My Wife and I mostly play chess. Cribbage too. The few times we have played Scrabble, we use the dictionary.
For my Wife and I it is mostly about fun and getting the TV away. We play 10-15 games of chess a week and probably 5 games of Cribbage. It’s also about listening to music and exercising your brain.
I’m having to travel away from home about 3 times a month. We play chess on line then just to have that connection together.
I consider it cheating, but then I’m fine with cheating if it legitimately improves my enjoyment of the activity I’m doing just for me. I’m not betting money on it, or trying to show off my skilz to the world, I’m filling in a crossword with the wife.
I also cheat at golf, why should I spend 10 minutes hacking the ball out of a pricker bush when I can just move it over there and have a nice time trying to get my next shot near the green? I am definitely not going to get better at golf by breaking my 7 iron on a root. As such, I’m not going to get mad trying to find the name of the 3rd largest river in Ghana or some actor who played a recurring role in a 20 year old TV show I never watched.
You’ve nicely encapsulated why I no longer play hard video games. I’m sure Elden Ring is great, or whatever. But I don’t actually enjoy being constantly frustrated, and this is my leisure time.
The advice columnist Carolyn Hax seems to spend a lot of time bemoaning the end of the good ol’ days when kids just played outside, and I think she’s…not quite right.
In my experience, when people say “Americans don’t ____ any more” (or “Americans do _____”) they don’t necessarily means “Americans” so much as they mean “middle class white Americans.” I live in a small city with adjoining suburbs, and there are big demographic differences between the two areas in terms of wealth, class, and race, and it’s very obvious just from walking and driving around that people in the city and people in the suburbs act differently where letting kids play outside on their own is concerned.
The kids in the core city DO play outside on their own–just one example, my church, just outside the downtown area, has a small playground, and it’s usually full of unaccompanied kids on weekends and after school–but the kids in the suburbs generally do not.
So it’s not something that has disappeared as much as it is something that has been disappearing among the dominant demographic group–which is not quite the same thing!
Sorry if this was a hijack. Carry on!
I imagine being in a city is a big part of it. I was in New York City last April and in the residential areas north of Central Park I hadn’t seen so many grade-school-age kids walking by themselves since I was a kid in a city-like (grid streets, small lots) suburb of Chicago. I occasionally see some in my neighborhood (suburban downtown, somewhat walkable) but always in groups.
Meanwhile, the Internet is rife with stories (admittedly, collected, repeated, and sometimes exaggerated) of kids coming to the attention of police or child-protection merely because they were out walking by themselves during the day and some concerned suburbanite panicked that every predator in the county would come flying towards any lone kid like the antibodies in Fantastic Voyage.
Nice imagery! 
If I might make a belated response to my own thread, one thing I’d like to see make a comeback is postage stamps. I still send greeting cards to friends and relatives for birthdays, holidays, etc., but whenever I take one to the post office I have to specifically demand “a real postage stamp” lest they slap an ugly, lifeless barcode on it. (I’m sure it’s not just philatelists who admire the miniature works of art that grace their incoming letters.)
Unfortunately, I’ve found that post offices are increasingly unable to comply with this simple request, especially for overweight letters, or ones where I’ve already stuck an undervalued stamp on it and need to make up the shortfall. The only real stamps they have in stock are the ones for standard letter sizes. It used to be that, if postage went up by say, five cents, they’d have plenty of five-cent stamps to sell to customers who still have stamps at the old standard letter rate. Now I daren’t buy any more books of stamps for fear of not being able to use them up before the next price increase.
I’d like to see T-tops on cars again. These were popular in the 70s, and were a great way to have the good parts of a convertible with the option of a hardtop too. I’ve owned convertibles and cars with sunroofs since, and prefer neither. The convertibles (at least IME) were noisy and vulnerable, and the sunroof isn’t really like a drop top, just a hole in the roof.
With the windows down and the t-tops removed, you got the actual feel of a convertible and could quickly transform should the weather change (or need to lock the car). I realize there are a few hardtop convertible models, but it seems t-tops would be simpler and cheaper to build.
For the young-uns, here’s some examples from “back in the day”. My cousin had a black Firebird like the first picture.
Magazines printed on paper. Newspaper stands. A neighborhood store within walking distance.
Civility.
They are still making “forever” stamps as far as I know. Your book of stamps will be good for as long as they keep doing that. I don’t understand how your stamps are undervalued.
If you need non-standard weight stamps, buy them via the online USPS store. And invest in a postal scale.
Although my correspondent list has dwindled through death and attrition, I still regularly send hand-written letters to about ten people, and pay many bills by check, for preference, so I use a lot more stamps than most people these days. I often buy books of stamps online as they have the full complement of offerings.
USPS stamps aren’t good where I live. And they don’t make forever stamps here.
I find it interesting that so many people associate having a piano in the home with singing.
My dad’s maternal grandparents had a foot-operated pneumatic player piano, which got moved into his parents house when he was a child. His mom decided that her two boys should have piano lessons, because she had wanted to learn.
40 year later, she admitted she should have just gotten the lessons for herself and not bothered paying for lessons for her sons.
When I was a child, my dad had the player piano shipped to our house. He and his friend went to a course about how to rebuild player pianos, and then rebuilt the player piano so that it could be used again. Of course, I got to take piano lessons so I could play without using the player functionality.
Darn thing still works, and my parents are considering giving it away, along with the rolls. They’ve realized that some of the music rolls probably should be destroyed as some of them have racist songs on them.
I don’t think we ever sang around the piano. My mom’s parents did, but they were also avid church goers and my maternal grandfather was a member of the church choir. In fact, most of the singing around the piano which I have personally been a part of involved church music of some sort.
I would like to see more music in the schools, both singing and learning musical instruments. When I was in school, music class stopped being obligatory after 6th grade, which is about the time many kids start developing their own musical tastes, separate from their parents.
Ah. I made an assumption. Sorry.
I order stamps (including forever stamps) from USPS online. Much better selection than you will find at any post office.
I do own a scale that I use for measuring coffee and flour.
There was a piano at my grandparents house until they died, I can’t remember anyone ever playing it. As a kid all I wanted to do was bang on that thing, but god forbid if you thought about touching it.
I though SF still had trolleys running in the city?
now you’re making me cry 
I miss the not one but 2! 24 hour newsstands in Hollywood when I lived there
Civility…Good God YES.
Besides the cable cars there are plenty of trolley buses, yep.