Sure, plenty of small phones with good battery life back then. Owned a new phone every three months or so, innovation went that fast in the 90’s.
But those small phones have a few drawbacks. Too small for my hands and you can’t really shoulder it like we used to with landlines.
I also mis proper flip phones like the Motorola Startac. You could snap those closed with authority. Can’t quite do that with those modern folding screen flips.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
I’d looooove a return of the brick phone. Modern phones feel small and dainty in my giant hands. Meanwhile, battery life absolutely sucks. I’d love a modern brick phone that does calls, text and nothing else. And a battery life of a fulm week.
Harassment ‘of’ 10-17 year olds ‘by’ the game? My brother in Christ, 10-17 year olds ARE the harassment. As a 40+ gamer, I’m confident that we can drop harassment levels by 90 percent if those kids weren’t on it. Little sweaty shitheads are why I stopped playing multiplayer games.
I just buy physicals of the reference books I really want and pirate the digitals of anything else that isn’t sold DRM-free. I WILL own what I bought, whether they like it or not.
In short, the complexity acted as a filter. It was a barrier to entry, which meant you had to be a bit of a nerd to get online. Back in the ‘90’s, people made fun of you for being an online nerd. But it also meant that the people who got online tended to be smarter. More educated.
The internet of the ‘90’s had a very nerdy culture. The worst debates were about Star Wars vs Star Trek. We disagreed on some things, but on the whole it was ‘us nerds’ online.
Now that we made it this easy, there’s no longer a filter: you can find anyone and everyone online. Including some folks who can’t really handle this much freedom without being assholes with it. The web also gravitated towards bigger platforms which, ironically, have much less of a community feel than the old web. In the 90’s, I knew everyone on a forum by name. But on a subreddit with a million people, there’s no real ‘community’.
The web these days is also overrun with politics, which simply wasn’t a thing back in say, 1995.
I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.
My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.
But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…
Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.
It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.
Welcome! We can definitely still use a few more people, especially if they’re willing to contribute to content.
That’s basically everyone with a decent routine, no? I go to bed the same time, so I wake up the same time. The alarm is just for backup.
If anyone has trouble sleeping/waking with a set routine, there’s probably other factors at play like interrupted sleep cycles or sleep apnea.