Today’s memory of the ‘90s as a lost golden age is:

Waking up to the sun shining over the green grass on a summer day, calling in to AOL and reading Salon and Slate, playing Final Fantasy Tactics for a bit

Going to the comic book store for M:tG day (also Battletech and Netrunner and Legend of the Five Rings), waiting for a match and reading the Vertigo compilations and watching patrons buy Lady Death ceramic busts and Milo Manara compilations from the highest shelf

It’s the world I grew up in and expected to inherit and now all I can do is memorialize it so it’s not lost forever

ilgreven:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Hey what was that FOX black-family comedy in the 90s that started doing a broadcast-live gimmick one season and then one week the lead just fucking died and they had to write an episode around it?

Wait I think I’m confusing Roc (the live one) with another

You might be thinking of The Bernie Mac Show, but it was gone before Bernie Mac died.

No that’d be after I went to college and this was before high school at latest

maybe it’s some Candle Cove bullshit but I swear I could remember this time the actor just straight died

and it was in the news, and the following episode opened with them doing a normal sitcom plot but then it turned out the patriarch just died of a heart attack at the bowling alley

…ok it was The Royal Family on CBS with Red Foxx and Della “the senior gospel angel on Touched By An Angel” Reese, 1991-2

Developed as “Chest Pains”, ha!

argumate:

gyppa:

no way

I feel the absolute units have crossed some kind of threshold

I remember this early-1990s SF novel that was like the leftists tried to solve global warming and sent us into the glacial age it had been saving us from

and there was a space station in orbit but the greenie bureaucrats resented it, but it could recharge its stores by sending this atmosphere-skipper craft down to scoop nitrogen

but then something broke and in order to maintain future-orientation they had to connect with some groundbound SF fans who rehabbed a museum rocket to rendezvou them in orbit for replacement

and in the last scene as the rocket took off the harpy head bureaucrat demanded a gun from her aide to shoot it down

but he (who still had the spark of future somewhere in him) made sure to tediously clear the weapon and eject the mag first, ‘elf & safety

(this whole sequence I suspect was influenced by Wings of Honneamise)

Anyway, the SF fans, clearly audience stand-ins to be flattered, at one point the orbiteers suggested they were maximizing their volume:area ratio for icefield heat retention by being so spherically fat

That was the same era as the story that became Children of Men, “oh no what if antinatalism”, and this one story I remember where the careerist scientress visits to condescend to the mommy track sister she stole her breakthrough ideas from only to learn that the real cure to the AIDS-alike she has was “having a kid before 30”

The early 90s: more reactionary than you remember!

(plus all the Kim Stanley Robinson “okay science and pacifism and postcapitalism but still, we fuck 9th graders in public baths)

Been seeing some nostalgic reminiscence of the Anita Hill hearings leading into the 1992 “Year of the Woman” election cycle

Not too much acknowledgment that all that energy yielded a wet fart of a session that dramatically failed to bring liberalism back to government (Hillarycare!), ending with the 1994 “Angry White Men” election where the Republicans took Congress for the first time since 1955, tried to depose the President, and settled for passing the parts of the Reagan agenda the Gipper hadn’t

(Certainly possible to programmatically overlearn from that tho – the Dems probably did on gun control, they were due to lose those southern and rural seats in campaigns with some headline wedge issue)

deusvulture:

Hate

Watched Burn After Reading. I feel like these days you rarely see something that radiates such utter contempt for every single one of its characters.

Each character, to the one, is depicted as a preening, narcissistic, self-centered, foul-mouthed sex addict. It’s not quite over-the-top enough to be silly; it hits the sweet spot of conveying this impotent, bitter rage and making clear that the writer-directors just consider these people scum.

The camera brutalizes them for being sophisticated (the ex-CIA who overenunciates every word of French origin in between outbursts of impotent rage), for being unsophisticated (the gym instructor thrashes his head to music we can’t hear with his mouth hanging open), for being lonely (the sad-eyed older manager whose fumbling attempts to ask out his coworker are timed like a punchline), for being loved (the ex-bodyguard who sleeps with every woman in the movie, who’s lampooned for showing emotion when his wife divorces him); for being poor (the underpaid older woman whose quest for cash is based on an obsessive demand for plastic surgery), for being rich (the suddenly-divorced old man who explodes in anger at his drained savings account from aboard his private yacht).

The movie hates these people, which gives a certain edge to a plot based on an onslaught of pointless indignities that culminates in spectacular violence. The message is: Just as well if they kill each other, right? And the scope of that “they” seems very inclusive.

The 90s causticity was why the 90s were so good; everyone was gatekept and shamed (hat tip William Bennett) but in accordance with pagan virtues of glory and mastery

“edgy”

(“bimbo boxes”)

The “finisher” mechanic reveals that Mortal Kombat was a bloody grimdark gritty vision of fighting for people whose sense of “fighting” came from professional wrestling and if that’s not the 90s in a nutshell

Just made the connection that all the telemarketers that called our house and fucked up our Irish last name in the ‘90s were probably from Deep or at least Sunbelt Southern call centers full of “American”-identifying “Scots Irish” and those were microagressions

kontextmaschine:

Clerks was a work of and about working class intellectualism

even the Death Star contractors bit – “have you noticed that even our culture’s myths of counter-tyrannical liberation are about the valorization of a small elite at the expense of countless faceless workers” feels fairly contemporary

but it was ‘90s as hell, the whole time Dante’s (Jersey girl, lasagna-baking, blowjob queen) gf is trying to persuade him to go to community college and he just doesn’t want to

the slacker 90s sequel-in-spirit, Mallrats, clarifies this in the character of Ben Affleck’s “Shannon”, that’s the kind of guy who goes to college, who climbs the ladder, a slick fake jerk who literally lives for the sake of fucking vulnerable people in the ass

at the end of Clerks, Dante’s life is ruined, and that’s in the nice version Harvey Weinstein insisted they use, originally he just got shot and killed

but it was ok because in reality we knew Kevin Smith was elevated to celebrity public intellectual on the strength of his nerd takes, put in charge of the culture, feted and featured, fed women, he got his wife as a reporter assigned to interview him

And so would we all. The 90s!

Yeah, all the problems of today we had dramatized then - Married With Children was “cultural liberation has given nothing to the common white man, merely undermining the structures by which he used to be guaranteed a respectable position as patriarch”, Falling Down and Office Space and Dilbert were about the how the new white collar life oscillated between precarity and vapid horror

And then the internet!

Fuckin’ solved everything

terebifunhouse:

what fandom looked like in 1995: jorts, hats, goths, kits

joshistheworst:

yachtfriday:

i’m all for making america great again. boo-yah, let’s do that exact thing.

my question is, when exactly is the chronological reference point for “again”? because i’m looking through our yearbook pictures, and none of them are very flattering.

I think about this a lot

The 1995 chimo-made film Powder, about a telekinetic albino, was a pretty authentic record of when the valence of “gifted child weirdo” was going from potentially threatening ESP starchild (see also: Carrie) to poor autistic cinnamon roll

kontextmaschine:

Something interesting I’ve noticed is that at this point the famed Pacific Northwest coffee culture is really two distinct cultures - the sit-down coffeehouses and the drive-thru “shacks”

It’s not exactly a class divide or a red tribe/blue tribe thing, tho it probably comes from how one customer base is bobos posting up outside the workplace at 3PM and one is Git-R-Done types driving on dispatch or commuting

The sit-downs have recently trended from overstuffed estate sale couches to that retro-austere look and hire post-hipster baristas to set a tone; the shacks are utilitarian but universally seem to hire flirty, attractive young women to the point of specialized topless or bikini sites

The sit-downs increasingly focus on terroir with tasting notes for specific strains of bean and elaborate preparatory methods to bring the inherent flavors out; the shacks have syrups and sugar and more artificial flavorings than a vape shop

It’s not even an avant-garde/normie thing, more like distinct avant-gardes. The coffeehouses will have vegan baristas and lemongrass shot add-ons, but the shacks will have CrossFit girls serving drinks for a ketogenic diet

friendly remonger that one of the signature popcult icons of the 90s was Jennifer Aniston as a barista who was clever enough to be a soulmate for a postgraduate-educated adrift-in-this-modern-world professional but also a leetle bit ditzy w/ a great braless rack

talkinggorillabutler:

kontextmaschine:

In retrospect a big part of the wonder of the ‘90s was that even trivial vidya entertainments would be, like, part of a competition between Peter Molyneux and Will Wright and Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to create the most accurate simulation of the entire world according to their own personal theories of the underlying metaphysics

The audience is supposed to fill in that at the same time the ecologists (Kyoto Protocol), economists (early HFT), and politicians (Karl Rove’s cutting edge get-out-the-vote-but-on-a-computer efforts of 2000-2004) were also doing world simulations according to their own personal idioms.

that’s not at all what I’m thinking of, I’m thinking about how they did games about the Gaia hypothesis and gestalt psychology and metamythology and New Urbanism in the 80s-mid 90s (SMAC in ‘99, Black & White ‘01 at the latest)

In retrospect a big part of the wonder of the ‘90s was that even trivial vidya entertainments would be, like, part of a competition between Peter Molyneux and Will Wright and Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to create the most accurate simulation of the entire world according to their own personal theories of the underlying metaphysics

rendakuenthusiast:

dagny-hashtaggart:

argumate:

dagny-hashtaggart:

argumate:

goatsgomoo:

argumate:

cyberpunk futures always have crazy new drugs, which is funny as the majority of people who aren’t VICE columnists seem perfectly happy with the old ones.

How the heck are Cyberpunks supposed to get Cyberhigh in the Cyberfuture if there aren’t sweet-ass Cyberdrugs though?

oh no, Cybercops!

I feel like this betrays a lack of knowledge of the actual drug scene, because let me tell you homeskillet: there are new drugs. It’s true they’re more prevalent in club, rave, and festival/hippy scenes than in the average crack house or meth den, but in any case new designer drugs/research chemicals are getting churned out pretty constantly.

(Also, it’s worth noting that a lot of what people take under the general heading of, say, “heroin” is actually a variety of different opiates depending on location, circumstances, and price range. Ditto amphetamines, benzos/tranquilizers, and so on. So some of these probably will be new-ish drugs, but the people using them may not know that, and the wider world often doesn’t either.)

come on though, varieties of opiates can’t compare with neuroin or nuke or whatever cyberpeeps are getting cyberfucked up on

Sure, but we’re not able to project our bodies into a perfect VR internet, either. Give it time.

A Juul is a cyberpunk joint

Yeah setting aside that vape rigs are like Star Trek TOS props as imagined by lowrider culture, IIRC in the ‘80s William Gibson stuff people were just doing Dexedrine and amphetamines and benzodiazepines and other ‘70s-ass stuff maybe projected a little into the future (plus ganja-smoking space Rastas), I think the exciting new drug thing was more ‘90s WIRED/Mondo 2000 technoshamanism

kontextmaschine:

Watching the “Michael Jackson voices an inmate in the mental asylum with Homer who thinks he’s Michael Jackson” episode of The Simpsons and at this point it reads like two worlds ago

“Stark Raving Dad”, S3E1, 1991, the inciting incident is Homer puts his shirts through the wash with a red hat and he’s institutionalized because an adult working class man wearing a pink shirt is a severe enough violation of social norms to imply insanity

(under a mental health system that is transparently staffed by time-servers as a mechanism of social control)

Just now reminded “Meet Virginia” was not technically the same song as “Drops of Jupiter”

A full generation (pop culture, so half a biological generation) before You Belong With Me, selling us (w/Daria & Kennedy & Janeane Garofalo & Mallrats & the Christina Ricci Wednesday Addams) that the challenge w/ Girls was just appreciating the smart ones more than yuppie businessmen would