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.
Gurren Lagann
The open internet.
Democracy
Netflix being the only streaming offering.
Yeah, once Netflix and other streaming companies discovered exclusive content it all went to shit.
The entire point was to have content distribution separate from production, and available in one place.
Streaming was supposed to ‘replace’ cable television, because people were fed up of forced commercials, unavailable content and restrictions on cable television.
Well, streaming got maybe some of that corrected. However, it has turned itself into a hydra where the content is here, there and over there with price tags on every service. Ads are now forced onto us but we now have “control” over them, I guess (if you don’t ad-block).
So it’s like cable television all over again.
The whole streaming thing is capitalism in a nutshell.
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It forces innovation that creates awesome thing
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It’s never happy with the amount of money it makes, so it keeps pushing harder and harder until the awesome thing turns into shit, and on its way of turning into shit it pulls up the ladder behind it so new competitors have a harder time competing.
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I miss the mailed DVDs…
I remember Brooklyn (NYC) Public Libaries had DVDs you could borrow. They even have foreign language TV shows lol.
Used to? Like they don’t anymore? That’s disappointing. My local library still carries DVDS.
No idea if they still have them, I don’t live in NYC anymore. NYC, even Brooklyn is expensive as hell, rent was going up. My parents barely managed to borrow money from close friends + some savings to be able to afford a house in Philly, where I’m now. The last time I’ve been to the library was… idk 4-6 years ago… I literally only go to libraries to use their computer or like I wanna skip school and chill a bit there so I don’t get home too early.
When I was younger, I remember borrowing comics and stuff… I never actually wanted to read “books”.
I was facing a lot of issues…
On one hand, I barely know enough Chinese to read a Chinese book (except like a childrens book, which is just cringe for me, yes I know very hypocritical since I was a kid myself)
On the other hand, my English wasn’t remotely good enough to read an English book.
So like comics were the only thing I could read.
As for the DVDs, I didn’t pick them, my parents did. And it was interesting enough for me, so I just watched it anyways since there wasn’t much to do. Early days I wasn’t allowed much computer time / internet time, when I did have more access, I wasn’t knowledged enough to find free stuff to watch. So its just TV shows in Mandarin from those DVDs. It probably helped with expanding my Mandarin skills for a bit longer, because like it soon atrophys when you don’t use it. I haven’t really spoken Mandarin for like… 15 years. Except rare circumstances when there was a Mandarin-speaking classmate. I kinda remember the pronunciations, but I’m gonna have to think in Cantonese, then convert it to Mandarin… so there’s a bit of a lag, sort of.
I used to live off the video game equivalent of the video disk delivery service…. I forgot what it was called, but that was the shit where basically you could “rent” a game but keep the game as long as you wanted unless you cancelled your membership. That was the shit.
GameFly maybe?
Oh they’re working on bringing that back.
My knees.
My back.
Thankfully that is still working. But you never know.
You have my empathy friend.
Blockbuster and similar video rental stores. Shit was magical before streaming or even getting movies in the mail.
Yeah, every Friday, we’d go to Blockbusters and peruse the aisles until we found a video. It was a nice tradition.
Hey you can recreate the experience by simply going to your local library, except most libraries have eliminated late fees and there’s of course no checkout fees either
Sounds like communism to me smh
It WAS magical compared to bring forced to watch/play all the stuff that was otherwise available to you, but your definitely spring some rose colored glasses here.
Yes, I also have great memories of walking the shelves searching for the Nintendo game we’d play this weekend while my parents picked out a movie or two, but I think you’ve forgotten the feeling of seeing that the one you REALLY wanted was out of stock, or rushing to head out the door in order to avoid a late fee, or forgetting about last week’s late fee and having to pay twice as much to rent this weeks entertainment.
It was an experience that no longer exists, but it was objectively inferior to what we have available now.
Inferior in convenience, superior in experience. (unless you’re a forgetful slob, but like… don’t be one?)
It is arguably preying on this trait that made the pricing possibleAsode from that, you can’t honestly suggest to that just ‘not being that way’ is a valid option. Sure that can work to a small degree for specific individuals, but ‘just don’t be the way you are’ to solve some specific challenge, likely at the detriment to many other traits you may not want to break, is thoughtless and ignorant advice.
Blockbuster generates 20% of its revenue through late fees. My lifestyle does make a difference! By strategically failing I am proactively participating in a concerted effort to expand this nation’s GDP.
This is my contract with America!
🤣 What?? Blockbuster was shit, renting was shit. From unavailability, to fees, to rewinding, the whole industry deserved to die.
I can’t believe people remember that shit fondly…
I knew a family growing up who’d check out movies from the library instead of Blockbuster usually, and as DVDs became more relevant they kept going for VHS tapes because they were less likely to be scratched to unreadability. I can’t remember how much my family went for VHS tapes vs DVDs but it may have been purely based on availability. I do however remember my dad had a strong preference for widescreen despite our setup letterboxing widescreen films (like most home theaters of the day) and quite a few times being sent back to swap the full screen release I grabbed for the wide screen one
For any young’uns reading, in the early 2000s with broadcasters shifting from transmitting a 4:3 image to a 16:9 image, home media soon followed but since many people didn’t yet have hardware supporting widescreen, fullscreen releases typically had the edges chopped off to fit in a 4:3 aspect ratio while widescreen saw less cropping compared to the version seen in theatres, but then for older home theatre hardware that only knows 4:3 video formats it would have black bars on the top and bottom whereas fullscreen would of course fill a 4:3 screen
Pre-algorithm driven social media.
When farmville was king.
That and Mafia Wars or something like that. Never got into them myself but I had a shitload of notifications and requests from people
Also Facebook having pokes
Uber and Lyft, by forcing cab services to get better while paying good.
Halo 1 to halo reach
end of soviet union to 9/11
Omg, they were gonna actually give undocumented immigrants legal status, then fucking 9/11 happened and suddenly xenophobia popular again.
Imagine how much better that 9/11 never happened timeline would be.
2000 United States presidential election in Florida
After an intense recount process and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, Bush won Florida’s electoral votes by a margin of only 537 votes out of almost six million cast (0.009%) and, as a result, became the president-elect.
I lived through this, and to this day when people say that voting doesn’t matter, it makes my hair stand on end.
Doubt the million or so Iraqis that died during that time period would agree
how about the million or so that died between 9/11 and 2011?
Re read the content I replied to, they were praising the period between 1989 and 2001
Its me, I am them. I was praising that period. Lots of iraquis die constantly outside of the timeframe I chose and had stuff happens all the time. Doesn’t change the key factors of being after the threat of global nuclear destruction and before the stamping down of human rights in the west
Motherfucker, the black people were segregated until the 70s and early 80s. Get that propaganda “stamping down of human rights in the west” bullshit outta here.
Grab a book and see how the west has been at the forefront of “stamping down of human rights” throughout most of recent history.
Ok. Black people were also slaves earlier than that. Also, the dragnet surveillance, and all the other human rights abuses created as part of the war on terror affects black people and racial minorities.
So you don’t want to engage with a literal what-about-ism?! Pff what has the internet come to, when dishonest arguments get shot down…
This word you are using, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s not whataboutism to say “no you are wrong, that period you say was great, really wasn’t, here’s one example”.
the liberal international order
the liberal international order
🤷
There’s always bad shit happening somewhere. I specified this timeframe as it signified an end to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation and before the start of the “war on terror” which signified a start of a ramping up of civil rights abuses in the west.
My view is biased towards the west, but everyone has their own frame of reference. I am entitled to my frame of reference, as are you, and you are free to post your own timeframe you believe is “good while it lasted”.
an end to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation and before the start of the “war on terror”
There’s an underappreciated film that came out during this period called Canadian Bacon, one of John Candy’s last films. Basically the president of the United States is trying to improve his approval rating as the military industrial complex is imploding and sending the nation into a recession, so he drums up a cold war with Canada instead. Its honestly a brilliant time capsule of geopolitical sentiments at the time, as well as funny as hell
Canadian Bacon,
“Surrender pronto , or we’ll level Toronto”
That’s pretty damn good
We have ways of making you pronounce the letter O
I was agreeing with you… but okay. The time period you specified is dominated by the largely uncontested ascendancy of the liberal international order, aka the West.
Idfk man, you’re saying it in a context that invokes the same mood as “liberals bad, Russia utopia”
“The West” 🙄
Oh fuck all the way off.
People mean the liberal international order (of western democracies) when they refer to “the West.” It is a shorthand. If the phrase can’t even come up without your toxicity, I’ll just block you and remove the source of the annoyance.
Yep. About 12 good years is all we got.
My childhood illusions.
Video games before gamergate
Back then they didn’t have balatro
We are in the golden age of videogames, if you look past the AAA stuff.
And the old games are still available via GOG!
The early Internet, where every company aimed at kids had a website with free games, where everyone who wanted to share about themselves or their interests did so in their own little corner so you could rabbit-hole your way through the link trees, most stuff was non-monetized or had easy-to-block ads, and no tracking of your behavior was really happening.
Every Cartoon Network show having it’s own free games on their website was peak computer room time for me in elementary school. Fun fact: If any of you remember the Amanda Show from the early 2000s, their website AmandaPlease.com was up til 2017. It was a true nostalgia moment to remember to look at once in a blue moon as a chuckle to old website styles.
Spacejam is still up!
The first game I every played that had “dailies” was a Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends browser game, that gave you a “chores list” you had to complete before accessing certain activities. You’d get a new list every day, and if you didn’t complete them, you’d have a longer list the next time you played. There was no login or anything, I assume it just worked off of browser cookies.
People who weren’t online at the time can’t possibly imagine how truly awesome the Internet used to be.
I miss separate websites.
You should make one! Neocities works if you need a host, free with no ads
Yea. These people always fantasize about personal websites. There are still a lot of those outside of the mainstream websites.
I would rather a guess that it’s way more than the early days of the internet, but it seems like the most amount of effort these people can put is to whine about the good ol’ days.
Reminds me of MAGA folks.
Insanely stupid take that tells me you weren’t online before Facebook
I didn’t have internet till like the 2010s
What did I miss out on?
You used to visit websites. News aggregators weren’t a thing so you’d visit the different sites focusing on different things. Search engines actually worked so you’d constantly be stumbling upon passion projects by highly knowledgeable people. You’d also find geocities sites teaching you how to go Super Saiyan, it was the wild West.
Instead of reddit and Lemmy, there were hundreds of niche forums. Maybe this is just me but human connection was a LOT easier. The internet was mostly populated by tech-savvy people who were excited to be online
Memes as we know them weren’t really a thing. They existed but you’d reply with them when they were relevant. People didn’t really “post” memes and no one was making the mass-market garbage that fills the Internet today.
I could go on a tirade on the last one because I truly believe memes were a significant factor in the downfall of internet culture
All this stuff is still around, you just ignore it in favour of things like lemmy which are better at stimulating dopamine production.
All this stuff is still around
This may be true, but,
you just ignore it
is an unfair claim. It used to be easier to find unmonetized small sites and blogs. I know some still exist, but I can’t help but wonder how many more are buried out in the web, unable to be accessed by newcomers because those who run search engines have different interests than their users.
Yes but since most users aren’t using these spaces they are not the same.
Life in Rome under Appius Claudius Caecus
He was the inventor of the app, right?
Analog television. Sure it may have been a bit grainy and staticy when the signal was weak, but the video wouldn’t get all blocky and outright freeze up, you could keep watching your show and not miss anything.
