Dollar Tree being only a single dollar on everything.
I didn’t know Dollar Tree existed further back in the years like the 80s. But, I didn’t discover the store until like late 2000s. That store was a godsend for my then mostly broke ass. Sure the quality of products could’ve been better and the food selection could’ve been better, but they were there for me and others who’re strapped on budgets.
And it was a good 16 years while that lasted. It is a little annoying at times to shop there and know it is no different than Dollar General and Family Dollar. But it could’ve been worse.
StumbleUpon was what I personally cite as the peak of the internet.
It was a website where you made an account and selected what categories of things you were interested in. Then click the button and it would take you to a random piece of content on the internet related to that. I remember thinking at the time it was like Pandora, but for the whole internet rather than just music. Eventually it got bought and shut down.
Mint would be another one. A free, ad-deiven website with optional premoun features that allowed you to easily link all of your financial accounts. It would automatically categorize transactions, but you could manually change them and change the categories themselves. It worked great back in the early 2010’s. Then Intuit bought it and it slowly got shittier. They reduced the visualization options. Eventually a few years ago they shut it down to try to get people to move to a different, paid product. Personally I moved to HomeBank, an open-source self-hosted solution. But it means I need to manually import everything.
For someone with ADHD, StumbleUpon was like a button that injects dopamine into your brain.
Really fucking addictiveI was so pissed off when that company bought stumbleupon and trashed it. I hunted and searched for an alternative and nothing was ever the same. It was a huge death blow to the internet I loved. 😭😭😭
We have so so many human AM’s out there, trying to destroy every single bit of joy that we have.
Public health and the general belief that vaccines work.
The internet without megacorps. Ok, the world without megacorps.
Having hope for the future. Believing it would be better than the present.
So much this. Please let politics be boring again.
Instead of trying to make idiocracy happen faster than previously believed to be possible.
I really miss having the delusion that MOST people were good, just more susceptible to media influence and bullshit.
Fuck, I really miss that. What a good response, thx!
There’s a reason “may you live in interesting times” is a curse.
Though I’m not sure the current times are really that interesting. More like terminally stupid.
Wow I hadn’t actually realised this had changed, but of course it has.
I remember watching “beyond 2000” as an 80s kid. A TV show about the inventions and stuff, what life would be like, it was so amazing.
Now we all know the future will just be more oppressive than it is now.
I remember Beyond 2000, it was great.
Reality was quite a disappointment after that, I must say.
Season cliffhangers.
Young people will never understand me in 1990, banished up to my parent’s bedroom to use their TV because they had a movie on downstairs, watching William Riker calmly say “Fire” on a borg cube containing HIS CAPTAIN, and then the music du-du-du-du-duuuuu and the words “to be continued”
And then having to wait an entire goddamn 3 months to find out the outcome.
Ending seasons on cliffhangers was magical. It’s still attempted sometimes today, but in the age of binge-watching and in some cases years between seasons, most shows just wrap up one season arc and start a new one. Kind of sucks.
A lot of good shows also end up canceled with cliffhangers so it’s a double-edged sword. I’m still pissed about Alphas not having a proper ending.
I hate cliffhangers. Especially since new seasons aren’t guaranteed.
Windows XP and 7. Before all the “AI”, bloatware and unnecessary features. Oh and that pinball game that was on xp.
that pinball game that was on xp
This one? Someone made an ad free port of it for android but it unsurprisingly got pulled off google. You can play it here and there’s a link to the git where you can prob get it for android still
I don’t want to play it! I want to fondly remember having fun playing it…
Yeah that nostalgia will get shattered real quick if you try to play it now. I tried it on Android, and it’s even harder because the input isn’t responsive enough sometimes.
Installing CachyOS hasn’t quite given nostalgia, but it got me away from the feeling of Windows’ bloatware.
There was a brief moment when broadcast television networks just put their shit on the internet for free. Like you just had to go to their website, and then like the whole catalog of Scrubs or something was just there to watch.
I heard about that in the 2000s when they did that.
And that was a solution to the piracy ordeal they were fluffing about. But then they got rid of the shows being put online, just so they can bitch about piracy years later.
the transparent electronics vibe, the whole y2k was a fast and awsome era
Turn of the millennium aesthetics were awesome. I’d love a translucent neon orange smartphone so durable it cracks the tile when you drop it.
Democracy
I’m back in the 70s and 80s we had but we called the dime store. Where a lot of the products were only a dime and then they raise the price to quarter and then raise the price again to 50 cents. And then eventually we ended up with dollar stores. But I mean overall they’re all the same junk some good some really really not. But I know when I was younger and poor the dollar store was always fantastic for whatever I needed. Hell even now for things that I can use I still go there and pick it up even though some stuff is $1.25 or more. It’s still less expensive than a lot of other places.
hrm. times change. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z-aVQtN1eBA
The internet’s creative centers pre YouTube algorithm.
Now, not just to make it big, but to get popular, you need someone talking for 10 minutes every week to draw attention - maybe even every day.
That forces hundreds of creators to consider what content can be made lazily with no effort, rather than with skill over the course of a few months. Rewind back to the better days of Flash animations and even my own hobby of Garry’s Mod / Source Filmmaker animations to see a lot of what I mean.
Yugoslavia. Party scene. Some relationships.
Democracy.
Inbox by Gmail
y/a answers before i jumpted to reddit, then oracle killed it.
INDEED FORUMS, and glassdoor reviews before the astroturfing, legal threats.’
the golden age of shows/movies pre-2010, everything after that were replications of each other, and mostly filled with boring titles and copaganda militaryganda, funny enough started appearing around P45 first term. sci-fi had a pretty bad streak after 2010s, if any was remarkable enough to be re-watched. the decline of cinema quality correlated with the rise in streaming.
Completely disagree on the movies. 95% of movie advertisements are for the big budget, low writing quality blockbusters. More than half of my theater’s current showings are typically original IP (or first-time adaptations) and the majority of award winners are original/first timers. If you’re not seeing the original titles, I don’t believe you’re looking for them
100%. I just watched One Battle After Another, and Bugonia in the last week or so, and both were awesome and original.
There’s definitely still good movies and TV shows that aren’t replications of other things.
Dune and Arrival exist during this timeframe and they are amazing. I’m sure you can find smaller productions that are also good. Oh, I also discovered The Expanse during this time.
Obligatory Fuck 45.
Dune was confusing, cut some details, skipped some time, threw a ton fo universe building at me and god damn did I enjoy it in theaters. Excellent sound, excellent visuals. Dune 2 felt like a political slog, somewhat like Star Wars 2/3, with less action and more exposition. But you know I’ll line up for 3 on the expectation it should be a theater experience.
Can’t say the same for avatar after the water one, so it’s still possible I’ll drop dune if I still can’t figure it out in time
Perhaps reading the books years ago helped me. I don’t think it was needed but I was in love with that world already.
The writing is beyond science fiction. It’s like reading poetry while in love. Every line hits and every character feels significant, even the minor ones.
The movies brought that significance even more to life. I suspect that if you watched them a second time details would show that you might’ve missed the first time.
I personally love the way these movies are paced. I know where it goes and I hope it’s not only a trilogy. There is so much more for Villeneuve to show.
I’d say that after reading Dune then seeing the excellent movies, I can’t enjoy Star Wars the same. In case anyone missed it, Star Wars copied Dune.
I also love the Avatar movies for different reasons and I find people that criticize them to be mostly insufferable idiots that don’t know how to enjoy things.
That’s a possibility. I finally figured out a method, albeit slow, to bring myself to read. It’s become my main passtime on flights. Took 11 months to read Revelation Space, the first book I’ve actually read since like 10th grade. I’m planning to continue the trilogy.
My gripe with Avatar is that it feels shallow in plot, like it’s a sales pitch for the next-gen CGI as it develops new elements. I also got stuck watching 2/Water in 3D, which I hate due to the uncanny forced focus. I get there’s a continued narrative of exploitation of indigenous people’s resources and ecological exploitation in general, but it’s not seeming too deep to me. 1 was blue Pocahontas, 2 was a CGI whaling/Pacific conquering documentary. But I welcome your input, if you’d like to expand my view
I saw half of Dune (1984) after Dune 1 (2021) and wow, I’m glad to see the Villeneuve take continue. I didn’t see it in it’s era, but Star Wars 4 wasn’t nearly as hokey, right?
Ugh. The Pocahontas reference is so overdone and stupid.
I’d happily take your input, but it sounds like you’re just disengaging
