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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3371 thread views

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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I think that's probably what will keep the 90s special as far as nostalgia goes; it feels like if we could time travel back to the 90s, we could have our cake and eat it too. The differences between then and now are technically qualitative, but they don't feel like they are, and the advantages of pre-Internet age hadn't really faded away yet. We often focus on how kids used to play outside, but rainy, bad weather days were boring. Now, possibilities for entertainment don't change much despite the weather, but before video game consoles, you had to hope your parents were willing to drive to go rent a VHS, or before the VCR you had to hope something good was on TV, and before the TV, you were pretty much fucked if nothing good was on the radio, etc... In the 90s, you could have it all. If you wanted social media: BBSes, usenet, forums were there. If you wanted to speak to someone across the world, there were crude audio video chat platforms like CU-SeeMe. You could play tons of videogames of all kinds, if you were on a computer you could download them too. Of course, when we imagine ourselves in the 90s, we tend to imagine ourselves as early adopters, even though few people had computers and internet (and broadband internet). But yeah, the perks of the current years were mostly possible, even if few people took advantage of them, and the tradeoffs hadn't materialized yet.

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