CRT displays.
Women having to get husband’s permission to open a bank account (speaking of the US).
Smoking everywhere. For anyone who wasn’t around for the 70s/80s/90s, everything was tinged yellow and smelled of smoke. Car/plane/train seats had built-in ashtrays. Restaurants had smoking sections separated from the non-smoking sections by waist-high walls.
I have asthma and it sucked. Not sure if I grew out of it as I got older or if there’s just not a miasma of smoke around everywhere, but it rarely bothers me anymore.
Hair bands.
Medicine in general has gotten a lot better. I’m also able to buy stuff like silken tofu without having to drive quite far to find a specialty store that sells it.
The lack of privacy, independence, and freedom that generally comes with childhood.
I’m glad that Furbys, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras are no longer mainstream. And may they never return.
Dial-up internet. I would open a website and go do something else for a minute until it loads, then fight with my parents when they pick up the phone when I’ve been downloading something for 3 hours.
We had very late internet infrastructure upgrade, so at the end we had a bluetooth dial-up internet router in the early 2010s…
Internet over bluetooth is a crime against humanity
@simple@lemm.ee Minitel was even worse. But then, Minitel was a French exclusivity.
@Servais@discuss.tchncs.de
Orkut, Flogão (kind of a precursor to instagram, it was mostly used by high schoolers around 2004-6), Skype, Internet Explorer and ActiveX
And Adobe Flash.
Literally installed Flash 8 today because it’s the comfiest way to animate for me.
Henry Kissinger
May he rot into nothing and be forgotten
Not 100% gone yet, but gas powered yard tools are dying. Battery powered tools are just better in 99% of use cases.
Two stroke engines do seem dead though which is awesome, because mixed gas was a massive pain in the ass.
I remember fighting with gas weed whackers endlessly as a teen trying to do chores… having to dick with the choke for a cold start, having to pump prime them (and it being possible to over prime and lock them out), then you had to carry them around and use them with the exhaust at steak searing temperature… and if you didn’t know how to tune an idle they’d just die in your hands if you didn’t goose the throttle occasionally
This is a great one - don’t miss small gas engines even a little bit lol
I had a 11kW two-stroke motorbike and while it was very important for my rural youth, I do not want it back. Fuck the constant oil refueling, fuck the fumes, fuck the noise. If I ever get a motorbike again, it’d be electric.
The fumes and noise of those little engines makes me excited that the battery versions are taking over.
Love my electric chainsaw except for in winter. Battery life is horrible.
I’m perfectly content with my little electric chainsaw. Basically I only ever use it if a tree dies or falls in a storm, it actually starts unlike the gas ones I’ve had…It wouldn’t be up to the task of chopping enough wood to heat my house through the winter but for occasional use it’s better than gas.
The electric chainsaw is the only one I still don’t like being battery powered. Indeed the battery life is too short for most jobs.
But the noise is also part of the experience, it just doesn’t feel as Powerfull without it.
Lawnmower and snowblower have been the only things I haven’t been happy with being electric. Climate change might help me not need the snowblower at all.
At the risk of becoming too anti-casual, anti-gay slurs were so common in the US up until the mid/late 90s, if you weren’t there for it you just have no idea. One of the Bill and Ted movies (I think the first one?) just randomly dropping it in there as a joke, where the slur is the joke, is a good example of just how it was then. There’s still bigotry but it’s not as casual and pervasive.
Eminem has a song where he casually drops an F bomb.
He dropped like a thousand of them. He was using it regularly until sometime in the 2010s.
Eminem is weird cause he leans left but will use any word— save for n word and now f— as long as it rhymes or fits the scheme, then does nearly nothing else offensive. It’s like words are exempt from his morality.
As does Tyler, The Creator, a decade later.
Can gay men not use that word?
In context, it’s an insult.
Policing a gay man on this is odd
the marshall mathers lp alone has like 4 tracks where he does
And yet his first major song endorses gay marriage.
It’s weird watching average sitcoms from then because of this. The more popular ones are sometimes better but even Seinfeld wasn’t great with it.
The Ozone hole.
Smallpox
phones with curly cords
