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.
Adult swim. Was top tier absurdism but slowly degraded into just boring.
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.
Having hope for the future. Believing it would be better than the present.
Yugoslavia. Party scene. Some relationships.
Fruit Stripe gum. That flavor would last about 10 seconds, but it was divine. It’s been discontinued, and I doubt the formula will survive through a rerelease. RIP Fruit Stripe.
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.
Physical media, physical buttons, watching sports without a subscription.
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.
Playing shitty RPG maker ripoffs, Kongregate…most of the time. Being an Indie dev was so easy 10 years ago, just pick up action script 3, and make a flappy bird.
Mint Chocolate Chip Soft Batch cookies. Once they disappeared, the cookie changed to taste like Soft Chips Ahoy.
My last marriage.
The internet without megacorps. Ok, the world without megacorps.
90s Japanese cars.
Windows XP and 7. Before all the “AI”, bloatware and unnecessary features. Oh and that pinball game that was on xp.
Installing CachyOS hasn’t quite given nostalgia, but it got me away from the feeling of Windows’ bloatware.
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.
the transparent electronics vibe, the whole y2k was a fast and awsome era
