Yes, this is what people did back then

Start prepping for some strategic tech investments.

Butterfly effect, your investments changes the fate of the companies you invest in.
- GOOD, i didn't want those companies to succeed anyway
- In terms of the global economy I doubt any of us could raise enough capital to impact corporate strategy

Take my routine morning shit. But instead of my phone I’m reading the label on the back of any bottle I can reach from the throne.

Do I wake up at 6 years old? Or as I am now, but in '95?

Doesn't matter, I'm watching fuckin POWER RANGERS.

What was I doing in 1995?

I would wake up, pour some Frosted Flakes and play Donkey Kong Country.

What would I do now?

Go outside and take a slow walk through my old neighborhood and probably cry.

1995...

I was 10 years old and in the 5th grade.

And I remember everything, huh? Hoo boy. Hoooo boyyyyy.

First thing I do is write this list while it's still fresh in my mind:

ADHD is real and it will ruin my potential if I don't face it head on. The medication won't work on me yet, though, so tell Mom and Dad I NEED to get back on medication when my brain is more developed in a couple years.
Also, for future reference: it isn't actually a deficit of ATTENTION at all--it's really stupidly named by neurotypicals who don't fucking get it--it's TIME BLINDNESS and a deficit of IMPULSE CONTROL and EXECUTIVE FUNCTION.
Sugar is going to make me extremely sick and all my weight and fitness issues come directly from carbohydrate overdose. STOP drinking soda, and avoid refined/homogenized starch!
I'm about to enter the most painful and traumatizing stage of my formative years. The middle school I'll be attending starting 6th grade will be hell on earth. I need to keep my FUCKING mouth shut and not talk to ANYONE unless they talk to me. I also need to practice the skill of mindful dissociation and compartmentalization. Stoicism will be my only shelter.
Yes the adults around me are morons and don't know what they're talking about, but broken clocks can be right twice a day. In this case, they're correct about homework and studying being important for the wrong reasons: It is NOT about satisfying the expectations of teachers, but rather it is entirely for practicing the skill of internalizing and recalling information. I will not regret time I spend on it.
Mom and Dad are struggling financially right now. Dad's racking up debt while Mom is the only reliable source of income. That's why they would "hold onto" my birthday and xmas money "for safekeeping". it is neither kept nor safe; it's gone. All of it. HIDE ANY MONEY I RECEIVE... and tell grandpa to buy stock in Apple.
Express early interest in nuclear energy and pursue it with everything I've got. Approach via Mechanical Engineering. I'll enjoy Computer Aided Drafting in High School.
Remember the major incidents to come: Columbine and zero tolerance policy in 1999, also dotcom bubble crash, Al Gore will lose in 2000, WTC will be destroyed by a terrorist attack 2001-09-11, Bush Jr administration will cause the housing market to crash as well by 2008, America succumbs to Fascism in 2016, and there will be a global plague in 2020.
I'm a furry and I am not actually a boy despite being assigned male at birth. Embrace androgyny. Get online. Find my tribe. Draw a lot.

Middle school CANNOT be THAT traumatizing 😭😭
- Edit: this is not a dunk and I don't hold it against you. By all accounts, in a better world, middle school shouldn't be traumatizing. But unfortunately, this is not the better world.

Fire up my PC and hit the dial up to check my email and BBS's.

Also go outside to grab my paper to read the comics first.
ascii ~~nudes~~ art
BBS's
You can still do that, if you want.
SDF (shameless plug) is still around
Tildeverse, a loose association of pubnixes exists
Gopher and Gemini (a protocol inspired by Gopher) have had some minor resurgence.
Will you use Turbo mode?

Two chicks at the same time

"That's what you'd do if you had a million dollars?"
"Hell yeah man, always wanted to do that."
That feels easier now than then
Your comment reminded me that many times this was my go to activity. GF was BI and enjoyed me interacting with her and her various girlfriends.

Boot up my dad's computer and play some shareware off the magazine cover disk I got months ago.

Or go to the library I guess.

I was probably playing Cannon Fodder at that time on our computer.

d: cd games cd cannon (space)(space)(F3)
I still like going to the library and reading real books

Cell phones existed in 1995. They were expensive and just used for making phone calls, tho.

Had the internet too. I'd be playing Doom or checking out Usenet forums.

OOOH Look at Mister FANCY PANTS with his dial up internet. You must be rich, Mister Fancy Pants.
I think I had AOL at the time...
- AOL was dial-up.
Making actual phone calls‽ The horror!
- Nice use of the interrobang!
Everyone had mobiles in 1995, they were like $300 The Australian mobile network started in 1982
- The Australian mobile network was CB radio until 2015.

I really miss summers without wildfire smoke.

Am i the only person who is driven insane by the insinuation that WiFi is synonomous with 'having the internet'?

No. It's the Chromebook/iPad generation. I feel like they don't truly understand the Internet or computers. Having used Windows 98 and onward, my friends and I had to really learn to troubleshoot and learn the innards of the system. Nowadays, everyone is in a protective shell like Chrome OS, iOS or Android. It's all dumbed down now. Simplicity isn't always good imo
Edit: Windows was a gateway drug into Linux

I'd hug my mom. Then I'd go ask the pretty next door girl for a date; I lesrned later in life that she also had a crush on me at the time, but since I was plain looking and slightly overweight nerd I never thought I'd hsve any chance with her.

After getting that out of my system I'd do the obligatory investing.

I'd walk out to the street then light me up that cigarette and strap shoes on my feet.

I'd probably try to find a reason where everything went wrong. I'd really like to find a reason why my money is all gone.

You got a dog? Still smoke?
- and I can still play the guitar like a mother fuckin riot.
You do mean your fee-f-f-f-feet?

Am I stupid or is this sentence unparseable?

Does it have to be one or the other?
- I didn't say xor.
[Imagine] you wake up in 1995. [There's] no wifi [and] no cell phones. [What's] the first thing you do?
- you've omitted "just." If "just" were not in the sentence I would have instinctively filled it in with the missing words you've suggested. But I can't reconcile "just" with any parse.

Get my SNES or Gameboy and play some Zelda.

Super Nintendo

Sega Genesis
- When I was dead broke, man I couldn't picture this

Go online, just like I did back then. I've been online before the web. And it was more fun. And no ads.

I didn't go online when I first woke up. I often though would check see how my downloads did overnight. In 95 I was still using the local collage dial in.
- At least, we had a leased line of 38400 bits per second for the whole department. ;-)

Buy AAPL

Then start plotting buy/sell points for bitcoin and GME (don't want to risk forgetting those over the next 15-25 years)
Ninjaedit: and real estate right after the 2008 crash

Invest in Apple.

Apple, Amazon... Plenty of others to choose from that were considered joke stocks for some reason

First thing? Honestly, probably curl into the fetal position and start bawling for a while as I fully relax for the first time since circa 2007.

P.S. it's April 19th and you're currently relaxing in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Enjoy your well-earned R&R!
- Oof! Hey, at least on the bright side it would be an extended repose.

Am I a grown adult that wakes up in a foster care home and the child that was there previously is gone?
Do I have to spend the rest of my life without an identity, or clinging to the “delusion” that I was this child that mysteriously disappeared?

Am I a child with 40 years of life experience?
Not long after, When I was 14, my first consensual sexual experience involved an 18-year-old. We got caught, and folks widely regard/regarded her as being inappropriate/in the wrong. Huh. First girlfriend, high school dances/romances. College. Jesus - every relationship basically forever.
If I proceed down the same path, does that mean I’m the creep now?

Envious of your first experience with an 18 year old
- It was weird times. I mean, great. But weird and great to my half-cooked, traumatized, and hormone-addled teenage brain.
  She was my sister’s best friend at the time and, well, physically she was like the girl who’d molested me as a child, which definitely had (and still has) an impact on my physical preferences.
  I don’t exactly know what her deal was, but I think it was that any male attention just short-circuited her. I recall her telling me she loved me after a few weekends of sneaking around, and after about a month, spinning a yarn as pretext to try to move in with us.
  It’s probably a good thing we got caught a day or so after she moved in. Stupid football game. It pushed some TV show back, and my mom/sisters stayed up late to watch it. My sister (her best friend) came downstairs to check in on her and caught us in bed.
  As for the how - I don’t know. I was an awkward gangly teenager, and she was honestly a pretty attractive girl. She had some self-confidence issues, I think.
  It was like the first day she’d come over for a sleepover. I had never met her - my sister befriended her when we were in foster care, so this was not unusual - and I was instantly into her. I have no idea if she picked up on that or not. We were watching movies (me, 2 of my sisters, and her). The couches were occupied, and so I had a pallet on the floor. So did she. Our feet were under the big couch, hidden by the little skirt that all couches had back then, heads pointing toward the TV. I thought I felt her foot touch mine (but it was probably wishful thinking). I edged my foot over, discovering the distance between us was way too far for her to have accidentally touched me, and sort of bonked her foot with mine while awkwardly exploring. I pulled back just slightly and she immediately pressed her foot against mine. Footsie lead some sneaky suggestive glances, then surreptitiously bridging our blankets together and doing our best to conceal our roving hands. At one point during a bathroom break everyone had left the room, she told me her intentions, and I was very okay with them. We made a plan - I was going to go to bed, and she was going to find me after everyone was asleep. (She was sleeping in a guest room that was conveniently located - my bedroom was in the basement.) And that was that.
  She used to page me with “143” (code for I love you - which I don’t think either of us could know what that actually meant) and I used to page her back with same. We were so dumb and teenager-y. It was fun, but unhealthy. I didn’t get enough positive attention, and this sort of reinforced a belief that I could only be of service to someone sexually. If I wasn’t serving someone sexually, I wasn’t of value emotionally - another formative belief that was maybe not the best and is still hard to shake.

1995? Springer and the price is right in the morning (Bob Barker baby!) then Aladdin, Batman/Superman, Animaniacs and the Simpsons in the afternoon.

In-between all that we get 90s commercials!

holy cow, I lived the afternoon half of that
Please tell me it's Friday, because that means the evening is Family Matters or Sliders, Boy Meets World, Step by Step, and Hangin' With Mr. Cooper.

I buy relevant stocks to make me rich and revel in the fact that there is no internet again. I am 68 and have been there and done that already.

Yeah, anyone who answers with anything besides “invest in the tech companies you know will get huge, then get into bitcoin early and ride it all the way to $100k each” is going to fail to thrive.

Buy Apple stock.

Try to find that cool looking Beavis and Butthead site I saw my brother browsing in the earliest days of our internet access. I had asked him where he found it and he couldn't remember, so I searched and searched and searched to no avail. I never found that Beavis and Butthead site. I just remember there was a lot of yellow.

Apparently there was an official Beavis and Butt-Head site hosted by MTV in the 90's. I didn't find any archives but there is a screenshot of it on the Web Design Museum. Not sure if it's the same one because there isn't a whole lot of yellow though.

Buy a cellphone. We already had them in the late 80's.

Here’s your new Motorola StarTAC with 120 anytime minutes and double-sized battery. That'll be $600. Do you want to pay with your Discover card?
Who am I, Parker Lewis?

Party like it's 1999!

Boot up my 486, call over my friends and play MK1

Alternatively make some new M:TG decks using my new Ice Age booster packs and head to the FLGS

Log on to BBS, play LORD and post to forums with local users, maybe chat a bit. Fire up sirdoom, waste a few bozos with a BFG. Drive to my buddies house maybe smoke some weed..

Go to all the live gigs, then invest. Probably steal PayPal.

Buy out Elons worthless PayPal shares with 50 million in valuable pets.com and webvan shares. They can only go up in 2000!

Do you wake up as you are now, or as you were back then? I didn’t exist in 1995.

I'm sure you were still a twinkle in your parents' eyes. And I don't envy what you're about to see.

Use my current knowledge of memory-safe system languages to invent D before Walter Bright, but without the garbage collection.

Take a big shit since I can't shitpost

I mean, your mom was around back then...

Go back to sleep

Hang out with my grandparents, ask them everything. I miss them.

Usually young people are not interested in learning about the past from the old.....until of course the old die and their knowledge is gone for ever

Buy bitcoin

Have tons of crazy sex, do piles of drugs, camp, see live music, dance, sex, drugs, repeat.

Same as now really

Find a job doing almost anything and being able to afford all of this is the best time traveling gift.
Also get a little house on that salary, oh if only.
- As if. I went into crazy debt. I'm still paying for it. But yeah. Boo hoo

I'll start a few websites, like facebook.com, twitter.com, reddit.com

Make them all federated sites right out of the gate

jerk it

Agreed. That's always a fall back to fill some time

Masturbate, back to sleep.

This is the correct answer.
I don't need to travel back in time to do that.

The first question is what kind of time loop am I in? Is it a ‘We are all going to die and I need to fix it’ or a ‘I need to grow as a person to get out’ loop. If it’s the first one then I need to figure out when Donald Trump and Jeffery Epstein are both going to be one of his flights to Epstein’s island and find a way to blow up the plane. If it’s the second one I guess do the same thing as that’s got to be good karma.

I have thought about this over the years. If I am in a loop, it's "which PhD am I doing this lifetime?" or "so I guess I am going to be the world's best cabinetmaker this round."

I'd probably shit the diaper and watch my parents fight

Turn on my computer and play some Command and Conquer or if it's weekday, get up and prep for school.

Have you played Tempest Rising yet? It's good 👍
- not yet, no budget remaining :D

Pack the bowl and fire it up.

Ask that blonde for a date...

There were cell phones in 1995. Though vastly different from today still widely used.

Also, wireless internet connected devices existed, though the wifi standard was still two years off and they definitely weren't widely used.

Calling friends and talk to them for hours.

Noo I'm using the dialup!

Dial into my local BBS and play some door games.

Also, tell my younger self not to buy the lifetime subscription to the local BBS and just pay yearly, because this Internet thing is going to get faster and less buggy.

Assuming I'm the same age I am today, probably the same thing 😅

Wake up, morning constitutional, coffee, bong-rip, check the server.

Do you run a BBS?
- I run a couple of services. A blog for my partner, a media server (farfetched but certainly possible in 1995), as well as a matrix server.
  I'm certain I'd be doing similar things in 1995. Based on my personality there's no way I wouldn't have gotten into that type of computing.

Gather as much money as possible and bet on the Chicago bulls to win 3 championships in a row.

Now that is a parlay.

1995? I'd play the just released International superstar soccer deluxe for the SNES

Go see Jeff Buckley and tell him to stay away from the Mississippi River.

As a guitarist: get the biggest headstart possible learning music

TV was shit, but online porn already existed. Only thing you'd be missing is doom scrolling memes and shit YouTube videos.

Ah yes, spend 30 minutes to download an image and print it out on your dot matrix printer to hide for use when you can't access the computer.
- I'm just arguing here - but dot matrix was mostly irrelevant at that point. Inkjet, bubblejet, and laser jet existed.

Since I am an absolute idiot who doesn't know what happened back then in order to rake in money off of things like betting ( either legal or illegally ), probably just ( assuming I have 'em ) listen to CDs on my CD player and hop on computer and hope I have any good games.

Register google dot com

They would just pick another dumb name, like Stample or Croaker and we'd be stuck Croaking things
Not even buying Apple will net you any short term money.
Better to bet on the superbowl (or whatever sports knowledge you possess).
- It's not about money, it's about altering reality.

None of you said, "prevent 9/11." For shame.

As a non american, this would have never crossed my mind
- I mean, I feel like that one has some cascading effects that really fucked things up for pretty much everyone on the planet, so if you ever find yourself hurled back in time, you might consider it.
Well now I'll be thinking all day on the thought experiment of how one could actually prevent it, assuming they're only a US citizen.
I guess you could send in an anonymous bomb threat on the morning for both towers, but that still wouldn't prevent the tragedy of all those onboard.
- We know where they went to flight school. Intercept and eliminate those hijackers. You will go to jail for murder, but you will change the course of history.

Go into a lab and start researching time travel. Proving to scientist that I'm from the future shouldn't be that hard.

That's 29 years ago. Eeryone I know is as good as dead. I need to find a way to go back

Play a Diku or Circle MUD on the local library BBS

Play video games, that is of course if I am my current age, because I was -1 years old in 1995.

Lay in bed for a moment and listen to the tunes on my sweet Panasonic clock radio alarm before slapping the snooze button. Then suddenly wake up to realize I have a clock radio alarm again.

I'd go to the mall to flirt with goth latina babes. Malls were actually popular back then right?

Playing DOOM with the friend

ahh sweet freedom

depends on what day of the week it is. if it's a weekday then I turn on the TV and watch like Power Rangers or whatever was on during Fox Kids Mornings. Or if i'm in my bedroom where I didn't have cable then bleh had to watch Global (Canada) and it was carebears or inspector gadget or something in the mornings. OR just put on the Genesis/SNES.

If it's Saturday then I'm up early to go to the basement to watch cartoons all morning.

it was way better back then.

Pee lol

Plug in the coax cable and forget the terminator.

Jork it

With... Magazines? Shudder
- Specifically, the magazines in the back of your older cousins closet they think they hid.
  But you can get fancy, you visit your cousin overnight, who doesn't have a spare bedroom so you just have to sleep on his couch in front of the TV that has just all of the channels on satellite... Especially those channels

Go and have a taste of McDonalds if its the same

“ffffuuuckk now I can’t get easy pron!!!!!!”

Back to usenet.

AOl, or the BBS's that I was a member of.

Probably play some Crash Bandicoot, or go to my nine o clock lecture.

I woke up

Then I went back to bed

Said I woke up

Then I went right back to bed

Chill

I would make sure the family car accident don't happen that year in October. Next thing would be to grow up and actually try to fix the climate problem so we reach the goal of 0 degree higher temperature on average. Imagine having 30 extra years to spare for this task. Telling how much damage it already have done and we have enough evidence that it is critical to start doing it now.

Use up my turns in Tradewars 2002 on my local BBS and some other door games.

Press the snooze button and go back to sleep.

Make coffee?

Drink a glass of chocolate milk, fool around until school time, which began in the afternoon

Open tv’s teletext page 245 (now 235) to see latest NHL results from last night.

Watch the infomercials until something remotely interesting starts.

Use the bathroom.

That really depends on if I'm my now age or my then age. Though either way, I'm looking for my mom

Turn the TV on.

See DJ Heather and silicon soul live.

Go back to sleep!

Listen to my mixtape, duh.

1995 I would just be getting home from night shift.

Figure out how to set up a stock trading account with ameritrade, or whatever the ad for the talking baby who bought stocks was for, and invest in today's big companies. I'd invest like 10 bucks at a time, but keep doing it. Also? Buy some bitcoins.

Gonna have to wait a bit for those bitcoins.

Have a long and frustrating wank to Cosmopolitan because I'm a teenager and haven't figured out I can just walk into a newsagent and buy a copy of Penthouse.

Turn off the alarm clock

Play with hot wheels and Transformers. Maybe take the afternoon and fold an entire ream of paper into airplanes, one design only, looking for small improvements on every crease, corner and pleat to create the perfect expression of that design.