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Comment by youngventier | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy thinking about the hauntologies in our time. I found it very funny that so many lo-fi videos on youtube are made to imitate a 90s anime style. Something about the videos and style is comforting to me and others despite us having never lived through that time. Synth-wave and other genres on youtube also try to imitate a past that never was. Modern hyper-pop of the 2020s does the same to the early 2000s.

The concept of Hauntologies was first introduced by Jacues Derrida[0]. I think it goes hand-in-hand deconstruction.

As an aside, poolside.fm, in addition to being a cool project, also imitates a past that never was[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida [1] https://poolsuite.net/

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Re: nostalgia for when you were not yet born: things like that, with the hyperaestheticism etc, are designed to be ‘coded’ (ie comprised of referential symbols) in the alphabet of “your imagination of that time”, which was pressed into your thoughts via social influence. It is an affirmation of what you’ve been told that time was really like- so it seems like a refuge or safe haven where everything makes sense. In some sense, they are like, well, bait- it’s like “well mass media that can operate during the present is not enough. How about a mass media that is constantly extending itself retroactively into the past as well?”

This is not shade on you. I myself love all kinds of vaporwave, probably to a fault. I think this is part of why The Weird and the Eerie was tough to read for me- you can tell Mark was exasperated about things that should not be juxtaposed. And I can’t help but think these “un-pasts” were probably an obstacle to improving the present.

I would love to write a small program (maybe called ThrowbackFriday) that on Friday afternoon would kill my X11 window manager and randomly select a window manager popular in the late 90s, or a wm emulating the Win95 look and feel. It should also fire up a music player skinned to look like WinAmp and play some GnR, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Pearl Jam, REM, Nirvana, Men Without Hats, Toto, Chumbawumba, Hootie and The Blowfish, etc.

Did anyone else remember using twm window manager with Java Swing apps in the early 2000s? Most window managers would ignore nonsense commands to resize windows down to 0x0 pixels, but twm would oblige. I ran twm with 1 px borders and no window menus (to maximize screen real estate), so I needed to watch the redraw carefully to get a good idea at my starting point for a game of "hunt the pixel" to find the 2x2 pixel border and drag the window back to my desired size. I played "hunt the pixel" much more often than actual games.

Ideally, ThrowbackFriday would be configurable where you'd give it a year range to emulate.

> As an aside, poolside.fm, in addition to being a cool project, also imitates a past that never was[1].

Very much so. It even looks like a 90s movie OS (e.g. like the mash-ups on the computers in Office Space, familiar but from nowhere).

Wow .. poolsuite site made smile. Opening it on my 4K monitor reminds me of when I first used Solaris on a Sun Microsystems Workstation. The monitors felt super high res (compared with normal PCs at that time).

Remember those early Sun optical mice that required you to use them on a special mouse pad that had a high-contrast pattern on it for the mouse to track?

I'm a bit sad that I recycled my (freeby, thank you reuse@mit.edu) SGI Indy when I moved from my first to my second apartment after college. "An Indy is and Indigo without the go.", but it was a really beautiful computer case, and a 64-bit MIPS CPU would still be fun to play around with.

The poolsuite site is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

I glanced at the history and noticed you also submitted this same article 3 years ago. That time it got no upvotes. Why did you decide to submit it again now? And any guesses as to why it "caught" this time?

Heh, that's funny. I didn't realize that I had submitted this before. Not sure why it took off this time; could just be random chance. I do think that Fisher's ideas are a bit more relevant post-COVID, though. To a lot of people, the future just seems like a slowly decaying, scary, unpredictable version of the present.

> Why did you decide to submit it again now?

I actually just launched a project that is attempting to "solve" the issue of contemporary society having no positive visions of the future:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781126

So I've been researching some different thinkers, like Fisher, that have talked about this idea.

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