6 ms·

I miss the kind of people who would write something like this. The early 90's were something special. Where did all of these folks go? The whole culture disa

I miss the kind of people who would write something like this. The early 90's were something special. Where did all of these folks go? The whole culture disappeared.

globular-toast 3y ago
They got golden handcuffs and forced to become normies.
gopher_space 3y ago
It's all written on Minecraft signs now, gramps. What was unique (imho and in retrospect) about that period was the longevity of its media.
- maxbond 3y ago
  And the sign says, "the words of the prophets were lost when the griefers called."
- anthk 3y ago
  Today most guides on SH, sed, AWK, Perl, ANSI C, FVWM, Emacs... will just work even if they are from Linux Gazzete in the 90's. For instance, setting up the XTerm title with terminal escapes, renaming files in batch with vidir (moreutils), ffmpeg/ImageMagick FX and transcoding... Here you have a mirror: https://github.com/linuxgazette/lg https://github.com/linuxgazette/lg Lots of awesome guides, retrocode, fun and comics inside.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
silisili 3y ago
We're all in our 30s and 40s and 50s working boring old jobs now. No idea where the culture went. Probably because it was greenfield then, laws were lax if not nonexistent, etc.
- beebmam 3y ago
  Mass culture grew onto the Internet and homogenized everything. Politics finished off the resistance.
- sneak 3y ago
  Culture's still here, still hanging out in the dark corners of the internet that most aren't invited to.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    How do I get invited to them? Also, probably discord.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      from most of these things you get the energy out that you put in. You can't be part of amazing culture without manually sifting through niche culture on the regular. Without reading forum posts by frankly rubbish amateurs. Without going to the bar where different garage bands host their first gig every night. Almost by defintion anything media promotes to you won't be interesting and new. If you just sit there and wait for it to come to you, you only get the things for which its worth people taking it to you. The things that extract the almighty dollar.
      - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
        Okay, so the issue is, idk where to even begin to find such places let alone sift through them. I found HN because I read a post by Scott Alexander (slate star codex), whom I found through lessWrong when I was studying RL and Control. And that was because I found OpenAI’s go-explore paper super interesting one night at the library which inspired me to go and do RL research for my thesis. So I am hoping I get some pointers in here :D
        bombcar 3y ago
        Pay attention when wandering the Internet, and keep an eye out for interesting threads to pull get exceptionally interested in thread-pulling when people tell you not to pull them. Be prepared to not be squeaky clean, and be alert.
sharts 3y ago
We’re working for techbros and MBAs that destroyed the culture for profit.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  MBAification is very real and very awful. I have a working theory that it’s not just tech, or just MBAs, or just the opposite political people, or tactical division, or just (prescription) drugs or just enshitification, or just media… but all of the things at the same time. A big theory of why everything sucks. For a microcosm… music. Music now objectively sucks, and it’s for all the reasons above at all the same time. But if you made me pick a single thing… it would be MBAs ruining everything.
  - zztop44 3y ago
    Interesting, I’d say music is a clear counterexample. I’m nostalgic for the 90s as well, but there is so much more great, diverse and wonderful music being made now than ever before. Even finding it isn’t really that hard, either.
    - slg 3y ago
      Whenever someone says a particular art form sucks now, what they are really saying is that they don't like the mainstream version of that art form. The thing about art is that people are self-motivated to make it. Sure, the financial incentives aligning with good art can help spur more of it by allowing people to dedicate their whole lives to making art. However, there is always someone making cool stuff in their free time regardless of the financial reward. There is more good art out there than any individual could possibly consume, it just becomes a little more difficult to find it when it isn't playing on the radio.
      - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        Disagree. This is a subjective dismissal for a topic that is objectively been enshitified. This isn’t “back in my day”. There is objectively less quality and massively more quantity. * With studio quality equipment being reduced to almost literally nothing anyone can be in the game. * Studios don’t need to pay to developer artists. They are entirely disposable now. * Albums aren’t at all important. There is very little in the way of major releases outside some traditional artists. Just dump a single to Spotify and walk away. * Directly from an executive that worked a major label - people that actually like music are no limited to basically just sound engineers. Everyone else has a MBA and couldn’t care less if they were making movies or music or gears. * From the same high up executive I am social with - Rap has been hit the hardest. It is objectively garbage. There are no Nas, or NWA, or Eminems coming up. The last of the actual poets that got any play at all like Kendrick for example just aren’t pushed. It comes back to quantity, but as a side note he did lament how these guys are the worst to try and deal with if they try to at all. * Automation has hit this industry with its massive influx of quantity. Basically get on Spotify and get to a level, then you’ll get an automated contact, maybe they’ll front you a few thousand at a bad deal so you can set up your own tour and make a couple dollars. If you fuck up or whatever they just move on to the next one. Literally no one cares about you until you hit a Spotify number. * previously there were things like handlers and PR. But now, as an artist you are entirely on your own. Want to do a porn or have a mental breakdown? Ok so what, you are more of a number in a system than you have ever been. There is no “guy from the label” until you are at the top Spotify tiers. * it’s not all studios and MBAs and labels. There’s a side effect going on as a culture we don’t really have a shared listening experience. Since the invention of radio, we all heard roughly the same thing at the same time. Now, kids have their on playlists and maybe they recommend some thing on that playlist to their friends, but you go one school over and they can have drastically different collections. They aren’t hearing the same song on the radio, there is no Casey Kasem‘s Top 40, everyone has been down selecting their own optimization. * trust me, if you knew my history with music, you’d be shocked as I would typically be the last person in the world to recognize any positive effects that labels and the industry had on the art. It’s strange days my man. * do you know the phrase “it takes a lifetime to make the first album, and the year to make the second”? Part of that is it your first album has so much polish. You need to hit hard to get the eye of a label. There’s no reason to hold a song back now at all, to work on it, to have versions that you’d like to hear better when you’re touring, versus on a car stereo versus in the studio… there’s no reason to polish anything anymore. You get it out you were Lisa you put it on Spotify and move along. Just like everybody else is doing. So no. Objectively, the quantity of music has grown exponentially and the overall and polish quality has gone down. I will old man shakes his fist of clouds all day, but I won’t take some thing so obvious and as many examples is this has, and just dismiss it as that.
magic_hamster 3y ago
So, this is a very niche community specific inside joke (or diss) which I think never really went away, you just need to find a small and nerdy community and you'll see this kind of stuff come up from time to time. I used to see this in forums but now I'd argue this sort of thing is easier to find on Discord, maybe.
deepakhj 3y ago
I dropped out to focus on college and then all the FBI busts happened. I work in tech now. I lost touch with most people. I can still find my name and groups in the scene reports that have been archived on defacto2.
RGamma 3y ago
It was once in a lifetime. Now most everyone's following commercial maximes while faking enthusiasm and dying inside a bit every year.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  It’s quite depressing.. Even more recently, the early days of youtube when it just edutainment, and gaming were great .. but now I see VSauce making short format videos (tiktok equivalent) and looking dead inside. The stress, living costs, and commercialisation of everything has sapped the internet of what made it so good in the first place.
  - RGamma 3y ago
    Not VSauce too :( It's like a virus.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    $$$ is the culprit. The lie that people only make things because patreon dollars, because ad impressions, because sponsorships. They begin to optimise for these metrics and not the most important metric (fun). The lie in general that creative output only happens because people pay for it is wrong in so many ways. People love to be creatively fulfilled. I'd argue the exact opposite, that unless something else is physically preventing them, people will make creative things. Video, songs, games, writing.
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
      I think most of OSS is evidence that people will do creative things for free. I suppose that if people's needs were met, more of them would be willing to do all these for free without chasing a dragon.
  - reportgunner 3y ago
    Advertisements did this.
- goodpoint 3y ago
renewiltord 3y ago
Groupies never know where the artists have gone. Only the artists know.
einr 3y ago
Where did all of these folks go? Zine writer Jason Farnon, who likely is the same Jason Farnon from the AWA issue in the OP although I don't know this for certain, wrote this article in his zine I Bleed For This? in 1996: http://textfiles.com/magazines/IBFT/ibft045.txt http://textfiles.com/magazines/IBFT/ibft045.txt A recommended read for people who wonder where this culture went as the people who were in it got Real Jobs in the Real World. This file affected me personally pretty deeply in my teens -- now as an adult it feels a little over-dramatic but it's written from a place of honesty and it's just one of those things that you read when you're 17 and you swear up and down that will never be me.

I miss the kind of people who would write something like this. The early 90's were something special. Where did all of these folks go? The whole culture disappeared.

globular-toast 3y ago

They got golden handcuffs and forced to become normies.

gopher_space 3y ago

It's all written on Minecraft signs now, gramps. What was unique (imho and in retrospect) about that period was the longevity of its media.

maxbond 3y ago
And the sign says, "the words of the prophets were lost when the griefers called."
anthk 3y ago
Today most guides on SH, sed, AWK, Perl, ANSI C, FVWM, Emacs... will just work even if they are from Linux Gazzete in the 90's. For instance, setting up the XTerm title with terminal escapes, renaming files in batch with vidir (moreutils), ffmpeg/ImageMagick FX and transcoding... Here you have a mirror: https://github.com/linuxgazette/lg https://github.com/linuxgazette/lg Lots of awesome guides, retrocode, fun and comics inside.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

silisili 3y ago

We're all in our 30s and 40s and 50s working boring old jobs now. No idea where the culture went. Probably because it was greenfield then, laws were lax if not nonexistent, etc.

beebmam 3y ago
Mass culture grew onto the Internet and homogenized everything. Politics finished off the resistance.
sneak 3y ago
Culture's still here, still hanging out in the dark corners of the internet that most aren't invited to.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  How do I get invited to them? Also, probably discord.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    from most of these things you get the energy out that you put in. You can't be part of amazing culture without manually sifting through niche culture on the regular. Without reading forum posts by frankly rubbish amateurs. Without going to the bar where different garage bands host their first gig every night. Almost by defintion anything media promotes to you won't be interesting and new. If you just sit there and wait for it to come to you, you only get the things for which its worth people taking it to you. The things that extract the almighty dollar.
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
      Okay, so the issue is, idk where to even begin to find such places let alone sift through them. I found HN because I read a post by Scott Alexander (slate star codex), whom I found through lessWrong when I was studying RL and Control. And that was because I found OpenAI’s go-explore paper super interesting one night at the library which inspired me to go and do RL research for my thesis. So I am hoping I get some pointers in here :D
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Pay attention when wandering the Internet, and keep an eye out for interesting threads to pull get exceptionally interested in thread-pulling when people tell you not to pull them. Be prepared to not be squeaky clean, and be alert.

sharts 3y ago

We’re working for techbros and MBAs that destroyed the culture for profit.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
MBAification is very real and very awful. I have a working theory that it’s not just tech, or just MBAs, or just the opposite political people, or tactical division, or just (prescription) drugs or just enshitification, or just media… but all of the things at the same time. A big theory of why everything sucks. For a microcosm… music. Music now objectively sucks, and it’s for all the reasons above at all the same time. But if you made me pick a single thing… it would be MBAs ruining everything.
- zztop44 3y ago
  Interesting, I’d say music is a clear counterexample. I’m nostalgic for the 90s as well, but there is so much more great, diverse and wonderful music being made now than ever before. Even finding it isn’t really that hard, either.
  - slg 3y ago
    Whenever someone says a particular art form sucks now, what they are really saying is that they don't like the mainstream version of that art form. The thing about art is that people are self-motivated to make it. Sure, the financial incentives aligning with good art can help spur more of it by allowing people to dedicate their whole lives to making art. However, there is always someone making cool stuff in their free time regardless of the financial reward. There is more good art out there than any individual could possibly consume, it just becomes a little more difficult to find it when it isn't playing on the radio.
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      Disagree. This is a subjective dismissal for a topic that is objectively been enshitified. This isn’t “back in my day”. There is objectively less quality and massively more quantity. * With studio quality equipment being reduced to almost literally nothing anyone can be in the game. * Studios don’t need to pay to developer artists. They are entirely disposable now. * Albums aren’t at all important. There is very little in the way of major releases outside some traditional artists. Just dump a single to Spotify and walk away. * Directly from an executive that worked a major label - people that actually like music are no limited to basically just sound engineers. Everyone else has a MBA and couldn’t care less if they were making movies or music or gears. * From the same high up executive I am social with - Rap has been hit the hardest. It is objectively garbage. There are no Nas, or NWA, or Eminems coming up. The last of the actual poets that got any play at all like Kendrick for example just aren’t pushed. It comes back to quantity, but as a side note he did lament how these guys are the worst to try and deal with if they try to at all. * Automation has hit this industry with its massive influx of quantity. Basically get on Spotify and get to a level, then you’ll get an automated contact, maybe they’ll front you a few thousand at a bad deal so you can set up your own tour and make a couple dollars. If you fuck up or whatever they just move on to the next one. Literally no one cares about you until you hit a Spotify number. * previously there were things like handlers and PR. But now, as an artist you are entirely on your own. Want to do a porn or have a mental breakdown? Ok so what, you are more of a number in a system than you have ever been. There is no “guy from the label” until you are at the top Spotify tiers. * it’s not all studios and MBAs and labels. There’s a side effect going on as a culture we don’t really have a shared listening experience. Since the invention of radio, we all heard roughly the same thing at the same time. Now, kids have their on playlists and maybe they recommend some thing on that playlist to their friends, but you go one school over and they can have drastically different collections. They aren’t hearing the same song on the radio, there is no Casey Kasem‘s Top 40, everyone has been down selecting their own optimization. * trust me, if you knew my history with music, you’d be shocked as I would typically be the last person in the world to recognize any positive effects that labels and the industry had on the art. It’s strange days my man. * do you know the phrase “it takes a lifetime to make the first album, and the year to make the second”? Part of that is it your first album has so much polish. You need to hit hard to get the eye of a label. There’s no reason to hold a song back now at all, to work on it, to have versions that you’d like to hear better when you’re touring, versus on a car stereo versus in the studio… there’s no reason to polish anything anymore. You get it out you were Lisa you put it on Spotify and move along. Just like everybody else is doing. So no. Objectively, the quantity of music has grown exponentially and the overall and polish quality has gone down. I will old man shakes his fist of clouds all day, but I won’t take some thing so obvious and as many examples is this has, and just dismiss it as that.

magic_hamster 3y ago

So, this is a very niche community specific inside joke (or diss) which I think never really went away, you just need to find a small and nerdy community and you'll see this kind of stuff come up from time to time. I used to see this in forums but now I'd argue this sort of thing is easier to find on Discord, maybe.

deepakhj 3y ago

I dropped out to focus on college and then all the FBI busts happened. I work in tech now. I lost touch with most people. I can still find my name and groups in the scene reports that have been archived on defacto2.

RGamma 3y ago

It was once in a lifetime. Now most everyone's following commercial maximes while faking enthusiasm and dying inside a bit every year.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
It’s quite depressing.. Even more recently, the early days of youtube when it just edutainment, and gaming were great .. but now I see VSauce making short format videos (tiktok equivalent) and looking dead inside. The stress, living costs, and commercialisation of everything has sapped the internet of what made it so good in the first place.
- RGamma 3y ago
  Not VSauce too :( It's like a virus.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  $$$ is the culprit. The lie that people only make things because patreon dollars, because ad impressions, because sponsorships. They begin to optimise for these metrics and not the most important metric (fun). The lie in general that creative output only happens because people pay for it is wrong in so many ways. People love to be creatively fulfilled. I'd argue the exact opposite, that unless something else is physically preventing them, people will make creative things. Video, songs, games, writing.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    I think most of OSS is evidence that people will do creative things for free. I suppose that if people's needs were met, more of them would be willing to do all these for free without chasing a dragon.
- reportgunner 3y ago
  Advertisements did this.
goodpoint 3y ago

renewiltord 3y ago

Groupies never know where the artists have gone. Only the artists know.

einr 3y ago

Where did all of these folks go? Zine writer Jason Farnon, who likely is the same Jason Farnon from the AWA issue in the OP although I don't know this for certain, wrote this article in his zine I Bleed For This? in 1996: http://textfiles.com/magazines/IBFT/ibft045.txt http://textfiles.com/magazines/IBFT/ibft045.txt A recommended read for people who wonder where this culture went as the people who were in it got Real Jobs in the Real World. This file affected me personally pretty deeply in my teens -- now as an adult it feels a little over-dramatic but it's written from a place of honesty and it's just one of those things that you read when you're 17 and you swear up and down that will never be me.