With UlyssesT out there touching grass, I haven’t seen this thread in a while. What in the past do you NOT miss? It could be very personal or just something everyone experienced but doesn’t anymore.
For me, I am so fucking happy the food scene in burgerland has changed since the 2000s. People seem to enjoy more well-seasoned foods and healthier options seem to outstrip the unhealthy slop I remember in the 2000s. Even my yee-yee ahh Ohio suburb has changed somewhat noticeably to support fresh ingredients. Less WASPslop is always good.
How about y’all?
Does UlyssesT himself count?
On a more serious note, I’m glad the whole valorization of “nerd culture” seems to be dying/dead. There was a recent cultural shift of making “nerdy” shit “cool” and it got really obnoxious really fast, especially since a lot of fandoms still seemed to keep this victimhood mentality even as their interests entered the mainstream more and more. Obviously a lot of nerdy stuff is still popular, but I get the sense that a lot of people now consider the construction of whole sub-cultures around it is a bit cringe, it seems pretty normal now to just accept that most humans have a few niche interests and being into Star Trek or Steam Trains or Anime doesn’t mean you have to do this performance of being a social pariah and you can just, like, be a normal person who also likes those things.
God I hate this one. In reality the only thing that was valorized was being a fucking treatler.
It also valorized being a smug fucking dork online, the consequences of which are felt even to this day…
I always saw that as geek culture. Geeks consume and obsess over things, nerds are people who like do maths puzzles in their spare time.
Geek culture got celebrated for a while, but at least in my neck of the woods “I’m gonna stay in this weekend and research the history of the lathe” never became anything other than shunned and mocked.
It might be because I surround myself with autistic people but if I said that most people around me would be like “Hell yeah”