You know what pisses me off? Nostalga worship....(rant-tasic)

[Manwat]

People tend to remember the good and not the bad. The biggest thing that's changed is that it's much easier to get the tools required to put your own bands music out. There's not less good, there's just more in general, to find amazing media you need to search for it now. And if you find that hard let me explain how it goes.

1) Oh man! I love the x-player in band!
2) google: x-player for "band"
3) Woh X-player was/is in "another band"
4) Repeat

Replace x-player with dialog/gameplay and band with show/videogame and voila. You've mastered looking for things, you lazy bastard ;P

 

[Darknacht]

I rag on new games alot, particularly RPGs, but that is because they don't make the kind of CRPGs that I like any more. So if I an quality(in my opinion) CRPG I have to go back to Fallout 1/2, Planescape: Torment, and Arcanum. Luckly they are big and open enough that you can always find a new experience in them. This does not mean all modern games are bad. Paradox makes and publishes some great games, there was nothing in the 90s that could compare to the Crusader Kings\Europa Universalis\Victoria\Hearts of Iron games.

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

portal

this. It's fun, and funny, but it's not SUPER UBER AMAZING LIKE EVERONE SAYS. (Though the cake is a lie is a funny joke when only 1 or 2 friends knows what the hell your talking about)
A couple years ago, I went back to watching the old Mighty Morphing Power Rangers shows. I got out my sega genisis, and started playing the games... I didn't think it was an action packed epic like I did when I was younger, I thought it was a comedy, the acting, the animation, it was all cool when I was 4-9, but now it's hilarious of how hard they tried.

 

[Shraggler]

There are genuine reasons for nostalgia. (my nostalgia at least)

1) Music goes downhill each year (with occasional spikes but the general direction remains the same)
2) The cartoons, oh god the cartoons.
3) The late 90s was the golden age of PC gaming
4) Each year more and more sensible movie ideas are used up, so movies like "Godfather" can only be made once.

I side with this post on the issue of nostalgia.

1) Agreed on the music scene, although I'll be a bit more specific and say it's more that mainstream music goes downhill each year. People sing someone else's penned songs, sing over pre-programmed beats and don't even play their own instrument. I can understand wanting a beat to dance to but come the fuck on, sitting and listening to the current pop line-up for mindful engagement or the evocation of emotion? The fact that people prefer "hip-hop" and dance music for "casual listening" is indicative of an extreme lack of intellect to me. It's not necessarily a "deal breaker" as I of course understand people have different opinions and ways of thinking, but I tread lightly around these folk.

2) I can't really comment on the Cartoons of the modern era. The 90's were filled with some good'ns: Freakazoid, Batman: TAS, Rocko's Modern Life, Ren & Stimpy, the sort of "golden age" of The Simpsons, etc.

3) I will agree with this, the late 90's/early 00's were awesome for PC gaming. System Shock 2, Half-Life (and all of its mods), Deus Ex, Anachronox, Thief, etc. Those were fun times. Sure there are great titles out now, but nothing like the flurry of innovations and games that were specifically developed for the PC market. 3dfx and their Voodoo cards competing with the then emerging Nvidia and ATI. When the GeForce 256 debuted; when the Radeon 9700/9800 came onto the market and just blew EVERYTHING away. When AMD emerged as a valiant competitor to Intel's Pentium line, whilst both shunned Celeron. I definitely remember how insane that was.

4) Movies are movies. In any case, they seem to be fairly steady in terms of good to bad ratio year after year. Independent films are actually getting decent funding and are able to open at more and more theatres. So instead of sheeping it up and forking over ten bucks for some shit like Transformers 3, there's the option of seeing something else with way less-than-equal footing, but a probability of better quality.

 

[Omnific One]

There is always good and bad; it comes and goes in equal amounts. It's just that people's hatred for older stuff is forgotten (as is the really terrible stuff), while their love is not.

 

[dlsevern]

There is always good and bad; it comes and goes in equal amounts. It's just that people's hatred for older stuff is forgotten (as is the really terrible stuff), while their love is not.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

[FalloutJack]

All very well and good, but...googles?

 

[Frozen Donkey Wheel2]

OK, first of all: Seriously....Lay off the fucking "enter" key. ESPECIALLY if you know your post is going to be really big WITHOUT skipping lines. Why the fuck do people do this? It just makes it look you keep losing your train of thought after every sentence and have to take a few seconds to find it again. I read your post kinda like this:

So I have this idea............And this other thing is related to that idea............Now I'm asking a rhetorical question..........Which also relates to the first idea........Here's another argument for my point.......So do you agree?

See what I mean? It just makes the whole post awkward and disconnected. STOP. PRESSING ENTER. AFTER EVERY LINE.

That being said, the actual ideas in your post are fine, I agree completely. No form of media has "gone to hell" over the years, some people just let nostalgia for their childhoods warp their memories and/or perception of current stuff. And it is indeed retarded.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

this is a rant......an emotional rant

ohhh boy where do I start

How about '91, when you were born...and as such, you could be termed as suffering from modernity.

It's quite likely that certain things were better in the 80s. It's also equally likely that somethings were a hell of a lot worse. (like deelyboppers, fluorescent tube socks and potential armageddon)

But attacking the promotion of anything before your memory as nostalgia? That's as big a crime as nostalgia itself.

The 90s main gift to the world was comedy. Very few decades could lift a custard pie to the 90s in cutting edge comedy. The music was ok, but a big slip away from the 80s. The games were prettier and longer, but often not as deep and certainly not as button-mashingly hard.

Cartoons? 50s beats most decades into the ground. Music? Hard pressed to beat the 60s. Games? Different sort at different times. Not even Modern Warfare or Halo can claim the over-riding cultural phenomenom of Space Invaders.

TL;DR: Just because someone is nostalgic doesn't mean it wasn't/isn't still awesome. And anything you grew up with gets layers of awesome piled on top as standard. What you may love can still be something naff with a new lick of paint. Doesn't mean it's not awesome to you.

Or should I be using groovy, bad, sick, wicked, tubular or epic? I can never keep up.

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

I have to greatly disagree, I love nostalgia memories are great. And the 80s being great? I'm not sure where you are from, but here in the states its known as the dark time. Terrible music, and movies, the 80s were just bad.

 

[funguy2121]

snip

Everyone, please remove your nostalgia Googles. OP is just Binging emotional.

This is what people are talking about when they say "simulacrum." It's like a band that's heard NOFX and tries to ape them, but doesn't understand what makes them work. Oh, the 3-chord double-time 2/4 simplistic stuff is there, but it's not really even punk. And because NOFX's singer has a snotty voice, bands like Good Charlotte just do a whole lot of whining, thinking that that will do the trick. In other words, they don't understand what they're emulating. For another example, listen to 90's-era Nine Inch Nails (or The Social Network soundtrack) and then listen to anything by Linkin Park. See? Now you get it.

The "scream comedians" like Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks (RIP) and their godfather, George Carlin (RIP), so named "scream comics" because the people doing the labeling were too intellectually diminutive to grasp the depth of their respective acts, started this whole rant thing. Intellectual larceny perp Denis Leary popularized it when he ran off with the far superior act of Bill Hicks. At least Denis Leary was still funny...if you'd never heard Bill Hicks. Leary's standup is gutted of the truth-telling, sincere anger (and sometimes hatred) of Hicks act. It was also stripped of the kind of love that sometimes led Hicks to refer to humanity as "God's perfect children" when he wasn't calling us "a virus with shoes." But even Leary is an articulate, if occasionally anti-intellectual, stand-up. And his rants, at their weakest, are well articulated. And even HIS rants occasionally targeted deserving persons.

Doing a bunch of yelling on the internet, riddled with the kind of serendipitous misspellings that allowed my jab at the beginning of this post, does not make for an effective rant.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Yeah I agree somewhat. While it good to remember the past sometime but not for too long. I just feel some people would rather remiain in the past were nothing change, stuck forever. Come on, people shouldn't hate or fear the upcoming unkowns and futures.

 

[VaudevillianVeteran]

Nostalgia is an interesting thing. Meaning that sometimes it just feels good to pick up a game you played ten years ago, watch a show you watched as a kid and just think about what it was like to be that age again and the good feelings you felt playing it the first time.
Though people should accept that things change and in hindsight, what you think of something is subjective and it is annoying when someone calls something 'the best ever that can't be topped' with nostalgia goggles on.

 

[MorsePacific]

You know what pisses me off? People who get angry over opinions.

In reality, I'm sure people who are full of nostalgia know that there's plenty of great media to choose from now, but it's hard to shake off really good memories you have with things from the past. Let people enjoy what they want.

I don't think I've ever heard someone try to say that everything produced in this decade is of no worth. That's just a gross exaggeration and I don't think any person could honestly say that.

 

[Radelaide]

This really aggravates me when media figures spout this off. About how "oh America used to be so much better, lets get back to the way America was, the real America." Are you fucking kidding me? What America was that? The America that allowed slavery? The America that trampled on people's basic civil rights because their skin was a different color? The America full of propoganda and hate convincing neighbors to turn in neighbors on some bullshit belief they're communists with no evidence? The America that shoots innocent college students protesting a war they saw as immoral? Seriously, how was America ever better than it was now as a whole? Maybe certain things (like the economy) were better at certain times but would you really want to trade everything else for that? I sure as fuck wouldn't. I'm not saying everything in 2011 is peachy-keen, rosey sunglasses but come on.

Probably an America that isn't broke?

OT: If you think it's crap, that's cool but don't rag on Pulp Fiction!

 

[Nickolai77]

We tend to only remember what was "good" about the past when we want to. We are all to aware of the struggles we face in the present, and the future is just uncertainty. Take music for instance, we remember all the good old pieces and forget all the bad ones, creating the illusion that music was "better" in the past than it is now.

 

[Saelune]

I know good stuff will always come...but its surprising how much music in the 80's I just love. Though rap started getting big then...and I HATE rap. However alot of rap and what became rap I actually enjoyed.

 

[II2]

You know, people's nostalgia for the 80's was better in the 90's. We had grown up and had time to really REFLECT, you know? Now all you kids think the 80's is cool as some trendy or kitsch way, but back in the late 90's - early 00's, we really GENUINELY APPRECIATED our nostalgia... not like people today.

-___-

 

[Vault101]

OK, first of all: Seriously....Lay off the fucking "enter" key. ESPECIALLY if you know your post is going to be really big WITHOUT skipping lines. Why the fuck do people do this? It just makes it look you keep losing your train of thought after every sentence and have to take a few seconds to find it again. I read your post kinda like this:

So I have this idea............And this other thing is related to that idea............Now I'm asking a rhetorical question..........Which also relates to the first idea........Here's another argument for my point.......So do you agree?

See what I mean? It just makes the whole post awkward and disconnected. STOP. PRESSING ENTER. AFTER EVERY LINE.

That being said, the actual ideas in your post are fine, I agree completely. No form of media has "gone to hell" over the years, some people just let nostalgia for their childhoods warp their memories and/or perception of current stuff. And it is indeed retarded.

Apologies, I was just trying too hard to avoid wall of text, plus I didnt exactally know how long it was going to be