Now it seems childhood is filled with sports practice, homework, summer camp, and fortnite.
The difference I note is we spend a lot more time together as a family, whereas when I was a kid it was more with friends. I'm not sure it's a bad thing, I wished I had spent more time with my dad.
[1] https://www.parents.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-her-kid-wal...
Warner Bros has been a lousy manager of the Looney Tunes property lately but I expect they’ll remembered fondly for decades more, while most of the repetitive schlock that was made for Saturday morning will be forgotten.
For a kid, 5 days is a long time. For a 5 year old kid, a 5 day school week is the equivalent of a 30 year old working for 30 days straight, then imagine you have a 12 day vacation. That's how time felt, and why those first few hours of Saturday morning were so cherished, it signaled the beginning of a weekend of possibilities.
...and to sell toys to those kids while you weren't watching, of course. ;)
Perhaps things are screwed up a bit more fundamentally if we're sending 5 yr olds to school. Or maybe it's not about the education, maybe everyone needs the government-funded daycare. It amazes (and frightens, just a little) me that you talk about it casually as if it should be the norm.
I don’t know, I went to school at 3 and I turned out fine. Same for my kids. It’s good to be with other children at that age.
> It amazes (and frightens, just a little) me that you talk about it casually as if it should be the norm.
It is the norm here. If anything, 5 is quite old to start school. The alternative is one of the parents giving up their career because the vast majority of people cannot afford full-time day care.
But there’s not only that. At that age children need stimulating environments and learn a lot, fast by being with others in a secure environment. You really see the difference between those who started at 3 and those who started at 6 in terms of cognitive, social, and motor development.
This anecdote is not just as problematic as most anecdotes, I think it is more so. The point of public education is allegedly not that "kids turn out fine" (whatever that means), but that they receive a minimum education. If you got 4 years more than me, was there 4 years' more worth of advantage bestowed upon you? If you merely approximated my level of education, then it would seem the government wasted 4 years worth of resources on you. Multiplied times every student in the nation, this is absolutely enormous. And that's not even counting the potential for psychological damage... you might be fine, slightly more resilient than some, but others might be suffering from any number of disorders that can't easily be traced back to early schooling. Less time to form family bonds, less time getting a more informal education, etc.
>It is the norm here. If anything, 5 is quite old to start school.
It wasn't the norm until quite recently. Even in the 1980s, it was not the norm. That you think it is a norm shows just how much such a policy can distort an entire population's perceptions.
>At that age children need stimulating environments and learn a lot, fast by being with others in a secure environment.
Such you are told. You assume it must be true. And yet, student performance at all age levels continues to decline, even as they're sent to school younger every decade.
>You really see the difference between those who started at 3 and those who started at 6 in terms of cognitive, social, and motor development.
The numbers don't support your claim.
I'd say a year now feels about as long as 3 months did c. 10 years old. Summer rolls around and I blink and it's already getting too cold for the beach again.
People come up with various reasons for it, with a popular explanation being novelty or something, but I've had a bunch of very novel years and it never seemed to make a difference. It's just a little faster every year.
Kinda depressing to think that, by subjective perception of time, I'm likely already in the last 20% or so of my life.
This is about kids TV in form of cartoons in Saturday mornings and how that has changed in the recent decade or two. Only relevant for a particular demographic and culture. Not an insignificant one, but the title "Disappearance of Saturday Morning" is much too general.
Maybe "Disappearance of Saturday Morning Kids Cartoons on TV"?
I have to have all the content on attached storage since I don't want to rely on online sources. But then of course the app is simply pulling up a file at a given time of the day and playing it with a media playback library in Python.
Unlike television when I was young, there are no commercials. Dead time is filled at random from lists of "shorts" that are kept on the hard drive as filler. (These in fact might include Looney Tunes cartoons or shorts, music videos, etc. scraped from YouTube.)
The schedule aspect means that there is a theme to the content and when it plays rather than just serving up random content from the drive. The Wednesday evening movie is always a western for example. Learning shows (courseware) and yoga in the morning, kid's shows around after-school time, a comedy series in the evening, mysteries on Mondays, etc.
The biggest shortcoming of the app is that I have no trial way to create the schedule short of a Mac OS app where you have to hand-add each show. When I get time I want to have a mechanism to specify "time slots" for content and have the app do an adequate job of preparing at least a stand-in schedule. (Maybe I'll finally get around to getting this going this Fall or Winter. I hesitate to even point out the repo since it is so half-baked, but if you check my GitHub and look for "UHF", you'll find the last checked-in versions.)
On any given day, I can load a web page I set up that shows today's schedule. Since the schedule that the app uses is just a JSON file, the web front-end just uses the same JSON file: parses to find today's content:
It was for me — although it is fun to think the kids could plop down and watch Speed Racer like I did. Unfortunately the girls were grown up before I created it.
Yeah, it's running all the time. The wife stops and watches from time to time — having to check the web site to see what a particular movie is. She got drawn into Columbo on Wednesdays when she was supposes to be working (from home as it were).
I'll stop too from time to time to watch an old Little Rascals or How It's Made. There's something about it just coming on rather than your having to make an effort to pull up the content. I guess just like TV.
Same thing with music: I have thousands of songs downloaded and can listen to my favorites anytime, but I kinda miss having a good radio station I can tune in and hear something I wasn't expecting, even if it's not as good.
As for music — I have all my stuff on a large SD card and it is in a player 24/7 on shuffle/repeat. So, yeah, I never know what's coming on. (Playing on a lowish volume in a different room, FWIW.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...
But what I also remember is that the broadcast networks over the years started reducing the number of cartoons they broadcast. I remember watching cartoons until like noon in the heyday. By the end of our broadcast cartoons, they were strictly a 1-to-2-hour event.
I suspect that part of the reason for that is cartoons became a lot less lucrative with advert requirements.
It wasn't until my parents got satellite TV (which got a LOT cheaper over my childhood. The old behemoth dishes were a sight to behold) that I experienced cartoons more like the GI Joe period. Cartoon network, nick, disney all had hours of unregulated cartoon nonsense with hours of kid targeted commercials.
And, by then, Saturday morning was dead as a cartoon time. Why wake up early for cartoons when you could simply turn on the cartoon channel?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
X-Men
Doug
David The Gnome
Care-bears
My little pony
Hello Kitty
He-Man
Garfield
The Littles
Duck Tales
Thundercats
Simpsons
Family Guy
Bobs Burgers
South Park
King of the Hill
Simpsons
obviously there’s more… but just pointing out the shift away from cartoon.
Especially Disney.
In case it's not yet widely known, KOTH is available on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/king-of-the-hill_202103
and coming back for another season on Hulu
The cartoon landscape is different now, but it's not gone and if you wanted to you could easily wake up early on a Saturday morning and binge great cartoons all day.
Just because it was shovelware, doesn't mean it didn't get worse (e.g. from shovelware to schmaltzy sanitized shovelware).
throawaywpg•3d ago
saalweachter•14h ago