So this has been a fun adventure; my oldest son has now read through the CAD 1.0 Omnibus. On top of a nice little daily reminder of how long I’ve been drawing this comic, I’ve now found myself teaching a crash course in the “olden days” of video games and the internet.
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Did you start every explanation with a “Back in my day…” while using a fake old man voice?
Hey, now! You’re not giving Tim enough credit here, man! He doesn’t need to fake the voice…
Stay a while and listen…
Where’s the multi-upvote button? That quote deserves it!
uh oh … I ..uuh .. cannot confirm nor deny I don.. uhm .. crap …
I had to teach my son twitch gaming reflexes.
He didn’t develop any, he was born in 2006.
I sat down and helped teach him and his best friend how to play Super Mario World, and Mega Man.
I will admit, I did laugh a few times, after several levels of stomping koopas how did he think ducking next to one would end except in a death?
yep, that’s how it goes with kids 🙂
Right in the feelings…as I wait for my first child, am very afraid of this kind if things ?
I treated my 4 year old with my old Wii and Mario Kart. Let’s see how it goes from here.
I read that as “traded”
Don’t be afraid, its awesome. They are amazed by the simplest things.
I’ve got a 9 and a 7 year old, and while I feel Tim’s pain on a nearly visceral level, the joy of watching them grow and turning them into gamers like me is amazing… wife is a little irritated though to have to deal with 3 “me”s haha
“No school like the old school.”
Given how short the battery life can be in those controllers I’m surprised he questioned them playing with the charging cable attached.
He likely doesn’t let him play for more than an hour or two at a time, so he’s not going to run into a situation where the controller runs low mid-session.
“Why are these Xbox controllers white?”
And why is Playstation black. They’re all backwards
Their not? They are grey 😉
They are not, they are Black with a Green logo printed on! Some of the buttons are in a weird place too?
It’s like I said during one of your last live streams ages ago, your comic is also a history of gaming. It’s edu-tainment.
You’re old when you start thinking “back in my day”, notice how young people dress and don’t get it and also seeing some new advanced piece of technology thinking “I don’t need that” and then end up with some kid explaining to you how it works.
I was “with it” once! But then they changed what “it” was! It will happen to you!
You just described my teenage years in a nutshell.
Wow did I get old fast.
Your time is your time. Others that didn’t live through it can’t relate because they lack the context created by the experiences and situations. Technology also changed extremely fast. We went from big bulky, rooms filling computers to smartphones. That was quite a leap, including many changes along the improvements, not always for the better. Likewise software went from well programmed, awful looking, on very limited resources running to the complete opposite.
Oh god, I can’t wait to try this with my eldest… she will have a blast (or blast me, IDK)
He’s not going to get the HALO joke about the advertisements either, you know that right?
THAT one is my favorite. I have it downloaded to show other people, but I’ll never forget it!
At least he’s not presenting those tedious “kids today won’t know the struggle” memes with a picture of a 39 year download time or blowing into an NES cartridge or boiling an egg for a new mouse ball… or is he?
boiling an egg for a new mouse ball? I used those old mice but… did people actually do that? I remember cleaning the wheels on it but never thought “Hey I should boil an egg and use the yolk as a new mouse ball”
Lol, no, it’s a thing people started saying to troll young people
As he said, no. A mouse ball just resembles an overboiled egg yolk in shape/color.
I had a client a few weeks ago that still uses one of those mice. I had to clean it, lol.
I had missed the announcement that Starcaster would only run for 2 weeks with a break. Not sure how I feel about that… I guess a one-week break isn’t bad, but if it went much longer I think I’d lose track a bit. I think the popularity of the break will depend on the quality of the filler. Today’s was great, I’m in the same boat of being familiar with what kids would consider ‘dinosaur’ technology even though most of the stuff we know today (smartphones, broadband, streaming, [anti]social media) has only been “big” for less than the legal drinking… Read more »
Welcome to the club.
I’ve made it my lifes work to educate my kids on the finer points of geek-life. One’s in college and the other high school. I think I’ve done a fairly good job. One quotes Monty Python at a whim. The other can appreciate Weird Al and Star Wars vs Star trek.
What you’re doing is very important work!
“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”
W8 until you explain THAT gaming to him XD
Ouch!
I realized I was old just a few days ago at a Halloween party at a bar. The amount of people that were obviously dressed up as *something* that I had zero clue what it was…was just staggering. And a bit depressing.
Now, imagine if your comic also had VHS tapes, 5¼-inch and then the 3½-inch floppies, casette tapes…
I just started Gotham Knights since it’s on PS Now and they use a logo of a floppy disc to indicate that the game is saving. Kids probably think it’s just how save logos have a standardized look.
Funny you should have a comment on this. Was JUUUUUST explaining 1337 speech to m nephews, and why we call it pwned and not owned. The concept of having to type quickly because there was no voice chat lead to TONS of misspellings. It used to be considered bad sport to shoot people that were typing.We covered a lot of early online gaming experiences from the early 2000s this weekend…
I know what all em mean it’s not that i’m old (i’m ’04) it’s just that i love old tech
I was like that. Now I work IT and I find myself fixing the old stuff from before my time.
fair enough, i’m gonna be a history teacher, but since my dad administers garages i have no shortage of old tech to get amazed with and tinker (you’d be suprised how many old computers are in a garage)
maybe he’ll learn all that if he takes up archaeology
I haven’t cracked those open in a while to look back at your older work. I remember a year or two ago I played a PS1 game while my nephew was over and he said he couldn’t watch me play because the graphics were so bad it gave him a headache…… He plays Minecraft.
Haha ROFL
The part that drives an icy shiv right between my ribs is the fact that those ‘olden days’ are still what I consider the ‘modern’ age… ?
Since it is a giant book chronically the history of gaming(even if it wasn’t your intention), you should send a copy to the library of congress so it can be cataloged for future researchers. In all seriousness, such things can be extremely useful for historians in the future and people may one day look back to it for real research.
In some cases it may be useful, but I can also see researchers dusting off CAD 1.0 in a thousand years and wondering why our primitive technological society had such an alarmingly high number of bow-and-arrow mishaps, especially in the early to mid 2000’s. They may also then vastly over-estimate the quality and effectiveness of our healthcare system, considering how fully Ethan seemed to recover each time. ?
Future archaeologists will ponder the ritual significance of sitting on the couch and holding that weird little thing and occasionally screaming at the TV.
Not quite gaming related but some coworkers of mine were talking about MTV and they asked me if I knew some celebrity from there and I said when I watched MTV it was mostly music. They called me old and they’re only like 10 years younger than I am. lol
OOoof
Why wouldn’t you just explain it all to him, rather than leave him confused?
This is a comic strip written to entertain and amuse, not a video recording of real life events. I know my artwork is so photorealistic it can be easy to mix up the two, but I assure you, the events you see above are fiction (inspired by real life, sure, but fiction nonetheless). I don’t even own a plain green shirt.
In real life, I most certainly do answer my son’s questions. I know this, because I wrote it in the little blog below the comic, and I believe everything I write on the internet.
But now in twenty years, when you release CAD 2.0 Omnibus, that doesn’t have the comments included, everyone will believe it is true.
So we shouldn’t believe everything we see on the internet, but we can believe everything we read on the internet. Gotcha. . . Wait, are comics seeing or reading?
F**kin’ dial-up!!!
What will you tell him when he stumbles into chef Brian?
Whats a Gamecube… *Eye twitches*
*Points to the purple cube that’s next to all of the other retro consoles*
The smashbros dedicated console?
the charger cable got me good. the rest made sense to me, i barely knew these even then. but the cable….ouch
LOL I’ve had conversations with kids and my own grand kids about how things were when I was a kid, black and white TV’s with tubes inside, big heavy rotary phones that hung on the wall, Rabbit ears for an antenna with tin foil to help reception, there being only 3 TV stations and they shut off at 12 AM, gas costing $0.35 a gallon, a candy bar costing a nickle, and so on. And of course the questions like “did you see any dinosaurs?” or “I thought the internet has been around for hundreds of years” gotta love kids….
I recently heard a teenager refer to “the late 1900s” and it made me deeply uncomfortable.
I told my almost-15 year old to read this comic and tell me which ones she knew the answer to.
She very proudly told me, “they’re not charging cables, he’s talking about an original NES like at grandpa’s house.”
She also is certain she’s heard of dial-up, but can’t think of what it could possibly be.
Wow, she must be dumb. I just asked a recently turned 15 year old the same questions. He didn’t know what 1337 was, but he knew the rest, and even began describing what Dial-Up was.
To be honest though, it took me a moment to remember was 1337 meant. So I don’t blame him for that one.
I sure hope most of that stuff is hyperbole, because you’d have to be a very dumb child to not know those things when your father is really into games. I mean, I bet you even have a GameCube on display next to your other consoles (along with its games). If you don’t, then shame on you!
Lmao. You should play him the sound of the Internet. I’ll never forget the sound of dial up.
Man now I feel old.
Did your hair turn more grey during that conversation? Maybe a new pain in your knee?
NOT THE CHARGE CABLE ?
Does this mean the boy now knows “Guymelefs Rock”?
Feeling old yet, Tim ?
Wait… Don’t people use 1337 anymore??
The “1337” bit hurts