Welcome to Bad News World

[cmdr_nova]

There's been a lot of bad news lately, from Rockstar trying to push the cost-of-a-game envelope even further, to Bandcamp firing most of their engineers only a few months after pledging to ban any and all music that even so much as hints at the existence of AI (whose got money on Bandcamp running AI internally as a replacement for their engineers?), and to Sony announcing that physical discs will be discontinued entirely... I find myself continually slipping into nostalgia for the early 2000s.

Don't get me wrong: I really like having a smartphone! And I think all these people below the age of thirty who pine for a dumb-phone that doesn't do anything, are looking into a past they never lived with rose tinted glasses (I almost said sub-level 30). Going about your daily life, especially the slog of being forced to have a job, with no entertainment in your hand whenever you want is torture akin to waterboarding lite.

Yeah, the 8020 looks great! ...as a novelty item.

But when I think of the early 2000s, I think of a Facebook that was less threatening. I think of Mafia Wars and Farmville, and a Toby Turner that wasn't a nazi (but maybe he was always a bad person). I think of The Sims, and my iPod, physical music CDs that you could burn, rip, and load onto that iPod, used cars that only cost like 500 bucks, rent at 600 dollars for a two bedroom apartment, and a World of Warcraft that wasn't wearing the stain of Activision.

Basically, I look back into the 90s, and the 2000s, and I see a time when things were more special, when time moved slower, and every day didn't bring more horrendous news about a billionaire pledging to make everyone's lives worse.

I'm at a crossroads in this technological apocalypse where I'm psyched for the continued advancement of technology and the potential to live forever as a computer person, and also the horrifying reality that the rich will kill all of us to make this a thing, but only for them.

The most you can do, though, is play Yoville on your phone in a scrunched resolution and pretend it's 2010. Just pretend entire countries aren't trying to strip everyone of their rights and their livelihood and their person-hood and their autonomy like fascism is the new shiny fuckin' toy for all of the oldest or richest people in the world who are too afraid to admit to themselves: That they are going to die, and killing everyone in the world isn't going to stop you from getting older and succumbing to the void you're too scared to acknowledge.

Because that's what this is really all about.

The reason the government is still in a choke-hold at the grip of octogenarians is because to the generation that had it all, the one thing they don't want, is death.

Unless it's yours.

But I sure do miss my Xbox 360, and my Mass Effect 2 disc, and the hours I'd spare for myself outside of my job actually feeling excited about something.

Instead of dreading every moment that something even more bad than the last bad thing, is about to happen, again. And finding any semblance of joy, or excitement in my day to day life fading more and more down to the point where it's nothing more than a soft glimmer in the dark.

No wonder I'm tired all of the time.

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Originally published at NovaLandia: https://mkultra.monster/gaming/2026/07/02/bad-news-bearer/