Ned Hardy
The Intriguing World Of Entertainment
When you’re young, the car isn’t just a mode of transportation; it’s a liminal space. A place where rules are both enforced and ignored, where the sacred (your parents’ cassette collection) intersects with the profane (whatever’s rotting in the cup holder). But there’s one rule every kid who grew up in a pre-smartphone world knows by heart: never, ever touch the dome light.
[Read more…] about Why Did Our Parents Treat the Dome Light Like a Weapon of Mass Destruction?
There’s a strange cultural artifact that unites us, a low-stakes hieroglyph that transcends generations, geographies, and even subcultures. It’s not a song or a movie or a fashion trend. It’s an S. Not just any S, though—a very specific S. You know the one. Six straight lines, two stacked triangles, and suddenly, you were Picasso with a pencil. Every middle school desk in America bore its mark, every notebook margin carried its banner. If aliens ever excavate our ruins, they might think we worshipped it. Maybe we did.
[Read more…] about The Cool S: The Greatest Unsolved Mystery of Middle School
Let me take you back to a time when the only thing that mattered was recess, and the single greatest existential crisis was losing your best slammer.
Yes, I’m talking about POGs. Those little cardboard discs that somehow captured the spirit of an entire generation while simultaneously being utterly useless.
AOL Instant Messenger wasn’t just a chat platform—it was a cultural phenomenon, a digital confessional, and a passive-aggressive battlefield. If you had an AIM account in the late 90s or early 2000s, your away message wasn’t just a utilitarian update on your whereabouts. It was a declaration of identity, a cryptic plea for attention, and sometimes, an emotional landmine that detonated silently in the background of your social circle.