What sticks out to me, in hindsight, is how much of the development that happened in my early childhood. I remember the large empty track of land next to the highway that was turned into the local mega-mall. I remember the highway itself transforming from a simple flat two-lanes-each-way stretch all the way into downtown. Now its a six-lane overpass that’s getting another expansion. I remember the old community swimming pool that’s been expanded into a sprawling Aquatic Center. And how the half dozen different church denominations have been consolidated into one big Catholic compound. We have this enormous City Center that was just an abandoned parking lot when my parents moved in.
I also remember how the neighborhood had been comically, painfully white. Way back in the 90s, the town was effectively built on White Flight from the inner city, so it was mostly business and engineer families who’d abandoned downtown. We had a few big immigrant communities, primarily East Asian in character. But Latinos and Black families were kept beyond the county line by a combination of notoriously racist policing and white nationalist affiliated developers and real estate agencies. But all of that lapsed over the subsequent decades - now we have a much more mixed and more minority-affluent population. Hell, we have an East Asian County Judge, which is something that the elderly white now-minority had been fighting tooth and nail for decades.
I have no idea whether I’d say the area is better or worse. The fact that there’s still a ton of money being pumped through the city doesn’t hurt. But there’s definitely a noticeable divide between the older and newer parts of the town.
bytesonbike@discuss.online 5 days ago
The biggest sign of aging for me is when you make a reference to a TV show and the person you share it with goes, “ah that was before my time.” Then, you realize it wasn’t released a few years ago… But more like a decade or two ago.
The biggest hit was someone who asked me about 9/11 because they weren’t alive at the time.
Jiggle_Physics@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
The other day I was talking in a common interest discord and mentioned that I largely moved from console to PC games in the late 90s. To which I was met with a “jfc how old are you?”