I’m just gonna comment that Pink Floyd is amazing!
I’d say life got significantly better after leaving school, absolutely don’t miss it.
I do miss the same abundance of free time but that is about it. That is what most people seem to miss, the lack of responsibilities or as strict schedules.
The secret to a more comfortable life is to reduce your dependence on systems/things/some people, where possible at least. If a small house leads to small rent/mortgage. Can live without a car, that is a few weeks a year of earnings freed up. You don’t need to purchase a thousand books you are unlikely to read if you use the library.
That kind of thinking. It doesn’t mean become minimalist to the point of fault, just figure out were you can introduce more slack into your life.
I regret to cite the Dalai Lama as a source of wisdom after what we now know about him, but back in high school what really resonated with me was what he said about how owning more possessions can add unnecessary responsibilities to your life that contribute to making it more stressful
Like, DGMW my materialistic ass would be devastated if I lost my collection of Nausicaa figures and Gashapon insect models, but at the same time I can recognize that I’d probably be a lot happier if I never even had to worry about having them
You can quote Tyler Durden who put it more succinctly:
The things you own end up owning you.
What did I miss about the Dalai Lama?
To be fair to figures and models, they are probably only a problem when you are moving them, otherwise it isn’t a huge burden. It is more about ongoing dependence. Now this isn’t an anti-children take BUT if you don’t have kids, you don’t have to worry about raising kids. Things go much easier in that sense. That said if you want kids, go for it, just be aware that it will make for a more difficult life. Just take the wins were you can.
As for the Dalai Lama, it is difficult to figure out were he stands as a person. Yes, there was the tongue sucking thing which, from asking folks familiar with it the culture, does seem to be an odd cultural joke/saying that is way to easy to misinterpret through western eyes. If you aren’t familiar with it, you look mentally deranged. But the phrase is meant to be “Eat my tongue”, as in ‘I have told you everything, the only thing left to do is to eat my tongue.’. Like in Japanese they have Neko wo kaburu “To wear a cat on one’s head” or in Finland Hevosenkenkä pyllyssä “To have a horseshoe in one’s butt”.
But then there is him being mentioned in the Epstein files 150+ times, but also is largely though to have not had any direct interaction with Jeff. How much of that is damage control and his handlers trying to keep the game rolling, it is difficult to tell. The one thing with the Epstein thing is just how many famous people’s names are in it even in passing. Like George W bush, is in it loads but there was never any direct contact, that is just funny in a way.
It seems like there is a lot of stuff pointing at him, but nothing concrete. It is a, keep an eye on him situation but it also could be an embarrassing situation worthy of Seinfeld.
You eventually realise that it’s having free time that you miss.
More importantly : no responsibility
And being completely ignorant to how awful the world can be.
Oh, the ignorance can return if you want to.
Ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer.
Well playing a video game did not mean signing up for a subscription, never owning it, signing up for an app that tracks you while you play and a console that constantly wants to update straight through your play time.
The quality was better too. More rudimentary but better.
How glorious the first day of summer vacation felt.
As a teacher, still does!
The difference is now when I’m sitting on the couch playing video games there’s 500 impending responsibilities floating through my head, keeping me from truly detaching and enjoying myself.
I hate that this is so relatable
I miss being a kid in the 60s, because that was way better than the 90s.
30 years prior…
It’s not like we are playing wow classic all over again 🫣
As a gamer, I just don’t see my hobby evolving like it was back in the day. Shit’s gotten stagnant. Very few new ideas. Everything is mostly a copy of a copy. A lot of it actually regressed from the late 90s/early 2000s. The only thing getting more advanced are the graphics, and even those advancements have started to stall.
But more and more I am also seeing this happen with TV, movies and even books.
One word: Indie. I agree with you that AAA games absolutely have stagnated and regressed. But smaller productions are far more frequent today and very creative and innovative. Arguably even more so than back in the day, if you really cherry pick. Personally, the main thing I feel is really missing from that time is mid-budget, AA games.
I think this is the big issue of the next few years. Large AAA studios have budgets so high that they are completely risk adverse. The low end of the indie scene is flooded with vibe coded Unity junk. And the gooey middle goodness with the awesome stuff is being squeezed by those two.
I suspect we will correct back to some form of sanity but it is a few years away and the interim period will be rough.
What are some good indies from the past few years? Most of my most placed indie games are over a decade old by now.
UFO 50, A Hat in Time, Celeste, Hollow Knight, Silksong, Outer Wilds, Balatro, A Short Hike, Smushi Come Home, What Remains of Edith Finch, Undertale, Deltarune, Hylics, Hylics 2, Peglin, Void Collector, Nubby’s Number Factory, Superliminal, Pizza Tower, Anton Blast, Rift of the Necrodancer, Night in the Woods, Uktrakill, Fallen Aces, Dusk, Scratchin’ Melodii
Lethal Company
Thats just because well, since the 90s, its all been done. Society creatively peaked and theres really nothing left. Even bands out there being weird for the sake of weird are doing the same thing bands did in the 70s.
There is nothing original in existence anymore. Thats OK though. Enjoy what you like and support art you like, kill slop, and youll be happy.
There never was anything original. All of culture, invention, science, and art is iterative and would not exist without copying in the first place.
As the other guy said, look indie.
There’s so much fun there at the moment. Even double A stuff like Galactic Racer is really damn good this year.
Triple A is a mess rn, gonna take some time to recover and it’ll be different I think.
Those at the top need to start looking smaller scale. If I was at Microsoft, Halo/COD can have its big budgets, whatever. But also loosen the chains on smaller teams to try new things. Games that have similar budget and finish turn around times of the Ps2/Xbox/GC era only now you have modern engine tech at your hands.
Budgets decent enough to have the chance to do it well but not so big that it comes up in the next share holders call as the reason for 500 laid off.
Sony used to do this in the Ps1 era, games would be given a change on the market and even if it wasn’t a huge hit, they would give them another chance. Silly ideas like Katamari Damacy came out of this thinking at Namco and that paid of big time.
Just a quick note on movies.
I’ve noticed dialogue is getting dumbed down across the board. The vocabulary is shrinking and plot is being explained more extensitvely (using basic vocabulary) so audiences don’t get confused regarding the plot. Basically, making it so the audience doesn’t have to think as much to fill in blanks. And as far as I’m concerned, filling in the blanks a little bit is part of what makes a good movie or book better. It makes it more personal to the viewer/reader.
One example I just experienced this weekend, and I’ll probably be crucified for this because apparently everyone loved this movie, was The Odyssey. Personally, I thought the dialogue was awful. I don’t mind that they went with the American accents, although I always think movies like that are better with British accents. It was the writers behind the dialogue. It just sounded like I was hearing dialogue written by junior high kids. I’m assuming it was a decision made on purpose, maybe to connect more with modern English speakers, but it just sounded bad and kind of ruined the movie for me. I ended up just having kind of a meh opinion of the film largely because of it.
Netflix apparently has a rule that movies they produce must explicitly state the goal out loud three times. Because they expect viewers to only half pay attention while browsing on their phones.
But yeah, the dumbed-down-ness really sucks. I only got 3 episodes into the Avatar live action TV show, and a big part of it was the quality of writing. It constantly felt like they were just telling me stuff instead of just letting the story happen. When the opening episode did a variation of the cartoon’s famous opening monologue three times I knew we were in trouble. And it just got worse from there.
There has always been a element of this in places but it has grown significantly in the last few decades.
Funnily enough my example is the film Grease. The dialog is astoundingly plain but presented well enough. Maybe this is why it is seen as a mainstream classic because of this simple language.
But then I see the works of some like Charlie Kaufman that was just wonderful but has rarely broken into the main stream.
I second this watched the first probably 90min and turned it off, I was bored out of my mind. Idk what people saw in it, the writing acting cinematography were all shit.
Absolutely not. If I get time gaming these days, I enjoy the fuck out of it. And then I ask for more!
Literally me right now, playing a 22 year old game 😂
What game is it?
I have not played it but it looks like runescape
It’s definitely Runescape.
Their username is an additional helpful hint there lol
Were the 90s that good? I really wanna know what the overall feeling of it was.
Economically, things were already turning downwards but it was still so close to the peak that it wasn’t really that noticeable. But because of the rapidly reducing price of technology it looked as though things were still progressing just fine.
The general vibe however was a largely positive one. The cold war was over, the new “war on terror” had not yet begun. The pace of computer technology was moving at an astounding pace that even if you didn’t like what it was today, tomorrow there will be a newer faster and cheaper one available of whatever it is. The idea of online shopping was new, now you can see the whole catalog. Video on a disc that doesn’t wear out and has “cinema grade” audio, wild! The internet had just gone mainstream leading to the interconnected global village and the prospect of a new digital utopia. Democracy of information and the end of censorship… yeah.
Computing had been liberated into the general populace and the panopticon of surveillance hadn’t been constructed in depth yet.
Mobiles phones started to become common but were so dumb that they didn’t intrude much except for some people. We didn’t have unlimited plans and it wasn’t uncommon for you to just forget to charge the thing for days at a time because you forgot about it for the most part.
The larger messaging and general visible signal of global warming/environmental blowback wasn’t much of thing and even then it was seen as something that we could unify on an tackle. There was still the attitude of, the present is pretty good and the future will be a better place and that we will address the issues as we are aware of them and there is enough time to address them.
Just look at anything design wise and you can see what it was like. Many designs of the 80’s/90’s by today’s standards are kind of ulgy but the reason why it looked like that because it felt like the chains holding back progress had finally been removed. Some magazines would have a new style on every single page, they did that simply because they could. No longer were they constricted by the limits of traditional print and the end result was fairly rough most of the time. But it was never boring in that sense.
That lack of constraint permeated everything. It was a time of being bombarded with novelty.
In retrospect, it was a time of pleasant delusion. The foundation for all the issues of today were being laid down but we weren’t at the point of it being activated. Speed high on a credit card is fun, the payback however is rough.
Tech was still exciting and interesting and had a nerd vibe to it. Much how the Linux community has always felt.
Instead of nowadays “ah, how will this new tech invade my life and introduce fascism even faster?”
You could disconnect.
I had it explained very sadly to me that my generation was the last that got to choose to be digital.
What do you mean? You can choose to disconnect right now.
Life was not exactly simpler. Technology has made a lot of things easier and better, too. Life was slower in a good way though.
The internet was in its infancy and mobile phones were not common. TV was broadcast on a schedule and your favorite show was only on once a week.
There was no algorithmic social media that ranked content by its engagement score. Culture and sub culture were more diverse, less polished and mainstreamed.
At least in the western world there was a lot of hope and optimism about the future. That was naive in hindsight but it sure felt better than the doom and gloom we have today.
I can think of bad things, too. Few cars had catalytic converters and particle filters and smoking indoors was still common everywhere. Basically, the world outside smelled like gasoline and the world inside smelled like cold cigarette smoke.
If you see a lot of nostalgia for the 90s these days that’s mostly because Millennials are middle aged now and start talking about “the good, old days”.
Keep in mind that what people mean with “good, old days” is never a specific, absolute time period. What they actually think about is their youth when their lives were still simple and fun and when they were full of energy, hopes and dreams.
They start to feel nostalgic about that lost youth, often remembering it as better than it actually was.
It happens to everyone. It’ll happen to you. That’s just life.
They were better than now somewhat, but we already knew that we were getting screwed compared to boomers (gen-X checking in).
Food and rent were a lot cheaper.
Things were more affordable and there was much less surveillance, both of kids by their parents and of people in general by the government and corporations. Growing up during that decade gave us a feeling of freedom and limitless possibilities. The millennium was a huge deal and the vibe was hopeful. Technology was advancing fast and making life more fun and convenient, and the downsides had not become apparent yet. Then 9/11 happened and then war and the Patriot Act, and I had to get a job and pay rent and things went downhill from there.
Ha, he has a little N64 controller
