the urge to rant about how the 90s were just plain *weird*; the cold war was over, the nightmares of 9/11 and later lay ahead, and a generation traumatized by nuclear fears and AIDS collectively wondered what to do.
Being nostalgic for the 90s is a little like missing suburban Ohio now that you live in East Oakland, or wishing your nightmares would let up so you could dream about the parking lot at Safeway. It's that sort of "well it wasn't THIS bullshit, but it wasn't actually good either."
@KronoGarrett I mean every decade sets up the next right? But I’m more thinking about the superficial stuff. All of us came out of the 80s, for the first time since the younger boomers were kids we couldn’t all die at once at any time, we’d been lied to and were maybe just figuring out how much, etc.
@Leucrotta Superficial stuff, like the design that went into retail environments and products and the social world that filled in those spaces. (Not so much the products themselves, nostalslop/nostalgia poisoning is all about the vast quantities of things.)
@Leucrotta It had some interesting elements worth looking back at, but it was more about the why and how and what went wrong. The more I think about it, the more I think about the darker side and all of the crises simmering away under the veneer...