Core memory unlocked.

There's a open-source implementation, if you want to dig into code: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm/

Looks like the visualizations are implemented here: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm/tree/master/src/libprojectM/MilkdropPreset

Basically, though, it's maths and GPU shaders, a.k.a. more maths.

I always wondered how it made those effects. And what they were supposed to be

WinAmp visualizer gang

Mushrooms

They weren't made by GenX either. I'm an earlyX (blackX if you've read Coupland's seminal novel) and I was 25 when Falling down was released. It was written by Ebbe Smith (b. 1949) and directed by Joel Schumaker (b. 1939). Michael Douglas (b. 1944) starred. It was about Boomers and middle-age discomfort, nothing to do with my generation any more than Grease or Thirty Something did.

In 1994 I got a t-shirt displaying "I could get a good job if I tried, but what's the point?"

Reagonomics and thatcherism were the drumbeat of incipient fascism, sleazy business was the norm, soulless corporatism was already eating the planet and culture was going plastic. The bombs could wipe it all out at any second and boomers had moved the zeitgeist from civics to car ads, from Punk to Pop.

Same with the bottom left from Falling Down? That guy didn’t have a job and was pretending to go into an office daily until he went off the rails

Made by genX, not the characters are members of genX. These films were all released in the 90's.

GenX entered the workplace with promises of stable employment and pensions and got the rug pulled; some have pensions. Some don’t. They started entering the workplace around Black Monday.

Millennials entered the workplace with no promises, but at least GenX had a hope of buying a house.

It’s the boomers who bought cheap houses and had them appreciate, got pensions, and also got 401k opportunities. The Greatest Generation got cheap houses and full ride pensions.

Falling Down is not a GenX film. Michael Douglas was playing a cop in the 60s when GenX was being born.

Didn’t most of than characters in Office Space get laid off by the Bobs? Doesn’t seem all that stable

This is more accurate than I'm willing to admit

Actually you have 3 rumble packs so.. Sorry Tamara but...

It was 1998. We were too poor for an N64. Depending on when it is, I'm in the process of moving hours away from where I had grown up, and leaving everyone and everything I knew behind.

(I did have some good memories around an SNES like this, but none of us were going for extra cheese on that pizza).

We got so good we would walk around looking down and glance up periodically. Then we memorized the floors. Caverns fixed this kind of, but we started stutter stepping to see if we got prefired. My friends and I got in trouble for coming home with bruises in our arms for getting caught screen watching. Big screen tvs and blankets were the final solution. 😭😭😭😭 I wanna go back

It really was some of the best times ever.

Nobody picks Oddjob or we're gonna have to rumble in the backyard.

Purposely thrown out by a consumerist culture that was taught "Newer is Better!" without thinking about it.

Or were moderately easy to repair with the right tools and replacement parts?

If they worked forever, where tf are they?

Yeah. And they were also inefficient as fuck, comparatively expensive, and required maintenance to last forever.

Companies became better at manufacturing and efficiently gauging what they could get away with cheaping out on and passed that along to customers in the form of cost savings while expanding their profit at the same time. You can still buy products that last forever made with modern materials and processes, you just have to pay out the ass for them.

Survivorship Bias. The bad appliances are rotting in landfills and at the bottoms of lakes.
I'm sure there are good things now... I've just yet to find one.

I also remember when a desk fan weighed as much as a bowling ball and could slice your finger off.

It's bad for business. We need them to break down and eventually fail entirely so you buy a new one. And we need to make ad revenue off of you while they're working.