I'm anti-nostalgic for the late 90s and 00s where white people thought bigotry was over so you had white people saying slurs constantly. There was this cultural mashup of like Chapelle's Show, Mind of Mencia, and South Park/Team America that was either misunderstood by white people as an excuse to be racist or was itself racist and made by white people.
It didn't invent it but it was extremely successful at transmitting those values to the youth at the time. While I agree that the conditions of the time would have produced some other similar media had South Park not existed I also think that if South Park specifically did not exist or was not as effective then the cultural currents could have leaned another way leading up to now. When South Park started Captain Planet had just finished and the children who grew up these two conflicting influences are in their 30's now. The world wouldn't be completely different but the balance of power between climate activists and fascists would probably be less bad than it is now.
grim dark grim dark grim dark everything. god fucking hell that was bleak
yeah, I lost interest in most TV and movies over the last 5 years so I'm a bit out of touch - I basically only watch things that are interesting to me, usually long after they've aired, and at the insistence of others. so "grim dark" being over is almost definitely confirmation/survivorship bias on my part. is capeshit over yet? I was so done with that after watching 30 mins of Iron Man 2.
"Maybe the next trend will be better" I keep thinking to myself until I realize that the real problem is that late-stage capitalism is incapable of producing good entertainment
Battlestar Galactica was great, but its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
My personal theory is that genuine mass media reflects the internal unconscious understanding/desires of the audience. So in that context the gritty dark realism reflects the collective view of the grinding pointlessnedsnif the forever war. As that slowly slipped away we were left with the looming fear of the unknowable but terrible future, hence apocalypse and capeshit, the fear of the future and the heed for a savior. Now that we have covid and climate change us really setting in with the long predicted droughts and catastrophes we will see what sets in. If we start seeing media depicting a positive collective struggle that would be a good sign. Catastrophe has a way of sharpening the mind and bringing out the best in people. Which is where our duty as communists comes in to build social power that creates the possibility for believing in a better future.
That's one thing I like more about anime American TV, there is a fuller range of "light" shows to go with any "dark" shows in any season
i do not miss people smoking indoors. like restaurants having smoking sections, bars/clubs being smoky. it was so normal at the time and the bans seemed so drastic when they started popping off.
but like 5 or so years ago, i was in vegas (not because i wanted to be) and walking through a casino and even though it was practically dead with 30 foot high ceilings and industrial air handlers, the joint was permeated with that stale smoke smell cigs make after days and days and days of smoke. reminded me of how much it inhibits the sense of smell, to where one has no idea how much their clothes/hair/hands reek.
My grandparents chainsmoked in the '90s and it was disgusting. Ashtrays with old cigarettes stuffed into them, ash permeating the wall-to-wall carpeting, blue smoke filling the air. Even my grandfather's buick, the quintessential Stan Kelly car, had multiple ashtrays that were filled with cigarettes. I even heard my grandfather maintaining once that smokers who died of cancer had really just inhaled too much car exhaust. And, of course, he died of throat cancer. I'd also like to thank the scientists working for the tobacco industry who told everyone that cigarettes were safe.
lol car exhaust is extremely poisonous too we're gonna look at car filled streets the same way we look back at smoking indoors :inshallah-script:
The "Lifestyle" ultra-indvidualist anarchism/leftism of the late 90s. Also some of the Cyber leftism I have nostalgia for in terms of experiences but I'm very glad it's gone.
In some ways it kept the left alive and even did some good things like the WTO protests and the beginnings of Internet Piracy. But my god what a deliberate abandonment of both Communist and Anarchist theory of prior generations does to a MF. Took me years to clear the brainworms out. Also some anarchist aesthetics got tarred by association and that's not cool.
Half got sane and joined a real org, the other half went down the Nick Land/Bazinga/4Chan Fascist hellholes at one point or another.
I'm glad the diets of the late 90s/early to mid 2000s are largely gone, especially for women, where the ideal was to get as stick thin as possible. For men you got foolish shit like GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) and the classic "chicken, rice and broccoli". So many eating disorders.
Though the current state of this is not much better, with the steriod culture for men and women being pressured into questionable cosmetic surgery to look like social media influencers.
Seeing people IRL with the popular social media cosmetic work done (lip fillers, cheek fat removal, cheekbone implant, nose job that makes their nose too small for their face) is jarring to me because I understand it exists, but IRL just seems weirdly out of place.
It gives me the same feeling as when I was a kid a and saw a teacher shopping or something outside of school.
The cheek fat and cheekbone stuff looks weird on men in general, makes them look like real life versions of :gigachad-hd:, and not in a good way. Look at Zac Efron and Tom Brady after the work they had done
The bullying and gatekeeping on just about everything. It was in every facet of social life as well as larger significant institutions. For whatever reason it was really important to body check people (particularly new people) in everything. It would be usually this very performative checks too, they were done usually in public and often like ambushes. For whatever reason from the 1990s to the mid 2010s it was "cool" to just be a bully to new people.
From nerd shit like video games and comics, to serious things like regular working jobs to political organizations. It was super prevalent while at the same time everyone was saying they wanted change. It was a strange time, everyone was just a jerk while using “authenticity/keeping it real/keeping the posers out” as a shield for that jerk-y-ness. New guy on the job? Be a jerk to see if he's "tough enough for the gig". Black woman in at the comic shop? Gatekeep her knowledge of Spawn and Lupin The 3rd. Someone is new to leftist thought? Call them an op and a plant until they can quote all of Capital Vol.1.
I remember as well that calling it out made you extra "Weenie Hut Jr." baby for some reason, you bullied for calling out bullying. I remember at the time being "tough on fakers" (not that people used the word "fakers" at the time but you know what I mean) was "cool".
I don't miss that exclusionary mindset at all. It sucked. It sucked to be bullied, it sucked to see bullying, and it sucked having to maintain a faux authenticity when trying new things. It was a weird time that growth and growing was meant to be in the shadows, which prevented a lot of people from growing.
My general assumption is bullying/gatekeeping was our grand scale Matrix social software trying to maintain the status quo. I am glad we got a more inclusive (in the non-:LIB: meaning of the word) update in the 2015s and beyond.
Advertisements designed to be as loud, bouncy and aggressive as possible in an attempt to be noticed and remembered. The current trend of “every ad is the weird avant garde ad” is only slightly better.
Of course, I would rather not have ads at all…
HEAD ON APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD
I'm still unclear why/how they were selling giant gluesticks for your forehead. Was it some kind of skincare thing?
It was homeopathy. The ad wasn’t allowed to lie, so the writers compromised by simply not saying what the product does (nothing).
The power of placebo. Placebo effect even works when you know it's probably a placebo which is interesting.
Head-on is homeopathic headache remover that they can't advertise as working to stop headaches. Superstition is useful sometimes I guess if it actually "works"
Anime I guess
I liked it when I was younger (and to be fair, 80s and 90s anime hit different)
but now its just... idk, so offputting, and sexualized. I definitely feel that anti-nostalgia towards it.
Anime changed a lot over the years, and became more and more generic. Nowadays, most shows are made to advertise a manga - especially since the switch to a seasonal format around 15 years ago - even shows like Gundam are given 13 episodes until the execs look approvingly/disapprovingly at the sales and decide if they continue with it.
There's still stuff worth watching like say the new Gundam, Bocchi the Rock, Mob Psycho, Spy x Family, but like 50% of all shows made now are shovelware isekai and/or romcoms.
Though the sexualization is not really that common in the better shows, there's still the one or two incel bait shows each season that are also objectively kinda ass, but always gather a way too large viewership from western weebs.
Eh, agree to disagree. and, I mean, I know I'm being anti-nostalgic towards it, but just,
Gundam, Bocchi the Rock, Mob Psycho, Spy x Family
I still hate all of those. Not that I've exhaustively given all of them a full chance; I went through a period where I gave my friend's recs a full three episode chance, but I started hating the style, so even these newer ones (that I get exposure to because my friends + fiance have watched some of them), are just very anti-nostalgic. I can come up with specific complaints about specific parts of those shows, but I think the deeper issue is that I just hate the 'style' and 'vibe' now.
My point isn't that 'anime is bad now', its that it doesn't appeal to me anymore. Even the stuff I used to like is now 'cringey' to me. (which, I'm not saying I judge you or think you're cringe if you like Sailor Moon or w/e, its that I can't stand it, even if I used to like it)
Though, I also dislike like 95% movies and shows these days as well, so I think I've gotten a lot pickier about what media I like as I've gotten older.
but its been like, a decade since I've actually enjoyed watching an anime series, whereas I've found at least a few western movies or shows I've liked in the last 10 years.
If nostalgia is a state of melancholic reflection on and desire for better times, then maybe you're talking about excitedly yeeting the old shit. In which case my feelings about my pre-transition self work perfectly. I killed that boy and I am so fucking happy about it.
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Thinking that Nietzsche is smart. This was really a thing in the '90s and 2000s (also—saying "aughts" instead of 2000s, good riddance!). I think since :jordan-eboy-peterson: has embraced Nietzsche so thoroughly, everyone else has basically stopped talking about him, except to say that he sucks. In the '90s people also argued that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi, but his fans just said that his sister was misrepresenting his ideas. Losurdo's gigantic book on Nietzsche has put that idea completely to rest. The dude was 100% a Nazi.
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Ubiquitous homophobia
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social media. Currently only tiktok and instagram are acceptable to libs, and how long is that going to last? Only hexbear is acceptable to us!
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thinking Elon Musk will save the world, a major thing from around 2010 to only recently
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socialism being so thoroughly crushed in the imperial core that it wasn't even mentioned, as far as I recall, on left-leaning websites in the '90s and 2000s (anyone remember gnn.tv?)
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my honest impression is that kids these days are generally nicer to each other
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chuds and libs have been so relentlessly mocked about "human nature" and "civility" that they rarely if ever mention it anymore
saying “aughts” instead of 2000s
I still do this, just try and stop me!
Calling everything "gay" was so lame that even South Park could tell it was a cultural dead-end
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Cringe culture. It's still around, but it's definitely past its heyday.
Him "Oh you like that band?"
Me "Yeah I guess."
Him "Name three of their albums"
I miss getting grilled on random shit for no reason.
accidentally made the mistake of revealing my dad had an xbox to one of those guys in highschool. big regrets!!!!
Rage comics from the mid to late aughts. I hated them then and I hate them even more now that they have made a resurgence. I guess the ugliest shitty ms paint art and the most absolute dumb fuck arguments possible really resonate with people.
Using pictures of cute little animals to make your noxious beliefs more palatable to impressionable teens is messed up. Remember unpopular opinion puffin? All of the opinions were like "We should bring back eugenics tee hee."
But at least advice animals haven't made a come back like fucking rage comics. I am just so sick of seeing le epic fash slash nordic beard man and his terrible carnival barker moustache and his stupid beard.
Some stuff from them is iconic, like trollface. Wojaks on the other hand are the most annoying thing on the modern internet.
I guess they are an evolution from rage comics, so they're not without sin. Retroactively, they were usually mid at best and bad because they got me into Reddit.
I am 100% lumping rage comics with wojacks, soyjacks, feels guy, tradwife, pepes etc. Basically any of that crudely drawn ideologically lazy cryptofash garbage. They all sprang from the same source, the heavily encrusted and fetid gooch of the internet.
The entire decade of the 2000s. Absolute cultural black hole, it makes me jokerified just knowing we allowed it all to happen.
Though tbh I’d love to make a podcast where we go over each third of every year that decade to figure out why that specific era was uniquely draining
Also my only memory of the 2000s was eating playdoh once but my point still stands
This is a fantastically dark compelling premise and I want to explore it, no joke. I have a wealth of surreal, harshly militaristic image/vibe based memories from early childhood onward.
