there's our catastrophe

whentroublesleep:

inadvertentcross:

Why did I print 100 cds? I don’t even listen to cds. 

Why did I use the money from the last 100 CDs to print 100 more? I don’t even listen to CDs.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually.  “are CDs gonna ever have the kind of retro cachet of cassette tapes?” has been literally (figuratively) the most burning question occupying me as we’ve moved through the 80s revival and the early 90s revival, and now it’s a full late-90s party and I’ve seen the odd use of CD imagery but no real mix CD revival (comparable to the mixtape nostalgia fetish) or enthusiasm for the audio properties of the format (compared to the still-more-compressed mp3)

I’m gonna make the call that it’s not gonna happen: they’re not a neat size you can hold in your hand, and they’re not very durable

they’re really terrible for archiving

they seem like a really awkward transitional data storage technique

I remember burning a lot of non-rewritable CDs in the time between files getting too big for floppy drives and USB sticks becoming a thing I was aware of, it was really annoying

I own about five CDs and they baffle me

I dunno, I guess my starting assumption is that everything, no matter how cumbersome and dorky, will eventually be mined by the retro chic industries, so it’s interesting and notable when something is just so terrible as to avoid that fate

speaking of pastels

I am 24 which is old by tumblr standards apparently,

and I am enjoying how the ~youth of tumblr~ (i.e. people who don’t actually remember the early 90s) are enraging slightly older people with their “soft grunge” and “pastel grunge”, or even better, calling anything with a 90s revival vibe “grunge” (tell me more about how your glow-in-the-dark tie-die smiley face crop top is grunge).

see also: people getting mad about “pastel goth” because “goth means dark colours” or “a colour scheme is not a subculture” or sometimes even both?!

I mean I have pretty mixed feelings about the actual visual content of those subcultures myself, because one thing that is absolutely authentically 90s about them is their saturation level of culturally appropriative motifs (gtfo with your bindis and dripping yin-yang symbols).  but people who care about the authenticity of grunge and goth are possibly even more ridiculous than people who get mad about “mall punks”, and they deserve a comeuppance. 

first world youth culture’s apathy towards history is irritating at best and can be really fucked up, but there is also a lesson here for aging hipsters, and it is that if you don’t challenge our culture’s obsession with extreme youth while you are yourself young than you will quickly fall into baffled embittered irrelevance. 

I am fascinated by teens, especially teen girls, I love how much they care about fashion and how inventive and ahead of the curve they are, but I hate how they become images that are used and chewed up and spat out by the culture industries.  & it’s more complicated than that again because of course the sixth sense teens have for the next trend is partly self-fulfilling, because they’re watched so carefully by the people who market those trends. 

it’s resistance and capitalism and exploitation and exploration and self-representation and cultural theft and narcissism in one big, messy, fucked-up ball and if the thing that makes you the maddest is “that’s not grunge!” then I don’t understand you.