Does anyone else genuinely miss the 2000s?

Sometimes THAT isn't enough. Not to doompost, but I feel people's tensions are so high, all it takes is ONE thing for somebody to lose it. Or you're walking on eggshells just getting by, then all of a sudden you did SOMETHING. You're so frenzied that you do not know how to respond or react.

I am approaching that point.
It has been that way with me for at least five years. I don't bother to interact with those who I don't already know (who haven't stabbed me in the back) as a direct result of that. The days of getting to know others without any serious, unreasonable negative consequence and broadening your social horizons are over, and that is one of the many reasons why I personally miss the 00s.
 
I've probably said this before, and I'm like a mixed bag to this situation; my lessons in nostalgia have taught me its bitterness as well, but does anyone miss how being an anime fan also covered playing video games and not just watching anime all the time, like today? I know that this association was at its peak around the mid 2000s, but back then Japanese video games were covered in the overall umbrella of anime because that's the other source of how we got it out here. I honestly liked that, it showed how an overall style wasn't just singularly just one medium of art and entertainment, it could span beyond and had its own identity, and how this far reaching encompassing influence wasn't restricted to boundaries. Fans could understand talking about Street Fighter to Evangelion to Rurouni Kenshin to Final Fantasy to Ranma 1/2 to Guilty Gear to FLCL to Yu Yu Hakusho to Wolf's Rain to Gungrave and back. Nowadays, the divide is so evident and even more weeaboo and self deluding, with the worst of older anime fans being insufferable nostalgia hanging hipster faggot belly tossers and the worst of newer anime fans being into dysphoric shithead degenerate garbage expressions of their interests. I honestly fucking hate it.

I've also probably have to let this die and get buried. This was also probably me too, but it was really exciting that there were kids and artists really back in the day wanting to draw anime stuff and create their own manga because of the boom. For me, it wasn't merely about Japan in this endeavor. I loved that the style came across as freedom and liberation and inspiration. I loved seeing this spirit. Then the bitterness comes..... then I saw shit like Avatar and Teen Titans get popular. I honestly grew up on the side that did not like either of those shows. I'm probably still riled and rabid since then, but I honestly for the life of me still feel those shows never got what made anime so enjoyable in the first place. Poser shit, as I'd call it. I suppose that since they made their audience happy, I could let it slide. Then Korra got made, and then, no matter how much I like it, Teen Titans Go was made, and the majority of fans and artists since fizzled out because of the Great Recession. For all that want of wanting to see something great come of the inspiration of this era, I suppose I got too lost in the moment and honestly found what I was looking for. Guess if you really want to see things through your way, you have to be the change you want to see, and let the times just be what they were in the past, because a mere decade by man's eyes isn't always what the universe follows.... Sorry, just meandering and rambling.
 
Another I miss about the 2000s is it was still a bit like the 90s as in TV was still the big thing when internet was catching on. I’m kinda a creature of habit and I miss looking forward to waking up or staying up at a certain time to watch something. That was fading in the mid to late 2000s but I was still doing that.
 
I miss the 2000s in that life seemed so much simpler in hindsight back then, but I'd like to add a caveat to that: I literally entered 2000 as a preschooler and left the decade as a teenager. There's an old Russian saying that goes along the lines of "back when the trees were tall," and I feel like that wholeheartedly applies to my perception of what that decade was like. Personally, I hold a greater attachment to the 2010s because that's the decade I have the fondest memories of (to date). I had so many experiences from 2010-2019 that I never would've experienced in the 2000s (i.e. most of my past romantic relationships, meeting some of my closest IRL friends to this day, sharing experiences with both people like movies, concerts, etc., being a legal adult with all of the benefits that would imply, and so on).

The 2010s also hold a special place in my heart because, despite the technological dystopia we live in, this is also the decade where I joined Kiwi Farms in the first place. So much of my current online habits were developed from the knowledge that I gained from this website. I learned that it's not a good idea to use the same identity everywhere, that sometimes it's not a good idea to publicise the minutiae of what I'm thinking at every single second of the day, and that there are viable alternatives to applications that I used to rely on before their discovery (i.e. Signal, ProtonVPN, Pleroma, Matrix, etc.). On a similar note, there are so many users on this website that I've come to liken to being "friends," (i.e. @Woke Blue Muttlema, @Pina Colda 88, @heatboss, @Orc Girls Make Due, among countless others). Even if we're not IRL friends, their insight into the various lolcows that we've come across remains valuable because they approached these people from their own perspective based on their life experiences.

It's surreal to me that artists like Keyshia Cole and Mary J Blige are now considered "classic" R&B in a vein similar to people like Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson, but that's the price we pay for getting older. Time's arrow only marches forward, so it's only fair that we march forward with it mentally. If we spend our lives reminiscing over the past, we miss out on what's happening in the present. It might be fucking shitty right now, but that doesn't change the fact that there's happiness to be found even in the bleakest of times. At least, that's the way I see it.

***

At a tl;dr level - I miss some stuff about the 2000s, but I'm more than happy to have lived through two full decades because there were so many experiences unique to each time period that I'd never trade for the world.
Bruv, I am crying fag tears.
All my knowledge of the 2000's comes from Malcolm in the Middle so it has always looked to me like an era of frosted tips, radical post-90's attitude and the genesis of the culture we live in today. I miss some stuff, but being a child sucked so it can only go up now, right?
 
No. But I miss the 90's.

I also miss the 80s to an extent.

I think some of 2000s were good. I started using the internet in 1997 and got my own PC in 2000. The internet was way better then. The wild west days are over. Social media was the true death blow to fun on the internet. Blue checkmark fun police have pretty much made cancel culture an international sport.

I miss hours magically disappearing while jumping from link to link on AniPike. I really miss the discovery odyssey that was webrings. Now everything is just slapped on someone's instagram, Twitter or Facebook or that god awful Pinterest that I hate browsing.

I miss when characters, games, movies and music could be fun without the #woke police coming in and complaining. Everything is offensive now. Everything is sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic ect... Trannies are bulletproof and no one is allowed to call them out on anything. We have to share our women's spaces with them and put up with terms like pregnant people, menstruating people and chest feeding. Because some men have periods and troongirls can't get pregnant. It sometimes feels like women and femininity are being erased to make sure a tiny vocal minority doesn't get hurt feelings. Fuck em. :mad:

The word phobia has been co-opted just like triggers were. You would think that the amount of ableism packed into that would be problematic. But real mental health problems are not as important as someone's Twitter induced PTSD.

And don't even get me started on numale soyboys.

Everyone has become a wishy washy pansy ass crybaby who at the same time is a huge bully to anyone who doesn't automatically bend to their whims.

Sometimes I wish the Earth would just explode.(:_(
 
the #woke police

It's as if a cult took over the West, and everything new is religious - preaching the beliefs of the cult. Just like it can be draining to keep up with the teachings of a cult where everything is a sin, it's really draining to keep up with mainstream Western media now because I'm constantly reminded of The Narrative®, or I'm told something I like is bad - constantly.

And of course even search engines - at least Google - are in on it too. Search for anything not "politically neutral" (like the history of ballpoint pens), and the top results are pretty much guaranteed to be persuasive "hot takes" reminding you of the "woke" Narrative® position.
 
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I remember making sure I was home specifically to watch the airing of the season finale of Star Trek: Voyager. I cried at the end. I was like 10, but still.

the same, but made sure i was home for the first episode. also the first episodes of next generation, deep space nine, x-files, and others (my family and i are big scifi fans)


I miss the days when there weren’t so many retards online, like the days before facebook and twitter got to be as big as they are now
in Net.wars (published December 1997) Wendy Grossman says the same thing.
 
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Is it me or was geek culture better back then? One of the things I absolutely hated about 2010s was how the "mainstreaming" of the superhero genre via the MCU tore out the fandom's soul and corporatized it. I cringe hard when I see people blather on about Wakanda or treat the MCU as the holy grail of geekdom that some normie ties their very identity to. It may sound like gatekeeping, but geek culture felt like it had some heart in the 2000s rather than the soulless corporate shell it is today. Granted, there were warning signs that things were going down hill with Dan DiDio's reign starting that decade and Joe Quesada's antics at Marvel. I would dare say the "One More Day" and the New 52 were the points of no return for the industry.
Geek culture getting merged into mainstream pop culture has been hugely detrimental in many ways. Not only did it turn a lot of things into soulless corporate shells, but it kind of destroyed what used to be a whole parallel media landscape to explore if you didn't like what mainstream pop culture had to offer. (Not that these two things never crossed over in the past, but when they did, it was usually kind of limited.) It's been kind of like watching a quaint little neighborhood full of small businesses get taken over by Starbucks and McDonald's.

It isn't just the superhero genre, either. I feel like the Harry Potter movies and Jackson’s LOTR trilogy kicked off this descent, along with the early hipster “so uncool it’s cool” mentality. The rise of the Marvel movie franchise, Disney buying everything, and constant reboots of older media just sealed the deal.


I've probably said this before, and I'm like a mixed bag to this situation; my lessons in nostalgia have taught me its bitterness as well, but does anyone miss how being an anime fan also covered playing video games and not just watching anime all the time, like today? I know that this association was at its peak around the mid 2000s, but back then Japanese video games were covered in the overall umbrella of anime because that's the other source of how we got it out here. I honestly liked that, it showed how an overall style wasn't just singularly just one medium of art and entertainment, it could span beyond and had its own identity, and how this far reaching encompassing influence wasn't restricted to boundaries. Fans could understand talking about Street Fighter to Evangelion to Rurouni Kenshin to Final Fantasy to Ranma 1/2 to Guilty Gear to FLCL to Yu Yu Hakusho to Wolf's Rain to Gungrave and back. Nowadays, the divide is so evident and even more weeaboo and self deluding, with the worst of older anime fans being insufferable nostalgia hanging hipster faggot belly tossers and the worst of newer anime fans being into dysphoric shithead degenerate garbage expressions of their interests. I honestly fucking hate it.

I've also probably have to let this die and get buried. This was also probably me too, but it was really exciting that there were kids and artists really back in the day wanting to draw anime stuff and create their own manga because of the boom. For me, it wasn't merely about Japan in this endeavor. I loved that the style came across as freedom and liberation and inspiration. I loved seeing this spirit. Then the bitterness comes..... then I saw shit like Avatar and Teen Titans get popular. I honestly grew up on the side that did not like either of those shows. I'm probably still riled and rabid since then, but I honestly for the life of me still feel those shows never got what made anime so enjoyable in the first place. Poser shit, as I'd call it. I suppose that since they made their audience happy, I could let it slide. Then Korra got made, and then, no matter how much I like it, Teen Titans Go was made, and the majority of fans and artists since fizzled out because of the Great Recession. For all that want of wanting to see something great come of the inspiration of this era, I suppose I got too lost in the moment and honestly found what I was looking for. Guess if you really want to see things through your way, you have to be the change you want to see, and let the times just be what they were in the past, because a mere decade by man's eyes isn't always what the universe follows.... Sorry, just meandering and rambling.
There's really been a bizarre shift in genres over the past decade and a half. Like you said, the whole anime scene used to cover several forms of entertainment, as long as it was Japanese and in that same sort of style: Anime, manga, video games... But the games part of it especially has really has tanked. I feel like the lack of decent JRPGs has probably been a contributor to that.

At the same time, there's also been this weird homogenization over all genres of geek culture. I can't go to my local anime convention without seeing people dressed like western cartoon characters and somebody selling pony and furry shit. It feels like conventions are less about one particular genre or thing and more about just mashing everything remotely "geeky" together into one big nonsensical glob. I've even heard of ren faires having to establish a "time traveler" day for all the people who insist on showing up dressed as storm troopers or Doctor Who. (Don't even get me started on Nendoroids and Funko Pops.)

And I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about Avatar and such. It's like western artists just don't "get" anime beyond drawing mouths and facial expressions a certain way (badly). They can't even get the style right, let alone the spirit of it all.
 
Geek culture getting merged into mainstream pop culture has been hugely detrimental in many ways. Not only did it turn a lot of things into soulless corporate shells, but it kind of destroyed what used to be a whole parallel media landscape to explore if you didn't like what mainstream pop culture had to offer.
At this point I've given up on culture entirely. If you can see it on TV or on the Internet it isn't real. It isn't really alternative unless you have to turn off your computer and go into a fucking library to read it and whoever wrote it has been dead for at least 100 years.
 
Tabletop games have been hit pretty bad by this as well. God help me I miss the days when playing D&D or World of Darkness was seen as something only basement dwellers or edgelords were into. In the early to mid 2000s you were still seen as a geek if you played tabletop (the kind of geek who would get made fun of, not the hipster tee hee hee I watch Marvel movies I’m such a nerd guys!) geek. It was a geeky hobby, but it was our hobby and a lot of creativity went into it. Ever since D&D broke out of the nerd circles and became more socially acceptable it and most other tabletop games have become infested with woke shit, dumbed down and become so bland and homogenized for normies that it’s just a shell of what it once was (thanks Critical Role faggots)

I miss those days when geek and nerd shit was made FOR geeks and nerds and didn’t try to appeal to everyone else
 
At this point I've given up on culture entirely. If you can see it on TV or on the Internet it isn't real. It isn't really alternative unless you have to turn off your computer and go into a fucking library to read it and whoever wrote it has been dead for at least 100 years.
Or make your own stories, which I have opted to do and it's probably one of the few lights I have left other than--you know--friends and family. I know that not everyone is creative in that way, but I admit that there is a certain thrill to building worlds and populating them with characters.
I miss those days when geek and nerd shit was made FOR geeks and nerds and didn’t try to appeal to everyone else
Unfortunately, one of the worst things about the 2010s is that some bad actors entrenched themselves in various media companies and made themselves the goddamn gatekeepers whose sole mission to hold back the "toxic" (old) fandom.
 
Or make your own stories, which I have opted to do and it's probably one of the few lights I have left other than--you know--friends and family. I know that not everyone is creative in that way, but I admit that there is a certain thrill to building worlds and populating them with characters.

Unfortunately, one of the worst things about the 2010s is that some bad actors entrenched themselves in various media companies and made themselves the goddamn gatekeepers whose sole mission to hold back the "toxic" (old) fandom.
Or as some people call it, the "actual fandom."
 
Or the people who actually buy the merchandise.
And yet the world is currently full of multinational corporations completely ignoring the people who actually buy their products in order to grovel to people with no money who if they even have one of their products, they shoplifted it, and if they don't, they probably participated in a riot that involved burning down somewhere that sold their shit.

Let's just remember how insane the world is for a moment.
 
It isn't really alternative unless you have to turn off your computer and go into a fucking library
Which you may not be able to do anymore because of this damned "New Normal". It feels as if there's no real life anymore because of this scamdemic scare over what really is "just a flu bro".
 
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Which you may not be able to do anymore because of this damned "New Normal". It feels as if there's no real life anymore because of this scamdemic scare over what really is "just a flu bro".
This is why it's nice if you already have a few hundred books in a room that you haven't read yet, by people who were dead before you were born. Fuck you, world.
 
Yeah, a decent amount. Even thought I didn't live through any of it, I have a pretty big nostalgia boner for the 1990s and 2000s. I was born around the turn of the millennium, and I have a bunch of mostly good memories of being a kid. Personally I think it's just a thing that comes with whenever people were born. I don't think people really care that much about it other than that -- there's always that desire to return to being a kid or something like that provided you didn't grow up in an absolutely shit household. The "Good Old Days" always had a pull regardless of when you lived unless things were really bad.

I think for me, the main thing though is that when I was growing up, I was raised in a way that was pretty "90s-00s" in how most things ran. Pretty different from how they're run now. No dumb race shit, no dumb online shit, and the overall culture I grew up in seemed to be way more optimistic than it is now, even with the interventions in the Middle East starting. I'm probably looking at it through rose-tinted goggles, but it really did seem that way. Even with the whole "being knocked down" by 9/11 that the US had, everything seemed way simpler and happier on the homefront than it did in 2014 or now in 2021. I mean Hell, I remember buying a toy gun in 2007 and nobody at my school gave two shits about it.

Nostalgia is weird, obviously everything wasn't perfect, but I can't really tell if things have just been getting progressively worse and gayer over the years as society seems to change and become obsessed with dumb shit like race and all the dumb troon shit. Just a few days ago I had a close friend of mine tell me that they (having a history of mental illness) considered taking HRT and only stopped because it'd shrink their dick. I'd ask them if they've turned to porn or something but they'd probably dodge the question.

It's always walking on eggshells with the current state of things. I think I miss the 2000s not necessarily because I see them as inherently superior, but probably because it was a simpler time. There was a novelty to everything like computers or iPods or smartphones or even cell phones in general, but it wasn't a 24/7 stream of new shit.

The 2010s certainly had their redeeming qualities too, even if it paled in comparison - especially the later half of the decade - to the earlier years. I don't necessarily think that kids reading escapist fiction is a bad thing, but the fact that the overall teenage or youthful struggles were incredibly different from those who lived only a decade or two before is something that's definitely cause for alarm in a case like that. Kids are meant to be exploratory on some level, but those things changing so rapidly is gonna cause way more problems than it solves, and it'll probably only exacerbate all the dumb woke culture bullshit.

I know it already got posted but I don't care I like the pic
the world.jpg


Maybe its because I didn't fully experience it, but on some level, I think it'd be pretty nice to go back on some level. Maybe relive things differently. Try my hardest to keep some old friends. Make new ones. Make the best of things while they last.
 
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