Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.
Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.
24/7 Wal-Marts
It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.
Video Games that were shipped in complete versions
Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.
Firefly.
Freedom,the internet, rationality of thought.
The pre-algorithm internet and social media era of about 2000-2014.
I remember when Instagram was just pictures of my friends cats, hikes, and thrift finds. It was great and fun.
When Facebook status windows automatically had an “is” following your name. So posts would start with “Mary is” and you’d fill in what you’re doing or how you’re feeling.
When Twitter used SMS and you could use it just to follow your favorite band, so whenever they posted it felt like you got a text from them. That was pretty cool.
The internet.
internet 1.0
I am old enough to have used the internet on a DOS machine with an acoustic coupler dialing up to a hyperboard. Guess my age?
57?
- My step dad was a computer junkie and we had a machine when I was a kid.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
More like B:> Run
I’m 46 and we got a 14.4 modem in around 1992-3 I think. We used gopher and ftp then later hotline to trade shareware, then warez and serialz.
I miss those days, but I don’t miss downloading 8 of 9 parts of a file and not being able to reconnect to the server for the last one.
And then at some point you started running out of space, so you had to go back and find all those incomplete downloads, and delete them to create more space.
Wasn’t even that good for me tbh just a time wasting exercise. Release the cable eating sharks!!
Freedom? Democracy? An Internet before the eternal September, SPAM, marketing surveillance, and ads everywhere?
- Dollar menus at fast food places
- Firefly
- Halloween neighborhood roam trick or treating
- Calvin & Hobbes but I’m glad Watterson ended it when he did
- Angular car design (yeah down with car centrism but those angles looked cool)
- Internet 1.0 and the separation of offline and online life
- The Beyond Taco at Del
- Personal privacy
C&H was the GOAT.
Weeping upvote for Firefly, taken too soon 😭 🪦 😭 😭
Why do the worst people make such good shows
Pensions
I barely got grandfathered into a pension program with the US military. They went away in 2015. I had served over a decade at that point and they still let me retire in 2022 under that program. The new program is a sort of 401k type system, but I didn’t have enough years in service to contribute to it for retirement, so they didn’t even give me the option to switch over.
Granted, I retired after only 20 years served so my pension is not very big. But it’s money in my pocket every month for the rest of my life, so I’m not complaining. I’ll never starve or go without shelter.
Until the current administration realizes and cuts the pension.
which kind? corporate ones, or public ones?
Depends where you live.
Early internet 2000-2011ish.
Physical buttons.
Watching sports without a subscription.
Keebler pizzeria chips.
The News.
Physical media.
Video games releasing finished without a day one patch.
Pokemon Go was so good in that first summer it came out
Ah 24/7 Walmart, that’s how I bought my first stuff for experimenting with femininity, waiting until 2am and going a town over to ensure nobody I knew saw me…
And to answer your question the wild west internet. There was freedom and rebellion there. A whole new world with every weirdo, freak, and nerd at your fingertips. A place where you weren’t alone until you found a person who could recommend a place, but instead you could just look it up and find out where your kind of freaks were chatting and they’d even tell you if there was a place irl. Ironically I’m noticing a shift back to needing to know a person to find a place, but that place is a discord server more often these days.
TIL that Walmart aren’t open 24hrs anymore. I thought it switched back after COVID, but I guess not.
I haven’t tried visiting a Walmart after 7pm in a very long time.
I think the covid thing happening was their excuse to seize doing that. They were 24/7 right around that period. But I could also see other reasons why they stopped. I mean, overnights were poorly staffed and it’s wal-mart, everyone is going to be getting away with tons of shit like stealing and customers getting rowdy.
Personally, as an overnight worker, I’m glad it ended. I miss being able to shop peacefully but, better safe than convenient.
There was a golden time when you could ride the gocarts and mini bikes around the store at 1 am and the 2 people on shift couldn’t be bothered so long as you don’t break anything or steal
It probably got expensive to keep all those overnight workers to handle the few customers they had. And those that are still left, and stocking the shelves for the next day, will be replaced by robotic stockers before too long.
24 hour Home Depots were amazing.
When one still could have the reasonable impression that everyone is the same before the law.
We need politics to be boring again.
I’m tired of living in “interesting” times. Because whats interesting, is detrimental to everyone equally aside those benefiting.
I think globalization and internet made everything permanently too interesting.
When was that?
Childhood.
We believed a lot of wonderful things in the 90s.
I know this is a rhetorical question. Still.
Maybe childhood as turtle answered, but also before this whole US downturn with openly proven criminals and still nothing happened.
From outside of the US it started for me with the impeachment of Trump.
He’s not the first of course. But before that at least an effort was put into the appearance.
The climate.
Macs, when the macOS was still called MacOS X, stability, sensible UX, and much better software and hardware compared to Windows.
It’s funny to me to see people mythologize how perfect video games were before they could be remotely updated.
Sure, game developers rely on fix-it-later updates much more than they should today, but games had bugs back then too.
It’s not mythology, testing was crucial so you wouldn’t ship a broken cartridge, which was very costly than a patch download. It made financial sense to test throughly, and more than that, develop carefully.
I think the only guys that made a working game in a week were Atari VCS developers, and IMO it wa a combination of the limited hardware, and the skill of a few legendary programmers.
Today we get games that dwarf the entire software stack of computers decades ago, but they’re made loosely, knowing they’ll ship broken and need patch after patch until it doesn’t make financial sense, and then they’re abandoned.
My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise. For example, a long-standing bug is that once it starts, and offers to press any button to sign in, you have to wait about a minute before doing that, otherwise it will likely hang. This has existed since launch, and after numerous patches it hasn’t been addressed yet.
My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise.
You know what’s interesting? I see footage and images from the previous few fallout games, all of them, in so many different contexts - people love those games and they talk about them, A LOT.
But I have never seen any footage from fallout 76.comparitively nbody seems to think it worth celebrating, in the same way as the other few fallout games.
That’s how you can tell a series fell off. You can apply this to TV and movies too - i see less ‘House of the Dragon’ stuff than i saw ‘Game of Thrones’ stuff
games back then were also done by dev teams of like a dozen people or two who did literally everything and you had like 1-2 people on each task. localizing games also took like a year or more from their country of origin.
now they are done by teams of hundreds or thousands, esp once you start adding all the middleware and outsourcing of various parts of the game they do now, and they are released internationally in dozens of markets at once.
it’s lot easier to find bugs in a game that is 1MB than on that is 256GB
Hot take: games don’t need to be 256GB. Even 10GB is pushing it.
A lot of 7th gen games did great with that kind of space.
I thought that seemed a bit high, but you’re right. Halo 3 was around 6.3GB and Reach was closer to 9. Genuinely thought they’d be way smaller than that.
They do if they want high quality 4K textures and uncompressed audio.
Which should be optional, especially for consoles. If you’re playing through a TV, using the inbuilt speakers and sitting a couple of metres away, there is no advantage to uncompressed textures and audio.
The first gaming system that connected to the Internet was the Sega Dreamcast, and even that ran games only off disc. It isn’t until you get to the PS3/XBox 360 era when games would be downloaded to the console directly, and even then games weren’t expected to need an Internet connection to use.
Mario Brothers might have had a small design team, but Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a much larger dev team.
SA had 50-60 devs. in 2025 that’s a small dev team. The original gta3 had 25-30. SA only has about double the devs of GTA3
GTA6 dev team is over 6,000 people. Most dev teams today are to 400-500 people for AAA games.
Well, yeah. There’s a meme I actually saw that demonstrates how developers were back then compared to now. Developers back then, really did care about how to make a game at its best with like…2MB of cache or very little video memory or what little of bits they had to work with.
Today and for a while, with technology as to where it is at where sky is virtually the limit, we’ve got games that are so poorly optimized, it makes you wonder.
I was guilty of that very thing once. During my first programming class back in college, I wrote an Asteroids clone as a project. My professor kept sending it back telling me to fix it. I really racked my brain trying to figure out what he was sending back to me (he wouldn’t tell me, I was supposed to find and correct the error). The game ran just fine. Finally a gave up and asked him to tell me the answer of what my code was doing wrong. He showed me that I had one line of code that was basically making a new instance of the entire game for every screen refresh. (I wrote it in Java, so Java was just correcting it for me in real time.)
Y’all might enjoy this.
