#vaporwave looked at the busts of Mozart and the dolphins in the clouds and thought that it meant “this is trippy” and not “universal shared hope”. This is a metaphor for how modern computing is all about looks with no actual meaning or message.

Help, my inbox! It's not SoundCloud, but I do have a book about an uncontacted tribe in a desert world within an hour-glass the size of Earth: https://camendesign.com/nomad

#worldglass

@Kroc As a kid the Utopian Scholastic aesthetic was so present everywhere and it really felt like we'd sort of come to the end of history and were looking back at it like we were in a museum.

I'm sure a lot of that was just childhood innocence but also I think there was just a lot more optimism for the future back then.

@dfstarshine I believe, in practice, that the style simply comes from digital-typesetting. It finally became possible to print books with full colour digital images anywhere in the page. That had been either prohibitively expensive or impossible in the past, and I think it lead directly to Utopian Scholastic’s design elements of disparate items combined together on the page. Education books no longer had to be boring and digital photo manipulation allowed designers to play with layout in a way they hadn’t been able to before with manual / photo-typesetting

@Kroc Probably. It's significant though how much of an effect the aesthetics of these things has on the psyche of a generation.

@dfstarshine It’s understated just how big of a shift in such a short amount of time digital publishing was. People who had been working in print publishing for decades were used to linotypes and “paste ups” where, if they wanted text to flow around an image, they physically cut out lines of text and positioned them by hand.

To go from that to having a Mac, Aldus PageMaker, a CD of stock photography and a copy of Photoshop utterly changed the rules on what was possible and how much the designer could play with it. There was reason to be optimistic there.

@Kroc @dfstarshine
And yet, my earliest website designs were wild and very creative, having no standard out there, we created sites that were more unique then. Now, though there are tools are infinitely better, websites are dull, filled with ads, poorly edited because of infinite scrolling, have little that isn’t some version of something you’ve already seen a million times. It’s boilerplate banality now. It occupies people’s time instead of engaging it.

@JoBlakely @Kroc @dfstarshine

Fortunately the times gone by are coming back. Neocities.org is one of the best platforms I discovered in over a decade

@Kroc @dfstarshine

Fortunately the universe has not de-supported the deep visceral pleasure of actual physical cut-and-paste layout.

@Kroc

It always fascinates me when someone points out how new iterations of technology removes shackles that everyone had sort of internalised as "that's just how it is".

See also: The concept of a glass teletype and how that changed the world of communications, or Image Recognition + Machine Learning, that has made it possible for researchers to use massive datasets consisting of millions of source images, instead of having to painstakingly digitize tens of images by hand.

@dfstarshine

@Kroc I was under the impression that vaporwave was at least partially a retrospective criticism of that universal shared hope. That the promise of 90s tech was always a lie, or a dream, and all that is left of it is the nostalgia for a future that will never be.

@Kroc I remember being so excited for the present and the future, it can be hard to explain for people how optimistic we were in the 90s.

@Kroc Also, fuck yea, Encarta

@Kroc
Local Seattle author Fred Moody actually wrote a book about the encarta team, it's called I Sing the Body Electronic
https://archive.org/details/isingbodyelectro00mood

@pencilears @Kroc that just about sums up the optimistic hysteria of the era. who would write such an enthusiastic book, comparing microsoft to walt whitman, today? or even just a few years later?

@cultdev @Kroc
he wrote later in his book Seattle and the demons of ambition https://www.amazon.com/Seattle-Demons-Ambition-Number-Future/dp/0312334001 that he had gone insane while embedded with the Encarta team

@Kroc CD encyclopedias were nice

@Kroc If the internet was a city, you would see those anti-homeless spikes on everything.

Digital brutalism. User-friendliness is no more...its about being user-hostile.

@Kroc I miss those days. So much of a buzz over computing and networking. Now I find myself wanting to switch off half the time.

@Kroc

I must say I've always had a soft-spot (even back then, and even more today) on how the colouring was done to take most out of the 256-palet. It really is something special, isn't it?

Gives that additional dreamlike quality.

@Kroc I was fully cognisant then and I remember those days well!

Unrelated but here’s the artwork from another late 90s thing, Mike Oldfield’s The Millennium Bell.

Spot the difference 😅😅

@Sobtanian You can see hints of Y2K aesthetic in that, Frutiger Aero even, with the excess of shiny spheres there. Quite the caught-in-the-middle artefact that is

@Kroc and it has a dolphin too haha.

Yeah it’s a weird cover and the music is terrible 😅

@Sobtanian @Kroc so that’s utopian scholastic, Y2K, and new age, all in one album cover. lol

@Kroc@oldbytes.space I miss Encarta

@Kroc "display this screen in the future" fuck yes

@GroupNebula563 It worked.

@Kroc I do think I prefer not needing splash screens, but these old ones had immaculate vibes.

@Kroc I wonder how many Wikipedians were raised on Encarta 🤔

@Kroc there was something just "so comfy" about using stuff like Encarta. like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket at night during the winter.

@Kroc It was inspiring, is still inspiring! Yeah, this enthusiasm made learning computers look so excitingly graspable.

@Kroc "Nelson Mandela is not dead yet, goddamnit!"

@lizardbill ¬__¬

@Kroc I think I had Encarta 98, about a year before we got dial-up internet.

@Kroc Encarta was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

@Kroc@oldbytes.space funnily enough, my mom's first experience with how scammy the Internet would become was from a later encyclopedia on CD/DVD in the early 2000s. she bought me a copy of the electronic world book in like 2006 thinking it would be a one time purchase but they roped you into a subscription very sneakily

@Kroc i miss the early times of computing (and the internet!), full of curiosity, excitement, fun and possibilities. Before rich techbros MFs raped it to death.

@retronom There’s still endless awesome stuff happening — we’re just forced to share it in the same space as the worst people, people who are being signal boosted on purpose

@Kroc that's true but almost the whole infrastructure is corrupted and way beyond the point of "losing its innocence".
Therefore places like the Fediverse are important! Content because of people, not because of content itself, because of scam, empowering the rich, making people hate each other, making more money, winning polls, spreading shit, making people addicted and sick...
Give this sh*t back to the Nerds! 😃👾

@Kroc I remember a maze game too?

@Cyborgneticz You did!

@Kroc
ah yes, the bygone era of when it seemed like computers were a good idea..

@Kroc@oldbytes.space

you're right, we should bring that shit the fuck back <3

@Kroc we used to have so much hope...and dolphins...

@Kroc I miss those softs so much!

@Kroc @foone I loved „browsing“ #encarta back in the days.

@Kroc We really did think we were entering a New Enlightenment.

@Kroc I was a Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia kid, myself. But CD-Rom encyclopedias in the 90s were great! They sort of tapered off and got more boring in the 2000s, being largely replaced by the Internet even before Wikipedia got big. But man, what a time to be alive.

@Kroc used to just play and replay all the little music samples they had. can't forget this was before napster. free music? you could pick what you wanted? and just play on repeat? no one picks it for you and makes you also sit through commercials? crazy talk.

@Kroc
~~MINDMAZE~~

@Kroc That mind maze game was one of my absolute favourites!

@Kroc computers used to be a magical land of wonder. I fondly remember the learning software from the late 90s and early 2000s. I spent countless hours with them as a kid.

Computers as a whole peaked with Windows 7 and it's been going downhill ever since.

@Kroc And Napoleon throwing a piece of cake at Saturn.

@Kroc I prompted CoPilot to generate a modern version with "modern issues and subject matters" and this is what I got.
Fairly dystopian, including the Mad-Max-tank-mobíl, that seems to have snuck in.
Quite depressing actually.

@forelioned @Kroc 🔥

@Kroc
#utopianscholastic

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Utopian_Scholastic

@magnetic_tape @Kroc

Yes, and remember that this was an ENCYCLOPEDIA!

This is what an encyclopedia looked like at the time:

@Kroc man i miss those days so much

@Kroc it was an amazing piece of software. Although I was more amazed by the CD caddy loading mechanism the school PC used to run it.

@Kroc literally high on knowledge.

The amazing times when tech was competing with pen and paper. I really wish we brought that back by making tech optional again.

@Kroc impeccable "Display this screen in the future" checkbox. Which is checked. because you are displaying this screen in the future. now.

@Kroc @Gargron Encarta was one of my favorite programs

@Kroc The journey from here to Ow, My Balls!

@Kroc Prominent Nelson Mandela there, before the right started trying to erase him.

@Kroc @admin

Never forget what they took from us.

@Kroc encarta was amazing. Like the golden record on voyager amazing. It had videos and sounds and a lot of library of congress stuff from the different eras. It came with a book. Everything did. Software and books living together in harmony. Lol. Times have changed.

@Kroc @Gargron I loved Encarta on CD. Everyone back then thought CDs were the end of dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Turns out it wasn't CDs, it was Wikipedia.