Behold! The blogging aesthetics of 2006:
hi every1 im new!!! holds up spork my name is katy but u can call me t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m!!! lol…as u can see im very random!!! thats why i came here, 2 meet random ppl like me _… im 13 years old (im mature 4 my age tho!!) i like 2 watch invader zim w/ my girlfreind (im bi if u dont like it deal w/it) its our favorite tv show!!! bcuz its SOOOO random!!! shes random 2 of course but i want 2 meet more random ppl =) like they say the more the merrier!!! lol…neways i hope 2 make alot of freinds here so give me lots of commentses!!! DOOOOOMMMM!!! <— me bein random again _ hehe…toodles!!!
love and waffles,
t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m
I recently came across a blogpost explaining something I was researching, and the comments beneath were exactly like this. Then I looked up from when it was: May 2006.
The internet is a time machine.
The internet is a time machine.
Man, it really is and it’s so cool to see. It brings back memories you forgot you had!
The sacred texts, they’re so bright I almost need to avert my eyes.
‘the sacred texts’
ROFL:ROFL:ROFL:ROFL ___^___ _ L __/ [] \ LOL===__ \ L \___ ___ ___] I I ----------/My ROFLCopter goes SOISOISOISOISOISOI
Is it bad that I can still read these shitposts in the correct tone?
I read them in Boxxy’s voice, it’s automatic
You truely were random as dice. ;)
holds up spork
Oh fuck! This caused my brain to reboot after a cascading failure of memories tripping fuses right the way back to 2001.
Did your brain then play the windows XP boot up sound?
Oh god, I forgot about the spork thing. The sporks seemed a natural part of the foundation. Where did the sporks go? This would have been perfectly at home on the very first forum my child ass ever joined, and I can feel everything I ever loved evaporating.
Holy shit what a throwback to the past
I miss MySpace.
Has there ever been a study from like an anthropologist/evolutionary biologist or something about why the
:)smiley won out over the=)smiley? I used to be a =) guy back in the day, but over time felt pressured to switch to :) because everyone else was using it. Now, whenever I see someone use =) I just assume they’re a boomer or something.I’ve never thought about that. Could it be because :) became the shortcut for emoji?
It came before emojis/a shortcut for them. I would think it’s from T9 keyboards. If you wanted any of those types of characters, it was a cycle of a single button and : comes before =, so doing : ) was a lot less button presses than = )
This made my eyes water
Honestly, I kind of understand why the older generation was afraid of using the internet, they saw this lingo while trying to fix a leaky pipe on a Yahoo Answers thread and said “not my worldwideweb!”
I didn’t talk this incredibly stupid and “unique” on chats during AOL and MSN days but by the time I got to highschool I realized I needed to stop with all the emojis and emphasis in text form because nobody knows how nor cares to decypher what you’re saying anyway.
I used to work with a lot of people who were younger than me, and I knew a few Katy’s in my time (in some cases, literally, though not all younger but still - Catherine Kathrine Kathy Cathy Kate and like 3 Katie’s were all people I knew in the space of about 3 years lmfao). 😂
E: to clarify - absolutely nothing against them! I was a closeted goth (already being bullied for but not knowing I was autistic started early and was bad enough) and I wish I could have embraced the weirdness like that.Did she ever made friends this day, or is it just a full on copypasta?
Gen X: Haha, those millenials sure looked stupid as kids!
Also Gen X:
Boomers: Haha, Gen X sure looked stupid as kids!
Also Boomers:
The boomer’s had everything better. That fashion works for me.
But everyone was so much thinner back then. The average person was so much hotter.
The only thing that’s really improved is people’s teeth.
But everyone was so much thinner back then. The average person was so much hotter.
Because they inherited an economy with actual food and replaced it with “food” filled with industrial inventions like corn syrup
Given a better quality photo, the women on the left and right really wouldn’t be out of place nowadays.
And these are the ones scared of gender/LGBTQ politics… We know why now…
Is… is that the rep we have? I sort of thought that was boomers and just, well, bigots from every generation. Gen X was also sex positive feminism 3rd wave and the beginning of intersectionalism.
Guess it depends on where you live. I find a lot of people around me that are 45 and up and don’t live in a more wealthy area are basically that way.
I saw a lot flip sides since 2020… From being open minded to closed. From repping Obama to repping trump and the coup.
It’s really weird to be honest.
Yikes that sounds rough!
We have had problems over here where we lose people down an antivax q-anon abbit hole, but it seems to affect all ages. I think maybe it has something to do with underlying mental health vulnerabilities.
I don’t think it is about flipping a coin between open-minded and close-minded but about radicalization. While it is harder to see with QAnon, radicalization be it right, left (although you have to go really far on the horseshoe), or religious is staunchly anti-intellectualistic. Once you believe in ideas or at least do not see them as really distasteful, it gets easier to go towards more and more batshit insane ideas.
While I am not sure if there is actual research on how age affects radicalization, research on radicalization has identified certain things that make it likelier for a person to be radicalized. Vulnerability, marginalization, and othering are all pretty common. To extend it there might be an age group vulnerability of 45 and up age group because of either being empty nesters or kids at least starting to be a lot more independent.
There is also somewhat of a domino effect. People like to be part of a group. If people don’t give any legitimacy to radicalized viewpoints, it makes it harder to be radicalized. The problem with this is also how hidden ideas can become mainstream as has at least in Western countries happened with the alt-right, they can reach a scary critical mass. Once you have been tempered with completely crazy viewpoints at one point thinking JFK Jr will be resurrected is not that weird anymore.
Over a decade ago when I started to get really worried about the rise of fascism in the West, my mom thought I was insane. Now we have had (not American) actual neo-Nazi as minister and no one of the ministerial parties thought it was a huge enough deal to actually not do it. In my books that means they all are neo-Nazies. My mom also doesn’t think I am insane anymore. The tools they used to gain power are not new. We are just not taught to identify them. I was because it would be a pretty bad idea to have someone in my profession if not aware of signs of radicalization.
Even education can only do so much to make up for a complete lack of cognitive ability.
We really need to step out of the idea that radicalization only happens to people who are somehow slow or uneducated. It might make you more likely to fall for it, but cognitive ability and education will not mean you will not end up there as well. Issue with the anti-intellectualism of the alt-right is not if someone themselves has education but if they are willing to listen to other people who do. If no one is an expert for example racist ideas of the alt-right about biological differences can’t be refuted. Which is probably partially where it comes from times quite a lot.
Everyone likes to think they have cognitive ability. If we just think radicalization happens only to stupid people, and you are not stupid, getting a person de-radicalized is going to be a lot harder. Thinking that we as people with cognitive ability can’t be radicalized will also make it easier to fall for it because you can’t be radicalized.
Instead of intelligence or education, we should focus on the trifecta of vulnerability, marginalization, and othering. That’s a better predictor.
(And no, I do not actually disagree about the ideas being idiocy, just that falling for them are not just for idiots)
I disagree on the fundamental level that if someone “intelligent” chooses to follow the ideas of idiocy it’s not proof that the intelligent can be swayed, but that the individual is objectively less intelligent that previously assumed. This is reinforced when someone more intelligent isn’t swayed by said idiocy.
Even education can only do so much to make up for a complete lack of cognitive ability.
Even education can only do so much to make up for a complete lack of cognitive ability.
Even education can only do so much to make up for a complete lack of cognitive ability.
Even education can only do so much to make up for a complete lack of cognitive ability.
I’ve also seen a lot of self identified progressive Xers and boomers that need to be explicitly taught these things. One was a terf before he looked around as his fellow terfs. Another was oddly possessive of Bugs Bunny in drag when he found out that some consider that episode a pro-trans episode. A whole lot of them don’t pick up on the anti environmental subtext in their comic book movies.
I think back then you could do “gay” things without being seen as gay so it was okay.
It was okay to dress like that if everyone knew you were out smashing loads of chicks.
But not people are going to think you’re gay so it’s really different.
Da packages.
Give them a break, they had no other accepted way to explore their sexuality
/s but also not /s
Yeah that’s just facts. This Bowie type shit is ANYTHING BUT straight, that’s what makes it iconic.
The straights have always copied/been inspired by queer fashion, just like white america with black american music genres (jazz, rock, blues, r&b, rap).Absolutely, there’s a long history of the “in-group” co-opting culture from the “out-group” because it’s seen as exotic and transgressive. Was it hypocritical for such a homophobic generation to idolize queer icons, only so long as they were cool and made good music? On a cultural level, yeah. On an individual level, depends on the individual and their specific beliefs and actions
Edit: Also my favorite Bowie album will always be Ziggy Stardust. Maybe a little basic but it just hits all the right campy, flamboyant, and always-incredible notes
Bowie, Freddy Mercury, Elton John, etc were just so damn cool they overpowered any homophobia
Aw man, I clicked that thinking it was going to be Grunge or even this sort of thing.
I always forget that gen x also includes people way older than me.
Seriously that’s some 80s shit my sister was into but she’s 9 years older than me, meanwhile it was more Biggie and Wu-Tang for me when they dropped around 93-94 when I was a teen. It was all baggy clothes.
Starter jackets, timbs, raiders… Fubu… Billabong… Wallet chains. The longer the wallet chain the more dominace you had over peers.
It all started with a Starter Coat… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Kc8GVUBRI
That was peak aesthetics.
Was?
You too stray far from the light.But we like the dark.
Darkness, for dark deeds.
BY FAR!
It’s sad they got so much hate back the days. Their style was so awesome and different. I always admired that, but didn’t have the courage to go full emo and draw everybodys hate on me.
Millennial fashion was pretty bad imho. From the emo look all the way down to the lumberjack look. All quite contrived and corny, but that’s just my opinion.
Excuse me I exclusively wore preppy clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch thank you very much
The manbun will go down in history as one of the worst hairstyles of all time
You shut your whore mouth.
You probably listen to the mountain goats
What else am I supposed to do with these luscious locks when I’m working!?
Get a haircut you dirty hippie /s
The man bun has been around for hundreds of years in different yet similar iterations. Fashion is cyclical as human tastes are. We reject the current popular trend which then spawns a new one, but mostly derived from previously existing trends in the far past. We do this enough times and then we circle around to arrive again where it all began. As it is, nothing is truly original, like matter and energy, everything comes from something.
Broccoli haircut is much much worse than anything
@YoungPrinceAmmon @manapropos, or this one
https://youtu.be/D1NdGBldg3wLooks like Peso Pluma without the mullet part in the back
Well this seems to be purely for comedic effect, you’ll probably never se anyone on street with such hair
@YoungPrinceAmmon, and also much worse.
Look a Estonian right-wing politician, for Example, without naming the death Ferret from Trump or this (???) from Borris JohnsonThat Estonian guy is another level, really got me off guard
Oh please. It’s at least gonna have to get in line behind the alt-right undercut.
I think you’ve misspelt mullet
deleted by creator
Emo/Skater outfit makes everyone over 9000% more attractive.
💯
Helps that the style “hides” a lot, hard to tell what she really looks like under the makeup, loose clothing and accessories.
I’m a millennial, and I still dress all emo even in my 30’s. My 20 year old coworker even complimented my black skinny jeans with zippers in random places the other day. No reason to stop loving your late teen/early 20’s aesthetic! Don’t let the world crush your creativity, do you and to hell with everyone’s opinions!
I’m with you!!! I’m gonna dress how I feel like I should and now that I’m an adult nobody can stop me!!
At 35 I continue to wear home made stenciled t-shirts and jeans I cut into shorts. If my boss doesn’t like it he can go break a hip about it, how I look has no bearing on how well I do my job.
Yesss you rock!
Same. I stopped dying my hair black but otherwise my style has stayed very similar
Hell yeha, as long as you’re not harming anyone, just do whatever the hell you want without thinking twice.
Mine is the casual yuppie look. Ha
Kids these days trying to take away our skinny jeans! Never I say!
We’ll see who is laughing when it snows and their ankles are frozen. Suppose they all have to learn somehow
Skinny Jeans forever. I can’t imagine not having a few pairs at home. They are the most comfortable pants I own!
Can we just get a happy medium between JNCO and skinny jeans, please? 😭
This was like, 5% of millennials. Trust me, I was one of them. We got our asses kicked for dressing this way. Most everyone else either did “gangsta” style with low-hanging pants and Timberland boots/Jordans, or “preppy” style with a boring-ass polo shirt and khakis.
Psh, I saw this and immediately thought " I would have wanted to date that girl back in the day". Now I think… “If I met a girl who was my age rocking that style… I would want to talk to them for sure”
-born in 89’
Same. Also born in 1989 and I would have had a huge crush on this girl in 2006. Haha
Yeah the emo look definitely worked for me… We didn’t have a lot of them in my country though, the alt style was more punk/dirty techno, or metalheads but the girls didn’t look like that. Shame…
Emocore stuff was also later on and seen generally as a pop-poser spinoff of punk and metal culture. It got uniquely hated on by both mainstream and alternative cliques because of this.
I personally went through a pretty extended punk phase and never really got picked on. I actually made plenty of friends with jocks and stoners in high school, while wearing a pretty cringe getup with operation Ivy patches and shit.
I gravitated toward nu-metal/industrial with wide leg JNCO pants and ball-chain necklaces.
I haven’t even heard of “emo” being an actual style until now. I thought it was just goth. Maybe because it’s a couple years after my time. I’m an older millennial, graduated high school in 2000.
Yeah, I’d say Emo really got going after 2000, at least in my experience
Emo is very specific sub genre of punk, but yeah, even the goths were very dressed down in 2000’s and emos and goths looked really similar
I was also nu metal and dressed the same, BAGGY jeans, wallet chains and skater trainers. We were “Moshers” where I was from.
Then there came a wave of boy bands with the Mosh aesthetic, like the music industry was trying to sell pop to Moshers. Good Charlotte was one of them.
This brought a whole new wave of kids into the fold, but they were drawn in by different music. These were the Emos and, like us Moshers, were generally frowned upon by those in for longer. The Metal Kids called us Moshers “Posers” or “Wanabees” and we treated Emos the same way.
Decades later my Mosh Wife I lovingly refer to as a Nemo for loving My Chemical Romance and say I’m “a bit Gothy” sometimes, it’s all just blended into the alternative subculture.
Most of my close friends are a bit older than me, part of the generation that called me a poser back in the day, and we still poke fun at each others taste in metal but we all headbang to all the tunes, it’s just Banter at this stage.
Don’t forget about thrift store style! Which wasn’t a style back then. Advantage though, us thrift store kids could switch styles daily. ‘Gangsta’ Monday, ‘emo’ Wednesday, poser Friday.
Wouldn’t that just be poser every day?
Pretty much lol. Only instead of going to the store to try you just end up with what you get and make it work from there.
I don’t know where people grew up that actually had cliques like that. It was just t-shirts and shorts or jeans while I was in school. There was no real trend chasing or trying to look gangster. Southern California here.
I went to highschool in Canada from 04 to 09. Most people when I was on grade 8 dressed casual in t shirt, jeans, hoodie, etc. Aside from that we had a gangster crowd we called the g units, cowboy preppy kids (not Alberta but my town had a rodeo vibe to it) who wore polos blue jeans and cowboy boots and all played football, the skater/stoner crowd, and a tiny goth crowd. Then grade 9 hit and like 30 to 40% of my school went emo. By grade 11 half the kids reverted back to “normal” clothing while the other half went into the scene crowd and later became hipsters.
boring-ass polo shirt and khakis
I feel attacked.
The Millenials laughing at Gen Z are the same Millenials who mocked emo/scene kids back then.
Was a goth, mocked emos and scene kids. Learned my lesson, rock on you little weirdos, enjoy your time of experimentation
Goths mocking emos always made me laugh. Which is itself a third layer of comedy because I was supposedly an old school punk but really just another kid with a funny 'do (green mohawk…which I still hold as the most righteous hairstyle known to man, however)
I mocked all of you. Jokes on me you all turned out pretty cool and to have good taste in music. I was just uncomfortable experimenting and possibly coming off ridiculous. Somehow I managed to be cringe because of my efforts not to.
cringe finds us all. Our curse was out fear of it, our blessing is we can free future generations with our knowledge.
There’s no escaping regret, so lets all just celebrate ourselves and understand others are doing the same.
to my hormone soaked brain being disaffected and into the grotesque was infinitely cooler than being disaffected and sad.
We enjoyed punks though, there was this group of kids that’d meet up in the city and we’d be punks, metalheads, and goths all confident in our superiority to emos who we called posers.
I’ll paraphrase a twitter comment: man I did not give a single fuck about gen x as a millenial, these posts are so weird. Maybe we’re just more exposed to each other now because of social media
Demographically there were way more millenials than genx.
The cohorts that are demographic bulges (boomers, millennials) get a lot of media attention (because advertising) and it plays out.
I’m convinced that news outlets and big tech intentionally push ageism / generational-warfare to substitute for class warfare, and divert criticism away from capitalists.
Like who decided to mark off these year ranges and put labels on them anyway, it’s completely arbitrary and meaningless.
Allow me to offer a different perspective from the previous reply: holy frickin shit, I honestly never noticed this before. Tbh I’m not sure about the intentionality behind it though.
I mean, who exactly is intentionally doing this? Intent is important here; if it’s not individually-assignable, and say emerges from a complex series of interactions between various other policies, or instances of individual decision-making - for example - then it seems hard to reasonably place “blame” like that.
This doesn’t preclude taking action against the companies which will be salient for them (e.g. puts financial viability in question, rather than BS fines that amount to parking tickets)… I mean corporations are people too, now, right? Just a thought on how to argue/clarify the premise.
Because otherwise… Yeah, wtf. A lot of dividing lines, a lot of material insecurity, and so on, and nobody has the time - let alone the resources AND perspective simultaneously - to challenge the real dynamic. One which arguably IS being perpetrated with individual intent at multiple scales, and with cancerous impacts (figuratively and literally) on the societies which enable and tolerate them.
I hope you’re being sarcastic because that kind of deranged conspiracy theory nonsense being taken seriously is why this country is so comprehensively fucked in the head.
…also, the whole genx/millenial/genz/etc labels are specifically a thing from marketing. They teach that stuff in business schools because it actually is useful to divide a population like that. The edges are gray, but people squarely in the middle of one of those demographics are more likely to be caricatures of it.
deranged conspiracy theory nonsense
They teach that stuff in business schools because it actually is useful to divide a population like that
Hmm
Alt Teenagers dress weird regardless of when they were born.
alt adults also do
We’re all still emo/scene kids at heart, it was never a phase mom
I still cry listening to Bright Eyes.
I don’t care what anyone says though. No one can write like Conor Oberst.
Preach. If I could be any age forever it would probably be one of the ones from my days as a scene kid.
Gonna be honest, I really like the aesthetic even to this day.
My wife and I have a standing agreement that we’ll get a divorce if either of have a shot with Hayley Williams
I mean, If I could I would do the same, feel u bro.
I think gen z has done a great job evolving the look too.
I see an Invader Zim T-shirt!
I’m gonna sing the doom song now! Doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom…
The Tallest: You made it worse!
Invader Zim: Or beeetteeeerrr!
To this day I still watch IZ. Especially the slow-explosion episode
Sometimes I think that since I still really love goth chicks I haven’t changed that much since the 00s
But then I remember that over that time frame goth chicks went from edgy rebellious teenagers in a ton of makeup to moms in their 30s with a wicked sense of humor that wear a lot of black. They still deal weed and hate authorities though.
Watching my once fully goth and punk friends raise kids is odd but also wonderful, knowing that they’re passing their zero tolerance for societies’ bullshit on to their kids (as best they can, considering what we’re up against) is heart warming.
Wouldn’t want to do it myself though lol
This is every generation with the generation before them.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes; written over 2000 years ago.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
