Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.
Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.
24/7 Wal-Marts
It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.
Video Games that were shipped in complete versions
Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.
Firefly.
Freedom,the internet, rationality of thought.
Macs, when the macOS was still called MacOS X, stability, sensible UX, and much better software and hardware compared to Windows.
Pokemon Go was so good in that first summer it came out
24-hour Walmarts
And Dollar Tree when everything still cost a dollar
Early internet 2000-2011ish.
Physical buttons.
Watching sports without a subscription.
Keebler pizzeria chips.
The News.
Physical media.
Video games releasing finished without a day one patch.
Netflix 2013 had basically everything for 8 dollars. What an experience that was.
I guess I knew it couldn’t last if it got super popular. It would have to get filled with ads or you’d be charged per show or movie you watched, I thought.
But for a brief window you had the perfect application for watching tv and movies.
Eh, the suckers way back then are why things are how they are now.
They were proud to pay for things they could be getting for free, and so businessmen see that opportunity and take full advantage of it.
It was called Netflix and chill because no bitches wanted to fuck you after watching you fumble around with your computer and usb drives for 15 minutes before watching How I Met Your Mother at 720p with no subtitles
That’s why you get a media server, do all of the pirating you’ve done years prior and get software that’ll load up all of those shows and movies by a click of a button. Nobody has time these days fumbling around with that shit.
Yeah, I’m definitely interested in setting up a jellyfin with radar and sonar like I see people on this site talking about, just got to find the willpower to figure it all out
Lol, you must be a computer illiterate.
America
Ah 24/7 Walmart, that’s how I bought my first stuff for experimenting with femininity, waiting until 2am and going a town over to ensure nobody I knew saw me…
And to answer your question the wild west internet. There was freedom and rebellion there. A whole new world with every weirdo, freak, and nerd at your fingertips. A place where you weren’t alone until you found a person who could recommend a place, but instead you could just look it up and find out where your kind of freaks were chatting and they’d even tell you if there was a place irl. Ironically I’m noticing a shift back to needing to know a person to find a place, but that place is a discord server more often these days.
There’s a lot of people here reminiscing about how it used to be a better world. It wasn’t, but we weren’t aware of all the horrible hidden shit going on, or we felt less affected/responsible because it was a less connected world back then. Sometimes I miss my ignorance, but ignorance won’t fix the world.
So I guess I miss pulp novels.
Every generation of people will be nostalgic for the period they’ve grown up in.
I’ve grown up in the 90s and 00s, so there are things in those decades that I hold dearly or will have a bias towards.
People born in the '10s will have theirs, people born in the 50s .etc
We took the world as it was in our times and some of us can admit that the world was never perfect, we just found what gems we did find through it all.
For me: the internet. The internet has done what my country has done and that’s centralization. Collecting everybody in a few big cities and subsequently killed small villages, towns and communities. Ironically, in the case of my government, it was done to save money and in the case of the internet, it was done to make money.
I also enjoyed my time during the years I was taking my degree. The friendships and fun hangouts, the way we helped one another and accepted one another and learned tolerance and humility. I remember that I actively participated in as many things as possible while I was studying, because I wanted as few regrets as possible when I graduated and the next phase of life started. I’m so happy I had the pressence of mind to think of that and take advantage of my time with these people while I still had the chance, because this current phase of life is a lot more slow paced and there isn’t much in terms of socializing because everyone is working and are making babies these years. I don’t mind that those years ended and that we are here now. It was good while it lasted, but I do think that if it had lasted any longer than it did, it would probably have gone stale at some point. We ended on a high note.
Oh, and since last year, my spouse and I have been returning to physical media and have started buying and borrowing DVDs and Blurays again. Recently we watched a 2004 movie that has a scene in a DVD store and I just blurted out to my boyfriend that I miss going to one of those stores and browsing DVDs. Especially Blockbuster-type stores where you’d rent the DVD because they always had a bin with discarded films you could buy for super cheap. These days most of our DVD purchases take place online and it’s so boring. I miss going to a physical store with atmosphere and find some random movie I hadn’t seen before and it was almost free, it was that cheap. Axel Music and Moby Disc were my favourite stores and I totally took that experience for granted because silly me thought that stores like that would always be around. The closest I get to reliving this experience is when we go to the library to borrow movies. The DVD section is shoved away in a sad little corner in my library so it’s not really the same, but it’s still better than nothing at all. I don’t know what I’ll do if physical media is forcefully phased out after the boomer generation passes away. Dx
On the other hand, LPs have made a comeback so maybe there is hope yet.
You can still have that DVD experience by going to thrift stores. Most of them have a decent collection.
No thrift store will ever be short of DVDs.
However, finding the ones you actually want i.e released in stores who still bother with DVDs, gonna have some patience.
Should probably check out some of my local ones and see what they have. Thanks for your comment! 🤗
- Dollar menus at fast food places
- Firefly
- Halloween neighborhood roam trick or treating
- Calvin & Hobbes but I’m glad Watterson ended it when he did
- Angular car design (yeah down with car centrism but those angles looked cool)
- Internet 1.0 and the separation of offline and online life
- The Beyond Taco at Del
- Personal privacy
Weeping upvote for Firefly, taken too soon 😭 🪦 😭 😭
Why do the worst people make such good shows
Knees that didn’t crack.
The pre-algorithm internet and social media era of about 2000-2014.
I remember when Instagram was just pictures of my friends cats, hikes, and thrift finds. It was great and fun.
When Facebook status windows automatically had an “is” following your name. So posts would start with “Mary is” and you’d fill in what you’re doing or how you’re feeling.
When Twitter used SMS and you could use it just to follow your favorite band, so whenever they posted it felt like you got a text from them. That was pretty cool.
The internet.
internet 1.0
I am old enough to have used the internet on a DOS machine with an acoustic coupler dialing up to a hyperboard. Guess my age?
57?
- My step dad was a computer junkie and we had a machine when I was a kid.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
More like B:> Run
I’m 46 and we got a 14.4 modem in around 1992-3 I think. We used gopher and ftp then later hotline to trade shareware, then warez and serialz.
I miss those days, but I don’t miss downloading 8 of 9 parts of a file and not being able to reconnect to the server for the last one.
And then at some point you started running out of space, so you had to go back and find all those incomplete downloads, and delete them to create more space.
Wasn’t even that good for me tbh just a time wasting exercise. Release the cable eating sharks!!
