I miss the inter­net when it was weird

Some­thing I have been think­ing about recently is how much the inter­net itself has changed in the past few years, possibly not for the better. I like the conveni­ence of modern services like Google Maps or inter­net bank­ing, but I actu­ally think the level of inter­est­ing content on the inter­net has gone down­hill.

90s Veget­ari­an Food

I haven’t eaten meat since the late 90s. Veget­ari­an­ism was on the rise at the time in the UK, but the selec­tion of meat-free products was very poor compared with the current day, and many of them had to be bought in the health food shop.

Sew A Dino­saur (1992)

I was given this book as a gift as a child. I never made anything from it because it’s defin­itely much too diffi­cult for chil­dren, I just admired the projects.

I want my MTV (late 90s edition)

I was a teen­ager in the dark ages when you had to have light­ning reflexes to tape songs you liked when they came on. I didn’t have cable or satel­lite at home, but I did a lot of babysit­ting at houses where they had the music chan­nels. So I used to to make mix tapes of music videos. Here’s some of the stuff I remem­ber taping.

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Categorised as Music

I’ve got it on, your favor­ite tee, it never looked as good on you as it looks on me

Talk­ing of 90s reviv­al, I real­ised that the clothes I was wear­ing yester­day were some­thing I could easily have been wear­ing 20 years ago. This isn’t the actu­al shirt I had as a teen­ager (that one, like all of them, inex­plic­ably had a German flag on the arm), but it’s pretty much the same. I got this one from an army surplus store at some point in my 20s for £4, but by mistake they gave me two, so it essen­tially cost me £2. I recently saw some identic­al shirts in Topshop for about £40. Some­times it pays to be a loser who never throws anything away. Until about five years ago I actu­ally did have a top I’d been wear­ing since the early 90s. It was a burgundy and black ribbed thing that seemed to be made of near-indes­truct­ible mater­i­al.

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Categorised as Photography

Forgot­ten late 90s Indie Pop

A little while ago, there was a thing on Twit­ter where people used the #indieam­nesty tag to tell funny or embar­rass­ing stor­ies about their involve­ment with the whole Land­fill Indie and Nu Rave thing in the mid 2000s (there’s also a surpris­ingly intel­li­gent and self-percept­ive inter­view with Johnny Borrell (!!) here). As the Guard­i­an article I’ve linked to said, “Indie amnesty brings togeth­er thou­sands of relat­ively banal anec­dotes about unglam­or­ous people doing slightly idiot­ic things into some­thing quite majest­ic” and most of the people were writ­ing about being fool­ish and easily impressed in their teen­age years.

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Categorised as Music
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