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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@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.