Things boomers are nostalgic for:
❎️ the ways things actually were better.
✅️ inconvenience.
Remember popping in a CD?
It could hold up to like 15 songs!
Nostalgia is good & nice but nah I don’t need artificial limits on stuff today.
CDs can’t be erased on the cloud, to then either push other songs on you, or the “remasters” (cough-cough In Flames), and otherwise most digital albums still hold this “artificial” limit. Even worse is when they limit it to 2-3 minutes nowadays, because Tik-Tok.
songs have been 2-3 minutes for decades now
Remember popping in a CD?
It could hold up to like 15 songs!
And remember paying $20 in 1996 for that 15 song CD, and remember your heartbreak when you listen through for the first time and find out there was only the one song you knew that you really liked and maybe two others that were just okay?
Dark days indeed.
what about when they started to make cd players that could read a data disc full of mp3s? what a time to be alive. no need for a changer in the trunk!
Ha ha yeah, around the time where 128MB mp3 players got accessible!
Well we went full circle. YouTube and Netflix killed the tv because they were young rebels that challenged status quo and had no ads, and ads on tv went very long. Now YouTube, Netflix and all others just went to shit because of annoying and long ads, or paying extra to skip ads, gathering of usage data, spying on users, selling data, censoring, and building huge monopolies. Time for the next thing.
Well we went full circle. YouTube and Netflix killed the tv because they were young rebels that challenged status quo and had no ads, and ads on tv went very long. Now YouTube, Netflix and all others just went to shit because of annoying and long ads, or paying extra to skip ads, gathering of usage data, spying on users, selling data, censoring, and building huge monopolies.
I don’t think your gripe is with Netflix on this. The reason they were able to offer mountains of commercial free content was because content owners didn’t think “streaming licensing rights” were worth very much, so they sold them very cheaply. When content owners saw their DVD sales dry up and the started looking where their audiences went, and found them subscribing to Netflix. So when the content licensing contract renewals came up, the content owners jacked up the prices to high heaven. Netflix had the choice to either drop content or raise prices. They did a chunk of both, then again at the next renew, and again, etc.
Scripted content is generally expensive. The alternative is the dirt-cheap-to-produce “reality TV”. If you wonder why you’re seeing so much more “reality tv” this is why.
Now the ads are 60sec? instead of 2.5min. Right now the time pressure to do your business is the hardest its ever been. Until they increase the ads again.
You could always keep an empty plastic bottle on hand. Start while in your chair and then finish up in the bathroom. Of course this would require some acrobatics if you are a female
Me, who never had a Netflix era but still never experienced this.
Kids not having the Saturday morning ritual and being disappointed because golf.
Now it’s going to the bathroom or grabbing a snack wile in matchmaking queue
The joy of when that Big Screen movie that you never got to see finally comes to the TV. With ad breaks. You absolutely didn’t care about the ads because they were normal at the time. And you had to be there on time to watch it, and make sure nobody else in the house was going to try to watch something at the same time. While I appreciate the huge variety and the ability to binge some great series today, it’s still the same old shit even with all the streaming services: A lot of bad TV, lots of uninteresting TV, with a few bright spots and plenty of ads.
The moral of the story is: no rusty banal or shitty memory is banal or shitty enough, for these postmodern kids nowadays to NOT commoditize it as “nostalgia”. EXACTLY like their boomer parents with their own rusty banal or shitty items in their memory bank.
“I look around me, and the horizon seems to be at the same distance everywhere I look, therefore it must be obvious: I am at the center of the Universe.”
