This is a poll for people over 40.

[pdcawley@mendeddrum.org]

@futurebird it’s always been the least compelling or appealing content? Not quite sure how to answer the poll.

[randomgeek@masto.hackers.town]

@pdcawley @futurebird yeah have to throw my ballot this way as well.

I enjoy old stuff mixed in with new stuff, and I do occasionally partake in a light dose of nostalgia, but I always had a low threshold. Two episodes of "Stranger Things" and I was done with the "nerdy kids in the 80s doing stuff I did as a nerdy kid in the 80s except with supernatural horror instead of domestic trauma."

[3janeta@beige.party]

@futurebird I’ve been actively opposed to nostalgia since my 20s

[jayalane@mastodon.online]

@futurebird less nostalgic for my own life but show me some art work a kid of mine made when they were little and I can’t keep my equanimity. And I do have the weird experience of hearing music that I desperately wanted to understand as a teenager to fit in, and now it is playing in the grocery store as a sort of modern Muzak; like hey they are playing the Dark Side of the Moon in the utterly conventional shopping thing. Not exactly nostalgia but something to do with time.

[corbden@defcon.social]

@futurebird I came of age in the early 90s, I felt like the punk/alternative scene contained a resistance to growing up. Wearing old fashioned clothes from the thrift store, trying to find plastic kids' barrettes, colorful yarn hair ties, childlike jewelry like we wore in grade school, candy ravers with pacifiers, Kevin Smith movies with rants about comic books and Star Wars movies. Hard to remember that those things, at the time, were considered kid's stuff, from our own childhoods, and the Star Wars franchise hasn't had a new movie for over a decade at that point.

Cartoon Network appealed, quite intentionally, to 20-somethings, with Space Ghost:CTC remixing our Saturday morning cartoons, they did a Scooby Doo Blair Witch, and even Power Puff, Dexter's Lab, Ren & Stimpy were more cartoons made for us than for kids, often with retro animation effects blended with the new.

All the action figures marketed to adults, that started during that time as well, and never stopped. We never let go of our childhood video games, a trend that eventually became normalized and heavily marketed, but we were originally *supposed* to have left Mario far behind.

90s music experimented with a lot of retro sounds, much of it from music of our 60s-70s childhoods, but also to earlier times. (Like Ska and Neoswing.)

So I think anyone my age (50) who liked that stuff during that time might want to think harder about how much of that was nostalgia for a lost childhood, something that before our generation, simply wasn't done. You were supposed to grow up, leave behind childish things like toys and cartoons, but we were the first generation who didn't. Hard to remember, because now it's normal.

[pdcawley@mendeddrum.org]

@randomgeek @futurebird Nostalgic “content” can fuck all the way off. Nostalgic conversations with actual people is entirely different and way more enjoyable thing.

I enjoy the #TOTP reruns on a Friday night in the UK, but that’s far more about the folk busily taking the piss on here in sync with the show than the actual music.

[haljor@sfba.social]

@futurebird I'm not sure how to answer this because I (late 50s) grew up on old cartoons and reruns (e.g. Bugs Bunny, Gilligan's Island) and learned to read with old comic books (e.g. Jimmy Olsen, Archie digest reprints).

Nearly everything I spent time with was from an era before I was born, so "nostalgia" (in the simple "from the past" sense) has always been a big part of my experience. I still prefer older material to new, so the transition to "my personal past" is kind of a blur.

[moss@beige.party]

@msbellows @futurebird the *audience* were the poor young saps who got those products dumped into their eyes. Think about who *ordered the shows into existence*.

[msbellows@c.im]

@Moss @futurebird I want to say it was just marketers who didn't care about the content and they weren't personally nostalgic, who just did focus group testing to see what would draw people's eyeballs. And maybe that's true for Gary Marshall, who created Happy Days and was a little too old to have been involved in the team culture it portrayed. But on the other hand, George Lucas absolutely drew on his personal adolescence in creating American Graffiti, so.

[marjolica@social.linux.pizza]

@futurebird I'm 75 and I still don't find nostalgic content in the least compelling.

[marjolica@social.linux.pizza]

@futurebird not applicable, still don't at 75.

[floatybirb@mastodon.social]

@futurebird From the replies, when different people hear "nostalgia", different definitions pop up in our heads.

Some people think "Oh like 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s/00s movies/music/games/tv/books or homages to those things in later works!"

Other people think "Oh like a deeply personal sense of retrospective longing or awareness that relates to people and places that I've been!"

With these polls, were you going for "media nostalgia", "personal nostalgia", or both?

[cthw@mstdn.ca]

@futurebird

After I retired I went through times I became maudlin about the people I used to work with.