The pre-algorithm internet and social media era of about 2000-2014.

I remember when Instagram was just pictures of my friends cats, hikes, and thrift finds. It was great and fun.

The internet.

Pensions

TIL that Walmart aren't open 24hrs anymore. I thought it switched back after COVID, but I guess not.

I haven't tried visiting a Walmart after 7pm in a very long time.

• Dollar menus at fast food places
• Firefly
• Halloween neighborhood roam trick or treating
• Calvin & Hobbes but I'm glad Watterson ended it when he did
• Angular car design (yeah down with car centrism but those angles looked cool)
• Internet 1.0 and the separation of offline and online life
• The Beyond Taco at Del
• Personal privacy

When one still could have the reasonable impression that everyone is the same before the law.

Movie rental stores

Online dating back when it was something normal people were embarrassed to do.

90s and early 2000s gaming

Minidiscs. More durable than CDs. They just looked cool. Sounded way better than cassettes and easier to record and modify tracks. If the data drives were easier to acquire (i.e. like a CD drive) I think they could've taken off.

For me: the internet. The internet has done what my country has done and that's centralization. Collecting everybody in a few big cities and subsequently killed small villages, towns and communities. Ironically, in the case of my government, it was done to save money and in the case of the internet, it was done to make money.

I also enjoyed my time during the years I was taking my degree. The friendships and fun hangouts, the way we helped one another and accepted one another and learned tolerance and humility. I remember that I actively participated in as many things as possible while I was studying, because I wanted as few regrets as possible when I graduated and the next phase of life started. I'm so happy I had the pressence of mind to think of that and take advantage of my time with these people while I still had the chance, because this current phase of life is a lot more slow paced and there isn't much in terms of socializing because everyone is working and are making babies these years. I don't mind that those years ended and that we are here now. It was good while it lasted, but I do think that if it had lasted any longer than it did, it would probably have gone stale at some point. We ended on a high note.

Oh, and since last year, my spouse and I have been returning to physical media and have started buying and borrowing DVDs and Blurays again. Recently we watched a 2004 movie that has a scene in a DVD store and I just blurted out to my boyfriend that I miss going to one of those stores and browsing DVDs. Especially Blockbuster-type stores where you'd rent the DVD because they always had a bin with discarded films you could buy for super cheap. These days most of our DVD purchases take place online and it's so boring. I miss going to a physical store with atmosphere and find some random movie I hadn't seen before and it was almost free, it was that cheap. Axel Music and Moby Disc were my favourite stores and I totally took that experience for granted because silly me thought that stores like that would always be around. The closest I get to reliving this experience is when we go to the library to borrow movies. The DVD section is shoved away in a sad little corner in my library so it's not really the same, but it's still better than nothing at all. I don't know what I'll do if physical media is forcefully phased out after the boomer generation passes away. Dx

On the other hand, LPs have made a comeback so maybe there is hope yet.

The climate.

Ah 24/7 Walmart, that's how I bought my first stuff for experimenting with femininity, waiting until 2am and going a town over to ensure nobody I knew saw me…

And to answer your question the wild west internet. There was freedom and rebellion there. A whole new world with every weirdo, freak, and nerd at your fingertips. A place where you weren't alone until you found a person who could recommend a place, but instead you could just look it up and find out where your kind of freaks were chatting and they'd even tell you if there was a place irl. Ironically I'm noticing a shift back to needing to know a person to find a place, but that place is a discord server more often these days.

Restaurants and stores that weren’t chains

Early internet 2000-2011ish.

Physical buttons.

Watching sports without a subscription.

Keebler pizzeria chips.

The News.

Physical media.

Video games releasing finished without a day one patch.

VRV with Crunchyroll, Funimation, and DramaFever

also de minimus

Nintendo after the GameCube dropped. Getting demolished by Sony letting basically any third party go nuts with what seemed like zero curation made them follow suit. Granted, they were a bit obnoxious about it… but the shift in quality even for their own IPs was huge.

It's funny to me to see people mythologize how perfect video games were before they could be remotely updated.

Sure, game developers rely on fix-it-later updates much more than they should today, but games had bugs back then too.

Rights to Digital Privacy

Knees that didn't crack.

Zebra Stripe gum

Censorship being taboo.

Netflix 2013 had basically everything for 8 dollars. What an experience that was.

I guess I knew it couldn't last if it got super popular. It would have to get filled with ads or you'd be charged per show or movie you watched, I thought.

But for a brief window you had the perfect application for watching tv and movies.

Usenet.

A Dollar Tree opened near me in Canada within the last year. Now don't get me wrong, our local Dollarama isn't amazing or anything, but that Dollar Tree is embarrassingly bad by comparison. 75% of a shelves were just straight up empty, and what was actually on the shelves was so cheaply made that I'd be embarrassed to give it away, let alone charge what they were trying to charge for it.

There was one aisle pretty well stocked though. They had an entire aisle dedicated exclusively to bibles. What the actual fuck?

US Democracy

This is a weird one, but there's been a definite shift in indie game development.

Before Steam Greenlight/Direct and Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and whatever, there wasn't a huge emphasis on trying to get money out of a game project. I'd speculate most indie (and modders) dev's goals at the time were to make stuff and hope it was cool enough to show to a studio as a portfolio piece and get hired, as self-publishing was rather difficult at the time.

A lot of conversation and discussion about game dev at the time was just trying out new things or learning how stuff worked and so it was a generally chill environment.

But after the success of things like Braid on the Xbox or Minecraft (when it first released) on the PC, there was a huge direction change into avoiding working for a big studio altogether and getting into self-publishing to make the big bucks. Now its generally considered strange to make something just to make something and not have a community or dev logs or self-promotion.

Its somewhat made me avoid some development communities and I find that kind of frustrating.

Pokemon Go was so good in that first summer it came out

Browsing the internet. You occasionally might find a malicious site but overall it was safer though more diversified. Now, I literally have a dozen sites I go to regularly because browsing online can be hazardous as hell.

Freedom,the internet, rationality of thought.

There's a lot of people here reminiscing about how it used to be a better world. It wasn't, but we weren't aware of all the horrible hidden shit going on, or we felt less affected/responsible because it was a less connected world back then. Sometimes I miss my ignorance, but ignorance won't fix the world.

So I guess I miss pulp novels.

Firefly.

Freedom? Democracy? An Internet before the eternal September, SPAM, marketing surveillance, and ads everywhere?

America

This summer

Dollar Temu

Macs, when the macOS was still called MacOS X, stability, sensible UX, and much better software and hardware compared to Windows.

24-hour Walmarts

yo papa

Sorry, I had to-