November 1993 - Atmosphere (photo album)

I don't remember 1993 as I was just a baby, but it feels so homely and familiar. Very uncanny.

Thinking some more, this era has a weird "baseball and apple pie" vibe for me, though that's at least partially related to the old tapes and reruns I watched when I was little. Movies like "The Sandlot" and "Dennis the Menace" from 1993 show this Americana, longing for simpler times trend, that I suppose Boomer nostalgia helped fuel. Even though the grunge movement was alive and well, among other rebellious or nonconformist subcultures, you wouldn't really know it from looking at so many "everyday" type photos. It's like there's this collective desire for innocence even if real life didn't actually mirror it. Something somber, melancholy even, behind the smiles that makes me uncomfortable.

Certain aspects of the plainness remind me of a few 2010's moments, oddly enough. I can't really put my finger on what it is. Maybe it's the sweaters or the vsco filters or the trying to pretend everything is alright.

That's such a nostalgic era for me. Back during 1993, I was still quite young, like early elementary age, but I do have some recollections.

That's around when Power Rangers became popular, and I started watching that show afternoons on our local Fox Kids Club on WXTX Fox 54. My parents would often tape the show, and I saved some of those tapes. I'm pretty sure we still didn't have cable yet, so I could only watch Nick whenever I was over at somebody else's house. I liked going to our local video store, and renting games for my brand new SNES, since my parents only got me a few. Back then, only rich kids had computers, and CD players. My kindergarten teacher had an Apple II computer in her classroom, and that was the first computer that I ever used early that year.

As cheesy as it might sound, that truly was a different era. There was no social media, or even web. You got the news by watching Peter Jennings on the evening news. You watched whatever came on the broadcast networks, and those shows were cultural icons. When I look back on my childhood, the notion of kids these days walking around with iPhones and stuff like that would have been ridiculous.

Woah, that's dark...

I could understand computers still being unaffordable for most people back then, but I would have thought that CD players would have been reasonably standard by 1993. It probably varied from area to area though.