Limewire.
Reddit.
The amount of times I tried to download a tv show on limewire and it was just bestiality…
Being able to eat, like, 8 meals a day and not feel like shit that night or the next day.
At some point my metabolism finally started to slow down.
I had the “hollow leg” of my youth clear into my 40s. But by 45 I could feel it noticeably collapsing, and by the age of 50 it was almost completely gone.
In my late 20s I polished off 7 full racks of ribs in one sitting. These days I have trouble getting completely through one full rack.
7 racks? Wtf?
Yyyyyyup. Baby back ribs, my absolute favourite.
First time I ever had racks outside of home, was at a local restaurant called Kelly O’Bryans. I was in my mid-20s at the time. Decided to “Irish size” the order to two racks, not aware that they were already running a special that doubled the racks. Entire party stared in shock when four f**king racks came out balanced on a single platter. And I ate them all. Including all of the pachos (cross-cut fries with a house dip sauce).
Second time was when Montanas came to town a few years later. At the time they were still doing six bones a refill, instead of the current 3-4. Had the whole initial rack (something they also stopped doing, only half a rack to start these days) and then did 12 refills. So seven full racks of ribs. I still have that receipt somewhere filed away in my bookkeeping.
Life before cellphones and internet.
Did you know in 1990 only .25% of the world’s population (12.5 million) had cellphones and only .05% (2.8 million) had internet?
It feels like we sacrificed local community and connection for global information overload and disconnection sometimes.
GenX, here. You are so very, very wrong. Phones and internet have made anxiety disorders endemic. We’re constantly bombarded with information, alerts, opinions, information and misinformation…
Young people have never experienced what it’s like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable. To get answering machine messages that you had no obligation to immediately respond to.
I’m in big tech and helped develop all this shit. We made it addictive on purpose. I’d love to go back to how things were in the 90s, and I’m not waxing nostalgic. Things were objectively better before all this crap.
Been talking about this a lot lately. Older millennial here. I loved that brief little slice of time I got to experience, when DSL / cable was around and no longer “pay by the minute” and someone answering a phone wouldn’t kick you off.
Web pages loaded fast enough. They were fine. Downloads? Just be patient. No problem. WoW and friends, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 2142, all ran just fine.
But mostly…
I miss when the Internet was a place you went all its own, it wasn’t everywhere, it wasn’t inside of literally everything. You had to “visit” it. Logging on meant you could also log off. It didn’t follow your every move.
Handheld game consoles were still airgapped, the main ones had it optional.
People had blogs for fun, they used the web to express themselves and share ideas and stupid subcultures and memes. It didn’t “matter.”
It wasn’t “the commercial internet.” It was just The Web. It was somewhere else.
Everything wasn’t built on inescapable addiction algorithms that follow you everywhere, and have already your shadow identity shared to innumerable servers because someone knows someone who used one of those services and you were in a group picture once.
For the younger kids, there was a time when your entire life from birth wasn’t shared without your consent for the world to see. (How many people really understood privacy settings anyway?)
Disconnecting now feels more impossible than ever, it takes a huge effort not unlike fasting, and mental overload is the norm.
So much of it is just corporatized, weaponized, and predatory.
I’m a millennial who’s old enough to remember those days. It’s an absolutely huge difference, though at least if you’re expecting a phone call, you don’t have to scuttle your whole day sitting by the landline.
meh. yeah it’s been bad for mental health but… what did you read while shitting, the back of the shampoo bottle?
Sometimes yeah, or your bathroom had a magazine rack
I don’t think you understand what anxiety is if you think being totally unreachable as a solution to modern anxiety…
I’m gonna venture he means being totally unreachable…
… by your boss on your day off.
Nah. “Young people have never experienced what it’s like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable…”
That is explicitly what OP said. To be totally unreachable in the literal sense can easily be a source of anxiety on its own.
Ah I see, yeah you’re right!
That is something that occurs to me too. It’s weird to me now, imagining couples separating to go to work or whatever, and you just gotta believe everything is gonna be fine, and if there were an emergency, someone has to be near the right landline.
Although I grew up with earlier cellphones and pagers, I got my first cell way later than a lot of highschool kids.
But yes, definitely, If me and my wife couldn’t reach each other during the day, that’d be a ton of anxiety! The world’s too insane these days to not have rapid communication on hand.
I only wish technology evolved as a tool for the user and the people, rather than primarily as content consumption and surveillance devices.
Then it would be more normal to have a setup like we do: We chat on Signal and can send our location voluntarily and it stays between us, without a dozen third parties quietly listening in, analyzing, and selling that information.
I do however, think there would also be a certain serene peace in being unreachable by undesirable contacts but not by loved ones.
For example, it’s dystopian how non-emergency jobs evolved to expect that they can just zip a message to you whenever they feel like, and you’re almost coerced to receive it and respond, and setting boundaries against that can be risky. It brings an unwanted cop or nanny into our personal lives.
Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. I’m a Xennial and also workin tech. You and I feel the same but I don’t think we’re in the majority. It might not be 90% but I think we are the ever shrinking minority that feels this way.
Heh. I read the title of this post backwards. You and I are saying the same thing!
Oh we killed local community before that
Suburbs and freeways, man. :(
in 1990… only .05% (2.8 million) had internet?
In 1990, the World Wide Web wasn’t even available outside of CERN/university usage yet. That didn’t become widely available to the public until 1993, and the first ISP would have only been established a year prior, in 1989.
This, to me, is like saying originally that only Edison had light bulbs in January of 1880.
In 1990 my father negotiated a new contract for himself, with IBM. He’s a computer programmer consultant that can program in 72 languages including Cobol and Lisp.
The one thing he absolutely insisted upon was that he wouldn’t have to carry a pager. He still refuses to carry a cell phone.
The more people know about tech, the more they want to avoid it.
Those square pizzas in the school lunchroom.
I raise you the hexagonal “Mexican” pizza’s
Borat
Explain?
Very nice
I miss old PC Games from the early 90’s.
I’ve reinstalled all that I remember and they sucked, but back then, they didn’t.Worms!
Although I just looked that one up and they have been making new versions of it continuously so I don’t know if it really counts as an old 90s game anymore.
It counts as a 90s game, but not an early 90s game.
Games really started to get much, MUCH better in '94 and '95.
Check out the remake of C&C!
Also Commandos still rock IMO!
I played through it recently. It is one of the few EA titles where I will concede that they did a good job and that I feel I got my moneys worth.
NHL Hockey 95 was really good!
I don’t know about early 90’s, but games from mid and late 90’s are bangers.
From early 90’s it’s probably just Wolfenstein 3D and Doom that were very good.
Doom was '95
It was released in late '93.
Ah ok my mistake, thanks, must have been thinking of Rise of the Triad
Police Quest.
Oh god, those old adventure games.
Where doing things in the wrong order (which was explained nowhere) would lead to permadeath, or worse, getting stuck with no way to progress and no hint what you missed in a previous area you can’t return to.
All I remember from police quest is getting killed or fired for missing a step at a routine traffic stop, or forgetting to check the tire pressure every time you start driving.
In Leisure Suit Larry 1 you straight up get killed without warning if you step onto a street (run over by a car) or into a back alley (mugged and clubbed to death), or take a cab with wine in your inventory (cab driver takes it, drinks it and crashes).
Fun times!
Do I miss physical gaming magazines? Yes, yes I do
Were they awful? Content wise, no, I actually believe transitioning to web magazines turned the whole industry into a shit show
I loved the game posters that came folded into the magazines.
So what was bad about them?
Well they pushed you too collect them.
That amount of paper cannot possibly be good for the environment
Like many others have said, the old, lost internet was really something special. Every website was crude and janky, poorly formatted for some specific resolution that you weren’t using, and both animated clipart and midis were exciting to collect. There were websites dedicated to them. My brother and I used to fill folders on our desktop with sparkling or flaming banners, signs that read “Under Construction” and more. Same with midis. I’ll never forget the first time I discovered Sublime’s Santaria in midi form. It may have been my first favorite song.
I wish I could properly articulate what that all felt like. It was a similar feeling to collecting Pokémon cards as a kid. Everything was just a neat spectacle on the mid-90s internet. Then over time, as everything modernized and monetized, it lost that weird magic and became what it is today. I can’t remember the last time I gave a shit about exploring a website. I no longer come across spooky animated images of a skeleton peering out of murky water and excitedly tuck it away for future viewing pleasure. The entire thing sucks now, but it probably sucked then, too.
the internet before advertising, before it became a utility, before it became ubiquitous and essential… When it was just that weird thing that nerds toyed around with…
Gods those were the days.
No search engines, Had to find websites on the internet yellow pages, via a web ring, or because someone gave you a slip of paper with an address, that was always written out to include the http://… and visitor counters and guest books… people always filled out the guest book, and it wasnt spam, viruses, or bullshit. actual, legitimate comments from the majority of visitors.
all at the blazing speed of 28.8k
and now I am unbearably depressed and sad.
Trusting the government
Kid Cuisine
Windows 3.1 and running dual nodes of TAG BBS.
The smell of leaded gasoline.
The smell of a fine cigar: I quit smoking 14 years ago but I miss that.And I’m 200% sure they were awful.
leaded gasoline
Few memories trigger a nostalgic response in me than this. Ahhh, I’m in heaven
smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory
That 5 minutes of smoking where you don’t do anything but think and enjoy a pieceful smoke… I miss that as well. I quit smoking 4 years ago.
Sitting on the porch with my morning coffee and first smoke of the day during the summer was always a wonderful experience. Doing the same in 30F in the winter, not so much.
You’re making me feel like I miss it but I haven’t even started yet 💀
Don’t.
Because what he left out is that for those 5 minutes of peaceful enjoyable smoking, you have to endure the rest of the day craving, smelling like dog shit, getting an earful from your supervisor at work because you’re constantly out for a smoke, spending your life’s savings at the tobacconist, and driving 20 miles in the middle of the night to find a pack of smokes in a convenience store in the middle of the night when all the other stores are closed. Not to mention long term health issues of course.
That’s an expensive 5 minutes of enjoyment, trust me on that one.
Are you sure you’re not just thinking of the smell of carburetor engines? I think I know the smell you’re thinking of and its the exhaust of a vintage carburetor engine.
Was there really a different smell for leaded gasoline?
this might shock you, but I have never smelled leaded gasoline. I’m too young, it got banned before I was born.
what did it smell like?
2005 runescape
try out lost city 2004scape!
Yeah I did and that’s what showed me it ain’t exactly as I remember haha. Without the quality of life updates it’s just brutal
