Nostalgia

Memories of being online

Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior.

Decker builds on the legacy of HyperCard and the visual aesthetic of classic MacOS. It retains the simplicity and ease of learning that HyperCard provided, while adding many subtle and overt quality-of-life improvements, like deep undo history, support for scroll wheels and touchscreens, more modern keyboard navigation, and bulk editing operations.

Last Wednesday Jobs himself received a more thunderous thumbs-up at the announcement of Apple Computer's successor to its own hall-of-fame classic, the original Macintosh: a machine designed for consumers dubbed the iMac (only Apple would dare to lowercase the "I'' in Internet). The crowd in Cupertino, Calif.'s Flint Center--site of the historic Mac launch 14 years ago--largely consisted of Apple employees. But due to an industrial-strength cone of silence shrouding the new product, few had been aware of its existence. So after a morale-boosting slide show documenting the company's new profits, and a demonstration of the speed of its sleek new laptops, the crowd went bonkers when interim CEO Jobs, in a rare appearance in a business suit, literally unveiled a piece of hardware that blends sci-fi shimmer with the kitsch whimsy of a cocktail umbrella. As distinctively curvy as the Beetle, dressed in retro-geeky, translucent plastic, the iMac (due to ship in August) is not only the coolest-looking computer introduced in years, but a chest-thumping statement that Silicon Valley's original dream company is no longer somnambulant.

I didn't want to be the one to forget
I thought of everything I'd never regret
A little time with you is all that I get
That's all we need because it's all we can take

This site contains 29257 unique* 88x31 buttons that I scraped from the GeoCities archives compiled by the incredible ARCHIVE TEAM before GeoCities' demise in late 2009.

We used to make websites because it was fun but at some point, we lost the way.

We need to make dumb shit!
Make useless stuff;
make the web fun again!

Choi: I love [this contemporary banana cream pie] because sometimes new presentations create that iconic or nostalgic thing, but then they don't taste like nostalgia. But this one tastes like a banana cream pie.

Puck: So many young chefs today forget that food has to be delicious. If it's not delicious, why do it? If it's just interesting, you go once, that's it – "okay, I get it, but I don't want to go back."

Choi: I hear you chef. That's what I teach my cooks. I say, "You can do anything you want, but if you can't beat a banana cream pie, then the banana cream pie still wins." In most cases they don't. They can't beat the original.

Tapedeck.org is a project of neckcns.com, built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette. There's an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60's functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70's audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80's and 90's.

At its best, politics isn’t an aesthetic experience, it’s a serious effort to look at problems in people’s lives and make things better. It’s not factually accurate that things were better in the past (even if the past had some good attributes!), and it’s definitely not the case that we could make things better by reversing the flow of time.

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.
Not every flavor of nostalgia peaks as sharply as music does. But by distilling them to the most popular age for each question, we can chart a simple life cycle of nostalgia.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven’t disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

...Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don’t necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called “liminal” spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you’re the adult and the child in you is disappointed.

Some of this is nostalgia for our younger years...but some of this is certainly based in the feeling that the web was just better back then.

...The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

When I envision the web, I picture an infinite expanse of empty space that stretches as far as the eye can see. It's full of fertile soil, but no seeds have taken root. That is, except for about an acre of it.

Remember when tech wasn't all sleek slabs and monotone minimalism? When gadgets were vibrant, playful, and dared to be, well, weird? Yeah, me too.

...In the recent past, we used to get new devices all the time. Palm Pilots, Tamagotchis, calculator watches, even clunky walkie-talkies – they weren't all game-changers, but they were sparks in the tinderbox of creativity for engineers and product managers the world over. They pushed boundaries, sparked imaginations, and kept the tech world humming with the energy of ‘what if?’

That's the real magic of new funky gadgets. It's not about the specs or the price tag (though, let's be honest, who can resist a new toy, and at $200 it’s an easy purchase to tinker with). It's about the audacity to be different, to inject a little fun into what some would say is now simply another part of change-averse corporate America. It's a neon sign flashing: you don’t have to be a trillion dollar company to build a device. That’s cool.

A sixty ton angel falls to the earth
A pile of old metal, a radiant blur
Scars in the country, the summer and her

Always the summers are slipping away
Find me a way for making it stay

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.

Sunday postcards with links to the quiet, odd, and poetic web.

When their expected readership is boomers, books emphasize the decline of respectable centrist media institutions and the rise of “extremism.” When the expected readership is yuppie millennials, well, you get disquisitions on Instagram photos of Iceland, taxonomies of third-wave coffee shops, and nostalgic paeans to … CD binders.

...None of this is wrong, of course. Physical media is wonderful, and Spotify is evil. But it does nothing to deter my suspicion that the alternate, algorithm-free dimension to which “Filterland” is being compared isn’t a possible future utopia toward which we might work, but instead a hazy millennial ‘90s to which our generation of imperfect shoppers wants to return.

Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a (modern) web browser.

Mac(os)talgia is exploring my 2020 work-from-home routine with an added touch of nostalgia. How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday. Unreliable internet, little disk storage, macOS 9 and much more.

In the summer of 1975, I began spying on my neighbors across the way while kneeling on my younger brother’s bed.

There was the constantly arguing family with a drunken dad, miserable mom and confused children. The parents screamed at one another constantly, cussing like pirates as though that was the only way they knew how to communicate.

Downstairs from them resided a single mom with two beautiful daughters. Their window was directly across from mine. Most nights their shade was down, but from the glow of their ceiling light, I could see whenever someone entered the room. Then, one night the oldest girl pulled up the shade. She didn’t seem surprised to have caught me peeping. “Hello,” she said boldly. I almost fell off the bed I was so shocked.

...It’s been 49 summers since I’ve seen her, but I still imagine India’s voice providing background vocals to the pop songs of 1975 and picture her pretty face whenever the Technicolor classic Rear Window streams across the computer screen.

You must lower your acti­va­tion energy.

What do I mean? Well, you know, there are a lot of people out there, reading ridicu­lous bullshit, forwarding it to a dozen others without a thought.

Meanwhile, the really thoughtful readers — I suspect you are one of them — they read … and that’s it. They wouldn’t burden anyone with a link. Never that.

You see the mismatch. Different stances, each with a different network potential. One grows exponentially, while the other recedes, politely.

“Activation energy” is the minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction (including nuclear fission and nuclear fusion). Why should the bad reactions occur more easily than the good ones? Why should ridiculous bullshit propagate faster than ironic points of light?

It is my hypoth­esis that, back in the 2000s, everybody’s acti­va­tion energy was a bit lower. More of us were bloggers, back then. Linking felt more natural, somehow. Now, in the 2020s, the algo­rithms do most of that work.

You must lower your acti­va­tion energy again.

Eternal September or the September that never ended refers to a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. Prior to this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time. The periodic flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet hobbyist point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.

give each pixel a random Pokemon type, and then battle pixels against their neighbors, updating each pixel with the winning type (using the Pokemon type chart) we quickly see areas of fire > water > grass > fire, electric sweeping over, ground frontiers taking over etc etc

Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again.

Riccardo Mori assembled a collection of screenshots of about boxes, many from really old apps. I miss cool about boxes — that’s where developers signed and got credit for their work.

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of our self is led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden.

https://bitbang.social/@NanoRaptor/111699576526610669