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  • many countries need to go back to reasonable inconvenience for superior and ethical product. same-day shipping is accelerating the speed of climate change so no you don't get to have it actually. no, fruits and vegetables are not available 24/7, seasons matter again. etc and etc. we need to go back to all of this. we have to reduce the strain.

  • I miss physically owning software, movies, and music, not having to pay a subscription for car features like heated seats or more horsepower. I miss getting a complete game that was usually mostly glitch free on day one you got it on CD/DVD.

  • Socializing.

    No social media to distract people. Nobody staring a phones. Nobody recording themselves for streaming.

    You memorized phone numbers or wrote them down. You called or got called to meet up at some place and everyone went from there.

  • Japan mostly skipped PCs (outside of offices). Since their phones were ahead of the curve, a lot of stuff was designed for them. That means that a bunch of stuff is either exclusively done through some shitty mobile app, fax, or in person. There was a brief phase where PC versions did exist, but those are almost all being neglected or decommissioned now. I much prefer to do things on a PC with a nice, clear, big screen, especially if I need to use some translation tool since the text tends to expand (learning thousands of kanji for stuff like legal and taxes is hard).

    I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.

    Software programs that were much more tested and completed before release.

    Software development where we think things through, define requirements, define states, etc. before any code is committed. I do think PoCs are fine to throw something against a wall but, if it works, the proper version should go through those design phases before anyone writes a line of code. Cheap components and fast machines and networks have made people lazy which makes software worse in a number of ways quite often. No vibecoding. No AI/LLM shoved into everything. I think they can have uses in certain contexts (rephrasing questions, generating examples/docs in projects with bad/no docs, etc.), but hate how they are being shoved into everything.

    An internet not run by corporations. I think a lot of people do see it through rose-tinted glasses (we still had trolls on BBS, UseNet, IRC, etc. and other bad actors), but a lot of things were much better.

    Third spaces. Places where people of different backgrounds would interact in some common way. Sure, some were echo chambers just like online communities today, but many were not and let people interact together rather than just being othered to the point of fear and reviling.

    I much prefer AD&D 2.5 rules to anything around today (and TSR still existing, but that ship has sailed).

    • I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.

      I prefer digital media that is locally stored. Many complaints I see about digital media revolves around DRM or a service's ability to remove media that you think you "own".

      I think locally stored media solves that without taking us back to the days of a shelf of hundreds of DVDs.

      I do own some physical media like certain very old PC games but only because there is no good digital option available that's more convenient.

      • I use locally stored digital media, but I still love my shelves of DVDs, CDs, and paper books. The CDs get ripped to FLAC and mostly left on the shelf thereafter, but I do still enjoy taking a movie off the shelf and loading it into the player.

  • I prefer D&D 3.5e over all revisions.

    Shadowrun 3E is so much better in so many ways, not least of which is that the "Wireless World" additions make hacking so boring and easy compared to how it worked prior. Don't even need a party

    Physical controls are better than touch sensitive controls.

    Wireless controllers last way longer when you can turn off the vibration, speakers, microphones, lights and other things that don't NEED to be there to control something (but I do like adaptive triggers when not just used as a secondary vibration motor; clicky tension feedback for shooting guns feels awesome tho).

  • Physically possessing the music that you bought, having the actual vinyl records (or later, CDs and DVDs of shows). That you don't have to keep renewing subscriptions for to continue being able to listen to (or watch), that you can lend out or pass down to your kids or sell to a used record store, where you can buy the ones someone else sold to them. Those were the days.

  • I like old timey radio (dramas like Twilight Zone, etc...Bob Dylan had a cool modern retro show, also stuff like Coast to Coast with Art Bell) but never listen to modern radio basically ever. Used to be much more magical.

    • The closest I've found is sound booth theature and the dungeon crawler Karl series. So good.

  • Modern tabletop miniature painting is dominated by contrast paints and airbrushes. This is especially true of small time commission painters.

    I personally only use my airbrush for priming, and only use contrast paints for intensely limited purposes like glazing. For the vast majority of my painting I use methods taught in the 80s and 90s.

    I personally like the results, and I like to think my methods give my pieces a "voice" that helps me stand out from other local commission painters which deliver interchangeable looking results.

    I don't dislike airbrushes (which I know were used by certain niche painters back in the day, but weren't in common use generally) or contrast paints. I know some people take the time to get good results with them, however I think the majority of people applying them do it in a sloppy manner and the effort it would take to prep or clean up the results to a standard I would accept seems like more work than just doing it traditionally.

    • I got into painting minis back in the day but didn't stick with it. I miss it a lot though.

      What types of paints and methods are you reminiscing about? I'm not knowledgeable enough to even know what you're saying you prefer, or how it's different from the off the shelf stuff, even assuming that what's on the shelf today is the same as it was 20 years ago when I painted.

      I skimmed your post history and saw a couple OC minis you painted, they look great, but what's different about them? I don't have a trained eye so forgive me I'm not trying to be rude.

      • And uh, ignore the Aliens minis and GCPD. Those were self admittedly a rush job.

        Here's some better examples of what techniques I try to apply look like.

      • Contrast paints are a new formulation that's gotten popular in the market. They are like a glaze with wash properties. The idea is that you can simply paint them over a white priming and you're done, all the shading is done for you.

        I find the average results I see in real life to be underwhelming. The colors can often be patchy especially if applied to large flat surfaces like for example Space Marine armor. What is more is that contrast paints only contain one shade of pigment and the darker or lighter portions on the model just relate to pigment concentration. I prefer to shade and highlight by adding different colors to the base paint. I find that it offers more control and greater range over the colors. The control relates also to how highlights are placed. Many people either skip them entirely by relying on contrast paint, or they copy the modern GW Box Art style which highlights pretty much every single hard edge rather than trying to give the impression of a light source. I like to give the impression of a light source.

        For traditional touches, blacklining is a practice of tracing a thinned black or near black paint on the borders of different objects of the mini to help give them definition. This can be especially important when painting in bright and saturated color schemes to keep them from assaulting the eyes with too much brightness.

        I underpaint, which is related to mixing for shading but means to paint certain areas a particular color in preparation for another color to support it. For example Caucasian skin is usually a red-brown or purple before the first actual flesh tones go on.

        Sometimes it's just things I consider absolutely basic like basing a mini at all in any way. All I my minis are based with texture in some way (any you see in my history that don't have basing texture were specifically requested such by other people) and have at least basic drybrushing or flock. A lot of people just paint the bases now, or simply just leave them bare.

        I also like putting segmented colors, camo patterns, or other simple freehanding on minis. This draws a lot of attention in real life as many people are so used to just contrast painting that they never learn fine control and as such never even attempt freehand.

        I do have a few paper copies of older painting books I reference along with various PDF scans. All the the exact paint recommendations are out of date, but the general concepts are still valid.

        I partially blame army bloat and the FOMO treadmill in Warhammer 40k for creating unmanageably large armies that cause people to treat the painting as a chore to be finished with rather than something to enjoy and get better at.

  • spelling it as "catsup" — the other way looks so juvenile, like "nite lite" instead of night light

    • Catsup and ketchup are two different things.

      • You might be confused by the fact that there are many catsups, beyond the sweet tomato kind that's so popular American children. Both spellings are correct, and both are, in fact, fairly old. It's just that when Heinz 57 ketchup became ascendant, most other styles (and spellings) fell out of fashion.

199 comments