Long Ago, It Must be

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

There is a strange theory upheld by a subset of the nuttubers that time stopped in 1999, just before new year’s and everything since then has been a vivid dream.

Look, it’s not even the weirdest theory in that corner of youtube. And in my defense, I only go to youtube when I’m either trying to research something very specific and can’t find it written out, or when I’m trying to not work because I’m too tired/sick and will screw up whatever it is I’m supposed to be working on. In that state of altered…. alteredness, I’ll end up in a loop where I trip from one thing to another.

And that’s why sometimes I end up listening to persuasive talks about how birds are a plot of the CIA, dinosaurs didn’t go existed, they got interstellar travel and have a multi solar system civilization. Or weirder stuff.

And to be fair the weird idea that we have all been vivid dreaming since 1999 is not the weirdest one even outside youtube. I mean, Phillip K. Dick thought that time had stopped in the first century AD, right after the crucifixion, and we were all living in something like a virtual chamber that disguised this fact. (If I understood him correctly, which I might not have.) I mean, there is a population increase, but that theory would sure explain the NPCs we run into, no?

But when the I heard that thing about time having stopped in 1999 I had a moment of complete and absolute longing.

Oh, to go back to that year. To wake up and find out none of these things had happened, all these years that have treated us so very badly. To find the friends who died and are dearly missed still alive; their future unwritten. To find out we still had all the friends that … you know the ones I say “I remember when he/she was sane.” To be able to write things without having everyone (other than the NYC publishing establishment, of course) dissect its sad little entrails to figure out what message I’m sending and what I’m “trying” to say. (In fiction? Usually nothing. I mean, there’s ideas I’m playing with, but they’re likely not what people are liable to think they are. Like the thing for this upcoming (almost done with the revision, I SWEAR) novel is not “fun with sex roles” it’s “clash of cultures with hard and fast framing that can’t be changed.” If I have a message I want to get out? I write a blog post.) And people won’t run around with their heads on fire saying vicious things about me. Or if they do, they’ll have to do it in person, which takes longer.

Oh, I’m not going to lie to you, and I’m not stupid. Crazy at times, but not stupid. I know the attraction of this erasing of a quarter century includes the fact I’d be under forty and have a lot more energy and ability to do things. And if I remembered a few things I’ve found (like, altitude bad) the next twenty years could have been a lot more productive.

But mostly it was this feeling I’d like to go back to when the world was saner.

but it was that thought of “people wouldn’t say vicious things behind my back about offenses I committed only in their heads” that called me back to sanity.

Yes, they did. And on top of that, they played a game of telephone while doing it. And not only could you get yourself hard cancelled for things that you couldn’t control (because you didn’t know you weren’t supposed to step on THAT square) but it wasn’t public, so people assumed that you were no longer being published because you either didn’t sell, or you had done something heinous. And the heinous things were assumed to be terrible and other people would cancel you without even knowing what it was, just knowing you weren’t in favor. And you couldn’t convince anyone at large that it was going on. People would think you were crazy.

But it went beyond that. You know how I said I miss all the friends I had (so many) of whom I say “I remember when he/she was sane.”

For some it’s true. Some cracked wide particularly these last 5 years. And before that, the seeds of insanity might have been there, but they were more or less functional and sane. (Some for values of sane as pertaining to writers.)

But for the vast majority, we tolerated them. Note it was we tolerated them. We were isolated. There was no blogsphere, no social media. We assumed that we were “extreme” and unacceptable and more importantly alone or in a tiny minority. So we used our inside voices all the time. We kept quiet.

They didn’t. They thought they were not just the majority but the only opinion among the smart people. In fact their opinions were what made them smart. They still think that, but it was more so back then.

So they would announce things apropos nothing, like “Ahah, Reagn sure is stupid.” And you put up with it, because, well, that was normal. That was acceptable behavior.

And provided we stayed quiet, and didn’t call out the Marxist assumptions in their stories, or meekly accept when they (for values of editors) demanded you incorporate Marxism in yours, you were in fact fine, and you could co-exist.

…. And were pushed steadily closer to the point of no return, while they had full coverage from the only press to do what they wanted.

So, even the lockdowns? They could have done them. And got away with them better. The difference is that they’d still be getting away with it, and the rest of us would be wondering just how bad that virus was, not seen through it.

Of course, the likelihood of their doing the lockdowns was low, because they weren’t desperate. It was desperation that forced them to become vicious.

Which means we’d be living in a fool’s paradise. But not really, because we had to “tolerate” them while they controlled everything and we couldn’t fight back because no one believed we were being oppressed and cancelled. We ourselves didn’t believe it. We kept lying to ourselves.

You know what? As badly as the last few years have treated us, as battered and bruised as we feel, and as much as we’d give to go back to our years of innocence, Heinlein was right: Always travel forward.

The past wasn’t as gold as it seems and as scary as the future looks, there’s hope in it.

Always forward. Let’s build a better future.

111 thoughts on “Long Ago, It Must be”

  3. I can see some charms of returning to 1999, and I have a little list….

    Nah. I have no desire to go back to what -I- was in 1999. Despite the little item that I might avoid a whole bunch of drama and tragedy, I really don’t want to be that me again. Plus, some really cool folks would no longer exist. And I would not have found some really cool people. (even though we often argue) Also finding a Savior is kinda important, so would not want to revert on that point. If only for that, I pass.

    Seeing some folks again would be cool. (See you again soon.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The question is if minor changes by a single individual would have major changes to the overall future for everyone? Like not killing Hitler, but taking a job with one company over another or eating a specific sandwich instead of soup on a certain Tuesday?

      (There is the “butterfly theory” and some aspect of chaos/nonlinear dynamics concerning 3-boby orbits initial conditions and yada verses the overwhelming river of time…)

      If my “past” person was allowed accurate knowledge of the future knowing that it was correct, would I take advantage of that, knowing aspects of my “current present and future” would change. Financially I’d say “YES!” , but I’d have to ponder the rest. I wouldn’t try to save the world, but I might be able to make it a bit better for a few more people.

      But all that is a teeth dream, since you have to play the cards you are dealt the best you can and the arrow of time usually goes one way up your butt without lube.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. You’d have to go back to the late 1970s but:

        Get IBM to use the Motorola MC68000 in their PC, instead of that POS 8088. Microware OS-9/68K instead of MS-DOG. That would change everything about computers for the better.

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        1. Heck yeah!

          68K was much easier to program. Just need to have a path beyond the PowerPC for the systems that aren’t mainframes.

          Also set up a BSD environment to win, instead of Linux. Stupid AT&T lawsuit.

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          1. If this is a religions discussion, please ignore, but seriously, can you give me a TL;DR about BSD vs Linux? (Base point, I know Linux, don’t know BSD at all.)

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            1. Lots of articles on line.

              I was a user of BSD, at Berkeley, even, and used various other *NIX flavors, but never LINUX.

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              1. See if DDG has something under bsd vs linux. Found something. Doubt I’d change; been using Slackware Linux for well over a dozen years.

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          2. One of the many reasons to go with OS-9. No connection to UNIX at all.

            The original OS-9 was developed for, and on, the MC6809. A full-on multiuser, pre-emptive multitasking OS that ran on an 8-bit CPU with 64K of RAM. The MC68000 version added lots more features.

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        2. Oh hell yeah! I programmed for OS-9 on both 6809 and 680×0 processors and it was the slickest multitasking OS I’ve ever worked with. I used it from about 1986 until 1997 when my 68000 workstation died. In a way it was my first love in the operating system space.

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          1. I wrote a better OS-9 floppy disk device driver for the Radio Shack Color Computer way back in 1983/1984 and posted it to the comp.sci.os9 group. Wrote a bunch of other system utilities, too.

            The 6809 has the densest machine code I’ve ever seen. Gets an amazing amount done with tiny binaries. My floppy disk driver was under 400 bytes.

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  4. I’d still be on the road to engagement. Deeper in debt. Wouldn’t have the fuzzballs, or the current house. Upside, relatives would still be alive, the most of them. Downside, I’d be less wise to the world. Bigger downside, still writing horror, not HFY.

    Eh. Nostalgia’s a thing, but I still remember who I was back then. And what world I was in. Not going back. That’s crazy talk.

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    2. I was crawling out of debt, still living in the (not quite then) People’s Republic of San Jose, Cali-f’n-ornia, and starting to see the rumblings of the great Silicon-less Valley of the future.

      Not married to $SPOUSE, but we’d survived the worst of the emotional storms and stayed together. Then-current house needed a lot of work, wasn’t much of a priority at the time. The next few years got lively, and 4 years later we left for the saner portion of Oregon. Still had Mom and step-Dad, along with future MIL, and step-FIL (can’t win them all; his passing was a net positive), along with future BIL and Nephew (both definately or likely victims of Fauci.)

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      1. tanglemud at wordpress, Search Dan Lane author at Royal Road, same at Scribblehub. This is a pseudonym, but most of the stuff I write now is right there. Haven’t been able to update much of late, health issues and suchlike, but chapters are still getting written whenever I can steal time.

        Liked by 1 person

  5. There was/is an old saying: “You are what you are because of what you were.” Or… something like that. Anyway, as I deal with the ‘grief’ process after having the wife die I’ve learned that the past pain, joy, etc. doesn’t go away it evolves. Yeah, 1999 was an odd time and while there was (for me) good and bad – I’m content that it’s the past. Now, dealing with today and what tomorrow will bring is my primary focus.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. Yeah. Not wife, but beloved relatives.

      Slightly off-topic, here’s a palate cleanser about beagles rescued from a Fauci test lab. It got seriously dusty when I saw this. (The 5 hour power outage last night made me eager for good vibes. Yes, you can move a CPAP machine without waking $SPOUSE if necessary. Thanks to the emergency power trailer. The other good news, no fires on the property from lightning storms, and I figured out that the well pump PV system’s lightning protection device actually works, and how to reset it.

      https://files.catbox.moe/bw00yk.mp4

      Liked by 1 person

  6. “They thought they were not just the majority but the only opinion among the smart people….they would announce things apropos nothing, like “Ahah, Reagan sure is stupid.”

    They may still think that, but, as I noticed at WonderCon this year, they now say it almost under their breaths. I guess you really don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Saturday Night Live once did a skit in which Reagan pretended to be an amiable dunce in public, but turned into a Machiavellian plotter in private meetings with his Cabinet. Everyone was supposed to laugh because it was so obviously counterfactual …

      Except that skit was much closer to the real man than any Democrat would let themselves recognize at the time.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Back when SNL was still (occasionally) funny.

        The joke of course was within the drug-addled SNL writers room bubble “everybody knew” he was just an actor moron. None of them would ever listen to the radio spot scripts wrote himself, and recorded, which show deep thinking on major issues, and the philosophical grounding that moved him from the loser at the 1976 GOP convention to the runaway winner at the 1980 one.

        No need to- all their friends in Manhattan agree…

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Instead of giving a link and risking the wrath of the AI hiding inside WP, look on your fave book buying site for “Reagan, In His Own Hand”.

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  7. If I could go back in time to 1999 knowing what The Author had planned for the next 26 years, I’d probably have to go visit my wisest uncle and have a long talk about the future. Or go crazy. Or both. I was making major changes life in a few years and fore knowledge could be really helpful. Or not.

    Knowing about financial trends and choices. Knowing about family and friends. Having the knowledge and money of an older man in a younger man’s body. It would be a Faustian situation, a spiritual gauntlet to avoid hedonism and ruin.

    I do miss the wisdom of my uncle.

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    1. This was my initial reaction – what’s the functional difference between wanting to go back to 1999 with what I know now and Old Scratch offering me the world? In either scenario, I suspect it would be tough to hold onto my soul.

      I’m also right there with you on wanting to seek the wisdom of those we lost in the interim. as a young man in the 90s, I regularly mowed the lawn of an elderly shut-in, who with his wife functioned sort of as a surrogate set of grandparents for myself and siblings. He was a WWII vet, got his feet wet wearing the big red one on June 6th ’44, and after getting a ticket-home wound somewhere in northern France, met his wife in the hospital in Charleston, moved to VA, and got shot again in the line of duty, this time as a police officer. He passed on April Fool’s day of 2000, and not a single April has come around since that I don’t wish I had been more willing to stop, sit down, and listen to that man tell his stories.

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  8. ’99 wasn’t too bad for me. Hadn’t yet started working for someone better with the job I had been doing (I loved the job enough to put up with some supreme stupidity from the owners and middle manager), slightly better shape, less arthritic (felt like Fred Sandford walking across the warehouse a few minutes ago) And stress was a bit too much (that’d change come 2000) but That was not yet fully clear. I’d take the body over the current. I’d not like the situation of that point over the current (own house outright, no debt but to myself, but Living in Michigan now v. living in Louisiana then is a wash, prefer Texas)

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  9. that could be real fun, i was definitely having a good run back then, ah the memories.

    as a OT side, there really is no reasoning with libs. I just got to avoid them and bite my tongue when i cant, got a bunch of them at work, yesterday i was trying to diffuse and get it to lets not talk politics and none of that stuff really matters in our little lives because we cant do anything about it, but these guys kept going, buncha hipocrates all of em

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  10. I read a short story based on the idea that the first test of a nuclear bomb destroyed life on Earth and after we were ghosts living in an illusion. 😉

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Neither was I. 😉

        Note, I “think” the two main characters were alive at the time of the First Nuke Test.

        Liked by 1 person

  11. I watch quite a bit of the tube of yuse. It’s great for how-to videos. Mostly I just watch for entertainment purposes like; military adjacent commentary (Shawn Ryan, Task & Purpose, Mover & Gonky, Preston Stewart), history stuff (Fat Electrician, The History Guy), news (Megan Kelly), political/economic commentary (VDH,Thomas Sowell, Razorfist), standup/sketch comedy (Crackermilk, Matt Rife), and “relationship advice” vlogs (Emily W. King, Dadvocate). The common thread through most of them is they have some comedy of some sort. Like wikipedia it gives quite a few good pointers, but I wouldn’t use it actual research though.

    I’m actually quite pumped for the future right now. I don’t think I’d really want to go back. Some of that is that Trump back in office, and we’re seeing some sanity in domestic policy. I have a coworker that is suffering TDS pretty hard. She keeps talking about him not being very smart, and that he’s crazy. I’m not sure how you build a billion dollar real estate empire not being very smart, but I think the reason many people think he’s “crazy” is that he doesn’t approach problems like a politician, but rather as a business owner.

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  12. “…strange theory upheld by a subset of the nuttubers that time stopped in 1999, just before new year’s…”

    On the one hand, sometimes I feel like 2020 was four years long, and this is 2021. I think there’s an argument to be made that we’ve experienced a timeline jump. I’d put it at 1989, not ’99. Everything after 1989 just felt fake to me. Where we are now? Super fake.

    But on the other hand, looking back over my long curmudgeonly career as a malcontent and sh1t disturber, I can see that we never had a timeline jump. The fakeness and bullsh1ttery has been there all along. Going back to -way- before I was born.

    It is just that NOW we can -see- them doing it in real time. The Rodney King riots were exactly the same thing as what’s going on in LA this week, and the same as #BLM in 2020. Same mechanism, same people paying for it to happen, same people organizing it. 1992 was pre-internet, we relied on the news.

    The news hasn’t changed. They tried to pretend the Rooftop Koreans were monsters in ’92, and they’re still pretending the same thing today. Literally today, they’re talking schlitz about Commie mayor Bass for calling a curfew. Literally today, the media has egg on their faces because so many of the rioters arrested last night were -convicted- murderers, rapists, robbers, drug dealers, etc. All somehow released from the US penal system, all foreigners in the USA illegally, and all out there burning stuff for pay.

    Looking backward, this is all the same since the 1960s. They’ve been doing it to us for over SIXTY YEARS, and only now do we each individually have the power to penetrate the smoke screen.

    They, the shadowy They we never see out in the open, are the same. They have not changed.

    WE have changed. We are not the scared little waifs of the Cold War, threatened with nuclear armageddon every single day. We are no longer the “f- it let’s have a party” kids of the 1980s, tired of the Cold War and just not caring about politics any more. We’re not even the somewhat suspicious adults of the 1990s, wondering what happened to our flying car. We were promised flying cars, remember?

    Nope. It’s 2025, and an ever-growing number of people are wise to the BS. We are p1ssed off and we’re not going to take it anymore. Thank you, Tim Berners Lee and an untold host of computer nerds for waking the slumbering Normies.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. There are time I suspect timeline shifts due to being unable to find things I do know happened. Though of late that might simply be that search is just that amazingly crap. I have experienced a time time glitches. Only a few minutes, and nothing of seeming significance. Things I where I look at the time, note it’s 2:15. Look at my watch and see it at 2:09 and wonder why size cell the thing takes. Get back to the desk or such and the system clock and watch agree that’s it’s… 2:15. Things like that have happened to me three time now, that I can recall, over the year.

      Liked by 1 person

  13. RE: Blogs –

    There were blogs in 1999, some of which are still around today (though many aren’t). But 9/11, and the left’s reaction to it, really seems to have served as an impetus for the creation of a lot more blogs. Notably, it caused some who had thought themselves lefties to reevaluate their fellow travelers and finally acknowledge that they were on the right. People like Roger L. Simon – who started PJ Media – and NeoNeoCon formally switched to the right and started their blogs due to 9/11 and the left’s response.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. How many blogs came from Verdant Oblate Spheroids*? JawaReport, JihadWatch, I think a couple of the mil-blogs, maybe Ace of Spades, several of the people who ended up at Pajamas Media/ PJMedia?

      *Aka The-Blog-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, because the owner lost his mind in the BlogWars, poor guy.

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      2. To an extent this blog. It was my hangout post 9/11. Though this blog became political when Breitbart died. “Well, I guess I must do something” was the thought. This was something.

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          1. And may George, Charlotte and all their companions pay homage to her.😉

            (And that will probably be my last reference to your “children”…)

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    2. By the late 1980s, Usenet was active, and the groups bear a faint semblance to social (and antisocial) media today. I was thinking about a thread on rec.bikes dated over 20 years ago, and wanting to share it with Laughing Wolf. Don’t have the search-fu to try to find it, even if r.b is archived somewhere.

      Plenty of disagreements and the odd flamewar, but they tended to be focused (mostly) on the relevant topic.

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        1. I remember the Green Card Spam. And “Make Money Fast!” And Kibo.

          Also certain complaints from certain posters in the science fiction newsgroups complaining about the presence of those StupidEvil conservative and libertarian posters. There’s a case that the left-wing move to blogs was driven by a desire for walled gardens where Nice People could have Nice Conversations without those StupidEvils harshing their mellow.

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          2. Kibo. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard for more years than I care to think about. Memory unreliable, but wasn’t his real name James Perry? (Checked Wiki; it was “Parry”) And was it Kibo or someone else who posted endless pics of traffic cones?

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        2. I was lucky. Tended to hit the more tech|hands-on oriented sites*, along with rec.music.synth and rec.bikes. Not enough traffic to collect the spam posts, and if memory serves, the killfile was workable. “Plonk!”

          For unknown reasons, I skipped the SF groups. Was spending a bit too much time on Usenet anyway… Happy to say I didn’t know the political views of 99.9% of the posters I ran across. (OTOH, the AfterY2K webcomic forum had a couple of interesting/creepy leftoids.)

          ((*)) rec.crafts.metalworking, r.c.woodworking

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  14. Would not go back – I’d end up in a world without the Dragonette, but I’d remember the world with her and that would be horrible.

    But if I could guarantee I’d still get my Mini-Me, I would go back to 1999 and do my absolute best to kill social media aborning. I’m convinced that’s the reason the world went crazy about politics and race in 2008 – before FB we had to live with the people around us, but now we have ‘friends’ all over the world, and we can winnow out the ones with icky politics and beliefs.

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  15. Due to their own actions and the violence they use to cover their lies, I can not in good conscious respect or give Liberals/Democrats the benefit of any doubt. They are now and will forever be the enemy, the dark, evil, Satan incarnate. This they have earned, be aware that your party is forever stained with that evil and so are you. I will never help you, I will never save you, I leave your fate to Karma, you don’t deserve the time it would take for revenge. But make no mistake, I will never lift a finger to save you, now or ever. Karma has a cold heart and you deserve every depth of that coldness. You are traitors, you desire power and wealth, may the gods give you everything you deserve not what you desire, and may your desires lead you straight to hell. The anger I feel after La. and everything since 1999 is resolute, may you all die in the depths of hell burning for an eternity.

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    1. And yet, the guy that saves -us- demands we -love- our enemy. Wow.

      Yeah. I struggle mightily with that one. I try to remember I used to be hard Left, and wised up. As did various friends and family.

      For practical reasons, it is still a good idea to separate the sheep from the goats. Every oen we “red pill” is that much less effect the rest can have. And some are simply unaware of a practical alternative to their leftviews.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. And it seems like they are making it so easy lately, especially with “ignore the live videos of mostly peaceful attacks and arson and looting, and that dead body over there, all requiring a curfew – don’t believe your own eyes, just think what we tell you to think…”

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      2. And praying for someone is one of the fastest ways to soften hatred. Cognitive dissonance, don’t y’know.

        Himself is, of course, a great psychologist.

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        1. It depends. Remember the advice in Screwtape Letters about how praying for someone in terms of their sins is a way to rub the grievance a little more raw?

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          1. Oh, yes. Which is why I try to say, “Bless them as you choose.”

            Which does not relieve the occasional sense of chagrin when He does.

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      3. love the sentiment. I often feel as orphengeorge does, then my lovely reminds me of HIS words. That said in good Jewish tradition my understanding is that the love we give our enemy heaps burning coals on their heads. Coals of shame and regret and bitterness and possible enough regret to seek repentance. Where we move on knowing we are forgiven and saved. They are left empty.

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          1. A traditional comment about someone doing exactly what they excoriated another (or another group) for is “they should look in a mirror.”

            Problem is, the traditional reason that, say, vampires can’t see themselves in a mirror is that the mirror shows the truth, which displays the lack of a soul. So for a lot of people, looking in a mirror may not show them anything, because there’s no truth to see. ;)

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        2. In very traditional Judaism (a few hundred years BC), those coals would be literal. There are 2 viable states for an enemy once diplomacy has failed: conquered, or dead.

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  16. I’d still be living abroad, number two son would be immanent, the wife would still be a red head, World Trade Center would still stand, I’d be building the short case that carried me through the tech bust. Good times. No regrets but yes good times

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  17. I wasn’t thinking the infection had gotten to the US (which in hindsight was…shortsighted) but my wakeup call was 9/11. After the Wall fell I thought the world was safe. Until 9/11. But the world never was and never will be. And unless the world becomes like the US they will envy and hate us because we are exceptional. Every action against us is predicated on that.

    Jolie LaChance KG7IQC unstagehand@yahoo.com

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    1. The idea of “the End of History” bugged me. History doesn’t end (until the Universe and Time does anyway) it changes, sure, Now, the End of an Era (or Error) is another matter.

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      1. I was in junior high when that phrase came out, and even at that age I knew it was ridiculous. (And very myopic; at the same time they said that there were wars all over the place, just not in the Cold War areas at that moment.)

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  18. You can’t change the past. You can ignore it, you can lie about it, you can try to erase it, but it’s still there, unchanged.

    You can’t change the future, but you can steer toward the one you want. Just remember the current and the wind are the ones in control, not you.

    What you can change is how you react to and live in the present. Be the best person you can be in the here and now.

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  20. I want my weight and body from 1999 back, please. The bad knee and hip would still be bad, but the other stuff wouldn’t have appeared yet, and I’d know to be more careful about certain things.

    Otherwise? I don’t know. But I’d be better prepared to deal with That One Supervisor at my 1999 job, the guy I learned so much about not managing people from. (What would he do? I don’t do it, or do close to the opposite.)

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    1. That supervisor sounds like the department head from my first engineering job (management by tantrum); part of my job entailed apologizing to people in other departments who he pissed off; then I could get to the real task. Not fun for an introverted engineer.

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  21. I’ll take our current timeline, thanks. I get my wife (met in 2000) that way. And get to meet you and all the rest of the Hunnish crew.

    So I think I’m fine the way things are, though admittedly there are still a lot of folks out there who need half a helicopter ride (in Minecraft).

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  22. I’m torn. Going back with memories intact would allow me to side-step some of my mistakes.

    At the same time it’s tempting to go back before I learned some of those hard lessons. But to go back, just to have to learn it all again?

    Best to leave it as it is.

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    1. I forget where I read it (some SF magazine when there was still trace of non-suckage in them?), but I recall a story where a person “gets” to go back to early life and, with accumulated knowledge/awareness, start over… only to realize TOO LATE that going through elementary school, junior high, high school, etc. a second time *while having to fake being normal, for the most part* was the Very Definition of **HELL**.

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      1. Piper’s “Time and Time Again” had that theme, but the “returnee’s” father listened to him, believed him (with evidence) and made it work.

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  23. On a personal level, at the end of 1999 I was just starting my freshman year in college. It was a good time. The college was liberal but not yet nuts, I had the chance to study whatever I wanted, and my entire future was before me. There were endless possibilities then, most of which have been, well, ended by now.

    But, on the other hand, at least some of those possibilities have turned into realities. Yeah, I can’t help feeling that if I’d been smarter then, I could have done better, but is it worth trading the life I have now, with a husband and child I love very much, as well as five books and two dozen short stories all published, for the chance that in a different timeline I could have done better?

    As far as the world goes, it’s hard to say. It’s clear we made a lot of mistakes in the first couple of decades of the 21st century, most of which we’ll be paying for a long time from now. But whose to say that we wouldn’t do even worse in hindsight? I don’t know that we’re in the best of all possible worlds, but I’m pretty sure that we’re not in the worst.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. I meant what I said above about praying for the hateful. At the same time, I’m well north of “irritated,” on a course toward, “seriously ticked off,” due to my beloved’s FB feed.

    Wherein, more (former, I guess) friends are in, “I can’t have anything to do with someone who supports fascists (i.e., Trump)” mode. They’re also posting messages encouraging military members to become “conscientious objectors,” and stand up against the looming tide of fascism, and repeating libels about ICE raiding a first-grade graduation in LA and “kidnapping,” children. The sowers of discord are working overtime.

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  25. The world in 1999 was the same as it is now. The only difference is we didn’t know who the enemy was then. Or our true friends, for that matter.

    Now, however, we know who they are so we can pray for the enemy’s immortal souls…after their eventual defeat. And for glorious victory for the righteous.

    It is good to have a list of people for whom we need to pray. Keeps us busy while Himself takes cares of business.

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  26. Despite a certain amount of temptation, I wouldn’t want to go back.

    Three things give a glow to the past:

    1. We were younger then.
    2. We tend to forget about the Good Stuff we didn’t have in the past.
    3. We know now that we survived the bad parts.

    And much of the recent & current fear comes not from ignorance about how good we now have it (ice machines, gas stoves, private cars, home ownership, no social credit, hot showers without timers, actual hamburgers made from beef instead of crickets…) but from knowing how hard the Enemy Left has been working to take those Nice Things away.

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  27. IN 1999 we had a internet and it was starting to panic about nonsense ie y2k.

    Mass media happily lied there faces off but we did not know how much they where lying, or maybe it was only me who did not know.

    But yes it was simpler time. in 72? I thought that by 2000 I would be so old 4x my current age and yet that was 25 years ago.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Y2K is interesting, because it WAS a real problem, but it was never as bad as it was portrayed. At no point would airplanes ever have been falling out of the sky on Jan 1st, 2000, for example, even if no effort had been put in to fixing the issues. BUT there were some very real issues involved with systems that used 2-digit years (for example, banking and other financial transactions would have been seriously screwed up if one-quarter of the computers involved thought it was Jan 1st 1900 instead of 2000), and the fact that none of those issues happened on Jan 1st, 2000 is solely because of the HUGE amount of work that was put in in the previous couple of years. Lots of COBOL programmers came out of retirement in 1998 and 1999, made about a million dollars each, then retired again in 2000.

      No question that the media definitely oversold it; absolutely. But there were some very real problems that were being oversold.

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      1. There’s also a year 2038 problem, which the media is NOT going to overhype because it takes the tiniest smidgen of understanding how computers work to understand that there’s a problem. (And therefore the American news media won’t be able to understand that there’s a problem). Short version is, any computers running a 32-bit version of Linux will have an incorrect date in their internal clock after 3 AM Greenwich Mean Time (about 10 PM Eastern) on January 19th, 2038. If they haven’t been upgraded to a 64-bit operating system by that point, their internal clocks will go from January 19th, 2038 to December 13th, 1901. But nearly all of them have already been upgraded, because 64-bit processors have been standard for the past 15 years, so it’s pretty much a non-issue.

        The explanation isn’t all that complicated, either. Linux systems, like Unix before them, keep their internal clock as a single number that represents the number of seconds since an arbitrary point in time (midnight Greenwich Mean Time on January 1st, 1970). That number used to be represented with 32 bits (4 bytes) because that was the standard size for numbers on a 32-bit processor. However, 32-bit processors CAN calculate 64-bit numbers, it just takes extra work so programmers didn’t used to use 64-bit numbers unless there’s a real need to. 32-bit numbers come in two flavors, signed or unsigned. Unsigned numbers can represent any value from 0 to nearly 4.3 billion (4,294,967,295 to be precise, which is 2^32 – 1). Signed numbers use one of the 32 bits to represent the sign (1 means negative, 0 means positive) so they can represent any value from -2 billion to +2 billion (precisely -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647 — the asymmetry is due to technical reasons I won’t explain here, but look up “two’s complement representation” if you want all the gory details). Also, due to how two’s complement representation works, if you have a signed 32-bit number containing 2,147,483,647 and you add 1 to it, the resulting number will be -2,147,483,648. Not going to explain why here because it would take too long, but again, look up “two’s complement representation” if you want to understand.

        Now, it just so happens that 2,147,483,647 seconds after midnight on January 1st, 1970 is about 3 AM on January 19th, 2038. And 2,147,483,648 seconds before midnight on January 1st, 1970 is about 8:45 PM on December 13, 1901. And now you understand the Y2K38 bug.

        The fix is simple: make sure your Linux computer is running a 64-bit version of the operating system, which 99.95% of them already are. And for those few that are forced to run 32-bit versions of the OS because they’re on a 32-bit processor from the early 2000’s, well, there are ways to switch the time representation to use 64 bits even though the rest of the operating system is still in 32-bit mode. It takes more work, but it can be done. So even those computers with 32-bit processors that are still in use by 2038 will be able to be fixed. (And there will be some; just look at the systems still in use today that use floppy disks. Some of them were mentioned on Instapundit in the past week). It won’t require nearly the full-court press effort that Y2K did, but it will require at least a little bit of diligence to check that Linux systems don’t end up thinking it’s 1901 when it’s really January 20th, 2038.

        (And if you’re wondering how long until a 64-bit counter does the same thing and flips over to the wrong time? The answer is about 292 billion years. So no worries.)

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        1. Windows has a similar issue, by the way, but with a different cutoff date. The internal time representation in Windows counts the number of 100-nanosecond “ticks” (or the number of tenths-of-a-microsecond) since an arbitrary date, which for Windows is midnight GMT on January 1st, 1601. With that fine a resolution, naturally Windows never used 32-bit numbers for the counter to begin with. The 64-bit “tick” counter that Windows uses internally will overflow in the year 30,828. This will, of course, be the event that kicks off the Horus Heresy, so one can’t really say there is “no” problem at all… but none of us are going to be around to see it.

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            1. you *know* there will be that one random computer running legacy DOS 5 that is the keystone of the Galactic AI’s judgment architecture

              Liked by 1 person

      2. In late 1997 I was the sole programmer/systems analyst/operator on a health insurance company computer that literally was hard-wired with 12/31/1999 as the maximum date it would recognize. I wrote and submitted a document to management saying they needed to make plans to find a new computer ASAP and start programming it to handle all of the underwriting systems before Y2K.

        Fortunately, they listened and they acted. It did take two years but the company had a new Oracle system up and running and all the data migrated without a glitch well before the drop-dead date. New computer, new operating system, even a new programming language (PLSql). But we did it. Because it had to be done.

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      3. My brother, a contract programmer, made a shit-ton of money in 1999. He went to The Keys after for an extended vacation.

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      4. My brother, a contract programmer, made a shit-ton of money in 1999. He went to The Keys after for an extended vacation.

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  28. My initial reaction was that there’s no way I’d want to go back to 1999 because back then traditional publishing was The Only Game In Town — and then I thought that, if I could just keep my memories of the future, I could know that the situation would change, so I needed to write and finish as many novels as possible, and not stop halfway through with the certainty that there was no way to get an acquiring editor interested. And to go indie early, when the bar to entry was still low, instead of being afraid it was a cruel trick to catch us out when they took it all away, until it became hard to get an audience because there were so many authors and so many books out there.

    And to know to keep focused and use the eighteen months of the 2020/21 shutdown to write like crazy, instead of spinning my wheels trying to chase crumbs of information about what conventions were happening and which weren’t (hint: none of them would, until July of 2021). I could’ve gotten so much more written if I hadn’t gotten on that particular hamster wheel.

    But it may be just feeling my mortality particularly strongly because all the achy joints are complaining after I spent a couple of hours yesterday evening cutting weeds and brush in our backyard, getting ready to plant the second and third beds of our garden. So much to write, and so little time left (especially if I got the dementia genes that run in my mother’s father’s family).

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  29. 1999?

    Mom and Dad were or just had moved out of the house where I was born and raised. I was trying to find work after about three years of just…not being able to do anything at all but small gigs here and there. The only reason I could stay in the Bay Area was one of my uncles let me stay with him at his place for a month. Then…Santa Rosa. Then, Crazy Roommate through the girl I was seeing at the time. Then one temp job after another until I had just interviewed for a full-time job…and the tech market crashed the next year.

    If was back…I would tell myself to not be so afraid that the doctors were going to throw me in the psych ward if I talked about my feelings. That I was depressed and functionally autistic, not ADD. To embrace my writing talent. To watch SFSU so that the day they started their Technical and Professional Writing program to jump in with both feet. To exercise more, even if it was just long walks. To do what I threatened my sister with-go around with a squirt bottle and spray her every time she smoked.

    To…take better care of myself.

    But the past is a country we can never return to. And knowing how bad things could have been, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. To…take better care of myself.

      That was my mom’s line – ‘If I had known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself.’

      Liked by 2 people

      2. My mom too. She’s actually in pretty good shape compared to her sister and surviving inlaws.

        Or why I’m trying to get my weight down and in better shape. Even dad’s side of the family, while the men tend to die younger, the women don’t. Mom’s side of the family live into their ’90s.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Yeah. I read a thing that was convincing on the subject of “if you live past 65, you’ll probably outlive your parents.” Since dad is heading for 100 (let’s put it this way, not for a few years, but he can see it from there) at a clip, I…. well another 40 years is a long time to live with a breaking-down body. If I’m going to live that long, there’s books to write. And given tech maybe AI animated films to make and….

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          1. Well, got the “past 65” part down. Have 4 years to surpass dad’s year died.

            Mom has a few years to go to “out live” her parents (95 and 93 respectively). She’s 90.

            Hubby just hit the age his parents each died at (73). His brother and sister have surpassed 73 (almost 80). Given his sister is a fragile type 1 diabetic, this was not expected.

            It’ll be what it’ll be.

            OTOH we finally got the legal stuff taken care of. With one snag. What happens if the kid dies without direct heirs or what happens if we are all in same accident and no one survives the 30 day legality. Oh, there is a law for that. I’m not happy with that option. So we needed to cover that. Most important. I trust the kid to properly take care of the animals. I do not trust the legal options. Plus while I don’t have a problem with his side of the family (surviving siblings) inheriting, I have a huge problem with ultimate heirs of his brother (nope, not happening. Petty? Yes.) My heir (mom, at this point). Okay, ultimately sisters and their kids would get it. Don’t need it.

            Liked by 1 person

      3. When $YoungestAunt died in a bizarre accident, Ma mused that she always figured she’d go first, being the eldest… and it was pointed out that perhaps with the exception of $YoungestAunt, she was the most in-shape of the siblings. She eats with care, and when the weather allows it, walks at least a couple miles a day.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Every one of my father’s siblings got Type 1 diabetes, probably through Grandmother. (She still outlived Granddad by 13 years and he made it to 70). Dad was told he was, “borderline,” diabetic and to cut out sugar. He did. He was, so far as I know, the only one of them to do that. He also walked with my mom until his hip gave out.

          He outlived every one of his siblings. (Good news for me is I have Mom’s body type, only taller, rather than their rectangular-tending-to-pear shape. The bad news is Mom and Grandmom both had dementia).

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        2. My father-in-law was the last one standing of his siblings, despite having lived with bad asthma all of his life. (Bad enough that when my husband was born, they didn’t project that he’d live to see my husband grow up, let alone graduate and get married.)

          You can’t always figure which one will stubborn it out.

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  30. When I think honestly about how I actually operate, I realize there is not one iota of a chance that I would make better decisions if I had a mulligan.

    I’d make some different decisions, sure, but there’s no guarantee they’d turn out better in the long run.

    It is worthwhile to me to know which people would gleefully turn me over to the gestapo. It’s also worthwhile to me to know that I am NOT one of those people who would turn friends and family in to the gestapo.

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    1. This wasn’t about going back and changing. if this were all a dream, what we “know” would make no sense, anyway. This was about a momentary surge of joy at all this being a dream. Then…..

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  31. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » IF YOU THINK THE LEFT WAS LESS VICIOUS IN THE PAST, YOU’RE NOT REMEMBERING RIGHT:  Long Ago, It Mus
  32. Pingback: Bygone Times – Splendid Isolation

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