I definitely relate to that. I spent a good chunk of my formative years just hanging out at the mall after school with my friends, sitting on the outdoor balcony with ridiculous coffees, openly smoking although we were underage, and just shooting the shit. Maybe we’d have hit up the music store beforehand and we’d chat about what we’d bought, read the liner notes and talk about the artwork. I miss music stores too, but I think a lot of people my age do. The mall used to be somewhere you could just hang out. I don’t know what’s changed, maybe it’s me. In my area they seem to be as busy as ever, but they all seem so sterile and hyper-optimised now, even though the floorplans are still the same as they were decades ago.

Me, I miss the proliferation of arcade video game cabinets. I miss arcades too, but I don’t think that’s out of the ordinary for old nerds. Going to them for a lock-in session was always a fun event, even by myself. Also having one at nearly every mall and being able to just go there and drop a few bucks and kill half an hour while you wait for a bus. What I really miss though, are the machines they’d just have randomly in places; corner stores, video rental places, restaurants, bowling alleys. We’d spend entire days riding around, scouting out new places for good games, which place had the cheapest Street Fighter 2, discovering weird obscure import titles no one had ever heard of. Of course now if I have a few minutes to kill I can game on my phone, but it’s such a non-event. Arcade cabinets were special, they had -presence-. When you found a good one you kept that location burned into your brain, told only your closest friends, and when they removed or changed it, it was such a tragedy.