The best years of our lives
Link of the Day [9.07.16]
Let’s continue with the time travel back to 1996.
Last month AV Club went and looked at the pop of 1996. Today’s link sums up all they did.
I turned 25 that year. I always thought it was my favorite time ever. Maybe.
I love the nostalgia of looking back twenty years ago to 1996. That was the year I broke. My favorite and I turned 25 during the proto-NewsRadio Quote Month.
Today’s link takes us to a list of music from that era. I remember, love, and cherish some of these songs. It reminds me of sitting on the couch and watching M2.
Sadly, that was then this is now. It doesn’t come back. At least we have “Peaches” from the Presidents of the United States.
http://www.spin.com/2016/08/96-best-alternative-rock-songs-1996/
A voyage back to yesteryear, Stephen Hyden goes back to his record collection in search of his youth, and as wee young lass growing up in America, liking music, and grasping for sounds that explain himself, he finds it in the alternative music of the 90s. Alt.90s if you will. From Nirvana through Alice In Chains he looks over the bands that made that era.
The funny thing is even if I had 10 years on him this was also the music I listened to as well. It was my pop music and reinforced who and what I was during that time. I spent the last hour reading all the way through to 1996, the latest article. It reminds me of good times.
http://www.avclub.com/features/whatever-happened-to-alternative-nation/
If there was flickr in the 90s, I would’ve favorited this photo.
The funny thing about this photo is that it was taken on September 18, 1996. It’s my birthday! Happy birthday, BrowserMetrics! You’re 25!
Now take a look at who’s helping me to celebrate. They are co-workers from Ruby’s, fellow servers. For my last birthday, it was just my family. I can’t believe that I had celebrated a birthday not with family. It’s been a long time.
The other aspect of this photo is that the girl I was crushing hard on at the time is also there to celebrate it as well. That’s why I’m ducking out of the picture. This can’t be real. Someone pinch me. The problem though is that I was a drunk at the time. So it was hard to figure out what happened on this night.
When I pulled this photo off the floppy, I didn’t know any of these facts. I had to search my memory for it. I had to look at the date on the files just to be sure that I had the right year. This time of my life is a drunken blur. I must’ve been having too good of a time to chronicle it. And yet I wish I had.
Currently, I like to chronicle my life with social media. Blogs, flickr, twitter are all contributing to making my memories indexable by google. Yet, these formative years of my twenties weren’t and they make it a big, black hole. So I look at this photo, and smile as it’ll help me recover them.
Here’s how I think the night happened. Drinks at the Harryman House. More drinks at one of these guys’ house. Passed out drunk. What a birthday! As I look back on it, I wish I wasn’t a drunk and I had put the moves on that girl. Some things are still the same with me.
So what I have here is an artifact of funness, something which I’ve been missing these last few months. I’ve been in a funk. I just need to get my drunk on and just have a good time. Like that bastard in the photo.
Remember this? I had promised a few posts related to these pictures in which I look back to who I was back then. Before doing so I want to get into the technology of these pictures, because it struck me as funny as to how far computing has progressed. And it was in thinking of how old these photos were that made me realize that even though I am in these pictures that person is not anything like the me of today and neither is the technology.
You already know I pulled these pictures from a 3/4″ floppy disk, but you don’t know that they were formatted as a gif file. That’s funny because the best way to store pictures onto storage media would be jpg. Why are they gifs? Who in their right mind would scan photos into gif files. What year is it again?! I remember when and where I got these photos scanned. It was a camera store in Hunt Valley by the Giant, and according to the time stamps of the files, they were created on Saturday, October 12, 1996. That’s just about 14 years ago, when the Internet was barely walking, the floppy drive was the favorite removable storage media, Windows 95 was within its year of release, and you didn’t own a scanner. Plus, cameras were still using film.
Look at it today, October 4, 2010. Our storage media contain 1000 times more floppy disks. The Internet is in its unruly teens. I don’t care anymore about Windows 95, because OS X kicks its ass, and Apple still rulez. I have a scanner and could scan those analog film pictures on my own into jpg files if I wanted. And my camera is pure digital.
We change. So does technology. What happens when we try to go back? It becomes somewhat of a hassle because things may not be compatible anymore. All the trouble to update outdated things, is it worth it?
This summer I had purchased a 3/4″ floppy drive. My motivation to go backwards in time was to find these photos. Little did I know was that I could’ve just brought the Win95 machine back to life and used it’s floppy drive or barring that I could’ve resurrected the Powerbook 190 for the job. All I’m saying is that I went through plenty of hurdles to put these on my flickr photostream.
These pictures are inspiring me to write a couple of posts about them, about that time, about that person who I was. When I pulled them from the floppy, lots of thoughts and memories came flooding to my mind. I wanted to identify who was who, when was when, and what happened. Needless to say this reminiscing leeds me to think I may have a few tall tales to tell from these photos.
I think I may have a few posts coming…
After reading this article, the first thing to come to my mind was, “Has it really been 10 years?”
The film was ahead of its time, Favreau said, setting the stage for the type of comedy found in more recent box office hits “Old School” and “Wedding Crashers.”
