Y2k Aesthetic

What does lain think about the y2k (for lack of a better term) aesthetic? It is defined by its minimalistic curvy shapes, bright or neutral color palettes, and so forth. I see it as a parallel or even outright antithesis to the cyberpunk aesthetic and genre. It has an optimistic attitude toward the future and technology being almost utopian to an extent. My inner cyberpunk cringes at the thought but I also somehow like it. Discuss your thoughts and post examples of y2k aesthetic media.

I absolutely hate it. Silver painted crap (paint which absolutely LOVES to flake off, by the way), "organic" curves just for the sake of looking different, completely destroying ergonomics, and "see through" designs through which you couldn't see anything of importance. Doesn't help that only the cheap consumer stuff was made around this design language. most professional gear kept the late 80s/mid 90s square-ish look. So when I see this aesthetic, I'm always reminded of brittle plastic, cheap components, consumer devices which were absolutely useless as anything other than a concept (MP3 players you couldn't even fit an album into, anyone?). For some reason these designs are still prevalent on many "audiophile" audio components, too. Which I find contradicting, as most music made in the time period when this soykaf was current basically consisted of fifteen minute loops of a single low quality five second sample with a 2dB dynamic range, driven hard into clipping. There's two exceptions to this hatred of mine, however. The PowerMac G4 and the Pokémon mini. The G4 might simply be because of nostalgia, as that machine was my gateway drug to UNIX/RISC. But I feel like the mini is exactly what this aesthetic was best fit for: conveying a sense of cheerfulness so to speak, asking you to not take the device too seriously. Which is exactly what the machine is; a cheap (but extremely well designed) piece of tat designed to be a time killer, with cute games based on short bursts of gameplay. Thankfully extreme skeumorphism came along to replace this. Oh, wait, that was even worse. At least that's also over and now everything's needlessly flat. OH, WAIT.

>>5614 It's aesthetic

>>5613 The whole phenomenon reminds me of William Gibson's short story "The Gernsback Continuum". He's describing a completely different aesthetic, of course - in his story his characters are talking about the 1950's chrome-and-spaceship-fins "raygun gothic" look. But the basic idea is the same. It doesn't matter what sort of space-age shell you put on top of a pencil sharpener, it's still just a damn pencil sharpener, no different mechanically than its Victorian-age cousins.

>>5613 Love it, even the more maximalist/"overdesigned" examples. http://lain.angelic-trust.net/wired.html http://www.depthcore.com/chapter/cataclysm/ https://virtualself.co/ https://y2kaestheticinstitute.tumblr.com/

>>5619

Was dope for a while but was overused poorly. how many times did you have to see those 'timewarp" >>5619 visuals midused before it got silly. Love the wipeout thing though.

>>5613 When it's done well I love it, but for the most part it makes me think of cheap throwaway electronics and tacky cafeterias

I know there are mixed feelings about Tumblr in general, but I found a really good little collection of this exact aesthetic on there that I really appreciate. They call it "chotwave," but I have no idea how prevalent that term may or may not be. Seems pretty niche. But yes, that aughts look was very interesting, sometimes overdone or worn out, but sometimes it was gorgeous. I'd love to have some translucent injection-molded gadgets again to be honest. https://chotwave.tumblr.com/ And this one's more general about all design, fashion, even video art and advertising from the 2000s. Still has lots of fascinating artifacts: https://y2kaestheticinstitute.tumblr.com/ I still have an old Cybiko somewhere. What a darling little early handheld computer. Kind of was a market failure though; wish it had more adoption, 'cause it would have been really cool to use the proximity networking features more.

>>5613 the Minority Report aesthetic.

>>5621 I totally get that, yeah. But I don't think it's possible to create an appealing aesthetic that won't get overused by most people. Once something is in fashion, followers latch on to it and lots of tasteless hacks will emerge from the woodwork,overdoing it with no nuance or subtlety, resulting in more bad examples from good ones. 80% of everything is bullshit, as the maxim goes. But sometimes that itself is the proof that there really is something great in there. The best examples usually transcend the piles of mediocrity that always pile up around interesting things, no matter the era.

>>5623 Tumblr aside, thanks for the links, man. Blast to the past to my late teenage years. What a time.

>>5614 >pokemon mini I had the yellow one. Also, that's 2001. Does 2003 count? Because, image related was cool. The pokemon mini had the tier of cpu as a snes. It's sad that the mini was wasted technology, thought the wikipedia suggests there was homebrew. The ram was lack luster though. Why give it a cpu of a snes in speed, but give it only 4kb ram? Even the nes did twice that via the cart increasing it's ram. If those things were to have had a tiny cart they'd have been something in between an nes and an snes. I'm just saying... The n-gage though, it was like a n64. Hardcore. I hate what society became. We used to have cool things like the pandora and also this phone.

>>5632 Wasn't the n-gage the phone that needed you to remove the battery to swap the game, and needed you to hold the phone sideways to talk? I'm not sure that either one counts as "cool" in a system designed to be a gaming machine and a practical everyday phone.

If you look closer, fashion and technology addiction of y2k aesthetics resembles 70's science fiction in terms of overused metallic and plastic textures both seen in illustration and film. After all, I've seen a statement somewhere that fashion rehashes itself every thirty years, so the y2k aesthetics is a repetition of late 60's early 70's, and late 30's early 40's, late 30's pulp fiction and early space exploration film again had this metallic feel to it. >>5624 The film takes place in 2054, the short story is written in 1956, so the film authors wanted to play around 50's aesthetics, it can be seen clearly in men's clothing, car bodies, common folk in the apartment building to the degree of overdoing it, various anachronisms, the kitschiest part was the German nurse and mad eye surgeon straight from noir fiction pages.

>>5632 >Why give it a cpu of a snes in speed, but give it only 4kb ram? Because it was a tiny time killer, not a full-on Game Boy. And you don't need much ram with ROM-based systems. The ROM is directly addressable, meaning you can access the game code without having to load it in RAM. Besides, the thing has a 96x64 display and no dedicated graphics hardware, what are you even going to do with more ram? We're getting into solution-looking-for-a-problem territory. >If those things were to have had a tiny cart They were cartridge based, though. Maybe what you had was a Pokémon Pikachu. >n-gage Very cool concept, but awful execution. Having to take apart the thing just to change the game was pants on head retarded. Also the stupid aspect ratio. Most games suffered from the forced TATE MODE. >the pandora To this day, I lust for one of those. Seems like the closest current equivalents all have Intel CPUs, which is absolute bullshit. And I don't even know what's going on with the Pyra. Anyways, I think this thread is about the aesthetic rather than the technicalities, so if you feel like discussing this further, making a thread on /Ω/ would be more appropriate. Here's a rare mix of y2k curved design and an early 90s beige color scheme: the beige Sun Blade 2500. I couldn't find a higher resolution picture. Also its silver and red counterparts, wearing their full y2k livery. "Your request looks automated." Huh?

>>5645 >the beige Sun Blade 2500 It's the computer equivalent of a corporate middle-manager who thinks any pattern on a necktie is pushing the envelope of acceptability for casual-friday attire.

>>5652 Everything about that room screams "Japanese love hotel" to me. And I love it.

I dislike the curves that only get in the way, but it's different if it molds well with a human hand or otherwise has real function. I think part of the reason transparent casing is no longer popular is because it makes it harder to sell a counterfeit which obviously doesn't meet its specification. You can't sell a hard drive that has nuts and bolts inside of it to simulate the weight, if they can be seen anyway.

>>5681 That's actually a pretty good observation, lainon. >>5654 not as much as I wuv you uwu

>>5645 >>5640 The filter makes my reply not worth the effort of capping in an image. Only computers changed physically. Image related tries to be yesterday's dream and I'm sure won't come in the mail. Indeed the carts where there, the yellow distracted my memories.

>>5681 It's all candybar shapes of black and other simple shapes to reduce cost of manufacturing and to avoid people rejecting new ideas. It's a capitalism thing. They shook hands with one another and sell the same thing over and over again.

Is PSP /y2k/?

>>5730 Screen too wide and kinda near halfway into the decade post 2000 so... kinda no in my opinion. It came after a lot of things and looks as wide screened as anything today and was made to be sold to this day, with slight aesthetic changes to appeal to the tastless z00m3rs that don't like good aesthetics. The phat is 04, that's practically 05, a decade being 10 years, why not just bump it up to 08, then 2010? The original ds is more 2k tier than that, as it had a real linux, psp was just next age tier a machine with a real OS on it. Next level stuff. At this point do we post all near half decade in consoles? The ds itself had an opera browser you could get via the gba port. That and dslinux existsing, it's too next level in my opinion. Then again, the dreamcast came before all of that and was the original console to have a linux on it. I'd post the Dreamcast first personally before it keeps jumping up via consoles that never died. The Dreamcast deserves better than this for being the start of such 'next level' consoles and actually coming from like 99 *checks* yep 1998. Also, the virtual boy is five years before the 2k, saying psp/ds is like saying virtual boy is 2k. At some point it jumps apart a literal decade. Just as well, technology changes so slowly I couldn't care as long as it doens't hit 2005+ nor 1990ish, but that's just me. I opened the door by posting the Nokia console I guess. Anyway, I'm just saying the phat psp looks like someone would create that today, and did it even stop being sold via new versions?

>>5735 >hello kitty Holy tainted batman!

>>5735 >>5736 My god that kind of frosty greyish-turquoise translucent plastic is the most aesthetic thing I've seen in weeks though

>>5684 I had that exact tiny boombox thing

>>5739 Those were fun little toys. Really funny how just a few years later personal mp3 players would get huge. I still remember the older days fondly.

I dig it to be honest

>>5776

>>5777

>>5778

>>5779

>>5776 >>5777 >>5778 >>5779 >>5780 Nice pics lainon.

>>5641 That webm hits hard

Long live the y2k aesthetic

LOVE y2k

>>5903 i dont know why it didnt include my other image hahaha

>>5775 I didn't know H.R. Geiger branched off into making home appliances.

>>5906 Didn't he design entire apartments? That would include appliances. He designed a bar somewhere, I don't know if it's still open.

CyberCafe with y2k aesthetic in Africa

There's something strange going in my mind when thinking about Windows Server 2003, seeing Internet cafés during a rainy day, all the possibilities new technology was going to bring. Funnily enough, this isn't my life, but just an imagination of someones y2k. Rainy day, human genome project, the Internet, PDAs.

>>6105 Thats exactly what made it special, lainon. It was a period of time of great optimism. Technology was this fascinating tool that had endless potential and there was great positive outlook into the new millennia. Also cybercafes are comfy as fuarrrk, I kind of wish they were still around but in a time when everyone has home internet service and a smart phone the humble cybercafe is regulated to a coffee place with wifi

In case someone likes pictures taken mainly with late 90s to mid 00s compact digital cameras, here's a website ran by some Tumblr users. https://digicam.love/ I really like these colors and browsing pictures like this makes me crave my days with Sony Cyber-shot.

>>5621 >>5624 to be honest, I think the same thing is happening to the retro 80s wireform in neon (again). I think that nostalgia plays a role in it too. People going through mid-life crisis wanting to recall their childhood, and younger generations thinking it must have been cool (born in the 80s and having teens-20s as children who now think the 80s was cool). >>5614 I pretty much despised the aesthetic at first because of the pastel/silvered color schemes and the curved bulgy edges on everything. It seemed to childish/toyish to me. The Nokia brick that came out a few years ago in the US market almost resembled that aesthetic. I did like the solid color clear products that were basically normal products but you could see the internals just enough to be interesting (gameboys/ calculators/ casio watches, and some larger personal tech). The matrix was pretty fashionable though If it wasn't socially unacceptable I would still rock the trench coat sunglasses combo >>5641 EYYYY those personal CD players! I still have mine somewhere

>>6117 it is indeed very comfy I really enjoy surfing in public places

>>6230 yeah there was something special about it, almost like it was a special occasion or something. At least it felt that way for me when I did not have internet service at my home back in the early 2000s >>6218 Im glad you liked the webm, I was a little sad not many lainons saw it. It is like a nostalgia overload for me when I saw it. btw personal CD players where fun. It reminds me of having a CD collection which was more tangible than having files saved on a hard drive.

>>6232 I still buy CDs. Not often, and I usually just play them once before ripping them to my computer and putting them on the shelf, but I like owning a solid representation of media I enjoy. I also love the booklets full of pictures and lyrics. That's something MP3s can't give you.

Galleries plus some old websites: www.imgur.com/a/sJ5lDbn https://imgur.com/a/NGU9j http://msg.sk/index_.php3 http://skylined.org/adamm/main.html

>>6280 thanks for the links, some cool soykaf in there

>>6280 Seeing that barcode club was really reminiscent to me of being in that club in Deus Ex: Invisible War and hearing the song "Feathers" by the Kidneythieves in the background.

>>6280 Third picture takes me back to the days of Blackbox, when even Windows users could get in on the fun of ricing your window decorations. I miss the whole gradients-and-pixel-fonts aesthetic, as tacky as it might be. Wasn't just for WMs, either, but for forums as well (like the picture implies). You'd go onto your buddies' little phpBB/Invisionfree/Proboards/etc forum and it'd have a skin just like that. I'd like to see the internet nostalgia crowd visit it a little more, it's kinda charming and it'd be a breath of fresh air after "dude remember geocities? gifs? marquees? blink tags?"

>>6280 Ah, man. You sparked a bit of nostalgia in me with those forum signature banners. I miss those days. polite sage for no input

>>5906 It's actually from late 80's Soviet Russia, the remote is for this TV >>6101 That cancerous monochromatic blue light is more like y2k10 with lens flares of same color in every movie. >>6212 If by mid 00's you mean 2012. >>6280 Oh gee, tat kind of websites is my next favorite thing after Japanese web 1.0 hobby pages. https://www.pouet.net/ instantly jumps into mind. There's a couple of urban exploration websites made into that style which is also very y2k~ish.

>>5647 Dude imagine being a dev and getting news that you all got new sun workstations and you cut open the box and start wiggling that block of styrofoam out of it and that fuarrrking thing is on the other side. Must have been so disappointing.

>>5613 I absolutely love the look, but at the same time, I'm not really all that surprised that it faded out. It's a very avant-garde style that appeals way more to artists and designers than it does consumers, and unfortunately it's the consumer that decides what sells. Once the novelty wore off I imagine your average Joe would probably think it's just weird more than it is cool. The skeuomorphic and flat styles that followed it are boring, but they're also a lot more readily understood, and if your only goal is to make money, palatable blandness is better than cool weirdness

>>5613 >What does lain think about the y2k (for lack of a better term) aesthetic? It is defined by its minimalistic curvy shapes, bright or neutral color palettes, and so forth. It's aesthetic of times I really well remember. I was primary schooler. Times of doing 1st programs, buying a lot of computer related magazines. I somewhat liked palette of colors. I absolutely hated cheap executions of most products - crappy thin and or brittle plastic with paint layers so thin it was peeling off in your hands. Easy to scratch. I hated a lot of blobby designs of the era back then. Overbloated shells with tiny PCBs hidden in them were screaming "I pretend to be futuristick assfugg buy I'm just simple piece of china made crap that barelly has any functionality". The only piece of equipment I liked having these semi transparent colorful casings were 3,5 inch floppies. Most of electronic in semi transparent casing was typically just reveling a sad truth of their cheap build both outside and inside with them. IMac G3 was a tru atrocity of design in my eyes and is a opus magnum of collecting all things that sucked back then into single piece of equipment. The example of design I liked back than and I still think looks neat was Nintendo Game Cube. >I see it as a parallel or even outright antithesis to the cyberpunk aesthetic and genre. It has an optimistic attitude toward the future and technology being almost utopian to an extent. My inner cyberpunk cringes at the thought but I also somehow like it. IMHO it was just blobby design went crazy after dominance of mostly straight lines of the 80's in computer and electronics design plus a lot of cheap plastic. The attempts on futuristic look were kinda ridiculous when paired with wild tempo of progress in speed that computers had in that era. 2 years old PC was a slow outdated fuarrrker , gap of 4 years was like between industrial era and stone age.

>>6117 >. Also cybercafes are comfy as fuarrrk, I kind of wish they were still around but in a time when everyone has home internet service and a smart phone the humble cybercafe is regulated to a coffee place with wifi You can still ocassionally find them here and there around the world.

>>6793 >It's a very avant-garde style that appeals way more to artists and designers than it does consumers, and unfortunately it's the consumer that decides what sells. Once the novelty wore off I imagine your average Joe would probably think it's just weird more than it is cool. It went away mainly becasuse it didn't mix well with cheap materials used to produce them. A lot of blobby shaped thin empty shells were prone to breaking, shaking also cheap paints were smearing of the surface. To this day the 1st thing I think about when I see them is cheap, breaking in your hands plastic. >>5645 Ever seen Silicon Graphic workstations of an era? xD

>>5613 Duuuuuude! The Wipeout games are SO good! I bought a new PS1 so I could play Wipeout again!

>>5613 I think it looks cool when done right, but I'm probably going to hate it in 5 years. You just know it will get popular and people will abuse it like they did with the whole vaporwave thing.

Cool thread. Esthar City in FFVIII really captures the aesthetic well.

>>5722 I use a gpd micro at work. Pretty similar except I dual boot centos/win 10. Very much worth it.

>>6943 I'm still salty about the ruining of MLG/dubstep montage parodies. It started off as legitimate parody of overedits in the FPS gaming community that had turned into a showcase of editing skill more than gaming skill, as well as gamer culture in general. The stuff from up to around 2014 was parody. After that it almost entirely devolved into a way to show popular memes really quickly with a bright flashing colors aesthetic.

>>6946 you got any favorites? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJiOXv1so_0

>>5613 I love it, it was so optimistic. Pic rel 2006, I think it still counts

>>6943 >I think it looks cool when done right, but I'm probably going to hate it in 5 years. You just know it will get popular and people will abuse it like they did with the whole vaporwave thing. Please no. I lament the raep of vaporwave, but I'd cry even more if they fuarrrk up the millenium aesthetic like that.

I wish I was that good at CGI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6HCnub_OoU

>>5614 The only thing I hate are those nickel paints which eventually come off and can cause skin allergies. >>5632 The quality was top notch back in the days. There were plenty of games developed on symbian/j2me platform and most of them were pretty good.

>>6994 Amidst the retardation in and around Sam, I have no idea how designs of this quality have emerged.

>>5619 The virtualself website is well done.

>>6117 I'm sure lesser developed places still have them around and also Korean PC bangs are highly successful to this day, they are rather gaming centers instead traditional internet cafes though.

I can't hate on the see through designs. It's not hiding anything and embraces its insides.Analog inputs also add charm to it.

We really thought we were technological. Like it wasn't gonna get better and that it wasn't conceivable. Hardware dominated our egos and drove the conversation. Unlike now where weve learned from our gullibility to not hype new tech because it will eventually get replaced. So its just a part of life now.

>>7223 Mhh, I mean any input that is not a touchscreen. When I think about it, there is no design if 99% of the device is a screen with a small border. It's certainly more efficient, but from an aesthetic standpoint something is lost.

>>7241 I miss flip phones and buttons. They feel so much more "natural" than touch screens. I could write on the buttons of a phone almost as fast as in a keyboard, but I can't get near that speed on a touch screen.

>>7241 That's a really cool design

the web design that was inspired by it in the early 2000's is really fantastic https://web.archive.org/web/20051228031247/http://www.wa007.com/2003/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030805210603/http://www.9gods.com:80/v04/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030927011640/http://www.xhorizons.com/chmiel/indexs.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031005233153/http://www.jamiroquai.co.uk/flash.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030330151013/http://designchapel.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHbQmqmmIFk more here:https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/ very unique and cool and well-crafted sites all around, far cry from the bland bootstrap clones you see everywhere today. sadder still that flash is gonna be redundant in a week or two.

>>7268 https://web.archive.org/web/20030927011640/http://www.xhorizons.com/chmiel/indexs.html WTF is this for? Jesus Christ modern internet is soykaf

>>7104 Sam mostly just does final compositing & touches nowadays, 95% of the graphics are done by some jap called konzept. https://bibliogram.art/u/konzept.globe

>>7400 I think I've put my finger on the *real* generational difference between zoo mers and mille nnials: the former fondly remembers all those fun flash games on newgrounds, and the latter just gets headaches at the memories of spending thankless hours cleaning up friends' computers due to them getting yet another damn flash-delivered virus. I say good riddance to the damn thing.

>>5641 nice webm, things sure did used to be a lot simpler. the world moves at such a pace now that everything just feels foreign to me to be honest. it has since like 2012.

>>6280

>>5613 I didn't like it. Everything felt completely soulless and dumbed down to me as a convicted lover of sharp angles. Everything from cars to guns to animation looked ridiculous and emasculated due to the trend of making things all bubbly and plastic looking. I also hated how corny ass rap became obligatory to incorporate into absolutely every single mainstream thing around in this period, how every fuarrrking cartoon had to have a kid friendly rap song and fake urban youth nonsense plastered all over it because ugly bastards in some boardroom had their eureka moment in how to appeal to kidz. The ultimate evolution of this style probably took hold in the mid-late 2000s with the whole applecore steve jobs irobot black eyed peas pop rap aesthetic which I liked even less. 2000s-early 2010s were the absolute tackiest period since the 1970s. But since everything is even worse now I have to retroactively pretend that it was soooo cool because at least it's not the fortnite 6ix9ine dyed green undercut xanax aesthetic we have now.

>>7418 And I think this is a stunted perception - denigrating the cultural legacy and the artistic expression it brought about down to either the mere consumption of the shallower games, or to residual tech support. Then again, the culture of the internet itself was different then, and it's what created that legacy - the platform wasn't the reason, but it was a great medium for all that art. So it's great that all that content will be easily accessible again, thanks to emulation, and will continue to inspire and entertain.

>>7432 This is spot-on. Exactly how I remember that era as well

>>7432 You are being unfair. OP didn't mention the latter half of the decade. Also, decline across multiple industries did not occur at the same rate. At the cinema, you could have watched fuarrrk all because Hollywood was on a downward slope for decades. In the car showrooms, you could get a relatively nice car if you bought one that was pre-2005. People like Ichiro Honda had died, but it took 10-15 years for their replacements' ugly proto-tech to finally reach tooling and assembly. As far as videogames were concerned, in 2005 you could walk into a shop and buy Half-Life 2, Rome:Total War, Star Wars Battlefront II the real one, Far Cry the original... These are deriverative titles but they were memorable and worth what you paid. My complaint about modern design for me is that everything looks like the knock-off version of a toy, where you could just swap the badges or the location and anyone would believe it. This was true to some degree of cars I quite like (the CR-X or the original MR2 to name two) but never to this extent. You still knew they were Japanese, you knew who made them, you still knew they were real, you still could appreciate the designer's intent just from a glance at the end product they made. Lines for the sake of lines don't work, lack of attention to depth doesn't work, international consensuses on art or on what looks good don't work. It makes me not want to consume any of it at all before I even look at the price of it.

>>7400 Flash Player is big in China. They have both the official support from local Adobe office prolonged, and in-house version developed. https://www.wired.com/story/zombie-flash-security-problems/

How about some y2k aesthetic/y2k futurist movies/tv/anime etc? First one that comes to mind is The Fifth Element; idk if it fits exactly, though

idk but i do miss things not being so gay. there was a lot wrong with the world as there always is but at least every narcissist with a phone couldn't magnify their hysteria to unbelievable levels. i also miss your own world being smaller (and the whole world being bigger as a result). the past 10 years have just been disgustingly retarded.

>>7968 irobot is pretty y2k

Do you think a y2k style site is possible these days without flash?

some galleries https://twitter.com/y2k_aesthetic https://y2kaestheticinstitute.tumblr.com/ https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Y2K https://www.pinterest.com/cucaracha_prada/y2k-aesthetics/

>>8070 Is that a real PS2 or a rendered one? I can't tell.

>>8476 It's real, some electronic products had a see through case version, like >>7155. I can't imagine a company doing this today in the age of minimalistic design, that tries to hide the technical and complicated look of their products that could scare potential customers away.

>>8408 Normalnigger garbage. Give me tagged booru.

I still have this phone, just the battery is dead.

The Y2K aesthetic, for me, represents a very libertine time before the wokies co-opted any sort of dissatisfaction with society and replaced it with their own (albeit weird) flavor of conformism. So, this aesthetic will always be special to me.

It's interesting to think about the nostalgia for the early-mid 2000s that many of us channers seem to have. Flash, early Youtube, UI designs that were more interested in visual excitement than functionality. These cornerstones are always fun to reminisce about and yearn for. The world absolutely had problems back then of course, the perception of 'better times' is often a result of blissful ignorance, that magic of younger days. Even these recent years will be nostalgic to those who outlive us. However, it seems to me that general feeling of cynicism is so much more common and present for the average person than it was a decade or two prior. A lot our past decisions are catching up to us on a planet-wide scale, and the technology we felt such adoration for has revealed its true colors and intent. The future will surely horrify us in ways we can't or dare not imagine, I just hope there's enough positive will and effort to make things right for the world in the end.

>>8503 Eh, I think it's has more to do with the culture being dead. And this has both a technological reason and an economic one that are mixed together. The technical one is that with the new hype in the tech world being machine learning, which is statistics if you scrape away the hype, culture has essentially become run by a digital marketing agency. What google shows you is what it has found to have worked in the past, which creates online spaces that are haunted by what happened. In the days gone you didn't have that and we got to know culture just by exploring. Just look at how many unique flash games you had in the past, which were outright copied for the mobile market a few years later. There were no set rules and it was allowed to experiment. Nowadays to get noticed you need to make something that's a copy of what's popular, but tweak it a little tiny bit to make it appear fresh. Which is what tiktok or modern memes are, isn't it? Just repetition after repetition of same idea, with slight alteration. The economic one is a bit different, but it has to do with how modern world is build on the idea of making everything extremely emotionally impactful because it gets clicks, and that gets ad money. It goes from everything, like sexually charged messages being put in everything because it's easy to get attention from that, to the preferred communication platforms having more noise than signal. Take twitter, which I think takes the crown in making people care about some topic for 5 minutes, without them understanding it because not much of worth can be stated in a message that has 4 lines, which results in outrage and then people forget it for the rest of their lives. Or even chat apps like discord. Which is fine for talking in a group, but I had to go more than once in some community discord to ask a question about their software. Back in the past you could have just put it in a forum somewhere and people could return to it 7 years after the message was posted and still get valuable info out of it. And all of this creates an online world, which then leaks into the real world, which is a mess that makes no sense, people are feeling emotionally charged for things that they don't really care that much about, and the 9/10 times you see the same thing you saw yesterday, because everything else is more or less hidden from you.

>>8504 That tendency to recycle things that worked before is an interesting phenomenon, the financial risk of trying new things is often considered too much by the world of big entertainment (with ballooning budgets especially in the AAA space that's no surprise). This sort of optimization for viewer engagement really homogenizes a great deal of productions. The idea of designing your work not in a natural way but to meet certain targets for audience retention (effectively to paint by numbers) is surreal indeed. Watching this trend infest the ambitions of independent creatives has been very disappointing also. These guys are at the mercy of ruthless algorithms and the amount of padding, filler and (paid) advertising they embed in what should be something they're doing for their own personal satisfaction is often exhausting. A resurgence in that old school philosophy of creation for its own sake would be a breath of fresh air in this modern corporate web. I'm sure there's those out there still exuding that quality but the ratios have surely changed.

>>8504 >>8506 I think the acceleration of the always present release review reboot cycle in media in the past 10-15 years is a really interesting vertical slice of our current society, it really cuts down to the core of the mechanisms at work in modern culture, towards ruthless internal efficiency with minimal risk, maximum brutality, external glamour and near total cynicism as the prevailing Mainstream cultural feeling, the marvel films resemble an ever iterated assembly line product more than a slowly evolving species for example. This kind of thing has always been present but its all pervasive now, and its in a strange semi open semi hidden position where its tacitly acknowledged but never fully owned by anyone in charge of it regardless of who they're speaking to or how they feel about it, its just a given, not so much learned directly but slowly incorporated into every avenue of thought via osmosis. Our times are being defined by the long messy morning after the failed end of history, the same way the 20's and 30's were defined by WW1 and the 60's & 70's were defined by bipolarity and the fear of the bomb, it will be really interesting looking back in 30 or so years and seeing what the defining aesthetic and mood of the early 21st century was

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2cACHACbvU

>>6212 The server is down :(

This stuff is really nostalgic, so optimistic and bubbly.

it's things like this that you don't notice were around until much later. thanks for the memories.

I'm trying to catch this 2001-2007 corporate portal webpage aesthetics, but seemingly can't. This site provides some points, but not quite what I'm imagining. Is this another variation of "80's were like new retro wave song", e.g. daydreamed fiction of past mostly rooted in present or am I not looking hard enough? https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/y2k-aesthetic-in-web-design

>>8848 try moving Specials to where news is (maybe make it a single column instead of two), issues to center, and news on the left. See if you can make issues into a horizontal format instead of vertical. Get rid of the box right under news. I think what you have now is mostly fine (to me, it more closely resembles some webpages closer to 05-07)

>>8848 >Is this another variation of "80's were like new retro wave song", e.g. daydreamed fiction of past mostly rooted in present or am I not looking hard enough? A little bit of both. I mean, you had a lot of that shiny, colorful design with bubbly/Wipeout-esque fonts, but it was mostly confined to advertising and electronics. But while that is the stereotype of Y2K design, at least there were actually instances of it. I just hope that when pastiches of that style become popular, it doesn't wind up becoming the daydreamed fiction you described. Especially because your picture is exactly what I think of when I hear "00s web design", that low-res pixel art style reminiscent of MacOS 9. Used to love playing around in Paint trying to make graphics like that.

It were times when general electronic plastic started to become thin and brittle in comparison to pre mid '90s when it was still pretty much so solid you can still buy items from that era in great condition only yellowing being a major issue but you can retrobright it. While later era plastic means guaranteed scratches and cracks, not to mention these annoying paint coatings that rubs of by simply touching that stuff . If you are coneseurs of transparent electronics - US prisons are still requiring electronic devices that inmates can own to be transparent - so it's hard to hide "stuff" inside. Looking for prison [whatever device] would bring you results.

>>8890 As I understand from the video on US prison electronics I watched it is supposed to be low quality to not cause inmates to be jellos over the fact that someone owns supper dupper cool electronics as it may cause tension etc.

>>8891 Assuming its the bog standard Koss headphone driver it should sound pretty good, not amazing by modern standards but pleasant and funky The tablet, how good does it have to be to do FM and read books? If it can do both at once at least I'd be happy enough with it

I like when devices are designed to look as if they are made to be easy to use for humans, rather than humans having to bend over themselves to use the devices. I think that's what Y2K was about in the end, even if the aesthetic isn't for everyone.

>>8888 Damn, this is cyberpunk. Digits confirm. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/gallery-prison-tech/ https://www.core77.com/posts/105211/Designing-for-Prison-Products-Specifically-for-Inmate-and-Guard-Use Just looked up "prison tablet": https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/jul/26/idaho-prison-officials-inmates-hacked-system-to-ge/ >Inmates exploited a vulnerability on their JPay tablets to steal almost $225,000 worth of credits >Prisoners can use credits to buy music, ebooks, stamps (to pay for email and inbound video messages), games and even the JPay tablets themselves. Are there surplus sellers for this stuff? Tablets in particular look schway. This company sells transparent Koss headphones: https://www.bobbarker.com/more/electronics Not sure if those are real dollaridoos or prison good boy points as mentioned above, but $6.19 for legit Koss is a deal!

>>8921 >Prisoners can use credits to buy music, ebooks, stamps (to pay for email and inbound video messages), >Prisoners can use credits to buy stamps (to pay for email) >Cost of an email approximately $0.005 per mail I'm surprised they don't have to rent the air they breath, how pervasive can nickle and diming get?

>>8899 >>8892 >>8891 Doing some basic searching it appears all of the Koss on and over ears manufactured for the prison system use the standard ksc35/porta pro driver so at least the earphones are decent even if everything else is garbage Oddly enough I can't find them on Koss's website though they're all very easy to find on third party sites, they must be OEM only from Koss and then resold to prisons and other places by middlemen, it seems like a lot of schools use them, which I'm sure Foucault would have nodded at

>>8926 https://www.head-fi.org/threads/koss-cl-models.755848/ Koss CL-PRO Koss CL-2 Koss CL-3N Koss CL-4 Koss CL-5 Koss CL-9 Koss CL-10 Koss CL-19 Koss CL-20 Koss CL-24 Koss CL-80 Koss KPH30i | KPH30icl officially sold as clear: https://koss.com/products/kph30i

>>5613 My favorite aesthetic

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bxBY046OMwE

>>8931 Average modding gallery website content circa 2004.

>>8931 ID on the keyboard???

>>5623 Pretty creepy, the mouses that got posted on the tumblr with the therapeutic adverts on them. Imagine being a schizophrenic and seeing mice with "seroquel" printed on them.

>>5613 how do you make these kind of graphics??

>>8941 So much strangeness here. Both that it's a mouse promo item which I never knew existed and that for some reason it's full of some liquid.

I found this really cool mid-2000's digital museum check it out: http://www.pixelmuseum.com

>>8941 due to medical theme obsession, i was gifted this one, love the blood!

This vid featuring Y2K nostalgia is definitely relevant the thread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBkGDk8gddM

>>9658 Expected a wage slave video when I saw this was a review, but the game actually looks really cool. Surprised this went under my radar until now. Any idea how the Linux version plays/what the system requirements are? All I have nowadays is a toaster as gaming isn't my priority.

There is a similar aesthetic called frutiger aero. It is the decedent of the y2k aesthetic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL7kTMtvebQ

shut the hell up tiktoker, my childhood is not your lame little poser aesthetic, try having apersonality instead

>>10250 idk man I was a child in the 2000s and I'm not offended by chasing common aesthetics of that time. kinda nostalgic. I get it not being your thing but I think it's an interesting enough topic to warrant a thread. nothing to get angry about at least.

>>5613 That music from 00s gives me hope.

>>10249 I forgot that frutiger aero soykaf existed. It looks like the hallucinogenic equivalent of hand sanitizer.

Pls let me in course, which period the "Y2K design" took place? I can clearly see the difference between the 1997-2003 and 2004-2009 styles, and both is what they name Y2K-style. Its strange to mix the calm flat-pastel design of the millenium with the frutiger-aero weird transparent-3d style of the 2007 in one "Y2K-style" Just take a look:

Glad this thread is still around. I came across this set of PS2 adverts that must have been in magazines from 2000-2003. They capture the zeitgeist of that short period of technological innovation in an artistic way. One thing I noticed is that the console itself is nowhere displayed. Only the controller at times.

>>10496 and the final post / 3

>>5613 So basically the New York Apple Store in New York, but without wood or the LEDs, and more white walls instead of glass. So picture this with fluorescent light. And with no color or distinct things to look at? I came to hate that soulless corporate hospital look for coming to dominate even in the malls. You'd go to IKEA and everything would be white. At the same time, gradually white, grey and black became the dominant car colors and now we live in a colorless world of color conformity. No thanks, I prefer a kaleidoscope of colors and art nouveau remains my favorite style. Of course, I like the clutteree Lain look too of wires and bare electronics everywhere like a mad scientist's labotory, because both styles look human and lived in.

>>10500 Might wanna scroll through this thread before posting, bub.

will it ever come back friends

>>10502 One thing won't return anytime soon and that is the often posted see through design for electronics. I recently learned that this style was chosen by the guy that designed the iMac around 2000, because at that time a lot of the general public was still hesitant about technology. Having it see through would make it more approachable and many companies copied it for a while. Now that technology is a normal aspect of our lives, the design philosophy tries to provide the desired functionalities with as little visibility and effort of the device itself. And so the minimalist look dominates for now. It's interesting that only computers went the opposite direction since LEDs got much cheaper over the years and show hardware off with glas covers and colorful lights.

The algorithm noticed my participation in this thread and suggested me this. A 1 hour documentary about the y2k aesthetic. Interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMeoeGGEimE

>>8925 >I'm surprised they don't have to rent the air they breath Give it time. >>10502 The art style? Maybe. In like another ten or twenty years when people old enough to be in charge of soykaf start getting really nostalgic for it, sort of like how Art Deco makes a comeback every few decades or so. The feeling? For reasons many other Lainons have already covered, no. Not a chance. The culture of the internet, and our own attitudes towards technology have changed irreversibly, and that turn of the century optimism is never coming back.

Here's a cool one (sorry to link YouTube, but the trailer does it more justice than a screenshot alone): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQnf8J-AFek CROSSNIQ+, a puzzle game that recently came out with a strong Y2k aesthetic. I haven't played it myself, but the style is killer. The original version is also playable via your browser with WebGL: https://maxkrieger.itch.io/crossniq

>>10521 They forgot Beat's sixth finger. Absolutely fuarrrking disgusting.

>>8045 thanks for reminding me there's a browser based winamp. pairs great with my y2k jap alt collection. too bad all I've got on this hard drive is Duel Jewel.

This thread is good for the soul.

do youconsider 1992-1995 design to sort of being a beta Y2K? or is Y2K just 1996 - 9/11/2001?

fuarrrk aesthetic users. I can't look back at my childhood fondly because of these people making it all into some kind of fashion thing.

>>11474 What a cool hidden gem that definitely didn't follow you everywhere you went in the mid-2000s.

I do think lain will like the style. the anime lain was created in y2k years (broadly speaking). and the style itself also shows an attitude of thinking positive about internet(the idea is also naive)

Its so weird seeing 2000s turned into a nostalgic aesthetic. At the time, everyone hated the 2000s and we were constantly complaining about how bad it was compared to the 80s.

>>12830 Y2K is a 90s aesthetic though. started around 1995 and ended with 9/11.

>>12830 >At the time, everyone hated the 2000s and we were constantly complaining about how bad it was compared to the 80s. Now, we're complaining about how bad it's now compared to the 2000s, and we are, were, and will be partially right. Pretty sure that people in the 2040s will complain about how bad it is compared to 2020s as well.