mostly because he was little and yellow and fast and I always rooted for the underdog.  I remember begging my parents to get Megatron, who transformed into a gun, but they were against the whole kids-with-firearms thing, even if it was just pretend, so that never went anywhere.

Sometime, I'm going to have to recount my memories of playing with transformers and watching the transformers cartoon, along with the first time I saw the Transformers movie.  Those were the days…

[Edit 17:03 – I just noticed the Vox Hunt title that was auto-generated when I posted this entry.  The pun is completely unintentional.]

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