Dollar Tree being only a single dollar on everything.
I didn’t know Dollar Tree existed further back in the years like the 80s. But, I didn’t discover the store until like late 2000s. That store was a godsend for my then mostly broke ass. Sure the quality of products could’ve been better and the food selection could’ve been better, but they were there for me and others who’re strapped on budgets.
And it was a good 16 years while that lasted. It is a little annoying at times to shop there and know it is no different than Dollar General and Family Dollar. But it could’ve been worse.
Public health and the general belief that vaccines work.
Democracy
Xbox 360 Multiplayer
Inbox by Gmail
There was a brief moment when broadcast television networks just put their shit on the internet for free. Like you just had to go to their website, and then like the whole catalog of Scrubs or something was just there to watch.
Gaiaonline, before it became overrun with men’s rights morons, alt-right slimebags, and libertarians.
Dude, Dollar Tree was awesome back in the day. In the early 2010s I got a complete set of dishware there, plates and bowls for $1 each, and the reason they were there was that the ceramic glaze wasn’t “perfect.” I couldn’t tell, I just had some cool looking plates and bowls that lasted me nearly a decade before they finally got scratched and scuffed up enough to bother replacing. Money well spent.
You could get actual glass mugs for a dollar. Bars of Jergens soap for sensitive skin were like $0.70 a bar. All kinds of actually decent kitchenware and housewares stuff for dirt cheap. Was an absolute life saver at the time.
Having hope for the future. Believing it would be better than the present.
Wow I hadn’t actually realised this had changed, but of course it has.
I remember watching “beyond 2000” as an 80s kid. A TV show about the inventions and stuff, what life would be like, it was so amazing.
Now we all know the future will just be more oppressive than it is now.
I remember Beyond 2000, it was great.
Reality was quite a disappointment after that, I must say.
So much this. Please let politics be boring again.
Instead of trying to make idiocracy happen faster than previously believed to be possible.
I really miss having the delusion that MOST people were good, just more susceptible to media influence and bullshit.
Fuck, I really miss that. What a good response, thx!
There’s a reason “may you live in interesting times” is a curse.
Though I’m not sure the current times are really that interesting. More like terminally stupid.
Adult swim. Was top tier absurdism but slowly degraded into just boring.
The internet’s creative centers pre YouTube algorithm.
Now, not just to make it big, but to get popular, you need someone talking for 10 minutes every week to draw attention - maybe even every day.
That forces hundreds of creators to consider what content can be made lazily with no effort, rather than with skill over the course of a few months. Rewind back to the better days of Flash animations and even my own hobby of Garry’s Mod / Source Filmmaker animations to see a lot of what I mean.
Yugoslavia. Party scene. Some relationships.
Season cliffhangers.
Young people will never understand me in 1990, banished up to my parent’s bedroom to use their TV because they had a movie on downstairs, watching William Riker calmly say “Fire” on a borg cube containing HIS CAPTAIN, and then the music du-du-du-du-duuuuu and the words “to be continued”
And then having to wait an entire goddamn 3 months to find out the outcome.
Ending seasons on cliffhangers was magical. It’s still attempted sometimes today, but in the age of binge-watching and in some cases years between seasons, most shows just wrap up one season arc and start a new one. Kind of sucks.
I hate cliffhangers. Especially since new seasons aren’t guaranteed.
A lot of good shows also end up canceled with cliffhangers so it’s a double-edged sword. I’m still pissed about Alphas not having a proper ending.
StumbleUpon was what I personally cite as the peak of the internet.
It was a website where you made an account and selected what categories of things you were interested in. Then click the button and it would take you to a random piece of content on the internet related to that. I remember thinking at the time it was like Pandora, but for the whole internet rather than just music. Eventually it got bought and shut down.
Mint would be another one. A free, ad-deiven website with optional premoun features that allowed you to easily link all of your financial accounts. It would automatically categorize transactions, but you could manually change them and change the categories themselves. It worked great back in the early 2010’s. Then Intuit bought it and it slowly got shittier. They reduced the visualization options. Eventually a few years ago they shut it down to try to get people to move to a different, paid product. Personally I moved to HomeBank, an open-source self-hosted solution. But it means I need to manually import everything.
For someone with ADHD, StumbleUpon was like a button that injects dopamine into your brain.
Really fucking addictiveI was so pissed off when that company bought stumbleupon and trashed it. I hunted and searched for an alternative and nothing was ever the same. It was a huge death blow to the internet I loved. 😭😭😭
We have so so many human AM’s out there, trying to destroy every single bit of joy that we have.
The internet without megacorps. Ok, the world without megacorps.
Physical media, physical buttons, watching sports without a subscription.
