29/09/2023

it's been quite a while, hasn't it? i'm procrastinating on making website 3.0: What is a PHP and so i'm hesitant to upload anything here, but i gotta jot this down before i forget again

An Essay on Nostalgia (and love as a whole?)

as quite a few of you know, i'm a huge fan of some time around the 1980's, the decade my parents grew up in. i have a shitton of retro tech in my room, my taste in pop music decidedly requires synthesizers (preferably yamaha), my architectural guilty pleasure is beige-brick houses, and and when i get a driver's license someday, i want a boxy car

but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. it was the second height of the cold war, healthcare was objectively worse than it is today (hell, smallpox was only eradicated in 1979), we polluted like hell and there was a housing shortage, even back then. these are very real circumstances that my parents (and grandparents) had to contend with

i personally don't really mind, i accept both the good and the bad of the 80's. i would've probably smoked like hell and get the same plate of stamppot every evening of my life. had i been transported to 1983 (or, more realistically, 1993) i could probably survive and even blend in seamlessly if i shaved my goatee and got new glasses. however, it seems i'm the exception and not the rule

gen z is obsessed with the past. the 2000's revival is, with all likelihood, their creation. however, apart from actually mentioning what sites they visited as children, they take great liberties in what they "remember" or obsess over. to my greatest regret, they modernize the entire decade.

let me say that properly: The collective Generation Z is adapting the past to a modern, anachronistic, ignorant and entirely inappropriate point of view. they "forget" the things they don't like and pollute what they do like. don't believe me?

case study 1: the lacey series. the ui gets a pass, but the characters themselves are completely out of place. the art style is decidedly modern and it would be a pain in the ass for 2000's flash artists to make. the characters are also too dark and desaturated for some reason? even if that's symbolic, it's a very poor stylistic choice given the ui

case study 2: the new(?) pepsi logo. if our lord and saviour matpat is to be believed, the new, old-style design caters explicitly to gen z. however, the execution is kinda meh, it just looks like yet another flat design with a bad font. who exactly does this design cater to? it's too modern to be taken seriously as something retro. do a pizza hut and JUST USE THE OLD LOGO !!!

case study(?) 3: where is somethingawful? where are the fifteen billion viruses you'd get perusing the web for torrents, which also aren't there? where is the homophobia? where is any aspect of what made the wild web, the wild web? as bad as all of these things are, to date i've never seen a single follower of the revival acknowledge them. arguably, it's even gayer, more child-friendly and more sanitized than ever before. and yes, that was in the same breath

so why does this matter? well, i argue that a modern look on history is the most potent poison to history. to adapt something necessarily requires that you remove something, and the one thing guaranteed to be removed in that process is authenticity. people assert as fact that some things happened in a remarkably modern and rose-tinted way, when in fact, there was a lot left to be desired, and the past is exactly as regressive as we'd normally expect.

and that hinders progress. what are we to believe if we are spoon-fed modern lies to fit an agenda? will our next generation truly know history, or will they need a paralyzing wake-up call? do we really long for the past when we imagine it to be just as advanced, if not more advanced, than the present?

this goes not just for the 2000's, by the way, neo-nazism is equally guilty of this. unless it says "Deutsch" on your passport and you have blonde hair, you and your family would be sent to a concentration camp under a hitler-type guy. that alone should make you seriously reconsider your world war 2 nostalgia if you haven't already

this sentiment is applicable to anything and everything, really. if you love your country's history, you should recognize that it abolished slavery obscenely late and still kinda mistreats black people to an extent. hell, if you love your wife, you should recognize that she probably has an unsavory past; nevertheless, she is the best thing to ever happen to you. if you love anything, you should recognize that it isn't perfect, and trying to rewrite it as something it isn't is going to violently disappoint you in the end - diminishing its value.

with that said, i'm never touching a cigarette in my life, but in my nostalgic fantasy, i'd probably smoke one right now as i finish this. see you in 5 years