What's something you miss/ are glad about nowadays?

Maybe the single most pronounced thing I miss from my childhood was my grandparents house. It was a meeting point for the whole close and extended family at weekends. It used to be a large farm, but when I was a child, there was only one cow and a few chickens left (my grandfather's heatlh was increasingly deteriorating from his ww2 experiences). Still, he cooked schnaps and stuff, he would drive me around in his car (whole day road trips) to visit his friends in near and distant villages. I got to meet lots of interesting folks that way; blacksmiths, painters and sculpturers, farmers and guys who owned heavy machinery, war veterans, etc. Very fascinating for a kid. My grandparent's house was always full of people, relatives and neighbors and friends dropping by, everyone knew each other well. Friends of family would drop by and have a drink and just shoot nonsense, gossip, or laughs. We held family lunch "parties" on sundays, as a kid I would run around all day doing shenanigans with other kids, etc. Across the street from our house was a club house for young folks where bands were practicing or sometimes they'd have open air theatre program in summer.

The house is empty today, the village is mostly quiet, with young people moving out to larger cities or other countries. Just last month I was having a conversation with my aunt, about the ways of our grandparents, how they always kept their family and friends close and knit. And in general how these traditions die out because of modern living, where each individual gets so wrapped up in day-to-day life and easily forgets about communities and such.

Making beats with just a tracker and shitty WAV files

wait I still do that

  On 1/26/2021 at 7:56 PM, Cryptowen said:

on the one hand you see the global homogenization happening irl - that thing Mark Fisher had a term for (can't remember it off the top of my head) where you can go a city anywhere on the planet & you'll see the same chain stores, the same re-used layouts, people referencing the same media, acting out the same personas etc. But on the other hand the internet allows for the emergence of all of these incredibly niche communities which would never have been able to exist previously. perhaps there's a kind of music, or philosophy, or spirituality (or porn) that only speaks to a few dozen people out of a global population of several billion. thanks to the internet they can still find each other & sustain a network of sorts

i think this does tie into what i've been saying in AI threads about the changing nature of artist identity, authorship, social roles & motivations etc. The internet is ushering in a new era of human identity & we happen to be living at just the right moment to really see the change beginning to occur. We got to catch a glimpse of the old world, and will probably spend the rest of our lives observing the emergence of the new (like specifically i think boomers & millenials have two distinctly different kinds of brains, with GenX being either or depending on how young they managed to get on the wired). By the end of this century I really do feel like there will be a new sense of identity that isn't tied to the individual & a new sense of community that isn't tied to location.

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Agreed, hard to still wrap my head around but I'm grasping this inevitability more and more. Well summarized. 

Regarding homogeneity this hits on that ~ https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification

I noticed this with American and the whole middle class fancy Chip & JoAnn Gaines rustic modern trend too. Like, American kitsch has even been diluted and lost to time. Same with truly unique and weird (albeit usually in subtle ways) diners, bars, and honky-tonks. March of time was going to kill these but I often get irked when I see faux pseudo-replications of that ersatz (I hate to use this word but it's very apt.) Examples: Cracker Barrel, the front section of Hobby Lobby, most mid-size town decent coffee shops, etc. Like man, I miss the really gaudy and tacky aesthetics of the 1970s and 1980s that have pretty much been removed or scrapped. I watch old movies from that era sometimes to revisit it. Very few period shows get it right, in fact they usually overdo it.  

There's a specific BBQ resturant I went to as a kid in Abilene, TX that doesn't exist anymore and to my chagrin very little evidence of it is online. It existed though for decades and was well known. Anyone else from that side of town who lived there knows it well. It had two rooms of really neat and authentic memorabilia and antiques and pictures tied to the nearby Dyess AFB. It had a lot of likely now valuable and rare WW2 era morale and propaganda posters. Most of the more then contemporary pictures and plaques and all that are now themselves all but lost to time. Chuck Yeager even signed a wall there. 

It was painted over over a decade ago when a new owner bought it and made it a run of the mill fried chicken restaurant. It since closed but I looked it up and the pictures of showed "retro" decor you can easily find on ebay or amazon and will likely always been able to find. Apparently it's closed now too. It was probably frequented by people who think that was "real middle America." Bums me out immensely. To bring it full circle it reminds me of Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club, a bar and ranch that is in the history memoir oriented film The Right Stuff. It was razed and while still remembered, as were it's patrons, the actual place itself is lost to time. 

  On 1/26/2021 at 8:03 PM, d-a-m-o said:

One thing I miss is the pre 9/11 feeling of "relative peace", I remember smocking a spliff with my friends after class then back home turning the TV on and thinking "WTF is this Die Hard 3 ?" then realizing it was real life... 

The 90s really ended on 9/11. I still find it strange people have grown up in the era after. 

https://www.wallstreetmagnate.com/index.cfm?do=article.beautifulandhauntingfoundpicturesfrominsidetheworldtradecenterrestaurant
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/take-picture

I'll be honest, I don't think I'll ever visit NYC because my familiarity with it is so heavily indebted to film and tv portrayals of it from decades ago.

For better and worst it's looking the real estate of it is looking like every other slick re-developed city in the world.

miss - burgers

glad - burgers

I miss having my own thoughts.  Now I just adopt the ones other people have as being my own.  For instance I feel like I've had this deep, reflective morning thinking about the way things used to be and how they've changed.  But all I've done is read this thread with nary an idea of my own.

i member 

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:20 PM, brian trageskin said:

i member 

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  On 1/26/2021 at 8:46 PM, joshuatxuk said:

The 90s really ended on 9/11. I still find it strange people have grown up in the era after. 

Yeah, the 90s were bookended by the fall of Soviet Union in 1991 and 9/11 in 2001. A relatively peaceful era in the west between the Cold War and the War on Terror.

Of course on the larger stage there was still the break up of Yugoslavia and the wars related to that, Rwandan civil war, civil war in Afghanistan, various conflicts in Middle East and Africa and so on. Some of which would boil over the borders and eventually lead to the War on Terror.

Now it looks like the 2020s will be a new very different decade from the previous ones.

(at the risk of getting political)

in a lot of ways my entire identity feels like a product of gentrification. my peasant anscestors were shipped to atlantic canada from ireland in the middle of the 19th century because some anglos stole all the potatoes or some shit. i dunno, i've never heard anything about my people from before then. all i know is i have no connections to this land - a fact i'm reminded of whenever i'm called a "colonizer" for having skin that's in a certain pantone range (usually by someone with a similar background/pantone range).

i moved to french canada in my early 20s - another place not my own. i live in a neighbourhood which was once a stronghold of the hasidic community. my being here is a form of gentrification. and yet my peers (also gentrifiers, also colonizers) complain when they see the cool little neighbourhood cafe getting replaced with a generic restaurant with that god-awful flat colour vector art style that all of the tech companies use these days (yes i know there's a popular slang term for this). i understand their complaints, but i also understand that it's just another instance of the same process that brought us here.

my cultural identity feels like showing up late to a party after everyone's left but a few scruffy drunks, and i'm expected to clean it up. i've had my century, apparently. it's someone else's turn to rule the roost. apparently. i think this is why i tend to identify with my rootlessness. trying to identify with the things i was born into just feels like getting tricked into punching myself in the balls. gentrifier, colonizer, toxic, etc. but in saying this i recognize that that's inherent to the millenial identity itself - taking on rootlessness as a form of identity, pre-emptively dissociating yourself from the complications you were incarnated into. finding collective identity only in declaring yourself abnormal, a poor fit for the role you were cast as. a generation of vague shapes & ghosts. but perhaps not forever. we have many decades left in which to define our historical legacy, we children of the millenium

  On 1/26/2021 at 8:46 PM, joshuatxuk said:

The 90s really ended on 9/11. I still find it strange people have grown up in the era after.

Yeah for real man, I would've been a 7 month old baby at the time but fair observation.

Similarly, I was wondering to myself the other day when the 2000s ended and I'd say 2013. The difference in music, music videos, games, websites and fashion when 2012 ticked over into 2013 is like night and day to me. I'd put it down to the influence Instagram and Tumblr had on younger people and young artists.

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:31 PM, Cryptowen said:

 whenever i'm called a "colonizer" for having skin that's in a certain pantone range (usually by someone with a similar background/pantone range).

Don't feel guilty for something you haven't done. Radlibs will try to say things like these as often as possible to try to gain validation from people who don't really care.

@Cryptowen @joshuatxuk

your posts are helping me refine some ideas in my original post. i think there is a strange parallel development where things are getting extremely samey and conforming, while otoh there is a kind of hyper-individualism happening within this. the latter seems to be taking place mostly online whereas our irl commons seems to have become far less meaningful and interesting. the online commons are somewhere in between this where you get a lot of niche sectors of small groups coming together but also this really pervasive conformity and adherence to market mentalities. fi, social media is a place where potentially unique pursuits are molded into a brand model - there are already so many rules about how people use podcasts, youtube, twitter, etc. where those things could actually be a lot more interesting if people didn't feel the pressure to monetize them (either for real currency or "clout"). cryptowen, your ideas about the artist are quite interesting to me. that should even be it's own thread. i think people are still captured in a possibly anachronistic urge to be somebody, to be important as an individual which ironically seems to be creating an oversaturation of such individualities where anything interesting gets immediately captured by marketable models and reproduced into meaninglessness. you're probably right that communities will be continuing to develop outside of local surroundings but i still feel nostalgic for that. i think physical spaces where people can come together are healthy. i say this as a complete loner, mind you.

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:26 PM, toaoaoad said:

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all has-beens, aside from thiessen. who since became one too i think

  On 1/26/2021 at 7:44 PM, Alcofribas said:

limits made it so that it was the kind of thing where you assembled knowledge more slowly and specifically and where chance played a major role.

Your public libraries were your internet basically. I still think one of the key turning points in my musical development is finding the Dead Kennedys' record "Plastic Surgery Disasters" in the main branch of my public library when I was in grade 4 (so 1984-85) and taking it out cause of the weird cover. Up to then my listening had been highly influenced by a friend who was like 3 grades ahead (family friends), so it was all Duran Duran/Madonna/Prince type stuff (although he got into the Art of Noise early). Then my friend's older brother got the Korg M1 in 1988 when it first came out and that was it.

My dad took me to the library every weekend without fail, I would always take out stacks of books. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever caught my interest. Lots of time to delve into reading, cause most TV was trash (except saturday morning cartoons obviously) in the 80s. No binge watching on streaming services either, so I think that really played into my own education.

Luckily, where I live still has some decent second hand book stores that are so much fun to just go in and browse and browse, finding all the weird and esoteric shit that never gets sold on Amazon.

Things I miss - Apple ][e, LOGO, good tasting fast food, recording songs off the radio, masturbating in the woods freely, 8-bit nofriendo, my neon pink Lance Mountain Future Primitive deck (w/ gullwing trucks and matching rat bones), university radio station. 

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:44 PM, chenGOD said:

Your public libraries were your internet basically. I still think one of the key turning points in my musical development is finding the Dead Kennedys' record "Plastic Surgery Disasters" in the main branch of my public library when I was in grade 4 (so 1984-85) and taking it out cause of the weird cover.

Things I miss - university radio station. 

That's how I got into music, both my dad playing lots of weird and wonderful stuff at home, as well as him taking me with him to HMV almost every weekend and as a little kid I'd walk around flipping through cool looking CDs and look up things I had seen on YouTube when I got home.

Also, fear not, university radio is still very much a thing (in the UK at least) but I'm sure you implied listening to it rather than it still existing.

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:43 PM, brian trageskin said:

all has-beens, aside from thiessen. who since became one too i think

From what I recall it was just a terrible show anyway lol. We could tell it was terrible even as kids but for some reason we were devoted to watching it. 

Also, 90s Simpsons were the best Simpsons (especially late 90s). 

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:49 PM, milkface said:

listening to it rather than it still existing.

Yeah I don't ever listen to the radio these days, but I know it still exists. Just so many other ways to discover music.

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:51 PM, chenGOD said:

Yeah I don't ever listen to the radio these days, but I know it still exists. Just so many other ways to discover music.

My friend sent me a link to this website that had an interactive map of hundreds, even thousands of internet radio stations a few years back and there were some amazing obscure electronic ones from central Europe which is a nice break from mainstream radio which has always been shit. Drum n Bass pirate radio is still a thing too in London!

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:51 PM, toaoaoad said:

From what I recall it was just a terrible show anyway lol. We could tell it was terrible even as kids but for some reason we were devoted to watching it. 

Also, 90s Simpsons were the best Simpsons (especially late 90s). 

Degrassi (og that is) was just awful CanCon that you had to watch because it was basically on right before something good.

Agreed on the Simpsons. X-Files was also an incredible show.

Oh snap, I just remembered - Sega Channel - used to sit around my friend's house in 95 getting mad high and playing Ecco for hours.

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:41 PM, Alcofribas said:

i think people are still captured in a possibly anachronistic urge to be somebody, to be important as an individual which ironically seems to be creating an oversaturation of such individualities where anything interesting gets immediately captured by marketable models and reproduced into meaninglessness.

that's exactly it imo. whenever i'm reading complaints about how grim the prospects are for musicians currently, i'm struck with a sense that a lot of these problems exist largely within a world-model in which you are an individual wanting to be recognized in a particular way by other individuals. you want your work to be carefully considered, and woven into a historical tapestry. instead what you get is you work hard on something, put it out there, and immediately it dissappears into this immense digital landscape where there's increasingly less sense of distinction or directionality to anything, in which even the music still being made by humans starts to feel more & more like the pulsations of some memetic artificial super-consciousness (which rules from the centre of the ultraworld), the meaningless flailing of an evermore schizophrenic hype machine. very frustrating from the individual perspective.

however, when i let go of the individualist framework, things feel far more optimistic. there's this great field of potentiality in which any idea can be expressed, any avenue can be explored, and anything - no matter how weird - can find an audience (although it might just be a few dozen dudes on a forum somewhere). the dream of building a cohesive individual identity/legacy within a cohesive society has faded, but in its place is emerging something new: the potential to be a multiplicity of identities, within an infinitly expanding network of virtual micro-societies (sorry i've been reading deleuze again).

of course all of this is still in a very nascent stage, so any attempt i make to describe it still feels extremely limited

On the subject of radio, libraries and finding music etc:

This is something that has crossed my mind recently. When I was a teenager we lived in a small town that didn't have a record store so I'd have to save up and wait til we'd go out of town so I could buy a few CDs of whatever I could find. In this way I was a lot more committed to developing a personal relationship with the music I bought. If I didn't like it, I'd keep listening and learn to like it because it was what I had. You just don't have to make that kind of commitment to music anymore. And that might be why if you held a gun to my head I'd still say LP5 is the best Ae album. I loved that album so much and absorbed it into my DNA. 

But it also means I uncovered the discography of all the major electronic artists in whatever order I could find them at the store, with these gaps in between. Now you can get the entire discography in a day if you want, or choose your jumping-in point. 

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:49 PM, milkface said:

university radio is still very much a thing

I'm glad to hear this - I got my first exposure through university radio. An instructor at the college where I was studying music knew one of the DJs, he put me on playing some of my electronic music, and we subsequently formed a post-punk-trance-synth band with some other people.

Anyways - yeah. university radio was and still is cool as fuck.

  On 1/26/2021 at 10:13 PM, chenGOD said:

I'm glad to hear this - I got my first exposure through university radio. An instructor at the college where I was studying music knew one of the DJs, he put me on playing some of my electronic music, and we subsequently formed a post-punk-trance-synth band with some other people.

Anyways - yeah. university radio was and still is cool as fuck.

 

Yeah many in Texas are still going strong and Austin and DFW still have community stations that play niche stuff, 91.7 KOOP and 89.3 KNON

  On 1/26/2021 at 9:51 PM, toaoaoad said:

From what I recall it was just a terrible show anyway lol. We could tell it was terrible even as kids but for some reason we were devoted to watching it. 

Also, 90s Simpsons were the best Simpsons (especially late 90s). 

I never got into Saved By The Bell but I don't just fans much because for some dumb fucking reason I watched Full House. Regarding that show I read a good rant somewhere about how Kimmy was actually the most well adjuster person on the show.

  On 1/26/2021 at 8:36 PM, cichlisuite said:

Maybe the single most pronounced thing I miss from my childhood was my grandparents house. It was a meeting point for the whole close and extended family at weekends. It used to be a large farm, but when I was a child, there was only one cow and a few chickens left (my grandfather's heatlh was increasingly deteriorating from his ww2 experiences). Still, he cooked schnaps and stuff, he would drive me around in his car (whole day road trips) to visit his friends in near and distant villages. I got to meet lots of interesting folks that way; blacksmiths, painters and sculpturers, farmers and guys who owned heavy machinery, war veterans, etc. Very fascinating for a kid. My grandparent's house was always full of people, relatives and neighbors and friends dropping by, everyone knew each other well. Friends of family would drop by and have a drink and just shoot nonsense, gossip, or laughs. We held family lunch "parties" on sundays, as a kid I would run around all day doing shenanigans with other kids, etc. Across the street from our house was a club house for young folks where bands were practicing or sometimes they'd have open air theatre program in summer.

The house is empty today, the village is mostly quiet, with young people moving out to larger cities or other countries. Just last month I was having a conversation with my aunt, about the ways of our grandparents, how they always kept their family and friends close and knit. And in general how these traditions die out because of modern living, where each individual gets so wrapped up in day-to-day life and easily forgets about communities and such.

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I'm struck by how this could apply to so many different places on Earth in the same timeframe of history. 

Being able to book a show spur of the moment a few weeks in advance and know that I/we could just show up and be guaranteed 75-150 people or more without putting any effort into promotion or anything.

I don't miss moving all the gear, though.