sad, remember the 90s
maybe the reason i have such a strong emotional response to 90s aesthetic, despite being too young to actually remember it, is because i want to recapture some of the bright optimism of that period instead of the mounting discontent of the 00s or the desperate, angry hopelessness of today
sad, remember the 90s
i just want us to feel that brightness again, as a culture, someday. i don't want to keep feeling like i'm in an endless war with the worst people in the world over the right for me and my friends to exist
sad, dreamcast
what even got me on this train of thought was thinking about... the music of sonic adventure, and then thinking about the whole aesthetic of the dreamcast. what is it about that console and the ones that came around and before it that makes me feel so faux-nostalgic?
it's... bright colors and spiraly doodly logos, it's gray matte plastic, it's weird little features like the controller with the thing in it. it's hard to articulate
sad, dreamcast
i guess it just has a connotation of being really earnest, in my mind
consoles nowadays feel so jaded by late capitalist horribleness and weird depressing modern aesthetics and just has this whole irony poisoning mouthfeel to it. the dreamcast and the first two playstations, the n64 and snes and genesis and such, they give me a sense of being... genuinely interested in progress, in delivering fun, rather than just Powerful Graficks or Status Symbol or Milk You For Profit
sad | zineth
zineth, a game by arcane kids, is a useful case study here, i think. it has the pedigree of a late 90s game, with brightly colored 3d lowpoly and cool speedy JSRish gameplay and surreal landscapes
it also has twitter integration! now, zineth came out in 2012. twitter was already 6 by then but i think it still had the feeling of being "way for folks to connect" rather than "fash hellscape". so it helped give zineth the 90s "new tech/optimism/experimentation" mood but in a modern way
sad | zineth
nowadays playing zineth is a lot more bittersweet for me. the twitter integration in the context of 2019 feels more like the ghost of something that was once promising, and it makes the rest of the game feel a lot more hollow
sad, back to remembering the 90s
credit where due to @Felthry for bringing up willingness to experiment. that's definitely a part of it. tech now is, uh, x86 and ARM and that's, er, mostly it? snooze
i think another big part is agency. the scope of "computer user" vs "power user/computer programmer" overlapped way more. hell, apple's whole thing was making it easy to do new things
what happened to shipping a simple and easy to use programming language with computers? oh right. capitalism. again
sad, back to remembering the 90s
@typhlosion @Felthry
It's so bullshit nowadays... Society has taught programming to be boring, teachers are not allowing students to explore, teachers aren't giving freedom to students, just strict guidelines - that's how you kill creativity real fast.
re: sad, back to remembering the 90s
@typhlosion @Felthry re this entire thread, having been there in the 90s in my formative years and despite it being a full on utter dysphoria depression feat I have the same feelings about the optimism, especially around the tech.
There was so much heterogeneity. People tried anything. Lots of it was really neat and had a lot of personality compared to today.
re: sad, back to remembering the 90s
@typhlosion @Felthry I just listen to a lot of vaporwave, play genesis games, and pretend :/
re: sad, back to remembering the 90s
@Fuego @typhlosion @Felthry Yeah, I feel this. I was there for the tail end of it myself, and... yeah. There was hope. There was far more room for self-expression - many if not most ISPs at the times offered complimentary space for personal web pages, up until the early-mid '00s. There was so much more you could do to make a computer, or really most any other piece of technology unmistakably -yours-, even if it just meant getting a new cover for your indestructible brickphone. And beyond that there was just a general sense of... even if things suck now, things will be alright in the future.
These days it's pretty much the exact opposite of all of that.
re: sad, dreamcast
@typhlosion I refuse to expand this so I can continue to believe you're talking about a dreamcast that is sad.
re: sad, dreamcast
@Nurbs these days all dreamcasts are sad, in some sense
sad, dreamcast
@typhlosion i think you’re doing a good job of nailing what I like about the system! It was the last video game system I’ve ever been excited about, and I got it at launch. It sounds cheesy but a part of me honestly died with the Dreamcast. Nowadays everything is just a computer wrapped up in different kinds of plastic and it’s hard to care about new game consoles in the same way as I did then.
sad, dreamcast
@typhlosion like, the Dreamcast wasn’t just a “platform” for games to be released on, it was a whole aesthetic and design methodology. There is a way that Dreamcast games tend to -feel-
sad, dreamcast
@typhlosion and like, that “feel” is a bit janky compared to modern standards, but at the time it really felt revolutionary. just like... imagine playing Phantasy Star Online with other people when “online console RPG” really wasn’t a thing yet. It was incredible
sad, dreamcast
@coda @typhlosion my shot at describing The Dreamcast Aesthetic:
Runs 480p60 internally, no dropped frames, no tearing, no interlace trickery needed to hit 60fps unlike PS2 which had problems on non-trinitron displays (by design probably) until developers gave up and interpolated 30fps fields.
Snappy controls. Instead of using an analog stick to control player velocity, it's used like a d-pad with 360 directions.
High contrast art direction.
Fun boot logo.
re: sad, remember the 90s
@typhlosion I think you're right, 90s tech was a lot more willing to experiment, and built better than later stuff (though 80s has 90s beat on build quality, but 90s is still better than 00s or 10s)
sad, remember the 90s
@typhlosion Huh. I have similar thoughts about Victorian railway station architecture. You could tell that the people who built those stations believed in Progress.
(I lived in the UK for a bit. My home station was a pretty good example of the genre, and the nearby railway museum had some fascinating pieces from the era.)
sad, remember the 90s
@typhlosion Having lived for most of the 90's I can safely say that I share this sentiment. Even just isolating video games specifically, there is something to be said for the 16-bit era of games.
sad, remember the 90s
@typhlosion I feel this. Even if a lot of it was artificial, it felt like anything would be possible, in a good way. In a weird way I associate those little beige box computers with hope for the future.
sad, remember the 90s
there are definitely things i like about 90s tech more than today's tech in some ways, but it's hard to parse if i would have felt the same way at the time or if it's just retrocomputing enthusiasm
culturally i missed a lot of pioneering work in tech and games and music (but also that's how the dotcom bubble happened so maybe that's a good thing too)
i dunno