Anti-Nostalgic

I thought I'd make a page that's a bit unusual here. Nostalgic gets clicks, it gets sales. But everything wasn't that great in the past either. This page serves as a bit of a reality check.

Car windows. You had to actually physically crank that fucker up and down. Sometimes, back windows in cars would pop outward. It was weird. It was ass.
Everyone smoked. Everyone. If you had asthma, grown adults would intentionally blow smoke in your face for having the audacity to ask them to not smoke near them or roll down a window. If you were in a car with the windows down and even brought it up, there was good odds at least one smoker in the car would immediately roll up their window in an attempt to increase how much smoke was around you. This would be followed up with "it's worse for me than for you, I'm more likely to get cancer from this", as if risking every single person in the car getting cancer was somehow okay so long as they kicked the bucket first I guess. Adults all smelled like cigarettes all day long. You could tell which of your teachers smoked because they smelled awful. All the lunch ladies smoked. At least one bathroom for each gender at school would be filled with cigarette smoke most of the time from kids smoking and teachers who blamed it on kids. Going to a restaurant with a no smoking section? Haha, you're not sitting there. Your smoking parents will not skip smoking during dinner. I don't recall ever seeing kids in the no smoking section. I'm sure some parents actually took them, but it was usually couples or single people. 80s and 90s parents loved to increase their kids odds of lung cancer and having asthma. This started to peeter out around the mid-00s, mostly due to legislation, not less shitty parents.
*dial-up noises for 15 minutes* Finally, I'm online. *your mom picks up the phone to talk to a telemarketer even though you have caller ID*
Uh oh. Mom opened the wrong email. Here comes a worm to eat every single thing on the computer! Better hope your most recent saves are backed up on one of your forty floppy disks.
It will take you roughly one hour to download one Inuyasha ED song.
Scanlation ass translation or wait a few years for the manga to finally catch up to Japan...oh never mind, Tokyopop is just gonna leave that one there in limbo forever. Buy Peach Fuzz and Dramacon today! Well, there's always Viz and their flipped, censored books instead with equally questionable translations. Let's fuck up everyone's easy to translate names. Who the fuck okayed "Jizabel"? How hard is it to spell Jezebel, guys? Favorite censorship type: when random Christian symbolism in manga is removed because what if it would offend a Christian.
Mondo Cool. I'm not elaborating.
This anime needs to hide that it takes place in Japan. Quick, come up with character names that sound like they're out of Captain Planet! Flip the video! We can't have the kids know cars drive in different directions in other countries! What will happen if they find that out? CHAOS!
Tail Spin getting canceled on a cliffhanger episode because parents think it's too scary for kids. (No actually kids were complaining.)
SWAT Kats being canceled because it's too violent and not because it's written by absolutely constantly horny furries who are supposed to be writing a kids show.
Justin Timberlake's ramen noodle hair and whatever that cursed short, front spikey hairstyle that all the douchey boys had. The eldest Brother's Gracia haircut.
Liking a show that has appeal to most kids/teens. Network cancels because too many girls watched. Too many being if show reached 50% female viewership. Even if it was originally pitched as a girls show so the 50% boys is actually kind of surprising. Not enough boys.
When Steve Irwin died, so much animal-related television shifted to being about how scary, vicious, and deadly a lot of animals are and a lot of wholesome or education stuff started to get pushed out. I also remember some "think pieces" about how "weird" it was that Terry Irwin wasn't performing "sadness" correctly in interviews after Steve's death.
Honestly, a lot of mainstream media seemed to hate Steve Irwin. He was popular with actual people, but companies didn't like him. Now that I'm older, I wonder if it was in part because he suggested a method of dealing with "pest" animals not by killing, but by relocation and promoted not being terrified of wild animals. You know, living in harmony with animals, because we share the same planet. We're not more "entitled" to it than animals are. Wendigos hate messaging like that. The media would go out of their way to try to make whatever Steve was doing look much more dangerous than it really was too. I also remember a lot of people online wanting to know Bindi's reaction to her father dying. Bindi was eight.
Rape jokes in everything. Rape jokes about man on woman, woman on man, man on man, woman on woman, woman on boy, all of it. Sometimes, in kids shows. A lot of internet humor was also around rape, from shit that would be on Newgrounds to anime fandom creepiness.
Yaoi paddles.
Ordering online was a crapshoot. In the early days, every single purchase at any site was always a gamble. I definitely recall a few sites being infamous for never shipping anyone anything, and they stayed open for years. Because no one did anything about that back then.
The anime section at Blockbuster would often have nothing rated and sometimes you didn't even have the case art to go by. You were just really hoping you didn't rent hentai for your sleepover. Yes, they'd just have the hentai mixed in with Pokemon and Duel Masters. Kite was always there. Which version? Who knows.
Blockbusters and movie rental places in general didn't get many new tapes in often. Actually new stuff was usually hard to come by because it'd been constantly rented out for a while and they'd never have enough copies for the demand.
Those crazy prints you see on fauc retro clothes and accessories these days would've never been on those items back then. A lot of what people are putting on clothes are carpet or wallpaper patterns you'd see in some theaters or arcades. Houses were pretty dull. Everything was wood and from the 70s or early 80s. Not all malls were that "loud" in design either. Most weren't. Some of the other "retro" patterns people get faux nostalgia over are really just corporate stuff. And I mean, some of it did look nice. But people at the time would've seen it for what it is, corporate "art".
So much pop music that was made simultaneously for little girls and pedos. It was an openly pro-pedo time in music, film, TV. You could have characters that were forty dating 16 year olds on family entertainment because the creeps in Hollywood didn't even bother hiding that shit anymore.
So many people with EDs.
Final Fantasy House.
It was common on LJ for people to fake having babies, fake babies dying, then fake their own deaths. Faking illnesses and race was also common. The former usually involved a grift of some kind. The latter sometimes did.
A lot of teens and adult women in the 90s wanted to have flat butts. Having a big ass meant you were "fat" even if you were thin everywhere else. This was most for women, but there wasn't much in the way of nice asses on men in that era either. Just pancake butts everywhere.
This is around when you really see schools ramping up re-segregation policies via re-districting that makes the most ridiculous gerrymandered voting districts look tame, "school choice", and more private schools.
Mainstream news had already turned to shit. Local news was still good in this time period though, but local news begins to degrade once we're getting close to the 10s. Newspapers are dying out. Magazines start dying out. Some switch to digital, immediately lose all quality, and then die online.
Some boys shot up a school! Time to ban trenchcoats! That'll solve all the problems.
Satanic Panic that never really went away. Sigh...You might even have to be see a "documentary" or a powerpoint about Satanic ritual sacrifices at your pulic high school. You gotta get permission to watch Harry Potter (frollomeme.png) and Jurassic Park (evolution omg) though, and also for sex ed. But Satanic Panic, you can't opt out of that. But that's been ongoing. People actually recommend The Body Keeps the Score by that fuckface Bessel van der Kolk, who was a key figure in promoting the Satanic Panic. No one ever talks about what's actually in that book. You ever notice that, when people rec it? They're just like "ultimate book on understanding trauma by an EXPERT"!! It's just repressed memory recovery via hypnosis BS that was debunked over 30 years ago.
It Came From X-Box Live
Stupid screamer videos people would pass around. If you got sent a video of something peaceful, especially someone just driving around, you knew it was coming. Better close it quickly before the loud noise and dumb "scary" face pops up.
Send this email to fifty other people or you'll be cursed!!
In an all ages space? Or a kid/teen focused space that technically doesn't ban adults? Welcome to Pedoland. Pedos, pedos everywhere.
No one actually travelled all that far alone on their bikes for hours. Every adult is exaggerating that shit. People were just hanging out in their neighborhoods or the woods playing with broken glass until they were old enough to go to the mall without their parents so they could go be proper consumers. People were outside more and parents were rarely home, but that's about all that's true. No one went thirty miles on their bikes off to some other town or whatever. LOL.
Oh no, I'm sick. Staying home from school. Let me take some medicine and go back to bed. What's on TV? HI THERE FACE HERE. *face drinking itself*
All the foot fetish shit on Nickelodeon.
12oz Mouse
Anime going from looking great to complete ass when switching to digital painting.
The endless discussions on forums about Vegeta's virginity. For some reason.
People used to die on Black Friday. People also used to be entertained by people dying on Black Friday.
There used to be a lot of TV stuff for Thanksgiving back then basically making up fake history about the holiday. All of it was badly done, most of it was racist, and no one enjoyed them but they'd air that shit anyway. You'd be seeing this stuff for the whole week of Thanksgiving. Thankfully (lol), that shit has mostly faded away. I've never met anyone who ahd any nostalgia for those weird Thanksgiving specials. The only Thanksgiving TV thing I like is the aiport episode KotH did, which was more about the chaos of the day and had a lot of funny jokes in it.
Being in second grade and my teacher talking about cheating and blowjobs in class because she was upset about Bill Clinton. Ma'am, I am seven. What the fuck. So, so many adults pretending to be upset about Bill Clinton.
The Macarena
The stupid Courtney Love conspiracy theories. Some bipolar guy who's addicted to hard drugs and has previously had some obvious suicidal ideation and has nearly died from an overdose already escapes out of rehab by scaling a wall and goes to get more drugs and buys a gun. Somehow, this is a murder case caused by an evil woman!! Who wasn't even at the location at the time. But you see, she hired a secret assassin!! A lot of people really believed that shit. Some still do. That it was more logical a woman already divorcing a dude would hire a hitman to stage him killing himself with a plan that also involved the guy to be murderered needing to want to and successful escape out of rehab for the set-up than for it to have just be a very mentally unwell, unstable guy succumbing to his addiction ending up dead by his own actions. Nope, couldn't be that! These same conspiracy theorists always get upset when you show them videos of Kurt around this time where he was very obviously physically not looking well shortly before the end. The man killed himself. It's sad that he couldn't overcome his drug problem and that combined with his mental illness made a recovery very difficult path. There's no need to make up shit. What happened is plain as day, but I think some people just don't want to see their "idols" as normal, struggling people. People's understanding of mental health back then was also really terrible.
All the ring tone commercials with shitty ring tone songs.
Some kid's mom listening in on your four-way phone call on the landline but no ones sure who's mom it is.
Porn pop-ups on everything. Even the school computers.
When channels would go off at night. Gotta switch to radio or play video games or watch a movie now. It won't be back till morning, and morning programming was always, always shit. Morning radio was also shit. Just some fuckers talking and occasionally playing a song or two. No one cares about your asinine thoughts. Just play some songs.
Oh, cool. A movie I really like is playing on this channel. *it's censored with redubbed less naughty words added in and some key emotional/cool scenes are cut for commercial time*
Speaking of commercials, the same episode of a TV show airing but different scenes being missing each time because of differences of when the commercials played.
Friends being on TV. Ugh.
The weird obsession with joking about autoerotic asphyxiation when famous people committed suicide by hanging.
People making fun of that poor woman who's baby was killed and eaten by dingos.
The yearly annouced "hot toys" by mainstream newscasters would tell parents kids are dying to have that no kid actually asked for but the parents would buy because a "reporter" told them what to believe about what their kids "really" wants. Looking back, this shit was so clearly manufactured.