Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.
Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.
24/7 Wal-Marts
It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.
Video Games that were shipped in complete versions
Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.
Freedom? Democracy? An Internet before the eternal September, SPAM, marketing surveillance, and ads everywhere?
Firefly.
Freedom,the internet, rationality of thought.
America
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.
24-hour Walmarts
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.
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.
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.
Eh, the suckers way back then are why things are how they are now.
They were proud to pay for things they could be getting for free, and so businessmen see that opportunity and take full advantage of it.
It was called Netflix and chill because no bitches wanted to fuck you after watching you fumble around with your computer and usb drives for 15 minutes before watching How I Met Your Mother at 720p with no subtitles
Online dating back when it was something normal people were embarrassed to do.
The internet.
Pensions
I barely got grandfathered into a pension program with the US military. They went away in 2015. I had served over a decade at that point and they still let me retire in 2022 under that program. The new program is a sort of 401k type system, but I didn’t have enough years in service to contribute to it for retirement, so they didn’t even give me the option to switch over.
Granted, I retired after only 20 years served so my pension is not very big. But it’s money in my pocket every month for the rest of my life, so I’m not complaining. I’ll never starve or go without shelter.
90s and early 2000s gaming
The glory days when every tech generation felt like a rocket-powered slingshot into the future.
Yeah, I miss it too
The glory days when every tech generation felt like a rocket-powered slingshot into the future.
“Graphics can’t possibly get any better than this!” —Me about the N64
I felt like that when playing Pod Racer.
US Democracy
🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
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.
games back then were also done by dev teams of like a dozen people or two who did literally everything and you had like 1-2 people on each task. localizing games also took like a year or more from their country of origin.
now they are done by teams of hundreds or thousands, esp once you start adding all the middleware and outsourcing of various parts of the game they do now, and they are released internationally in dozens of markets at once.
it’s lot easier to find bugs in a game that is 1MB than on that is 256GB
Hot take: games don’t need to be 256GB. Even 10GB is pushing it.
A lot of 7th gen games did great with that kind of space.
I thought that seemed a bit high, but you’re right. Halo 3 was around 6.3GB and Reach was closer to 9. Genuinely thought they’d be way smaller than that.
