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The 90s had a lot of good in them but I gotta admit I’m a bit tired of this nostalgic mindset people have about the past.
Sure, a lot of things are not going well today, but at the same time we have made amazing advancements in multiple areas where I’m sure most of you would regret going back to the 90s and not have them.
Advancements in medicine and science as well as social advancements in the form of a better understanding and acceptance of mental health issues. Being gay and trans today is also a lot easier than it was in the 90s. We hold sexual predators more and more responsible for their actions today than we did back then. More people today are aware and concerned about fixing the environment than they were in the 90s where you got to hear things about the ozone layer and then that was it.
Smoking is on its way out. Similar with alcohol. At least in my country. It is less nad less socially acceptable and more and more people turn away from those vices, which is amazing.
In my experience, more and more people raise their kids with respect for the child’s emotional well being. My generation were barely seen as humans when we were children and I see more and more people around my age raising their children with the respect they didn’t receive themselves when they were little. It is bound to create some more robust people in the future who have a healthy sense of self and who believe in themselves.
There are so many good things in the world right now, but if you only look for the bad and start romanticizing a past that wasn’t really as perfect as you think it was, then you’re, in my opinion, living wrong.
It’s okay to appreciate things from the past and miss them, but this “the world was better” bullshit is just very counter productive and in many cases objectively untrue.
My favorite thing from The Matrix was the concept of “Residual Self Image.” It is the perfect starting point to understanding dysphoria. If I was plugged into The Matrix, I would not at all look the way I actually do. I would look to you the way I see myself in my own mind.
I believe the creators are also trans
Yes. And I understand that one of the character’s expressed gender is opposite inside and outside the Matrix.
Living in the 90s would be so chill compared to today.
Wealth inequality is fucking over everything.
I just want to be rewarded for working to support humanity with a life that doesn’t feel like a prison. :c
monkey paw curls now you won’t be rewarded for working while being contained in an actual prison.
Me: dam this place is great :3
So relevant now lol
I think it turned out worse than that.
I am ok with “question everything”, the problem is that people don’t believe in reputable sources that don’t confirm their beliefs, they look (possibly unreliable) sources that confirm them
I think it is due to the echo chamber of social networks. People have constant confirmation of superficial “sources” and they continue to want that.
Incidentally it’s the reason I use lemmy where the algorithm is not optimised to the point of echo chambers (also looking for “all” helps)
If we really were to be in the Matrix that’s fine, but could I maybe ask for some better living conditions? Maybe be able to actually afford things without constant worry and anxiety over whether I can pay the rent.
They tried a perfect society but humanity rejected it as fake.
But that’s the thing it doesn’t gotta be perfect, just a little better. We can still handle some suffering, but goddamn could we atleast afford a house to suffer in?
That’s part of the control.
It was that gods damned Hadron collider, I’m telling you. It let the 5G into our reality and now we’re all being controlled by fucking lizard people from the Nth dimension who are after all of our blood.
It was in all the papers.
It’s actually red Lectroids from the 8th dimension.
But I understand how you’d get confused.
How much are the lizard people paying you to spread their propaganda?
Probably not the place for it but I shall point out that the 00s were going swimmingly until the cunts at Goldman Sachs and others of a similar bent made a shedload of cash out of turning the housing market into a massive casino and then stuck taxpayers the world over with the bill in the '08 crash and the global economy has been pretty much fucked ever since.
It’s Goldman Sachs. Those board members should be in prison.
Sure. Prison would be fine. Hell, I’ll gladly argue for the reduced sentence after they’re brought to justice. I bet I’ll be feeling generous.
I dunno. I kinda consider 9/11 to be the shifting point. That’s when racism came roaring back and also the introduction of the Patriot Act. The 2008 crash was just the solidification of the shit show to come.
The 2008 crash was also the result of Greenspan and Bush’s 0% interest rate bullshit that prevented savings and ruined the housing market while starting wars to avoid smaller correctional recessions. 9/11 was the excuse, so I kinda caused all this, in a way.
YOU did?!? You son of a…
The LA race riots and Clintons going on about “super-predators” would like a word with you about racism going away in the 90’s
Didn’t say that it wasn’t there. Just that it got a lot worse after 9/11 and the following years.
9/11 was a pretext for doing what they wanted to do anyway. Kind of like how the Olympics in LA was the pretext they needed to militarize the police there.
Finding a pretext isn’t hard, but sometimes events outside of your control just kinda hand one to you.
I’ve heard that the high tide was end of WW II. Sloping exponentially downwards, with the occasional oil boom or bust.
Guys, guys. We all know the true inflection point. Harambe.
I’m starting to think having my dick out this whole time hasn’t been working.
Just imagine how much worse things would have been if we hadn’t
Its working for me…
Dicks out everyone.
Well yes, but actually no.
Mid-2000s were also kinda nice. We got relatively capable pocket computing devices. Proper 3D games. Avatar: The Last Airbender. Music was not yet so… algorithmic.
Kinda downhill from there, though, ngl.
Someone hasn’t heard of late nineties, early two thousands boy bands if they think music wasn’t formulaic…
I didn’t say it wasn’t formulaic, I said it wasn’t AS “formulaic”. Back then popular music still had much more variety, nowadays whatever flows to the top is much more same-y, and you gotta dig deeper for the interesting stuff.
I think it’s easier to find the weird stuff these days. Back then you’d basically have to be a part of a particular scene, or have someone i produce it to you. Otherwise you had whatever top 50 radio stations were in your area. Speaking of formulaic…
It’s definitely easier to find weird stuff with all the streaming services. But I don’t often look for stuff, and back then the good stuff found me. I’ll occasionally even look at what’s trending now to try and find something interesting, but I rarely see anything.
Either way, it’s not just my opinion, it can be verified empirically, there is way less variety in popular music these days. I even remember Vsauce had a video about that. And it applies to other mediums as well. All big budget movies are generic. All AAA games are either live service or Assassins’s Creed but Vikings/Hackers/Jedi/etc. And by “all” I mean “most”, of course. If you want the good stuff you either go indie or retro.
What are you talking about? The golden age was obviously 2010 when the Last Airbender movie came out! You’re way off
What movie? Never heard of it.
James Cameron directed it. Went in a very unique direction from the source material.
The earth king has invited you to lake laogai
deleted by creator
Finally? Everybody appreciates it.
I’ve got good news for you, it’s in top 5 best animated TV shows of all time, pretty much on every website that has rankings, and sits at 9.3/10 rating on IMDB with 410k votes. A lot of people appreciate it very much.
As a trans person, I’m very glad I live today and not the 1990s
That’s good. I remember doing the scene in the 90s there were fuck all trans people
A lot of them were already there and just afraid
Peak was 2011 change my mind.
Nah, '95 was best. BBS systems were in their final bloom, Usenet was better than everything that came afterwards (OK, the fediverse maaaay be a good successor) and there were still the COOL systems (Atari, Commodore…) around even after their respective companies had abandoned them.
You also could make some decent money if you had some rudimentary coding skills… I financed my first motorcycle (for which I hadn’t a driving license, mind you) by writing a (QBASIC? Visual Basic? I don’t remember) software for managing car parts for some local used car dealers.
In between the matrix and 2011 you have 9-11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the 2008 financial crash. And that’s just the big US-centric stuff.
Well, my first kiss was around 2011 so that kinda evens everything out
Fair
I’m not old enough to remember that time. What was it like?
Okay so the fascism was still thoroughly deniable if you were straight cis and white.
The internet was this like magical cool thing that was going to change everything.
The illusion of ownership was a lot more substantial, because while we were connected, we weren’t all always connected to everything
There was more space for privacy, interiority.
Houses were basically free (it was a scam but most people didn’t want to know that)
‘Conservative’ old dudes with nazi memorabilia usually got it the right way.
Even the literal nazis regularly shot at the cops. The cops even shot other nazis sometimes!
There were rarely more than 4 genocides going at once, none of them as bad or directly by major powers.
The cold war had just ended, so the libs were like 80% less insufferable (i know) and everyone was haopy the world couldnt suddenly end in nuclear fire with like two hours notice
A buncha annoying hippies and nerds were whining about ‘global warming’ but nobody really had to listen.
None of your tech had the juice to do what it said on the box and spy on you. Everything was unsecured. You could get into any computer anyone who mattered used by just deleting the password.
That last part sounds like some hyperbole i made up for a joke. It is not hyperbole and i did not make it up. It was, arguably, a joke.
‘Conservative’ old dudes with nazi memorabilia usually got it the right way.
How exactly did they get “it” the right way?
The Nazi memorabilia was from their time killing Nazis and they remembered how great it was to kill Nazis. The few that were Nazis hid or because the others really wanted to kill Nazis again.
Yeah. Say what you want about 90s racist grandpa; the biggest problem he’d see with your gay blue haired ass getting gassed by cops who’re covering an ICE raid is that you let any of them live.
Like, he’d still call every single person on your side a slur, but he’d be doing it while he shouted abuse at you for not killing the nazis.
Killin nazis, lootin corpses.
to sum up in one world “hopeful”. Things were getting good. it was still the fairly early days of the internet and while speeds for the majority of people weren’t great honestly unless you were in college on a T1 line you didn’t know any better. you had IRC, ICQ, AOL IM, Forums, etc so you met and talked to interesting people and friends from the world over. you expressed yourself and found people with similar interests via geocities, livejournal and/or myspace.
Technology was progressing rapidly and new opportunities were opening up. Suddenly you could make a living building said Geocities sites or designing things on your computer. It was a fun time, a lot of cool and interesting things were happening and it felt like things could only go up from there. So yeah, we were hopeful for the future.
It honestly still felt like a “sky’s the limit” mentality like it probably was in the 50s. The internet and computers were just really starting to catch on and everyone was talking about how great they would make our lives and people were doing what they could to deliver on that promise.
Terror was something that wasn’t really on peoples radars. You could still go directly to the gate to meet your loved ones when they travelled, people were endeavoring to be inclusive as you could see from TV and other media, and racists we’re very much immediately dismissed without much of a platform.
It wasn’t the best for LGBTQ people, especially with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but it was generally just considered a matter of time before it would be accepted.
And finally the climate wasn’t trying to actively kill you and people were talking about things we could do around renewables and other energy initiatives.
I’ll take off the rose colored glasses as I know there are some bad things, but it’s hard not to say that objectively it was a good time.
I always think of the song from Portlandia whenever someone brings up the 90s: https://youtu.be/U4hShMEk1Ew
Although, from what I’ve heard, tech bros migrated from the Bay Area to Portland and have radically changed its culture for the worse.
Lots of stuff in the news how things could go wrong and it could be the end of civilization. Because of all the scaremongering however there was enough money to go around to fix all critical systems.
In the end only minor things happened, like a library charging people 100 years of interest on their late fees. It could’ve been a lot worse. Banks charging 100 years of interest were avoided, no infrastructure went down. But the checks and fixes done were needed. Some computers in production systems would just brick themselves when the date was set to 2000.
Then after new year came the comments of people complaining that all the money was spent and nothing happened.
Can’t wait for Y2K38!
And everybody trying to get AI to fix the issue
Obviously this is just my perspective on things… I’m a UK millennial probably old enough to be your mother
The millennium was hyped up but came to nothing weren’t as big as it was supposed to be.
Terrorism barely got mentioned before 9/11. In the UK we had the IRA so we had more awareness.
Internet wasn’t really around as much. Online shopping definitely wasn’t a big thing, big stores had few or no shopping options. It was absolutely NOT used by everyone, and not everyone used computers. Mobile charges were expensive.
I’ve noticed a big generation gap between millennial and Gen Z. Better awareness towards MH, inclusiveness etc. Also seem to be more health conscious and drink less.
Did UK people smoke much more back then? I recently went on vacation to Germany and was appalled at how acceptable it is there. Here in the Netherlands we have a program called “Smoke-free generation”, which forbids smoking in places that children often visit, such as schools and sports fields. From what I heard, the bottom kinda fell out when vaping became popular under teenagers.
Never come to South East Asia lmao. China, SK, Japan have been taking measures, like its banned in most hotels and restaurants now, but theres so many restaurants in Japan that are grandfathered in and literally everyone smoking, hotels in China that are technically apartments or something to skirt the law, and people smoking in the streets even when its banned.
Yes, loads. I think you could still smoke on planes but not totally sure. Absolutely nobody vaped it was all ciggies, and they were WAY cheaper. There weren’t the scary signs on them, they had branded packs and loads more people smoked. I remember the smoking ban in pubs coming in, it was controversial
The Y2K was a different kind of virus, a virus of the mind.
During updates the unit goes into swamp mode.
It was already around the peak of the US empire, yeah. You may be biased.
