Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.
Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.
24/7 Wal-Marts
It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.
Video Games that were shipped in complete versions
Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.
Censorship being taboo.
- Dollar menus at fast food places
- Firefly
- Halloween neighborhood roam trick or treating
- Calvin & Hobbes but I’m glad Watterson ended it when he did
- Angular car design (yeah down with car centrism but those angles looked cool)
- Internet 1.0 and the separation of offline and online life
- The Beyond Taco at Del
- Personal privacy
Weeping upvote for Firefly, taken too soon 😭 🪦 😭 😭
90s and early 2000s gaming
US Democracy
The internet.
I am old enough to have used the internet on a DOS machine with an acoustic coupler dialing up to a hyperboard. Guess my age?
57?
- My step dad was a computer junkie and we had a machine when I was a kid.
I’m 46 and we got a 14.4 modem in around 1992-3 I think. We used gopher and ftp then later hotline to trade shareware, then warez and serialz.
I miss those days, but I don’t miss downloading 8 of 9 parts of a file and not being able to reconnect to the server for the last one.
internet 1.0
Wasn’t even that good for me tbh just a time wasting exercise. Release the cable eating sharks!!
The pre-algorithm internet and social media era of about 2000-2014.
I remember when Instagram was just pictures of my friends cats, hikes, and thrift finds. It was great and fun.
When one still could have the reasonable impression that everyone is the same before the law.
When was that?
We believed a lot of wonderful things in the 90s.
Childhood.
Minidiscs. More durable than CDs. They just looked cool. Sounded way better than cassettes and easier to record and modify tracks. If the data drives were easier to acquire (i.e. like a CD drive) I think they could’ve taken off.
Pensions
I barely got grandfathered into a pension program with the US military. They went away in 2015. I had served over a decade at that point and they still let me retire in 2022 under that program. The new program is a sort of 401k type system, but I didn’t have enough years in service to contribute to it for retirement, so they didn’t even give me the option to switch over.
Granted, I retired after only 20 years served so my pension is not very big. But it’s money in my pocket every month for the rest of my life, so I’m not complaining. I’ll never starve or go without shelter.
Until the current administration realizes and cuts the pension.
which kind? corporate ones, or public ones?
Depends where you live.
TIL that Walmart aren’t open 24hrs anymore. I thought it switched back after COVID, but I guess not.
I haven’t tried visiting a Walmart after 7pm in a very long time.
I think the covid thing happening was their excuse to seize doing that. They were 24/7 right around that period. But I could also see other reasons why they stopped. I mean, overnights were poorly staffed and it’s wal-mart, everyone is going to be getting away with tons of shit like stealing and customers getting rowdy.
Personally, as an overnight worker, I’m glad it ended. I miss being able to shop peacefully but, better safe than convenient.
*Cease
Just FYI
24 hour Home Depots were amazing.
Restaurants and stores that weren’t chains
plenty of those around if you live in a city. i grew up in a rural/suburban area and even in the 90s there was nothing but chain restaurants apart from some crappy pub or pizza place in the town center.
It’s funny to me to see people mythologize how perfect video games were before they could be remotely updated.
Sure, game developers rely on fix-it-later updates much more than they should today, but games had bugs back then too.
It’s not mythology, testing was crucial so you wouldn’t ship a broken cartridge, which was very costly than a patch download. It made financial sense to test throughly, and more than that, develop carefully.
I think the only guys that made a working game in a week were Atari VCS developers, and IMO it wa a combination of the limited hardware, and the skill of a few legendary programmers.
Today we get games that dwarf the entire software stack of computers decades ago, but they’re made loosely, knowing they’ll ship broken and need patch after patch until it doesn’t make financial sense, and then they’re abandoned.
My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise. For example, a long-standing bug is that once it starts, and offers to press any button to sign in, you have to wait about a minute before doing that, otherwise it will likely hang. This has existed since launch, and after numerous patches it hasn’t been addressed yet.
My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise.
You know what’s interesting? I see footage and images from the previous few fallout games, all of them, in so many different contexts - people love those games and they talk about them, A LOT.
But I have never seen any footage from fallout 76.comparitively nbody seems to think it worth celebrating, in the same way as the other few fallout games.
That’s how you can tell a series fell off. You can apply this to TV and movies too - i see less ‘House of the Dragon’ stuff than i saw ‘Game of Thrones’ stuff
games back then were also done by dev teams of like a dozen people or two who did literally everything and you had like 1-2 people on each task. localizing games also took like a year or more from their country of origin.
now they are done by teams of hundreds or thousands, esp once you start adding all the middleware and outsourcing of various parts of the game they do now, and they are released internationally in dozens of markets at once.
it’s lot easier to find bugs in a game that is 1MB than on that is 256GB
The first gaming system that connected to the Internet was the Sega Dreamcast, and even that ran games only off disc. It isn’t until you get to the PS3/XBox 360 era when games would be downloaded to the console directly, and even then games weren’t expected to need an Internet connection to use.
Mario Brothers might have had a small design team, but Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a much larger dev team.
Well, yeah. There’s a meme I actually saw that demonstrates how developers were back then compared to now. Developers back then, really did care about how to make a game at its best with like…2MB of cache or very little video memory or what little of bits they had to work with.
Today and for a while, with technology as to where it is at where sky is virtually the limit, we’ve got games that are so poorly optimized, it makes you wonder.
I was guilty of that very thing once. During my first programming class back in college, I wrote an Asteroids clone as a project. My professor kept sending it back telling me to fix it. I really racked my brain trying to figure out what he was sending back to me (he wouldn’t tell me, I was supposed to find and correct the error). The game ran just fine. Finally a gave up and asked him to tell me the answer of what my code was doing wrong. He showed me that I had one line of code that was basically making a new instance of the entire game for every screen refresh. (I wrote it in Java, so Java was just correcting it for me in real time.)
Online dating back when it was something normal people were embarrassed to do.
Online dating when sites didn’t conspire to keep you single.
Movie rental stores
VRV with Crunchyroll, Funimation, and DramaFever
also de minimus
Oh that’s a good one. Sigh.
