And Trump is horrible, no mistake. Worst President in history and somehow we elected him twice. But Reagan? The man dismantled society in real fucking time and bribed the population with tax cuts to allow him to do it. Corrupt (Iran-Contra), bigoted, demented blight on the world.
AIDS
The whole reason Trump got elected is because Boomers are still chasing that "FUCK THE WORLD GOT MINE" high that the Reagan Years provided...
I thought Gen x love the 80s!
It's very easy to argue that Reagan is the REASON we have Trump! Not only cause of all the dismantling & corrupt things but also the "Republicans don't fight Republicans" bullshit that made them ALL fall lockstep into whatever shithead gets the nomination! IE: TRUMP!!
Oh, and did you want to talk to your friends? For any reason, however important? Well, good luck with that, schmucko, if anyone else in either household got to the one (1) phone line first, you good and goddamned well waited, and as often as not, never managed it.
Having a phone on your room was uncommon so any conversations were often in the kitchen or somewhere else every one could hear
Plus long distance charges if you wanted to call someone who moved away!
But that's what phreaking was for.
Always fun to spot the point on a graph where all the US quality of life indicators fall off the cliff and just *know* it is pointing to the Reagan years.
There was nothing like online shopping. Mail order was ridiculous, and tracking numbers? LOL. If your local store didn't have it and didn't know how to order it, then you didn't get it. The end. Ebay? Try garage sales and flea markets. Good luck finding what you want!
I am nostalgic for that thick Sears catalog that came out for the Christmas season.
"allow six to eight weeks for delivery"
You fuckers whining about trying to write a paper for school when you have access to the ENTIRE INTERNET in your pocket? ALL WE HAD WAS THE LIBRARY AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS, MOTHERFUCKER. AND GOOD LUCK AFFORDING AN ELECTRIC TYPEWRITER, MUCH LESS A WORD PROCESSOR. But oh no you need "AI" you weaklings
Donovan Freberg was once the most hated teen in America because of encyclopedias...
And Chilton manuals if you wanted to work on your car :-)
I still call them Chiltons, even though it's Hayes now...
MOM GET OFF THE LINE I'M ON THE PHONE
*Dialup Modem Screeching*
And your entire friend circle was the place where you lived. Thirty mile radius, if you were lucky. Why? Arranging travel was expensive, no GPS, long distance charges on phone calls could *bankrupt* your ass, and even trying to find out about an out-of-state con was like seeking the Holy Grail.
You could get an extension to your local calling area for a small fee. (And the BBSs that got into networking took advantage of it.)
All y'all dipshits nostalgic over the first Atari and Nintendo consoles can jump right up my ass because they sucked. THEY. SUCKED. Games were expensive and they looked and played for shit. YES EVEN ON THE NINTENDO. Online play? What's that, some kind of sex thing?
Just had a flashback to the Atari Pac-Man game. Where Pac-Man could only look left or right, not up or down.
You bought a game, you played the shit out of it no matter how bad it was because you likely weren't getting another one for MONTHS at best. Imagine paying $39.99 in 198X money for NES Burgertime. *Burgertime*.
...I mean, I'd kinda prefer Burgertime over a game like Friday the 13th. That said, there were always games like Track & Field I swear gave everyone a nervous twitch and/or carpal tunnel from all the button mashing.
I was the lucky kid who would get a couple a month only cause our local pawn shop was stupid as sold ps2 games at $7 a pop
Even as a kid in the 90s I had to make sure I finished my games. I got enter the matrix. I loved it because until I had a job it was my only game aside from FFx and Kingdom Hearts. Shit was expensive so I played them all to completion. And thus I still do
in what way does mario bros 3 look or play like shit
Do you want to look at all of the work done by modders and enthusiasts in the years since it came out just to make it look *less* like crap than it did on an ancient CRT scanline ass of a TV?
and yet i can still load up mario 3 on my switch and just have fun playing it just like how i can still have fun with the old pokemon games or any other older game
OK
Thing is, while there were good games back then, another major issue was actually finding out which ones those were. Without the internet or even access to the gaming magazines of the day, you were stuck relying on word of mouth and taking wild guesses as to what ones were actually decent.
My family had the DOS version of the first TMNT game where they screwed up the gap in the sewer stage when porting it, rendering it actually unbeatable.
I think about the cost every time I see people complain now about game prices. They've barely moved in forty years! In some respects, they're actually cheaper!
I guess that means we all just got poorer, then. Should I feel better that I got it right?
You think finding new music is hard today? Try finding new music when we had a centralized homogenized collective culture. Oh sure, you could get lucky back then and have one *really cool* local radio station or record store, but in general it was Billboard or nothing.
I'm so glad I didn't have to drive during the 80's, I get lost easily and rely on GPS all the time, looking at a detailed roadmap, I don't know how much more those helped in finding anywhere, especially out of state
As an appreciator of anime and jpop in the 80s, SO MUCH THIS.
With me it was following @rxgau.bsky.social’s “Consumer Guide” columns in the Village Voice (and reprinted in Creem), supplemented by the annual “Pazz & Jop” critics polls he curated. My access to new (and historic) music didn’t improve substantially until I got a music store job in 1987.
We didn't even have the fucking Amiga yet. Your options were the Commodore 64 or a Timex Sinclair 1000/ZX81 if your family was REALLY poor. Software came on cassette tapes and took an hour to load fucking Frogger. If you had a PC or Mac in your house, your family was *loaded.*
Don't forget the TRS-80. That's what we had.
I mean if you were really poor you just didn't have a computer. Most didn't.
My dad managed to get us a Timex Sinclair 1000 so I could learn BASIC. It was $99, literally the cheapest home PC at the time. I still have it It was also terrible. I didn't get a real PC until the 90s, when Dad brought home a trashed AT&T 6300 from work.
Yeah not contesting but, as often as not, people didn’t have computers at all.
Computers were luxuries, at best. My 80s "computer" was one of these, and I didn't get the real deal until 1997.
And as a person who values gameplay over graphics...I attribute that to being forced for years to play things like Bubble Bobble and Carmen Sandiego in solely the glorious, realistic, colors of yellow and black the Apple IIe output games in.
80s nostalgia is horseshit. Either you weren't there or you were and your memory is starting to go. For all we have it worse now, we have it *better* today. Cancer treatments! A no-shit cure for AIDS! Energy efficiency! No hole in the ozone layer! You weird shits, grow the fuck up.
also the cyberpunk fiction dystopias had better healthcare and career options than the shitty near-future fascist autocracy we're in now
Like you want to talk about crime and what cities looked like then versus now in a post-00s rapid gentrification era?
I'm lucky I'm from Ireland. The 80's was possibly the peak of our very shit 20th century so nobody is being fucking nostalgic for them.
The reason why you hate today even though we have real advances that make life better is entirely because of the people running the world, and know that all the good things we have now happened in spite of them. You want better things? Eat the rich, kid.
Or you were a kid and were blissfully unaware of just how many troubles plagued the world which is pretty much universal for any decade; if I time traveled back to the 90's or early 2000's wouldn't be nearly as happy as I was because I'm not a kid anymore
Really, the only thing I'd be nostalgic for is my childhood... but I had to go to speech therapy because of an impediment, got bullied for much of the decade, and in 7th grade (86-87) I got so tired of the bullying that I got into so many fights, *I* got sent to therapy. So yeah, fuck the 80s.
Yes, that's true. You couldn’t make an emergency call to someone unless they had a pager, but you would still have to find a public pay phone and have quarters to make the call. There were no AMBER alerts as well.
(*stands on soapbox*) People who want the 80s back either *specifically* want the bad shit back, like freely getting to drop the N-word and other slurs, like certain demographics being too socially oppressed to EVER see the light of day. Or they want to be a child again and not think about anything.
This reminds me of an old quote about the 50s nostalgia—the 60s were no fouler a decade than the 50s. It wasn’t “Leave it to Beaver” or rock n’ roll parties, it was racial violence, burning crosses, shelter-in-place from nuclear bombs, McCarthyism, and the Korean War.
Every time I think about movies and TV shows from the 90s or 2000, the only thing that stops me from thinking, "I want to go back to that," is remembering how shitty it was for autistics!
Okay maybe not the ONLY thing, but it's a big one!
I think nostalgia is more about wanting to escape the fear & anxiety of today. Your list is extensive and accurate. But, I spend 90 seconds on here and learn some other thing Trump is doing to destroy...well everything. Or how companies are screwing us over even more. It's overwhelming and can feel
a bit hopeless. But, my experience growing up in the 80's & 90's. Maybe it was just me, but there was a sense of hopefulness. The world was (it seemed to me) to be getting more diverse. It seemed like great things were coming. I don't really want the 80's back. I just want the future I thought was
The 80s were shit. Recession, no jobs, no future, fucking awful fashions, the government destroying and selling off everything they could. Not happy times, to be nostalgic about.
It's wanting to be a kid again coupled with the not-so-subtle cultural propaganda of Stranger Things.
Good luck collecting comics if there was no comic shop in your town. You basically got what you could at local newsstands and grocery stores. And if you missed that comic, good luck finding it. Collected editions were BARELY a thing. No Amazon to order from or online comics.
I want you to know this is the soundtrack to your thread. Like I literally pulled it up and am listening to it right now. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOV5...
Poor or budget minded. Thatcher’s Britain after all.
If you weren't lucky enough to have cool older people in your life (generally friend's older brothers/sisters) or a solid musician in the family, you were fucked. I was lucky.
Don't forget the part where you'd have to gaslight yourself into liking the awful game you bought because of the cool cover. Fuck, I was born in 94 and still had that shit happen!
I'll agree that the Atari lineup is mostly dated, only good for what it pioneered as opposed to being actually good. With Nintendo it depended on what dev you had. First party or even someone like Sunsoft/Capcom? Usually good. But you'd get someone like LJN and remember, "oh right, these are shit."
There were *so many* shit games for the original NES, and I know because I rented every damn one of them from the video store.
Fair enough. I grew up on Xbox/GC so I wouldn't know what it was like to be there. But I know that when I play the best of NES I have a good time and go "Yeah, I can see how this kicked ass back in the day." Then when I play the best of Atari I get bored after 2 minutes and turn it off.
Oh, yeah, the stuff that’s survived this long is great, that’s why it survived. But Sturgeon’s Law has always applied.
I always think back to that speech at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, about how most information and history is filtered out so only the most relevant stuff stays. Mind you it's coming from the villains, but it's a case of "Jerkass has a point."
And sometimes you got a hidden gem like Little Samson, but 90% of the games sucked!
I took a long ass bus trip this summer and will be doing a longer Amtrak trip in a couple weeks. There is no way I would have gotten through either of them without my phone/computer. To any nostalgic boomers, try taking even a 2 hour bus trip without looking at your phone or listening to music.
Weakling! Fish food! I've been taking multi-day train trips for decades. Bring a book or two, spend some time looking out the window--even Kansas is fascinating if you pay attention--or, as a last resort, go to the observation car and chat with other passengers.
This is total erasure of this near unplayable game.
There’s a reason games workshop become a hobby giant. Most miniatures of the 80s were poorly sculpted with cheap molds that would deteriorate. You had to determine which detail was what and hope you file off flash instead of detail. Also they were made of lead with one pose.
I remember my family had lawn darts. Somehow none of us got impaled.
"We're going to the amusement park the next state over. Time to break out multiple paper maps and chart a course like we're Magellan.
And phone companies. They were such monopolies “long distance phone calls” could break you
People confuse going to a garage or yard sale now, where one doesn't really have an objective beyond finding something cool with how things were back then where you were more likely to find yourself NEEDING something.
Good luck buying second hand or collectible anything. Want to know how much something costs? Hope your niche interest is large enough to justify a price guide magazine or you just get to hope the local comic shop/game store/swap meet booth/convention table/etc. wasn't price gouging you.
It’s one of the reasons why I am such a hardcore garage sale / thrift store / antique store person. My grandparents baked that into me on road trips with them in the 1990s. Still before the internet made shit easy, never knew what you could find!
Mail order ? I remember them commercials. "Please allow three to six weeks for delivery." I mean I was like WTF even then !
And worst of all: condiments counting as vegetables.
It's funny to see someone post a graph of something that's fucked up like pay discrepancy or pollution levels or union membership or cost of living and you can see precisely when the dip/spike is and it's between 1981 and 1989.
Also Reagan had the veneer of "legitimacy" to him, very loose use of legitimacy tbh, Trump doesn't even have that. Oh sure the upper crust of society are trying to force everyone to bend the knee to Trump but it doesn't seem to be working.