@@AwesomeYenait doesn't take too much to get started :D I'd suggest trying a mainstream distro, maybe like Linux Mint -- it's a lot like Windows. There's also a lot of guides for it online too!
You still can have themes if you want, you just have to get unofficial.. which I always had anyway since xp. On 7 I used to have a nice 3rd party nice flat aero theme. I don't even consider the ability to change win 7 aero color a theme. You are just changing the color of an ugly dated 3d theme.. it's still same.
No but I used the custom theme packs on the chrome web store, now those were FIRE 🔥 🔥 I had one with a flaming skellington rocking a guitar! And the home pages could change pictures
UA-cam held out until 2013, the site really began to go downhill when they switched to the One Channel design, or as I call it, the Boring Milk Carton design
It happened to everything. Customised ring tones became a thing of the past. It got bad for partially sighted people because everyone expects the default only and goes nuts using someone else’s computer when the theme is set for someone that can’t see well. For a long wile it became fashionable to not have fun with themes. Social media stopped allowing customisation and everyone just sort of stopped. Part of it is that when people used code to change the look of profiles they could remove adds from being viewed and people that make text the same colour as the background and ruin their profiles. I personally agree I loved customisation.
@@photonigarcia you'll never have the chance to own your own house, and YOULL BE HAPPY. The EU legislated for insects to be added to products last year, so long as they have a little label on them. Can't wait
I'm a middle school teacher in the netherlands. I've been noticing that my students (age 12-17) have been personalising their computers with backgrounds, but mostly with their mouse cursors. Something that will always be visible, and will be unique to them.
aww that is actually so amazing to hear, I didnt mention it hear but I also loved to do that as a kid, thats so cool its still a thing that warms my heart, thank you for telling me
Sad thing is, ChromeOS only allows you to customize the background and two colours, both which can be restricted, and iPadOS only changes wallpaper too but is a bit better.
@@lilymulligan8180 to quote a comment on a video from UA-camr “greentext gold” I read: “I will take responsibility for the RuneScape Dragon Scimitar mouse cursor that downloaded 20 Gb of malware onto my parent’s computer. We pointed and clicked in style, but at what cost..”
Pillars of modern design 1: rounded corners everywhere. 2: a lot of padding and margin in evrything. 3: removing useful extensive features that dummies can not understand.
Well you could change colours in DOS. So DOS is more customizable than any modern website. In Command Prompt there are more options and its even easier.
@@JBBrickman he is right. White\Green text on black background were the basic DOS thing. The "dark" themes does the same way, lol, both to android and ios.
Everything became clean, greyscale and uniform, We have the same issue happening with architecture too, Everything used to be ornamental and unique in western cities, but now everything is grey, brick and square
It all began as a retro hipster counter-culture and then it started to become mainstream by 2012 after Windows 8 was released. Even older iPhones had more creative design on the home-screen.
I finally found someone who appreciates the lost culture of super customizing things. As I loved doing it in every program I used. Those times are missed, but I end up making up for it by customizing my visual studio code more and more.
I am in 40's and this really sparked something in me that used to be pure enjoyment, excitement and adventure. You are right, the ability to not change things and contribute towards the community for other people to enjoy is lame. I made and did things for free for others to enjoy and got joy out of knowing that so many others are enjoying with things I made.
I find it so fulfilling that people who are older feel the same way, a lot of this is a lot of the time chalked up to "nostalgia" or "missing of childhood" when people my age bring it up, witch, it defiantly is a little of. but its so nice when I hear people of other ages saying it too, it proves its more then just that. thanks for the sharing your story, and thanks for all the thing you made back in the day, no matter how big or small
@@bjiru_ Yeah, it is nice to see that it is not just you. I'm 35 now and I often think whether technology was really more exciting 10-15 years ago or whether I've just lost that excitement in me with age. Every Apple keynote used to be an event to watch, and things like Google Glass were like little visions of a future filled with promise. Maybe a bit of both, but phones have definitely gotten a lot more boring since 2000s, just as you say in your other video. Same with customisation and skins.
What we have now some call minimalism but i'd call it brutalism. It's just a utilitarian way to get on your PC and getting to work or consuming media or buying something without distraction or anything in between. No toys or anything to stop and see and appreciate from here to there. Just a dull gray hallway and doors. No nice parks, no nice public art, no nice decorations people put up for fun or to make the space more enjoyable to be in.
Yeah! Minimalism doesn't have to be an endless sea of gray always! Sites could just as easily have minimalistic, but colourful designs, but companies just want boring and uniform >~
and even when it is, it's in the _exact_ way they would put it in corporate buildings, as a cynical "morale booster" to make a number go up instead of actually making something worth appreciating
It's not even utalitarian at all. In fact, I find minimalist design much less readable than skeuomorphism. It frequently gets in the way in ways that skeuonorphic design just doesn't.
Customisation is how i got into graphic design. There was this diary type of website. And i had spent so much time doing it, I've learned how to use photoshop, how to draw, how to make animations, how to record and make music as a theme for my diary. Man. It was so fun
i always used to love these themes. the first time i turned on my first laptop and got that windows 7 jingle, i remember opening internet explorer and seeing in search results that osama bin laden was killed. i can't unseperate those two memories anymore. it's been a curse ever since. good times.
I love that more and more people are realizing how much less creative the world has gotten over the past decade. My prediction for the mid 2020s is that we will finally make things more customizable, and design will become more creative again, especially considering how much demand there is for it. Your UA-cam channel reminds me of the first one i made in 2007 at the age of 10. I used the Wayback Machine to visit websites in the 2000s again, and it brought back so many memories of when the Internet was more alive.
THATS WHAT IM SAYING!!!!!!! THIS 100 TIMES!!!!!!!!!! Genuinely my biggest issue with all of technology is simply customizability. My iphone cant have moving backgrounds. I cant change the colors of my windows, cant even make it glossy like it used to be either. My switch is either Light mode or Dark mode. My youtube channel has a banner and a pfp and nothing else. It actually sucks and is so devoid of whimsy or excitment. I really hope we can go back to normalizing more customization. Discord has been adding more profile customization, but at the cost of a MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION, and even paying individually for pfp borders. Steam has a good wealth of options too for your profile, but still at the cost of points from purchasing games. Great video btw, I actually really love this channel, the way you talk about things feels so free-form and naturally funny 😁👍
@@bjiru_ After watching this I did start doing some research on the program Openshell and I already set it up so my windows 10 taskbar looks like windows XP, its so cool
Switch to android, switch to Linux, mod your switch, install css theming extension to your browser and make whatever theme for any website you want. Discord is fully themable with mods, client and web version. It's not that nothing has themes nowadays but you are not looking for them hard enough.
kyomaku here, thank you so much for featuring my little website!!! ;__; never thought id make it into a youtube video... no less for my silly little corner of the web >:P
AAAA! HELLO! AMAZING WEBSITE!! ITS SO COOL AMAZING JOB, I CANNOT BELIEVE YOUR HERE ! ITS NOT JUST A LITTLE WEBSITE ITS A BIG AND COOL WEBSITE !! AND I CAN ONLY IMAGINE THE TIME IT TOOK TO MAKE, THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT !! :3
i just found your website and holy fuck it looks amazing!! the colours, the icons, the windows 9x look... its got a shit ton of personality and i love it!
tumblr still allows you to completely rewrite the direct html code of your blog page, so you can even make your blog page just not a blog if you want but overtime its become less of an advertised feature and harder to access, and now it doesnt even show up when you go to a blog unless you go to a specific blog link which you basically cant access via the normal site and it doesnt help that nobody uses it anymore because its not visible on mobile at all and its barely accessible anymore, and not to mention how html has kind of become a lost art for the average person nowadays
Ironic when you think about it considering html became capable of doing things you would ordinarily require flash for, and I'm most people remember how big flash was.
was going to say that, I love having a theme for my page and having silly little buttons and an mp3 player but it stops being fun if barely anyone including myself is going to see it
spacehey has html customizable layouts as one of the main features, and it works on the new mobile app too! sometimes people make their pages total seizure machines, but for the most part they're really cool
Same, I thought about my Tumblr blog. I'm not that good at doing big customizations, so mine is just my fave shades of blue and a drawing of myself. It's sad that Tumblr is dead.
A lot of the missing features in websites can probably be attributed to the Internet becoming advertiser -friendly. Embedded music players might violate copyright, custom uploaded images could be nsfw or hate speech, manually embedded links could lead to scams or screamers (this was common back in the day). It's not an excuse though, there should be more options for public-facing custom themes. I remember ten years ago Tumblr was still allowing a pretty loose amount of customization for your own blog, even if most people used the default dashboard. For all client-facing themes there's really no excuse at all. I want my UA-cam music desktop player to look like those cool y2k ones! I want to have widgits and bubbles and custom sounds! I'm probably gonna root through windows 11 hacks and find ways to make it happen now.
That's why i use BetterDiscord themes, some themes are even better than discord's official themes, tho if u want to use it, be aware that people get banned for using it, from what i had heard, i still didn't and used it for almost a year now
People still think I'm crazy for missing Skype, but back before Discord, Skype let you customise _everything._ The most discord lets you do is choose between 'cozy' and 'compact', in either white or grey. Except now you can pay to decorate your profile. ...Yay?
growing up I always liked everything default, whether that was my computer's theme, wallpaper, or even my weapon in a video game. No skins, no themes, just the original look. But now, I want to do anything I possibly can in order to get AWAY from that original look. I think it's probably because everything is so dull now, back on Windows XP, and even windows 7, you had COLORS, GRAPHICS, and the design overall was still so good even if you didn't customize it. I'm talking green, blue, transparent, red, orange, LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Now, you open your windows machine and its like, white, black, grey, and WOW BLUE!!! I yearn for the customization!!!! BTW great video I love your channel!!
Compared to the animations Microsoft uses windows 11 is just a void of white or grey with a really muddy hint of whatever your wallpaper is Aero sometimes could have this problem but at least it was more interesting than white void that was trying to be frosted glass and failing miserably
@@kreuner11 You could make anything any color and font you wanted though, and there were third party themeing tools that could replace how window borders and widgets were drawn.
@@vogonp4287 I think this oversimplification comes from the opposite viewpoint. Culturally, things with lots of color and little additions to mess around with are seen as childish. People think that they need something extremely bland and devoid of character in order to seem professional because of the previous viewpoint.
I’m almost 40 and back around 2002-2003 you were able to download official noise packs for AOL. I had mine set to Mr Moviefone, he would loudly proclaim “Your mail is Rated R”
most artist brings back memories about Windows 2000-Windows XP things, 7 - is more likely to be a fresh thing, but, because it was a very reliable and good OS. Like an old fashioned Renault car. Simple, durable, fun as hell, easy to drive, easy to make it look like a 9yrs old sportcar You own it, not a copro owned you.
I think the problem with modern trends is not about design preferences or lack of taste, but about density. It's not hard to make these fancy pages responsive. And, for example, our b2b company allows us to make as many little animations and ui goodies as we want. But noone has time for that, cause development schedules are so god damn tight. The internet is no longer a playground. It's a market now.
So long as I'm alive I will never accept that. The web is a playground for me, whether corporations like it or not. We shouldn't just bow down to their ways but keep hold of our creativity, fun and good taste!
Yeah, just maintaining two different theme options for users of my own website has been a lot of work. Coding the ability for users to customize every little thing about their profiles or how they see other pages just isn't practical. And while I'm an individual working on my own website, huge companies aren't necessarily going to be incentivized to put their productivity towards that kind of thing either, especially when the benefits aren't easily quantifiable.
I’m a little older than you but I remember being legitimately shocked that you couldn’t change or edit a Facebook page like you could on MySpace and UA-cam. I still remember hanging onto MySpace because fb and Twitter just seemed so…plain…. Honestly the whole internet now seems so plain and corporate. Shout out to the people who had the halo theme for windows media player. That shit popped.
My part of the world used friendster. There came a point when I only logged in just to change the layout css, the music and the cursor. Or enbed another video.
@@beardsntools Obnoxious? Not really. They were fun, millennials use facebook, instagram, snapchat and ticktock lol I'm not sure you have your finger on the pulse of culture as much as you think you do
@@NOSTahlgia Lmao these pages were obnoxious af.. that's the main reason why myspace failed. As social media sites, there was no noticeable difference in features, facebook literally had less and that was not having website like personalization, but ironically everyone wanted that, that's why everyone switched to it. And nah they don't, some do, but majority don't.. millennials don't use facebook anymore lmao. snapchat and ticktock are apps made for gen z, where short attention span, depression, anxiety and false sense of security are their main properties
@@NOSTahlgia lmao these website like personalization were obnoxious, facebook literally came and offered the lack of it and that was enough to get everyone two switch. And no millennials do not use facebook anymore it's a boomer website- Ticktock and snapchat are apps made for short attention span and false sense of security, so gen z
@@ErimlRGGYeah, we all know Windows XP had a notoriously hard time attracting users. This argument sort of makes sense for social media but not for operating systems, in the vast majority of cases only you have to interact with your operating system, yet we have still consistently slid backwards to the point that I can't even have a vertical task bar. It's like they took the fun away and then took the practical customization they left behind and chopped THAT in half.
I was born 10 years before you, so I definitely get it. I grew up through all the customizing. I used winamp, I made skins myself. I had a myspace profile and customized that too. That was fun. I learned HTML, CSS, and how to use programs like Photoshop and Gimp. I still find creative things to dabble in, but it is sad not being surrounded with as much that can be personalized with more than an accent color.
It's not that difficult either. whole page backgrounds that could you could scroll through. A different text and background colour. Don't like how this profile looks? Need the high contrast version? Click this button to show the default theme for it and set a cookie.
I'm 28 and I didn't even know about these Windows XP features until just now... 😫 My parents didn't know much either since I was raised by Baby Boomers.
Being in my 30s (basically a fossil by internet standards) I remember the early days on the internet and back then literally everything was customizable if you knew a little bit of code, it felt like everyone owned their own little piece of the internet, and I remember when I first started making music MySpace was popular, and being able to essentially turn into into a band website with all the features you'd want (a music player, a place to put flyers, embedding music videos, etc) made every artist stick out from each other. Now everything is uniform and corporate and there's no real way to catch anyone's eyes and ears and it feels like the internet owns you rather than you owning part of it.
I'm slightly younger than you (I'm 27, born in 1996) but also an ancient fossil by internet standards. I remember the things you're talking about. Remember those homemade websites? They were all hosted by Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire. None of them were very good but we liked them anyway, they had a personal charm to them unlike the soulless social media borg that's absorbed everything today.
"feels like the internet owns you rather than you owning part of it.", man that a good quote, thanks for sharing *also, as much as these internet 10 year olds may make you feel like it, your not old
@@GraniteStateVictoria you were born in 96? Damn you're a millennial just like me (only I was born in 85 lol) if you were born in 97 you'd be a gen z. Funny how you're considered a "boomer" by gen z standards.
@@ryuno2097 One kid did call me a boomer once after I showed him my Game Boy Color and I was like "Sheesh kid, I'm not THAT old! It's a Game Boy Color, not Pong" Funny thing is you're the exact same birth year as my boyfriend (I know, it's a big age gap, but we had an instant connection when we met last year).
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 if you stupid enough to trust a company's every single word, and never read their EULA - i have baaaaaaaaaaad news about it for ya
I still remember when I was 15 agonizingly trying to fiddle with a program to have a live koi pond animation on my Tumblr blog. I was trying to get the proportions of it just right and make the fish rainbow colors. You could even feed them by clicking the water!! I also had a music player from a website literally filled with dozens of pages of them. i miss it a lot.
The internet from the 2000s does have a special place in my heart. Very nostalgic and I agree it was so much more interesting. I think companies locked the designs for uniformity and so that their website is easily distinguishable from others.
god i forgot phones truly are probably the reason we dont get fun themes anymore. i know tumblr let u customize and just show the default theme on mobile, but it seems theyre trying rly hard to phase that out lol (tho blogs can still have custom themes if u go out of ur way to view them properly). but i feel like we could have this for other sites too!!
correction: iphones, not phones, as android is as customizable as it can be, samsung looks different to google pixel, yet all ios'es are the same, yet android is ultra customizable.
@@VirtualDialog Yup, many websites are designed for mobile phones first now. Even MacOS and Windows 11 have adopted a UI style from tablets/phones. MacOS had one of the best menus for settings but they switched it out for the iOS settings menu.
I remember finding some random sketchy taskbar addon thing that lets you customize your mouse cursor on windows xp. I remember having this flaming cursor that left a little fire trail wherever it went.
I miss those days a lot. Part of the reason I got into graphic design. You helped me remember my YT channel background image was digital tracings of my online graffiti battles from 2007. I remember thinking those backgrounds were the pinnacle of personalization LOL. Also customizing our Myspaces made us all feel like professional coders every time we would drop lines of code into the profile editor. Good times. Great video too.
@@golubochnot all of it is, for example there's aerothemeplasma for KDE which attempts to recreate windows 7, and it does it pretty well at that; there's also chicago95 for xfce which also supports the color themes from Plus! and every other 9x release
i probably have to mention KDE itself, there's genuinely a mountain of customisation in there, couple that with the styles and plasmoids and you can make nearly anything you want to edit: my first comment somehow disappeared into nothing, so i'll mention aerothemeplasma and chicago95 here ig
If someone would want some crazy themes and customization there’s still people developing and using the old E16 branch of the Enlightenment desktop for Linux. The themes and screenshots from back in the day has pretty much disappeared from the visible Internet, but it’s still possible to find some links and archived pages here and there. There was someone compiling it for their 64 bit RISC machine just recently. On the other hand, I just bought a new oled laptop so I’ll be using dark and boring themes on that to preserve my screen :-)
Sadly, I never experienced this era of internet but my dad did explain lot of things how today's internet is boring, stale, and nothing like 1990's. It really saddens me and I truly wished that kind of freedom would come back, the freedom to do anything, customize, and whoever else, and it should be more fun, but now UA-cam sucks. All social medias sucks. Designed to be addicting, not for you, but for company's money. I was mad when Steam removed theme feature, too because I was going to customize it soon but now I can't :(, I am actually glad you made this video, it really opened my mind up and made me realized even more further, to be honest. You deserve far more than 300K views on this video man
If you're fortunate enough to have some free time and don't mind diving into tutorials to customize your machine then definitely give linux a chance. Debian linux is super stable and there's loads of beginner friendly distros and theming options. It was funny when he mentioned winamp because I have a program called QMMP running with the classic winamp theme playing in the background. You can customize practically everything, even add effects to how windows open and close with a gnome extension called Burn My Windows
Man, this is the most nostalgia I’ve experienced all at once. The internet in its infancy was the bomb, dude. People AND COMPANIES cared about expressing themselves. I used to go as far as to downloading replacer programs along with theme packs off places like deviant art. There would always be so many unique options to pick from and there was always some new theme I had to try out. Ever tried custom shells back in the day? There were a few but man some of them were cool, like talisman desktop. Good times man. I’ll never forget those days.
Its like nearly every important that has any sort of influence has become the souless husk that only cares about their own power and about the political hot topics among the elite (of course everyone voicing the exact same oppinion on anything)
@@Charles.Foster.Offdensen So many comments are saying "I miss x thing" when these are all still options lol. "I miss when you could customize the title bar and windows". Well then fire up the personalization window and check the boxes that add color to them. "I miss custom shells". You can still install them. "I miss Windows Media Player and all its skins". WMP is still a part of Windows and it still supports the same skins you remember from the Windows XP days. Even the batman one and the giant green head. I think people are just looking for pity points at this point.
8:35 I have distinct memories of going to the site Sonic Central as a child and looking up information from Sonic games like Adventure 1 & 2, Heroes, the recently released Shadow the Hedgehog and previews for Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Sonic Rivals. All the while a mini player was blasting the main team themes from Sonic Heroes.
so the thing is, in music production there's so many synths that when booted up, look like some weird futuristic instrument, when it could just look like nothing
I began really using the internet after things started getting more uniform and less customizable. So when I learned about the youtube themes and other old social media I felt quite envious of what was taken from me lol
Sameee man The happiness my artistic soul felt when I found out that spacehey existed and I could customise everything Now all I need is social skills to make the site fun to use outside of remaking my profile over and over 😭😭😭
I remember in Windows 10 being able to change the title bar and taskbar/start menu colours, there's a checkbox you need to activate under the colours selection menu at 1:30.
DING DING DING! This is an option in Windows 10 and 11. It doesn't appear if you haven't paid for a Windows license because Windows being used for free disables personalization features.
I did this and made it where from a distance if you weren’t paying attention it looked like xp until you opened the start menu or looked closer at the taskbar
I love themeing! I themed Steam a handful of times, used to break Windows trying to install themes from XP era to 7 when you'd have to patch system files, and now work in web development where I had the pleasure of setting up a dark theme for our development system.
I do web design and had the pleasure of kitbashing stock photos together. The entire website was made out of images and also worked on phone with mobile specific images to make the page load a bit faster.
What's even more sad, and you might not remember this because you're very young, but phones used to have themes too. Everything was customizable, and each theme changed everything from the menu colors, font, sounds, background etc. And previous versions of Windows (pre Windows 7) were even more cistomizable. Btw does anyone remember the search option in Windows with the golden retriever and other chatacters? Or the talking pin in Microsoft Word? Golden times, truly.
Hint: Those themes still work in Windows Media Player, which is still part of Windows 11 to this day. Just find the archived WMZ files online, they work just like they used to.
Windows 98 had the best themes. Mystery, Space, Inside Your Computer, Travel, Nature... just thinking about it gives me nostalgia. We later upgraded our Windows 98 PC to XP and the old themes carried over in addition to the new XP ones. The early 2000s were an exciting time to be alive as the little computer-nerd boy I was. I wish I could go back, and I wish the new generations could have something just like that to experience today. Maybe they do? I hope so.
You can install VirtualBox on Windows 10/11 to create a virtual machine, find an ISO of the Windows 98/Me installer for that virtual machine, and reexperience the old operating systems & themes today. 😀 Although you need to look up how to manually install graphics drivers, and sound won't work properly.
@@ZeeZeeNg VMWare Player/Workstation is a lot better imo, it has more developed graphics drivers too you can play a lot of older games both 2d/3d in your virtual machine and with that, technically you could use your virtual machine as your daily driver since it has better performance than VirtualBox
@@ZeeZeeNg I actually installed a lightweight version of Linux on my 2GB RAM Lenovo D830 ThinkPad, and spent 20 minutes installing Chicago95 (a Win95 theme), and I love it so much lol (on my main Arch system on my PC I have more of a modern "rice", like rounded corners and transparency but its so clean)
Fun fact: The screensavers weren’t the first time Nintendo and Microsoft teamed up because in 1998, Microsoft did develop collections of their very own PC games and make a collection of them on the Game Boy Color.
Say what you want about Tumblr, but I think they are one of the few social media that allows you to customize your profile/blog. On mobile it only lets you choose background colors, fonts, etc. but on PC/Web browser you can use themes with html code and there are TONS of blog who make a compile themes for you to use
I love seeing how many variations there were, these were so pivotal in making things unique and fun and there was just so much love put in to making these cool custom things and sharing them online for other people to use! Bring BACK custom themes and skins!!
on the other end, its really cool to see people who's childhood wasn't during that period, a lot of people are quick to dismiss these things as nostalgia, so its good to know its more then that
@@hehasnolips1371you're one of the few people who think that and people like you have personal issues that you need to fix first before giving an opinion about anything. So Fk off where you came
@@bjiru_there's huge revival and rise on frutiger aero and y2k aesthetics if you're interested. Welcome to the future that boomers promised us yet they lied to steal from us
honestly this is the reason i love tumblr. you get to make ur blog/account/whatever u want to call it absolutely however u want with custom themes and other stuff. its amazing and its something websites and stuff dont do anymore :[
and the best part is you don’t need to pay for it! really hoping they keep it as a free feature (despite them making custom html/css increasingly harder to access sadly)
I want to live in a windows 7 wallpaper so bad. Humanity yearns to customise. Another brilliant video and I’m a bit ashamed to say I haven’t caught up since your ‘virtual worlds’ video. Fashionably late but im glad im subbed 💙
Linux is very cool to play around with and customize however you wish. I'd recommend trying to play around with something like Kubuntu because KDE has amazing customization options, and Ubuntu is rather easy and safe to use ^-^
5:08 You just triggered intense nostalgia for me with that one. I had always used that Da Vinci skin back in the days on my first own laptop, thought it was pretty dope. I had pretty much forgotten about it until this video.
Agreed. Why did we go backwards? I remember when Windows 8 and 8.1 came out, and it was the first Windows OS where applying visual styles became difficult. And Windows 10 and later 11 made it even more difficult. Especially if you wanted the square minimize/maximize/close buttons of Windows XP, because in Windows 8 onwards, all visual styles must have rectangular buttons, so making authentic themes was impossible, unless you have Window Blinds which is a paid software. The Windows XP/Vista/7 era was the peak of visual styles and themes.
The fixed size of the caption buttons in Windows 8+ actually was in Vista, but themes avoided it by using the XP engine (basic theme). Nowadays, it's fully understood by the community how to change the size of the caption buttons without WindowBlinds by modding DWM.
I love this about AO3. If you really want to, you can customize the website to your liking so it looks personalized for only you. It certainly isnt perfect and not broad in options, but its cool that they allow you to do something.
finally, someone that i could relate to. man, i used to be a huge fan of Windows XP's visual styles, i remember looking for them online all the time. my focus though was the fanmade Windows Longhorn themes, those were the real deal back then. heck, i even went ahead and got TuneUp Utilities 2013 on my old Windows 7 computer just to apply a visual syle that was similar to the ones in windows XP (you can see that clearly from my old videos on my channel).
I love your channel, I'm from Argentina and it's so beautiful found someone that's has the same nostalgic for the internet when we were kids. great job you should do a video talking about the flash games from the 2000s :)
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MENTIONING NEOCITIES!! i have a website on there and it's a lot of fun :D i think everyone should try their hand at making one if they have an interest in old web design, it's a great time and there's a friendly community around it :]
i love the vibe these videos have, fun little ramblings on topics i (sometimes) never knew existed and it’s all just so comforting to be honest, along with how the video is edited! i get excited whenever you post :D
I played a lot with the themes on Win95. I remember there was a sahara/lion theme and I loved listening to the shutdown sound, Miss that theme a lot. edit: The theme was called Dangerous Creatures
I'm gonna be honest here: I'm not from those times. Sure, i had a laptop with windows 7 in it back in like 2014 and i played stuff like club penguin and flash games, but im not exactly entirely from the current era, but not exactly from back then, which HURTS cuz i wish i could have those experiences, i like customization because it helps me express myself, so you can imagine how much i HATE minimalism. (not cuz its inherently bad, it could be fun, its because of overuse) When i saw the stuff about the Windows XP themes that were like, not just color changes but added some cool stuff and details into menus it actually blew my mind, so thank you for that, you showed me a whole new world, ill look into something similar for Windows 10. If anyone reading this know any cool websites, customization stuff, whatever remotely relating to this and old internet, you could do me a favour and tell me by answering this comment.
I had a youtube channel in 2008-9 too and it was like a social media page with my own backgrounds and themes and all that. I was so upset it died when the 2010s rolled in. I loved it so much. Yes, even youtube had "themes" in a broader sense.
I still can’t comprehend what happened to native Windows default programs like the Media Player and the Picture Viewer. Especially those are unusable nowadays. Often it feels like there are multiple default implementations for each, with one being more invasive than the next.
WMP is still usable even on modern systems. Hell, even Windows Movie Maker still works on Windows 10 (though you'll have to find it on some 3rd party website since Microsoft pulled it from the official Microsoft Store in 2017, which technically means it's abandonware).
Windows Media Player is still on my Windows 11 install. It still supports custom skins from the XP days, just go find the archived WMZ files and play stuff on the big green head. Use CTRL+1, CTRL+2, and CTRL+3 to switch different view modes
I miss massive customization and personalization as a broad feature of software and web design, but I've also managed to carry some of my favorite custom elements over every PC I've used since Windows 98: Starcraft and C&C Red Alert cursor themes, check. Winamp 5.666 "bunker" skin, check (though I actually went and found a new one recently on that same skins archive you showed). For a long time I also used a Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries sound theme for Windows--Making your PC sound like a Mech starting up is pretty sweet. Since I used Windows Vista and then 7 for such a long time, I've also been determined to keep as close to the Aero aesthetic as possible after finally moving to Windows 10. I would definitely recommend Open Shell to bring back that nice taskbar and start menu look and feel, as well as offer even more customization options than ever before! I even got it working on Windows 11, but thankfully I only need to use that for work--10 is still preferable by far. I really hope customization and the ability to personalize user profiles etc. comes back into vogue, since I think at this point even people who weren't previously that into customizing what they used are getting tired of every major site / app looking nearly identical.
I miss them too, which is exactly why I *haven't stopped using them.* I have skins for every program and site as possible to make them adhere to the graphic / web design styles of late 2000s - early 2010s internet. Even for stuff that _didn't exist_ in those time periods like Discord.
@@mrbones909 I use a program called WindowBlinds to skin W11 to look like 7, then get a ton of user styles and extensions to make sites get their old layouts back
Dude, that screen shot took me back, haha. I loved WinAmp for all of its skins too, there were so many obscure metal band ones available at the time. Good stuff.
Frutiger Aero is a hamfisted attempt to categorize an aesthetic that gen-z still can't decide where the lines are drawn. Just say "I like early 2000's interface design"
@@snickerdoooodle frutiger aero is a memorable term that's evocative of the 'vibe' of thing one might be looking for. even if the lines are blurry, the point is that the term exists so people who like it can actually look for and find more of it or things similar to it, as well as like-minded people who also enjoy similar aesthetic choices
When the startup sound from the Landscapes theme played . I got a deep flashback from my old laptop . It's like wherever I ever go , at anytime in the future , when I hear this it immediately sounds like home to me ...
i miss customizing my deviant art and tumblr blog !!! aaa adding bios with stamps that are also gifs and have glitter that show off the fandoms you were in and your favorite characters was so fucking cool u__u aahh i am also nostalgic for older times where we could have personalized shit for ourselves
I've only experienced new DeviantArt, and although I don't mind how it looks now, it does seem like it used to be a lot more active and fun. AI isn't as prevalent as people say it is imo, but that is also a slight annoyance.
Seeing how things are now, I'm so grateful I was born in '89. It was such a great time to be a kid. The world seemed to have so many creative outlets & forms of expression. Ways that kids, teens and adults could enjoy themselves. Places to go, things to do, unique style and design. I really miss the Vibe of that Era where it treated us all like it respected our intelligence, time & experience. While also providing aspects with in our society that help keep our inner kid in us alive. It felt like everything acknowledged how important YOU were as a citizen, customer, fan, person because without us they would be nothing. The creativity that came from that era really put effort into it's ingenuity, not this bland minimalism we see today. I really hope we find a way to reconnect with it because the world really needs it right now. Look how soulless so much has become nowadays? Look at the horrible aesthetics, poor quality & creative design in modern cities, or even in shows, movies, & video games. Things have become so bland, bleek, and minimalistic to the point that it doesn't even make since. Most Old house's/building's/uúnique shop's are gone. Interesting oddities like drive in movies, indoor fun zones, arcade's, magazines that came with a demo disc to try out game's, blockbuster/Hollywood video, McDonald's had N64's & crazy fun zones & art designs all over, you could preview music before buying it, they had great kid's toy's, Roller Rink's, Garbage pale kid's card's. You get the point. Bring back Retro-Futurism or Y2K Vibes. ANYTHING compared to this current Dystopian toxic positivity. Our society feels more lost then it ever has. Society is solely focused on out of control capitalistic agendas. That anything that isn't constantly increasing profits is a failure and has no value to society? Our Quality of Life should be better than this. Basic living shouldn't be this unaffordable. People should be able to have fun, dork around, have things that engage them. The list goes on. Bring me back to the 90's.
totally agree, there is something satisfying and cathartic about "making it yours". To that end, I actually created a desktop notepad app that lets you add an image in the background lol
The Linux users have arrived
I wish I had Linux
@@AwesomeYenait doesn't take too much to get started :D I'd suggest trying a mainstream distro, maybe like Linux Mint -- it's a lot like Windows. There's also a lot of guides for it online too!
@@kleptomaticagain My dad won't let me, its not that I don't know how.
@@AwesomeYenaoh that's unfortunate :/
"It looked horrible, it looked awfull - and it was mine"
That hits sooooo hard!!!
It's so ugly! I love it!
this!
You still can have themes if you want, you just have to get unofficial.. which I always had anyway since xp. On 7 I used to have a nice 3rd party nice flat aero theme. I don't even consider the ability to change win 7 aero color a theme. You are just changing the color of an ugly dated 3d theme.. it's still same.
MySpace in a nutshell
No but I used the custom theme packs on the chrome web store, now those were FIRE 🔥 🔥 I had one with a flaming skellington rocking a guitar! And the home pages could change pictures
"You WILL use our sanitized, soulless designs and you WILL like it!"
-Every single corpo from 2010 and onwards
Yiu will iet tze baks
UA-cam held out until 2013, the site really began to go downhill when they switched to the One Channel design, or as I call it, the Boring Milk Carton design
It happened to everything. Customised ring tones became a thing of the past. It got bad for partially sighted people because everyone expects the default only and goes nuts using someone else’s computer when the theme is set for someone that can’t see well.
For a long wile it became fashionable to not have fun with themes. Social media stopped allowing customisation and everyone just sort of stopped. Part of it is that when people used code to change the look of profiles they could remove adds from being viewed and people that make text the same colour as the background and ruin their profiles. I personally agree I loved customisation.
and heres why thats a good thing
@@photonigarcia you'll never have the chance to own your own house, and YOULL BE HAPPY. The EU legislated for insects to be added to products last year, so long as they have a little label on them. Can't wait
New windows is like a room with no furniture
based
@@azumi182 firmly
A room with no furniture but full of security cameras
Which is why I modded W11 to look indistinguishable from XP 😂
Close widows, open doors!
I'm a middle school teacher in the netherlands. I've been noticing that my students (age 12-17) have been personalising their computers with backgrounds, but mostly with their mouse cursors. Something that will always be visible, and will be unique to them.
aww that is actually so amazing to hear, I didnt mention it hear but I also loved to do that as a kid, thats so cool its still a thing that warms my heart, thank you for telling me
I definitely downloaded a computer virus with one of those crazy cursors back in the day lol
i customised my mouse cursor to GIR!! :P its subtle but very fun to look at everytime :]
Sad thing is, ChromeOS only allows you to customize the background and two colours, both which can be restricted, and iPadOS only changes wallpaper too but is a bit better.
@@lilymulligan8180 to quote a comment on a video from UA-camr “greentext gold” I read: “I will take responsibility for the RuneScape Dragon Scimitar mouse cursor that downloaded 20 Gb of malware onto my parent’s computer. We pointed and clicked in style, but at what cost..”
They took our skins...
my skin!!!!
AHHHH GET OUT OF MY SKIN
ChaNinja!
WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CANT MAKE MY PC LOOK LIKE KUNG FU PANDA ANYMORE
TRRRKRRRSKRRRRRRR 😂
Pillars of modern design
1: rounded corners everywhere.
2: a lot of padding and margin in evrything.
3: removing useful extensive features that dummies can not understand.
Nr 2 looks like mobile centric design;
Nr 3 appears to be the logical extreme of "Keep It Stupid Simple".
Rounded corners make memes harder to screenshot. They are visually appealing though so I'll give them that.
I absolutely hate rounded corners
Same, they must be afraid babies will get hurt with em corners
@@Nerves_of_steel You seem to be hurt by rounded corners.
It crazy how we've devolved to white text on black background, basically back to DOS.
Well you could change colours in DOS. So DOS is more customizable than any modern website. In Command Prompt there are more options and its even easier.
"Windows is a bulky, and more likely - useless extension for DOS, made by Microsoft", Radio and Communications (1989)
You mean black text on white right?
@@JBBrickman he is right. White\Green text on black background were the basic DOS thing. The "dark" themes does the same way, lol, both to android and ios.
@@nikostalk5730 I was just saying that every website uses black text on a white background, I rarely see white text outside of discord.
Everything became clean, greyscale and uniform,
We have the same issue happening with architecture too,
Everything used to be ornamental and unique in western cities, but now everything is grey, brick and square
Blame minimalism/brutal styles fault.
It all began as a retro hipster counter-culture and then it started to become mainstream by 2012 after Windows 8 was released. Even older iPhones had more creative design on the home-screen.
Ornamental architecture recently seems to be fighting back though
@@pawemarkowski2768 I wish. What I see is "intentionally visible concrete" and such.....
so essentially western world has downgraded to the soviet style architecture
I finally found someone who appreciates the lost culture of super customizing things. As I loved doing it in every program I used. Those times are missed, but I end up making up for it by customizing my visual studio code more and more.
I miss customized pages on Myspace
in part, there's no limit to create your own web age tbh
I don't wanna be that guy. Please. Don't. Drag. Me. But. i UsE aRcH and it's super customizable. That's the ONLY reason I run it 😂
I am in 40's and this really sparked something in me that used to be pure enjoyment, excitement and adventure. You are right, the ability to not change things and contribute towards the community for other people to enjoy is lame. I made and did things for free for others to enjoy and got joy out of knowing that so many others are enjoying with things I made.
I find it so fulfilling that people who are older feel the same way, a lot of this is a lot of the time chalked up to "nostalgia" or "missing of childhood" when people my age bring it up, witch, it defiantly is a little of. but its so nice when I hear people of other ages saying it too, it proves its more then just that. thanks for the sharing your story, and thanks for all the thing you made back in the day, no matter how big or small
@@bjiru_ Yeah, it is nice to see that it is not just you. I'm 35 now and I often think whether technology was really more exciting 10-15 years ago or whether I've just lost that excitement in me with age. Every Apple keynote used to be an event to watch, and things like Google Glass were like little visions of a future filled with promise. Maybe a bit of both, but phones have definitely gotten a lot more boring since 2000s, just as you say in your other video. Same with customisation and skins.
What we have now some call minimalism but i'd call it brutalism. It's just a utilitarian way to get on your PC and getting to work or consuming media or buying something without distraction or anything in between. No toys or anything to stop and see and appreciate from here to there. Just a dull gray hallway and doors. No nice parks, no nice public art, no nice decorations people put up for fun or to make the space more enjoyable to be in.
Man very good way of putting it
Yeah! Minimalism doesn't have to be an endless sea of gray always!
Sites could just as easily have minimalistic, but colourful designs, but companies just want boring and uniform >~
and even when it is, it's in the _exact_ way they would put it in corporate buildings, as a cynical "morale booster" to make a number go up instead of actually making something worth appreciating
@@RedBlueProductions1 well stated, definitely.
It's not even utalitarian at all. In fact, I find minimalist design much less readable than skeuomorphism. It frequently gets in the way in ways that skeuonorphic design just doesn't.
Customisation is how i got into graphic design. There was this diary type of website. And i had spent so much time doing it, I've learned how to use photoshop, how to draw, how to make animations, how to record and make music as a theme for my diary. Man. It was so fun
Livejournal right? And same
i always used to love these themes. the first time i turned on my first laptop and got that windows 7 jingle, i remember opening internet explorer and seeing in search results that osama bin laden was killed. i can't unseperate those two memories anymore. it's been a curse ever since. good times.
he definetly was
indeed he was
Dang
Do you remember your reaction
lol
I love that more and more people are realizing how much less creative the world has gotten over the past decade. My prediction for the mid 2020s is that we will finally make things more customizable, and design will become more creative again, especially considering how much demand there is for it.
Your UA-cam channel reminds me of the first one i made in 2007 at the age of 10.
I used the Wayback Machine to visit websites in the 2000s again, and it brought back so many memories of when the Internet was more alive.
"[...]especially considering how much demand there is for it" Tech execs: Nuh-uh!
Neumorphism is the design trend that’s taking over for the next decade, so still much of this soulless flat and boring designs
The internet will look more creative but it won’t feel that way. It’s currently a shitshow.
Lmao. It’s not going back to creativity. Creativity is dying in a lot of ways. I think we should just accept our basic shapes with blank spaces 🤣
@@Luke-zj6ge delusional.
THATS WHAT IM SAYING!!!!!!! THIS 100 TIMES!!!!!!!!!!
Genuinely my biggest issue with all of technology is simply customizability. My iphone cant have moving backgrounds. I cant change the colors of my windows, cant even make it glossy like it used to be either. My switch is either Light mode or Dark mode. My youtube channel has a banner and a pfp and nothing else. It actually sucks and is so devoid of whimsy or excitment. I really hope we can go back to normalizing more customization. Discord has been adding more profile customization, but at the cost of a MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION, and even paying individually for pfp borders. Steam has a good wealth of options too for your profile, but still at the cost of points from purchasing games.
Great video btw, I actually really love this channel, the way you talk about things feels so free-form and naturally funny 😁👍
I hope so too.. there’s just no, or very little fun these days in the internet
Thank you so much also :3
@@bjiru_ After watching this I did start doing some research on the program Openshell and I already set it up so my windows 10 taskbar looks like windows XP, its so cool
Hiii Polygon Donut!!I rlly love your videos and i agree with u and bjiru too!ヽ(>∀
Cool to see you here
Switch to android, switch to Linux, mod your switch, install css theming extension to your browser and make whatever theme for any website you want. Discord is fully themable with mods, client and web version. It's not that nothing has themes nowadays but you are not looking for them hard enough.
nostalgia hits different when you are in your 20s
Yup owo
Wait til you're 30, man. It only gets worse lol
yeah because we actually have things to reminiscence over now :(
@@yahstino I don't think my body can handle more existential dread, man
@@eggi4443 I'll be 32 in November. It's pain, my man. I'm happy with my life, but the years are moving way too damn fast. You'll be alright though.
kyomaku here, thank you so much for featuring my little website!!! ;__; never thought id make it into a youtube video... no less for my silly little corner of the web >:P
AAAA! HELLO! AMAZING WEBSITE!! ITS SO COOL AMAZING JOB, I CANNOT BELIEVE YOUR HERE ! ITS NOT JUST A LITTLE WEBSITE ITS A BIG AND COOL WEBSITE !! AND I CAN ONLY IMAGINE THE TIME IT TOOK TO MAKE, THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT !! :3
i just found your website and holy fuck it looks amazing!! the colours, the icons, the windows 9x look... its got a shit ton of personality and i love it!
@@maje2610 eee thank you so so much!!! ^_^
9:34
Shoutouts to Nintendo 3DS homebrew keeping the spirit of relevant custom themes alive
Yeah custom themes on 3DS are awesome.
I made a Starcontrol 2 starbase theme.
hell yea and ieas easy af to do with a program for windows
@@guidedexplosiveprojectileg9943 I made an eevee theme but don't know how to share
@@subarulenz1470 Make an account on the 3ds theme website? I do not know.
tumblr still allows you to completely rewrite the direct html code of your blog page, so you can even make your blog page just not a blog if you want
but overtime its become less of an advertised feature and harder to access, and now it doesnt even show up when you go to a blog unless you go to a specific blog link which you basically cant access via the normal site
and it doesnt help that nobody uses it anymore because its not visible on mobile at all and its barely accessible anymore, and not to mention how html has kind of become a lost art for the average person nowadays
Ironic when you think about it considering html became capable of doing things you would ordinarily require flash for, and I'm most people remember how big flash was.
was going to say that, I love having a theme for my page and having silly little buttons and an mp3 player but it stops being fun if barely anyone including myself is going to see it
spacehey has html customizable layouts as one of the main features, and it works on the new mobile app too! sometimes people make their pages total seizure machines, but for the most part they're really cool
Same, I thought about my Tumblr blog. I'm not that good at doing big customizations, so mine is just my fave shades of blue and a drawing of myself. It's sad that Tumblr is dead.
@@-Julien- tumblr is very alive and well idk what youre talking abt
I remember ricing up Windows XP lol. We would buy magazines that had CDs attached to them with themes for everything.
A lot of the missing features in websites can probably be attributed to the Internet becoming advertiser -friendly. Embedded music players might violate copyright, custom uploaded images could be nsfw or hate speech, manually embedded links could lead to scams or screamers (this was common back in the day). It's not an excuse though, there should be more options for public-facing custom themes. I remember ten years ago Tumblr was still allowing a pretty loose amount of customization for your own blog, even if most people used the default dashboard.
For all client-facing themes there's really no excuse at all. I want my UA-cam music desktop player to look like those cool y2k ones! I want to have widgits and bubbles and custom sounds! I'm probably gonna root through windows 11 hacks and find ways to make it happen now.
i know it's easy in 7 and 10, you just have to patch a file
Tumblr still allows u to customize your blog!
And its fun as hell
have you found any ways to customize things?
You can have customization if these big tech executives somehow figure out that they can sell skins to their users.
@@01Gshadow mmm nah. The ability to express shouldn't be behind a paywall
minimalism kills creativity
yep
hell, even minimalist approaches to stuff back then (prior to the mid-2010s) were better than the ones today
anime pfp
@@vishwarao6064letter
You can be creative in your own way though. UA-cam may not let you make an ugly ass profile, but your videos can exist anyway you want.
And discord wants you to PAY for customization, damn it's so over
That's why i use BetterDiscord themes, some themes are even better than discord's official themes, tho if u want to use it, be aware that people get banned for using it, from what i had heard, i still didn't and used it for almost a year now
People still think I'm crazy for missing Skype, but back before Discord, Skype let you customise _everything._ The most discord lets you do is choose between 'cozy' and 'compact', in either white or grey.
Except now you can pay to decorate your profile. ...Yay?
@@Her_Imperious_Condescension There's themes now but like always you also need to pay up in order to use them, otherwise you just have dark and light
Steam too
Betterdiscord is always a thing
growing up I always liked everything default, whether that was my computer's theme, wallpaper, or even my weapon in a video game. No skins, no themes, just the original look. But now, I want to do anything I possibly can in order to get AWAY from that original look. I think it's probably because everything is so dull now, back on Windows XP, and even windows 7, you had COLORS, GRAPHICS, and the design overall was still so good even if you didn't customize it. I'm talking green, blue, transparent, red, orange, LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Now, you open your windows machine and its like, white, black, grey, and WOW BLUE!!! I yearn for the customization!!!! BTW great video I love your channel!!
The Windows XP design was mind blowing after coming from Windows 98. I feel like we've gone back to the blandness of Windows 98.
Compared to the animations Microsoft uses windows 11 is just a void of white or grey with a really muddy hint of whatever your wallpaper is
Aero sometimes could have this problem but at least it was more interesting than white void that was trying to be frosted glass and failing miserably
Minimalism sucks so much but it's just so easy and safe to do compared to actual style
By all means windows 2000 was minimalist though
@@kreuner11 minimalist as in blank squares and stuff like that but yeah I get what you mean
@@kreuner11It still had more character to it. It felt more professional, and not toy like.
@@kreuner11 You could make anything any color and font you wanted though, and there were third party themeing tools that could replace how window borders and widgets were drawn.
@@vogonp4287 I think this oversimplification comes from the opposite viewpoint. Culturally, things with lots of color and little additions to mess around with are seen as childish. People think that they need something extremely bland and devoid of character in order to seem professional because of the previous viewpoint.
I’m almost 40 and back around 2002-2003 you were able to download official noise packs for AOL. I had mine set to Mr Moviefone, he would loudly proclaim “Your mail is Rated R”
I think that's exactly why I see a lot of artist embracing this "old internet style" and I love it
most artist brings back memories about Windows 2000-Windows XP things, 7 - is more likely to be a fresh thing, but, because it was a very reliable and good OS.
Like an old fashioned Renault car. Simple, durable, fun as hell, easy to drive, easy to make it look like a 9yrs old sportcar
You own it, not a copro owned you.
*embracing
And I agree :)
That derpy crashing through the windows wallpaper AND the bubbles screensaver is EXACTLY how my high school partner had their setup
I think the problem with modern trends is not about design preferences or lack of taste, but about density. It's not hard to make these fancy pages responsive. And, for example, our b2b company allows us to make as many little animations and ui goodies as we want. But noone has time for that, cause development schedules are so god damn tight. The internet is no longer a playground. It's a market now.
So long as I'm alive I will never accept that. The web is a playground for me, whether corporations like it or not. We shouldn't just bow down to their ways but keep hold of our creativity, fun and good taste!
Yeah, just maintaining two different theme options for users of my own website has been a lot of work. Coding the ability for users to customize every little thing about their profiles or how they see other pages just isn't practical. And while I'm an individual working on my own website, huge companies aren't necessarily going to be incentivized to put their productivity towards that kind of thing either, especially when the benefits aren't easily quantifiable.
Oversimplified should be outlawed we need to go back to having more freedom
I’m a little older than you but I remember being legitimately shocked that you couldn’t change or edit a Facebook page like you could on MySpace and UA-cam.
I still remember hanging onto MySpace because fb and Twitter just seemed so…plain….
Honestly the whole internet now seems so plain and corporate.
Shout out to the people who had the halo theme for windows media player. That shit popped.
My part of the world used friendster. There came a point when I only logged in just to change the layout css, the music and the cursor. Or enbed another video.
lol myspace pages were obnoxious af, but facebook is for boomers anyway. milenials use insta and gen z uses ticktocks and snapchat.
@@beardsntools Obnoxious? Not really. They were fun, millennials use facebook, instagram, snapchat and ticktock lol I'm not sure you have your finger on the pulse of culture as much as you think you do
@@NOSTahlgia Lmao these pages were obnoxious af.. that's the main reason why myspace failed. As social media sites, there was no noticeable difference in features, facebook literally had less and that was not having website like personalization, but ironically everyone wanted that, that's why everyone switched to it.
And nah they don't, some do, but majority don't.. millennials don't use facebook anymore lmao. snapchat and ticktock are apps made for gen z, where short attention span, depression, anxiety and false sense of security are their main properties
@@NOSTahlgia lmao these website like personalization were obnoxious, facebook literally came and offered the lack of it and that was enough to get everyone two switch.
And no millennials do not use facebook anymore it's a boomer website- Ticktock and snapchat are apps made for short attention span and false sense of security, so gen z
Customization lets you make something truly your own. That's not compatible with Big Tech's vision of you owning nothing.
This comment is the ultimate truth.
Sad but apparently true
Klaus Schwab, is that you??!!?!
No idea why you think that's the connection. I think it has more to do with company wanting their products to be easily recognizable to attract users
@@ErimlRGGYeah, we all know Windows XP had a notoriously hard time attracting users.
This argument sort of makes sense for social media but not for operating systems, in the vast majority of cases only you have to interact with your operating system, yet we have still consistently slid backwards to the point that I can't even have a vertical task bar. It's like they took the fun away and then took the practical customization they left behind and chopped THAT in half.
thank for telling about neocities man. this revived not only my want to customize but also one silly webpage i made back in 7th grade.
I was born 10 years before you, so I definitely get it. I grew up through all the customizing. I used winamp, I made skins myself. I had a myspace profile and customized that too. That was fun. I learned HTML, CSS, and how to use programs like Photoshop and Gimp. I still find creative things to dabble in, but it is sad not being surrounded with as much that can be personalized with more than an accent color.
It's not that difficult either. whole page backgrounds that could you could scroll through. A different text and background colour. Don't like how this profile looks? Need the high contrast version? Click this button to show the default theme for it and set a cookie.
I'm 28 and I didn't even know about these Windows XP features until just now... 😫 My parents didn't know much either since I was raised by Baby Boomers.
GIMP omg what a throwback!!!
@@Galidorquest Same, i also didn't know about XP and 7 custom msstyles.
I had the Windows Vista "beta" theme on Windows XP.
Being in my 30s (basically a fossil by internet standards) I remember the early days on the internet and back then literally everything was customizable if you knew a little bit of code, it felt like everyone owned their own little piece of the internet, and I remember when I first started making music MySpace was popular, and being able to essentially turn into into a band website with all the features you'd want (a music player, a place to put flyers, embedding music videos, etc) made every artist stick out from each other. Now everything is uniform and corporate and there's no real way to catch anyone's eyes and ears and it feels like the internet owns you rather than you owning part of it.
I'm slightly younger than you (I'm 27, born in 1996) but also an ancient fossil by internet standards. I remember the things you're talking about. Remember those homemade websites? They were all hosted by Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire. None of them were very good but we liked them anyway, they had a personal charm to them unlike the soulless social media borg that's absorbed everything today.
You're both not fossils, just vintage 😂
"feels like the internet owns you rather than you owning part of it.", man that a good quote, thanks for sharing
*also, as much as these internet 10 year olds may make you feel like it, your not old
@@GraniteStateVictoria you were born in 96? Damn you're a millennial just like me (only I was born in 85 lol) if you were born in 97 you'd be a gen z. Funny how you're considered a "boomer" by gen z standards.
@@ryuno2097 One kid did call me a boomer once after I showed him my Game Boy Color and I was like "Sheesh kid, I'm not THAT old! It's a Game Boy Color, not Pong"
Funny thing is you're the exact same birth year as my boyfriend (I know, it's a big age gap, but we had an instant connection when we met last year).
The reason these companies have been getting rid of customization is to further cement the fact that you don’t own the product you paid for.
this sort of thing is exactly why I switched to linux
yes, we are now only renting no longer owning :(
"You will own nothing and you will be happy"
They really hammer it home by occasionally resetting everything to default with "feature updates".
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 if you stupid enough to trust a company's every single word, and never read their EULA - i have baaaaaaaaaaad news about it for ya
I still remember when I was 15 agonizingly trying to fiddle with a program to have a live koi pond animation on my Tumblr blog. I was trying to get the proportions of it just right and make the fish rainbow colors. You could even feed them by clicking the water!! I also had a music player from a website literally filled with dozens of pages of them. i miss it a lot.
Aaaaaah that is so cool!!!
Then: "Make the computer personal again"
Now: "Make the subscription personal again"
Microsoft renamed the "My Computer" icon to "This PC" in Windows 10.
You will own nothing and be happy.
@@MrEdrftgyuji Psst, you can rename it back and create a local account.
@@MrEdrftgyuji IIRC this is just a default name. You can also name it "dingus" or whatever
At least there’s SOMETHING personal… for now.
The internet from the 2000s does have a special place in my heart. Very nostalgic and I agree it was so much more interesting. I think companies locked the designs for uniformity and so that their website is easily distinguishable from others.
god i forgot phones truly are probably the reason we dont get fun themes anymore. i know tumblr let u customize and just show the default theme on mobile, but it seems theyre trying rly hard to phase that out lol (tho blogs can still have custom themes if u go out of ur way to view them properly). but i feel like we could have this for other sites too!!
correction: iphones, not phones, as android is as customizable as it can be, samsung looks different to google pixel, yet all ios'es are the same, yet android is ultra customizable.
@@poisoncrabi think they meant that its harder to format themes to be viewable on phones
> who is it for?
I used that theme, it was for me.
@@poisoncrabno, it has to do with browsers and apps, not the phones themselves.
@@VirtualDialog Yup, many websites are designed for mobile phones first now. Even MacOS and Windows 11 have adopted a UI style from tablets/phones. MacOS had one of the best menus for settings but they switched it out for the iOS settings menu.
There's an app called Swivel made by Newgrounds which is used for animators but still encapsulates the Y2K era design
Love swivel, and everything newgrounds does, ruffle emulator, flash forward, and even just newgrounds itself, thank u tom
I remember finding some random sketchy taskbar addon thing that lets you customize your mouse cursor on windows xp. I remember having this flaming cursor that left a little fire trail wherever it went.
BURNING SUPER DEATH SWORD
I miss those days a lot. Part of the reason I got into graphic design. You helped me remember my YT channel background image was digital tracings of my online graffiti battles from 2007. I remember thinking those backgrounds were the pinnacle of personalization LOL. Also customizing our Myspaces made us all feel like professional coders every time we would drop lines of code into the profile editor. Good times. Great video too.
Unix ricing is still alive and well, it’s hard to beat that amount of customization
I hate how all unix ricing is just dwm with anime on background
@@golubochnot all of it is, for example there's aerothemeplasma for KDE which attempts to recreate windows 7, and it does it pretty well at that; there's also chicago95 for xfce which also supports the color themes from Plus! and every other 9x release
i probably have to mention KDE itself, there's genuinely a mountain of customisation in there, couple that with the styles and plasmoids and you can make nearly anything you want to
edit: my first comment somehow disappeared into nothing, so i'll mention aerothemeplasma and chicago95 here ig
If someone would want some crazy themes and customization there’s still people developing and using the old E16 branch of the Enlightenment desktop for Linux. The themes and screenshots from back in the day has pretty much disappeared from the visible Internet, but it’s still possible to find some links and archived pages here and there. There was someone compiling it for their 64 bit RISC machine just recently.
On the other hand, I just bought a new oled laptop so I’ll be using dark and boring themes on that to preserve my screen :-)
@@goluboch Yeah, they embrace the minimalism, and waifus.
The real problem is minimalism, it kills personality and self expression
Yeah, this trend has really sucked.
the derpy hooves crashing through the win7 logo gave me so much nostalgia holy shit
i still miss the freedom of self-expression to this day to the point where i'm insanely happy neocities exists
Sadly, I never experienced this era of internet but my dad did explain lot of things how today's internet is boring, stale, and nothing like 1990's. It really saddens me and I truly wished that kind of freedom would come back, the freedom to do anything, customize, and whoever else, and it should be more fun, but now UA-cam sucks. All social medias sucks. Designed to be addicting, not for you, but for company's money. I was mad when Steam removed theme feature, too because I was going to customize it soon but now I can't :(, I am actually glad you made this video, it really opened my mind up and made me realized even more further, to be honest. You deserve far more than 300K views on this video man
I love how this is a really positive video focusing on the fun, rather than a negative one focusing on the lack of it
If you're fortunate enough to have some free time and don't mind diving into tutorials to customize your machine then definitely give linux a chance. Debian linux is super stable and there's loads of beginner friendly distros and theming options. It was funny when he mentioned winamp because I have a program called QMMP running with the classic winamp theme playing in the background. You can customize practically everything, even add effects to how windows open and close with a gnome extension called Burn My Windows
Man, this is the most nostalgia I’ve experienced all at once. The internet in its infancy was the bomb, dude. People AND COMPANIES cared about expressing themselves.
I used to go as far as to downloading replacer programs along with theme packs off places like deviant art. There would always be so many unique options to pick from and there was always some new theme I had to try out. Ever tried custom shells back in the day? There were a few but man some of them were cool, like talisman desktop. Good times man. I’ll never forget those days.
custom shells still exist dude
Its like nearly every important that has any sort of influence has become the souless husk that only cares about their own power and about the political hot topics among the elite (of course everyone voicing the exact same oppinion on anything)
@@Charles.Foster.Offdensen So many comments are saying "I miss x thing" when these are all still options lol. "I miss when you could customize the title bar and windows". Well then fire up the personalization window and check the boxes that add color to them. "I miss custom shells". You can still install them. "I miss Windows Media Player and all its skins". WMP is still a part of Windows and it still supports the same skins you remember from the Windows XP days. Even the batman one and the giant green head.
I think people are just looking for pity points at this point.
The old channel designs were so unique, I even had some photoshop templates to make a couple for some friends channels
THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN USEFULL, I WAS LOOKING FOR EXACTLY THAT FOR THIS VIDEO BUT I ENDED UP JUST INSPECT ELEMENTING SMOSHS CHANNEL LMAO
8:35 I have distinct memories of going to the site Sonic Central as a child and looking up information from Sonic games like Adventure 1 & 2, Heroes, the recently released Shadow the Hedgehog and previews for Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Sonic Rivals. All the while a mini player was blasting the main team themes from Sonic Heroes.
I miss browsing old personal homepages/sites. It was fun to see what bad midi music would be making the page load so slowly.
so the thing is, in music production there's so many synths that when booted up, look like some weird futuristic instrument, when it could just look like nothing
Very true, a perfect example that you CAN make things fun and unique, most things just are lazy
try reason
i love the designs for VST's
Whe tot a movie where the projector crashed
They could’ve just shown the imax logo but they had a whole animation of a movie theater screen
shouts out to roku for keeping themes alive on streaming sticks. every other kind is just a black void plastered with ads
I wasn't even from that time with Windows XP, but I still wanted themes like that so much 😭😭 having something unique for you is such a good thing
I began really using the internet after things started getting more uniform and less customizable. So when I learned about the youtube themes and other old social media I felt quite envious of what was taken from me lol
Interesting to hear from someone who wasn’t there for it, that proves it’s not just nostalgia talking
Same. [Started using teh net in the early 2010s]
Sameee man
The happiness my artistic soul felt when I found out that spacehey existed and I could customise everything
Now all I need is social skills to make the site fun to use outside of remaking my profile over and over 😭😭😭
@@oliverhatesolives just friend anyone that has a cool pfp or likes the same stuff as you lol
We can revive website themes with browser extensions and you can bring back OS themes by using a GNU + Linux distribution.
I remember in Windows 10 being able to change the title bar and taskbar/start menu colours, there's a checkbox you need to activate under the colours selection menu at 1:30.
This is correct.
Yeah for some reason they made having no color the default. It looks awful
yeah i wanted to say the same thing, there is 2 checkbox and ur good to go
DING DING DING! This is an option in Windows 10 and 11. It doesn't appear if you haven't paid for a Windows license because Windows being used for free disables personalization features.
I did this and made it where from a distance if you weren’t paying attention it looked like xp until you opened the start menu or looked closer at the taskbar
I love themeing! I themed Steam a handful of times, used to break Windows trying to install themes from XP era to 7 when you'd have to patch system files, and now work in web development where I had the pleasure of setting up a dark theme for our development system.
I do web design and had the pleasure of kitbashing stock photos together. The entire website was made out of images and also worked on phone with mobile specific images to make the page load a bit faster.
The steam deck has some really cool user made plug-ins for themes. You can make it look like a switch, wii, Xbox, or whatever
What's even more sad, and you might not remember this because you're very young, but phones used to have themes too. Everything was customizable, and each theme changed everything from the menu colors, font, sounds, background etc. And previous versions of Windows (pre Windows 7) were even more cistomizable. Btw does anyone remember the search option in Windows with the golden retriever and other chatacters? Or the talking pin in Microsoft Word? Golden times, truly.
This was fantastic. Themes really had a hold on everyone in some way in the 2000s, especially on Windows Media Player. It was wild back then.
I never really used windows media player when I had windows xp. I wish I did though because those custom themes are amazing.
Hint: Those themes still work in Windows Media Player, which is still part of Windows 11 to this day. Just find the archived WMZ files online, they work just like they used to.
Windows 98 had the best themes. Mystery, Space, Inside Your Computer, Travel, Nature... just thinking about it gives me nostalgia. We later upgraded our Windows 98 PC to XP and the old themes carried over in addition to the new XP ones.
The early 2000s were an exciting time to be alive as the little computer-nerd boy I was. I wish I could go back, and I wish the new generations could have something just like that to experience today. Maybe they do? I hope so.
You can install VirtualBox on Windows 10/11 to create a virtual machine, find an ISO of the Windows 98/Me installer for that virtual machine, and reexperience the old operating systems & themes today. 😀 Although you need to look up how to manually install graphics drivers, and sound won't work properly.
@@ZeeZeeNg VMWare Player/Workstation is a lot better imo, it has more developed graphics drivers too you can play a lot of older games both 2d/3d in your virtual machine and with that, technically you could use your virtual machine as your daily driver since it has better performance than VirtualBox
@@potatoking2597 Good tip, I mentioned Virtualbox coz it's free and I'm more familiar with it.
@@ZeeZeeNg I actually installed a lightweight version of Linux on my 2GB RAM Lenovo D830 ThinkPad, and spent 20 minutes installing Chicago95 (a Win95 theme), and I love it so much lol
(on my main Arch system on my PC I have more of a modern "rice", like rounded corners and transparency but its so clean)
One of the reasons why Firefox is still my favorite browser.
yeah, firefox not only has lots of themes but also has full css support
@@擻 not just themes, my favorite part is that you can customize the placement of every single icon in the menu bar.
I suggest you to try Vivaldi
Why? What does vivaldi have that firefox doesn't? When you get into user.css customization, both can do that. @@fantasmatice999
@@fantasmatice999same, I love Vivaldi AND Firefox
Fun fact: The screensavers weren’t the first time Nintendo and Microsoft teamed up because in 1998, Microsoft did develop collections of their very own PC games and make a collection of them on the Game Boy Color.
Say what you want about Tumblr, but I think they are one of the few social media that allows you to customize your profile/blog. On mobile it only lets you choose background colors, fonts, etc. but on PC/Web browser you can use themes with html code and there are TONS of blog who make a compile themes for you to use
I love seeing how many variations there were, these were so pivotal in making things unique and fun and there was just so much love put in to making these cool custom things and sharing them online for other people to use! Bring BACK custom themes and skins!!
It's so nice to see Gen. Z appreciating the late 00's/early 10's design. There's hope for the world yet.
on the other end, its really cool to see people who's childhood wasn't during that period, a lot of people are quick to dismiss these things as nostalgia, so its good to know its more then that
@@bjiru_ I'm borderline Millennial/Gen Z (born in 1996) and I agree, there's more to it than nostalgia, it was something special.
Nobody is appreciating these designs it’s a nostalgic aesthetic that is nice but its ugly and should stay gone
@@hehasnolips1371you're one of the few people who think that and people like you have personal issues that you need to fix first before giving an opinion about anything. So Fk off where you came
@@bjiru_there's huge revival and rise on frutiger aero and y2k aesthetics if you're interested.
Welcome to the future that boomers promised us yet they lied to steal from us
5:23 maaaaaaan! The feels! I miss those days.... I remember so freaking well this theme for Windows Media Player😢😢😢
kid named kde plasma:
Hey that's what I'm running ;3
The new plasma 6 ocean sounds are awesome
@@ilamparithi.but mah plasma 5 themes 😢
I have it... it isnt enough.
i literally have mine set up in the most default way possible 🔥🔥🤫
honestly this is the reason i love tumblr. you get to make ur blog/account/whatever u want to call it absolutely however u want with custom themes and other stuff. its amazing and its something websites and stuff dont do anymore :[
well technically yes but Tumblr kinda butchered that feature by making people's blog themes harder to actually view compared to how they used to.
and the best part is you don’t need to pay for it! really hoping they keep it as a free feature (despite them making custom html/css increasingly harder to access sadly)
I want to live in a windows 7 wallpaper so bad. Humanity yearns to customise.
Another brilliant video and I’m a bit ashamed to say I haven’t caught up since your ‘virtual worlds’ video. Fashionably late but im glad im subbed 💙
Linux is very cool to play around with and customize however you wish. I'd recommend trying to play around with something like Kubuntu because KDE has amazing customization options, and Ubuntu is rather easy and safe to use ^-^
How strange that such a random and silly video has meant more to me than most things I watch on here
5:08 You just triggered intense nostalgia for me with that one. I had always used that Da Vinci skin back in the days on my first own laptop, thought it was pretty dope. I had pretty much forgotten about it until this video.
holy shit when you were talking about myspace i was like "is he gonna mention spacehey??" and then you did :DDD
‼️SPACEHEY MENTIONED ‼️
YAYY I LUV SPACEHEY
Agreed. Why did we go backwards? I remember when Windows 8 and 8.1 came out, and it was the first Windows OS where applying visual styles became difficult. And Windows 10 and later 11 made it even more difficult. Especially if you wanted the square minimize/maximize/close buttons of Windows XP, because in Windows 8 onwards, all visual styles must have rectangular buttons, so making authentic themes was impossible, unless you have Window Blinds which is a paid software. The Windows XP/Vista/7 era was the peak of visual styles and themes.
I hate Windows 8-11 for many reasons but this is the main one.
The fixed size of the caption buttons in Windows 8+ actually was in Vista, but themes avoided it by using the XP engine (basic theme).
Nowadays, it's fully understood by the community how to change the size of the caption buttons without WindowBlinds by modding DWM.
i love that you can still do all this on tumblr, it's such an archive of the internet olden days
I love this about AO3.
If you really want to, you can customize the website to your liking so it looks personalized for only you.
It certainly isnt perfect and not broad in options, but its cool that they allow you to do something.
This was a great video!! I miss themes and skins and being able to customize things T-T
I love Neocites and being able to see old web creativity :3
finally, someone that i could relate to.
man, i used to be a huge fan of Windows XP's visual styles, i remember looking for them online all the time.
my focus though was the fanmade Windows Longhorn themes, those were the real deal back then.
heck, i even went ahead and got TuneUp Utilities 2013 on my old Windows 7 computer just to apply a visual syle that was similar to the ones in windows XP (you can see that clearly from my old videos on my channel).
I love your channel, I'm from Argentina and it's so beautiful found someone that's has the same nostalgic for the internet when we were kids. great job
you should do a video talking about the flash games from the 2000s :)
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MENTIONING NEOCITIES!! i have a website on there and it's a lot of fun :D i think everyone should try their hand at making one if they have an interest in old web design, it's a great time and there's a friendly community around it :]
This is a big reason why I love having an Android phone. I customize the heck out of it, because I can, and it's fun
i love the vibe these videos have, fun little ramblings on topics i (sometimes) never knew existed and it’s all just so comforting to be honest, along with how the video is edited! i get excited whenever you post :D
I played a lot with the themes on Win95. I remember there was a sahara/lion theme and I loved listening to the shutdown sound, Miss that theme a lot.
edit: The theme was called Dangerous Creatures
yayy neocities mention. neocities webmasters rise up!!
I KNOW YOU OH MY GOD
YOU MADE THE ROBLOX LIMINAL SPACE GAME THAT I WOULD PLAY LIKE EVERY DAY TO SEE IF THERE WERE ANY NEW MAPS
Hello :3
Hi!!! Im still learning :3
YAHHH
The Windows 7 bubbles at 0:42 are actually still a screensaver option in Windows 10.
Now people are complaining about OLED monitors. Most of them probably forgot about using screensavers 🙄
@@marks80 Facts, nobody uses screensavers anymore.
I'm gonna be honest here: I'm not from those times.
Sure, i had a laptop with windows 7 in it back in like 2014 and i played stuff like club penguin and flash games, but im not exactly entirely from the current era, but not exactly from back then, which HURTS cuz i wish i could have those experiences, i like customization because it helps me express myself, so you can imagine how much i HATE minimalism. (not cuz its inherently bad, it could be fun, its because of overuse)
When i saw the stuff about the Windows XP themes that were like, not just color changes but added some cool stuff and details into menus it actually blew my mind, so thank you for that, you showed me a whole new world, ill look into something similar for Windows 10.
If anyone reading this know any cool websites, customization stuff, whatever remotely relating to this and old internet, you could do me a favour and tell me by answering this comment.
Tumblr still allows you to customize your page using HTML similar to the myspace stuff. Just make sure to use the desktop version of the site
7:27 AND IT'S MINE hits hard man❤
I had a youtube channel in 2008-9 too and it was like a social media page with my own backgrounds and themes and all that. I was so upset it died when the 2010s rolled in. I loved it so much.
Yes, even youtube had "themes" in a broader sense.
showing spacehay and neocities etc really made me feel like this was an episode of DONG- things you can do online now, guys. love the nostalgia.
I still can’t comprehend what happened to native Windows default programs like the Media Player and the Picture Viewer. Especially those are unusable nowadays. Often it feels like there are multiple default implementations for each, with one being more invasive than the next.
WMP is still usable even on modern systems. Hell, even Windows Movie Maker still works on Windows 10 (though you'll have to find it on some 3rd party website since Microsoft pulled it from the official Microsoft Store in 2017, which technically means it's abandonware).
Windows Media Player is still on my Windows 11 install. It still supports custom skins from the XP days, just go find the archived WMZ files and play stuff on the big green head. Use CTRL+1, CTRL+2, and CTRL+3 to switch different view modes
I don't use Windows anymore, I switch to Unix based... MacOS and Gnu Linux. More freedom and stability.
I miss massive customization and personalization as a broad feature of software and web design, but I've also managed to carry some of my favorite custom elements over every PC I've used since Windows 98: Starcraft and C&C Red Alert cursor themes, check. Winamp 5.666 "bunker" skin, check (though I actually went and found a new one recently on that same skins archive you showed). For a long time I also used a Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries sound theme for Windows--Making your PC sound like a Mech starting up is pretty sweet.
Since I used Windows Vista and then 7 for such a long time, I've also been determined to keep as close to the Aero aesthetic as possible after finally moving to Windows 10. I would definitely recommend Open Shell to bring back that nice taskbar and start menu look and feel, as well as offer even more customization options than ever before! I even got it working on Windows 11, but thankfully I only need to use that for work--10 is still preferable by far.
I really hope customization and the ability to personalize user profiles etc. comes back into vogue, since I think at this point even people who weren't previously that into customizing what they used are getting tired of every major site / app looking nearly identical.
I miss them too, which is exactly why I *haven't stopped using them.*
I have skins for every program and site as possible to make them adhere to the graphic / web design styles of late 2000s - early 2010s internet. Even for stuff that _didn't exist_ in those time periods like Discord.
How do you do this? Linux?
@@mrbones909yes. You can theme almost everything on Linux, even discord using 3rd party clients
@@mrbones909 No, I use Windows 11
@@mrbones909 no, i use Windows
@@mrbones909 I use a program called WindowBlinds to skin W11 to look like 7, then get a ton of user styles and extensions to make sites get their old layouts back
Dude, that screen shot took me back, haha.
I loved WinAmp for all of its skins too, there were so many obscure metal band ones available at the time. Good stuff.
Y2K and Frutiger Aero, Search them up! (I want this type of shit back)
play Kitten Burst
Frutiger Aero is a hamfisted attempt to categorize an aesthetic that gen-z still can't decide where the lines are drawn. Just say "I like early 2000's interface design"
@@snickerdoooodle frutiger aero is a memorable term that's evocative of the 'vibe' of thing one might be looking for. even if the lines are blurry, the point is that the term exists so people who like it can actually look for and find more of it or things similar to it, as well as like-minded people who also enjoy similar aesthetic choices
When the startup sound from the Landscapes theme played . I got a deep flashback from my old laptop . It's like wherever I ever go , at anytime in the future , when I hear this it immediately sounds like home to me ...
i miss customizing my deviant art and tumblr blog !!! aaa adding bios with stamps that are also gifs and have glitter that show off the fandoms you were in and your favorite characters was so fucking cool u__u aahh i am also nostalgic for older times where we could have personalized shit for ourselves
aaa I only recently learnt about stamps with spacehey, its such a fun thing though, will defiantly be collecting more
I've only experienced new DeviantArt, and although I don't mind how it looks now, it does seem like it used to be a lot more active and fun. AI isn't as prevalent as people say it is imo, but that is also a slight annoyance.
you would like neocities!
Seeing how things are now, I'm so grateful I was born in '89. It was such a great time to be a kid. The world seemed to have so many creative outlets & forms of expression. Ways that kids, teens and adults could enjoy themselves. Places to go, things to do, unique style and design. I really miss the Vibe of that Era where it treated us all like it respected our intelligence, time & experience. While also providing aspects with in our society that help keep our inner kid in us alive. It felt like everything acknowledged how important YOU were as a citizen, customer, fan, person because without us they would be nothing. The creativity that came from that era really put effort into it's ingenuity, not this bland minimalism we see today. I really hope we find a way to reconnect with it because the world really needs it right now. Look how soulless so much has become nowadays? Look at the horrible aesthetics, poor quality & creative design in modern cities, or even in shows, movies, & video games. Things have become so bland, bleek, and minimalistic to the point that it doesn't even make since. Most Old house's/building's/uúnique shop's are gone. Interesting oddities like drive in movies, indoor fun zones, arcade's, magazines that came with a demo disc to try out game's, blockbuster/Hollywood video, McDonald's had N64's & crazy fun zones & art designs all over, you could preview music before buying it, they had great kid's toy's, Roller Rink's, Garbage pale kid's card's. You get the point. Bring back Retro-Futurism or Y2K Vibes. ANYTHING compared to this current Dystopian toxic positivity. Our society feels more lost then it ever has. Society is solely focused on out of control capitalistic agendas. That anything that isn't constantly increasing profits is a failure and has no value to society? Our Quality of Life should be better than this. Basic living shouldn't be this unaffordable. People should be able to have fun, dork around, have things that engage them. The list goes on. Bring me back to the 90's.
I was born in 2004 and I still agree with you. I miss those good old days
totally agree, there is something satisfying and cathartic about "making it yours". To that end, I actually created a desktop notepad app that lets you add an image in the background lol
could u link 2 me ?
@@bjiru_ sorry I did respond to this on mobile but idk if it worked?
i hate having our creativity, themes, and nostalgia being taken away, its like they want to take away the good stuff from us.