Comic Strips

There was a window where the internet was a huge positive.

That ended 10 to 15 years ago.

Kinda coinciding with social media apps.

My mom almost bought me a tamagachi in the 90s. I say almost because what she actually bought me was a cheap knock off.

What I remember most about it was my friend showed me their tamagachi, and it's born as an egg.

Then I remember what mine was born as.

Imagine seeing this pixel art gorilla, and then he sees a second pixel art gorilla wearing a skirt. Then you see the closeup of the male gorillas face, and he wiggles his eyebrows exitedly.

The next thing you see is a pixel art of a sperm attacking an egg. In a knockoff tamagachi meant for children. I was 13, so I was old enough to know what I was seeing, but it definately had some real WTF vibes. Let's put it this way. I'm 41. I remember nothing else about that tamagachi besides seeing pixel art gorilla sperm.

That's all. I just wanted more people to know about chinese knockoff tamagachi with gorilla sperm.

One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren't being harsher on criminals. Society's views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.

I think what we're seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there's basically a cultural luddite movement.

We thought the internet would change the world. It did, but the world changed the internet, too.

I mean, the internet went to shit when we all centralized around enormous corporate gatekeepers like Facebook and Twitter instead of the personal websites of yore, so I feel like that sentiment still tracks

The internet in its original concept was great. Unfortunately it wasn't shaped around profit, so it was quickly remodelled.

As someone from 90s, we were told not to trust the internet.

The Internet was so much better in the 90s.

The Internet was incredible until the corporations colonized it

Now when I see someone saying 'gatekeepers are the problem', I assume they were kicked out of somewhere for being a bigot.

It turned out that gatekeepers were the only ones keeping the hoard of idiots and rubes off the Internet. RIP quality free content.

The internet felt like the beginings for a star trek utopia. All the worlds knowledge for all to access. Never really thought about it being sectioned off and limited for anything of quality and then being loaded with crap to sift through. Never thought that it could be filled with propoganda and be used to control whole sections of the populace.

Grunge music being described as "wacky" is the wackiest thing here.

Also: David Bowie foresaw the internet's negative effect way back in 1999 like a god damn prophet.

3/4 here, never was interested in tamagotchis lol

It was a nice dream at least.

My daughter got a tamagotchi with like a colour LED screen that does way more than the ones we used to have, somehow they seem less fun to me, maybe cause they’re like $80 and I’m now the one buying them

The gatekeepers moved to control the internet.

Oh that's right, in the Internet's early days people thought it would do what they also thought television would do in its early days. But then the Internet did the same things television did - became an advertising platform and and dumbed down its addicted users. Maybe when the next communications breakthrough comes we'll realize... lol nah of course we won't.

The "This machine kills fascists" sticker that John Green put on his laptop for his Crash Course World History series has not aged well at all

Yeah, that third one was a mistake.

When I first started working I did some temp work. One of my bosses asked me to look after her niece's Tamagotchi. I'd not had one so didn't have a clue what I was doing. Anyway, I killed it within a day.

Grunge is not a fad. And for the record Eddie better and mark langlain ,,,however you spell it... Are the last front men standing from the grunge era

Yep, the world would be so much better if we got all our news from cable TV.