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.

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.