I don’t miss dial-up internet, I just don’t. I don’t even like the sound because it’s just digital screeches and it’s a sound that makes me cringe a little upon hearing it. Because I remember the times when I’d be listening to music with headphones with volume high and then that fucking digital screech just blares into my ears.
I don’t miss waiting 30 minutes to load a page. I don’t miss a bit of it.
Smoking.
Do you know why all the wall paint and curtains of the 70s and 80s never included pristine white? Yes, that’s why. I’m convinced the choices of golds, oranges, and browns were just giving in to the inescapable film of nicotine tinge on everything, everywhere.
To this day, when I see “cream”, “ecru”, “chiffon” or any other creative name for not-quite-white, I think of nicotine stains.
Restaurant smoking was the worst.
I’ve never, and this is likely why. Growing up in that acrid awfulness was a great deterrent.
When I was doing some interior work and searching paints, Ralph Loren paints had a Nicotene stain to apply over colours or wallpaper to give it that smoke era feel. LOL
It’s a film of goo. If you’re in a kitchen of a smokers house and a tea kettle or boiling pot goes for a bit, rusty drips will form on the ceiling and down the walls. There’s a filmy goo to it if you get it on your hands. It’s a piece of what needs to be cleaned then painted over, sometimes multiple times, to lock it away.
I guess if there’s no context for it, then it’s a mere sepia tone or some such.
I could not find a listing for this paint of yours.
Might have been this product line https://trash2treasure.wordpress.com/tag/ralph-lauren-smoke-glaze/
Yeah, should have been more descriptive. I have purchased smokers homes. Getting walls and ceiling clean was a nightmare. The Ralph Lauren paints was part of their antiquing collection?? I believe. It had various types like heavy smoke, light smoke and nicotene. They were sort of a translucent after finish you applied. They would not give the stickiness of nicotene tar, but give the yellowed over layer. You could paint on thick, but it looked like many used the spray on and dab off, to get either smoke or nicotene accumulation at corners and have general wall the chosen colour. It found it hilarious that people would be spending top dollar on Ralph Lauren with purpose of making your wallpaper or painted wall look dirty. But maybe it got used to remodel heritage homes or movie sets to get the era right.
People smoking everywhere
The children of today have no idea what it was like to go into a McDonald’s and see used ashtrays on the tables. And good for them. But holy shit, how did anyone ever have an appetite?
Ugh, and the restaurants with the low half wall to separate the smoking and non smoking sections?
You are lucky if you get a half wall!
I miss that. You would go to someone’s indoor wedding, and one half of the room just would not be visible.
It gave the disco lights way more flair when passing through a high smoke cloud. Yes, we have fog machines now, but they’re typically more to your knees, it’s a different effect.
Plus you could tell which tables were discussing the heavy politics based on the thickness of the smoke above the table. The weakass smoke-free tables was where the dull-minded sat, saying nothing of consequence.
I don’t miss only having 3 channels to watch and having to be home at a particular time to watch something.
It was a shared experience, and! and! the quality was better! Don’t believe me? Find any freesat channel right now and compare it to any streaming service.
Streaming services have to serve millions of different customers different content on-demand, and as a result the signal is compressed and dithered to the point of unviewabaility (says me, my family are apparently unaffected by the fuzzy black dots…) even on 4K streams.
Broadcast content? Its just chucked out there over the waves for anyone to catch, and the bitrate and quality are fantastic in comparison.
the quality was better
This very much depends on when you’re taking about. Over the air television when I was young was absolutely not better quality than any streaming service now. 480i delivered by an analog interference-prone signal definitely does not compare favourably to streaming.
I guess I’m talking about now. Yeah it’s interference prone, but when the signal is good, ota amazing
This is definitely a hot take. I’m yet to see broadcast content that comes close to streaming content in quality.
Paid streaming, sure - you get the nice bitrate.
Free streaming (or Netflix bottom tier) vs Free Broadcast? Broadcast wins hands down in quality
I’ve seen silky smooth 60fps 720p streams coming over the air, compared to what I was getting with Netflix through cable.
Also the ‘cultural exchange’ you’d get if you lived in border regions!
Just pirate the 4k versions if you want to be a video snob.
HD piracy on demand is not that easy. Even popcorn time at its peak would suffer buffering if the media wasn’t popular enough
Pirate it ten minutes before demand.
you’re asking me for a level of foresight that is simply not possible
Stremio+debrid-link is pretty great, although it isn’t free.
Getting paid by check instead of direct deposit.
I’m still getting paid by check.
France, public administration.
I moan absolutely every time, and then hold on to it as much as I can to fuck up their accounting because unclaimed checks whacks their balances. When they phone to complain I call them palaeolithic morons & ask them to fucking wire the money already. I think my record is three months (I don’t work exclusively for them). Nice people and fun job otherwise but gosh, why the checks, seriously.
They could at least fax you the checks to your home fax machine for convenience.
Minitel it
Cable television.
Every time I visit my mom she has it on and I can’t believe I spent an entire childhood putting up with that shit. I can’t even watch it while I’m there. Too frustrating.
Whenever I have a chance to watch cable tv occaionally, I am astonished how many commercials there are and that, before the inception of the internet, everyone put up with commercials that lasted for about 10 minutes. And seemingly still do.
Today, when using the internet exclusively, one gets annoyed by maximum when there is one single ad that slipped through the ad blocker.
School. I don’t miss any of it.
You see movies and TV shows romanticising middle/high school a lot, as though it’s all about parties, friends, hanging out, and getting into relationships. It’s not that. Just an endless barrage of busywork with the occasional holiday.
I share this sentiment. School was such a drag and I miss nothing about it.
Meh, this one depends on where you lived. We had parties, lots of time with friends and hanging out, plus relationships…it wasn’t until Grade 13 (which was a pre Uni course year) where we had so much homework, especially 3 uni level math course…just doing calculus for hours after school.
The school bullying.
In my opinion, the bullying is still as alive as it ever was. Kids are just better at masking it. There is definitely more acceptance for LGBT, neurodivergent, and kids that would be considered outside the “norm” nowadays. But, teenagers have a strange capacity for cruelty to one another, it is just a different type of cruelty than past generations.
I’d also argue as someone thats experienced schooling more recently than many other Lemmy users, the methodology of bullying has changed. My parents always told stories of being physically assaulted by other kids as a form of bullying. My experience was being falsely reported for all sorts of crimes, funnily enough only to the school and never to actual authorities who could properly prove my innocence. Being accused of having and sharing drugs as well as death threats over anonymous messaging platforms is still most definitely bullying, though the style of violence and persuasion have changed.
I coach kids, and false reporting has become an issue recently. We take every report seriously and have to investigate/escalate each case individually. I have seen two different teenagers admit to maliciously reporting another kid when their stories were questioned or enough time had passed that they no longer felt vengeful toward the other person. The systems for reporting bullying/abuse/crimes are a huge step in the right direction from the past strategy of ignorance. I don’t know how to impart to kids that false claims damage the entire social system we have in place for keeping them safe.
I’m so glad to hear that this is something actually being thought about. It hurts extra because I know that the cases of false reports will then take resources away from cases that may be urgent. I don’t intend to dump emotional info but I genuinely feel that this affected my self-concept as a whole and still have an issue with presuming my own guilt. I’m still trying to take my time to build my own concept from reality and not the false reality others tried to impart on me. It sucks because these systems of believing reporters are of course better than ignorance. However, if we continue with this route of handling justice it will turn to case-by-case deliberation, which can be extremely difficult and then harmful biases can come into play.
Hopefully you are never going to experience this shit again, schools are like part-time jails and people behave accordongly.
Children who have grownup bodies and are supposed to be behaving like adults by now also bully using false reports.
Traded it in for work bullying
Stop putting the nerds from accounting into lockers
Smokers.
I do not feel nostalgia for the information isolation and bottleneck prior to the late 90’s, like needing the newspaper classified ads to find a job, music discovery was primarily limited to local FM radio (although I’m totally disenfranchised from streaming ads with a little bit of music added into the gaps), and cable TV as the only form of home entertainment. I am nostalgic for the age of ownership and citizenship. I hate neo feudalism and the corruption of the tech bro oligarchy, but I digress.
The fact that I can have New Pipe content filled with people holding masters and doctorate degrees while communicating in a layperson format is awesome. I can’t imagine how terrible physical disability would have been if I couldn’t take a break from a project, like right now, and feel like I’m in a casual conversation with a real group of people despite being in bed hurting. It lacks the same psychological depth as in person interchange, and people often fail to understand the depth or specificity of what am talking about here, but it is better than nothing by a long shot. The negativity of the average anon seems to get better with time in the present age. We are still not at a point where we can be wrong in a truly civil way and see value in people. We do not seem to process that we are all evolving and a growing mess of change at various levels, but we are getting there slowly and we are a long way away from the negativity of the early internet. So yeah, if this is the information age, I do not feel nostalgic about the previous information bottleneck.
Access to infinite knowledge from the internet, sitting right in everyones pocket. Sometimes, I will find myself talking to someone a few generations older than me. And they will say something along the lines of “I wonder how many…” and then just let the idea rest. Because they still act like they would have to go to a library to look up the fact. It amazes me! We don’t have to wonder. I can look it up right now! It’ll take me a few seconds.
Alternatively, I cannot stand when I am talking to someone and make a statement to which they respond: “I don’t know…” or “I’m not sure if that’s true”. This is often a tactic I see older men use (often talking politics) to cast doubt on a younger or female person. And unfortunately, back in the day that was good enough to derail a conversation. Nowadays though… Don’t believe me? Let’s look it up. We don’t have to take your word for it. People forget they can be fact checked in real time.
I often find looking up facts defeats the point of the conversation, specifically in the context of your first para
Leaded gas
VHS tapes, and having to rewind them.
Although the ability to record almost anything on a cheap VHS tape was nice, now everything has copy protection.
VHS could copy the subtitles and teletex info too, even if it wasn’t displayed, which is nuts
Please be kind, rewind.
Cassette tapes. Sure, they where handy and cheap, but the sound quality wasn’t great and got worse the more you use it.
And don’t forget about track skipping!
Fast Forward…wait…Stop. Play. Fast Forward a little more…wait. Stop. Play. Rewind a little. Stop. Play. “Ehh, close enough.”
I have an old cassatte player (mid-90s) that is capable of recognizing the tracks, if there is a gap of at least 2 seconds between them. When going fast forward it stops at the beginning of the following track. Also it is equipped with an auto-reverse feature: when reaching the end of side A it automatically switches to side B, without having to eject, flip and insert the cassette manually.
That is amazing!
I don’t miss having to have a separate device for digital photography. I remember having to pay 4 or 500 for a decent digital camera that fits in your pocket. When I got my first smart phone about 15 years ago, I took a picture with it and compared it to a decent Canon and a decent Fuji camera, that were one the best ones you could get in Best buy at the time for that budget. I compared the images and they sucked compared to my phone. Smh. Now my phone is around 4 or 500 and way better than basic digital cameras you can fit in your pocket, with way more functionality.
I don’t miss dial-up internet,
Nobody “misses” 56kbit/s.
I don’t even like the sound because it’s just digital screeches
When I hear that sound now I am very briefly returned to the excitement I felt in the 90s. It was an age of wide-open possibilities, free from commercial influence. Full of patience and anticipation.
Oh well.
CRT displays. The day I replaced my old CRT with a LCD I thought I hope I never use one of these again.
