Gyokuyoutama

It was something on my mind because of me coming back again and again to Civilization 2 in my DOS Box Windows 3.1 setup.  You have to make a conscious decision with that game whenever you play in terms of which disk you load.  The Fantastic Worlds CD has about three times the number of music files as the original, which is appreciated since while the original music was great it is a bit sparse for a game that goes as long as Civilization does.  However, the animations (for wonders, high council meetings and ambassadors) only appear on the original CD, likely due to space reasons.  The game doesn't let you install this stuff to your hard drive (and hard drives were so tiny back then that no one would have wanted to anyway) so you have to choose between a larger soundtrack and animations.

The compromise was probably made due to Fantastic Worlds primarily consisting of alternate scenarios that radically change the nature of the buildings and units.  No sense in having a medieval high council when you are actually commanding dinosaurs or having the video for the Pyramids play when you actually built the futuristic food transporter.  But if you are playing a "standard" game the choice matters.

And of course, if I got bored I'll just pop in Iron Maiden or something and it'll play that too.

During the period from about 1993-2001 many CD games used redbook audio for their music.  This meant that they would put music data on the CD and play that music like any other CD while it was in your drive.  In terms of consoles these were common on the PSX and Sega CD, but many PC games also did this.  For PC games specifically there were several advantages. For example you would be able to play high quality music in a way that didn't eat up valuable hard drive space.  It was also inherently an anti-piracy measure, both in how it encouraged you to play the game with the CD in the drive and how pirated copies would frequently lack music.

On the player end, one advantage is being able to use the CD as a music CD in a normal CD player.  Like the soundtrack of the likes of Civilization II, Sim Isle, Warcarft II, Heroes of Might and Magic, Half-Life, etc.?  Pop that baby into your CD player and you can listen to it wherever you want.  Ripping the soundtrack is also trivial.  Since you were encouraged to have the CD in the drive for music (and sometimes other media files, such as the videos in Sim Isle) these games often didn't have proper CD checks, meaning that you could play them with any CD in the drive.  Some games did a check on the number of audio files, etc. to make sure that the right CD was in the drive and refused to play music if it wasn't, but others would just play the corresponding track of whatever was there which could lead to some interesting results.

As far as I'm aware, no game embraced this as much as the 1999 version of Aliens vs. Predator.  It was a 2 CD game, but the second CD was nothing but the soundtrack.  It was straight up a normal music CD, no data of any sort.  Because of this you could easily use any CD you wanted for music, and the game even included a config file to select which tracks would play in which order on each level, or when playing as each species in multiplayer.  Unfortunately the GOG/Steam rerelease doesn't do this and simply plays music files from the hard drive.  It's a niche enough feature that I'm not sure if anyone has even modded it in.

The process is always the same:

STAGE ONE: We aren't doing anything. You are being paranoid.

STAGE TWO: Sure we did some stuff, but what kind of messed up person would you have to be to not agree with us?

For example, consider the recent remakes of the Telltale Sam and Max games.  At first this was presented as a simple graphical remaster.  The audio and gameplay were supposed to be identical to the original, just new 3D models and such.

Then it turned out that they replaced Bosco's voicelines, due to not liking how his original voice actor was not black.  When they did this it was presented as the only change they were making.  That is, it would be a new actor, but he'd say the same things.  And how could you possibly disagree with having a black character voiced by a black actor, right?

And of course they used the opportunity to change a bunch of Bosco's voicelines to change a bunch of jokes.  The devs claimed that the changes were so minor that they forgot they changed them, and that the changes were minor anyway, and now we could realize the originals were more problematic than we thought, etc.  Doesn't really matter, since they already lied to their fanbase twice, so why trust them now?

Anyway, modern companies are going to keep acting dumb no matter what people do.  So the real lesson to learn is to get copies of games that can't be modified, so that you don't have to constantly police game companies.

8 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

Anyone else feel like "80s" has become more of a genre or something than a time period? The idealized "80s" has basically become a fantasy setting of its own.

This is something that I have thought about for a long time and discussed in other places, so allow me to give you a tl;dr essay:

The 80's was the last "nostalgia" era.  See also the 50's, the roaring 20's and the gay (18)90's.  For a long time (at least a couple centuries) people would get fixated on some time period which happened pretty reliably every 30 years or so.  It's not that there is no nostalgia for other decades, but if you look at the number of works of fiction set in these time periods it dwarfs the surrounding ones.  These decades also picked up nostalgia pretty quickly too: there were "80's days" events in schools by the mid 90's.

The trouble is that culture started stalling out in the late 90's, slowed to a crawl in pretty much everything but video games (which had a golden age then) during the early 00's, and basically froze around 2007.  The only way to distinguish works from 2007 compared to works from today is to see what politics they kowtow to, and even that is more a question of degree than type.  Very little has changed in terms of fashion, the use of technology (ex. how the internet effects things), styles of music, etc.  So the 2010's couldn't become a nostalgia decade, since they are practically the same as right now.  If you doubt this, look up people engaging in "10's nostalgia."  It's always going to be one of two things: Either personal nostalgia, i.e. "I miss being a kid" from people born in the 00's, or nostalgia for something which has been in steady decline through the 10's, meaning it was better then than now, but it was even better before that (ex. internet animation culture.)

Hollywood absolutely needs name recognition and nostalgia to work now.  The suits never cared much about quality, but now they don't even recognize it as something that can be in movies.  But they do know that if people recognize what something is then you can catch them more easily with an advertising campaign to at least break even before people catch on to the fact that something sucks.  And every once in a while you'll get something actually good (or at least above the low bar set by modern films) and make tons of money.  In contrast original properties are a huge gamble: they need to be groundbreaking in terms of quality to make a profit and even then there's a big risk that people won't see them because the marketing campaign doesn't work.  (Even stuff like The Shawshank Redemption bombed on release, and things are much worse now.)  So they need to grab something that is "safe" which usually means going back to the 80's in some way, as things stalled out since then (i.e. they should be able to go back to the 10's for new content, except there really isn't non-derivative new content from the 10's.)

As a consequence of all of this we've been running on 80's nostalgia for literally 30 years at this point.  People are graduating college who have lived their entire lives in an 80's nostalgia boom.  And like anything if you keep copying it over and over and over again, the quality will decrease and you'll lose track of what you were trying to do in the first place.  It's the same reason that so many Isekai stories are crap: they are usually copying another Isekai, which lazily lifted things from a JRPG, which in turn lazily lifted things from another JRPG, which in turn stole its mechanics from a pen and paper RPG, which in turn stole its ideas from classic (pre-80's) fantasy fiction.  You're so far removed from someone trying to be creative that the result feels hollow. The same thing has happened with the 80's: modern works set in the 80's are often rip offs of stuff which are in turn a rip off of Stranger Things which in turn is based more off 80's movies than the actual 80's itself.  The original is obscured.

I think the process is more obvious in attempts to make 90's movies.  There's not a lot of these, but occasionally Hollywood tries it do to realizing that the 80's are pretty played out and they probably should look for another vein to mine.  (Not that this realization will stop them: we figured out that zombies were overdone in what, 2010? And yet we still have plenty of zombie crap.)  The trouble is that 90's nostalgia has never really been a mainstream thing, unlike 80's nostalgia.  So they try to apply this lazy copying process to the 90's but they don't have the cliches to work off of.  For example, in the 80's you'd automatically do neon lights/pastel colors, new wave or synth heavy music, make nerdy kids the stars, have bikes and retro technology be front and center, etc. What do you do for the 90's?  Hollywood has decided it's the "grunge" decade, with maybe some old school hip hop culture.  What makes this particularly absurd is that "grunge" was a fake concept at the time and so it can't guide anything.  So in the end "90's nostalgia" movies end up being modern culture, just people have flip phones instead of cell phones and the internet is dialup.

When it comes to the 80s though there is another complicating factor: 80s science fiction in particular has captured the imagination of many young people.  Imagine that you are 16 (which I'm pretty sure that no one here is.)  Then you were born about 2007.  What significant progress have you seen in terms of technology?  I'll give you the recent stable diffusion type AI stuff (which isn't being used for anything worthwhlie) but everything else hasn't advanced noticeably throughout your entire life.  Skyrim came out when you were 4.  What, are you supposed to be amazed by the futuristic possibility of playing Skyrim Special Edition or Skyrim VR?  In contrast, suppose you were 4 when Super Mario Bros. came out.  Then when you were 16 it'd be about 1997; you'd be playing Goldeneye, Symphony of the Night, Final Fantasy VII, Diablo, Quake II, etc.  No one would have to convince you that video games had been revolutionized during your lifetime, and your expectations for the next decade would be sky high.  The same would be true in every other avenue of technology.  But if you were born in 2007, the best you can really hope for is "the same stuff, but with somewhat better graphics."  This isn't getting into the "mud genre" (i.e. the same "open world" template applied to 90% of AAA games) and "story based" games which provide little to expand upon other than another (by the books) story.

So if you are in this age group, it's hard to have high expectations of the future.  If things keep going the way they are going, it's just going to stay 2007 forever.  But when you watch 80's science fiction you are being offered a different vision of the future.  Back to the Future: Part II, Blade Runner, Bubblegum Crisis, Dune (David Lynch), Akira, etc. are all offering you something very different than what you've seen in your life.  So it is easy to get obsessed with those ideas.  Yet the result is not the 80's, but the 80's as experienced by someone living through current year +8.  It's much like how steampunk is ostensibly based on 19th century ideas but in reality has very little to do with it beyond aesthetics.  This gives you the "synthwave" style of 80's nostalgia, which is not really 80's nostalgia (since most people active in it were little kids or not born in the 80's) but rather has more in common with longing for medieval fantasy worlds.  That is, you know it isn't real, but you wish it was.

1 hour ago, Moby said:

They are actually rewritting some Skullgirls parts and outright deleting scenes and art because its "pRoBlEmAtIc nOw yIkeS UmpHiEs".

 

Its a 10 year old game, fucking hell.

This sort of stuff is why I globally disabled automatic updates for my GoG games.

(Specifically it was the NeoGeo port of Baseball Heroes removing country/city names from all teams just because two were named the "Taipei Hawks" and "Taiwan Dragons.")

I already had disabled updates for a lot of newer games that messed with game mechanics constantly (fuck you paradox, give me my old subjugation mechanics back) but now you can't trust anything.

Encountered an apropos image on JP twitter:

It's the Japanese line for "If you only knew the power of the dark side" to "if you only knew the power of the imperial unit!"

For added relevance this was posted in a conversation where it was claimed that confusion between metric and imperial units caused the sub disaster, with people pushing back saying that Imperial units are cool.

Bonus meme:

"We should decrease the use of imperial units and unify the international system of units."

"That's right! And we should also cease using horsepower as a unit."

...

"We are going to all use kW, right?"

About two days ago I started to be unable to move the Steam window.  It gets stuck in the lower right and no matter how I try to drag on it nothing happens.

Looking around some people suggested going into big picture mode and backing out, which does resolve the issue, but it comes back when I restart Steam.

Has this happened to anyone else?

I managed to find the Nichijou scene in question on youtube which actually explains the game Kokkuri pretty completely.  In classic youtube anime fashion though you'll only get Spanish subs.

EDIT: I guess this is a fandub, though in the description the guy claims it isn't and in fact the weird voices are due to using a shitty iPhone to record another video.

Either way the explanation still works and you get some 2010s-era internet nostalgia.

Misaki's introduction.  This one had an obvious difficulty in the fact that most of the information is behind her tails, and both removing the text and repeating the effect on English text was definitely beyond my image manipulation abilities.  But this caused me less difficulty, since I decided early on to just leave it as is and put the translations to the side.  I guess that means that those of you who know some Japanese (which I guess means one person) can more easily critique my translations.

In panel two the three children each have a kanji making up the word "children" (子　供　達).  I did my best to mimic this in English.

The phrase "I use no tricks or gimmicks" is originally 種も仕掛けもない, meaning the same thing, and is apparently a stock phrase that magicians use in Japan.  If I recall correctly Trucy Wright says that even in the translation.  I originally changed it to "I have nothing up my sleeves!", the western equivalent stock phrase, but then Miko's retort didn't work as well.  And I've heard magicians make very similar statements in English so I ended up leaving it as is.

The text in the fourth panel is crossed out in the original.  Literally the first paragraph means something like "she loosens her expressions" but as far as I can tell this is an idiom to mean looking fiercely determined.  But it's crossed out presumably to indicate that no, she just ahs a fox's head at this point.

In the second to last panel the kids are screaming about a monster.  I almost changed it since I could have replaced that text, but at this point I just want this chapter to be done with.

There's a pun I didn't translate in the last panel.  "Master fox" corresponds to a word 達人 except 人 is literally crossed out and replaced with 狐.  The word 達人 means something like "master", i.e. someone very skilled in his field, and the second kanji literally means "person" or "human."  So the joke is that since Misaki isn't a human but rather a fox she should properly be a 達狐.  I couldn't find a way to preserve the pun, but if you can think of one let me know.

Now we get to the most tertiary character of all, Yuzu.  I don't much to say here other than to remind you that a "Yuzu" is a type of citrus fruit, which Yuzu is holding.

The title of the chapter is tricky to translate.  It means something like "a relationship decreed by fate" which could refer to Yuzu ending up living with Miko and Misaki, but I am taking to reference to how she's stuck being thought of as "that shrine girl."

I have no idea what the cloud is on panel 3.  Presumably some sort of spirit, but spoiler alert: it never shows up again in the comic (not even in the extra art pages provided in the pdf.)  All we know is that it's kind of like a cloud, it's hazy and it can take on other shapes.

The game Kokkuri is basically the Japanese version of Ouija.  You write out the kana on a piece of paper and have different people touch a yen coin which then gets moved to spell out messages in response to questions.  You may have seen it in anime without realizing it, for example Yukko tries to get Mio to play it in an episode of Nichijou.  The reason why Yuzu is getting asked about it is that rather than a ghost (like in Ouija) Kokkuri is supposed to be a fox spirit, like in the Kokkuri anime.

And that's it for the introduction.  I have drafts done of several of the later chapter, but since I need to revise and polish a lot I'm not going to give an estimate on when you'll see them.  (I don't think that actually lets you dodge the comic curse, but it doesn't hurt to try.)

EDIT: I just realized that I didn't replace Miko's text on panel two of the last page, and I'm definitely beyond caring enough to repost the image.  She's just saying "okaerinasai", i.e. the standard welcome you say to people when they get back home.

Miko's intro page.  As will become clearer on the next page, she's kind of a pathological germaphobe.

The original says that Miko is a "潔癖な狐" (keppeki kitsune) where the first word means obsessively clean and the second word is fox.  It then abbreviates this to "keppekitsune", liking the words by the shared "ki."  This pun obviously doesn't work at all in English.  This goes back a month or so ago so I'm not sure, but I think "neatsune" is a suggestion from Jay.

The second panel should be read "chozuya hygiene".  There's no way to fit those words into such a narrow box without putting them vertically, which I really hated doing since it messes with the English reading order, but the only alternative was to completely change the size of the box which I didn't want to mess with.  "Chozuya" is a Shinto ritual where the worshipper washes both hands and the ceremonial ladle (the hishaku mentioned in the panel below).  It's for ritual cleanliness, but Miko is worried about the actual hygiene of using a freestanding pool of water.

The "gifts" here are the donations to the shrine, but "donations" wouldn't fit.  The text in the second to last panel caused me no end of problems before finding the high res pdf, since the compressed version looks nothing like the actual kanji (in particular 困難, which means something like "hardship," did not look anything like that.)  Things were made worse by the fact that Kotoan has repeatedly used archaic kanji in previous chapters, so I had no idea if this was just some bizarre term, as well as the fact that the first Kanji was 賽銭, meaning monetary offerings at a Shinto shrine (and not the sort of kanji you are likely to discover even in L3 or L2 textbooks.)

I think the meaning is pretty straightforward after all that; Miko doesn't want to touch filthy currency and so makes an e-payment system.  I just wanted you to know the trickiness involved in working with this page.  The remainder were easier and I probably could have posted them by now, but I wanted to do things in order.

The comic curse: no matter how far off you place your deadline, the comic will come out after the deadline.

The main problem that I've been having is that on Pixiv, twitter, etc. Kotoan posted a low resolution set of images for these intro pages.  There are some handwritten Kanji which become barely visible blobs in this format, which isn't helped by the fact that they are .jpg files and thus have compression artifacts.

I probably would have gotten this done earlier if I had been aware that there is a pdf version for sale on Kotoan's pixiv booth for 100 yen.  As I said in the previous post there is a printed copy, but all things considered (shipping, etc.) that will run you over 3000 yen and is a pain in the ass to get.  But the pdf file was quick to get and high resolution throughout.  I'm not sure if I just overlooked this a month ago or if Kotoan rose from the grave to post a pdf file since March, but in any case I now have higher resolution images to refer to.  I'm going to still work from the lower resolution images on pixiv though, out of respect to the artist (i.e. if you want the high res stuff pay the 100 yen fee yourself.)

Unfortunately that means that when I saved my own images some of the text became low resolution enough to be just on the edge of readability.  I guess that gives you the authentic experience of the original text.  Let me know if you need something clarified.

Okay then, let's start posting pages:

I was going to say "no one insists that Greece should be called 'The Hellenic Republic' on the basis that regions outside of the modern nation of Greece were once called 'Greek.'"  Then I remembered that the Macedonians actually do that.

All this proves is that America is #1.

Fahrenheit: 0 = really cold, but commonly experienced, temperature.  100 = really hot, but commonly experienced, temperature.

Celsius: 0 = kind of cold but it gets colder than this in most places. 100 = お前はもう死んでいる (i.e. you ded.)

And yet Celsius apologists will defend their system on the basis of finding it easier to remember the temperature that water boils at, as if you wouldn't be able to tell if water was boiling without putting a thermometer in it.

As usual, I'm just listening to weeb stuff.

From Rurouni Kenshin, episode 61:

From Princess Tutu, Episode 24:

From Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 24

From Big O, episode 6:

I can't apologize for being a weeb when Japanese are able to create such musical works of art.  Truly there is something in these emotional expressions which could never be matched by the west.

(It didn't work.)

But on another matter, apparently Microsoft Edge now sends every image you view to Microsoft servers.  This is all done so that they can be displayed in "super resolution," i.e. fed through an AI upscaler and sent back to you.

It's kind of a microcosm of software design.

1.) Identify user data to be harvested and stored on your servers.

2.) Brainstorm some sort of "feature" that can be used to excuse this.

3.) Even though said feature is often pointless, and usually could be done locally, insist that it is essential and most be done on your servers.

Some day some kid-oriented business is going to use AI art to create a mascot, type in "blue cartoon fox" and then wonder who the hell Krystal is and why they are getting sued by Nintendo.

I had forgotten about that whole "anime cause seizures" stereotype until I started watching Gaogaigar.  Damn.  The villains headquarters is filled with rapidly strobing light, and the scenes there happen every episode, often going on for over a minute.  It's like they were actively trying to give people seizures.

The only other time I remember an anime being obnoxious about this sort of effect is one episode of Tenchi Universe (No Need for Knights.)  Outside of that and Gaogaigar I only remember seeing very quick strobe effects in explosions and the like, not whole scenes with constant strobing.

EDIT: Gaogaigar is pretty cool though.  But if you're Kurt Eichenwald you might want to keep to your big sis hentai manga instead.

EDIT2: They even do it in the intro.  Imagine this, but for up to three minutes straight.  (Obviously don't click if you have problems with flashing lights.)

The only time I ever used reddit was when I was looking for Shadowverse expansion previews, and I still felt dirty.

As long as we're doing blasts from the past.

I know I should really be used to the pliability of people, but it always catches me off guard.

"Did you hear? An aircraft whistleblower said that the government has alien spacecraft are real! So we finally have proof that we are being visited by extraterrestrials?"

"What do you mean 'finally'? People have been saying this sort of stuff for a century now.  Even if you just want an aircraft whistleblower, Bob Lazar was saying this stuff in the 90's."

"Yeah, but that was all a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense. This new leak is real proof!"

"Why?"

"Because it was on the news!"

I swear, by 2030 they're going to say that Bigfoot is real and within a month the whole country is going to act like they never once doubted that there was a large hominid in the woods.

Personally I find the UFO evidence intriguing, though I follow Keel and Vallee in having extreme skepticism about whether actual aliens play any role.  But I find these recent "disclosures" to be fake as hell.  The quality of evidence is far below even some of the shoddy cases of the past.  But there is an obvious attempt to make it seem like this is unprecedented.  Regardless of whether aliens are actually visiting here or not, the new "disclosures" are a pretty obvious psy-op.

Re-reading Necromancer by Gordon R. Dickson, first published in 1962.

Basic theme of the story is "technologically the world is in a great state, but society is about to tear itself apart."

For example there are regularly riots and police just hold up their hands and say "what are you going to do?" The only precaution is to tell people to get out of the area where the riot is happening.

One "shocking statistic" that society ignores is that the rate of medicated mental disorders among adolescents is approaching 7%.

In one scene a reporter decides that the quote he was given isn't the "right fit" for the story and uses technology to create an alternate statement from the guy he was interviewing. This is presented as standard procedure.

Villain outright states that 80% of the world's population will do whatever it's told, no matter how dumb it may seem.

I had long held that Fahrenheit 451 was the world we were living in, but I think I've found a new contender.

It's weird because it goes both ways.  TV definitely got more diverse as time went on.  In the 60's there were maybe 4 networks to watch, and since you wouldn't have a VCR if you wanted to see something you had to watch it at the same time as everyone else.  So if there was some big event the night before you could be pretty certain that a lot of people at work were watching at the same time as you.  But the VCR allowed "timeshifting," meaning that you might watch something later (and of course the VHS and later disc market greatly opened that up.)  At the same time cable and satellite expanded what was available to watch, requiring guides just for proper scheduling.  And the advent of streaming made things even more open.

But somehow we seem to have looped around to unity, at least in the mainstream.  How many times have you suddenly had people ask you if you just watched the new show that dropped on streaming (be that Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Velma, etc.)?  Often it's not even very good, and there's certainly no pressure to watch it immediately, yet millions of people do just that.

As for radio, it was actually pretty diverse in terms of the stations through the mid 90's.  Cable TV networks could pretty easily hit all the sets across America, but a radio station was necessarily bound by the range of its signal.  (Of course there were over the air TV stations, and in fact there still are, but they became less popular and were often saddled to a cable channel anyway.)  Now certainly you can buy up multiple stations in different markets and force them to all have the same programming, but this largely didn't happen through the 80's and early 90's.  This was due to restrictions against Radio monopolies which ended in 1996, and even by 1997 Clear Channel Communications had obtained almost every FM station in the country.  If you don't know who they are, it's because they go by iHeartRadio now; I guarantee you've heard that if you've turned on a radio in the last decade.  Payola (i.e. paying stations to play songs to put albums up the charts) had always been a thing, but with one company control over almost the airwaves it became trivial.  And the independent holdouts often did top 40 plays (which would be dominated by Clear Channel's choices) or took requests (which would be dominated by the Top 40, since that's all most people heard) meaning that past the mid 90's "popular radio" became far more unified than before.

Incidentally, this is probably why the music you here in stores is often 80% music up to the mid 90's, with most of the rest being recent and very occasionally a hit from 1997-2020.  Big hits before 1997 had a higher chance of being organically popular (not that there weren't propped up bands before that).  The charts after 1997 were largely decided by corporate decree.  So in that sense we have more unity on the airwaves too.

I don't know comics as well, but they got unified at about the same time.  Diamond Distribution gained a monopoly on comics distribution in 1997, and since that point has sold basically to specialty stores only.  In the early 90's it would be possible to get a weird "Scary Zombie Stories" comic or something in the supermarket, now comics are 90% capeshit that you must buy at a place with gross nerds.  This probably contributed to the manga explosion in the late 90's, early 00's (which continues to this day); if you wanted a comic and you only went to a bookstore, not a nerd store, you'd mainly see manga.

Similarly the unification of Hollywood should be obvious at a glance.  The "mid level" movie has basically vanished; everything is blockbuster spectaculars and weird no budget indie movies now.  Gone are the days when you might go to a movie made by some random studio that showed up in theaters for a couple of weeks.  Similar story for books, though the sea change event for them is the Thor Power Tools decision from 1979 (though there were a lot of mergers of big publishers starting around the turn of the millennium.)

So in theory everyone should be lockstep even now, culturally.  And with boomers you do kind of see this.  But the issue is that kids often don't follow the trends, or only do so halfheartedly.  And once you get outside the mainstream there is a huge amount available to you.  In the 60's a kid might rebel from his dad's old fashioned music and listen to some rock on the radio.  And unlike today he might find a radio with a legitimately independent DJ who was able to find some underground picks.  But this would be the same DJ that all the other rebels in his area would listen to, enforcing some conformity.  The situation with TV and movies would be even worse, since you would have to watch them at specific times with very little options.  The only thing that you really had wide access to was books (perhaps this is why nerds of that era were so well read, while modern nerds hardly read anything?) 

But I don't know how long this will last.  Most kids are firmly on the "normie-web."  They might not be aware that an internet exists beyond youtube, twitter, tiktok, discord, whatever the fad site of the week is, etc.  And as many of these centralized sits try to exert more and more control over their userbases, they might fall back into the situation of being able to "rebel" in only one approved way.  Now you might say that kids are more tech savvy and can get around these measures, but I don't know.  Tech savvy kids might have been an accident of being exposed to complicated UI from an early age, which was only true for people who grew up before 2010 or so.  You don't need to learn much to use a modern smartphone.

Cultural shifts of course never line up nicely with the ends of decades.  Saved By the Bell is perhaps the most "80's" thing ever, but the vast majority of its episodes aired in the 90's.  (The grand finale took place in 1994!)  But there is still an "idea" of each decade which is pretty strong through the 80's.

Of course, since somewhere between 1997-2001 cultural trends have become more and more bland and harder to distinguish.  There are still unique trends in gaming until about 2007, and that also happens to be when we had the last major technological shift in culture (i.e. mass adoption of smart phones.)  But 2007-2023 is largely indistinguishable otherwise.

I find the 90's interesting because the stagnation is definitely starting there; it really didn't have a very strong identity in contrast to the 80's, 70's, 60's, etc.  But there were unique things about it.  And yet those things basically never show up in modern entertainment, despite the something like 30 years of 80's nostalgia that we've had sold to us.

(Incidentally, if you want to get the most accurate idea of "90's culture", I'd just watch Hackers.  It's not a very good movie, but damn if it didn't capture a moment in culture which has been otherwise forgotten.  Soundtrack is also amazing.)