One of the many side stories that influenced my life is that Abbie Hoffman committed suicide like 9 miles away from me in 1989 when I was alive, in the late 90s when I first read about this my dad said yeah, he knew the medical examiner who’d done the autopsy

But the stuff I read was like he was despairing over the failure of his whole life’s project (and also that he was bipolar, which makes sense)

Which sounded ridiculous to me, I was even reading about him in the first place cause by that time we were celebrating him and Alexander Shulgin and Hunter S. Thompson and Timothy Leary as our forefathers. He should’ve waited to realize he won!

Anyway I mostly rented The Big Chill about it

Dawson’s Creek reboot about how since the 90s the town got all gentrified and… Dawson’s Creek was set in Massachusetts?

Naaaw, it was yuppiespawn New South as all hell, that’s the point of what the Old Navy brand drew from, and what it was for

kontextmaschine:

hello friends

daughterhood:

Why don’t u have a better off alone by alice deejay and calm down?

I just did and I wouldn’t have thought to without this recommendation and thank you

It DID remind me of the Dune ‘96 “Rainbow to the Stars” video with its whole “desert explorers” theme, which got me thinking about how Eurodance was all white continental girl singer/black colonial boy rapper and wondering what weird sort of colonial backwash that whole Low Countries pop-techno ‘90s thing was really up to

me: From the debut of Friends in 1994 to the finale of How I Met Your Mother in 2014, their popularity suggested we at least had a stable consensus on what an idealized modern life course *should* be: move to the city, fall in with a “tribe” of friends who form the core of your social life. Serially date a lot of people who you ultimately don’t make a good pairing with, but from that develop the ability to correctly identify who you DO make a good pair with, preparing you to make a lasting soulmate match. Likely this is a member of your tribe, if only for the same reason that high schoolers tend to date people from the same school - they’re the ones around that know you.
also me: Stable consensus, huh?
me: Excuse me?
also me: By the end of Friends the 34-year-old Ross had seen three different women marry him, the finale is that his soulmate/babymama turns down a career move to stay with him, which resolves both their character issues as established in 1994: HER reluctance to commit to a partner at the expense of chasing some dream of self-fulfillment and HIS frustration that women won’t commit to him, instead chasing some dream of self-fulfillment.
also me: Now the end of HIMYM, by contrast, Ted gives up on the soulmate he’s been orbiting for several years and takes the good-enough-and-available option out of a sense that it’s getting time for him to take the next step on his bourgeois life course.
also me: But that was just the fakeout ending, the real ending is that the soulmate gives him a chance, once she’s a 50-year-old lonely careerist who’s done with her multi-year phase of sleeping with the manipulative scumbag of the friend group.
me: ...
also me: Had you not noticed that?

morlock-holmes:

kontextmaschine:

In the grimdark ‘90s Harley Quinn was developed as an exploration of the internal life of a woman in an abusive relationship

And in the “female representation” 2010s she’s been reimagined as a DD/lg roleplayer or a nonmonogamous bisexual pinup fantasy.

I think about that sometimes.

Oh, @kontextmaschine, do you… do you think that Bruce Timm wasn’t super into sexy nonmonogamous bisexual pin-up girl fantasies? 

Oh you sweet summer child.

Timm was like “crazy girls are hot because their eccentricities give you opportunities to connect with their vulnerable core”

The new stuff’s just “crazy girls are hot cause they put out for attention”

Which was the tired back when Timm was wired, really

chrisevans-sexualfrustrations:

Steve?

I remember the ‘90s, Maytag still ran ad campaigns on the premise that their appliances, uniquely, would not require frequent professional repair, and it was a national running joke that no one knew how to program their VCR.

KMFDM - A Drug Against War (1993)

Watching Joe Dirt (2001) at the bar and reminded that there’s a whole sequence where it pulls back to the shock-jock frame story for a bit about how incest is hot and funny, but the audience expects you to disclaim it for their comfort, but it loves even more when you affirm it’s hot and funny and is honestly your kink, but it expects you to disclaim it for their comfort again

::remembers that time as a teenager he got into Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For through AOL keyword DTWOF::

Haha I just remembered Loveline, “Like a Dan Savage talk show on MTV but the showoffy purience is hetero-coded from the morning zoo comedian who goes on to do The Man Show” has got to be in the running for Most Late-90s Thing Ever

vintagelasvegas:

Las Vegas Blvd neon in the 90s

Silver Bell Wedding Chapel (607 S Las Vegas Blvd), Monterey Motel (1133), Yucca Motel (1727), Holiday Motel (2205), Candlelight Wedding Chapel (2845). With the exception of Monterey, these signs are all now with the Neon Museum.

argumate:

alpha-beta-gamer:

Some original mocap footage used to animate the characters in the first Mortal Kombat game!

wild

Something I remember from Web 1.0 was background images that just looked like wallpaper

Like, pastel or beige or other mild colors with unobtrusive repeating elements

Which seems weird now why insert ANY such obnoxiousness vs. white backgrounds but back then a well-tiled 4-8Kb gif* could make your whole page colorful while style sheets hadn’t been invented yet and colorful spot illustrations could take upwards of a minute to load

*back then gifs weren’t synonymous with animation, known more for reduced color palettes (and thus file sizes) vs. jpegs

A while ago PlayStation gave out free copies of the “remastered” Day of the Tentacle, so I’ve been playing that

The original came out in 1993, and referenced the 1988 Maniac Mansion it sequeled (and the inexplicable Canadian sitcom spinoff that came in between). So there’s some culture lag and that’s interesting

Not so much at object-level so far: it’s only partly “contemporary”, in parallel with Apocalypse Future and Founders-era past, and that that “today” has landline phones and DOS computers seems like a natural part of the already-retro vibe, “mad science” and Elvis and the same vein of midcentury Weird that the B-52s and the swing/burlesque revivals drew from.

This one player character though, premed sophomore Laverne, is so particularly 1993 it’s killing me. Her personality felt hard to place until I realized it’s a combination of things that I’m used to seeing after the fact as distinct period tropes – she’s like halfway between the aetherial ditziness of Phoebe Buffay and the dark bitterness of a Janeane Garofalo character but NOT in a flattering way, like someone assembled a MPDG backwards. Her character animation looks like Delerium of the Endless as drawn in a Slave Labor Graphics book, and all in all I’m starting to think of her as the eponymous girl from The Presidents of the United States of America’s Lump. It’s amazing.

Setting aside the Clara/Doc stuff, Back to the Future III was significant bcuz it made pretense to extend the authority of SoCal suburbia across a gorge into the high desert/Old West and the message was NO, THIS IS STILL OLD WIERDO GROUND

“Closer To Fine” At 30: The Legacy Of Indigo Girls’ Spellbinding Singalong

Michfest was more important to the ‘90s than you’d think, laundered by Lilith Fair

The New South is a lot more important to “the 90s” than we admit, laundered by evangelicism, NASCAR, country music, college rock, the “Republican Revolution”

comicsansstein:

kontextmaschine:

tennessee-titan9174743937496765:

dreamhouse777:

tennessee-titan9174743937496765:

dreamhouse777:

tennessee-titan9174743937496765:

rcktpwr:

dreamhouse777:

rcktpwr:

dreamhouse777:

I wish I was HOT but instead I’m CURSED! Oh what a hand I’ve been dealt

*etching fresh runes on my greatsword* we’re breaking this curse tonight

*drapes arm dramatically over my eyes* alas….the curse is within…..*burps up a toad*

hm… this is not a problem i can solve with my greatsword so im a little lost

AYEYEYAYAYYOUHUHUHOHOHOUIIIIIIIIGH

Hold on I’m breaking rp that wizard has NO BUSINESS being this built

HOGHGUYIAWAHAHHAWIWIGOGOGOHUJUJUJUJJUJJAHAHAHHAHAAAA

Ok breaking rp again this one is kind of scary :(

AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEYAYAYAYYAYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGAGAGGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I just realized tennesee-titan was specifically quoting Enigma’s “Return to Innocence” (from the Pure Moods commercials) in all of these posts, listen around 1:32

Are you shitting me? How?

I’m serious about those commercials, depending on your media diet you would hear that chant around four times a day every day in the mid-90s, it became the go-to example of “mystic chant”, which I think is why tennesee-titan used it and I recognized it

There’s an article to be written about the “exotic flavor” trends of the mid-90s, after the “white American nation” had secured its retreat to the suburbs and reconsolidated a cable-TV multiplex hegemony over culture – this and Enya and “world music” and Riverdance and alt-country and all sorts of yin-yang and mandala and Tibetan prayer-flag imagery around like, Snapple-alike brands

(the article would be called “Return to Innocence”, obv)

drethelin:

gasmaskaesthetic:

Friends, a poll: have you ever set yourself on fire, set one of your friends on fire, or been around while people were catching on fire as a side effect of avoiding boredom as a teenager?

Only a little.

this is part of the story I tell about how quality of life has really improved in the last few decades

that you remember, we always used to be taught “stop drop and roll!” as an anti-fire technique

the thing being that clothing, especially warm but not heavy clothing, with natural fibers and a raised nap to catch an insulating layer of air

was flammable as HELL

stop drop and roll was for the case where your clothing caught fire and served as a wick, it’s not like you could roll your way out of a structure fire

anyway the memory is a friend’s cousin in this would’ve been the early 90s wrapped himself in three layers of clothing for a family barbecue at a national park, with the outer layer dipped in gasoline

and lit himself on fire for a stunt and ran through the scene and there was this earnest accountant uncle there trying to take command like “Stop Drop & Roll, Stop Drop & Roll!”

and the (cousin-of) friend would retell this story and we’d all be curled over laughing, bcuz America’s Funniest Home Videos was still new and we had a low bar for real-life slapstick

birdsongvelvet:

Been working with VHS; here’s some 80s/90s aesthetic for ya.