year 2000 nostalgia thread snips crawling on 3 11 2020 thread from mid 2019 - march 2020 === I kinda wish I could've grown up in the 70s. Kids from all around a neighbourhood would actually hang out and play with each other, toys were more "dangerous" and you had to just not be stupid to avoid getting hurt, the nuclear family was (probably) much more of a thing, and growing up then would mean you get to come of age in the 80s, where computers were starting to get affordable mass produced, cars were getting way better and more computer-augmented, but not to the severe point its at today, as well as recovering from the stranglehold the 70s emission tech had on engines, and last but not least the wealth gap wasn't nearly as bad as it is now, (although it was on its way to becoming terrible). I say that, but the 70s and 80s were pretty terrible in their own right, I just feel like to me personally it would've been more interesting, especially being a kid in the 70s. Guess I just liked hearing the stories from my mom and dad, and they seemed much better than what I dealt with. --- My dad grew up in flyoverville in the 50s and 60s. To hear him tell it, the good times ended when Vietnam hit full swing. He was lucky to not get drafted (too short lol) but said America just wasn't the same during or after. Kind of like how the millennial generation took a hard left after 9/11. Hearing stories about driving cars into lakes on a dare, blowing up tree stumps with dynamite, buying M1 carbines for dirt cheap, and having ad-hoc drag races on sections of unused country blacktop sounds better than my childhood or what my kids will have. If asked what decade I miss, it would be the 90s. I grew up in flyoverville like my dad. He was a poor white hillbilly and one of his best friend's was a poor black hillbilly. Everyone likes to think fucking hillbillies are the sum cause of racism, but it's the fucking cities. Nobody gave two fucks if you were a coon or a redneck; if you could work your ass off, you were part of the community. I never looked at any of our Latino or black neighbors any differently from the white ones. Now I can't go two minutes at my job without corporate trying to suck-start its own hard-on over inclusion and diversity. --- I did my growing up in the 90's and I miss parts of that. The early to mid 00's represent peaks of my life where I was achieving many things I wanted to do growing up so it holds a lot of memories. It was also a time where creativity and thought on the internet were at a high, things like Youtube and Newgrounds were full of cool things and there was a feeling of freedom online that you don't feel today. Some of it was bad but a lot of the internet was full of really cool people trying new things. It was my favorite time in anime too, lots of creativity and deep ideas compared to the splattering of isekai anime and Digibro pleasing moe-waifu garbage each season in the last 10 years. I also miss old Tokyo too from when I was a student in Japan. In the early 00's it still wasn't a very mainstream tourist destination like it is now as being a nerd or a weaboo wasn't really seen as a cool thing until a good few years later. A lot less tourists and many areas were still what they were before they were made more tourist friendly due to a push to increase tourism with the whole "cool Japan" thing. I think like everywhere else the level of freedom and creativity left Tokyo in the 10's and places that used to be about that are tourist friendly shells of it's former self selling overpriced souvenirs to giggling Thai women and obnoxious Americans/French people. --- The rise of politics as a topic of relevance was triggered by the Great Recession of 2008. In much of the 2000s, people really didn't care for such things much, a common complaint was that people only cared for themselves and that hedonism and materialistic lifestyle choices were en vogue. So, I really think that it was quite a positive development that people started to get interested in politics more. Until in 2015, when the media decided to jump onto the woke bandwagon and a famous golden-wigged TV celebrity leaped into the political landscape, since then, politics became so unbelievable toxic and just exceptional. --- Your father is correct, to a large degree. I grew up at the tail-end of Happy Days and American Graffiti. People were different then. We socialized, knew our neighbors, made tree forts and had crabapple fights. Went to school dances. Teased the shit out of each other in real life, but remained friends no matter what. Perhaps much of our happiness was in the fact that we were so naive as kids. We weren't "protected" per se, but there was no 24/7 news cycle. No social media. No internet. We went outside and played and made our own fun, blissfully ignorant to the horrors today's kids see streamed live. I never registered for the draft; it ended 01/73 and I graduated high school in '74. I played with the Hippies, protested the war in high school, but yes it all changed about that time period. What changed exactly? People's general trust of the government. Watergate, Nixon, scandals. You had absolute boneheads like Ford and Carter as presidents, then Reagan, which restored a lot of faith that the government could actually be trusted and do something. He got the USA more or less back on track. Bush, Clinton, Bush - the 2000s and while not as bad as the Carter era, still plenty of scandal. And 9/11 being the major factor that shaped the 2000s. The Patriot Act. Iraq. Again war. The mortgage meltdown. It's pretty obvious why the millenials tacked hard left. --- While I admit my rosy view of the early 2000's and mid-2000's is because I was a kid back then, it's kind of weird that I thought the 2000's sucked at the time, especially during the late 2000's, around the time of the Great Recession and my high school years. In the early 2010's, I was initially optimistic that things would get better (for context, I graduated high school in 2011) but I was wrong. At first it wasn't so bad and I have fond memories of 2012, but by 2013-2014 things really did take a turn for the worse. I think a lot of this 2000's nostalgia is due to how much better 2000-2007 was in hindsight compared to the chaotic and severely polarized 2010's. This is especially true for Zoomers and even the younger Millennials like myself. I've noticed 2000's nostalgia is starting to pop up on the internet more often, kind of like how 90's nostalgia was in the early 2010's. 80's and 90's nostalgia are still predominant, but I think that even with things like 9/11 and The War On Terror taken into account, the pre-Recession 2000's will be looked on fondly, especially as more Zoomers start to enter adulthood. I think nostalgia for the 2000's will be viewed in ways similar to 1980's nostalgia. The 80's had a lot of bad things at the time such as the Cold War, the Satanic Panic, AIDS, and the crack epidemic, but there was also a lot of memorable pop culture from that decade as well. We see similar patterns with 1960's nostalgia among the Boomers. The rampant excess and conspicuous consumption of the 2000's is maligned now, but it's not that much different than the "Greed Is Good" attitude of the 80's. Some eras are basically perfect for nostalgia when you look at them from a historical point of view, such as the 1950's or the 1990's, with vibrant pop culture and a stable political or economic climate. Some eras seem like they were bad at the time but become nostalgia magnets anyway, such as the 1960's or 1980's, and to a lesser extent, the 1970's. I think the 2000's will fit in this category. Other eras are seen as so unstable and bad that there isn't much nostalgia for them at all in the mainstream culture. Prime examples include the 1910's, 1930's, and the first half of the 1940's. Coincidentally, these eras coincided with World War I, The Great Depression, and World War II. I'm not sure if the 2010's will ever have a nostalgia movement in the 2030's or 2040's, but there was a 70's nostalgia boom in the 90's despite the 1970's being infamous for poverty, rampant crime, and a similarly polarized political climate. So, who knows? My best guess is that 2010's nostalgia will be a lot like 1970's nostalgia. It will definitely be a thing, but it will be a much shorter-lived movement and not as ingrained or as widespread as nostalgia for the 1950's, 1980's, or 1990's are in the American cultural consciousness. --- I knew a guy back then who got himself arrested after he talked online on a message board about doing a school shooting (he really suffered from mentall illness), that was like 2008 or '09. << my note: i know a person irl with this story! well i met him once. he was joking on a chatroom, then got arrested. as the story went.>> --- In retrospect, 2010-2012 were sort of this weird "calm before the storm" moment compared to what would happen from 2014 onward. It was a strange in-between time where the worst of the Recession was over and the public as a whole had not quite yet realized what a terrible Monkey's Paw that social media and Web 2.0 turned out to be. Occupy Wall Street gave us a sense of initial hope that we might see some major reform and boy, were we wrong on that one! See, Occupy Wall Street was in many ways the main progenitor of the modern SJW zeitgeist as we know it today but it wasn't obvious to anyone on the ground level at the time, at least not until it was already dying out in mid-to-late 2012 and when it did finally burn out, a lot of people shrugged and didn't think much of it at the time, unless you were living in a very left-leaning area like Portland or the Bay. 2013 had some bad moments like the Snowden leaks and the Trayvon Martin media circus that in retrospect were the first real warning signs of what was to come in 2014 and onward. --- > FBI arresting person joking about columbine Well yeah that's FBI territory, even back then alphabet gang would knock on your door. Anyone old enough to remember TOTSE, CDC, THE HIVE? Meth recipes, converting AR-15s to full auto, synthesizing high explosives, ID theft, CC dumps. Real banned/hidden info that shit dissapeared post 9/11 and IP adresses started getting subpoenaed... --- I remember when extreme sports such as skateboarding, snowboarding, and biking was the craze then. I guess it encouraged a sense of athleticism while being "cool". --- Also encouraged a lot more injuries and learning to push through it. The paper bag generation could probably use some outdoor activities to toughen them up. --- I miss law enforcement being effectively useless regarding online activity. Unless you were doing something the FBI cared about nobody gave a fuck or were competent enough to do anything about it. --- It was nice when Police did the thing you'd expect and laughed you out the building if you came in with screenshots of mean words said over the internet. Now they send out an inquisition and spend thousands of tax payer money to better track down bad words on the internet to the one who said them. --- > police going after cyberbullies hat's still the case in real countries (America). I'm sorry you live in some Eurocuck lalaland nation. --- Since I don't really have much childhood nostalgia, I don't miss the 2000s. From a detached perspective, it was the peak of the war on terrorism and the resulting erosion of civil liberties; the feelings of national unity many people here are remembering fondly had the effect of suppressing criticism of the Patriot act, the Iraq War, and the construction of the surveillance state that culminated in laws like Obama's 2012 NDAA, which allowed indefinite detention of citizens. Much as we saw in New Zealand earlier this year, the aftermath of terrorist atrocities is a fantastic time to shove through whatever power-grabbing laws you have lined up, because you are with us, or you are with the terrorists... From a uniquely British perspective, it was also when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 passed, which is the premise of the current laws against saying nasty things about Islam on Twitter. It seems quite likely that that, too, was prompted by the religious tensions resulting from the war on terror, along with the 2005 London bombings. Getting out of the EU also seemed very unlikely back then; it was only because Cameron decided to settle the issue with a referendum that we got the chance. The rise of nationalism in the 2010s, while marred by neo-Nazis and other exceptional individuals like the "skeptic community", at least gives a chance for a brand of politics that could reverse the drive towards more and more encroaching government power that progressivism (in the sense of the Progressive Era, not troonery) and fearmongering over terrorism created. Most people on the right wing of the culture war these days are strongly opposed to censorship, gun control, and other government power grabs, though sadly all too many of them fall into the trap of thinking fascists will save them from the communists rather than just making their own tyranny. It's also possible that the EU will end up disintegrating now given rising nationalism in Europe, or at least not forming a giant superstate, which will be satisfying. --- When you're young everything feels so fresh, so new and so exciting, but there comes a time in which a certain magic is lost, a certain mystique. I don't know why that is. --- I think Pax Americana peaked in the late 1990s and we’re just living in it’s irreversible decline. I liked the Wild West aspect of the internet in the 2000s but that’s about it. I like the 2000s only because the 2010s were shit awful and I suspect the 2020s are going to be worse for the same reasons. --- So weird to think of 20 years ago being some great epoch of history, everything just felt normal at the time. --- Nope. Couple elements but not the whole thing. I hated the music, The list of new movies I liked got smaller every year and holly fuck those reality shows on TV... fuvk that. Don't even miss my younger self, since years were complicated. Two things I do miss are overall edginess and the way video games used to be. The shocking, daring, sexy, gross edgy shit I miss the most. I don't blame all of it on PC culture even. It plays a part, but it goes deeper than that. There's a lot more emphasis on "relevant social commentary" (even before Trump derangement) and also "deep themes", and everything that isn't that has to be called a guilty pleasure. Because you have to force yourself to look classy or make the movie classy somehow. And don't tell me that the new generation is more classy. There's no way in hell teens and young people stopped caring about sex, fun and appearing more adult and cool. This new "classiness" is so fake because there's not enough dirt to feel special over being clean. And video games... Less open world in AAA which meant more focus and no bloatedness, also there was more AA junk-games that were less than AAA but bigger than indies that were uneven but had a cool idea. So yeah edgy shit and videogames. The rest can fuck off. Hope 20s will bring back some shock content. --- I think what I miss the most about 2000's video games is the feeling of things actually improving and getting bigger and better. The sixth and seventh gen were really good with that. The jump from Goldeneye to Halo was huge. The jump from Halo 2 to Halo 3 was equally huge. Half Life 2 blew us away with unheard of physics and facial animations. Mass Effect, Total War Medieval 2 and Rome, Modern Warfare the list goes on. The scale and scope of gaming just went up and up. The eighth gen just feels so fucking stagnant and samey in comparison. We're a year from the ninth gen and I have not once gotten that "Wow! This blows what came before out of the water.". Instead all we've gotten are tiny incremental improvements. Honestly I think the 2010's will be remembered culturally for stagnation and endless sequels, cinematic universes and reboots. And as much as I've enjoyed stuff like the MCU or GOT, book master race though, I wouldn't be sad if Nerd Culture just fucked off and died in the 2020's. So thats my long winded way of saying yes I do miss the 2000's. --- Very well said. Just try to think of a game from the eighth generation that can't be described as "like (older game) but-". The seventh gen even had plenty - Dead Rising and Bully immediately spring to mind. Even the indie scene these days is a crock of shit. At the beginning of the decade, indie games became a thing and had a promising outlook, with the likes of Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, and Minecraft (it counted) leading the path. But now? It's just an endless torrent of pretentious artsy games for game jurnos to soil themselves over, and anything of quality will just kind of get lost in the shuffle. Even practically giving your game away by way of bundles still isn't enough because of how many games have been handed out in those. Fifty games for a buck from Fanatical? Sign me the fuck up, my Steam account's already an overflowing toilet, just keep pouring complete garbage in there until I find a diamond in the rough so I can leave a nice review and make the developer happy as a clam that someone somewhere enjoyed their work. --- I"m nostalgic for the pre-2012 days. You could escape from politics. You didn't have to worry as much about political correctness and the media wasn't too pozzed up. Back then I wasn't deemed a member of a "privileged" group. I could be a conservative or a pre-SJW progressive. I could be an individual. But that was all just an illusion. As "diversity" has started reaching critical mass we now can start to see that multi-ethnic countries inevitably lead to Balkanization. After the "American" Empire decisively loses its "world policeman" status and our economy takes a major hit we'll see these tribes split off and form new nation-states. It'll happen by 2033 give or take a few years (If not 2033 then sooner). People in the coming decades will be looking back to the 2000's with even deeper nostalgia than we do today. You ever see a movie made before 9/11 with the World Trade Center in the background and feel strange? People in the near future will look at 2000's movies displaying a united America and feel strange. "Look at how united America was. Los Angeles used to be a part of the United States back then!" --- That is really what I miss most, the fact that you used to be free to be an individual. I fucking hate the fact that modern America has boiled down to just one big king of the hill match between all the different demographics, just fucking hate it. I hate that people are just so fucking obsessed with their group identities, they literally worship it like it's their God, I saw in National Geographic not too long ago this story about Hispanics in America and they had this group photo of these Hispanic college students on their graduation day and there was this purple haired Hispanic girl with a look of pure Religious rapture on her face, like looking up with her eyes closed and a smile on her face, that girl just fucking loved being Hispanic so much. There is of course great power in that sense of tribalism and giving up your individual identity to feel a part of some greater whole, the trouble is in the 21st century that tribalism is a flat out dangerous and regressive thing that will eat away at modernity like acid. Because I'm sure Klansmen get that same euphoria when they stand around a burning cross and the more society props up that sense of joy women and "people of color" get from shared identity the harder it's going to be for them to convince white men that they shouldn't do the same. --- The 90s were my personal favorite, but that just might be because those were my teenage years when I had no real responsibilities and most of my favorite music and movies came out. I went to a lot of shows back then. Played shitty guitar. Feels like someone else's life now. Everyone else here has it right in that late 90s and early 2000s internet, forum "culture" and online gaming was really something special. We were seeing the birth of something really new and exciting and people were just running in all kinds of weird directions with it. Some friends and I played Ultima Online together around our college years, and as clunky and shitty-looking as it is by today's standards, that game was so far beyond anything we'd seen at that point that it just blew our minds. And it was fun. A lot of MMOs that came later like Everquest and World of Warcraft tried to recapture the magic, and some did for a time, but it wasn't the same. I still have a lot of great memories of that game despite not touching it for close to a couple decades, though apparently there's a small core of people still playing. Most of the rest of us drifted away to jobs, lives and families. The forums in particular are odd to look back on. This was before social media, and most people didn't think too much of oversharing about their lives on them because it all seemed so innocent and nobody had really had their life ruined by the internet yet. The internet in general seemed like a much smaller place then. I posted regularly on some gaming forums and at least one smaller local music-related one around the early 2000s, and people would post updates and details on their lives, pictures of themselves and their friends, all publicly accessible for anyone to see. Nobody would do that shit now, for good reason. There was a huge boom of blogs around this time, and a lot of them were shit, but some were really interesting and unique because your average Joe Dumbass didn't know how the internet worked and didn't care to learn. Seeing Maddox's downfall on this forum is funny and deserved, but it's also sad because I remember back when he was fucking hilarious. Webs 1.0 and 2.0 were gold. Nobody gave a shit about politics. Post 9/11 everything took a nosedive. Economically, culturally, artistically, you name it. Things were extremely safe and boring for a long time until they suddenly weren't. The 2000s were full of ups and downs for me personally. Couple shitty relationships, some bad decisions, fell into a decent career. The TV got a lot better, the music got a lot worse. When I look back on the 2010s I mostly just see things getting... stupider. More corporate, more over produced, bigger, louder, dumber, glossier, flashier. Not that we haven't had that in every decade, but it seems especially bad now. People are more creative and have more platforms to showcase their creativity, but you also get idiots posting every detail of their shitty lives and turning into lolcows overnight. Everything is so much faster, louder and more disposable. --- No decades are perfect, but it seemed like a simpler time. Of course I probably think that because I was a kid at the time. The 2000s were basically the leftovers of the 90s, and it wasn’t bad. Sure, the radiCOOL Xtreme bullshit wasn’t gone and in fact got even more intense, but I kind of like that stuff in that sort of ironic sense. I might be biased though, as I was a wee lad/lass back in those days and what I remember the most were the visual styles of what I mentioned before and childhood innocence that I often wish I can return to instead of being my jaded modern self. Seeing as I grew up then nostalgia bias is there, but as we all know, nostalgia is never honest. You had 9/11 and the various government attempts to control and restrict the public that followed soon after, the Second Iraq War that saw people sent to destabilize a nation based on a lie while sacrificing various soldiers that should have been fighting elsewhere, and so on. Do I miss it? Yeah, I do. Was it as good as I remember? Hell no. Mostly what I want back are the dark, gritty, and edgy visuals popular at the time and that childhood innocence, but I can’t really have both because they sort of go against each other. I’ll take the dark and gritty visual flair that everything had if I had to I l one, though since it’s one of those visual styles I’ve always liked thanks to growing up with them. Even if I didn’t, it’s so much more interesting than the lifeless and sterile minimalist crap and overly pastel bullshit that’s popular today. This is excluding memories of family, of course. We all have great memories of family from when we were kids that aren’t specific to any decade, so it’s obvious that that should come with it all. --- no. the 2000s were trash. the only good things were that you could still interact with people without them being braindead phone zombies and the cars weren't bloated monstrosities with horrible visibility that constantly tracked you. of course they say this is for "safety", but there's nothing keeping Karen from killing me with her Chevy Suburban. for some reason, every house mommy needs a massive SUV now. --- I was born in the early 1980s, so I can recall the tail end of the 80s the early 90s and they felt very corporate and squeaky clean too. Just replace SJW shit with Maude Flanders and Hellen Lovejoy from the Simpsons. Instead of a danger hairs complaining about a lack of people of color, women and trans people in video games you had these church ladies complaining about violence and nudity in movies. Corperations bent the knee to them just like they bend the knee to today's SJWs. I feel like the Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead paved the the way for this irreverent, nihilistic culture that came in the late 90s and early 2000s and the early internet was drenched in that shit (Or maybe they grew out of it and they were just the first time I noticed it). You can say 9/11 changed things, but the reality is pop culture and especially internet culture was so nihilistic people were shit posting memes about 9/11 the next day. That's what I miss. Imagine someone making something like this... < hulk hogan doing 9/11 image> ...for the Christchurch Shooting today. You'd get permabanned from everything and possibly lose your job. I think that people who started or were in college around the great recession got caught in the crosshairs of rising student debt, the social activism of the occupy movement and a changing economy and got all fucked up. Now they're saddled with these huge loans and they're underemployed so don't have much money, they have a lot of time on their hands and they got involved in social activism during occupy. Then you end up with the SJW shit. I think you're going to see a turnaround in the 2020s where the SJW stuff reaches the point of parody just like the church ladies in the 90s and pop culture will produce SJW versions of Kyle's mom and Hellen Lovejoy and start freely taking potshots at it. --- I was a kid and a pre-teen in the 2000s. Most that I can remember is that people told what they have in their minds and some wealth until the economic depression. I even miss the earliest 2010s, as we at least cared about important issues. During the oughties my country was in a boom, like the roaring 20s in America, everyone could be someone involved with construction and get paid 2000 euros per month, which was sweet money at the time, but the housing prices were terrifying. Freedom of speech was good despite having a prime minister who was like Justin Trudeau. When the depression came, everyone was scared, but with our voice we protested every week demanding the end of austerity, the 15-M was our biggest moment. Whenever I came to an hospital, there was propaganda to fight against the end of our public healthcare, in television there were shows who criticized the government and were the nightmare of modern SJWs. In the late oughties we were kinda united, at least in my neighbourhood. Someone who had connections to a job would tell it to some parent who need it in order to feed their kids, the Church was pretty active at these times, they were glad to help at anyone, no matter what they believed. Grandparents were glad to house their entire family in their tiny houses and help their kids. But the late 2010s came and everything was fucked up. Not only our economy was broken, despite the lower unemployment numbers and our GDP growth, but our society. Maybe it was the access to Internet that broke us, right now we have an independence process on a region, that in the best case would be ruled by someone like ADF, people are getting more divided, right wing and the left are both guilty of it. Our unity saved us at our worst, but another depression is coming, and I don't know if there will be the same unity as the last crisis. --- It's weird how these moral panics in America come and go like that, from periods of things being very "anything goes" (the 70s, the late 90s and early 2000s) to periods of moral panic and wanting to censor everything (the 80s and early 90s, the 2010s) I think I know what you're talking about, are you talking about the sort of thing that was very personified by the anime/manga Death Note? The whole Hot Topic goth/emo aesthetic? I miss that as well. --- Ironically, some of the very people who mocked those people for their idiocy, their shitty, evil behavior and their hypocrisy went on to be even worse than the fundies and, bafflingly, not just even worse in general, but worse in the same exact ways fundies are shit. --- I really can't emphasize enough how shocking it is that left wing fundies became a thing, I never in a million years would have predicted that, it would have sounded like an impossible oxymoron. --- there's a lot more to life than what video games existed at the time --- One thing I honestly miss is the cell phones of the mid-2000s, before the iPhone came out. "DUMB" phones were ubiquitous and extremely useful tools of communication, but they didn't take over your life. The different form factors allowed designers to actually be creative in a way that isn't possible now. There was enough variety that you could almost choose a phone that expressed something about who you were, in a similar way that cars do. You could hang out with your friends and go do things and not be surrounded by social media exceptionalism. It was peak civilization imo < fancy "dumb" phones > I used to have that last one (Nokia N81). It was sick - the slide mechanism was tight and solid feeling, and it came with a micro SD slot, 3.5mm jack, and great sounding stereo speakers on either side of the exterior. --- I'd argue that it was a better decade than 2010 but to be honest I'd split it, anything up to 2005 was ok, post 2007 the rot had started to set in. This is all from personal reflection so take with a grain of salt. Point in case, the ass end of the 90s was fun, most people didn't have computers or internet and if you were smart or willing to learn you could interact with people only via things like BBS or some of the very primitive web browsers, (You used to be able to get an internet yellow pages, no joke.) Netscape was a god send, and around 97/98 is when things started to take off with faster modems 56k and more people getting PC's. You also had access to a lot of stuff via piracy, that used to have to be manually traded like older computer games, and dare I say it the very primitive exchanges and hiding on the family computer of porn, or in my case the discovery of my older brothers folder. And then the P2P explosion with Kazaa, Napster, and I can't remember the other multitudes. That said it was a happier time, the internet wasn't this over powerful thing that took up a majority of ones time, you had internet time mandated usually by phone usage and so connectivity 24/7 wasn't guaranteed. It was also at least for me a better time in regards to television. The saying lesser choices makes a happier person was as true then as it was now, 3 channels which you knew what you wanted to watch made infinitely better viewing than the satellite TV upgrades that followed, it was around 2002 that conventional 90's TV started to die off and be replaced by reality TV shows, once 24/7 multi-channel TV became the norm this only brought in the decline on network television programming quality. TLC used to actually be about documentaries and learning, history used to be about semi-decent war documentaries, etc. By 2006 you started getting the introduction of rap style music into pop music, which was already flaccid at this point because of diminishing returns from shit like American Idol, everything was just generic from that point and got more generic. TV basically became generic too, for everyone one good TV show it would inspire clunky clones, like the original CSI and then hit a point where it just became boring because like House could only cure so many cases of Lupus, you could only murder someone so many ways. By 2008 every asshole seemed to have an internet connection and Facebook was in its infancy and fun because it replaced a lot of the trepidation out of online social interactions. The info was actually genuinely useful too, like looking if people were dating beforehand, etc. You could use it successfully as your wingman in some cases. That was also the time that I had started studying, and I was fortunate in the fact that my university wasn't overtly liberal but had a decent mix. That said my favorite instructors were both seniors faculty at the school and they'd lecture the class over things that were going to be incoming, I still remember the English professor openly speaking about the changes to academia which meant that speech laws were going to get restrictive. We all thought it was mad at the time, though privately I held her in high esteem and my biology teacher as well, because he didn't mince words either when it came to things like biology and race. This was of course back when gay rights and gay marriage were still crusader issues and so trannies weren't on the horizon. If they passed, nobody said anything because no one cared, if they were a man in a dress it would invite derision, but honestly never once encountered a tranny or a furry who was brave enough to be open with that shit in public. By 2010 twitter had been a new creation, and since I'd already grown disillusioned with the brigading that had started appearing on Facebook, where people weren't posting honest opinions anymore because anything right of centre was called out, by people who wouldn't have the balls to mention it to you IRL or people were just sharing the same old shit over and over again. No one was posting anything original either. At that point I kind of gave up on any meaningful social media interactions, something had changed and now it was more a source of negativity than enjoyment. Smartphones were already a thing, and were going to become more of a thing as people converted over. I'd lived like a savage for two years without any cell phone or house phone. (Best two years of my life.) So it was a culture shock when suddenly everyone had one, and of course the better they got meant more access, more social media, more shit. It's been downhill from there on in, I honestly believe that. --- I think internet access an thus constant access to social media and the news is what makes our current time suck so much. When the internet was confined to one room of your house it created this separation between your online identity and real life identity that made the internet feel more like this fun abstract space and that no longer exists. Now the internet is serious business and people literally kill themselves over getting bullied on Twitter because mean words online carry just as much weight as mean words in real life. The internet itself is not the problem, but the pervasiveness of it is. People just can't handle 24/7 access. --- The pervasiveness and addictive nature of social media is a recipe for disaster (sounds cheesy I know). I see parents give children or even babies smart devices to shut them up, when out somewhere like a restaurant. Imagine the mental and emotional damage upcoming generations will have to deal with, because of shit like this. Wouldn't be surprising if newborn babies started getting social media accounts made for them, like a modern day birth cert. << my note: many people have discussed the humiliation that people will face 10 years from now, because their millenial parents put eeeeverything about their baby on social media, in great detail. pedos eat that shit up. >> --- My wife and I kicked the habit and deleted our social media accounts pretty early in our relationship, around 2011 or so. It's pretty weird not being on it when everyone around you is. It's like being the one guy at a party who isn't drinking. People introduce you as the guy who doesn't have Facebook like you're the designated driver. --- > He was willing in private to talk about subjects like the IQ bell curve, African development problems, and in his mind why he thought Mugabe and South Africa's moves against Boers would eventually lead to the downfalls of those societies, and also how most African development was wrong because the premise should have been population control and economic development, rather than the aid system currently in use that is subject to massive abuses. > He was pretty based. My Biology teacher outright told us all that gays are nature's mistakes; crossed wires in their heads, but that it's okay they arent hurting anyone. She also said that transexuals are just sexual deviants who made their fetish into their personality and that it's an extraordinarily unhealthy mentality. This was well before the troon uprising too. << my note: as someone who is very opposed to racism, it's awkward that i'm including these snips, but free speech is a rare and precious thing, so. these are stuff people say. i don't know what to say. there's so much going on that people pretend doesn't exist at all. so. >> --- He had a similar view that homosexuals shouldn't be prejudged or excluded from society because they were effectively defective and natures dead end. He was more candid with his views towards transexuals, personally thinking they were joke and anyone taking them seriously also was a joke as well. > Damn, I never knew bio teachers could be like that. My experience with them was mostly uppity nerd shits. Also, that the more genetically diverse you are the longer your life would be or something like that. The funny thing was is that he was totally what you would have classified as the classical nerd archtype and he definitely knew his subject, though he'd come to the conclusion that facts over all else mattered and he loved practical/experimental biology and laboratory work for this reason. He was the type of guy who would say it's only true if the hard science backs it up, otherwise its purely theoretical, which was why he hated aspects of the woman's and genders studies disciplines, because 90% of it was couched in psuedo-science. Now this was pre-witch hunt days, but he was already getting pissed off with the waves of speech policing that had started to get mandated in. And he unlike my English professor hadn't gotten tenure, so he had to tread quietly and didn't really speak as candidly in class as he did in private. > I've always thought of 2007 as the end of an epoch, I really couldn't pinpoint why, other than that it was the year the iphone was first released, but it was just something I could feel in my bones at the time and looking back it really does mark the end of an era for American history. It definitely was the end of an era or at least the last great stumbling point before breaking into completely uncharted territory. It's hard to describe, because of course it's subjective to ourselves, but realistically the 80s to the midpoint 98 was the last period of time that any children born would have a childhood traditionally similar to that in line with their parents complete experience. By the 2000's it had already changed, and by the end on 2007 change irrevocably. Not to sound nostalgic, but rather introspective the reason I say our generation was to have the last in line of what was mainly common to our parents is in part to the fact that it wasn't until the mid 2000's that most of the mass adoption of technology not just by adults, but by children and adolescents became a reality. Think about it like this growing up in the 90's prior to the mid point with the internet explosion a world where the vast majority of people relied on telephones for communication and computers were still not a commonplace item in most family homes, the ability to be constantly glued and clued in to ones social media, to contact friends at a moments notice, or develop an overwhelming reliance on technology for everything wasn't a reality. It was also a point where you didn't have the internet as a constant point of reference. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it has in some part had a lot to do with the over diagnosis of things like mental health issues, and the rise in diagnosis for Autism and ADHD, which in itself I see as a social problem. It's also been the major point where there has been large spikes in depression, and I think that again it's something that people will be able to look back on at some point and see a correlation between the explosion of home entertainment and internet usage, sedentary lifestyle choices, loss of actual meaningful social interactions, instead of online or ersatz formats and increases in long term basic depression. This is a different subject for discussion entirely, but people are meant to move, meant to interact, to fight, to play, we don't and it has a baseline effect not just on our waistlines but also majorly on our mental health. --- The internet is majorly used by a certain generation that is now reaching the point in life when our parents would've settled down and laughed over the bullshit they did as kids that ultimately lead to them getting together. I went to NorCal and a mall in Oregon, and I could really feel that "run around as kids" vibe, but it also seemed intensely depressing. A hole in nowhere with all its commerce isolated in one building. Desert in all directions, no opportunities to educate well and work better. Here in northern Europe, I do not miss anything from the 00s. I miss that people were available and willing however. GTA V online was a great socializing space. MH:W was a game everyone bought with huge coop potential. D&D took off again, yet nobody engaged in it, they just watched podcasts. We have all the same "that'd be cool" concepts in new shapes, but we lack the social framework to pursue it. People make out their lives to be 5 times as hectic as they are, so nobody got time for going on a walk. You could get nostalgia down to a formula of reaching a % of your expected life, and sighing for that point in time minus another percentage. When kids in the future can Deep AI their perfect porn; we'll go "back in my day, we had a favorite whore ruining her holes for our pleasure". --- The 2000's had a delightfully weird theme to it and gaming in the 2004-2007 were some of the best yet. Internet forums were always their own tight knit community with a sense of belonging (context: this is the only internet forum I connect with at a meaningful level these days) . YouTube was the best in 2007 and 2008 with the advent of counterculture edginess and general weirdness because the concept of a budget was beyond luxury. You just made good content and that's all you needed. --- I have a soft spot for the very early 2000s, though I think what I missed most about it was the kind of life I led during that time. It was before I could drive and I remember vividly how much I enjoyed walking everywhere and how good it felt even if I was walking for miles. I remember when if my mom wouldn't take me to the comic book shop I'd just head across town all by myself on foot or ride my bike. I remember hanging out behind stores and goofing off with my friends, doing parkour and drinking cream sodas. I looked up to my friends, they were my heroes. Genuine mad lads each and every one. Of course I was so much braver and impressionable then and we got up to all sorts of shenanigans, pushing ourselves and each other to be even better than the day before. I haven't met anyone like them since and that world I knew sometimes feels like a fleeting dream. --- I was just a child when 9/11 happened. The main thing I miss from those times is how uninvolved in politics everyone was. I liked the time more for the people I was surrounded with knew when people were and weren't being serious and had actual interests and personalities. suddenly the 2016 election happened and now I can't open any of my social media outlets without getting it shoved down my throat about how god awful of a person I am for finding edgy and dark humor still funny in my 20's. On top of that everyone seemed to have had an actual personality outside of politics and again enter 2016 election and now their life is politics tit for tat. It's pretty infuriating having to hear about the current president all the time. I'm suspect to believe it's a side effect of being addicted to social media. I at least was grown up under the guise of to not believe everything I read online. --- The way people remember the 80s today is not dissimilar to how people remembered the 1950s, there were/are people that looked at back at the 50s as basically being utopian, forgetting the specter of nuclear war that hung over that decade as well. It's just human nature and how we remember stuff, we focus on the good and kinda forget the bad, it's always been that way. --- There was also a brief and fairly mild recession in 2001 and the early part of 2002 that roughly coincided with 9/11 and was largely due to the Dot Com bubble of the late 90's finally bursting. --- @Dom Cruise and I both have mentioned how the early 2010's (2010-2012) seemed to be a lot more positive than the woke malaise of the "Current Year" era that has succeeded it. Even with Occupy Wall Street (probably the closest thing we have to a single origin point for SJW's) there seemed to be a lot of positive vibes from 2010-2012 and even the Occupy protests seemed to be a lot more innocuous at the time than they have become in hindsight. But something happened that caused the cultural shift and I'm not fully sure what that is. Obviously, a lot of this stuff had been brewing underneath since the Great Recession (and for some issues, since 9/11) and Occupy was probably the first "bubbling over" of the Woke Left before we went into full "Current Year" around 2014-2015. 2013 is kind of a weird outlier year because it wasn't quite as hopeful as 2010-2012 but it also wasn't quite as woke scold as everything from 2014 onward. The Trayvon Martin trial was a big deal that year, which was almost like a preview for the insanity of Black Lives Matter. Something happened in the latter half of 2012 that really accelerated this cultural shift, and a lot of people will say it was Obama's reelection that year, and while that definitely played a part, I'd say the bigger "wake-up call" event would be the Sandy Hook massacre at the end of 2012, at least in the United States. Sandy Hook really was a game-changer for the Left and a lot of the gun control spergs started going into overdrive after it. The gun control debate drifted away from pistols to rifles, specifically the AR-15 and its many derivatives. Both the Woke Left and the liberals tend to get really emotional and angry over Sandy Hook even to this day. While it was a horrifying tragedy where innocent people were killed, the way that they react to it today, especially with regards to "truther" conspiracy spergs. When they un-personed Alex Jones, a lot of the justifications the media gave was because of his asinine statements about Sandy Hook. But here's the thing, there have always been "truther" types when it comes to politically significant tragedies. You have the 9/11 truthers, and back in the Bush years, most 9/11 truthers were explicitly left-wing and usually militantly atheist (Zeitgeist: The Movie and the Tuscon shooter) with Alex Jones as the sole major exception for most of the 2000's. Hell, there's even Columbine truthers, who were a big part of Web 1.0 culture (at least in conspiracy circles) and a lot of their rationale was similar to the Sandy Hook conspiracy nutjobs, but they didn't attract near the amount of MSM ire that Sandy Hook truthers do. I personally think that Sandy Hook was just one of those "black swan" events that helped forge the Woke Left in its early days, along with the 2008 Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and The War on Terror. Earlier in this thread, we talked about how certain major events signified the demise of 90's culture and the beginning of 2000's culture and I think it was @Dom Cruise who mentioned Columbine, 9/11, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq as those big changeover moments, and I see a similar trajectory with the transition from 2000's culture to 2010's culture. The Great Recession was probably the defining moment of the late 2000's and in many ways, it did a lot to set the stage for the culture of the 2010's. It was sort of the "Beginning of the End" for the culture of the 2000's in the same way that Columbine was for the 1990's. Occupy Wall Street was the direct response to it, and I think this would be the best "start date" for 2010's culture much like how 9/11 is often seen as the event that truly kicked off the 2000's. I think Sandy Hook was probably the point where any of the positive vibes of the early 2010's and the hard-partying nihilism of the 2000's were killed for good, although you could probably have the Zimmerman trial or Ferguson as that event as well. --- << my note: yeah i'm including tons of... well, the opposite of "woke". and sadly the word "woke" itself refers to sjw crazy tumblr bluehair screecher shit, not actually being awake and seeing what's going on and knowing it's all bullshit. anyway. boy, count them fake things i've copied into here. well. i don't know exactly who these commenters are, what goes on in their heads. i have no idea if they know the secrets and truth and are just pretending to be sleeping, or if they really truly believe this. idk. whatever. >> --- Politics already sucked in the 2000s - Dubya, Fundies, 9/11, the Iraq War & Great Recession. You just didn't notice it that much because most people didn't have internet access and those who did didn't have social media like today. --- > I've seen some people argue that the SocJus movement exists to protect Wall Street and "woke" corporations at the expense of class-based activism. > That would probably explain a lot. actually. I wouldn't put it past the big corporations to co-opt Occupy back in 2011 and astroturf the fuck out of the movement so it could be neutralized. When Occupy first started, it got really big really quick and it wasn't "woke" but by mid-late 2012 it was going in a direction that was sort of woke, especially in places like California and the Pacific Northwest (Antifa black bloc attacks also made a few appearances at Occupy events up and down the West Coast) but making something like Occupy go woke and veer off into identity politics would be a great way to sink the movement by muddying the waters to keep the whole thing from getting centralized and also promoting unrelated stuff like intersectionality to distract from economic issues. Combine that with a brewing resentment towards the old Bush-era order (and Obama's continuation of many Bush era policies) and the fact that so many Millennials went to college with worthless degrees and then got indoctrinated into intersectional bullshit, and it made the astroturfing of Occupy fairly easy. Then it got out of hand and now look where we're at. The corporations created a monster and they can't really control it anymore, at least not as effectively as they did before. --- This is something I've long thought myself, because I noticed how almost all this stuff seemed to crop up right after OWS. And it's bizarre how much SJWs suck corporate cock, the corporation used to be the number 1 enemy of the left, remember the Seattle WTO protests from 20 years ago? Imagine liberals being mad about world trade today, now corporations are a SJWs best friend. --- Someone else said in another thread around a similar topic that the introduction of social media in the later half of the 2000's marked the end of the normie-free Internet. I think the world was better before the internet—which was originally made to share information—became another diseased dumping ground for the human condition. Instead of ye olde sperging at peers in one's respective town or city, or going full sped to try and make the news during the cable era, one truly exceptional fellow could now cry as a collective with millions upon millions of other spergs on social media, which has started to noticeably affect various aspects of real life at an alarmingly fast pace throughout the 2010's. Hypochondria is being rewarded. Mental illness is being glorified and profited on instead of attempting to fix the root cause of the issue. Any person who claims to be of a different gender instantly becomes a socially and politically protected class without further question. If you question what the fuck is going on at all you are socially condemned. If you express yourself anywhere outside the vaguely-defined box, you will be the target of such cannibalistic barbarism you could make a chimp blush. TL;DR everything up until 2007 was great --- In 2029 you'll all be begging for the 2010s. Screencap this post. --- I was a kid in the early 2000's but I always saw something magical in the old forums. There was a website for everything instead of having it all concentrated on a social media site that doesn't let any sort of creativity and has the same plain interface. you could form a small following as an artist at a forum instead of being only on social media and hope someone notices. --- Forums were still state of the art in the early 2010s, 'twas only in the mid-2010s that I saw the many forums I use to suddenly start loosing activity and members fast. << my note: noticed that too. ?? >> --- I got to browse the internet, watch genuinely creative content on YouTube and Newgrounds and played a lot of top-notch video games. There was still a spirit of competition, creativity and regard for the quality of one's craft both in the entertainment industries proper and online. The 2010s has been a recession in creativity. The content of this decade lacks ambition or innovation. It's now all about accepting mediocrity and being admonished for criticizing artists because "it's their style". I'll gladly take the dark and edgy content of the 2000s over the hideous milquetoast cultural marxist trash and shoddily made cash grabs we get nowadays, at least those artists had some semblance of self-respect. Then you have game publishers and developers who have no incentive to make good games because they're guaranteed to make a profit from their established consumer bases unless they fuck up really bad like Bethesda did with Fallout 76. Perhaps this decade showed us the eventual outcome of copyright law - businesses abusing their creative monopolies to the point of collapse. --- > dying forums They all decided to move to facebook pages, it makes me sad that I can't leave facebook since every SCA group out there wants you to use the facebook page and not a forum. --- I was in high school and college in the late 90s through mid 2000s. It's not so much the culture of the era I miss (although it was a hell of a lot better than what we have today) it's a bit more nebulous and personal. We all get nostalgic once in awhile for "the good old days" Often we understand that we're looking back on those years with rose colored glasses, and things back then probably weren't as wonderful as our memory tells us, things aren't as terrible now, and we smile at the memories and move on. I miss some of my old friends from that era that I've lost contact with along the way. I miss hanging out as teens with my former best friend, no care in the world, us spending nights hanging out playing PS2, MtG, D&D, and I lament how these days I just don't seem to care much about making new friends or meeting new people. I miss having that sense of excitement and enthusiasm for things. I don't give a flying fuck about video games anymore, but I remember being on the edge of my seat over how awesome and innovative games seemed back then. I miss feeling excited just by logging online and roaming around finding new things, interesting sites, cool people to chat with, funny flash animations ect.. The Farms here, YouTube and a handful of other sites are all I bother caring about visiting now. I miss not having politics be the defining factor and litmus test on how we treat people. There was some backlash against Republicans during the Bush years, but it never felt as downright hateful as it does now. I was a liberal back then, and I had Republican friends. No one ever ostracized me or told me I was a bad person for doing so. We could flick shit at each other good naturedly, knowing we were just kidding around and nobody would screech about being triggered or offended. I miss when nerd and geek hobbies were FOR nerds and geeks, not soyfaced SJW assholes trying to insert their politics into our fun and shame anyone for wrongthink, or people LARPing as nerds because they like superhero movies. People that actually appreciated and enjoyed the hobbies instead of just being there to be popular because they're suddenly trending on social media. I could go on. But yeah, I do miss those days at times. I'm happy being an independent, financially stable adult with a pretty good life despite the craziness in Current Year, but I do miss those idyllic old days on some nights. Kind of a bittersweet feeling. --- > But something happened that caused the cultural shift and I'm not fully sure what that is. I heard the endgame the elite have is to break society down into an atomized (hence identity politics and the isolation of modern life), smaller (hence depopulation agenda), cyberneticized (hence the oversaturation of technology like smartphones and upcoming brain-computer interfaces) slave class lorded over by them and AI. The theory goes that work towards this goal took off since WWII ended. Conspiracy theory or not, it sounds ominous -- and it can be quite difficult to think the modern world doesn't suck. --- << my note: that's it for the thread for now. skipped over loads of unremarkable stuff. just realized that no one brought up the Patriot Act. for all the Bush jr. talk, too. huh. >> =====