The Big Generation X Nostalgia Thread

[Tulpa Girl]

I always thought one would a more accurate picture of each era if instead of counting these decades on the "'0", one split them at the '5', so 1945-55, 1956-1695, 1966-1975 and so on. Social trends, fashions and events just seem to follow that pattern better, in as much as they follow any pattern at all.

I think it was comic book writer Steven Grant who said something similar, for example what most people think of as 'the Sixties' was really around '64 to '73.

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[Kilted Rob]

Coming to Blu-Ray with a 2k restoration.

 

[PolarBlues]

I have that, or at least the DVD verision. Importing it from the States cost a small fortune (it was only available from the US WB shop), but it's a great series. The world building, chanracter designs and sets in Thundarr are wonderful.

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[Bunch]

View attachment 28124

Well it's nice to think it's at least half way done by now.

 

[TristramEvans]

Well it's nice to think it's at least half way done by now.

but will it fit on a floppy disk?

 

[Bunch]

but will it fit on a floppy disk?

After all these years it probably will have a little flop to it.

 

[spittingimage]

View attachment 28124

What makes you think I'm nostalgic for that?

 

[Teyrnon]

What makes you think I'm nostalgic for that?

It's a dystopic fantasy though and a badly doctored image. 180MB at that thruput would take about 110 hours. Back in the day, I did downloads that size from time to time and a few were a bit larger. Download managers were key.

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[spittingimage]

It's a dystopic fantasy though and a badly doctored image. 180MB at that thruput would take about 110 hours. Back in the day, I did downloads that size from time to time and a few were a bit larger. Download managers were key.

Living at the bottom of the South Pacific, it wasn't a fantasy for me. My first internet connection got 200 b/s on a good day. Any download larger than a couple of megabytes was guaranteed to fail at some point. I routinely browsed with images turned off, and if I needed to see one I'd start it loading and go to make coffee and a snack.

*thousand-yard stare*

 

[Teyrnon]

Ouch...That's harsh...I remember I was managing a file section on a BBS back in my 2400 baud days and some clown uploaded 3MB of what purported to be the latest in a series of hot shareware games. After all this time I don't remember what it was called but it was a title that had been essentially vaporware for a couple of years. The sucker took me around 3 hours to download. This was during the 9600 baud era but all I had was my trusty 2400 baud modem I had for years and years. I finally got it downloaded and unzipped to discover some clown thought it was a cute joke to create a bunch of files with appropriate extensions that were all text files with the words, "Hahahahahaha Bet you thought this would be the real thing!" repeated a gajillion times. The uploader was very lucky it wasn't a virus. He did get upset when I promptly deleted the thing so nobody else wasted time downloading it.

 

[Bunch]

Hehe. I may have already told this story but a friend of mine ran a C64 warez bbs back in the day. I hated on of the guys on the site. My friend was a constant procrastinator so made sure he got to school on time each day. I'd go over in the morning and make him get ready. Well above mentioned asshat used to like to download files right before going to school. I'd wait until he was well into the download and open and close the drive door. One bad bit in all of those successful bits was enough to guarantee a failed download. It's the small bits of revenge I enjoyed.

 

[Teyrnon]

Hehe. I may have already told this story but a friend of mine ran a C64 warez bbs back in the day. I hated on of the guys on the site. My friend was a constant procrastinator so made sure he got to school on time each day. I'd go over in the morning and make him get ready. Well above mentioned asshat used to like to download files right before going to school. I'd wait until he was well into the download and open and close the drive door. One bad bit in all of those successful bits was enough to guarantee a failed download. It's the small bits of revenge I enjoyed.

Kind of evil but I'm sure the guy deserved it. Although I cringe at opening the drive door during a read operation since that could occasionally be catastrophic for the contents of the disk. A safer way of screwing with the guy, at least if you cared about what was on the disk at all, would have been picking up the phone on the modem line and hanging up hard. It would have either caused a serious case of line noise for a few seconds or knocked the guy offline.

 

[Nobby-W]

It's a dystopic fantasy though and a badly doctored image. 180MB at that thruput would take about 110 hours. Back in the day, I did downloads that size from time to time and a few were a bit larger. Download managers were key.

I got banned from a Debian mirror once by inadvertently rsyncing the whole thing. I woke up to 18GB of a disk filled with "Why the f- have I got SPARC and Alpha binaries"?

 

[Endless Flight]

I’m always nostalgic about AOL, for no other reason than that’s how I met my wife.

 

[Bunch]

I’m always nostalgic about AOL, for no other reason than that’s how I met my wife.

I never logged on to AOL. I'm pretty sure I still have a disc though..

 

[Endless Flight]

I remember when it was $7.99 a month. The most fun I had wasn’t really surfing the web, it was talking on the AOL forums. It was kind of like the Wild West of forums. They had moderators but I don’t know if they were paid employees or not. They would come in at random and check everything out and move on.

 

[Teyrnon]

I utterly missed out on AOL between dialup bulletin boards, the T1 at work, and my shell account at school I never saw a point and by the time I needed to look for an ISP, there was Mindspring.

 

[Fenris-77]

I'm a luddite. AOL was a thing I knew about, but that's about it. When I started Uni in '96 it was my first time having an email address.

 

[Brock Savage]

I remember when it was $7.99 a month. The most fun I had wasn’t really surfing the web, it was talking on the AOL forums. It was kind of like the Wild West of forums. They had moderators but I don’t know if they were paid employees or not. They would come in at random and check everything out and move on.

Back in the day AOL was great for meeting women. A buddy told me in 1997, "It's the only thing this f-ing box (a PC) is good for."

 

[spittingimage]

I’m always nostalgic about AOL, for no other reason than that’s how I met my wife.

Ugh. I worked for a kiwi ISP for a while and every time someone called up and said they wanted to use the AOL offer for free hours that arrived in the mail, I knew the conversation was going to get ugly real fast.

 

[TristramEvans]

So here's something I don't miss...



Frell, do I LOVE MP3 players. No more lugging around a battery-chugging disc player that skips with the slightest movement, and having to switch discs between songs. This is one area where the future is entirely a net positive.

That said, who the hell uses Itunes? That overly controlling ripoff BS is for chumps.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Coming to Blu-Ray with a 2k restoration.

Thanks for the heads up. Pre-ordered a copy. :-)

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[Séadna]

Jesus! Flashbacks of everybody having Spice Girls pencil cases, school bags, swimming gear, songs on endless repeat in every shop and "Which Spice Girl do you fancy?" debates.

 

[TristramEvans]

Jesus! Flashbacks of everybody having Spice Girls pencil cases, school bags, swimming gear, songs on endless repeat in every shop and "Which Spice Girl do you fancy?" debates.

lol, I imagine you guys had it worse on that side of the pond.

 

[Teyrnon]

Jesus! Flashbacks of everybody having Spice Girls pencil cases, school bags, swimming gear, songs on endless repeat in every shop and "Which Spice Girl do you fancy?" debates.

I was in college during the craze and aside from the occasional reference I barely noticed it was a thing. Britney Spears had more impact on me because a friend's daughter was heavily into her and couldn't pass through a room without chattering about Briteny Spears or vampire novels.

 

[Séadna]

lol, I imagine you guys had it worse on that side of the pond.

Yeah them, Robbie Williams and B*Witched, who also formed part of the "Who do you fancy?" wars, were basically gods.

 

[TristramEvans]

Yeah them, Robbie Williams and B*Witched, who also formed part of the "Who do you fancy?" wars, were basically gods.

I don't think I ever heard of those other two.

It makes me curious what things were big here that never made it over there.

 

[Séadna]

It makes me curious what things were big here that never made it over there.

The examples off the top of my head:
Seinfeld. I mean it was on TV but nobody really watched it. This is the big one, as even today most don't understand the humour.
Cheers.
Twin Peaks.
Ellen
3rd Rock from the Sun
Everybody loves Raymond

There are some shows that had more success relatively over here I think, like Freaks and Geeks.

Most pop music acts made it over I'd say.

Anything not directly pop music or TV probably not.

 

[Bunch]

I worked with search engines in the early 2000's and Britney Spears will always stand out to me because she was the #1 search result for the better part of that decade. Other things came and went but she was like the Northern Star. Constant and fixed as the number one search.

 

[TristramEvans]

The examples off the top of my head:
Seinfeld. I mean it was on TV but nobody really watched it. This is the big one, as even today most don't understand the humour.
Cheers.
Twin Peaks.
Ellen
3rd Rock from the Sun
Everybody loves Raymond

There are some shows that had more success relatively over here I think, like Freaks and Geeks.

Most pop music acts made it over I'd say.

Anything not directly pop music or TV probably not.

I didn't understand the appeal of most of those shows myself (except Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is love, Twin Peaks is life - but that's one I was surprised of it's popularity here). Sitcoms I find, on the whole, to be aimed at a very specific and lowest common denominator audience of a distinct culture with no crossover. Like, I watched two episodes maybe of Everybody Loves Raymond and I thought it was just godawful and miserable. But then I thought the same about the British sitcom from that era "My Hero". There's some cultural elements in both that just don't translate outsidde of some specific target demographic.

 

[Bunch]

I didn't understand the appeal of most of those shows myself (except Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is love, Twin Peaks is life - but that's one I was surprised of it's popularity here). Sitcoms I find, on the whole, to be aimed at a very specific and lowest common denominator audience of a distinct culture with no crossover. Like, I watched two episodes maybe of Everybody Loves Raymond and I thought it was just godawful and miserable. But then I thought the same about the British sitcom from that era "My Hero". There's some cultural elements in both that just don't translate outsidde of some specific target demographic.

They are products of their time. I'm curious what sitcoms will look like in the streaming era.

 

[TristramEvans]

They are products of their time. I'm curious what sitcoms will look like in the streaming era.

It's funny to me seeing recent shows wrestling with different ways of visualizing, in an interesting way, online interactions.

 

[Séadna]

except Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is love, Twin Peaks is life

Twin Peaks was very simple in that unfortunately it was judged too expensive to licence or something. My Dad loves it, I've always meant to watch it.

Yeah I agree on the sitcom thing. It's pretty much the same with soaps. Things like Dallas and so on weren't too big, being replaced by stuff like Coronation Street. I think it's for the same reasons you mentioned.