What’s a thing you miss that you’re 90% sure was objectively awful?

Reddit.

Those square pizzas in the school lunchroom.
- I raise you the hexagonal "Mexican" pizza's
  
  I remember choking those babies down. Definitely not my fave, but I made it work.
- They don't sell Totinos Party Pizza in your area?
  
  Biggest false equivalence ever. :D

The amount of times I tried to download a tv show on limewire and it was just bestiality...

Borat
- Explain?
  
  Very nice

Being able to eat, like, 8 meals a day and not feel like shit that night or the next day.
At some point my metabolism finally started to slow down.
- I had the “hollow leg” of my youth clear into my 40s. But by 45 I could feel it noticeably collapsing, and by the age of 50 it was almost completely gone.
  In my late 20s I polished off 7 full racks of ribs in one sitting. These days I have trouble getting completely through one full rack.
  
  7 racks? Wtf?
  
  I was the same, but now that I'm working my ass off at 54, I struggle to get enough calories down the hatch. Feel like I'm 20 again.
- Pizza. Nightly.

Do I miss physical gaming magazines? Yes, yes I do
Were they awful? Content wise, no, I actually believe transitioning to web magazines turned the whole industry into a shit show
I loved the game posters that came folded into the magazines.
So what was bad about them?
Well they pushed you too collect them.
That amount of paper cannot possibly be good for the environment

The Gameboy Advance. Fuck you. It was like a mini Super Nintendo in your hand. Suck my dick. Fuck you.
- I'm laughing and I don't even understand the random hostility in this image LOL.
  
  It's a quote from a YouTube person (Liam, of the old Super Best Friends channel)
  .... Edited atop an actual GBA magazine advert cuz that's funny.

Lunchables. I loved them as a kid but they are terrible
- Also lead

Orbitz, a novelty beverage with little floaty gummy spheres
Tasted terrible, looked disgusting but I loved the look, texture and sensation. Haven't found anything yet that matches
- There’s always boba.
  Oh and there’s these Aloe Vera drinks I get at gas stations that have Aloe pulp in them that I’m pretty sure 99% of people would think are nasty as fuck BUT they’re so good imo. You can chew the pulp or just crush it with your tongue in your mouth. I wish I knew what they’re called but I only get them occasionally cuz I don’t like to drink my calories. But they come in a square green bottle
  
  Yeah but the boba sink to the bottom
  Orbitz did all this research to get the little balls to be the exact same density as the water so they'd hover in the middle

Phish tours

Life before cellphones and internet.
Did you know in 1990 only .25% of the world’s population (12.5 million) had cellphones and only .05% (2.8 million) had internet?
It feels like we sacrificed local community and connection for global information overload and disconnection sometimes.
- GenX, here. You are so very, very wrong. Phones and internet have made anxiety disorders endemic. We’re constantly bombarded with information, alerts, opinions, information and misinformation…
  Young people have never experienced what it’s like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable. To get answering machine messages that you had no obligation to immediately respond to.
  I’m in big tech and helped develop all this shit. We made it addictive on purpose. I’d love to go back to how things were in the 90s, and I’m not waxing nostalgic. Things were objectively better before all this crap.
  
  Been talking about this a lot lately. Older millennial here. I loved that brief little slice of time I got to experience, when DSL / cable was around and no longer "pay by the minute" and someone answering a phone wouldn't kick you off.
  Web pages loaded fast enough. They were fine. Downloads? Just be patient. No problem. WoW and friends, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 2142, all ran just fine.
  But mostly...
  I miss when the Internet was a place you went all its own, it wasn't everywhere, it wasn't inside of literally everything. You had to "visit" it. Logging on meant you could also log off. It didn't follow your every move.
  Handheld game consoles were still airgapped, the main ones had it optional.
  People had blogs for fun, they used the web to express themselves and share ideas and stupid subcultures and memes. It didn't "matter."
  It wasn't "the commercial internet." It was just The Web. It was somewhere else.
  Everything wasn't built on inescapable addiction algorithms that follow you everywhere, and have already your shadow identity shared to innumerable servers because someone knows someone who used one of those services and you were in a group picture once.
  For the younger kids, there was a time when your entire life from birth wasn't shared without your consent for the world to see. (How many people really understood privacy?)
  Disconnecting now feels more impossible than ever, it takes a huge effort not unlike fasting, and mental overload is the norm.
  So much of it is just corporatized, weaponized, and predatory.
  
  I'm a millennial who's old enough to remember those days. It's an absolutely huge difference, though at least if you're expecting a phone call, you don't have to scuttle your whole day sitting by the landline.
  
  meh. yeah it's been bad for mental health but... what did you read while shitting, the back of the shampoo bottle?
  
  I don't think you understand what anxiety is if you think being totally unreachable as a solution to modern anxiety...
  
  Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. I’m a Xennial and also workin tech. You and I feel the same but I don’t think we’re in the majority. It might not be 90% but I think we are the ever shrinking minority that feels this way.
- Oh we killed local community before that
  
  Suburbs and freeways, man. :(
- in 1990... only .05% (2.8 million) had internet?
  In 1990, the World Wide Web wasn't even available outside of CERN/university usage yet. That didn't become widely available to the public until 1993, and the first ISP would have only been established a year prior, in 1989.
  This, to me, is like saying originally that only Edison had light bulbs in January of 1880.
  
  Internet is the interconnected networks and WWW is the open system of interconnected pages that can be accessed through internet.
  Before WWW you had online portals and BBS.
  Its is more like saying that cars existed and were used before of the production of the Ford Model T.
  
  We got broadband super early for the UK, I think around late 2000, as my dad was part of the 21CN team at BT.
  It was surreal how fast that seemed back then and being an 11 year old kid with that instant access to a whole web that seemed almost exclusively populated by adults if not late teens at that moment.
- In 1990 my father negotiated a new contract for himself, with IBM. He's a computer programmer consultant that can program in 72 languages including Cobol and Lisp.
  The one thing he absolutely insisted upon was that he wouldn't have to carry a pager. He still refuses to carry a cell phone.
  
  The more people know about tech, the more they want to avoid it.
  
  The one thing he absolutely insisted upon was that he wouldn’t have to carry a pager. He still refuses to carry a cell phone.
  I've recently started a new job, and it's the first I was unable to negotiate no pager, but I was a 'motivated applicant'.
  Wow, does it suck. This is also the LAST job I will have with an expectation of interrupted sleep and never-fucking-ending weekend bullshit. I will frame it as a reliability/change-control question that if after-hours changes are required, then the customer has a broken H.A set-up.

I miss old PC Games from the early 90's.
I've reinstalled all that I remember and they sucked, but back then, they didn't.
- One of my friends found his old Gamecube with a copy of 007! So of course we had to have all the boys over to have a little tournament complete with 2 liter sodas and chips and cheap pizza.
  Man I forgot how rough around the edges those earlier FPS games really were. They were super bare bones, with janky at best controls, and mediocre hit registration. At least the maps were still good.
- Worms!
  Although I just looked that one up and they have been making new versions of it continuously so I don't know if it really counts as an old 90s game anymore.
  
  It counts as a 90s game, but not an early 90s game.
  Games really started to get much, MUCH better in '94 and '95.
- Check out the remake of C&C!
  Also Commandos still rock IMO!
  
  I played through it recently. It is one of the few EA titles where I will concede that they did a good job and that I feel I got my moneys worth.
  
  Some of them got open sourced btw:
  https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2229890/view/502818210084553731?l=english
- Try age of empires too!
- Police Quest.
  
  Oh god, those old adventure games.
  Where doing things in the wrong order (which was explained nowhere) would lead to permadeath, or worse, getting stuck with no way to progress and no hint what you missed in a previous area you can't return to.
  All I remember from police quest is getting killed or fired for missing a step at a routine traffic stop, or forgetting to check the tire pressure every time you start driving.
  In Leisure Suit Larry 1 you straight up get killed without warning if you step onto a street (run over by a car) or into a back alley (mugged and clubbed to death), or take a cab with wine in your inventory (cab driver takes it, drinks it and crashes).
  Fun times!
- !retrogaming@lemmy.world
- I don't know about early 90's, but games from mid and late 90's are bangers.
  From early 90's it's probably just Wolfenstein 3D and Doom that were very good.
  
  Doom was '95
  
  The best game of the early 90s was "Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge" (later translated and re-released with dumbed-down mechanics as "Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny"), and I'm willing to die on that hill.

Kid Cuisine

Windows 3.1 and running dual nodes of TAG BBS.

1990s internet. Yeah it had to start somewhere and a lot of them were butt-ugly for design. Now 2000s internet up until roughly 2009, that's the shit.
- I always thought whatever generation comes next will have it so good, because the i ternet is fast and well developed and shit. But no, the internet actually peaked in 2000. With all the ads now, it's barely usable anymore. Does anyone remember when you would go to a website and not immediately click it away because it's just a clickbait ad filled minefield?
  
  I remember websites having links to other websites that weren't really affiliated and that being as effective as an searches. You clicked through the internet like it was a file folder system managed by thousands of html authors playing the telephone game.
  
  There's this seach engine called Wiby that only displays old websites. I've used a virtual version of Windows XP to browse random pages through Wiby just to re live the feeling of the web feeling more like a library and less like a night market.
  
  There's a split opinion on when exactly the internet peaked at. You'll have some people say 2007, others will say 2009 and then there's those who'll even say mid-2000s like 2005. My personal opinion is that I think it peaked at 2007. Social Media was fairly at its infancy with Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace all a few years old each by that point. Cell phone technology was still primarily 3G. The Messenger Era was at its peak but was also starting to steadily go downhill.
  2009 was actually when the internet started to corrode and it began with Facebook acquiring FriendFeed and that cracked open the idea that corporations could take control of the open web, which they eventually try and do as the years followed.

My alcohol addiction
- Especially in our current timeline. My alcoholic tendencies are at an all time high. Sigh.
  But damn it feels better than being sober and seeing the idiotic timeline come to pass.
  I felt this one in my bones.
  
  well with my tendencies, i’ve found that alcohol doesn’t help anymore with the current timeline….
  there’s just too much awful shit and being drunk is just frustrating because then i’m dumb and still in this stupid timeline….
  i used to be able to make problems disappear (for a minute), but now they’re still right there, alcohol just makes me feel more stuck
  
  It makes your personal timeline worse, unfortunately. I know it's hard to believe, but sobriety can make life significantly more tolerable. The problems are still very much there, but most of the underlying anxiety is caused by the alcohol, not treated by it.
  It's like cigarettes - it only feels so good because first it made you feel worse. It's not even just withdrawal, it's craving. When you believe you have a "make everything better" button, it is really hard not to push it.
  
  If you're drinking you're spending time and money that could be used for better purposes.
  DM me if you want help.

A buddy of mine owned a video game store that I worked at for a bit. The pay was crappy and the hours were unstable and random, but I do miss working there.
- If I could have any job from my youth it'd be the go kart track.
  It was actually a ton of physical work, people were just as shitty back then as they are now, I got paid less than minimum wage ($5/hr in cash compared to $7.something in taxable income so it wasn't too bad) and the owners were this crazy white-trash couple who screamed and yelled at everyone including customers.
  But damn man that job was so much fun. I miss running tournaments and hanging out with the regulars and fixing karts and getting almost unlimited free track time.
- I do miss stores like that. We had so many random stores like video games, comic book stores, record stores and things like that. Even then, they wouldn't get rich there, but they at least seemed passionate about what they sold and their store was also kind of a hangout spot. Now rent has gone up like crazy and they got replaced by apple stores and other garbage shops.
- As a teen, I worked at a restaurant as a cook. The pay was terrible, the hours were unforgiving, the amount of cuts, bruises, and burns I got deserved hazard pay, and my coworkers were overly dramatic backstabbers. Liked the cooking and getting through a huge rush of customers, loved that when I left for the day my responsibilities and thoughts about work were behind me.
  
  Yeah, I can see this. My analogy was working in a campus dining hall. Everyone else hated working dish room but I loved it. So satisfying to keep up with a lunch rush, feed the machine as fast as people got done eating.
  The floor was always covered with slime and water, but once I learned to walk on it, I could walk on anything without slipping for years after. It was noisy and hectic and rushed, but we could skate in with a huge cart of dishes and gave the satisfaction of turning into clean dishes and going back out almost as fast. Speed was paramount so even if you dumped a cart of hundreds of dishes, that’s just teasing, clean it up and work even faster to catch up again. FOOD FIGHTS! Every day someone would start a food fight in the dishroom, but since we were all covered in mess anyway no one cared. I remember it as a fun break from studying, with side effects for great balance and handling slippery floors. I imagine my roommate remembers a lot more stench on me and my clothes than I ever noticed, and I’m sure it would have been a horrible job if it lasted longer or if I had to work more hours.
  
  I worked at a fast food joint in the early 90s where often I was the only person running the kitchen during lunch rush because we were understaffed. It was hectic and utterly batshit and the pay was minimum wage, but those times when we were super busy I felt like a goddamned superhero because I would just get into the zone and be the eye of the hurricane managing the chaos with grace and elegance. It felt so damned good during but especially after. It was a shit job and I was glad to move on to something better, but it had its moments.
- I worked at a dial-up ISP in the late 1990s and it was the most enjoyable job I've ever had (it also helped considerably that we could smoke inside). Sadly it paid really poorly and they weren't willing to make me full-time because of budgetary concerns, so I was ultimately forced to take a job that paid double and had great benefits but that I hated.

Trusting the government
- Ha. Very true. The people that were clued in knew you couldn't trust the gov't, but the lack of easy information meant most people had no idea.

Connecting to dialup and listening to computers scream at each other over the phone line.
- Yes that was bad. And it was always so loud for some reason. But I'd argue better than waiting in silence.
  
  I'd agree. I kind of developed a Pavlovian response of excitement to the noise. Back then though, the Internet was nothing like it is now though. There was a time when we didn't even have websites, we had stuff like Internet Relay Chat (still around actually), Usenet, and subscription services like America Online. There was Gopher, but it really wasn't the same as the web.

Original recipe shamrock shakes. They must be awful to my palate now, but I wanna know what the original tasted like

2005 runescape
- try out lost city 2004scape!
  
  Yeah I did and that's what showed me it ain't exactly as I remember haha. Without the quality of life updates it's just brutal

Working in a bar
I love people. I'm a people-person, but I kno know that I am remembering it through rose-tinted lenses
Most customers were average, a few were great, a fair number were dicks
But the hours, the late nights, the cost to my own social life, the lousy pay, the inability to eat normal meals at normal times, all of that shit takes a toll
But I still have some fond memories and occasionally think about opening a bar with my woman
Oh, and I was running a place with a long-term partner. Doing that shit was the final nail in the coffin of our relationship, so fuck that...
- Good Bartenders make a place.
  We Salute You.
- Great answer, exactly the kind I was looking for.

The smell of leaded gasoline.
The smell of a fine cigar: I quit smoking 14 years ago but I miss that.
And I'm 200% sure they were awful.
- That 5 minutes of smoking where you don’t do anything but think and enjoy a pieceful smoke… I miss that as well. I quit smoking 4 years ago.
  
  Sitting on the porch with my morning coffee and first smoke of the day during the summer was always a wonderful experience. Doing the same in 30F in the winter, not so much.
  
  You're making me feel like I miss it but I haven't even started yet 💀
- leaded gasoline
  Few memories trigger a nostalgic response in me than this. Ahhh, I'm in heaven
  
  smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory
- this might shock you, but I have never smelled leaded gasoline. I'm too young, it got banned before I was born.
  what did it smell like?
- Are you sure you're not just thinking of the smell of carburetor engines? I think I know the smell you're thinking of and its the exhaust of a vintage carburetor engine.
  Was there really a different smell for leaded gasoline?
  
  No, it's the smell at the pump. Nothing to do with how the engine feeds itself. Yeah, leaded gasoline smelled different. "Sweeter" or something. Maybe it wasn't the lead, and maybe whatever replaced the lead inside modern gasoline is what smells different, but it definitely isn't the same.
  It's not like gasoline smelled better, it's just that I remember smelling that smell when the entire family went on summer holidays and we kids were allowed to stretch our legs while our dad gassed up the car. Good times and good memories!

I was an 80’s kid, and we had the best Saturday morning cartoons.
Transformers, GI Joe, Scooby Doo, Thundar the Barbarian, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Superfriends, Hurculoids, etc.
- I loved Saturday morning cartoons! I used to get up at 630 to watch them all. It made me so happy 😊

Windows XP.
A security nightmare, had more unfinished backends than a plexiglass gloryhole.... But goddamn could that machine run
- People remember Service Pack 2 as the definitive version. Base and Service Pack 1 XP was awful.
  Service Pack 3 refined it a bit better.
  
  I had the Student XP cracked version. That baby was smoooth
- Windows ME too. Or maybe it was just playing Red Alert 2 on it.
  
  That was my first Windows and it was unstable as hell. Barely had anything installed on that PC and yet it had random blue screens and crap like that. Really scared me as a PC beginner.
  
  Fucking red alert, man. Our computer couldn't handle it, so it would take 20 minutes to build a single refinery as the individual frames t. i. c. k. e. d. b. y. Meanwhile, our parents' rule was we had to switch who was using the computer every 30 minutes. That fucking sucked.
- Early 90s.....I think you mean windows 3.1, bro.

Lemmy.ml
- half my feed is about lemmy.ml today - begging, censorship, being awful....

Like many others have said, the old, lost internet was really something special. Every website was crude and janky, poorly formatted for some specific resolution that you weren't using, and both animated clipart and midis were exciting to collect. There were websites dedicated to them. My brother and I used to fill folders on our desktop with sparkling or flaming banners, signs that read "Under Construction" and more. Same with midis. I'll never forget the first time I discovered Sublime's Santaria in midi form. It may have been my first favorite song.
I wish I could properly articulate what that all felt like. It was a similar feeling to collecting Pokémon cards as a kid. Everything was just a neat spectacle on the mid-90s internet. Then over time, as everything modernized and monetized, it lost that weird magic and became what it is today. I can't remember the last time I gave a shit about exploring a website. I no longer come across spooky animated images of a skeleton peering out of murky water and excitedly tuck it away for future viewing pleasure. The entire thing sucks now, but it probably sucked then, too.
- the internet before advertising, before it became a utility, before it became ubiquitous and essential... When it was just that weird thing that nerds toyed around with..
  Gods those were the days.
  No search engines, Had to find websites on the internet yellow pages, via a web ring, or because someone gave you a slip of paper with an address, that was always written out to include the http://.. and visitor counters and guest books.. people always filled out the guest book, and it wasnt spam, viruses, or bullshit. actual, legitimate comments from the majority of visitors.
  all at the blazing speed of 28.8k
  and now I am unbearably depressed and sad.
- 🎁🫶

Lawn Darts
- I loved those things when I was a kid. So much fun to throw. We also had metal horse shoes
  
  Are there plastic horse shoes now?

My first vehicles as an adult in the mid to late 90s. Objectively cheap used jalopies that I bought for a few hundred dollars but were loved because they were mine.
My first car was a 1981 Dodge Aries K-Car. The front bumper got ripped off by a guy running with no headlights while I was delivering pizzas and I literally just threw the bumper on the back seat and continued on with my deliveries, then went to my local pick-a-part and took a replacement off a different one and bolted it on myself. You just couldn't kill it.
I eventually replaced it with an 1984 Sentra that I bought at auction. I called it the "relationship killer" because the passenger door didn't open from the outside so there was no way to "open the door for your date to get in first", and half the time it didn't go into reverse, so since my dates didn't know how to drive standard transmissions, they were the one that had to push us out of parking spaces. It honked when turning left for some reason.
My point being, when things were wrong with them, they were cheap enough that you could just go to the local pick-a-part and get replacement parts. If it wasn't starting for some reason, you could stick a screw driver in the carburetor valve to give it more air. You could "own" and "tinker" on those things in ways that doing so in a new car would terrify us.
- My first car was my Dad’s old Chevette: we’d occasionally go on drives with a family of 6 plus dog. 6 people learned to drive a stick on that little car. My brothers and I started learning how to work on cars by installing an eight track player. At one point I replaced the springs and didn’t need a spring compresser. My little brother who got more into fixing cars said it’s great to work on because “it’s the only car I can pull the transmission and hold it one handed while still working on it”.
  Even at the time, we all knew it was a crappy car, but we all learned to drive on it, all learned to fix cars on it, and we kept it on the road far longer than it deserved, with far more miles.
- Man I had my handful of these end of the line vehicles, loved them. I had one car so beaten up by me and my buddies, when it finally died one day I just left it on the side of the road and never saw it again - couldn’t afford to tow it and fix it and would have cost more than it was worth. I pour out a cold one for you, old ride. That one’s name was Blue Goose.
  
  Those old beaters contain the best memories. Vehicles today are just kind of soulless. (IMO)

E-cards. I got at least some cards for my birthday...

My Uncle.

Ice cream.

Websites with frames.
- And the crucial "Break out of frames!" link which I always appreciated
- Xanga, anyone?

Hey OP, limewire lives on in Soulseek
It's still running to this day, i use it alll the time
- I've dabbled with slsk.
  Is there any option to run it in docker on something like a NAS?
  
  https://github.com/slskd/slskd
- How safe is it compared to limewire? Like how do they ensure everything is what they say it is and not something malicious is misleading?
  
  Soulseek itself is FOSS, it's fine. If you're worried about the other person's downloads, just practice safety. It doesn't hide extensions, so no worries about elmos-got-a-gun-weird-al.mp3.exe making your system run cryptominers.
  
  No it's p2p foss
  If you scan your downloads it should be fine
- I'll check it out!

Come to think of it, I miss school and I miss the military. They were both godawful, but I was young.
- You miss consistent structure
  
  Nah. I just miss my youth.

Being absolutely sure about everything.
- Kids can be so annoying with that.
  
  Not just kids...

Going out with friends between 1991 and 1997. It was a great time looking back, but most night probably were just a lot of (underage) drinking and not much else.

not being on ADHD and depression meds
- Can't relate. Life is way better when your brain works almost how it's supposed to

Only knowing small TVs. Step by step, displays have inarguably improved massively, and I do love my giant OLED flatscreen. But watching TV was still great fun in the before times, people still watched the hell out of it, so can we say it brings people more joy now? Or is it just technically and visually better?
I think if you're the kinda person watching beautiful premium shows, that's an experience you couldn't really get before. But I like TV that I can have on in the background, while I'm doing the dishes, and now we're expected to pay attention to details on screen. Back when half the audience had tiny, grainy or monochrome displays, shows were written to suit listening as much as watching. And it's not just scripts, shoddy visuals allowed costumes, sets and design that was evocative but cheap, in a way that cannot pass muster today.
And by comparison, it's reduced the justification for going to cinema, and even kinda made the real world look bad. It used to be worth going somewhere in person because it would look infinitely better than seeing it on a screen. But now, it can actually be a disappointment, as the carefully composed filmed version with post production actually looks more impressive than irl. It's the Connoisseurs Paradox, has it really deepend my pleasure, or merely raised my standards so much that I'm actually less satisfied?
- I think the same can be applied for personal computers and smartphones. Mundane things were so fun on those devices.

The wait before things worked.
Yes, it's better to get what you want no delay. But the pace of life, the rhythm, has changed. I'm old, it's true, but I'm still gonna throw it out there.
Yes, it's 90% better now. But I miss waiting.
- Just put windows on a laptop from a few years ago and you can revisit that feeling. Haha
- If you really like waiting I could type out only half my--
  
  comment and make you wait for the second half.
- Just install your OS on a hard drive

My ex.

Candy cigarettes.
Bad tasting sugar. Trains you for holding a real one.
But they were at the gas station a mile from home and near a park. Freedom from family and responsibilities. Just spending time with friends, eating candy, enjoying the sun shine. Dreaming of smoking.

The 2000's.
- shit compared to the last 15 years, the 2000s were a cakewalk

Little Caesar's as a traditional pizza parlor.
- The old pizza hut was better
  
  My friends and I hit up the pizza hut regularly and would just hang out playing cruisin' USA and whatever fighting cabinet they had set up in the pickup waiting area. Never once got pizza there.
  The employees must have hated our guts, but they never kicked us out so we couldn't have been that bad.
  
  I have fond memories of Little Caesar's and Pizza Hut for very different reasons and neither taste or feel like I remember from being a kid. Not sure how much is being older and how much is the two companies going cheaper on ingredients and labor.
  
  No chance, Pizza Hut was gut-rumbler food and Caesar's had better breadsticks. Amazing breadsticks!
- Pizza! Pizza!
- I can't ever look or taste a little caesar's pizza the same way again. The last time I had one was back in 2018 and they tasted so dry and you get maybe three seconds of pizza before it is all just dryness mushing together. Definitely was better as a kid.

Random things I liked as a kid. I was obsessed with Spy Kids for a bit.

Let's make it 100%. Dial up noise, window XP startup and shutdown tune
- Nah they had a vibe, no shame in enjoying them

I miss my first two cars. The first was a 1989 Dodge Daytona which was probably the worst car ever made and it only lasted 6 months before the head gasket blew. The second was a 1995 Ford Escort LX sedan. This was the car that I taught myself how to drive manual transmission on. It was more reliable than the Daytona, but it still had a ton of quirks like shorts in the wiring harness in the steering column --so much so that I learned which pins to short out to hot wire it lol. I miss both of those cars because of the sense of freedom they provided to get away from an emotionally abusive home life.
- That Daytona looked like the KITT you had at home tho. Still looked pretty cool. I know nothing about the car at all, but I like the look of it.

Metz Black
Was the king of alchopops

All my friend's parents smoked when I was younger, but mine didn't so I always associated the smell of cigarettes with meeting my friends. I absolutely hate the smell today, but I still get a flash of nostalgia when I smell cigarette smoke.
- There is one specific cigarette that reminds me of my first boss when I got into IT. She mentored me for a few years and taught me so much about being in IT, and more generally in a professional environment. My entire career up to this point has been built on the foundation she built. I'm just below a C level position now and I'm not even 30 yet.
  But I've long since forgotten what cigarettes she smoked, and it's been a few years since I've stopped myself. But every once and a while I meet someone who smokes them and the smell will shunt me back to that first shitty job and everything that's happened since then. It's like when Ego tries the food at the end of Ratatouille.
- I used to loathe the smell of ciggies, especially when it lingered in fabrics and on surfaces. My parents didn't smoke and I knew it was bad for people.
  Now I like the smell of fresh ciggies :/

Dude limewire was great. Nice logo, good color scheme, had pretty much everything. Other things have just gotten better in some ways, and worse in others. (Torrents are often way better quality, but it was nice being able to search limewire vs. searching the web and wading through sketchy torrent sites).
- Mind you downloading things on limewire could be sketchy too
  
  Tbh, that was part of the appeal. You accidentally download the wrong thing and your computer throws an error message that you never get to read because it shuts down too quick and you know you fucked up. I can't explain it, but the danger was part of the fun.
  
  Yes for sure! But if you didn't download executables or other files that could contain code, you were usually ok.
  The crazy thing about it is people got digital music from all kinds of sources back then - mix CDs, recordings, etc, and would create the title/artist/album tags by hand, so you'd see all kinds of wrong information.
  Like you could probably download "Dancing in the Moonlight - Van Morrison.mp3" on limewire, but really you'd be getting either "Moon Dance" by Van Morrison, "Dancing in the Moonlight" by King Crimson, or rarely, something else entirely.

Windows 98
Windows XP
Dialup
The Old Internet aka when 90% of it was html and shockwave flash
Weird childhood obsessions; some were good, some were bad, some became things that defined me as an adult.
A lot of the edutainment games I played as a child. I actually went back and installed them to see what they were like through the eyes of an adult. There were a few that were still fun, but as you might be able to guess, most were pretty shitty.
That said, there have been a few things that ended up being 100% worth revisiting. CRT monitors, for an example, are unironically still kinda awesome. I just wouldn't replace my main monitors with one.
- The edutainment games were great! I still remember one where you would fight robots through a factory to build your vehicle that you would race against the villain. It was all about bigger engines being more powerful but weighty, larger tires and their racing characteristics vs. smaller tires, airplane wing styles... I think it's why my brother is an engineer now, lol.
  
  The ones I had were pretty shitty, lol. Like, I had some good ones like Zoombinis or Freddi Fish, but most of them were stuff like "Milly's Math House".
- I, unfortunately, have had all nostalgia for WinXP removed after having to support it in corporate environments. I wish I could say that was a decade ago, but no, I'm still supporting it periodically.
  
  RIP
- For me I'd put the old Internet and the edutainment games in the good category -- most were pretty good, only some were bad that I can remember.
  Although Gmail, digg, and reddit pretty much changed the game for what was possible on the Internet.

Banana Cow

Pretending I could make something or my life...

Check out Soulseek. I recommend the client nicotine+

Undertale fandom — I'm no longer part of it, I'm not interested in becoming part of it again, and it was awful, but I kinda miss it.
- From what I understand it got very wild after a time, I can see the appeal if I look at it from the right angle