what gives you 2000s nostalgia?

[castlevania]

i was born at the end of the 90s, and grew up as a 2000s kid. unsurprisingly, i have a lot of nostalgia for my childhood, but as an adult now i sometimes wish i could have lived that era as an older person to have fully experienced its culture.

what gives you nostalgia for the 2000s? is there anything you like to do to relive it, what do you miss from back then? how do you feel about your experience living back then versus now?

[castlevania]

to start the subject, this is pretty lengthy:

ive been on a 2000s nostalgia craze lately by trying to do things that i did not (or could not do) as a child back then. im playing ffxi, im listening to rock music from popular bands back then, i want to buy a refurbished ipod, im browsing through neocities and archived internet, im playing on 2000s neopets servers and webkinz (and magistream of course!), im blogging on FC2, i have a long list of cartoons and movies and video game playthroughs to watch from back in the day. i want to try to overhaul windows 11 on my PC go look like windows XP. and even though it is impossible now (and impractical in any case, i unfortunately have to have a smartphone for necessary things) i wistfully imagine using a telemoto flip phone like the ones my parents had. i love looking at art that people drew and uploaded to the internet from back then, especially if its a ms paint drawing or a scanned paper with colored pencils and pens.

not sure how to feel about how many sites opt to have discord servers instead of traditional forums like on magistream- discord is wonderfully convenient, but i feel like a lot of sites lose their charm when their official communities are discord-exclusive. and i dislike that a majority of the internet experience nowadays is centralized towards using a few mainstream sites like twitter, instagram, and tiktok (which i do not use and personally avoid- infinite scroll is very stressful to me. i also dont really "get" many aspects of modern online culture anymore, even though i should still be at the prime age demographic to be a part of it in my 20s )

the 2000s wasnt a perfect time. growing up as a very carefree child back then, without dealing with the responsibilities and awareness of being teenager or an adult, definitely shows through my rose tinted glasses. but i do miss the parts that i look back on fondly, and want to try to experience in my own way now

[6and]

I am younger but I feel like I just get waves of nostalgia when I see old flash games being played. First time surfing the web was spent finding free flash games to play. Very early youtube videos. I like sodium vapor lamps, the yellowy orange glow that's disappearing slowly. My parents saved for this pool for a long time and that filled my early childhood with so much fun! Looking for frogs in the cracks at night. Catching lizards, watching caterpillars grow and seeing their nest pop up in trees all around! Hanging out with and renting redbox movies to watch with the family. running around outside with trashcan lids and large sticks. Still enjoy the new things glad some of the old still exist.

[allicatlane]

I was also born at the tail end of the 90's so while most of what I experienced was early 2000's, I still vividly remember using a VCR in kindergarten and 90's PCs, including one my dad used to emulate arcade games for the longest time complete with controllers (I even outdid his high score in Joust when I was 11, something I tease him about to this day).

Among the stuff that induces that nostalgia is:

-vintage Neopets (including the older flash games + animations/comics)
-other older adoptable websites I perused like Magistream + Chickensmoothie + Mweors + Tygras + Valenth.
-kid's MMOs like Pixie Hollows + Club Penguin (pre-disney). Ones that required memberships for everything like Webkinz my parents did not consider worth it.
-slightly suspicious flash game aggregate websites like girlsgogames that would activate the child monitor program on my PC EVERY time
-those 10 in 1 game CDs your grandmother would buy and let you play on her woefully underused computer (there was a version of the Incredible Machine I could never relocate to this day)
-drawing on KidPix and playing CoolMathGames at school (also messing with BonziBuddy & Clippy, the former of which terrorized the school computers)
-watching cartoons my mom and dad sometimes disapproved of in secret like early spongebob, buzz lightyear of star command, cyberchase, + invader zim later on in middle school which caused a WHOLE phase...
-reading webcomics that you look back on and go "wow okay I was far too young for that/that comic had some very uncomfortable messages or undertones", but others I remember fondly like Neopets plot (I had a mad crush on Lord Kass), Gunnerkrigg Court, StupidFox, Romantically Apocalyptic, and Homestuck (despite the flaws)
-scrolling DeviantArt for fanart or fanfic of your favorite medias, mine was mostly Pokemon (where I learned the concept of a gijinka), mostly looked at oc memes + paper dolls + shimejis of anime + cartoon + video game fanart (Soul Eater, Death Note, No.6, Hetalia, MLP FiM, Invader Zim, TF2, OFF, creepypasta, vocaloid). I also look back at this and go "huh there was a lot of content that's suspicious that I had no idea it was"
-attempting to run (some) video games on a very not so great PC (SPORE I'm looking at you) and later laptop. Mostly on discs, Steam was a foreign concept to me until around 2013-16. There was a freeware version of a dog care & training program I got from a Wendy's kids meal I was very fond of but don't recall the name of. Also Mysims Aquarium, and Minecraft of course. Horses being released in Minecraft was a HUGE deal to me, and I still play a very ancient mod by now called Mo'Creatures that is one of my top five faves.
-using emoticons versus emojis. I still prefer using them over emojis, they age better to me and feel more personable (exempting the old DevArt and Magistream ones, those are eternally golden and way less corporate looking)

...that's all I can think of for now, but wow that was way more than I meant to type but the reminiscing was nice!

[LadyJhudora]

Neopets, Tamagotchis, and the original pokemon games / show are the biggest thing that give me large feelings of nostalgia

[Seallbay]

Yo! Amazing thread

It's funny how you mention iPod because whenever I use my iPods, I get soooo much nostalgia, and then I have to go listen to older music to get my fix

[PhoenixSolblade]

Stuff like flash animations that I watched back in the day on AlbinoBlackSheep, and webcomics that I used to keep up with. I'll forever have a special place in my heart for the discontinued webcomic My Name is Might Have Been, it was a wild one that was heavily based on video game Rockband of all things haha. Speaking of, games like the older Guitar Hero and Rockband games, along with ones I remember goin over to friends' houses to play/watch them play like Sly Cooper

Fanfiction dot net as well! Certainly spent a lot of my free time reading those and different online forums as well. I first joined here in 2010 so it doesn't quite count, but I used to post on a place called TVTome iirc, think it turned into TV dot com eventually and who knows if it exists anymore

I agree that I miss communities being on websites rather than on Discord servers. It can be nice to have but not for information that would be better off being able to search for online instead of being locked behind a Discord join link.

[froglady]

I was in my 40's in the 2000s so I have no real nostalgia for childhood connected with them, but I do remember the sound of a modem dialing up, floppy discs, taking forever to download 1MB games, having to text by banging your phone keys multiple times for the right letter, the war to make the smallest phone followed by the war to make the biggest screen when smartphones took over, when PBBGs were the thing to do online, payphones, internet cafes, etc etc.