Gyokuyoutama

Holy shit.

Major late 00's era energy:
 
 

You remind me of this really good dev commentary node from a mod called "Half-Life C.A.G.E.D.". https://vocaroo.com/1hrZvB6PLlju
 
The "Big Lolly" mod he was talking about
 
I wonder if he knows how much of an impact his map, pl_hightower, had on the tf2 community... https://caylegeorge.com/

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

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.

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.

It is rather hilarious that they posted (on threads closed to comments) on how they "know" what is best for the game, how they "discussed internally" this and how they won't go back or discuss this because their mind is set.
They getting slammed on both Steam and Twitter, because this is the THIRD time they are editing stuff to scrub any sexualization from the game, but this time they went as far as removing art and editing the design of some characters.
 
First, they removed basically every panty shot from the game. Then they replaced one of the NPCs by this idiot that as far as I know, his entire personality is being black, gay and a furry.
Now they edited even more art (removing anything that looked barely sexual), removed a few scenes from the story (including a BIG one from the Big Band story mode), removed some voice lines, edited the design of the Black Egrets because they "looked too much like nazis" (their entire purpose was being an in-universe good version of the nazis), among some other things, like apparently they removed one entire announced because he was just a russian stereotype joke.
 
People fear the slippery slope will continue and more stuff will be censored soon, because there are rumors of some sort of shit happening internally and they are just deploying the smokescreen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"The United States" is generally too unwieldy to use in most contexts, especially when using a possessive like in "the United States' actions" - it just sounds gross. Think about the logical implications of replacing "America" with "(The) United States" and you'll see why nobody does it.
 
"The United States the Beautiful"
"United States citizen"
"Death to the United States!"
"The United States Revolution"
The Luftwaffe's hypothetical "Vereinigtestaatenbomber"
"United States' economy"
 
Every other country on the American continent has an unambiguous name it's referred to other than America so it's completely logical to use "America" to refer to the US because the US has no other way of referring to it outside of its disgusting word salad name. It's either "the United States" or "America" - we don't have the luxury of an easy and good-looking name like "Mexico" or "Columbia" or "Canada".

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.

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.

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.

Why did you ever leave

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

This popped up in my recommendations and I was forcefully sent back in time to middle school.
 
 

Relatedly if you said our elites were pedophiles going to a secret island to fuck kids in like 2010 you'd be laughed out of the room and branded as an insane conspiracy theorist while after Epstein and all the media coverage everyone just kinda laughed and said "Yeah, those wacky elites!"

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.

>going through old files
 
>remember this track exists
 
 

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.

Decided to watch some cartoons. Man, how far these channels have fallen.
 
There are like 10 cartoon channels, 6 of them are for babies/toddlers. Disney is either live action sitcons or Loud House. Nickelodeon is either Spongebob, Patrick, Spongebob Babies or live action sitcom.
 
Cartoon Network is a shadow of its former self, I looked at the channel schedule and it was 3 hours of Teen Titans GO, followed by Bare Bears Babies, Total Drama Babies, Gumball and some shitty obligatory by law brazillian cartoons, followed by another 3 hours of Teen Titans Go. ITS ALL THEY SHOW, THE ENTIRE SCHEDULE WAS 70% TEEN TITANS GO. THIS SERIES HAS 400 EPISODES WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK
 
Dreamworks has an entire channel to "low quality shows of our animated movies".
 
The only channel worth watching is Tooncast because it only runs old cartoons (early 2000s ones), shame that the Boomerang channel that used to show really old cartoons changed into live action sitcoms then was nuked.
 
Its times like these that I really miss the old schedule, weird cartoons played early in the morning (I remember some show about Tripplets and a witch), at the start of the afternoon they started with shows like Shaolin Showdown, Toonami started at 17:00 with Pokemon, followed by Dragon Ball, Inuyasha and Zatch Bell. Followed by Cartoon Cartoons from 19:00 to 22:00, having a mix of Dexter, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, Johnny Bravo, Megas XLR, Time Squad, Samurai Jack, Powerpuff Girls, Ed, Edd n Eddy, and several others. Then after that, it was Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck Show for one hour, ending with the Tex Avery Show.
Adult Swim wasn't from my time, but I remember stuff like Evangelion and other animes playing after midnight.
 
Was the Locomotion channel available in other countries? I remember it was mostly adult anime, I still remember stuff like Agent Aika, Burn Up Excess and Saber Marionette from there.

If I had to guess, I would say it was because the 80's was the last decade of truly "unified" culture where big organizations controlled most of the mass media. Which I recognize sounds conspiratorial, but it's actually not! "Cultural decades" as a thing are only possible in industrialized nations where technology is advanced enough to allow rapid and national change - but not advanced enough to allow self-segregation. Which is to say, the "idea" of having cultural decades is something that is now past us.
 
Before the 19th century there wasn't much of a "national" culture anywhere in the world. For example, Occitan was the everyday language of most people in Southern France, and Occitan is only somewhat intelligible with what we think of as "the" French language, so you couldn't really have a unified national culture - let alone national cultural shifts. And even if you could, introducing a new style of clothing, music, etc. simply couldn't happen that quickly in the pre-industrial age. In a way the United States was the perfect country for national cultures to emerge, as it came into being right before communications technology was advanced enough to facilitate national cultures, in addition to lacking any historical cultural baggage. Even still, regionalism was prominent throughout the 19th century and I would argue you didn't really get cultural decades until the 1920s with the proliferation of radio.
 
From the 20's onward the media landscape was comprised of a few large media companies (radio, then television) that produced nationwide content, those being the Big Three networks of NBC, CBS and ABC. This worked until about the 1990s, when the internet became popular enough to create distinct subcultures throughout the United States that could no longer be confined to specific regions. At first it was just nerds and freaks who abounded on the internet, so mass culture was still humming along, but once the smartphone became mainstream normies flooded the internet and started self-segregating as well.
 
One of the plainest examples is in news - in the "national culture" age, almost everyone trusted large news corporations or at the very least trusted the broadcasters themselves, like Walter Cronkite. You can debate whether or not media was more trustworthy back then but the fact is most people trusted it simply because that was what was there. Now, in 2023, the average person has to actively go out of their way to find news they disagree with. Ditto with popular culture - if you got home after work in 1965 and didn't want to go out you would have to watch whatever was on, which wasn't much. And music? You'd have a lot less choice back then than today as well. So of course most people would share memories of specific eras, which makes it easier to conceptualize and communicate the idea of a cultural decade.
 
Basically, The Breakfast Club couldn't happen in 2023, because all of the kids would be on their phones in their own niche communities, listening to their own micro-influencers that nobody else cares about. So in the future, when people think back to 2008 or 2010 or 2015 or 2023, it will be hard to see the difference because any cultural changes would be perceived within these isolated communities, and not the nation as a whole. Ironically enough, the only thing that affected just about every community equally - the pandemic - also drove people further into online bubbles.
 
On the "bright" side, maybe big tech will eventually become so consolidated we'll all be force-fed the same media soon.