remember the 90s and internet nostalgia

i dont know if i can exactly articulate why but i think this phenomenon is horrific and it makes me want to sterilize the entire country

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/can-you-make-it-through-this-post-without-wanting

i guess i don't necessarily have a problem w/ 90s nostalgia itself but buzzfeed's style is particularly lazy

That's like just regular ol' nostalgia, nothing really "internet" about it beyond the medium through which it is presented. Still, its pretty awful and like a weird conflation of eras going on. I don't feel like that really encapsulates a certain age's experience, they just threw up a bunch of "lol this" imgs. But clearly from the "all dressed" img it isn't meant to be taken too seriously.

Still, yes, awful.

sometimes cool stuff stops being cool

Buzzfeed pages take like 25 minutes to load on my work PC, I don't even bother anymore.

hmmm sounds like your computer beat you to the 90s time machine

I am working on this

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/vic20.jpg

lol xp

i liked reading that buzzfeed thing less via nostalgia more of in awe of how universal children of my gen's life was when you zoom into this level of, like, banal minutiae. also, lol'd at this

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/web03/2012/9/11/0/enhanced-buzz-12327-1347336654-3.jpg

I did not know what a single one of those things were in that until they got to floppy discs.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/what-a-crappy-evening-in-1998-looked-like

i think what's interesting about this is seeing in real time how the 90s are being reduced to a handful of signifiers and relating it to how like "the 80's" = a clunky walkman and a dayglo baseball cap and expanding it forwards and backwards.

and the dhshshshbhdhfurrbfjdhshhhhshhhhshhh sound of a modem connecting.

i dont know if i can exactly articulate why but i think this phenomenon is horrific and it makes me want to sterilize the entire country

get used to this shit or resolve to be an angry and annoyed person, it's just a thing that happens. watching my generation elevate 80s music to When The Music Was Amazing status is rivaled in annoyingness only by how willing my peers are to go "but the music really was better"

Did dial-up really ever cut out when someone picked up the phone? When I had it the phone just didn't work if the computer was plugged in.

Wait, there was a year when young people used dial-up AOL to connect to kazaa and dl songs?

Also I don't think Kazaa was around in the 90s?

Also I think games were a little more advanced than Oregon Trail by 1998?

not to be nostalgic, and much respect to slsk, but they never did make anything better than napster.

Napster wasn't out til '99 ... I remember downloading albums off FTPs before that. lol90s, I found the Slim Shady LP on an FTP and being one of the few kids with a CD burner I had some friends sell copies of it around school and made about a couple thousand in a few weeks. I barely knew who this slim shady guy was.

damn. check out the operator.

it's the only worthwhile thing I've done with my life, so I like sharing the story whenever I get the chance. If 90s nostalgia picks up steam... 8)

i dont know if i can exactly articulate why but i think this phenomenon is horrific and it makes me want to sterilize the entire country

get used to this shit or resolve to be an angry and annoyed person, it's just a thing that happens. watching my generation elevate 80s music to When The Music Was Amazing status is rivaled in annoyingness only by how willing my peers are to go "but the music really was better"

― Inconceivable (to the entire world) (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, October 2, 2012 5:23 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:-(

i feel like the internet somehow makes this worse, or i guess just makes it easier, which makes it worse

Getting nostaligic for making a couple of quick easy thousands is OK.

nostalgia as means of expressing shared experience, non-depressing way of marking passage of time, low-fi time travel, lol look at my hair what was i thinking = pretty positive thing in moderation i think

nostalgia as means of promoting reactionary politics, aesthetics, pretending that no really saved by the bell was a good show = definitely horrific

internet aspect ease in nearly recreating the media experience as it happened plus rapid noticeable changes (ie i know i spent alot of time on the internet in 1998 but how? did i just read suck and feed over and over again?) plus financial motivation in throwing up a bunch of pictures of abc tgif cast members w/ 'the 90s' in the header and acting like what you've done is journalism.

squatting on domain names was easier in the 90s...

Oregon Trail isn't '90s.

creatively bankrupt newish chillwave/post-AnCo bands whose names are just '80s ephemera

plus internet itself is a pretty big shift in how ppl (and by ppl i mean americans obv) experience media and arguably (let's pretend this is arguable) life so there is an actual before and after. combine that w/ (relative) peace and prosperity vs where we are now, the past ten years and nostalgia is very understandable.

i forgot when the end of history was supposed to be, but we've been recycling and rebooting even before broadband.

like richard pryor's brewster's millions is like the 8th brewster's millions or something.

What's been getting me are these posts on Facebook lately:

http://i.imgur.com/5qAo4.png

Yes, motherfucker. I've got one about 50 feet away from me in the mail room?

Are we really getting to the point where it's "OH WOW, EVERYONE REMBER LETTER OPENERS?"

That's pretty ridiculous, we still get students our paper cutter every day. Paper isn't quite obsolete yet.

ugh yeah I've seen these

rotary telephone? GO FUCK YOURSELF YES I REMEMBER IT

yeah i'm torn between the rest of the internet going 'remember burning cd's????' and that ilx thread filled w/ ppl going 'i've bought 100 cds this year. have never listened to an mp3 and never will!'

creatively bankrupt newish chillwave/post-AnCo bands whose names are just '80s ephemera

― pun lovin criminal (polyphonic), Tuesday, 2 October 2012 22:04 (11 minutes ago) Permalink

this thread title was so well formulated, the thread could have just been locked right there

"rotary telephone? GO FUCK YOURSELF YES I REMEMBER IT"
all this 90s nostalgia talk made me hear this in samuel l. jackson voice from pulp fiction

man yeah i remember pulp fiction

i watched it again recently and was weirded out by "PRODUCED BY DANNY DEVITO" in big letters which i didn't remember seeing before and wondered if danny devito broke into every house that still has a VHS player and redubbed copies of pulp fiction so his name would be on it.

man yeah i remember vhs tapes and shit

yo I read all those Choose Your Own Adventure books on the lol 90s buzzfeed in the 80s, that is how hip and cutting edge I was, a decade ahead of my time. apparently

I will be honest that nostalgia for past ephemera is totally catnip to me but the glibness and ubiquity of "omg Power Rangers" is depressing (or maybe it is just that Power Rangers were a little after my time and I would rather read great significance and profundity into the ephemera of just before my time, like say Bagpuss or italodisco)

i am trying to be ahead of the curve in venerating vhs for its now-auratic qualities of degradation & palimpsettesque rerecording potential

I went to a 90's party with a bunch of ppl who were 10 years younger than me and and was just, mystified by the stuff ppl wore. Costumes included: Ed, Ed N Eddy...the burglars from Home Alone...Vince Vega & Mia Wallace/Pulp Fiction...Daria...Garth from Wayne's World...and of course Monica Lewinsky

I felt out of place for wearing what I pretty much actually wore in high school

I felt myself getting v snobby and annoyed, like this is NOT nineties, if you had been anything like grownup you would know that jeeez. AND QUIT SMILING, no one smiled

ppl totally smiled vg. rachel, phoebe, chandler after a zinger - totally smiled.

maybe they were referencing gilmore girls, not the 90s?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTRvYCJ-Ygg

can't tell if the way 90s nostalgia is slanted towards those who were children then is just a reflection of demographics (gen x much smaller than generations before and after it) or just increased infantilization of the culture in general.

watching my generation elevate 80s music to When The Music Was Amazing status is rivaled in annoyingness only by how willing my peers are to go "but the music really was better"

Hahaha man I want to troll you on this so badly but I know aerosmith is supporting a new record and I don't want to divert Steven Tyler's focus.

i feel like open displays of infantilization is more accepted now than before, but that really applies to adults consuming contemporary kids culture rather than retro kids culture.

diaper drinkers

also the zeitgeist of the 90s was retro so really we should be getting updates of not 90s stuff but stuff that was retro in the 90s, like speed racer, which... we already got.

ha -- I still burn CD's and had a dial-up modem until '05.

btw the first Living in Oblivion eighties comp was released in '92! I bought it in '93. For reasons best left to sociologists eighties nostalgia happened, like, immediately.

i was gonna say, is burning cds a thing of the past now, but then i remembered i still own a vcr, conclusion i give up

me too!

then again not every Bunuel film is on DVD.

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/aol.jpeg

haha soto 80s nostalgia happened before the 80s even ended - mtv had a 'remember the 80s?' show on in 1989, they even brought martha quinn back to host it.

i think the second you hear "people still do x?" it means the newness of y has worn off.

I hope there's a journal article buried in my university library's bound volume floor explaining how 90s kids burned with a desire to hear Missing Persons in the early Clinton years.

I know I reviewed that comp somewhere at the time...

Didn't Rhino's "Just Can't Enough" series launch in '93?

I own a few of those cassettes. I was so happy to finally play Spandau Ballet's "Gold" in my car!

http://www.fiorella.com/photos/mondo2000-full.jpg

Forgot the "Circuit" music DVD/promo series too: http://www.tower.com/circuit-1-3-311-dvd/wapi/107033626

the only things I recognise at all from OP buzzfeed are CYOA and the slip'n'slide

Did dial-up really ever cut out when someone picked up the phone?

Can't speak to the 90s but this was certainly the case when using Hayes 300-baud acousticoupler in 1987.

And so it has happened. This thread has become a thread of "hey! wow! the ninties! that's back when we all {listened to / watched / wore / played with} stuff!"

balls otm

also terrible, those lists of things like "the children who turn 18 today will have no clue what a vcr is"

For this year's class of incoming freshman, Kurt Cobain has always been dead.

a baby born today will never know a world w/o facebook memes

By the time that baby is old enough to remember anything much, facebook will be AOL.

huh what's aol

they make winamp.
(is winamp still popular in netherlands?)

also terrible, those lists of things like "the children who turn 18 today will have no clue what a vcr is"

― max, Tuesday, 2 October 2012 22:35 (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these are really cool
also as a relic of the print magazine age a child who turns eighteen today would have no idea what you were referring to

when i was really losing it over my dissertation a couple months ago i found a strange, nigh-profound relief in the google image search results for "information superhighway"

http://www.billfrymire.com/gallery/webJpgs/digital-information-highway-horizon.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rHACaMOLXRw/SCzE98Cd6NI/AAAAAAAAABo/XJkp6hjlnw0/s400/information_super_highway_by_actionjosh.jpg

http://catandcow.davidguay.com/uploaded_images/info_hwy-717867.jpg

bill gates rendered that img, you can tell from his distinctive Bill Gates Helium Balloon watermark

someone should do a slightly too far ahead of the curve one of those like 'the children who turn 18 today have no idea what a dvd or blackberry is' or 'for today's college freshman mark ruffalo has always been the hulk'. that or go the reverse w/ 'today's college freshman has never sent a telegram' or 'for the children who turn 18 today franklin pierce has always been dead'.

or "for today's movie critics Meryl Streep has always been awesome"

But the music really was better!

someone should start a tumblr devoted to most hilarious music videos to garner a 'this was when music MEANT something' type comment

there's a suburgatory where the dads are listening to some sufjan/decembrists type indie rock band (an oboe is noted) and thinking 'are we just old or does this suck?' and man, it resonated.

i just saw a good one earlier today... oh yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lLmYLw0WRI

Music is dead! Im only 18 but i prefer music like this. Today's teens don't know what music is!!
Andrew Brand 1 week ago 18

yeah when it's a kid it's kinda sad. at least IN MY DAY when kids were false nostalgic for music from before they were born it was real music like the beatles!

btw it wasn't until the 80s rock poll i figured out that album cover, that it's a beetle escaping a crystall ball or something. always just glazed over it and thought it was a spaceship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epqZrkxZ3_o

Great song. The 90s sure had a bunch of great bands--didn't appreciate it at the time. Oh well, thank goodness for Youtube.
jrbgeog 1 year ago

lol I thought it was a jellyfish.

x-post

also i was looking at ciara vids just now and there were a bunch of 'i love this old music, this is the real shit!!!' comments

god i wish i could find it but i remember one where they did the 'this is when there was REAL music, not like today' and their example of 'crappy music of today' was stevie nicks

I must say, Jason Mraz is my absolute favorite musician. It is always nice to put aside all of the other "music" out there and listen to this guy. Now this..is real music.

Taj Lalhal 3 days ago

lol

aaaaaahhhh

http://crappypictures.com/images/2012/09/mcdonalds-2.gif

also as a relic of the print magazine age a child who turns eighteen today would have no idea what you were referring to

Nah, the Beloit College PR office distributes it online these days. People post it on Facebook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/us/worries-over-defense-dept-money-for-hackerspaces.html?hp

1999:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/06/us/JP-HACKERS-1/JP-HACKERS-1-articleInline.jpg

today:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/06/us/JP-HACKERS-2/JP-HACKERS-2-articleInline.jpg

"What happened to you, man? You sold out man. You used to be cool, hanging out smoking underneath the interstate flyover. Remember when we drove up to the beach and the surfboards came off the top of the car 'cause we forgot to ties 'em down to the roof rack? We were fuckin' blazed off our heads, man. But look at you now, you sold out. Man, you've become The Man, man."

not really related but i was just thinking that the most 1990s song of all time is the butch vig "metal mix" of "shamrocks and shenanigans" by house of pain

lol otm

Thank you for the thread idea:

"i was just thinking that the most 1990s song of all time is the butch vig "metal mix" of "shamrocks and shenanigans" by house of pain"

CNN

January 31, 1997; Friday 7:11 am Eastern Time

SHOW: CNN EARLY EDITION 07:00 am ET

Searching for Missing Children on the Web

GUESTS: LEXIS-NEXIS Related Topics Full Article Related Topics Overview

This document contains no targeted Topics.

BYLINE: Kitty Pilgrim

SECTION: News; Domestic

LENGTH: 1151 words

HIGHLIGHT: The effort to local missing and exploited children has taken a high- tech turn and one success story is helping. Search efforts have expanded from pictures of children on milk cartons to images on the Internet and it was the Internet that helped reunited Beau Arceneaux with his mother twelve years after the boy's father took him.

KITTY PILGRIM, CNN ANCHOR: The effort to local missing and exploited children has taken a high-tech turn and one success story is helping. Search efforts have expanded from pictures of children on milk cartons to images on the Internet and it was the Internet that helped reunited Beau Arceneaux with his mother twelve years after the boy's father took him.
A neighbor who let Beau use her computer became suspicious because Beau knew so little about his mother. The neighbor contacted the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Beau was back with his mother within three months.

Beau and his mother, Becky Comeaux are in our Washington bureau this morning. And also with us is Rick Minicucci with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Thank you all very much for coming on the show and sharing your story with us.

And Beau I wanted to say that we rejoice with you in your reunion with your mother and I wanted to congratulate you on that. And ask you, did you ever think that learning the Internet would be so profitable?
BEAU ARCENEAUX, REUNITED WITH ESTRANGED MOTHER: Not really. I just did it for fun. It was really amazing by what they could. It was just really fun to be able to make a connection with people and talk to them.

PILGRIM: When you first learned that you made the connection through the Internet to find your mother were you surprised and will you continue to use the Internet for other purposes?

ARCENEAUX: I was very surprised that just -- just having fun could do something that I would never have thought possible. I -- I really didn't never knew that my mother was looking for me and yes I'm still using the Internet a lot.

PILGRIM: That's great. Let me ask your mom, did you have any leads on Beau before this Internet connection turned up?

BECKY COMEAUX, REUNITED WITH MISSING SON: We had leads throughout the years. One of them just a couple of years ago that turned out not to be him in Canada and all. But as time went on, the leads were fewer because he had been missing since he was 15 months old and when we found him, he was 13 years old so the leads had been very thin in the past few years.

PILGRIM: Had you just about given up hope or were you still trying actively?

COMEAUX: No I never gave up hope and we kept trying using all the avenues that were available to us. We never gave up hope that one day we would find him.

PILGRIM: Did you ever think the Internet could be a tool for this sort of thing?

COMEAUX: Never. My husband Ricky's a computer consultant. We have computers in our home.

PILGRIM: Isn't that ironic.

COMEAUX: Yeah. And we were not on the Internet. We've only been on the Internet since Beau came home and taught it to us.

PILGRIM: I'll bet you're surfing that thing daily at this point.

COMEAUX: Oh yes. I've learned E-mail rapidly.

(LAUGHTER)

PILGRIM: What about you Beau, are you teaching your mom some pointers on the net?

ARCENEAUX: Yes. She does a news group because she's a race walker and she gets E-mail from race walkers all over the United States.

unusual intersection there.

sorry, didn't realize that c&p was so large.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkM6RJf15cg

haha, what a weirdly self-defeating ad. "remember when microsoft was actually relevant to personal computing? remember all those short-lived cultural fads of the 90s? yeah, we were one of those. wow. those were some good times."

lol yeah

is it a plea for people to start using IE... ironically?

I realise I am old but I met a lot of those things in the 80s actually.

The apostrophe is the wrong way round 4 seconds into that.

Yo-yos, at least those ones that looked like skateboard wheels = 80s with a mid 90's revival.
Oregon Trail = 80s
Walkman = 80s (1979 if you lived in Japan)
Hungry Hippos = 1978
"You really had nothing to lose." ...except all the money in your wallet.
Lost count of how many times I flipped off the screen.
Dear Gen Y, please stop stealing our cool stuff, signed Gen X.

(the wallets on chains though, you can keep those, because they were fucking stupid)

Lost count of how many times I flipped off the screen.

And that was before it turned out to be an ad for IE. really, Microsoft? When a tech company's best shot at selling their product is to try and invoke nostalgia, it's screwed.

Waiting for the swell of hipsters using Microsoft Bob.

Did dial-up really ever cut out when someone picked up the phone? When I had it the phone just didn't work if the computer was plugged in.

Yeah, AOL would just close out and the person who picked up the phone would hear EEEEEERRRRRRRRRKKKKKSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH!

I've lived through nostalgia for the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's and while I am a child of the 90's I'm so worn out by nostalgia that i couldn't give less of a shit. I saw "Full House" maybe 10 years ago and was shocked by just how unfunny and cheesy and lousy it was.

MICROSOFT: WE REMEMBER POGS

Can't wait to see the Hodgman/Long ads with this

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/splashes/netscape/4.03.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM_ruBwYGtg

"its like a game of scrabble gone wrong"

"And ask you, did you ever think that learning the Internet would be so profitable?"

feels like a proto-self helper from Gr8080's thread

Ugh! The nineties were my twenties... In my twenties I remember meeting forty somethings at work who were in their twenties in the seventies and thinking that was so much cooler than what I was stuck with.

Did dial-up really ever cut out when someone picked up the phone? When I had it the phone just didn't work if the computer was plugged in.

Yeah, AOL would just close out and the person who picked up the phone would hear EEEEEERRRRRRRRRKKKKKSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH!

I had dial-up until early 2006....

I had an ex recently send out a mass email announcing that she was changing her address from earthlink.net.

I think I had dial-up until 2009 or thereabouts.

did people really play pogs that way? (stacking up 20 and throwing the slammer into the middle)

iirc we used to just stack up 4-6 (2-3 pogs from each player) and then take turns trying to flip them

has anyone tried to play Goldeneye recently? one day I'm going to have to explain to my kids "when I was your age, we sat around drinking Mountain Dew and staying up until 3 AM playing Goldeneye" and my kids will say, "Dad, that really blows"

lol

has anyone tried to play Goldeneye recently?

I played it for the first time a year ago tomorrow and it was great. Went to get through some more of it a few months ago and the 64 crashed and died :( :(


I saw "Full House" maybe 10 years ago and was shocked by just how unfunny and cheesy and lousy it was.

I saw "Full House" maybe 25 years ago and was shocked by etc etc

well I also played a ton of Timesplitters 2 multiplayer, which is like Goldeneye but better in pretty much every way

what's striking about games like Goldeneye is how incredibly bad they look today - I remember thinking when the N64 came out (I was 9 or 10, I think), that this was it, that graphics could not possibly get any better

See I'm glad i was a bit older, and when N64 came out i just thought all the games looked like crap compared to Donkey Kong Country etc. for SNES. Goldeneye, as fun as it was, seemed way slower than Quake.

i didnt play goldeneye until a few years ago and i thought it was awful

Yeah I can't see it aging very well

h4a did you play it four-player

Yeah multiplayer was the meat if the game back in the day

Lots of fond memories of getting my ass whipped constantly by my brother and our buddies. We also played Goldeneye sometimes.

no, it was me vs my gf at the time. she kicked my ass because i picked Jaws, not realizing that me being taller than the other character models was going to put me at a mechanical disadvantage

Yo-yos, at least those ones that looked like skateboard wheels = 80s with a mid 90's revival.
Oregon Trail = 80s
Walkman = 80s (1979 if you lived in Japan)
Hungry Hippos = 1978
"You really had nothing to lose." ...except all the money in your wallet.
Lost count of how many times I flipped off the screen.
Dear Gen Y, please stop stealing our cool stuff, signed Gen X.

Maybe it's this is just Y's first attempt at gaslighting Gen X. Up next: "Remember how everyone in the 90s agreed that Bill Clinton was the coolest president ever? And politics was a lot more civil and we weren't divisive? Yeah, remember how there wasn't talk of a culture war and we all just wanted to stay up late and watch 120 Minutes with our parents? Yeah, the 90s were cool"

if we all use Internet Explorer we can bring back those lost on 9/11

this video right here is how *I* remember the 90s

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3697885/macarena/

this page is so awesome:

http://www.geocities.com/spunk1111/new.htm#new

LOL crut.

Funny how I grew up but ads like that IE commercial, or most Apple commercials for that matter, have a style and narrator that reminds me of 90s Nickelodeon commercials for "Nick News w Linda Ellerbee" or "The Big Help" aka commercials about his kids can change he world, too.

Solemn but whimsical Nickelodeon ads were the future.

*how

http://i.imgur.com/oUsUO.jpg

yeah but

http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/babel.jpg

"via hitlersmoustache"

"When kids cared more about music than popularity or sex." Ah, yes, that magical era called NEVER.

Excellent trolling. A+

I grew up through the 90s and i hated it and wished i was alive in the 60s instead.

LOL @ New Found Glory. Yes what a magical time to have New Found Glory on the radio. We were truly blessed.

"when punks were the cool kids, not the outcasts"

btw what is a mowhawk?

wanna order this new the knife disc but having trouble logging into my CDNow account. anyone else having trouble or is it just me

2000, the Year Formerly Known as the Future

http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/

http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/networld/

As you enter Networld, you instantly become immersed in the Internet with the humming of over 30 computers, 25 projectors and various other systems all running at once.
You can enhance your Networld experience by purchasing a Netpass card. The Netpass card can be used to digitize one’s body to create an avatar, which is a computerized form that will be your personal guide and playmate as you travel throughout the 5,000-square foot exhibit. With an avatar, your experience in Networld is completely unique from other guests’ experiences. No two moments are ever the same since each element in the exhibit is geared to be affected by your individual presence.
With the help of interactive walls, you will feel as though you are immersed in the superhighway traffic of the Internet as you go from station to station. Use your avatar to guide you to exhibit stations to learn about the foundation of the Internet’s technology, which includes bits, bandwidth and packet switching.

hahahahahahahh

Yes, the 90s were a strange time. Things I miss:

*Dialing in to a BBS or any computer
*Interacting or downloading software/games from other computers doing the above
*CompuServe, etc. (and maybe AOL for a very brief moment, but for all the wrong reasons)
*Security
*GIFs (I don't understand its appeal now, though)

There was also a piece of software very similar to Spotify around the mid-90s that I quite liked, but I can't remember the name of it. It was Internet radio that grouped stuff by similar 'artists'/'genres'.

For the most part, there are very few Internet-related things I miss. It seems like technology and Internet have only been improving while people have been becoming less adept at using it and more clever at misusing it.

Talking about 90s Internet nostalgia, here is a little gem from GitHub:

http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/

that tumblr thing is an amazing troll.

<3 blink 182.

"when people were happy with themselves" lolololololol

i watched mallrats today and i definitely missed certain aspects of the '90s

Been reading @tweetsfrom97 all afternoon, it's very british childhood-specific but freakishly nostalgic

*GIFs (I don't understand its appeal now, though)

Tiny file sizes, loopable, perfect for short-form digital animation art, works on pretty much any platform ever, no need to install any plugins/worry about crashing Flash player/etc.

although I've had the internet since the early 90s (or some precursor to it, like Prodigy) it really wasn't such a huge part of my mental landscape until probaly the early 2000s - it was more of a novelty entertainment thing, like a video game system, not something that pervaded life. So nostalgic over-associations of the 90s with "early internet" are kind of funny to me.

c234897mizs908un has a point. Gifs were so much better when they looked like this:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3tznjTVQW1qb14uyo1_400.gif http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3hcksOl0X1qkrwydo1_400.gifhttp://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2nlh9XrjA1rqanplo1_250.gifhttp://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2nt82B5Et1ru71nxo1_100.gifhttp://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2nmcttw1K1qabbzvo1_100.gif

that exploding gif has to have been on about 90% of the angelfire pages i remember going to

http://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/wsg/image/1359/18/1359182123932.gifhttp://0-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/wsg/image/1358/91/1358918768962.gif http://0-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/wsg/image/1351/24/1351243485425.gifhttp://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/wsg/image/1359/18/1359182123932.gif
http://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/wsg/image/1341/73/1341739491744.gif

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2gn3rhhfK1qbzzgco1_400.gif

Xavier: Renegade Angel was way ahead of it's time.

Most of those GIFs are just early CGI animation loops of low-rez polygons.

Only a matter of time before Ironic CGI becomes a thing.

"Only a matter of time"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKosaf5tmpI

That's Next Media Animation's whole schtick

Enjoy:

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/IMG/homebox.gif
http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/Business/welcome-1.gif
http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/3d/entrance.jpg
http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/3d/doorlil4.gif
http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Moving/WebElements/24hour.gif

^worth poking around; some real gold in there

good stuff

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Moving/PopCulture/Joinbnr798.gif

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/SciFi/geologypropaganda1.gif

That is so 90s.

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/OccultFantasy/0aprduni1.gif

Ok it wasn't very 90s but I thought it was funny.

Xp

It was from that website.

Guys I have a copy of Game Player's Nintendo Guide from 1991 and the awkward layered-gradient-shapes-dominated design of the letters section is so 90's it could destroy this thread.

The ancestors of FB image macros:

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/CausesSentiments/gangel.gif

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/CausesSentiments/heroes.gif.jpeg

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Still/CausesSentiments/AngelsAward1.gif

Reminds me of www.hippy.com, which is STILL working and STILL totally 90s.

http://hippy.com/

Actually, crap, it's more mid-2000s at the moment. Not nearly enough GIFs.

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Moving/WebElements/signpenc.gif

does anyone else like to pronounce "geocities" so it rhymes with "atrocities"?

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/IMG/Opgether4.gif

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/IMG/ani-wrds_Tell-A-Friend.gif

I made so many pages with Netscape Composer, using all the moving GIFs available in its built-in arsenal of GIFs.
~sniff~

I don't know what kind of mental illness you must have to be nostalgic for dial-up though.

hm, maybe nostalgia for the days when you could feel internetted out after 30 minutes (having promised yourself only 20 bcz phone calls cost money but then your selected 3-meg download wasn't finished yet), go offline, and do something more constructive without feeling the need to refresh a webpage every minute

^^^

This could be why 90s nostalgia is as intense as it is. Enslavement followed soon after.

Well I wasn't calling long distance BBSs (well, only occasionally) so until my parents needed the phone I could be online ALL THE TIME! but you're right, back then, one could go "ok, I'm done with the internet for the day" and actually mean it.

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Moving/Recreation/07.gif
http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Moving/Recreation/07.gif
http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Moving/Recreation/07.gif
http://www.internetarchaeology.org/img/Moving/Recreation/07.gif

yeah there were a few sites that updated enough i could/would check them everyday - suck, feed, arts & letters daily, salon - and most i checked only every now and then cuz that's how often they updated. there were a lot fewer rabbit holes and the holes were shallower then. also: no wikipedia.

unfortunately Andrew Sullivan's site was one of those.

when did sullivan really start? i'm thinking more late 90s, when for example we could not have internet where i worked but it was ok cuz i only spent like an hour on the internet a day anyway (some days might not even go online at all). when you would find a website by going to yahoo and then clicking the category you were interested in on the directory on their first page. the jennicam years.

I started reading him in 2001 and he was already updating every 25-45 minutes iirc

but yeah otm: until 2000 I could check email in the morning and night and not get anxious about missing much.

I can't imagine working at my current job without the internet. xp.

I agree with the feeling of not needing to be online all the time. I was totally cool with going to my university's computer lab once a week to check out the latest on a few select websites (mostly gaming and music news/reviews). I didn't even own a computer until 2005.

I've had a computer since the first Mac came out. Many old games directly associated with nostalgia for specific portions of the 90s.

addicted to noise.

http://www.90sisland.com/

(Promo website for a book, apparently.)

http://i.imgur.com/9yTXjSs.jpg

Yahoo to shut down pioneering AltaVista search site

I remember in 1995 using both Lycos and Alta Vista simultaneously.

I used to use AltaVista Babel Fish all the time but never used the site for anything else.

It was exciting because whichever of the two gave the best search results (*cough* pr0n *cough*) seemed to change weekly. Yahoo was always pretty terrible though.

I used to use Lycos to send free text messages via their website

Alta Vista was recommended by a literature professor in 1997. I used it until maybe 2003(?) when someone laughed in my face for not using google.

altavista was fking great for a while in the late 90's. I used it a lot for picture research back when I was in publishing.

and babelfish was fun

started watching the Sopranos this week - Meadow takes her little brother to a Mafia website that's pure '90s lols. Animated bullet gif, zubaz background, bullet hole link buttons

Ha, there's a scene where Tony says he won't use the internet because he "don't like those cookies."

The best thing about altavista was you could just go to av.com, which was the shortest url of any of them. I had a bunch of muscle memory tied to it.

the other weird muscle memory i have is my default page to test for web connectivity was netscape.com. sometimes i still accidentally type it in, and end up at a slightly rebranded aol page. i've typed it in various times over the years and seen different versions of the aol page, always with hints of netscape branding still.

tweaking the design of the aol page for netscape and other dead properties seems like a lonely, meaningful job. i wonder how many other urls they do that type of thing for, and if anyone still cares or if this was just a decision made and a person allocated and nobody even asks why anymore

you wont find us on alta vista

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BWMuUCBCEAA4-IZ.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BWMqpW_CMAEVERH.png

altavista was fking great for a while in the late 90's. I used it a lot for picture research back when I was in publishing.

and babelfish was fun

so otm.

I'm still not sure what a webring was... and I was there, dude.

oh i remember

basically just a bunch of unrelated small/independent websites that covered similar interests linking to each other, rite? I don't think they were strictly limited to an actual ring, where each site could only link to two others so you could go around in each direction and eventually return to where you started, although attempts were made to have it work that way. It required the webmasters of each site to frequently verify that the website on each side of yours was still up and running (and hadn't changed URLs), as one dead link would break the ring. So most I saw had a mechanism to skip across several nodes or draw a line through the circle to get to another site quickly.

Oh I remember those! Yeah, usually it's a banner that you just place on your site. So if you had a website that had Beatles bootlegs people could click on a "Beatles bootleg ring" banner and find other sites. I think it was randomized to an extent...

Sign my Guestbook plz

http://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-the-jennicam/

Just remembered I used to babelfish lyrics and things I was working on. Sidechain 'em through a few languages and see what came out on the other side. Really opened doors of lyrical perception, man.

I admit I have some nostalgia for the whole "cyberdelia"/digital Be-In/virtual reality/tech shaman thing.. especially compared to zuckerberg and gawker etc.. oh well!

had i been an adult at the time i probably would have dismissed it all as privileged hippy nonsense, though

The anti-Vietnam backlash was still going on, and frankly the 'net was depressingly right wing.

I think images took some of the good "creepitude" / mystery out of the 'net, but that's the only thing I miss.

That "altered states" theory was intriguing, but like I said net was too reactionary - lots of post-OKC gun culture and anger for hippies to gain legitimacy.

What was altered states about

comas and cavemen and the "take on me" video iirc

I'm still not sure what a webring was... and I was there, dude.

― pplains, Thursday, October 10, 2013 3:39 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was there at the first geocities meetup in 1995. i said don't do it that way.