Things you don't miss at all - The counter-nostalgia thread

[Not a bee]

• Being a kid, unironically. Going to school. Not being listened to or respected because you're a dumb kid.
• Dial-up internet, big box computers with a shitty screen, shitty internet speed. Downloading or watching vids took forever, good lord. Getting pop-ups and potentially catching viruses from certain advertisements on websites was annoying.
• Certain youtube fads back then like Fred, RWJ (his music is okay), react girls I think they were called?, annoying orange.
• Landline phones.

 

[Wot Zit Too Yah0996]

(Post-communist country, so this might be specific)
-The overall quality of air (the ''cleanliness'' of diesel engines in trucks and heavy machinery has significantly improved in last 30 years),
-The omnipresent cigarette smoke (There used to be almost nowhere to sit inside and have something to eat or drink without being soaked in the smoke after a while, you had to have separate sets of clothes for that. Every time someone brings up the good old times when it was allowed to smoke in public interiors because the modern alternatives ''aren't quite it'', I wish for Total Smoker Death again.)
-Dog shit absolutely everywhere. Almost everyone had a dog, or it seemed like that, and training them wasn't really a thing and picking up their shit neither. I still refuse to walk on city grass, let alone sit on it. When you live your entire childhood with the fact that your every first step from the house might be right into a shit, every getting off a car into shit again and every literal touching the grass results in being covered in shit, you have to be aware about every step you take. (at least this wasn't Yugoslavia, cos I'd have to worry about landmines too)
These years, dog owners are mostly disciplined by bans and fines.

-Pre-internet lack of possibilities to share experience with other people, be it professional or personal ones. Reddit and such might be far from ideal, but still better than feeling alone and isolated with own problems.

I saw white dog shit outside my high school one dreadful drudge of a morning. That was probably 20+ years older than me. This in England, by the way, so maybe it was some scummy Pole's dog who laid it ages ago. Adopting the chav lifestyle, while their dads/grandad's stayed on and helped GB's economy, and helping restore bombed buildings in WW2. And, sort of, I think, fun fact: A lot of Slavs, Czechs, Ukrainians, Serbians etc. ended up in Britain (mostly south and north England), because, mostly, from what I remember, they were paranoid about Hitler and Stalin turning their attention to former Prussia/Austria-Hungary... areas.

Blooming Heck, that was a bit of a tangent, weren't it...

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

Being a workaholic. I had to learn the hard way that getting up at the asscrack of dawn, and working myself to near death, to try and impress people I genuinely hate, provides an identical outcome to not actually giving a fuck about my job, taking 15 minute shits, and pretending to be busy. Decades of my life could have been spent in prehypertension, rather than stage-3 hypertension, if only I had known that being useless was normal back then.

This doesn't make me as happy as you think it would, but at least I'm not as stressed out. I have recently realized that this is how everyone else does their job, and I'm actually in the wrong for attempting to maximize productivity. The worst part? Ever since I learned how to lazymaxx, I've been promoted far more often. What the fuck.

 

[The Ugly One]

1. Cassettes, both audio and VHS.
2. Fox Body Mustangs
3. Browser toolbars
4. Pay-by-the-minute cell phone & internet service
5. Being unable to cut through the lies of the media and the deep state in seconds by visiting forums full of conspiracy theorists and bigots
6. Card catalogs
7. Sports cars with under 300 hp SAE Net
8. Windows 9x and XP. They both were hot garbage and are the reason I used Linux as my daily driver for ten years. Win 10 was good enough to get me to switch back.
9. PC gaming from about 1998 to 2007 was awful. Constant driver and compatibility problems, video cards that were obsolete ten minutes after launch, games that weren't designed to run on any current hardware...just atrocious all around. People don't appreciate the degree to which the success of the Xbox platform and the unification of Xbox & Windows APIs drove PC games to be a billion times more playable than they were back then. There were good games released, but the platform was such a maelstrom of soupy shit that I don't ever want to go back.
10. Being single. Marriage rules, everyone should get married and be glad for it. If you both are glad you got married, enough so that you give a shit enough to not be miserable, it's the best thing ever. I've got no patience for miserable fucks who ruin each other's lives because they don't appreciate the gift they've got and shit it up with their resentment and stupidity
11. Blockbuster, specifically, was awful. But I do miss video stores. Having everything at my fingertips removes the pleasure of the hunt.
12. Clintons and Bushes

I don't miss dial-up internet per se, but life was objectively better before the internet was so good I could waste a whole day on it. I see Uncle Ted's point with that one. I didn't put DOS because the world of DOS computing was just fundamentally different and really quite nice, if limited.

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

PC gaming from about 1998 to 2007 was awful. Constant driver and compatibility problems, video cards that were obsolete ten minutes after launch, games that weren't designed to run on any current hardware...just atrocious all around. People don't appreciate the degree to which the success of the Xbox platform and the unification of Xbox & Windows APIs drove PC games to be a billion times more playable than they were back then. There were good games released, but the platform was such a maelstrom of soupy shit that I don't ever want to go back.

And by extension, people appreciate the SEGA Dreamcast even less for doing all of those things first, and aligning the stars for Microsoft, in order for the Xbox to even come about. People generally don't really understand the "Compatible with Windows CE" stamp on the front of the console, but it effectively meant that you had complete access to a trimmed down version of just about every Windows library you would need to make a game work, if you used Microsoft's Dragon SDK. From DirectX, to DirectShow, DirectInput/Xinput, and everything in between. I don't even think the Original Xbox had some of the shit the DC had access to. Granted, none of this was built into the console, it was loaded from the kernel on the disk, but it was still there, and a very good SDK option for PC developers, as was its intent. In any case, here's that information you didn't ask for.

 

[The Ugly One]

And by extension, people appreciate the SEGA Dreamcast even less for doing all of those things first

No, it really didn't. The fact that the Dreamcast could run Windows did nothing to stop PC game development in the late 90s from being a shitshow. What changed things wasn't licensing Windows to a console company, it was having a coherent program inside Microsoft to shift the lead platform for game development from the PC to the console and remove as much daylgiht between the platforms as possible. It's the Xbox program as a whole, which matured with the 360, that accomplished this, not the mere fact that the Xbox ran DirectX.

 

[Not A Bunny]

don't miss dial-up internet per se, but life was objectively better before the internet was so good I could waste a whole day on it.

True dat, my brother or sister.

There was a time when normies stayed off the internet, and even some of the nerds did too because your sibling was on the phone with her friends all night.

It meant you had to do SOMETHING else with your time.

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

No, it really didn't. The fact that the Dreamcast could run Windows did nothing to stop PC game development in the late 90s from being a shitshow. What changed things wasn't licensing Windows to a console company, it was having a coherent program inside Microsoft to shift the lead platform for game development from the PC to the console and remove as much daylgiht between the platforms as possible. It's the Xbox program as a whole, which matured with the 360, that accomplished this, not the mere fact that the Xbox ran DirectX.

DirectX is the reason why PC and console cross-development was as streamlined as it became toward the end of the 90s. The GPU landscape may have been a shitshow back then, but DX succeeded in unifying as much of it as possible.

 

[W00K #17]

Looking things up without the internet.
You zoomers have no clue how difficult it was to find something up until around 2000.
You had to buy magazines so that you could find out how to mail order more obscure magazines, just so you can look up some random band that didn't have music videos on MTV.

Trying to find where the fuck someone is without a cell phone.
Think about it: you want to meet up with a friend, he's not home, it's 1998.... what the hell do you do?
You had to walk around the city to find the bastard.
The kids of today will never understand.

I mean unless it was an emergency and someone really needed to get a hold of you it was kind of nice in the way you could just take a day to yourself without feeling rude about it.

Now if you want to just veg out and watch sports or movies or play some vidya by yourself without having to talk to anyone for a day, people know you're actively ignoring them if they send you anything and you don't respond.

As for what I don't miss at all, companies not airing Christmas advertisements weeks before goddam Halloween has even passed. It was already annoying as fuck when they decided it was acceptable to run them run them before Thanksgiving, but mid October? 10 weeks of ads, you need that much now?

 

[Kel1 shi1]

Being a workaholic. I had to learn the hard way that getting up at the asscrack of dawn, and working myself to near death, to try and impress people I genuinely hate, provides an identical outcome to not actually giving a fuck about my job, taking 15 minute shits, and pretending to be busy. Decades of my life could have been spent in prehypertension, rather than stage-3 hypertension, if only I had known that being useless was normal back then.

This doesn't make me as happy as you think it would, but at least I'm not as stressed out. I have recently realized that this is how everyone else does their job, and I'm actually in the wrong for attempting to maximize productivity. The worst part? Ever since I learned how to lazymaxx, I've been promoted far more often. What the fuck.

Yup, learned that one too. All you have to do is not bring attention to yourself and just be competent. All that actual hard work I did when I was younger counted for shit.

 

[Town Drunk]

Pre internet era. Yeah, brainrot, e-whores, etc, but having an entire wealth of knowledge/media seconds away is great.

 

[Unicorn Fairie]

Having to pester EVERYBODY on your local BBS if they had a dub of a certain record. Thank God for direct downloads now.

 

[Mesh Gear Fox]

Pre internet era. Yeah, brainrot, e-whores, etc, but having an entire wealth of knowledge/media seconds away is great.

I didn't have internet access until I was in high school. Things were so different back then. If you wanted information on a certain subject, you know someone in your sphere who had info on it, own an encyclopedia or go to the library. When you grow up in a small town, the local branch is quite small. Most likely the book you wanted was at another location. The librarian would then request that book be sent to the local branch. Ours got deliveries every 2 weeks. It could be checked out to someone else so you had to wait for them to return it. It was a whole process.

Now, you can get information on nearly any subject almost instantaneously. It really is incredible. I never would have imagined as a child something like this would exist someday.

 

[Eadred]

Burning CDs for your car stereo, and every time you found a cool new song, you had to burn another CD because your shitty little aftermarket stereo could only read non - rewritable audio CDs.

 

[Yukako]

Flip phones, only because typing on them was a pain.

 

[Po's Cootah]

The 2000's to early 2010's screamer fad. Back when you could be simply watching a video of cute kittens in 2009 and one of these fuckers would suddenly pop up to greet you:




However, my first screamer is rather unknown. It's called "HALLUCINATE WITHOUT DRUGS", and I remember watching it back in 2007.

Spoiler: Archive

I was only 6 YEARS OLD, for fuck's sake!

 

[Cheesy Beavy]

I don’t miss social media. Most of it is retarded

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

The dial up noise was annoying and gay, dial up was just aids in general.
Buffering 3min Youtube videos for up to an hour.

 

[Taser Confetti]

I do miss Christopher Hitchens quite a lot, but the rest of them? Nah.
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Hard disagree - not because of them but because during the golden era of Youtube Athiest vs Creationist debates the Overton window didn't include SJW's and BLM yet. Literally the biggest culture war was idiots who thought he Flintsones was a documentary.

 

[ForgedBlades]

Having to call a restaurant to order takeout or delivery. Online ordering is based.