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.
Gay jokes on TV. You know the kind. “it’s funny because it’s gay”, very prevalent on series like Friends. Friends is a great show even today, but I do not miss the gay jokes.
I watched ace Ventura the other day and I cringed so hard at the transphobia and I remember laughing at it in the theaters too when it was new.
My internalised homophobia definitely thought homophobia was comedy gold back in the day…
I love monty python’s flying circus, but they had multiple sketches across several different episodes where the punchline was a gay person getting murdered. Kinda hard to watch some of them now.
People smoking everywhere
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?
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.
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 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.
The school bullying.
Traded it in for work bullying
Stop putting the nerds from accounting into lockers
In my opinion, the bullying is still as alive as it ever was. Kids are just better at masking it. There is definitely more acceptance for LGBT, neurodivergent, and kids that would be considered outside the “norm” nowadays. But, teenagers have a strange capacity for cruelty to one another, it is just a different type of cruelty than past generations.
I’d also argue as someone thats experienced schooling more recently than many other Lemmy users, the methodology of bullying has changed. My parents always told stories of being physically assaulted by other kids as a form of bullying. My experience was being falsely reported for all sorts of crimes, funnily enough only to the school and never to actual authorities who could properly prove my innocence. Being accused of having and sharing drugs as well as death threats over anonymous messaging platforms is still most definitely bullying, though the style of violence and persuasion have changed.
I coach kids, and false reporting has become an issue recently. We take every report seriously and have to investigate/escalate each case individually. I have seen two different teenagers admit to maliciously reporting another kid when their stories were questioned or enough time had passed that they no longer felt vengeful toward the other person. The systems for reporting bullying/abuse/crimes are a huge step in the right direction from the past strategy of ignorance. I don’t know how to impart to kids that false claims damage the entire social system we have in place for keeping them safe.
I’m so glad to hear that this is something actually being thought about. It hurts extra because I know that the cases of false reports will then take resources away from cases that may be urgent. I don’t intend to dump emotional info but I genuinely feel that this affected my self-concept as a whole and still have an issue with presuming my own guilt. I’m still trying to take my time to build my own concept from reality and not the false reality others tried to impart on me. It sucks because these systems of believing reporters are of course better than ignorance. However, if we continue with this route of handling justice it will turn to case-by-case deliberation, which can be extremely difficult and then harmful biases can come into play.
Hopefully you are never going to experience this shit again, schools are like part-time jails and people behave accordongly.
Children who have grownup bodies and are supposed to be behaving like adults by now also bully using false reports.
Having to do yard work or setting up holiday decorations outside. Ever since moving from a house to an apartment, I’ve had zero yard work outside of picking up dog shit when walking my brother’s dogs and the closest I’ve come to holiday decorating is setting up a fake indoor Christmas tree and decorating it.
Used to have to do a lot of leaf picking up and weed pulling growing up. Never liked it and still don’t because of how long it’d take and how I don’t like getting dirt dirty. Also, I was never a massive fan of decorating outside, specifically just Halloween and Christmas, because my family used to have a ton of decorations and my mom always wanted them a certain way, even if that meant taking a few down and moving them. Lots of work over a weekend. Looked good afterwards, but I can’t say I’ve missed putting stuff up. I’ll leave that to other people like the people near me who for some reason still have Halloween decorations up.
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.
Not that gasoline cars are gone (unfortunately) but I personally won’t ever go back to it. Electric cars are just so much better in any way except range and charge time. But those are honestly overblown topics that you won’t think much about in your daily life once you got used to it.
I don’t miss dial-up internet,
Nobody “misses” 56kbit/s.
I don’t even like the sound because it’s just digital screeches
When I hear that sound now I am very briefly returned to the excitement I felt in the 90s. It was an age of wide-open possibilities, free from commercial influence. Full of patience and anticipation.
Oh well.
I don’t miss being in my 20s. I was broke, miserable, sometimes homeless and kind of a shit. I had a lot of fun and good memories but my living situation was miserable.
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
CRT displays. The day I replaced my old CRT with a LCD I thought I hope I never use one of these again.
Cars that would vapor lock when driving in the mountains.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Also the ‘cultural exchange’ you’d get if you lived in border regions!
Smokers.
