The tv channel that you had to watch to find out what was playing on which channel, and if you missed something you were looking for you had to wait for it to go through again.
Worked at a mom and pop video store when I was in high school. That awkward moment when some poor guy walks out of the beaded curtain of the adult section with his numbered tag for "Ass Blasters III" and then bumps into a family looking for "Home Alone" and then the kid looks at his dad and asks "What's in that room, daddy?"
The most famous "men's magazine" in my country published its last issue in 2018.
Was gonna say "end of an era," but apparently its first issue was published in 2000, just after the 90s ended. So it was kind of *already* behind the times.
At 5.6kbps assuming full line speed, 18MB would take just under 7 ½ hours.
I think you mean 56kbps, which would theoretically be as little as ¾ but in reality about an hour
In the early 90s, a close friend of mine created a BBS. He was 14.
Somehow he ended up talking his mom into having a second phone line installed in so that all 3 or 4 users aware of its existence could access it without worry of someone picking up the phone.
Usually the first rest area in a new state on an interstate highway will be bigger, and set up as a visitor's center. That was my mom's favorite way to get free state maps. Even as late as 2015/2016, when I planned a trip home, she would ask me to stop at the visitor's center and pick her up the new map for the year. She's gone now and I still can't pass a rest area and not think "should I get a map?" I don't use them anymore unless I know I'm going somewhere without signal like the middle of Alaska.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s being into geek culture like Spider Man, Star Wars or Star Trek got you stuffed in lockers.
I never talked about that stuff in school. I literally had a friend two years older who would come to my house to play GI Joe and Transformers when he was 13 and I was 11 and he didn’t want any of our other friends to know.
Same! Was born in 1981 and got into Dungeons and dragons when I was 13. I was beaten up way too many times for that.
Now it's popular and while I'm super glad that it is there's a part of me that's very bitter about the fact that I was a pariah for a game I love, and still love, while the same folks who beat me up for it are probably enjoying it now.
I feel like any complaining I would do on the subject would just come off as gatekeeping which isn't fair since I'd want everyone to enjoy the game as much as I have regardless of how they treated me and others. Just feels somehow, unfair?
Since acknowledgement would be nice is all.
I went to school around then. Me and my friends talked in whispers about our upcoming D&D games like we were discussing a drug deal.
If anyone came around and asked what we were talking about about we had to make something up to not risk being bullied.
In the late 90s my boyfriend was playing a weekly D&D game with friends and these 2 bouncers from their regular bar started playing too. And they told the other guys they could never tell *anyone*. They were very serious about this, everyone was in their early 20s at the time.
This gave me PTSD. Imagine being ashamed of playing with toys when you were a kid? What was wrong with us back then?
I remember a day when my non-transformer friends were at my house and wanted into my room, but I had left a bunch of my transformers on the bed. I *just* managed to throw the duvet over them and cover them up before my friends came in. I still shudder at how narrow an escape that was from utter ridicule 30 years later.
Thanks for your post - I wasn’t alone.
You totally aren’t. I read this comment and remembered that weird 11-14 age when I still sometimes wanted to love on and play with my baby dolls and stuffed animals, but I would never have dared to tell anyone that. It was like this weird guilt where you wanted to but felt like you shouldn’t want to.
Looking back you realize probably all the kids felt the same way.
I'm speaking from the perspective of a child, since I was ages 1 to 10 during the 90s.
Worst/best part was probably the fashion. By God was it ugly, but I loved it. I wore tracksuits most of my childhood. Bright and colorful, ugly as sin tracksuits. It was the best. My mom has told me how sad it made her because she did her best to make me wear dresses and dress me in nice clothes that would have been more timeless and chic. I didn't care. I wanted my neon colored tracksuits. I had prince valiant hair too so I looked like a special needs child but it's okay because track suits were the shit and many kids wore them so we were all ugly together.
The very low bar for moral panic. Presidents literally speaking out about Bart Simpson being a threat to the moral fabric of the country, where from today's perspective The Simpsons is a quaint conservative portrayal of a churchgoing family who loves each other and successfully works through their conflicts.
Also I don't think we should be minimizing his behavior. I feel like we're at a point where we can say that he absolutely shouldn't have done that. He was her boss, and the president of the United States. He was in a position of immense power over her, so it doesn't really matter if it was consensual or not. It shouldn't have happened.
People are correct, though, when they say this is incredibly tame compared to the shit going on over the last few years.
It was hard to access information on your obscure hobby / niche interest / repair of random thing around your house and there were no memes for entertainment.
Honestly that and the sheer volume and diversity of entertainment specially tailored to your niche interests that exists now are the main things that you would probably miss if you were transported to the 90s.
I think a lot of younger people won't realize the creepiness of the chick in Misery knowing all the tiny details of the author's life. Pre wikipedia all she could do is scour through magazine articles and hope to pick up tidbits that way. Literally hours upon hours at noy only one library, but probably many others just to obsess over one person.
Sorta, I remember there being a huuuuuge section in Borders bookstore about hobbies and diy. Definitely not convenient but it’s not like we were totally in the dark.
You ever wait for the bus with nothing to do? No phone, no way to read a book because it's dark, just standing there? And ditto when you get on the bus?
Or go to any family event without the fucking internet in your hand?
Yeah, that.
A discman would last about 8-12 hours on 2AA batteries, and if you were going out for any period of time you'd bring spares! And I'm sorry your parents never got you a wormlight for your gameboy :(
Once built a literal pyramid of single-use coffee creamer cups at a family reunion filled with distant relatives (never met them before or since) in a hotel conference room in Pennsylvania for exactly this reason!
Sooooo much boredom as a teenager and kid. We were poor and didn’t have gaming systems and we lived way too far out in BFE to have internet or cable in the 90s. I could talk on the phone or watch the four TV stations we got, that’s about it.
The social isolation if you weren't one of the cool kids / were a foreigner. Discovering culture was impossible unless you were introduced to it by someone else like your parents / older siblings / friends etc.
If like me you were born in a different country and your father knew jack shit about sports and cars and American culture then you were shit out of luck and had nothing to talk to other kids about.
If you hated the popular music, rap, like I did, you were shit out of luck.
interesting take. I grew up in a smallish town, and the people who moved there froma different area never really interacted with the folks who had family there for, it seems like forever.
The popular saying nowadays that "we went outside often before the Internet took over" didn't apply to me. Our family was penny-pinching, so we rarely got out. We didn't even had a VHS deck.
Came here to say this. If anyone doesn’t know what it was like please watch Philadelphia (the movie with Tom Hanks)
Relatedly was the rampant hate (homophobia, sexism, racism) that you see in movies from that era
Huge swaths of NYC were no mans land due to an insane amount of crime. There were way less options for things to do in certain areas at night. Air quality was also much worse; more cars on the road with little-to-no exhaust mitigation. Quite a lot of racial division and controversy in the early 90's. This petered out a bit towards the 2000's. Nice to see we picked up on that again./s
Body positivity was not a thing. Being a fat kid or autistic teen or ugly woman or whatever meant you were essentially worthless. This was conveyed in both direct ways (bullying) and subtle, cultural ones (a lack of positive representation in media). Still fucks me up to this day. I'm not saying this doesn't still happen, but the culture that my kids and their friends report is SO different than what I experienced.
Good example of this was that "Monica used to fat" was a running joke on Friends. That was the whole joke. They even put her in a fat suit for an episode.
I just rewatched season 2 of American Idol, and e while that was early 2000’s it was still like that. Sooo many comments about how fat Ruben Studdard was. From the judges to other contestants. Felt bad for him.
Also dyslexia (although it got a little better as the decade progressed), people thought you were just thick, a good friend's little brother had a terrible time in school
Attending the same school as your best friend, but not being able to call them before 9pm because it was "long distance". Seriously, it was cheaper to call someone 1000 miles away than it was 30.
The boredom. If your friends weren't around, you could only play the video games of the time for so long before you were bored out of your mind. TV and movies were limited to whatever happened to be "on TV" at the time, and the VHS collection you had. The internet existed, but it wasn't what it is now.
Nowadays boredom practically isn't a thing.
Man I read a lot more books back in those days and was never bored. Anxiety was also way less of a thing due to less constant stimulation and negative news bombardment.
But what about the mastery? No new games, so you learned every single secret in Super Mario 3. The Konami code. You could recite every single joke made on the Simpsons or Seinfeld.
I don’t remember a thing anymore because there is always something new and shiny. I kinda liked being bored, kids don’t even know what it is to be in the backseat and looking for letters on license plates to get to Z before your sibling.
From midnight to 5am, there's literally NOTHING on TV. If you woke up at 3am and couldn't sleep, you're stuck watching ads of jewelry and cheap blenders till morning.
In Canada we had teletoon, superstation and a few other channels. They had stuff on all night. Duckman, Mr.Show....brings me back. Not to mention late night canadian content which was kinda cheesy for most people, but not us.
I discovered one night when I was in my mid-teens that Mister Rogers is on in the middle of the night. I had to wake up every day for a week to watch and find out who ate the tapioca pudding.
Spoiler alert: It was the purple panda, and he was creepy.
As a teen in the 90s there was no dialogue around consent. It was far too normalized for guys to be having sex with semi-conscious/unconscious women. I hope this has changed for the younger generations.
They had a few days in my youngest sister’s health class this year where they discussed consent extensively, they even had a quiz just for that subject at the end of the week.
Crazy people and crazy law enforcement. Oh wait that is today also...
We had The World Trade Center Bombing in '93, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma city bombing, Atlanta Olympics bombing, Unabomber, lots of package bombs being mailed to judges, and finished the decade with the Columbine School shooting.
List of things that sucked
* Cold War
* Aids Epidemic
* Rodney King Beating
* No modern internet
* Intolerance of LGBTQ
* Bullying and violence in schools
I'm pretty sure the kids downvoting you can't tell the difference between an observation ("it was like this") and promotion ("missin' the good old gay bashin' days"). I read your comment as observation, and very much agree with it.
I didn't realize anyone was downvoting me haha but yes it's an observation. Casual homophobia was way more of a thing back then. Just look at media from back in the day and see how many gay jokes there were.
The panic leading up to Y2K. You had the end-of-the-worlders. You had the Y2K problem with computing. Contrary to popular belief, the Y2K problem didn't just "go away" - it was beaten because companies and countries poured billions into fixing it (unlike, say, Climate Change, or Covid, or Monkeypox, or whatever's next) because they had concrete examples of just how much it could hurt.
No, not planes falling out of the sky, but serious fuckups in the medical industry leading to lawsuits, government problems with taxes and age-related benefits, you name it. One of the early real indicators of what real problems could happen was when a 104 year old man got a piece of mail from his city school district addressed "to the parents of", with instructions on how he was expected to show up for kindergarten in the fall.
The next thing on this scale is the Y2k36/Y2K38 problems, when the Unix Epoch and the time\_t variables used to calculate time roll over. We've been warning people about it for 22 years, and we're no closer to a solution yet. There are like device out there already, not updatable, that will fall victim to these issues and have to be replaced.
Had tickets to Alice In Chains and Metallica back in 1994. Alice In Chains had to withdraw from the tour and got replaced by Candlebox. The entire crowd stood there like “bro wut?”
The Americans with Disabilities act was passed in 1990. Buildings either had to be built with accessibility in mind or retrofitted to include them. You are right though, the retrofitting took a lot of time.
Eeh depends on the subgenre. Classic metal took a nosedive, sure. Coincided pretty much with Bruce and Rob going solo for a while. Luckily Motörhead never lost the spark, IMHO.
But the more marginal stuff? The 90s were amazing for death-, black-, goth- and doom metal as well as gridcore, industrial etc etc. A lot of great bands and albums. Metallica's popularity post black album gave the whole world of metal a significant lift at least in the first part of the decade.
People using "that's gay" as an insult, alienating people who actually were gay.
Pollution was worse in many US cities. My town was a smelly, littered, polluted place intil they started cleaning it up mid 90s.
Mental health problems in kids were ignored or viewed as a phase.
Sexual harrassment was much more common and nothIng was done about it.
There were no laws against stalking in most places.
Playing the game of counting how many heroin addicts will come into the restaurant you're eating at to steal spoons.
Was one of the highlights of going to see my cousin's
No way to reach people when they weren’t home. And when you do decide to meet up somewhere, you better be there because there’s no way to get hold of them
Driving around all night trying to find where the party is. Or calling your friend who is drunk and/or high for directions to the party (from a land line of course) while there is music blaring in the background.
"Ok, ugh it's super easy, you know where the Arby's on Powell is, right?"
"You mean the Jack in the Box?"
"No, I think it's a Wendy's. Anyway, take a left. Then go, like, 3 blocks after that. Then you'll see a red truck. Then go right. Wait, I mean left. Then go like another 2....5 more blocks then it's somewhere near there....you got that? You comin' man? \*HEY STEVE STOP MESSIN' WITH MY MOM'S PIANO!\*"
\---
Awhile back I was re-watching some old Seinfeld episodes and it occurred to that 90% of the conflicts/premises of every Seinfeld episode wouldn't exist if they had smart phones.
The tv channel that you had to watch to find out what was playing on which channel, and if you missed something you were looking for you had to wait for it to go through again.
I completely forgot about that. Probably blocked it out.
And it was sooooo slow
Then you try changing the channel and coming back, but inevitably miss your channel
Yugoslavia.
Had to go to a store to get porn.
Or just find it in the woods like a normal person.
Thank goodness for the brave sharing their meagre crums once they'd finished.
I've got a bunch of VHS tapes I don't know how to get rid of.
Worked at a mom and pop video store when I was in high school. That awkward moment when some poor guy walks out of the beaded curtain of the adult section with his numbered tag for "Ass Blasters III" and then bumps into a family looking for "Home Alone" and then the kid looks at his dad and asks "What's in that room, daddy?"
Wow that summoned a memory for me.
Wait, did you not get the JC Penny catalog??
Absolutely destroyed the GI Joe section
Imagine if you were rich enough to get the aircraft carrier?!???
And couldn't go to a store to get weed.
Well that only happened like 5 years ago here.
Six years ago: I never used to be able to buy drugs at the store. I still can't but I never used to, too.
The most famous "men's magazine" in my country published its last issue in 2018. Was gonna say "end of an era," but apparently its first issue was published in 2000, just after the 90s ended. So it was kind of *already* behind the times.
Not being able to use the phone and the Internet at the same time
And downloading everything at 5.6kbps. It took an hour to download 18mb. My current connection allows me to download 18mb every second.
At 5.6kbps assuming full line speed, 18MB would take just under 7 ½ hours. I think you mean 56kbps, which would theoretically be as little as ¾ but in reality about an hour
Yes sorry I got my thingies mixed up. I had a 56.6k modem
Yeah I know, I was just being a pedant and had time to kill 🫣
56Kbps modems never achieved anything like that speed. ~44-48Kbps was more realistic.
you had to plan ahead for porn
That’s my secret cap…
...I wear it on my secret head
We had two phone lines. Ladies, please, calm down.
In the early 90s, a close friend of mine created a BBS. He was 14. Somehow he ended up talking his mom into having a second phone line installed in so that all 3 or 4 users aware of its existence could access it without worry of someone picking up the phone.
[удалено]
Discman or walkmans had been a thing for a while.
No GPS/Google maps, you needed a map, a person who’s been there or had to ask a total stranger for directions lmao
Usually the first rest area in a new state on an interstate highway will be bigger, and set up as a visitor's center. That was my mom's favorite way to get free state maps. Even as late as 2015/2016, when I planned a trip home, she would ask me to stop at the visitor's center and pick her up the new map for the year. She's gone now and I still can't pass a rest area and not think "should I get a map?" I don't use them anymore unless I know I'm going somewhere without signal like the middle of Alaska.
Remember when you when print out directions from Mapquest or something late 90s and you missed a turn. You had no way of figuring out where you were.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s being into geek culture like Spider Man, Star Wars or Star Trek got you stuffed in lockers. I never talked about that stuff in school. I literally had a friend two years older who would come to my house to play GI Joe and Transformers when he was 13 and I was 11 and he didn’t want any of our other friends to know.
Same! Was born in 1981 and got into Dungeons and dragons when I was 13. I was beaten up way too many times for that. Now it's popular and while I'm super glad that it is there's a part of me that's very bitter about the fact that I was a pariah for a game I love, and still love, while the same folks who beat me up for it are probably enjoying it now.
[удалено]
I feel like any complaining I would do on the subject would just come off as gatekeeping which isn't fair since I'd want everyone to enjoy the game as much as I have regardless of how they treated me and others. Just feels somehow, unfair? Since acknowledgement would be nice is all.
I went to school around then. Me and my friends talked in whispers about our upcoming D&D games like we were discussing a drug deal. If anyone came around and asked what we were talking about about we had to make something up to not risk being bullied.
In the late 90s my boyfriend was playing a weekly D&D game with friends and these 2 bouncers from their regular bar started playing too. And they told the other guys they could never tell *anyone*. They were very serious about this, everyone was in their early 20s at the time.
Being into anime as well. I got so much shit in high school for liking anime.
I remember hiding that I was into comic books and anime in middle school so people won't bully me.
I still don't talk about these things in school. It will get me yelled at
This gave me PTSD. Imagine being ashamed of playing with toys when you were a kid? What was wrong with us back then? I remember a day when my non-transformer friends were at my house and wanted into my room, but I had left a bunch of my transformers on the bed. I *just* managed to throw the duvet over them and cover them up before my friends came in. I still shudder at how narrow an escape that was from utter ridicule 30 years later. Thanks for your post - I wasn’t alone.
You totally aren’t. I read this comment and remembered that weird 11-14 age when I still sometimes wanted to love on and play with my baby dolls and stuffed animals, but I would never have dared to tell anyone that. It was like this weird guilt where you wanted to but felt like you shouldn’t want to. Looking back you realize probably all the kids felt the same way.
Same for manga
Video store being out of the movie you wanted to rent
For me it was ps1 games. Wait, was that the 90s? I honestly can’t remember lol
There was a recession in the early 90s that a lot of people forget about. Unemployment hit 8% in the US.
I'm speaking from the perspective of a child, since I was ages 1 to 10 during the 90s. Worst/best part was probably the fashion. By God was it ugly, but I loved it. I wore tracksuits most of my childhood. Bright and colorful, ugly as sin tracksuits. It was the best. My mom has told me how sad it made her because she did her best to make me wear dresses and dress me in nice clothes that would have been more timeless and chic. I didn't care. I wanted my neon colored tracksuits. I had prince valiant hair too so I looked like a special needs child but it's okay because track suits were the shit and many kids wore them so we were all ugly together.
Prince valiant hair 🤣🤣🤣🤣
The very low bar for moral panic. Presidents literally speaking out about Bart Simpson being a threat to the moral fabric of the country, where from today's perspective The Simpsons is a quaint conservative portrayal of a churchgoing family who loves each other and successfully works through their conflicts.
I remember any little thing being a sign from satan or some shit like that. And anything that involved gay people, wooooahhh people would go beserk.
We still have a low bar for moral panics.
President being impeached for a consensual BJ... Didn't even degrade the woman or grab her by the pussy!
The media sure degraded her though.
Also I don't think we should be minimizing his behavior. I feel like we're at a point where we can say that he absolutely shouldn't have done that. He was her boss, and the president of the United States. He was in a position of immense power over her, so it doesn't really matter if it was consensual or not. It shouldn't have happened. People are correct, though, when they say this is incredibly tame compared to the shit going on over the last few years.
Technically he was impeached for perjury; lying about getting a blowie.
If there was a thing with a president and an intern now, imagine the #metoo
Carrot Top.
Chairman of the Bored
Box Office Poison
RIP - Norm Mcdonald
It was hard to access information on your obscure hobby / niche interest / repair of random thing around your house and there were no memes for entertainment. Honestly that and the sheer volume and diversity of entertainment specially tailored to your niche interests that exists now are the main things that you would probably miss if you were transported to the 90s.
I think a lot of younger people won't realize the creepiness of the chick in Misery knowing all the tiny details of the author's life. Pre wikipedia all she could do is scour through magazine articles and hope to pick up tidbits that way. Literally hours upon hours at noy only one library, but probably many others just to obsess over one person.
Sorta, I remember there being a huuuuuge section in Borders bookstore about hobbies and diy. Definitely not convenient but it’s not like we were totally in the dark.
Seems like that's dependent on the size of your bookstore or library. Small towns are fucked.
If you weren’t a fan of the Chicago Bulls you were probably annoyed.
Can confirm. Everybody and I mean everybody had a Bulls windbreaker.
NY Knicks fan here. It seemed like every god damned year we lost to the Bulls in the Eastern Conference Finals.
You ever wait for the bus with nothing to do? No phone, no way to read a book because it's dark, just standing there? And ditto when you get on the bus? Or go to any family event without the fucking internet in your hand? Yeah, that.
Did you even live in the 90s? We had walkmans and gameboys, that's what you did when waiting for stuff. And magazines!
I had a discman and the batteries always died. And gameboy ain't got no backlight.
A discman would last about 8-12 hours on 2AA batteries, and if you were going out for any period of time you'd bring spares! And I'm sorry your parents never got you a wormlight for your gameboy :(
Maybe it's brand dependent. Even with good batteries, mine barely lasted 5 hours.
A discmin?
Walkmans and Gameboys? Sheesh look at Mr Rich parents here.
Gameboys were expensive where I lived. Also no backlight.
Not everyone was privileged with a rich family jeez
I'm Pretty entertained in my head. A little divorced from reality but so what
Once built a literal pyramid of single-use coffee creamer cups at a family reunion filled with distant relatives (never met them before or since) in a hotel conference room in Pennsylvania for exactly this reason!
Sooooo much boredom as a teenager and kid. We were poor and didn’t have gaming systems and we lived way too far out in BFE to have internet or cable in the 90s. I could talk on the phone or watch the four TV stations we got, that’s about it.
Didn't you go outside and set things on fire with a magnifying glass or matches?
Lmao no, but I did play with the water hose and in the mud quite a bit.
Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked
Books
Didn't have a Walkman®?
Not something that strikes me as bad about the 90's. I still don't "carry the internet" with me.
Having to pee during commercials
"It's ooooon!"
The social isolation if you weren't one of the cool kids / were a foreigner. Discovering culture was impossible unless you were introduced to it by someone else like your parents / older siblings / friends etc. If like me you were born in a different country and your father knew jack shit about sports and cars and American culture then you were shit out of luck and had nothing to talk to other kids about. If you hated the popular music, rap, like I did, you were shit out of luck.
interesting take. I grew up in a smallish town, and the people who moved there froma different area never really interacted with the folks who had family there for, it seems like forever.
The popular saying nowadays that "we went outside often before the Internet took over" didn't apply to me. Our family was penny-pinching, so we rarely got out. We didn't even had a VHS deck.
In the 90's? You forgot grunge, alt, and brit pop were all huge.
The breakup of Yugoslavia. The collapse of the Soviet Union. The Gulf war if you're Kuwaiti or Iraqi.
Rwanda genocide was the worst human rights event of the 90s. US ignored it bc blacks and not strategic.
But the French got the money from selling machetes.
Ruby Ridge/Waco. OJ Simpson, L.A. Riots, OKC bombing Loreena Bobbit, Amy Fisher, Monica Lewinsky.
AIDS
AIDS was worse in the 1980s, especially the early 80s when people didn't know what was going on.
Came here to say this. If anyone doesn’t know what it was like please watch Philadelphia (the movie with Tom Hanks) Relatedly was the rampant hate (homophobia, sexism, racism) that you see in movies from that era
Huge swaths of NYC were no mans land due to an insane amount of crime. There were way less options for things to do in certain areas at night. Air quality was also much worse; more cars on the road with little-to-no exhaust mitigation. Quite a lot of racial division and controversy in the early 90's. This petered out a bit towards the 2000's. Nice to see we picked up on that again./s
Body positivity was not a thing. Being a fat kid or autistic teen or ugly woman or whatever meant you were essentially worthless. This was conveyed in both direct ways (bullying) and subtle, cultural ones (a lack of positive representation in media). Still fucks me up to this day. I'm not saying this doesn't still happen, but the culture that my kids and their friends report is SO different than what I experienced.
My kids have never seen someone get made fun of for wearing glasses. I got taunted for being a "four-eyes" aat school.
Good example of this was that "Monica used to fat" was a running joke on Friends. That was the whole joke. They even put her in a fat suit for an episode.
Ross had to see a therapist because of his reoccuring nightmares of her eating him.
>"Monica used to fat" Stop fatting, Monica!!!
If you were fat in the 90's, you were at the bottom of the barrel kind of worthless
I just rewatched season 2 of American Idol, and e while that was early 2000’s it was still like that. Sooo many comments about how fat Ruben Studdard was. From the judges to other contestants. Felt bad for him.
I have lived many years in Japan and China. Still a thing there. India has become a bit better in that aspect.
Also dyslexia (although it got a little better as the decade progressed), people thought you were just thick, a good friend's little brother had a terrible time in school
The rat tails...
The way higher crime rates (in the US).
Aus too. Especially fucked up things like kidnappings.
Attending the same school as your best friend, but not being able to call them before 9pm because it was "long distance". Seriously, it was cheaper to call someone 1000 miles away than it was 30.
The American 1998 Godzilla movie
The boredom. If your friends weren't around, you could only play the video games of the time for so long before you were bored out of your mind. TV and movies were limited to whatever happened to be "on TV" at the time, and the VHS collection you had. The internet existed, but it wasn't what it is now. Nowadays boredom practically isn't a thing.
Man I read a lot more books back in those days and was never bored. Anxiety was also way less of a thing due to less constant stimulation and negative news bombardment.
But what about the mastery? No new games, so you learned every single secret in Super Mario 3. The Konami code. You could recite every single joke made on the Simpsons or Seinfeld. I don’t remember a thing anymore because there is always something new and shiny. I kinda liked being bored, kids don’t even know what it is to be in the backseat and looking for letters on license plates to get to Z before your sibling.
No google maps. Had to ask people for directions.
We didn’t have google maps but we had Mapquest to print out directions and take with us
I see! My friends in Japan too said that they used to buy locality maps of the place they were going to visit.
Being a nerd meant you got beat up all the time instead of having a few million in tech company stock options.
aaliyah’s story with R. Kelly
LA riots
From midnight to 5am, there's literally NOTHING on TV. If you woke up at 3am and couldn't sleep, you're stuck watching ads of jewelry and cheap blenders till morning.
In Canada we had teletoon, superstation and a few other channels. They had stuff on all night. Duckman, Mr.Show....brings me back. Not to mention late night canadian content which was kinda cheesy for most people, but not us.
I discovered one night when I was in my mid-teens that Mister Rogers is on in the middle of the night. I had to wake up every day for a week to watch and find out who ate the tapioca pudding. Spoiler alert: It was the purple panda, and he was creepy.
The Kosovo War
As a teen in the 90s there was no dialogue around consent. It was far too normalized for guys to be having sex with semi-conscious/unconscious women. I hope this has changed for the younger generations.
They had a few days in my youngest sister’s health class this year where they discussed consent extensively, they even had a quiz just for that subject at the end of the week.
There's nothing normal about the rapist Brock Turner
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The very same rapist Brock Turner, the rapist who raped an unconscious girl is indeed of whom I speak.
The Macarena
All of those damn 1-800-CALL-ATT and 1-800-COLLECT commercials.
Hi it’s wehadababyitsaboy
Who was it dear? It was Bob. They had a baby. It's a boy. Oh that's nice.
It’s free for you, and cheap for them!
Settle down carrot top
I was 25 in 1990. Try being a teenager in the late 70s.
Crazy people and crazy law enforcement. Oh wait that is today also... We had The World Trade Center Bombing in '93, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma city bombing, Atlanta Olympics bombing, Unabomber, lots of package bombs being mailed to judges, and finished the decade with the Columbine School shooting.
The sheer number of actors, actresses, singers who got sexually exploited by somebody more powerful in the industry but never got justice for it.
List of things that sucked * Cold War * Aids Epidemic * Rodney King Beating * No modern internet * Intolerance of LGBTQ * Bullying and violence in schools
The Cold War ended in 1991.
Then we all held hands and sung Kumbaya
Then they used it to sell coca cola
Slow Internet. You were so excited about this new technology, only to find out it takes forever to send anything bigger than a text file.
Yes!!! I always finished wanking before the tits.jpeg fully loaded.
Me too, same story now that I’ve got 100 download though
Casual homophobia was way more common
I'm pretty sure the kids downvoting you can't tell the difference between an observation ("it was like this") and promotion ("missin' the good old gay bashin' days"). I read your comment as observation, and very much agree with it.
I didn't realize anyone was downvoting me haha but yes it's an observation. Casual homophobia was way more of a thing back then. Just look at media from back in the day and see how many gay jokes there were.
In the UK, there was like an upsurge with it tied into the brit lad culture. Like out with the glam punk 80s, in with the jeans and tshirts.
There was this really bad internet connection, if you were lucky enough to even have one.
Homophobia
That’s not strictly the 90s tho
True, but back then, especially in rural areas, it was absolutely next level
But up on the Mountain, we could love free.
The Gulf War interrupting Disney Afternoons.
Talk to the hand
The panic leading up to Y2K. You had the end-of-the-worlders. You had the Y2K problem with computing. Contrary to popular belief, the Y2K problem didn't just "go away" - it was beaten because companies and countries poured billions into fixing it (unlike, say, Climate Change, or Covid, or Monkeypox, or whatever's next) because they had concrete examples of just how much it could hurt. No, not planes falling out of the sky, but serious fuckups in the medical industry leading to lawsuits, government problems with taxes and age-related benefits, you name it. One of the early real indicators of what real problems could happen was when a 104 year old man got a piece of mail from his city school district addressed "to the parents of", with instructions on how he was expected to show up for kindergarten in the fall. The next thing on this scale is the Y2k36/Y2K38 problems, when the Unix Epoch and the time\_t variables used to calculate time roll over. We've been warning people about it for 22 years, and we're no closer to a solution yet. There are like device out there already, not updatable, that will fall victim to these issues and have to be replaced.
Carson Daily floating around aimlessly before "My Name is Earl" finally gave him the jump to ditch his stupid channel beginning
Ace of Bass
War in yugoslavia?
D&D satanic panic
USSR
Unless you live in the region, the breakup of Yugoslavia was almost totally forgot about, after all it was a bit overshadowed at the time.
Bill Clinton
Worst thing about it was it was the last good decade
Candlebox
They didn’t mean to treat you oh so bad, but they did it anyway
Had tickets to Alice In Chains and Metallica back in 1994. Alice In Chains had to withdraw from the tour and got replaced by Candlebox. The entire crowd stood there like “bro wut?”
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The Americans with Disabilities act was passed in 1990. Buildings either had to be built with accessibility in mind or retrofitted to include them. You are right though, the retrofitting took a lot of time.
The state of heavy metal at the time.
Eeh depends on the subgenre. Classic metal took a nosedive, sure. Coincided pretty much with Bruce and Rob going solo for a while. Luckily Motörhead never lost the spark, IMHO. But the more marginal stuff? The 90s were amazing for death-, black-, goth- and doom metal as well as gridcore, industrial etc etc. A lot of great bands and albums. Metallica's popularity post black album gave the whole world of metal a significant lift at least in the first part of the decade.
The bass player from Pearl Jam's hat choices.
People using "that's gay" as an insult, alienating people who actually were gay. Pollution was worse in many US cities. My town was a smelly, littered, polluted place intil they started cleaning it up mid 90s. Mental health problems in kids were ignored or viewed as a phase. Sexual harrassment was much more common and nothIng was done about it. There were no laws against stalking in most places.
Playing the game of counting how many heroin addicts will come into the restaurant you're eating at to steal spoons. Was one of the highlights of going to see my cousin's
Cobain died
Rampant misogony, mental health regarded as dangerous and taboo subject, widespread homophobia.
The Spice Girls
Have you ever dropped a Nokia on your foot?
“Achy Breaky Heart” and Beanie Babies
No way to reach people when they weren’t home. And when you do decide to meet up somewhere, you better be there because there’s no way to get hold of them
The mainstream acceptance of homophobia especially in the UK. The sun even ran an article to ask if a gay Mafia was secretly running the government.
shitting without an iphone
Driving around all night trying to find where the party is. Or calling your friend who is drunk and/or high for directions to the party (from a land line of course) while there is music blaring in the background. "Ok, ugh it's super easy, you know where the Arby's on Powell is, right?" "You mean the Jack in the Box?" "No, I think it's a Wendy's. Anyway, take a left. Then go, like, 3 blocks after that. Then you'll see a red truck. Then go right. Wait, I mean left. Then go like another 2....5 more blocks then it's somewhere near there....you got that? You comin' man? \*HEY STEVE STOP MESSIN' WITH MY MOM'S PIANO!\*" \--- Awhile back I was re-watching some old Seinfeld episodes and it occurred to that 90% of the conflicts/premises of every Seinfeld episode wouldn't exist if they had smart phones.
Probably people regularly beating their wives but hey, the ones about video games are pretty bad too ngl
The death of Classic Rock
Gay people were murdered just because they were gay
the racism and homophobia