#Wishing for certain aspects of a bygone era but not other aspects of it because honestly I think life is better now it's just there are

[pickledkiwiberry]

I can't find the exact one but one of my favorite childhood CD holders looked something like the above. It was a plastic transparent-but-not-see-through drawer that you opened by pushing into the front to pop it open, and then the front part would pop forwards a little to make it easier to access.

The inside was a bunch of soft sleeves attached to the drawer that you could sort your CDs into. I remember not having very much room and pushing CDs together and very carefully sliding them in to avoid scratching them because I was a child and couldn't just go out and buy new CD holders.

That, combined with spindles like this:

And books like in the original post were everywhere in my home.

And let me tell you: I preferred the floppy disks so much. I had a bunch of 3½" floppy disks (the kind where they're hard plastic and only the internal diskette is still floppy, vs the older kinds where the whole thing was floppy) and they were so nice because they were much easier to store safely, could be rewritten multiple times, and just felt really great to use (the ker-klunk when sliding them in, the ker-pop when ejecting them).

Not nearly as much storage space but files were so small back then. CDs were more for storing larger archival data (backups) and software (installers, games), and floppies were how I moved files around between computers. How I shared them.

I never used zip drives or any of that family. I didn't need that much storage space.

But man I really would love to go to an era where the evolution of the ZIP drive, the Clik drive, was the norm.

Mainly for aesthetic reasons. I think USB drives are fine, but they don't have the satisfying clicks and ejects.

More than anything, though, I wish that people still relied on physical media the way they used to. Now everything's being sent around in cloud storage servers, and backed up to cloud storage servers, and lost in cloud storage server sync failures...

Physical media was so much more under your own control. You didn't have to worry about people tracking what you were doing (even if you think you're not breaking any laws, trust me when I say you'll end up with a record if anybody truly audited your life against the books; so many things that seem intuitively fine are either breach of contract from an EULA you didn't read well enough or surprisingly criminal). You didn't have to worry about the cloud service going offline. Or losing internet.

Electricity was out? As long as you had a generator, those files were still accessible. (I didn't have a generator... couldn't install one in the condos I grew up in, which sucked considering the amount of power outages.)

Internet is so much less reliable by comparison. Cloud providers even less so.

Sure, you had to keep your physical media in the right conditions. The right temperature, humidity, etc. But in my opinion, that's much easier than making sure that your account is secure at all times.

IDK. This sort of thing is why I'm a big fan of Cassette Futurism era of Cyberpunk. The modern Internet-focused Cyberpunk narratives are great for writing dystopian fiction, but the old "haha I stored your soul on a mini CD" era has so much aesthetic appeal and comfort to me.

[ybaport19]

The post cold war world as told by a game from the 90′s

By going through the internet a person can easily find the whatever it is that comes to their interest. The internet can become a source anything that has been digitized from books, games, movies, etc. Old games are now easily attainable with no cost due to people actually sharing their copies online for future use and this has led to even preserving the games despite dwindling number of physical copies. Old dos games became a kind of hobby of mine after discovering them while looking for simulation games on the internet. Simulation games have been popular in the last few decades due to how they try to represent the real world and how they give their player’s a chance to live in a world where they are free to be anyone they want. A popular sub genre from this genre are geo political simulators wherein players are able to take charge of a country from its economy, its society, and its military. To expound on this the game Shadow President will give us an insight to how a video game can easily politicize itself into promoting certain ideas among its players. The idea being satirized in this game would be the United States Foreign policy due to how the country can be considered as the world’s only super power after the fall of the soviet union. As the president of the US the player becomes the most powerful person in the world and could now also bring it to its knees if he/she wishes to do so.

Shadow President is a geo political simulation game from the early 90’s and the game puts its players into the role of the president of the United States of America during the end of the cold war and the start of operation desert storm. The game has been said to incorporate cyber punk and dark science fiction into its gameplay. The main goal of the game is to stay in power as elections happen every four years which bases a win through the approval rating that the player has. The player controls everything from the country’s economy to its military with the help of a few advisors. After a short tutorial, Shadow President then leaves the player on their own to decide how they will remain in power and also how they will lead the world in the coming years. With no real goal in the game, the player then becomes free to turn the world into whatever they want it be.

Playing through the game even with its original setting of the heated political landscape of the early 90’s the in game world can easily return the “cold peace” of the world’s peace level to the “cold war” that it just got out of. Another aspect of the game is how wars in the game are unavoidable and require the player to act in order to not lose their approval rating. With both the military and the economy in the player’s hands it becomes clear that the game puts you in a place where you can make the early 90’s better for the world or even worse for it. As a simulation the game represents the real world and simply gives you in a role where you can make change with the help of either your economic policies, diplomatic actions, military actions, etc.

I personally played this game and did an expansionary approach during my term as the president and proceeded to invade an oil rich South American country while surgically destroying Iraq to keep public opinion high which also prevented desert storm from occurring due to. Lowering corporate taxation for increased growth was another strategy that I used to keep the people who care about the economy at bay and also increase my approval rating. These actions easily led to my worldwide conquest to spread capitalism in 3rd world dictatorships around the globe. By 1993 I used the bad political situation in Russia as a chance to finally invade it with US troops stationed in the recently US occupied china. This lasted to a twelve day fire fight which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in both the military and the civilian population even without the exchange of nuclear weapons. Within just three years I conquered a quarter of the world with the US military arsenal and easily bought capitalism and democracy to the corners of the globe that used to belong to human rights violating administrations.

Playing the game easily gives the idea that the United States can be considered as a rogue state because of its strength and diplomatic ties. The game, as seen in my play through, gave me a world where I was free to do whatever I want hence also giving the idea that the US was unstoppable after the fall of the berlin wall. Whether the world becomes a peaceful utopia wherein every world government has settled their differences or a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland dystopia where we see the human race struggling in the nuclear fallout with the continuing advancement of technology, the world’s fate is up to how the player interacts with the different countries in the game and dealing with their ideological and economical differences.

Aside from the geo political nature of the game, the game can also be seen as a form of satire due to its depiction of a political landscape in a way that is easy to understand. Although it doesn’t tackle other important aspects of geopolitics and warfare such as logistics, resources, complex ideological shifts, etc. the game gives a dark and somewhat comic take on the political landscape of the world due to how it uses colorful graphs and 8 bit representations of the different countries in the world. Even though most of the game consists of numbers such as Quality of life, spending per soldier, average personal income, etc. the game leaves it up to the players’ imagination to visualize the things happening in the game. Just like a book, promoting ideas during the non-digital age, the game has become something that can be interpreted by its users whether as a form of entertainment or as a commentary of the political situation in our world. Getting this game from a website of people contributing to the preservation of old video games can be seen as a kind of effort by a community of people in preserving these games. Even without the intent of going political or cultural, websites like these preserve pieces of entertainment from a bygone era and in turn saving representations of society or even culture from the past.

 Sources:

https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=1516&letter=S http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/ShadowPresident http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Intro_RogueState.html