I don’t miss dial-up internet, I just don’t. I don’t even like the sound because it’s just digital screeches and it’s a sound that makes me cringe a little upon hearing it. Because I remember the times when I’d be listening to music with headphones with volume high and then that fucking digital screech just blares into my ears.
I don’t miss waiting 30 minutes to load a page. I don’t miss a bit of it.
As trivial as it sounds, pornography.
Imagine having to pull out the trench from the winter drawer and drive to another town’s smutt shop, so they don’t recognize you, every time you feel like wankingFor a long time, I thought porno mags in bushes at parks was a ruse invented by the previous generation to confound the current
Oh man. Finding porno mags in bushes as a kid was like finding buried treasure. Especially if the pages weren’t sticky.
Getting paid by check instead of direct deposit.
I’m still getting paid by check.
France, public administration.
I moan absolutely every time, and then hold on to it as much as I can to fuck up their accounting because unclaimed checks whacks their balances. When they phone to complain I call them palaeolithic morons & ask them to fucking wire the money already. I think my record is three months (I don’t work exclusively for them). Nice people and fun job otherwise but gosh, why the checks, seriously.
They could at least fax you the checks to your home fax machine for convenience.
Minitel it
I don’t miss only having 3 channels to watch and having to be home at a particular time to watch something.
It was a shared experience, and! and! the quality was better! Don’t believe me? Find any freesat channel right now and compare it to any streaming service.
Streaming services have to serve millions of different customers different content on-demand, and as a result the signal is compressed and dithered to the point of unviewabaility (says me, my family are apparently unaffected by the fuzzy black dots…) even on 4K streams.
Broadcast content? Its just chucked out there over the waves for anyone to catch, and the bitrate and quality are fantastic in comparison.
Also the ‘cultural exchange’ you’d get if you lived in border regions!
Just pirate the 4k versions if you want to be a video snob.
HD piracy on demand is not that easy. Even popcorn time at its peak would suffer buffering if the media wasn’t popular enough
Pirate it ten minutes before demand.
you’re asking me for a level of foresight that is simply not possible
Stremio+debrid-link is pretty great, although it isn’t free.
This is definitely a hot take. I’m yet to see broadcast content that comes close to streaming content in quality.
Paid streaming, sure - you get the nice nitrate.
Free streaming (or Netflix bottom tier) vs Free Broadcast? Broadcast wins hands down in quality
the quality was better
This very much depends on when you’re taking about. Over the air television when I was young was absolutely not better quality than any streaming service now. 480i delivered by an analog interference-prone signal definitely does not compare favourably to streaming.
People smoking everywhere
Ugh, and the restaurants with the low half wall to separate the smoking and non smoking sections?
You are lucky if you get a half wall!
I miss that. You would go to someone’s indoor wedding, and one half of the room just would not be visible.
It gave the disco lights way more flair when passing through a high smoke cloud. Yes, we have fog machines now, but they’re typically more to your knees, it’s a different effect.
Plus you could tell which tables were discussing the heavy politics based on the thickness of the smoke above the table. The weakass smoke-free tables was where the dull-minded sat, saying nothing of consequence.
The children of today have no idea what it was like to go into a McDonald’s and see used ashtrays on the tables. And good for them. But holy shit, how did anyone ever have an appetite?
I don’t miss having to have a separate device for digital photography. I remember having to pay 4 or 500 for a decent digital camera that fits in your pocket. When I got my first smart phone about 15 years ago, I took a picture with it and compared it to a decent Canon and a decent Fuji camera, that were one the best ones you could get in Best buy at the time for that budget. I compared the images and they sucked compared to my phone. Smh. Now my phone is around 4 or 500 and way better than basic digital cameras you can fit in your pocket, with way more functionality.
I do not feel nostalgia for the information isolation and bottleneck prior to the late 90’s, like needing the newspaper classified ads to find a job, music discovery was primarily limited to local FM radio (although I’m totally disenfranchised from streaming ads with a little bit of music added into the gaps), and cable TV as the only form of home entertainment. I am nostalgic for the age of ownership and citizenship. I hate neo feudalism and the corruption of the tech bro oligarchy, but I digress.
The fact that I can have a New Pipe content filled with people holding masters and doctorate degrees while communicating in a layperson format is awesome. I can’t imagine how terrible physical disability would have been if I couldn’t take a break from a project, like right now, and feel like I’m in a casual conversation with a real group of people despite being in bed hurting. It lacks the same psychological depth as in person interchange, and people often fail to understand the depth or specificity of what am talking about here, but it is better than nothing by a long shot. The negativity of the average anon seems to get better with time in the present age. We are still not at a point where we can be wrong in a truly civil way and see value in people. We do not seem to process that we are all evolving and a growing mess of change at various levels, but we are getting there slowly and we are a long way away from the negativity of the early internet. So yeah, if this is the information age, I do not feel nostalgic about the previous information bottleneck.
Access to infinite knowledge from the internet, sitting right in everyones pocket. Sometimes, I will find myself talking to someone a few generations older than me. And they will say something along the lines of “I wonder how many…” and then just let the idea rest. Because they still act like they would have to go to a library to look up the fact. It amazes me! We don’t have to wonder. I can look it up right now! It’ll take me a few seconds.
Alternatively, I cannot stand when I am talking to someone and make a statement to which they respond: “I don’t know…” or “I’m not sure if that’s true”. This is often a tactic I see older men use (often talking politics) to cast doubt on a younger or female person. And unfortunately, back in the day that was good enough to derail a conversation. Nowadays though… Don’t believe me? Let’s look it up. We don’t have to take your word for it. People forget they can be fact checked in real time.
I often find looking up facts defeats the point of the conversation, specifically in the context of your first para
Leaded gas
Vaporwave… It was cool for like 2 minutes in 2015 but it got old very quick. Just get any 80s song and slow it down on some free audio software. In a lot of ways it could be seen as a precursor to other trash like nightcore or breakcore.
Nightcore way predates 2015
I remember those old Alvin and the chipmunks versions of songs you used to get in YouTube. They were similar
Nightcore existed since like early 2000s. Huge scene when youtube just became a thing. Vaporwave came at the very least in 2010s, when lofi experienced a burst of popularity
I wish it stayed cool longer only because I didn’t care for it at first but then really got into it around 2020, but by then the genre was already dead.
About the timeline, i attended breakcore parties in the 2000s, vaporware may be related but as a far descendant, not a precursor
‘Breakcore parties’ sound like the worst thing ever. I’ll rather go to a P. Diddy party
I actually miss that all the things take a wile to start or function. Im not happy with this fast life were all its instantly. That only give me anxiety.
Non-shitty affordable gaming. No Internet required, no updates, no game breaking bugs if you bought it on day one. Just bring your Game Boy Colour in the back seat of the car on vacation, bring a shitload of AA’s and finish Pokémon Blue 3 times in a few weeks.
It sounds like you are nostalgic for that
Oh I misread the question.
Get a Steam Deck, load it with emulators and indie games.
Cars that would vapor lock when driving in the mountains.
I’ve never heard of this but I didn’t grow up near mountains. I did however grow up in the Midwest and couldn’t stand anti-lock brakes — one time I hit a car because instead of allowing me to control the sliding the car refused and just went straight into the car ahead of me.
These days I live nowhere near snow (unless I choose to drive into the mountains) so I’m not sure what the situation is with modern cars. I did go up into the mountains last years when the temperature dropped to 39°F overnight and my car freaked about tire pressure — that wasn’t a fun lesson to learn.
As flatlander: I need some clarification. Why was this, why is it no longer something?
Vapor locking is an interplay between a mechanical vacuum based fuel pump and carburetors that causes the engine to get starved of gas and stall out. It’s made worse at high altitude and particularly when ascending rapidly like driving up a high altitude pass such as Wolf Creek. If you’ve even needed to pop your ears several times while driving you’ve been in a situation where it could have happened.
Back in the day, the fix when it happened was to stop the engine and wait for air pressure to equalize through the system, which generally took about 30 minutes. Of course, this was on the side of a narrow twisty mountain road and people would sometimes get impatient or not know what was going on and flood their engine in a panic.
It’s pretty rare now due to electric fuels pumps and fuel injection.
I work at a place that pumps several million pounds of liquid a day. As such, I know all about vapor locking. However, as a flatlander, I had no idea this was a thing. Thanks for the TIL.
collecting wood for heating.
VHS tapes, and having to rewind them.
Although the ability to record almost anything on a cheap VHS tape was nice, now everything has copy protection.
Please be kind, rewind.
VHS could copy the subtitles and teletex info too, even if it wasn’t displayed, which is nuts
Changing CDs just to listen to a few songs from a different album. Also carrying around CDs.
I’m conflicted. I enjoy being able to listen to anything anywhere but it makes me not listen to full albums anymore, possibly missing out on good music.
You can set most music apps to go by album
Thank you Mr obvious. The point is that streaming platforms are changing the mentality and behavior to listen to random titles of different artists instead of full albums and that is also why albums don’t have a „story“ anymore. It’s too easy to click away to something different, skip a title (was already easy with CDs), be distracted. I personally own a vinyl player to combat this for myself.
You have free will and can make your own choices about how to consume music. And drag wants you to use that free will to not misgender drag as “mister”.
Same, I tend to reserve full album listens for working and long car/plane/train rides. With the current standard of streaming services over mobile, I find myself mostly listening to previously downloaded stuff because of inconsistent US mobile data service in my area occasionally. I’ve also gone the route of upgrading my old iPod with more storage (160GB -> 1TB) and battery life and just carry all of my music with me.
My childhood. I don’t understand people who do. Mine was mostly loneliness, confusion, trauma, emotional neglect, guilt, shame, some abandonment, some physical abuse, etc. Every day has been a step towards better than the previous. I don’t want to or miss anything going backwards.
