This is what those dementia towns are going to be based on when we old old
when we old old
I’m already there. can I stop working and move to whatever utopia they described?
They closed radio shack cuz they didnt want us building our own open tech. You can’t change my mind
Speaking as ex rat shacker, components and kits were already trending down as consumer electronics became more difficult or impossible to repair. Then they ultimately folded after incompetent leadership bet the farm on cell phones sales exactly while iPhones were still AT&T/Apple store exclusive.
I was working there during that time and it was awful. No one with any interest in electronics ever came in. Just the thirteenth person of the day asking for an HDMI cable for their phone which like 3 phones supported at the time. Why did everyone want that feature? I’ve never met a person who actually used that setup.
That was me. I remember asking about phone HDMI cables in a RadioShack as a teen.
I wanted to Bluetooth a controller to my phone and plug my phone into my tv and play some emulators.
I never did manage to do either with my phone back then. I can do it now, but I never play games on my phone lol.
Lol I just remember trying to sling the Samsung Instinct, was laggy and pretty awful to use, but the best we had comparable to the “buttery smooth” iphone. Those were tough days.
As a kid I remember wishing radio shack was a more general consumers electronics store. As an adult I really wish I had easy access to the stuff they sold, like I’ve had a lot of projects that need a random transistor or whatever.
I was too young to appreciate them for what they were and they went out of business before I could.
Same here, rip to the RadioShack.
Also a store for some reason linked to pre-child-predator era Jared Fogle and Subway, they just kind of had the same vibe
If you dig around, you can find value kits with a few of of each major transistor, cap, resistor, diode, LED, and logic IC’s.
Radio Shack didn’t really have the breadth of stock you’d want, you were just hoping you could get by.
Buying a kit every time you need a compoenent, you end up with your own stock super easy.
Yeah, Radio Shack really screwed the pooch by not branching out into the online system earlier.
If they had set it up so that you could order whatever parts you needed online and then have it shipped to your local store and ready for pickup for you, they’d probably be tech Amazon right now.
We have one open still near me and it’s incredible for hobby electronics, they have basically any small part you could ever want. Dunno how it still exists, but I’m glad it does.
I have one still in my town as well. Sure they charge $3 for a single 555 chip and I can get a pack of 100 of them for $8 online, but if I’m in a bind and need it today, as long as it’s before they close at 6pm I can hit up the RadioShack (they’re phasing out the RadioShack branding but still) and probably get what I need
When frys went too I cried
What if I told you no one’s stopping you from canceling the internet at your house and living like it’s still the 90’s. Go to the library, get your DVD’s, get a TV antenna, use signal instead of social media. RSS is still supreme.
At this point I’m just listing what I’ve been doing, but God it feels nice
My kids are stopping me
Yeah, I dont want my kid to have friends over and be the weird family that only has dvds and no streaming services. That was like being in the 90s and meeting a family that didnt have a tv.
Kids are stupid. I didnt mind places not having a TV at all as a kid…many grandparents didnt have one.
Even now, our living room has no TV. Obviously none in the bedroom either. Now, my basement gaming room is full of CRTs but yeah no streaming brainrot 😁
Same here, and I love it. Its veeeery rare to find someone who isnt brain dead with scrolling the Tok now, all my IRL friends can’t shut the fuck up about llms and will not put their phones away, so I’d rather just be alone. Hanging around them makes me upset at how corpo brainwashed everyone is. Really sucks they’ve let the technoligarch lobotomize them and refuse to listen to anyone else.
Can you drag your friends on a camping trip? Or even just a walk on a local trail? Basically organize a friend activity that’s not really compatible with scrolling on phones so they might get a break from the dopamine drip?
The thing that sucks today is phones work everywhere. Theres almost nowhere without service now. Unless we hang out in a concrete bunker
Basically how most grandparents currently live, minus social media.
Really? Þe grandparents I now are obsessively online and in social media, especially Facebook.
Anecdotes don’t prove anything. The grandparents I know aren’t on social media. Most barely use smartphones.
One was complaining to me about how their bank requires everything to be done through a phone app. They don’t like how they can go into a branch to do anything because the bank teller tells them to do it on the app.
Just because social media addicted a lot of old people doesn’t mean all old people are doom scrolling.
Studies are better, sure. So how about þis:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1319311/us-meta-audience-by-age-and-gender/
Think more of the greatest generation and elder boomers, the people who unironically thought netscape was the best the internet ever had to offer, and rightfully so.
I guess skipping right over the Silent Generation tracks.
I don’t know anybody who lives like it’s the '90s. My mother has several streaming subscriptions on her smart TV, and shops on Amazon. My friend, who just turned 80, streams music from Twitch. I told him about GrapheneOS recently, and he’s thinking about trying it on one of his Pixels.
You just can’t live like the '90s anymore, of you want to interact with the world at all. Shopping, event announcements & tickets, entertainment, social connections, bill payment, public meetings, it’s all online.
Except that ostricizes you from your community peers. The point of these “communes” is to be able to live with others who share your lifestyle and be able to talk and share.
Yeah I haven’t run into any issues with it. I talk to people on signal, I watch shit on Jellyfin I pirate at work and transfer to my server. I borrow video games and books and DVDs from the library. I come on here on my phone from time to time to jerk off to beans
Peers? PEERS!!? How DARE you!
I do most of these things and am still connected to my community. My “online social” is here, limited as it may be (on purpose), and my real community is in real life, where the internet is kind of irrelevant (or when it does come up, is mostly meme sharing)
Idk man, “I saw this Thread (or whatever they’re called) earlier that said “blah blah blah” is far too commoningly overheard. I’m not that old myself, mid 30s, but almost all community notices (wife deals with it) is through Facebook, or some other group messaging system. I don’t think that’s the era they are refering to, they want face to face communication. Like gotta go knock on the neighbors door to tell them there’s some deer coming down the hill.
Aol, all you get is a notification on your computer (when you choose to look at it). Nothing urgent is gonna get noticed in time.
It’s hard to get other people off the bad parts of the Internet.
It’s very hard to get businesses to stop exclusively posting stuff on Instagram.
People are brainwashed to use only the 3 corpo sites on the internet now. They’ve completely forgotten how awesome the human internet is.
Oh well. I’ll keep enjoying it while i can and not talking to people who refuse to leave fb and snap.
It’s hard to get other people off the bad parts of the Internet.
Why does it have to be a purity test? Don’t force your own values on other people
It’s not a purity test, I just don’t want 500 different accounts on platforms I have no interest in and don’t trust because they’ve demonstrated their adversarialism.
Because I want to interact with them, but don’t want to be on Instagram.
Yeah, but I still need my corner Radio Shack…
DVD’s
VHS you heathen
I’m a laserdisc head myself
That’s just bragging.
Fuck yeah. Half-Life, Team Fortress, X-Com, C&C, etc will be your top games forever.
With good modding community I can live with that.
In the 90s we also had ICQ, remember ohoh :)
Somehow I still remember my ICQ number… Even though I don’t remember my phone number from that time 🤔
That didn’t last long however before it became completely spammed and unusable.
Removed by mod
Out here in Amish smokin’ fat doinks
I’m all in on neo-Amish, where do I sign up?
Put it in your away message on AIM, and they’ll find you.
See if you have any Mennonite churches near you. They can use power tools at least
I’d prefer 2008 tech over 90s, that was my peak torrent era.
Never had the chance to experience alt.binary newsgroups and PAR2 files!
How about:
No internet. Everyone runs a reticulum mesh network, HaLow to the houses, LoRa on mobile. We work out Video/Music service by private torrent.
Radioshack is replaced by an AliExpress store that carries maker gear and mesh radio hardware and a full compliment of components, fab tools and a community discount to JLPCB
The AliExpress store could be attached to a large warehouse sized maker-space where the eventual goal is to community fund all the hardware to replace JLCPCB with in-house fab
Bring me back ICQ, Winamp and the newsgroup thingy to d/l my (current timeline) animes and I’m good with the plan.
ICQ is so around, though I think it’s run by the Russian government or something, webamp is your friend, and usenet still exists
The 90s was good because my brands
Pizza Hut always sucked. Insane thing to be nostalgic for
Sometimes you want a shitty pizza. Like frozen pizza, but worse!
Their crust was like someone took a cheap sponge, toasted it, and soaked it in lard. Just gross
I would legitimately love this.
Removed by mod
I love this follow-up/sequel:
Yeah was gonna say that’s just Portland
Blockbuster
Radio Shack
Pizza Hut
AOL
When did we outsource our shared culture to corporate identities as shorthand for those shared experiences? Is this meme secretly causing me to rethink how much of my nostalgia is for consumer behavior driven by corporate marketing, so ubiquitous that everything we’d later remember as common interests and backgrounds was just how we spent our money?
I have to rethink everything for a little bit. Maybe I should sit down.
It started convincingly in the 60s (tracking on Bowling Alone, a book written in 1999 about the decline of the American community), but isn’t clear-cut on likely reasoning at the about halfway point I’m at, other than older more socially-involved generations dying out.
My take expanding what I’ve learned so far is that appears to be a combination of:
- there are things that are ‘entertaining enough’ at home to discourage former events like going over a friend’s or coworker’s, so general schmoozing is relegated at best to video games online with rare exceptions. The 60s is when television really “took over” the family room, but there was radio and books before it.
- the generation that grouped together to fight the oil barons died out, and did not transmit their union dinners and other community behaviors to their children.
- churches saw significant decline during the social movements of the 60s that has continued since.
So we may be too comfortable at home with new technology to go out, even if we’re not fulfilling all of our social needs (that is, the “epidemic of loneliness” so often brought up). And when nearly all the interactions you have left is “vote with your dollars,” whom you choose to pay becomes the political and social choice that defines who you are.*
* though the fact that a few people own most of the dollars means your vote basically means squat anyway, but that’s getting on to class war, for which social isolation is a fantastic benefit for the ownership class against labor negotiation
Christmas, Halloween and Valentine’s Day are all entirely commodified, to the point where pretty much everything you think of as being part of Christmas is actually a hundred-year-old corporate psy-op to get you to buy coke and go to Macy’s
I think we’ve done that since essentially forever. Many businesses are for gathering or socializing. If this were the Middle Ages, we’d hang out at the inn after the work day was done, or maybe talk and drink down by the town well. Its just that in the modern day, businesses are stand-ins for “3rd spaces”, because we’ve societally forgotten that we need those and should take care of that.
Many businesses are for gathering or socializing. If this were the Middle Ages, we’d hang out at the inn after the work day was done, or maybe talk and drink down by the town well.
In many rural communities especially in the Midwest this is the role that the town bar(s) fill. You need something like 50 people living in a given community for one bar to be sustainable, and because of that you get towns with ~250 people that have 3-4 bars but only 2 churches. These small town bars generally know their role and price their food and morning coffee accordingly-making it as affordable as possible so the few customers they have can afford to come back more than once a week
On one hand, my town didn’t have a Blockbuster, but an independent video rental store. I still call it Blockbuster when i talk about it because it being the point across. So sometimes it’s just a short hand.
On the other, you really have a point. Personally, I am trying to be more mindful of decoupling “good times” from consumerism. The last two dates I had with my partner were mostly walking around chatting. I like having people over for board games, or going to the park. All zero or low cost activities that have been collectively pushed put of the “cool zone” by, I would guess, consumerism.
Dude we got dropped off at the mall to hang out with our friends. The place where 100 different stores were all owned by 7 different companies. The fucking mall.
Same for me. My childhood access to small electrical components was sadly thanks to big corpo. I’m sure the small town I grew up in had a mom ‘n’ pop electronics shop somewhere, but it would’ve been in some strip mall or old building downtown where I wouldn’t hang out as a kid.
What if instead of modern brands, which is bad, we have slightly older brands (same owners though). Isn’t it the best when the brands have different names?
Yeah like idgaf about blockbuster, but i do miss family run local video stores and small chains. I mostly miss landlines tbh
When did we outsource our shared culture to corporate identities as shorthand for those shared experiences
Some time during the 80s. I think it was one of Reagan’s first bills
More like 50’s.
@Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world makes a good point—Reagan admin legalized advertising to children. And now children of the 80s and later have nostalgia for corporate products and experiences
I remember in my childhood in the 90s, like, if you went to a different town, you would get completely different stores.
Now every town has the same stores.
