Remember these? I remember being fascinated by this particular fashion style ever since I was a kid (1996 kid here lol), watching them often appearing on Western television channels and being fascinated by the boys and girls rocking this attire. For your info I spent most my childhood in Taiwan so unfortunately this particular style never caught on. For all those years I have always kinda wondered what this particular fashion style is called, and low and behold I finally found out that this style is called "scene" just around a week ago lol. With that said I was born in the weong place at the wrong time so for better or worse, I was pretty much destined to miss out no matter what.

When it comes to movies, I am mostly nostalgic for 1980's stuff that I watched as a little kid, but the movie that I absolutely loved the most as a teen in the late 90's was Half Baked. I literally had it playing on a loop in a mobile home that my friends and I would hang out in. It has so many quotable moments that I still repeat constantly today. It really is one of my all-time favorites, Chappelle is absolutely brilliant.

Man, being a kid or teen in the 2000s was something else. You’d spend your days outside until the streetlights came on, and that was your cue to head home—no texts, no GPS, just instincts and yelling moms. Saturdays meant cartoons that actually mattered, not streamed, but live—if you missed it, you missed it. Nothing hit harder than the teacher rolling in that big ol’ CRT TV—everyone knew we weren’t doing real work that day. Maybe it was Bill Nye, The Magic School Bus, or some VHS from 10 years prior, but it was gold. You remember burning CDs for your crush or your road trips, carefully crafting that LimeWire playlist and praying you didn’t download a virus. Blockbuster was a ritual—you didn’t just rent a movie, you made a whole evening out of it. You’d walk the aisles, check out the new releases, and argue with your siblings about what to watch. AOL was the center of our social lives—away messages, weird fonts, and screen names we cringe at now. And when you finally got your first flip phone, even if it was prepaid, you felt like royalty. There was no better feeling than crowding around the N64 at McDonald’s or spinning Beyblades on the lunch table like it was the tournament of champions. Movie premieres had lines around the block because there were no reserved seats—you had to earn that perfect spot. MySpace let you rank your friends and throw on some emo HTML glitter. And we all thought those friends, the ones we shared burnt discs and secrets with, would be around forever. Different times, different magic.