Limewire.
My ex-wife it’s been six years since she left. She cheated on me, got knocked up and took off with the boyfriend.
She was super religious. She treated me like garbage but she prayed all the time.
All this time and sometimes I think of her coming back. I know better but my heart doesn’t.
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
so brutal!
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.
meh. yeah it’s been bad for mental health but… what did you read while shitting, the back of the shampoo bottle?
Sometimes yeah, or your bathroom had a magazine rack
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 settings anyway?)
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 don’t think you understand what anxiety is if you think being totally unreachable as a solution to modern anxiety…
I’m gonna venture he means being totally unreachable…
… by your boss on your day off.
Nah. “Young people have never experienced what it’s like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable…”
That is explicitly what OP said. To be totally unreachable in the literal sense can easily be a source of anxiety on its own.
Ah I see, yeah you’re right!
That is something that occurs to me too. It’s weird to me now, imagining couples separating to go to work or whatever, and you just gotta believe everything is gonna be fine, and if there were an emergency, someone has to be near the right landline.
Although I grew up with earlier cellphones and pagers, I got my first cell way later than a lot of highschool kids.
But yes, definitely, If me and my wife couldn’t reach each other during the day, that’d be a ton of anxiety! The world’s too insane these days to not have rapid communication on hand.
I only wish technology evolved as a tool for the user and the people, rather than primarily as content consumption and surveillance devices.
Then it would be more normal to have a setup like we do: We chat on Signal and can send our location voluntarily and it stays between us, without a dozen third parties quietly listening in, analyzing, and selling that information.
I do however, think there would also be a certain serene peace in being unreachable by undesirable contacts but not by loved ones.
For example, it’s dystopian how non-emergency jobs evolved to expect that they can just zip a message to you whenever they feel like, and you’re almost coerced to receive it and respond, and setting boundaries against that can be risky. It brings an unwanted cop or nanny into our personal lives.
Oh we killed local community before that
Suburbs and freeways, man. :(
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
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.
I like to call this the wild West of the internet. I miss it.
ReallyGoodSong.mp3.exe
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.
Predevloped brain. Like speeding is fun. 👹
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.
If you’re drinking you’re spending time and money that could be used for better purposes.
DM me if you want help.
This stupid timeline doesn’t deserve the benefit of sobriety.
No, you deserve the benefits of sobriety.
Sorry bub, but I do not exist in isolation from reality.
So, you’re saying that the money you could be sending to refugee kids is better spent buying you booze?
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.
You’re making me feel like I miss it but I haven’t even started yet 💀
Don’t.
Because what he left out is that for those 5 minutes of peaceful enjoyable smoking, you have to endure the rest of the day craving, smelling like dog shit, getting an earful from your supervisor at work because you’re constantly out for a smoke, spending your life’s savings at the tobacconist, and driving 20 miles in the middle of the night to find a pack of smokes in a convenience store in the middle of the night when all the other stores are closed. Not to mention long term health issues of course.
That’s an expensive 5 minutes of enjoyment, trust me on that one.
Also, you get the exact same effect of 5 minutes relaxation, just by stepping outside, concentrating on your breathing and being in the moment.
