chat

Wasn't as bad as now IMO. Far more people in desperate financial straits now and far less hope for the future. Misogyny, transphobia and homophobia all on the rise now, any gains made in those departments since the 00s look set to revert.

It’s really impossible to overstate how much damage South Park did to an entire generation. To this day I see ripples of it. At the time I was oblivious, but looking back, god damn.

i will never forgive cringe culture for continuing to make it hard for me to properly express myself

Cringe culture (aka trans/homo/acephobia & ableism galore), South Park humour, everything becoming a COD clone, half of the media being arab/russian killing simulations, neoliberal realism and people still thinking capitalism works.

Yeah the late 2000-2010s sucked.

I just want to appreciate that in the span of two years we have:

Y2K - Not a real threat but I was young and it felt like it could be real
9/11
Post 9/11 Anthrax

If you really want to be technical:

• Bush stole the election
• Y2K
• 9/11
• Anthrax

By 2004 we have the War on Terror. By 2007 we have Virginia Tech and the financial crisis. 2000-2010 was one hell of a decade.

That's not listing all the other stuff. Creationism in schools, Katrina, The Tsunami, Covid Part 1, Dotcom bubble, Enron, Columbia Shuttle Explosion. It just fucking goes on and on. It was a decade where decades happened. There was no social media to get a sense of 'The discourse" either. You just went off cable news, online news papers, blogs, and whatever shit your classmates/coworkers and parents were talking.

Most of the mainstream TV of that era was astonishingly shitty and mean-spirited. I was really into watching 24, which in retrospect is one of the worst television shows to ever shoot out of a cathode ray tube.

Listening to Green Day drop the f slur, but against themselves sarcastically for opposing the Iraq War

It was a terrible time and a lot of what has led my life to disaster can be traced to that. The 9/11 jingoism did a number on my family. Death to AmeriKKKa, it was not a good time to be from one of the terrorist races here.

But I don't know that there's ever been a good time to be growing up. I look at what friends' kids have to deal with now and it's still terrible. Like, kids were thrown into the meatgrinder of Covid for the economy because supposedly it didn't impact kids (which never made any biological sense) and now the pediatric Long Covid population just keeps growing year after year because recurrent covid infections greatly increase the chance of long covid. Meanwhile, the economy gets more and more fucked. We just live in a horrible fascist society. And for all that some of the younger generations are more based, others are more fascist. Then when they get out of school they are plunged into an extremely fucked economy.

Things were bad and are just getting worse. 2000s nostalgia is nostalgia for when things were slightly less bad for slightly more people.

One thing that is better is that there's way more awareness and acceptance of queer people. It would have been so helpful for realistic understandings of gender (read: trans-aware) to be this prevalent in the 2000s.

no they on the large part rocked and nothing you have listed is actually notable to the 2000s itself except the war on terror.

"internet that simply did not give a fuck who it traumatized" have you scrolled any social media site for an hour recently?? Sure, in the 2000s you had a pretty good chance of stumbling upon shit like 2Girls, BME Pain Olympics, or various beheading videos if you were on various sites or downloading shit from Limewire (i'll never forgive whoever renamed a bunch of porn audio to be the Pokemon 2.B.A Master tracks so when my 8yo ass downloaded it from limewire and played it off the speakers, I was immediately banned from using the computer without supervision for the whole summer) but I would argue you're more likely to see worse in 'tame' corners of the internet these days. Go on Facebook or Youtube and you'll be traumatized by some AI generated trauma porn (this dog with 5 broken legs managed to walk again - the first minute of this 1:30 video will be the dog nearly dead from mange & bleeding out its rectum. oh yeah it autoplays too), some real trauma porn (this dog with 3 broken legs managed to walk again - the first minute of this 1:30 video will be the dog nearly dead from mange and bleeding out its rectum. oh yeah it autoplays too), AI generated/real racism, various TikTok Communities/Facebook Groups promoting eating disorders (search 'skinny' on tiktok!), so on and so forth. Do you think the internet gives a fuck who it traumatizes now??

Apparently the washed-out brown thing in games of that era was a way for developers to get around the graphics limitations of the hardware with “grittiness”.

Definitely agree that the War on Terror both destroyed political discourse for a decade and just fucked culture. Outside of a handful of anti-war protest songs (and some of that veered into lib territory), there was this general sense of avoiding anything spicy due to the War on Terror and “remembering 9/11.” Politically, we’re still dealing with the fallout of that as this belief of Dems that running candidates that are former military and/or CIA will win over swing voters is them learning all the wrong lessons from the Bush-Kerry race.

However, I don’t think free-range parenting was that pervasive, that seemed like more of a minority backlash to the more common helicopter parenting. What I would say happened then was the start of the “mommy wars” and the weaponizing of the “right” way to rear kids as a cultural/political football; that’s when the whining over “participation trophies” became a talking point. Which was toxic and hinted at how future online culture war slop would play out.

Evry decade is the worst decade Safe for all the ones that come after it. That's just the logic of capitalism

Elder scrolls n mgs 3 was peak fam

Good things that came out of the 00s:

• The Gamecube
• The Gameboy Advance
• The Ace Attorney series
• Let's Plays
• The last good Disney movies (yes it's me, I'm the weirdo who liked Atlantis)
• Literally nothing else

I just saw an extremely cringy post in the modlog that reminded me of how much I hated that whole Maddox edgelord garbage that was so popular online at the time

The only thing I'm willing to give Maddox is that he liked Ikaruga, one of the greatest games ever.

I would mount a defense but I was a polydrug using teen chain smoker and alcohol addict miserably depressed and afraid to open up to anyone because beating queer people to death was a popular evening passtime.

So yeah, I just miss cargo pants and singlet tops haha.

You're not wrong but I will go to bat for Halo actually being cool and good

Spent the whole time in one major depressive episode after another. SSRIs eventually stabilized me but it was a long and rocky road.

The music was awful. Hip-hop was like the only genre not completely garbage, but then you still had bullshit like Eminem getting called the GOAT.

Also, what the fuck were we doing with our clothes? I miss how women dressed in the 2000s, but men? JFC we looked awful. You had either big suits, baggy clothes, triple popped collars, or Hot Topic poser gear.

This post reminded me of Porsche girl and how sociopaths sent her death photos to her parents for years with taunting messages.

agreed.

however, counterpoint: zenith of French House/Electro

Like, the world still sucks now yeah? Like, it for sure sucks less than before. Was it really the Twitter vibe of people being able to talk to each other all the time that let us exorcize a good part of the cold war brainworms we had? I was thinking about it the other day. The culture wars of that time feel so quaint in retrospect

If you haven't, check out Remember Shuffle podcast, they're a favorite of mine and the subject of the pod is how much the 2000s sucked.