• roofuskit@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    This was a rumor created and disseminated by children. I think that context is pretty important when you’re using it to gauge naivety.

    • lars@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 hours ago

      Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy did they have to teach us that “never again” and “lest we forget” are but rhetorical kindnesses and also poisonous lies??!

  • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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    8 hours ago

    I have a strong feeling that if we were to re-live the 90’s right now we’d quickly realise it wasn’t so “innocent” after all. People just had thicker skin back then and recreational outrage wasn’t really a thing due to how slow news and trends speaded at the age of early internet.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      For most of the 1990s the internet wasn’t much of a factor in pop culture or daily life. Email was something of a newfangled gimmick in the movie You’ve Got Mail.

  • little_beefy@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

    Shock marketing and the release of hyper gory “banned” vhs tapes was a big marketing tactic for music in the early 90s. There’s a great NIN documentary that covers this.

    I wouldn’t be surprised to find out this rumor was somehow disseminated by labels.

  • WhatSay@slrpnk.net
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    17 hours ago

    In the 90s, I remember going to rotten.com and seeing dead bodies. Kids these days don’t know about the wild west world web.

    • garbagebagel@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      I was usually pretty good about avoiding those things, but that fucking sloth guy still haunts my nightmares.

    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      Not to mention the granddaddy of link pranks, Goatse. This excerpt from Wikipedia gives a nice little window info how the web operated back then:

      The goatse.cx image has been used by website authors to discourage other sites from hot-linking to them. By replacing the hot-linked image with an embarrassing image when hot-linking has been discovered, an unsubtle message is sent to the offending website’s operators, visible to all who view the web page in question. In 2007, Wired.com hot-linked to another site in an article about the “sexiest geeks of 2007”; the site subsequently swapped the hot-linked image with one from goatse.cx.

      Man, I miss the early Internet.

        • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          It wasn’t that early but early enough that a) a major news site hotlinked an image from some random website and b) that website redirected the image to point at a sexually explicit shock image without anyone panicking.

          That still has early Internet energy to it. Not quite Mahir Çağrı energy but still markedly different from today’s relatively sanitized interactions.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      In Tombstone, when Wyatt threatens to turn that dude’s head into a canoe? I saw that exact pic on rotten.com. Looked like: U

    • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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      15 hours ago

      yeah I remember that in 2000 or so. Was scarred for some time. Would not recommend

    • frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe
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      12 hours ago

      But did you go to a suicide forest as part of a YouTube video? And then have to fake cry an apology?

        • lars@lemmy.sdf.org
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          9 hours ago

          I remember only the post-mortem fingernails that weren’t growing. And was it Rotten that had 9/11 aftermath pics? Yikes.

  • EABOD25@lemm.ee
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    19 hours ago

    What? The Rodeny King beating and subsequent riots, OJ Simpson murdering 2 people, Columbine, the first time the WTC was bombed, 1500 people died near Mecca, and like 3 civil wars in Africa

    • andyburke@fedia.io
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      18 hours ago

      Not to mention all the shit that wasn’t being captured on any kind of recording at the time.

      The rose tint feels so fuckin good tho, right?

      • Nollij@sopuli.xyz
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        13 hours ago

        There’s only a single decent quality video of the first plane on 9/11. Because in a city of millions of people, only 1 person in the area was recording at the time.

        I can’t even imagine how many videos there would be if it happened today.

      • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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        18 hours ago

        yeah and for a lot of people who’d be using lemmy, the reason they weren’t aware of all this shit is our parents kept us safe from it

        • andyburke@fedia.io
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          18 hours ago

          I mean - I probably got to live the very best of the 90s Americana as a suburban kid with an old computer and a modem in it.

          I still saw a lot of shit going on in the world. I mean … AIDS pandemic, anyone? Remember fear around shaking someone’s hand?

          Sometimes I think the problem is that at any GIVEN time, like 2/3 of people aren’t paying attention to what is happening outside their own immediate experience.

          • lars@lemmy.sdf.org
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            9 hours ago

            It is intensely difficult to join those ⅔. It takes more than adding fascists’ names to your Lemmy filter tell ya that much.

            • andyburke@fedia.io
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              9 hours ago

              “Oooommmmmm … Ooooommmmm”

              <deep breath>

              <2 minutes guttural screaming>

              “eh, I’ll try again next time”

              • lars@lemmy.sdf.org
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                9 hours ago

                I’m supposed to be walking even more now. I have no ability left to forget difference between what should be and what this garbage today is. Play some old favorite shows in my earbuds? Idfk.

      • GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works
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        8 hours ago

        I was in 3rd or 4th grade at the time and happened to be sick that day. Freaked me out that people were going to think I did it.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          Oh god, I can’t tell if that would be an epic prank, or a traumatizing nightmare.

          Your teacher gets a cop, and all your classmates to go in it. Everyone acts like you did it.

          Then a cop comes in, and arrests you. Throws you into the back of his car…then DRIVES YOU TO DISNEY WORLD!!!

          Which, might be kind of a long drive now that I think about it. I have no idea where you lived in 1995.

      • EABOD25@lemm.ee
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        15 hours ago

        I did not forget about them, but I felt I gave enough examples to where I drove my point home

    • Beacon@fedia.io
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      18 hours ago

      I mean as bad as those things were, none of those things come close to recent events. Look at your examples and compare them to “worldwide virus kills millions and the entire planet goes into quarantine for a couple years” or “president of the United States fails to get reelected so he foments a literal coup on the US government and his rioting mob breaks into the capitol building trying to stop the transfer of power. And then 4 years later that criminal gets elected to be president again”.

      • Repple (she/her)@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        AIDS has killed many more than COVID-19, albeit slower. Gingrich and Justice Thomas are responsible for a lot of the degradation of our institutions that allowed for trump and his ilk. Gay and Trans rights were essentially non-existent compared to today.

        We are worse off in many many ways, but for me personally that last one means I am much better off at this moment (this may not last).

    • then_three_more@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Eastern Europe collapsing in the power vacuum left by the fall of the USSR, multiple civil wars, horrendous war crimes including genocide. NATO having to go in.

    • Theo@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Maybe OP should have used the word ridiculous instead of outrageous. Removing ribs for such a thing is ridiculous IMO.

  • d00phy@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    A group of friends and I had a little website we used as a precusor to modern day social media. I made a comment on a post on there where I linked to an image on SA. Little did I know that Lowtax didn’t use goatse. No he used a very high resolution close-up image of the head of a penis with a drop of pre-finishing liquid oozing out.

    So I post this comment from my desk and go back to work. About 30-minutes later, my roommate, who sat a few cubicles down from me says my name. Not like normal, his voice broke as he was saying it. I’m like, “what?” He says, “what did you post to the site?” I told him and he says that is not at all what he’s seeing. I go over there and holy shit all 1600x1200 pixels of his 21” CRT is filled with this engorged dickhead!

    We reached out to the site admin and told him what happened. He deleted the image ref and I posted a comment explaining what happened.

    Another time, at my same cubicle desktop, I updated my Linux workstation and went to lunch. When I get back, my screensaver is just a whole bunch of very explicit porn images. Apparently Jamie Zawenski(sp?), the maintainer of xscreensaver, thought it would be a good idea to introduces a new screensaver that went out and eandomly pulled images from anywhere on the web. So that was fun.

    • d00phy@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Forgot to add the SA image was cached in my browser. So when my roommate asked me about it I brought it back up and, of course it looked fine to me! No dicks to be seen.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          Something Awful, it was a link aggregator and comment site like Reddit before Reddit was a thing.

          I didn’t use it much but I did like that they had voting on posts in multiple dimensions (like funny, insightful, etc).

  • solomon42069@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Sorry bud, but I think you just used to be more innocent.

    Just look at the celebrities and culture of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s… Even the whole outrage culture pushed by conservative media like Fox News also goes that far back!

    The fashion of the day changes but humanity itself… not so much!

    • draneceusrex@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Hmmm…I seem to remember the Republicans in Congress actually having a spine with Nixon. Though I do agree things weren’t roses back then. The cost of living was easier, but we paid for a lot of things we don’t now. $12 for one CD vs $10 a month for Spotify. But I would say the late 90s/ pre 9/11 was pretty nice for the US. Not the case for the rest of the world admittedly. But we definitely have nothing on how bad the 20s, 30s and 40s were.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      In roman times they used to chain link slaves together by the necks and ankles. Then they’d scoop out the eyes of everyone who isn’t the first in the chain.

      Today, we not only don’t have slaves (well, except for prison, but thats another conversation) but the idea of scooping out anothers eyes is horrific sounding, rather than just the norm.

  • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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    18 hours ago

    It was a long time before that when (allegedly) a rib was removed from a man to create the first woman so he wouldn’t have to suck it himself.

    • cardboardchris@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      This was what I thought the OP was talking about at first. It took me a minute to remember that urban legend from the 90s.

  • snooggums@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    There was also the rumor of the actor who put the hamster up their bum.

    It was all innocent stupidity and none of it was malicious though.

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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      17 hours ago

      I remember seeing an Ozzy interview about what happened.

      In short, he didn’t eat it, but he did bite its head off. Why? Because he thought it’d look cool after someone had thown what Ozzy assumed was a toy bat. “Because who the fuck brings a luve bat to a concert and throws it on stage?”

      Also, he wasn’t hospitalized. He just went and got a tetanus shot or something like that to be safe.

      • Lumidaub@feddit.org
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        18 hours ago

        Was that Ozzy? Whoever it was, it was a request for a bowl of only brown M&Ms backstage and their reasoning was that, if that request wasn’t fulfilled, whoever was responsible didn’t do their job and they’d assume that other, necessary stuff also wasn’t done properly. Kind of a canary, in a way.

        • Nollij@sopuli.xyz
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          13 hours ago

          Van Halen’s road crew confirmed that. They also confirmed that, without exception, if the M&Ms were wrong, there were other major problems. And when I say major, it’s on the level of “people would have died” if they had continued with the show.

            • Kitathalla@lemy.lol
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              7 hours ago

              If I remember the story about it, van halen productions were way bigger than most, on the order of 18 semis worth of equipment compared to a normal production’s two semis. The candy thing was a quick and dirty way to check that the venue had followed the instructions for everything else to the letter, because it would get complicated if they hadn’t.

          • Lumidaub@feddit.org
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            15 hours ago

            Oh I see, hah. It did sound like you were simply misremembering and it’s been quite a while since I saw the movie so that went right over my head.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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        17 hours ago

        Not ozzy. Van Halen.

        That way they knew all the prep work was properly done by the crew: unsorted M&Ms = short on time, and it’s possible something more important was missed.

        • wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
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          9 hours ago

          I wonder if they ever thought that maybe the crew was short on time because they were too busy separating all of those M&Ms.

  • ivanafterall ☑️@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Not just any guy, but Marilyn Manson, who used to play Paul on The Wonder Years. I’m not sure what was more shocking, learning about this, or learning of Mark Paul Gosselaar’s fatal motorcycle crash. Taken from us far too soon.