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.
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.
When Facebook status windows automatically had an “is” following your name. So posts would start with “Mary is” and you’d fill in what you’re doing or how you’re feeling.
When Twitter used SMS and you could use it just to follow your favorite band, so whenever they posted it felt like you got a text from them. That was pretty cool.
The internet.
internet 1.0
I am old enough to have used the internet on a DOS machine with an acoustic coupler dialing up to a hyperboard. Guess my age?
57?
- My step dad was a computer junkie and we had a machine when I was a kid.
I’m 46 and we got a 14.4 modem in around 1992-3 I think. We used gopher and ftp then later hotline to trade shareware, then warez and serialz.
I miss those days, but I don’t miss downloading 8 of 9 parts of a file and not being able to reconnect to the server for the last one.
And then at some point you started running out of space, so you had to go back and find all those incomplete downloads, and delete them to create more space.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
More like B:> Run
Wasn’t even that good for me tbh just a time wasting exercise. Release the cable eating sharks!!
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.
Until the current administration realizes and cuts the pension.
which kind? corporate ones, or public ones?
Depends where you live.
- Dollar menus at fast food places
- Firefly
- Halloween neighborhood roam trick or treating
- Calvin & Hobbes but I’m glad Watterson ended it when he did
- Angular car design (yeah down with car centrism but those angles looked cool)
- Internet 1.0 and the separation of offline and online life
- The Beyond Taco at Del
- Personal privacy
C&H was the GOAT.
Weeping upvote for Firefly, taken too soon 😭 🪦 😭 😭
Why do the worst people make such good shows
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
That’s why you get a media server, do all of the pirating you’ve done years prior and get software that’ll load up all of those shows and movies by a click of a button. Nobody has time these days fumbling around with that shit.
Yeah, I’m definitely interested in setting up a jellyfin with radar and sonar like I see people on this site talking about, just got to find the willpower to figure it all out
Lol, you must be a computer illiterate.
Firefly.
Freedom,the internet, rationality of thought.
TIL that Walmart aren’t open 24hrs anymore. I thought it switched back after COVID, but I guess not.
I haven’t tried visiting a Walmart after 7pm in a very long time.
I think the covid thing happening was their excuse to seize doing that. They were 24/7 right around that period. But I could also see other reasons why they stopped. I mean, overnights were poorly staffed and it’s wal-mart, everyone is going to be getting away with tons of shit like stealing and customers getting rowdy.
Personally, as an overnight worker, I’m glad it ended. I miss being able to shop peacefully but, better safe than convenient.
There was a golden time when you could ride the gocarts and mini bikes around the store at 1 am and the 2 people on shift couldn’t be bothered so long as you don’t break anything or steal
*Cease
Just FYI
It probably got expensive to keep all those overnight workers to handle the few customers they had. And those that are still left, and stocking the shelves for the next day, will be replaced by robotic stockers before too long.
24 hour Home Depots were amazing.
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.
When one still could have the reasonable impression that everyone is the same before the law.
We need politics to be boring again.
I’m tired of living in “interesting” times. Because whats interesting, is detrimental to everyone equally aside those benefiting.
I think globalization and internet made everything permanently too interesting.
When was that?
Childhood.
We believed a lot of wonderful things in the 90s.
I know this is a rhetorical question. Still.
Maybe childhood as turtle answered, but also before this whole US downturn with openly proven criminals and still nothing happened.
From outside of the US it started for me with the impeachment of Trump.
He’s not the first of course. But before that at least an effort was put into the appearance.
For me: the internet. The internet has done what my country has done and that’s centralization. Collecting everybody in a few big cities and subsequently killed small villages, towns and communities. Ironically, in the case of my government, it was done to save money and in the case of the internet, it was done to make money.
I also enjoyed my time during the years I was taking my degree. The friendships and fun hangouts, the way we helped one another and accepted one another and learned tolerance and humility. I remember that I actively participated in as many things as possible while I was studying, because I wanted as few regrets as possible when I graduated and the next phase of life started. I’m so happy I had the pressence of mind to think of that and take advantage of my time with these people while I still had the chance, because this current phase of life is a lot more slow paced and there isn’t much in terms of socializing because everyone is working and are making babies these years. I don’t mind that those years ended and that we are here now. It was good while it lasted, but I do think that if it had lasted any longer than it did, it would probably have gone stale at some point. We ended on a high note.
Oh, and since last year, my spouse and I have been returning to physical media and have started buying and borrowing DVDs and Blurays again. Recently we watched a 2004 movie that has a scene in a DVD store and I just blurted out to my boyfriend that I miss going to one of those stores and browsing DVDs. Especially Blockbuster-type stores where you’d rent the DVD because they always had a bin with discarded films you could buy for super cheap. These days most of our DVD purchases take place online and it’s so boring. I miss going to a physical store with atmosphere and find some random movie I hadn’t seen before and it was almost free, it was that cheap. Axel Music and Moby Disc were my favourite stores and I totally took that experience for granted because silly me thought that stores like that would always be around. The closest I get to reliving this experience is when we go to the library to borrow movies. The DVD section is shoved away in a sad little corner in my library so it’s not really the same, but it’s still better than nothing at all. I don’t know what I’ll do if physical media is forcefully phased out after the boomer generation passes away. Dx
On the other hand, LPs have made a comeback so maybe there is hope yet.
You can still have that DVD experience by going to thrift stores. Most of them have a decent collection.
No thrift store will ever be short of DVDs.
However, finding the ones you actually want i.e released in stores who still bother with DVDs, gonna have some patience.
Should probably check out some of my local ones and see what they have. Thanks for your comment! 🤗
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.
Freedom? Democracy? An Internet before the eternal September, SPAM, marketing surveillance, and ads everywhere?
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.
It’s not mythology, testing was crucial so you wouldn’t ship a broken cartridge, which was very costly than a patch download. It made financial sense to test throughly, and more than that, develop carefully.
I think the only guys that made a working game in a week were Atari VCS developers, and IMO it wa a combination of the limited hardware, and the skill of a few legendary programmers.
Today we get games that dwarf the entire software stack of computers decades ago, but they’re made loosely, knowing they’ll ship broken and need patch after patch until it doesn’t make financial sense, and then they’re abandoned.
My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise. For example, a long-standing bug is that once it starts, and offers to press any button to sign in, you have to wait about a minute before doing that, otherwise it will likely hang. This has existed since launch, and after numerous patches it hasn’t been addressed yet.
My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise.
You know what’s interesting? I see footage and images from the previous few fallout games, all of them, in so many different contexts - people love those games and they talk about them, A LOT.
But I have never seen any footage from fallout 76.comparitively nbody seems to think it worth celebrating, in the same way as the other few fallout games.
That’s how you can tell a series fell off. You can apply this to TV and movies too - i see less ‘House of the Dragon’ stuff than i saw ‘Game of Thrones’ stuff
The crazy part is that it’s only mildly inconvenient now compared to the spray glued collection of game breaking bugs and horrendous design choices it was at launch.
And yes, I’m an old timey gamer who’s also a masochist playing it nightly.
Stupid sexy Fasnacht!
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.
They do if they want high quality 4K textures and uncompressed audio.
Which should be optional, especially for consoles. If you’re playing through a TV, using the inbuilt speakers and sitting a couple of metres away, there is no advantage to uncompressed textures and audio.
The first gaming system that connected to the Internet was the Sega Dreamcast, and even that ran games only off disc. It isn’t until you get to the PS3/XBox 360 era when games would be downloaded to the console directly, and even then games weren’t expected to need an Internet connection to use.
Mario Brothers might have had a small design team, but Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a much larger dev team.
SA had 50-60 devs. in 2025 that’s a small dev team. The original gta3 had 25-30. SA only has about double the devs of GTA3
GTA6 dev team is over 6,000 people. Most dev teams today are to 400-500 people for AAA games.
Well, yeah. There’s a meme I actually saw that demonstrates how developers were back then compared to now. Developers back then, really did care about how to make a game at its best with like…2MB of cache or very little video memory or what little of bits they had to work with.
Today and for a while, with technology as to where it is at where sky is virtually the limit, we’ve got games that are so poorly optimized, it makes you wonder.
I was guilty of that very thing once. During my first programming class back in college, I wrote an Asteroids clone as a project. My professor kept sending it back telling me to fix it. I really racked my brain trying to figure out what he was sending back to me (he wouldn’t tell me, I was supposed to find and correct the error). The game ran just fine. Finally a gave up and asked him to tell me the answer of what my code was doing wrong. He showed me that I had one line of code that was basically making a new instance of the entire game for every screen refresh. (I wrote it in Java, so Java was just correcting it for me in real time.)
Y’all might enjoy this.
The climate.
