101–110 of 232 posts
Here's another, next-level of nostalgia: a copy of the official Gillian Anderson website (1) with her favorite music from the 2000s. 1. https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html
Watching millennials and gen Z discover her previous life on American TV is cute.
The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you wil…
I wrote an essay for a private journal last year about how the X-Files mainstreamed anti-scientific and anti-government conspiracy thinking and thereby led to the downfall of American democracy in the 21st century. It valorized the fringe, presaged "do your own research" and consistently told us that the skeptic is always wrong, the believer is always vindicated. It wasn't a bubble of the 90's, it was a prescient blu…
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What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism. Technology was going to make our lives better and unlock opportunity, not take all our jobs and render us irrelevant. To me, the weirdest thing about the AI hype cycle is the inherent nihilism of it all. If there's one thing I miss, it's the optimism. I used to be enthusiastic about what the tech industry was doing and where it was going. > The larger…
I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better. These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that. I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something…
We didn't realize that it only felt that way because the people with power didn't care yet. Tech was like an ant crawling across a picnic blanket and thinking it's powerful because the people aren't doing anything about it. Once traditional power structures woke up to tech and the internet, they coopted it all.
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It might just be age and experience, but the world felt bigger in the 90s than it does now.
Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be ther…
I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times. The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization. Tech was exciting, futuristic. Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems. People talked socialized read books. Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which…
A couple snippets from my own experience / wow points :
- browsing bookstores was phenomenal, hand illustrated romance, fantasy and sci-fi covers
- Turbo Pascal, Dr Dobbs journal
- Wolfenstein and Quake ushered in the era 3D interactive games
- shareware and file sharing on BBS boards, via dialup modem
- tapes, then CDs, then minidisc !
- digital watches, scientific calculators !!
- double your hard-drive storage every 18months !!!The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actu…
>Music was incredible Ehhh, the post-grunge world was a bit of a musical wasteland. Rock died as a culturally relevant force with Cobain, but hip-hop hadn't ascended yet, so we were stuck in this weird doldrum that gave us things like the swing revival, ska, nu metal, and boybands. I mean Counting Crows were the big megastars at the time. Really hard to name a timeless album from '96-'99 the way you easily could on e…
Black metal was a 1992-1998 thing. It was dead (and many of the genre's leading lights were looking to move beyond it, mostly without success,) by the end of 1999.
Those six years also produced an explosion of experimentation in industrial, ambient, darkwave, and many other niche genres. In some cases, musical and aesthetic boundaries were pushed as far as they can possibly go.
From where I'm standing, the 26 year period from 2000-2026 absolutely pales in comparison to just those few years 1992-1998.
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I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint. It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle. I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as…
It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
It's not like being straight was perfect protection. You'd get abuse just for acting in ways that had been arbitrarily decided to be gay-coded.
There was plenty of other bigotry to deal with as well. For example, support for interracial marriage was under 50% at the beginning of the decade (in the US), and was still under 2/3rds by the end. Bigotry is still plentiful, of course, but it was quite a bit worse then.
The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you wil…
> Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this." I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.