Slashdot Mirror
Toronto Family Bans All Technology In Their Home Made After 1986
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mary Am Shah reports in the Toronto Sun that 26-year-old Blair McMillan has banned any technology in his house post-1986, the year he and his girlfriend Morgan were born. They're doing it because their kids – Trey, 5, and Denton, 2 – wouldn't look up from their parents' iPhones and iPads long enough to kick a ball around the backyard. 'That's kind of when it hit me because I'm like, wow, when I was a kid, I lived outside,' says Blair adding that now 'we're parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it's like.' The McMillans do their banking in person instead of online. They develop rolls of film for $20 each instead of Instagramming their sons' antics. They recently traveled across the United States using paper maps and entertaining their screaming kids with coloring books and stickers, passing car after car with TVs embedded in the headrests and content infants seated in the back. Their plan is to continue living like it's 1986 until April 2014. Morgan, who admits she thought her boyfriend was 'crazy,' now devours books to pass the time and only uses a computer at work. 'I remember the day before we started this, I was a wreck and I was like I can't believe I have to delete my Facebook!' Blair originally experienced a form of phantom pain for the first few days after giving up his cellphone. 'The strangest thing without having a cellphone is that I could almost feel my pocket vibrating and I wanted to check my pocket.' Still Morgan says the change has been good for their family's spirit. 'We're just closer, there's more talking,'"
I hate to be pedantic, but, the past tense of fish is fush, and I am quite certain that your worms were dead too and the past tense of worm is spice.
They actually have to go to the store and buy porn... instead of finding it for free on the internet.
Other than that, I think this is a great idea.
-hps
Only Mennonites do that any more.
I was only kidding! Everyone knows that the Mennonites are still using S100 bus machines.
Burma-Shave
I wonder if they spend their days terrified of a global thermonuclear Soviet invasion at any minute cause y'know the 1980's isn't complete without the cold war.
I hate to be pedantic, but, the past tense of fish is fush
Only in New Zealand.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
At least back then the DeLorean would have existed so that those poor kids can get BACK TO THE FUTURE.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
If you're illiterate, you probably couldn't use a dictionary. Nowadays anyone can mash a keyboard and c read an green squiggly lions and keep excepting the suggestions until there's nun left.
I certainly doubt that the Amish are too worried about their correspondence being intercepted and read by the NSA.
What would they read on AmishNet?
My trusted friend Eli,
Your humorous rendering of that unhappy cat made me burst forth with laughte!. I've since shared it with the rest of the community, many of whom have dutifully reproduced your work during their precious few evening hours to share with our bretheren across the country. I trust you'll forgive me for my presumption.
Faithfully yours,
Jacob Yoder
Required reading for internet skeptics
I was fishing with my 4year old today.
What were you hoping to catch?!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
And also they must not have looked up the Streisand Effect.
Now this news story is "stuck there" on the interwebs for people to laugh at them about forever.
The Stressand Effect is from 2003... They wouldn't know about it in 1986... ;)
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
When I was growing up in the 80s, being the only kid without a Walkman and NES made me the "poor loser kid" on the block
Sometimes on Slashdot it seems like if you didn't have a C64/Amiga, and a shell account on the Unix machine at your Dad's workplace in the 80's, you were a "poor loser kid"