Smoking everywhere. For anyone who wasn’t around for the 70s/80s/90s, everything was tinged yellow and smelled of smoke. Car/plane/train seats had built-in ashtrays. Restaurants had smoking sections separated from the non-smoking sections by waist-high walls.
I have asthma and it sucked. Not sure if I grew out of it as I got older or if there’s just not a miasma of smoke around everywhere, but it rarely bothers me anymore.
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Having recently played some retro games on era appropriate hardware, I’m actually a little sad CRTs are gone.
Obviously they were heavy, hard to manufactur safely, and were filled with toxic materials, but man are they like the perfect anti-aliasing tool for retro games. I’m sure some good filters exist to replicating it on newer monitors tho.
Overall tho I am glad both of these things are no longer the defacto used tech.
Yeah those things would get HOT. like, hot enough to melt plastic. And they were really wasteful.
DEI
Smoking everywhere and anywhere. Younger folks have no idea how ubiquitous it was, not to sound boomerish, but everything smelled so bad, and people would smoke in places that would shock you now, like in hospitals they would smoke in the nurses station, if you walked into a clothing store at the mall they’d be smoking at the counter, etc. Even when they did things like making that glass room for smokers at Tim Hortons, I once saw a woman sitting in there with her toddler in a stroller puffing away. It was actually amazing that anyone put a stop to public smoking because so many people did it.
Leaded gas.
I’m so fucking glad we’ve stopped calling women “hysterical” whenever we don’t believe them. That word is so blatantly misogynistic and it seems to be dying out now.
The Nazis.
OH WAIT.
Objectively, dial-up.
Otoh, what I would really badly like to become a thing again is actual media ownership, ie. not having streaming services randomly yank your stuff away from you.
Yup! Spotify removing things off my playlists was a big initial factor into me getting into self hosting. All my music streams through Plex now and I haven’t looked back
Even DRM-free storefronts like 7Digital for music or GOG for games aren’t immune to random delistings.
For music, I’ve pulled it into my self hosted Plex setup, so even if the original sources like Bandcamp die, I am hosting my own copy.
Games are their own beast. Hard to do similar self hosted concepts when there are servers involved, other players, etc. I’m still 100% on the “streaming services” for games.
Vinyl (for music, not floors).
I don’t care much about the supposed fidelity, but having a group of mates around each pick an album from my stack is a lot of fun.
It stops people from focusing too hard on the music and going “oh wait lemme queue up this track” etc.
CDs would fulfill the exact same use-case while being more convenient, space efficient and cheaper.
CDs and DVDs and (video)casettes. Took up so much room, annoying to use while travelling.
CDs are great though :( I love that I can rip them and back them up, play them wherever I go, no licences or streaming. :)
So you don’t actually love CDs but the fact you can not use them after buying them. You can still buy non DRM music you don’t have to subscribe and you could rip or copy streamed music if it wasn’t easier to pirate it.
CDs by the way also are subject to licenses and DRM has started to appear on them. The reason they did not try as hard as with DVDs and Blurays is that Music is trivial to copy, people have been ok with taping from the radio after all. If video on physical media was still a thing you would have plenty of DRM, they’d probably make you buy a newer player after 5 years or so.
I love that they play in my car, don’t take up a tonne of space, have liner notes, and occupy physical space. I stick them on in the house as much as my LPs, and like picking out what to play.
I’m okay with being in the minority, but the sentimental value of where I was when I picked an album, where I’ve listened to it, and who I was with means a great deal to me. :) I download too, but usually things just sit on my drive and don’t get listened to.
You present a good point about licences, but I’ve not ever experienced this, and my main concern with licencing is things vanishing from my library - it bothers me when an album vanishes from spotify, and that never happens with physical media (same is true of downloaded music to be fair). It’s not that I’m blindly loyal to Phillips or whatever, just that I like this format for my specific use case.
Can’t argue with non licensing/copying/backup reasons for preferring CDs or other physical media.
But a lot of people are under the misconceptions that things like licensing came to existence after the switch away from physical media or that there were not DRM in physical media, therefore switching back to a physical media would solve the current problems with lack of control over our media. It will not.
What we need is DRM-free digital media, which we can use wherever and however we want. Just like a lot of us did with MP3s and CDs.
I’m with you 100% :) I have a record collection too, but heck if I’d want only records! There’s a use case for each, even if mine’s oddly specific.
I feel Steve Albini’s take on CDs hit it correctly, it was basically to the effect of “welcome to the rich man’s eight track tape, the music industry’s newest way to make you re-buy your music and spend more money”.
I will say he couldn’t have forseen CDs lasting like they have and being the last big physical format, but I think it’s very true. You’re right that physical formats don’t negate the greed/capitalism, and there’s a compulsive desire from companies to control how you enjoy the media you paid for and “own”.
In short, I completely agree with you and the media industries are really restrictive/anti-art, but love CDs as a format. :)
We could always bring back the 8 Track Tape!
Quality was also very low. Nostalgia blurred our memories, watching/listening that stuff today is wild.
CDs still sound better than streaming.
DVD and VHS, absolutely they look like trash now.
Oh definitely.
I was thinking VHS and cassettes
Cassettes can sound great if ya got Type III metal tapes. Lots of cheap tapes were Type I, which don’t sound nearly as good.
VHS tho nah, as nostalgic as I am for it, it’s just a bad option today lol
CRT displays.
Still using mine daily! Older shows and movies just look better on it.
I like to have one around 😅. I like the look and it’ll probably survive me
Survive you or outlive you?
The lack of privacy, independence, and freedom that generally comes with childhood.
yeah I always wanted to be an adult and now that I am it’s fucking awesome
Orkut, Flogão (kind of a precursor to instagram, it was mostly used by high schoolers around 2004-6), Skype, Internet Explorer and ActiveX
And Adobe Flash.
I kinda miss Flash because of the amount of interesting games made with it. Some very cool animations too, good thing Ruffle exists nowadays.
The problem (besides Adobe buying Macromedia) was every fucking business deciding to make their entire sites in Flash
Literally installed Flash 8 today because it’s the comfiest way to animate for me.
Pagers. Having to find a pay phone. Looking through newspapers for jobs. Absolutely gutless emissions- strangled malaise era cars with horrible brakes and numb steering.
Looking through the paper for a job was in some ways better. Now it’s so hard to even get past the initial filters to an actual human because job postings get spammed with hundreds of applications, many from people who are underqualified and/or straight up lying on their resume. For remote jobs, you’re competing against the whole country whereas with jobs in the paper you were mostly competing against those in your local area.
Is funny how we have all this tech for it and they’ve only managed to enshittify the process. Some sites are going back to the original purpose like indeed but it’s still like tossing your resume into space.
The enshittification is the point of tehse “high tech” replacements for things that worked just fine beforehand.
Capitalism is the point. They’re usually fine tools until they have investors steering the ship.
“Capitalism is the point.”
“Enshittification is the point.”
They’re the same sentence!
Pagers certainly still exist.
Troubleshooting issues with them is a pain too.
That being said, I’ve only seen them in the medical field.
I’m glad that Furbys, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras are no longer mainstream. And may they never return.
Disposable cameras are making a return.
Like 35mm point-and-shoots? That’s surprising. I wonder why?
Disposable cameras and Polaroids have been getting popular at weddings in place of guest books or as something for the guests to do during the reception. The couple then gets something physical they can keep.
Interesting. I still wonder why, because this was a trend in the '90s that died out with camera phones and social media. Maybe it’s a retro throwback trend that got popular with younger folks? Still, I thought they stopped manufacturing Polaroid paper, and can you still get film developed at like the grocery store or a pharmacy?
It’s definitely a hipster thing yeah, they aren’t selling them cheap either since it’s a novelty item now. You can still get film developed but same thing, it’s a niche thing now so fewer places to do it and more expensive.
I think it’s that the physical part provides a value that digital doesn’t.
furby was so creepy. esp when he bugs out
