Defector @defector.com · Apr 19 What kind of sicko would you have been in 1988, if you had the sum total of human knowledge in your pocket? defector.com/how-many-peo...
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In '88? A He-Man sicko for sure.
If I had access to BaseballReference.com as a young baseball stat sicko I might have starved to death.
I read the World Almanac as a kid. Got a new one every year. I was (and still kinda am) obsessed.
This was why Nintendo magazine, SI kids, and Becketts almanac were worn over when I was a kid. I also burned through d&d monster book despite never really playing all that much, it was just cool to learn about the world. I spent a LOT of time at the comics/baseball card store in town too.
Oh god, I would be all over whatever version of a Transformers Wiki existed. And then dinosaurs. All of them. I'd also probably be insufferably tedious, but I'm pretty sure I was back then anyway, so...
As a kid, I read the entire set of encyclopedias a few times. So, everything? Which has proven to be true as an adult w internet and a library account.
Garbage Pail Kids
I was super into poring over my dad's atlas as a kid--wondering why so many counties in Midwestern states were just rectangles, memorizing state capitals, realizing how many countries were out there... So I'd definitely have been a Google Maps sicko.
Moonlighting sickos rise up.
Probably a boxing sicko
My parents did have a nearly complete set of encyclopedias that they'd salvaged from a neighbor's outgoing trash. I had an unsuccessful mission to read it all, which would have made me an expert in everything that didn't start with the letter "J".