Since Anti-Nostalgic is pretty negative, I thought I'd make this page as a bit of a balance to that. Everything in the past wasn't all bad, though people do glamourize a lot of things too much. But anyway, here's some positives, things to actually be nostalgic about.

• You owed things. You owned your movies, you owned your TV shows, you owned your music, you owned your books, you owned your video games. A company removing something from shelves didn't make your copy vanish. Subscriptions were rare, and usually for things that made sense, like magazines and newspapers.
• Less ads. One way you can see this is ironically magazines still in print versus old issues. Ads were always in magazines to help fund them, but there were usually only a few. The magazines still in print are something 25% ads or more. You're just buying a bunch of ads. Watching a show? Here's some ads longer than a commercial on old cable TV! The ads in modern movie theaters have gotten more and more ridiculous. In the old days, you would see a couple local ads before trailer if you showed up super early for a showing. The last time I went to the theater, I had to watch ads past the local ads for big companies and it felt like these ads had as much of the run time as the actual trailer previews. By the time I got to the movie, I felt exhausted.
• Arcades were the shit. And no, not just the video game cabinets. I rarely played on those. Get me to those skee ball machines and air hockey. For video games, I always preferred the vehicle ones, where you'd be riding a motorcycle or had a steering wheel, sometimes in this big boxy set-up to mimic a real car. I remember this Jurassic Park one it was like one person drove and the other shot dinosaurs or something. That was another fun thing. Some of the video game ones took into account you needed two people to play together, not necessarily against one another.
• Malls used to have shit other than shoes and clothing stores. There'd be some really weird, niche shit run by some local person in some malls that you would travel hours out to go see.
• Lines at amusement parks used to be quicker. I don't know how things got this bad, but you didn't used to have insanely long lines for popular places the way you do now. Only the most popular of rides would ever be crazy like that. This one baffles me.
• Mainstream music was better. It mostly died around the mid-00s and has been in free fall since 2010. Indie is a whole other beast, of course. But turning on the radio used to still guarantee you some big music.
• Movies were also mostly better, especially the big ones. Their impact lasted a hell of a lot longer and some movies really were cultural phenomena in the way nothing these days is. I'm talking impact that would last for possibly decades, like Star Wars or LOTR. New shit doesn't have the staying power nor the deep devotion to anything the way things were back then. It's always on to the next hype train now. The cinematography, sound design, musical score, writing, everything was better too. Some things may not have aged well, but overall, the quality was higher.
• Cars were better made back then. And they were less complicated under the hood, which made them easier to maintain and fix. Some of the newer car models out there have intentionally designed some things so that you can't fix some things without lifting the whole car up or taking apart a huge chunk of the vehicle that used to be easy access (speaking from experience here, fuck you, Ford and Dodge). There were no subscriptions to anything inside a car. And they all worked with an aux.
• Printers worked better. I haven't had a good printer since probably 2010 or so. You didn't have to have ink that was the same brand as the printer either, you could refill the cartridges, no ink subscriptions or paper subscriptions, no randomly just dying after a year, no constantly needing to clean and align anything. They just worked.
• By and large, anime looked better. You could find more anime where women actually looked like adult women instead of skinny little 12 year old waifs. Hell, plenty of the teen girls looked older than some of the "adult" women in a lot of modern anime. (They still looked like teenagers, they just looked their age.) The men looked more adult too, though men gradually looking more juvenile in anime happened a bit slower over time than it did for women. The anatomy had less issues, even in weekly productions, and you could tell the artists overall understood art more than the current crop. People say a lot of it is artists being overworked, but they were overworked as fuck back then too. Some of the difference is the pet OVA projects that existed. Devilman's 2 OVAs stands as an exceptionally well animated, albeit incomplete (because funding, couldn't get OVA 3) work that is lightyears better than Crybaby. There are nicely animated works these days, but even the quality ones feel like something is missing. I feel more like I'm looking at shiny, nice generic works on Pixiv than anything memorable. (Gotta give a shout out to the Reze movie for giving us a "rougher" looking style instead of the safe crap the S1 anime was.) Some of the absolute crazy intricate design from back then just don't happen these days. Machinery in particular seems to have suffered the most since this era.
• Even dumb anime was usually memorable and had something unique about it. The titles were generally less stupid. And the isekai were more likely to actually be good. Except that one that involved a swirly. I'm not naming names. IYKYK.
• Nothing wrong with cassette tapes. I see this opinion on Reddit a lot that they're shit and die easily. I have some tapes that are 50 years old, sound great. Tapes sound good or bad depending on what you play it on, the quality of the tape to start with, and how it was kept. For some reason, Reddit thinks CDs never wear down. I actually will never switch back to CDs because CDs notorious did. My memories of the 90s and early 00s are CDs skipping, CD-roms going back, and PS1 discs getting fucked up. But cartridges and cassettes that were old as fuck worked just fine. Blu-rays and DVDs tended to be better than VHS though, in terms of not dying. On high quality devices, cassettes, CDs, and vinyl all sound great. On lower quality ones, you can sort them out, but it's not enough to matter much unless you're a complete snob. Only rich people cared about having the absolute "best" experience with anything. It didn't matter if your boombox was a cheap ass one from Walmart with a shitty cassette or skipping CD when you were hanging out with your friends. It played, and it would play even while it was falling apart. When you're not rich, that last part mattered a whole lot. Even the VHS going bad wasn't that big of a deal until it hit a sizeable portion of the movie.
• You didn't need to constantly be working. When you left work, you left work.
• You didn't have to go through hoops to get a job. No psych evaluations online. No multiple job interviews for basic ass jobs. No prior experience needed for basic ass jobs. Hell, a lot of jobs that require Masters or PhD's these days could be had with an Associates or a Bachelor, if not just on the job training. Nothing changed in these jobs at all. They just got gatekept behind new requirements to keep younger people out and make you pay more money out to more people. And there were more of these jobs too. What would an English degree get you back then? A teacher job, naturally. And it paid well enough to live off of. A lot of the "Mickey Mouse" degrees did in fact land you jobs back then because you didn't have a bunch of rich dipshits pushing the public to think anything other than STEM needed to not exist. And now all the STEM shit is getting pushed overseas or replaced with shitty AI that makes things worse. You really could just walk into a place and get a job back in the 80s and 90s and even the early 00s. It would be a simple job, like a cashier, but you could live off that paycheck without roommates.
• People let you adopt pets back then. No rehoming $200 fees. No references. No house tours. No vet references. Even some of the local pounds around me are now requiring vet and personal references and house tours and increasing all their fees for adoption. You know what that's resulted in, these measures to "protect" animals from bad owners? More dead animals put down because no one can adopt them.
• HOA's were only in rich areas. Now even poor areas have these stupid things.
• Houses were affordable. Starter homes cost what some new cars cost now and new cars were dirt cheap. People typically still didn't buy new, because people waited a year or two to see if a new car had any unexpected issues that needed recalling first. My current car is over ten years old and I couldn't even buy it outright because of the cost.
• The internet was, for the most part, a fun place to hang out. But most people weren't online for hours and hours. You couldn't be, because someone would want to use the phone at some point and very few people paid for an extra line so they could do both at the same time. LJ was great. Loads of sites filled with pages to explore, forums full of knowledge on the most obscure things. And only idiots ever used their real name or posted pictures of their faces.
• Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, none of these shitholes existed yet.
• Bookstores with couches in them so you could chill and read books while you were there. Some restaurants and cafes also had couches in them. One of the few things real from Friends.
• There was an interest at the time to try and combine science and action movies to make science more interesting to the general public through entertaining media. These weren't perfectly accurate when it came to science, and that was by design. The writers knew too overboard would lose the people they wanted to pull in. These days, it's all action but with no brain.
• These was a plethora of fantasy films back then, with the best of the lot being the LOTR trilogy, extended cuts of course. Modern fantasy stuff is insincere and empty, like everything else these days. The films may not have been a 1:1 with the books, but something of that caliber that is so self-indulgent in being what it is will never be made for a mainstream audience again. Too risky to have flavor.
• Clothes and shoes were better made. I've mentioned elsewhere on the site I inherited some Converse shoes from my dad that he outgrew as a kid that I wore until I outgrew them. They were from the 70s. I've never had a pair of shoes in that price range ever match that quality. The shoes from the 80s and 90s and early 00s were still much better than today though, but damn shit from the 60s and 70s was amazing. The sweater I had of his from when he was a kid that I had as a kid from the 70s was also the best sweater I ever owned. Never fells apart, I just outgrew that too.
• Physical textbooks. When I started my undegrad degree, some of the classes were already pushing for e-texts. Going back to school much later via online courses for my Masters has left me with exclusively e-texts. (Because apparently if it's online, why would I want to read a real book?) Like, I'm grateful that I can do my education around a work schedule like this and what I'm doing doesn't really need in person anything due to the nature of it, but can I get some real books? No one learns better with digital textbooks. I'm glad some schools are switching back to real books for K-12. That shit was always a mistake.
• I know it's only because of AIDs, but people cared a whole lot more about safe sex back then. Younger people have so many STIs these days some of these infections are becoming immune to medication. Please, use condoms. Babies shouldn't be the only thing you're worried about.
• Unless a game was really badly made, and it would become notorious for it, video games worked day one and didn't need DLCs of basic shit like extra characters and costumes. All that shit would've just ben an unlockable you had to do something for, not something you paid extra for. Also, alpha and beta versions of games used to be something developers paid you to play, not something they'd charge you for "early access". LMAO. And you could work this as a full time free lance job that supported you enough to buy a house, if you really stayed on top of your applications and assignments. Hell, people lived humbly off of mail in surveys and product testing back then. Because they paid a shit ton more for this stuff than they do now. They've convinced people with products even that just getting to test the product is "payment" because you got it for free. A whole lot of disabled people lived off these sorts of freelance gigs.
• I know it's convenient to have mobile websites, but back in the day, you didn't have to code for a whole bunch of different display types and what you were working with were basically just squares or one type of rectangle. Now you got rectangles in different directions with different size phones, tiny laptops and tablets, gianticly absurd monitors, and I've even seen some square phone models coming out in China. There's too many shapes and sizes for something to look good on all of them. So, I have the nice version for computersa nd the stripped down worthless version for mobile that's at least readable, but hideous. There's no making a mobile design look good, and there's definitely no making both a mobile and desktop design of the same thing both look good and basically the same without being so stripped down you may as well be reading a PDF file. Modern internet honestly seems hostile to anything other than bland corporate designs.
• Local news was still news and not propaganda.
• Before the local radio stations got bought up for corporate interest, DJs used to serve their local communities. Things organically went mainstream because they were good, as vetted by the people around them. The corporate music in this era was still full of more effort than now, but some kid's garage band really could become something big back then.