I don’t miss dial-up internet, I just don’t. I don’t even like the sound because it’s just digital screeches and it’s a sound that makes me cringe a little upon hearing it. Because I remember the times when I’d be listening to music with headphones with volume high and then that fucking digital screech just blares into my ears.
I don’t miss waiting 30 minutes to load a page. I don’t miss a bit of it.
My childhood. I don’t understand people who do. Mine was mostly loneliness, confusion, trauma, emotional neglect, guilt, shame, some abandonment, some physical abuse, etc. Every day has been a step towards better than the previous. I don’t want to or miss anything going backwards.
Gay jokes on TV. You know the kind. “it’s funny because it’s gay”, very prevalent on series like Friends. Friends is a great show even today, but I do not miss the gay jokes.
I love monty python’s flying circus, but they had multiple sketches across several different episodes where the punchline was a gay person getting murdered. Kinda hard to watch some of them now.
I watched ace Ventura the other day and I cringed so hard at the transphobia and I remember laughing at it in the theaters too when it was new.
My internalised homophobia definitely thought homophobia was comedy gold back in the day…
Lemmy.ml leading up to the election.
Getting paid by check instead of direct deposit.
I’m still getting paid by check.
France, public administration.
I moan absolutely every time, and then hold on to it as much as I can to fuck up their accounting because unclaimed checks whacks their balances. When they phone to complain I call them palaeolithic morons & ask them to fucking wire the money already. I think my record is three months (I don’t work exclusively for them). Nice people and fun job otherwise but gosh, why the checks, seriously.
They could at least fax you the checks to your home fax machine for convenience.
Minitel it
Having to do yard work or setting up holiday decorations outside. Ever since moving from a house to an apartment, I’ve had zero yard work outside of picking up dog shit when walking my brother’s dogs and the closest I’ve come to holiday decorating is setting up a fake indoor Christmas tree and decorating it.
Used to have to do a lot of leaf picking up and weed pulling growing up. Never liked it and still don’t because of how long it’d take and how I don’t like getting dirt dirty. Also, I was never a massive fan of decorating outside, specifically just Halloween and Christmas, because my family used to have a ton of decorations and my mom always wanted them a certain way, even if that meant taking a few down and moving them. Lots of work over a weekend. Looked good afterwards, but I can’t say I’ve missed putting stuff up. I’ll leave that to other people like the people near me who for some reason still have Halloween decorations up.
Polio
Cable television.
Every time I visit my mom she has it on and I can’t believe I spent an entire childhood putting up with that shit. I can’t even watch it while I’m there. Too frustrating.
Whenever I have a chance to watch cable tv occaionally, I am astonished how many commercials there are and that, before the inception of the internet, everyone put up with commercials that lasted for about 10 minutes. And seemingly still do.
Today, when using the internet exclusively, one gets annoyed by maximum when there is one single ad that slipped through the ad blocker.
Big family gatherings. I did not particularly enjoyed them growing up (I come from big extended families) but when I became a parent they were unbereable so I just stopped attending. I couldn’t fathom to subject my child to all that nonsense. Best decision ever! While cousins fight over who brings what side dish for Christmas I will be relaxing in a hammock by the beach, thank you very much.
Not that gasoline cars are gone (unfortunately) but I personally won’t ever go back to it. Electric cars are just so much better in any way except range and charge time. But those are honestly overblown topics that you won’t think much about in your daily life once you got used to it.
Netbooks. Jfc that performance of a mid-tier smartphone whereby they’d become unusable in a few years for anything heavier than lxqt or some tiling wm, a simple music player like audacious, vim and static websites (accessed only using something lightweight like Netsurf, Badwolf or Palemoon as well). I don’t remember what happened to mine but I’m pretty sure that even mpv with no scripts would drop frames like crazy on FHD x265 matroska videos. I’m so glad that ultrabooks started to become more affordable and nowadays I’d be able to buy an i7 t440s for the price of my acer aspire one back in 2011.
I don’t miss them either, but they were necessary in moving our portable devices forward. Everyone and their best friend was making bigger and faster laptops. No one was making power efficient and light ones. Netbooks filled that need. And cost less than a macbook air by a large margin.
I used an Acer one with an atom as a mobile terminal for six years before the battery gave up on me. I was getting a day’s work out of a device I could fit in my (oversized) back pockets. And since it was just an SSH device, the speed didn’t matter.
Like others here, childhood. I am not at all nostalgic for childhood. It wasn’t awful but being an adult is much better.
Music I am not nostalgic about - is this a gender difference? Both my ex and my husband listen to the music of their youth, I like plenty of old stuff but also like so much newer music, it just keeps coming, so much good music. It’s just delightful to know there is so much talent and creativity in the world.
Not nostalgic in general, actually. There are plenty of current problems, but people who think the past was better are either old white men, or crazy.
Smoking.
Do you know why all the wall paint and curtains of the 70s and 80s never included pristine white? Yes, that’s why. I’m convinced the choices of golds, oranges, and browns were just giving in to the inescapable film of nicotine tinge on everything, everywhere.
To this day, when I see “cream”, “ecru”, “chiffon” or any other creative name for not-quite-white, I think of nicotine stains.
Restaurant smoking was the worst.
I’ve never, and this is likely why. Growing up in that acrid awfulness was a great deterrent.
When I was doing some interior work and searching paints, Ralph Loren paints had a Nicotene stain to apply over colours or wallpaper to give it that smoke era feel. LOL
It’s a film of goo. If you’re in a kitchen of a smokers house and a tea kettle or boiling pot goes for a bit, rusty drips will form on the ceiling and down the walls. There’s a filmy goo to it if you get it on your hands. It’s a piece of what needs to be cleaned then painted over, sometimes multiple times, to lock it away.
I guess if there’s no context for it, then it’s a mere sepia tone or some such.
I could not find a listing for this paint of yours.
Might have been this product line https://trash2treasure.wordpress.com/tag/ralph-lauren-smoke-glaze/
Yeah, should have been more descriptive. I have purchased smokers homes. Getting walls and ceiling clean was a nightmare. The Ralph Lauren paints was part of their antiquing collection?? I believe. It had various types like heavy smoke, light smoke and nicotene. They were sort of a translucent after finish you applied. They would not give the stickiness of nicotene tar, but give the yellowed over layer. You could paint on thick, but it looked like many used the spray on and dab off, to get either smoke or nicotene accumulation at corners and have general wall the chosen colour. It found it hilarious that people would be spending top dollar on Ralph Lauren with purpose of making your wallpaper or painted wall look dirty. But maybe it got used to remodel heritage homes or movie sets to get the era right.
School. I don’t miss any of it.
You see movies and TV shows romanticising middle/high school a lot, as though it’s all about parties, friends, hanging out, and getting into relationships. It’s not that. Just an endless barrage of busywork with the occasional holiday.
I share this sentiment. School was such a drag and I miss nothing about it.
Meh, this one depends on where you lived. We had parties, lots of time with friends and hanging out, plus relationships…it wasn’t until Grade 13 (which was a pre Uni course year) where we had so much homework, especially 3 uni level math course…just doing calculus for hours after school.
I don’t miss having to have a separate device for digital photography. I remember having to pay 4 or 500 for a decent digital camera that fits in your pocket. When I got my first smart phone about 15 years ago, I took a picture with it and compared it to a decent Canon and a decent Fuji camera, that were one the best ones you could get in Best buy at the time for that budget. I compared the images and they sucked compared to my phone. Smh. Now my phone is around 4 or 500 and way better than basic digital cameras you can fit in your pocket, with way more functionality.
I don’t miss only having 3 channels to watch and having to be home at a particular time to watch something.
It was a shared experience, and! and! the quality was better! Don’t believe me? Find any freesat channel right now and compare it to any streaming service.
Streaming services have to serve millions of different customers different content on-demand, and as a result the signal is compressed and dithered to the point of unviewabaility (says me, my family are apparently unaffected by the fuzzy black dots…) even on 4K streams.
Broadcast content? Its just chucked out there over the waves for anyone to catch, and the bitrate and quality are fantastic in comparison.
the quality was better
This very much depends on when you’re taking about. Over the air television when I was young was absolutely not better quality than any streaming service now. 480i delivered by an analog interference-prone signal definitely does not compare favourably to streaming.
This is definitely a hot take. I’m yet to see broadcast content that comes close to streaming content in quality.
Paid streaming, sure - you get the nice nitrate.
Free streaming (or Netflix bottom tier) vs Free Broadcast? Broadcast wins hands down in quality
Just pirate the 4k versions if you want to be a video snob.
HD piracy on demand is not that easy. Even popcorn time at its peak would suffer buffering if the media wasn’t popular enough
Pirate it ten minutes before demand.
you’re asking me for a level of foresight that is simply not possible
Stremio+debrid-link is pretty great, although it isn’t free.
Also the ‘cultural exchange’ you’d get if you lived in border regions!
