I was considering putting this all in comic sans for a hot minute but decided against that.
I feel like this was more or less a result of the world wide collective pandemic than anything I probably would’ve ever willingly dipped into so hardly, the concept of nostalgia through rose tinted lenses for things that you did or didn’t experience.
Entertainment education games?
Yeah, sure, Humongous Entertainment. I still have Putt Putt and Freddi Fish discs in my house somewhere. But I can’t play them, my computer doesn’t have a disk drive… I still remember “gratuitous educational content”.
You could always check out my abandonware for more games though, it could be on there. Probably not.
It’s an interesting balance because like, stuff like nicktropolis and club penguin and poptropica and pixie hollow still exist with recreations, but you can only go so far with a recreation.
To have nostalgia for something when I was a child is less of rose tinted glasses and more of a giant mirror reflecting something that can never exist due to the fact that like,
flash is dead and I’m not a teenager anymore and a lot of the things I used to enjoy are no longer airing on TV and the music I liked is outdated and the weather channel
is never going be something I fall asleep to on the couch. Sometimes they can come to mind in my head, but like, it’s in my mind. It's an interesting relationship to have and describe and try to explain to other people.
Mallsoft?
I never even liked shopping in malls. I think it’s the concept of seeing something empty that was once full that spoke to people. Like, I don’t think I’m gonna be nostalgic about Kmart anytime soon. This is like a largely “vibes” based sort of thing.
Future funk and city pop?
Well, sort of because they call to me because the music is nice, but it’s a lot of anime I haven’t seen aside from Sailor moon. I like listening to the OG songs more than the remixes.
Load bearing albums.
I feel like a large part of this whole nostalgia thing is that a part of it is community based memory sharing of things that were enjoyed but aren't really as well known now,
like there's an inherent disconnect between people who were on the internet in a time period versus people who have never been on it but wish they were.
Like the memory of the family desktop. I had that, but I definitely wouldn't want it back.
I think a pretty big example of this concept would have to be like, that mario 64 personalization thing? That's kind of the best way for me to have an example.
Because some of it is based on reality, and then the other stuff is based on like, muddly childhood memories. Playground rumor tiers. Of course, people want to be into that sort of thing for all sorts of reasons but I think it was more about a community connection.
I remember the wario dream type of thing.
Lost memory is an interesting thing to cover. I could talk about it a lot because I admittedly do have a lot of chronic memory issues. There’s a disconnect of me not really feeling nostalgically about a lot of stuff but more or less me seeing things from the past as things that could be treated with the same level of enjoyment of like, things in the present. I don’t think nostalgia should be used the way it is sometimes in reboots where it’s like “there’s a thing, do you remember it?”
I don’t know. This is harder to describe and say in a shrine of all things. I like looking through the internet archive to see what was in the past, but I’m not sure I’d want to fully replace the future with it either.