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RULES (updated 01/22/25)
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Objectively, dial-up.
Otoh, what I would really badly like to become a thing again is actual media ownership, ie. not having streaming services randomly yank your stuff away from you.
Also, I would nominate the fact that the 'It's obsolete as soon as you get it in the door' meme hasn't been valid for decades now, but hardware manufacturers, Windows itself, and the game industry are trying really hard to make that a thing again seemingly.
Yup! Spotify removing things off my playlists was a big initial factor into me getting into self hosting. All my music streams through Plex now and I haven't looked back
Even DRM-free storefronts like 7Digital for music or GOG for games aren't immune to random delistings.
Orkut, Flogão (kind of a precursor to instagram, it was mostly used by high schoolers around 2004-6), Skype, Internet Explorer and ActiveX
And Adobe Flash.
I kinda miss Flash because of the amount of interesting games made with it. Some very cool animations too, good thing Ruffle exists nowadays.
The problem (besides Adobe buying Macromedia) was every fucking business deciding to make their entire sites in Flash
Literally installed Flash 8 today because it's the comfiest way to animate for me.
I think they were speaking of the Player.
Smoking everywhere and anywhere. Younger folks have no idea how ubiquitous it was, not to sound boomerish, but everything smelled so bad, and people would smoke in places that would shock you now, like in hospitals they would smoke in the nurses station, if you walked into a clothing store at the mall they'd be smoking at the counter, etc. Even when they did things like making that glass room for smokers at Tim Hortons, I once saw a woman sitting in there with her toddler in a stroller puffing away. It was actually amazing that anyone put a stop to public smoking because so many people did it.
The Nazis.
OH WAIT.
Women having to get husband’s permission to open a bank account (speaking of the US).
Aiso used to be true in France, along with any operations on it. Hence why my mom preciously my grand-ma's old "Liret A" with the mension "mon assisted of her husband". (My grand-dad himself found the situatin ridiculous, and had made the necesary to ensure she could oprate their bank acounts without him.)
Smoking everywhere. For anyone who wasn't around for the 70s/80s/90s, everything was tinged yellow and smelled of smoke. Car/plane/train seats had built-in ashtrays. Restaurants had smoking sections separated from the non-smoking sections by waist-high walls.
I have asthma and it sucked. Not sure if I grew out of it as I got older or if there's just not a miasma of smoke around everywhere, but it rarely bothers me anymore.
CRT displays.
I like to have one around 😅. I like the look and it'll probably survive me
Survive you or outlive you?
Pagers. Having to find a pay phone. Looking through newspapers for jobs. Absolutely gutless emissions- strangled malaise era cars with horrible brakes and numb steering.
Pagers certainly still exist.
Troubleshooting issues with them is a pain too.
That being said, I've only seen them in the medical field.
Looking through the paper for a job was in some ways better. Now it's so hard to even get past the initial filters to an actual human because job postings get spammed with hundreds of applications, many from people who are underqualified and/or straight up lying on their resume. For remote jobs, you're competing against the whole country whereas with jobs in the paper you were mostly competing against those in your local area.
Is funny how we have all this tech for it and they’ve only managed to enshittify the process. Some sites are going back to the original purpose like indeed but it’s still like tossing your resume into space.
The enshittification is the point of tehse "high tech" replacements for things that worked just fine beforehand.
Capitalism is the point. They're usually fine tools until they have investors steering the ship.
"Capitalism is the point."
"Enshittification is the point."
They're the same sentence!
George W. Bush's presidency. I don't know what the kids are smoking when they say current republicans make him look "classy" or that Trump's first term was worse than his. He bred a constant state of paranoia and xenophobia and used it to justify killing countless people in the middle east. The damage done to that part of the world is staggering and everyone just treats it like background noise.
Also that decade post-SpongeBob where every kid's cartoon was about a loud, annoying, dumb guy.
Imagine being 6 years old and your mother hugging you while crying. You have no electricity. It's night time. Artillery shell explosions followed by the crumbling buildings and injured crying in pain are the only break you get from your mother's sounds of sobbing. They're destroying your entire block, but what you feel is terror. You can look out a window and see flashes. You don't even know what politics or weapons of mass destruction. You're just there scared until you die. You wonder what you did for this to happen. Now imagine hundreds of that same experience per night.
That never makes it into the news. I would love to see people's responses. Show the child and mother live. Then, people are randomly asked, "Push button to kill this person immediately or you will be put in jail and shamed for life." Let's see how they react to that guilt for eternity.
There's a quote from Game of Thrones that I think of often. The setting is that 3 brutal high-class leaders have to decide which one of them will die as punishment. They start getting nervous, so Tyrion says:
It always seems a bit abstract, doesn't it, other people dying?
I find it validating.
Vinyl (for music, not floors).
I don't care much about the supposed fidelity, but having a group of mates around each pick an album from my stack is a lot of fun.
It stops people from focusing too hard on the music and going "oh wait lemme queue up this track" etc.
CDs would fulfill the exact same use-case while being more convenient, space efficient and cheaper.
Dial-up internet. I would open a website and go do something else for a minute until it loads, then fight with my parents when they pick up the phone when I've been downloading something for 3 hours.
We had very late internet infrastructure upgrade, so at the end we had a bluetooth dial-up internet router in the early 2010s...
Internet over bluetooth is a crime against humanity
white dog poop
This is probably completely uninteresting to everyone else, but this has re-surfaced an old memory for me. I had a really dull data entry job one summer, and the crowd I worked with included a few odd figures. One particular guy was always making jokes that were just a bit too edgy for the workplace, especially amongst a bunch of people that didn't know him well enough to know how much he meant any of it. For some reason, completely unprompted, he brought up that "you never see white dog turds any more". Everyone heard this as "white doctors" and immediately winced in anticipation of some incoming racism, and everyone still heard it that way when he tried to clarify several times. Turns out no, it was 100% innocent, just weird.
He was fired for unrelated reasons a few weeks later; he had gone to the nearby pub on his lunch break and had several pints
It's not "gone", but the notion of it being "acceptable" is gone:
Using 'retard' as a slur, not only for people with intellectual disabilities but also just for people or things you think were stupid.
Sadly that slur's starting to become in vogue again ⚰
I was gonna say the same. I saw the R word casually dropped in a CRT enthusiast group the other day and called the guy out, and a bunch of people stood with me, but nearly as many brushed it off as no big deal.
Worst part ? Seen LEFTISTS say it wen clearly they should know better ❗❗ And in my experience see it on tumblr more than any where else
Oar wat about "sch⬛⬛⬛" ⁉️⁉️ Wen we'll ever move past describing (peop|thing)s using ableist words
I have no idea what word you're redacting there. "School"?
Schizo
I'll update my slurs list. That's an entirely new one on me.
Another person with a slurs list?!
I keep mine in a little book in my font pocket so its close to my heart.
Might need to go digital soon, its almost full.
I have to keep track of the ever-changing landscape of what offends people this week.
I'm glad that Furbys, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras are no longer mainstream. And may they never return.
Disposable cameras are making a return.
Like 35mm point-and-shoots? That's surprising. I wonder why?
Disposable cameras and Polaroids have been getting popular at weddings in place of guest books or as something for the guests to do during the reception. The couple then gets something physical they can keep.
Interesting. I still wonder why, because this was a trend in the '90s that died out with camera phones and social media. Maybe it's a retro throwback trend that got popular with younger folks? Still, I thought they stopped manufacturing Polaroid paper, and can you still get film developed at like the grocery store or a pharmacy?