Me in 1999: Really? This is the peak of human civilization? Everything sucks though.

Me now: Maybe they were onto something

More like The Village by M Knight Shamalambalan.

I would sign up?

Also, tangentially, the plot of project zomboid. Basically the zombie apocalypse happens in the late 90s so the survivors are stuck there forever

It’s period appropriate, should be fine

I want Pidgin or Trillian so I can talk to my friends on both MSN and Yahoo.

Also shoutouts to the brief period where everything was xmpp and Gmail could talk to Facebook and self-hosted.

uh oh

Give me back the golden era of Usenet!

Both. Pagers with LCD or eink only. No LED screens.

Yahoo Messenger

And Domino’s instead of Pizza Hut

Maybe that's why I still use IRC. I was doing this subconsciously all along.

IRC is still around and kicking. My friends and I use it all the time.

Yahoo or MSN.

Also can we keep the progress (what little there has been) we made for LGBTQ folks?

I would like to add one exception to this: explicitly for smoking establishments. It'd be nice to have a weed'n'feed is all.

The nightmare of the 90s is alive in Ft Wayne

Well, with dial-up that could be 10 minutes.

You'd still beat me by 50 minutes, though.

Data over LoRa is like 200bps :)

we don't draw things in real time tho, we wait for them to finish

Or '90s crime.

IRC is the shit. I remember wasting so many hours as a teenager just shooting the shit with random people.

Or at least ICQ!

How did they manage a 2 G website‽ Amazing!

this is fucking targeted marketing, move the fuck over advertising companies, holy shit

I'm gonna run d&d 10 hours a day when I retire

Did you know there is a generation between boomers and millennials?

The key there is that it is remembered in a positive way, not that people thing of it positively now. Pizza Hut used to be it's own thing, you would get deep dish personal pizza that came out on the cast iron pan they cooked it in. It wasn't the greatest thing ever, but it was good and different. Now, it's just shitty generic pizza and i don't know why anyone would go there, I don't think I've been there for at least 20 years now. It also used to be more like a restaurant, not a fast food joint.

i think it was mostly the mood lighting and the cups, and they ripped families in with the scholastic reading coupons.

The Blockbuster glazing going on these days is more egregious in my opinion.

I loved renting movies in general, but no one talking about how great it was was old enough to be an account holder with them.

'80s Pizza Hut is entirely different to modern (ie post 2000) Pizza Hut. They may not have been quite as good as the best pizzarias, but they were actually good. '90s is where the decline started, but they weren't "unimaginable shit" until the turn of the century.

Pizza Hut was never good but it was one of the conglomerations that led to a fairly universal experience. Everywhere had and has a Pizza Hut. It wasn’t limited to the northeast people that genuinely have access to good pizza. It was also generally a childhood experience, where one cared more about the other parts of the whole thing rather than the quality. 90s Pizza Hut was known for “book it”, a program that joined with schools. If you read a book you’d get a star, 5 stars meant a free small pizza. In a world not over saturated by gamification of every single thing it was pretty meaningful

I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.

I am always a forward looking person but i agree with this. The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course, but the cold war was over and the economy was amazing. It was the second "Era of Good Feelings".

The word "was" is doing a lot of work here. Those things all still exist, and I currently use all of them :)

Newsgroups are just a good technology. Decentralized, moderated as much as the forum decides it needs. Not monetized in any way.

websites you could only discover via a webring

every now and then i remember how eminently feasible it is to go completely off grid and still have remarkably many conveniences, if i had a friend group i would absolutely try something like this while camping.

Reticulum and HaLow please. Give me enough bandwidth to stream a movie from my house.

Meshcore, and the underlying LoRa, are trash.

We'll make it a gay blockbuster!

The 90s did a terrible job of that...

But I feel like we could import some of the modern improvements, and improve on them even more. Like #metoo, lgbtq rights, and generally acknowledging and attempting to reduce/solve subconscious and systemic bigotry (racism, sexism etc)

I feel like we can grandfather that into the 90s, you've watched nightmare on elm street I'm assuming,

We don't have to do everything. Even the Amish allow for some advancement.