The star of the show was hardware and firmware advancements. Software and content, while increasing in quantity, took a dump in quality. I can’t think of much culturally that would actually define this decade. Much of it was trying to rehash everything previous to it because…I dunno…people gave up…people gave up. But fuck it, the past is salvageable. Thanks internet!

Mashups
At the turn of the century, commercial music creatively lit itself on fire and pranced around until it collapsed on the ground and rolled around a lot. Sure good music has come out this decade and sure most of it is difficult to discover, but what else happened? What band took the world by storm? The answer is none. As much fun as it is watching Radiohead, Tool, Killers, and Arctic Monkeys fans try to stab each other to death, the winner of the decade was the culture movement to shatter the copyright hold on music culture. Bloc Party mixed with Nine Inch Nails, Kanye West thrown against Oasis, Eminem vs Miles Davis, Metallica vs Dolly Parton. Stealing music in waves meant little up against smashing it all together into seventy minute balls worth hundreds of infringement lawsuits. Everything from creation, possession, to listening to most of the products of this subgenre is all kinds of illegal, but the product done well is so worth it. Thank you to TimG, Girl Talk, PartyBen, McSleazy, 2 Many DJs, DJ Food, Soulwax, and countless others for making the spectrum of music suck far, far less than it otherwise would.
(honorable mention: P2P services)

MP3 players.
Remember when music skipped? That sucked. Remember when portable music was limited to fifteen disc tracks or a hundred on a MP3 cd? That sucked. Remember carrying some large disc piece of shit that couldn’t fit in a pocket to save your life? That sucked. If you still carried around a cassette player? Sweet jesus god help your soul. MP3 players came along and made the world a better place. Now you can play music from your pocket, your phone, your watch, your shoe, your hat, anywhere you damn well please. If it exists, there’s probably a version with a MP3 player stuck in it.
(honorable mention: Podcasting)

Custom Soundtracks
Sorry friends, most videogame music sucks. Gaming should be the combined art of visuals, interactivity, and sound. In practice, most works just meh their way through two thirds of those qualities. Thankfully, being able to replace most Xbox 360 soundtracks with your own saves you from 1/3rd of the mediocre qualities in a videogame. Bless their hearts for forcing that. Now if Sony could force this on all developers, we’d be in good business.
(honorable mention: Custom Ringtones/Ringback)

HD Projectors
You’re stuck in a classroom watching a powerpoint of some halfhearted lecture, you look in the back of the machine and see all the A/V inputs that you use for your awesome things, then you think to yourself, “holy shit wouldn’t it be sweet to have this in my house?!” Well friend, for $500 you can. The results are the best any priest could hope for. You can have the biggest personal TV screen in your city if you play your alignment right. The other shocker is I have nothing but contempt for HDTVs when I’m not watching the game. The input lag on almost all of them makes twitch video gaming almost impossible. HD Projectors don’t have these problems. Fuck you HDTV, bless you HD projector.
(honorable mention: free streamed porn)

Touch Smartphones/Personal Digital Assistants
Nothing made me look like I knew what I was doing more than having a personal organizer in my pocket. I had a Palm PDA for the longest time with a 4GB MP3 player in it. This was years before the iTouch. Nowadays, phones with touch capability often have competent organizers built into it. In addition, hundreds of random applications can be hosted by your phone to do any electronic task you can think of. Smartphones are a work of wonder, even if the cell phone service powering them is overpriced junk.
(honorable mention: Nintendo DS)

Cheap Gigabite flash storage/USB drives
Very few things have actually progressed technologically without introducing new waves of problems, artificially destroying another convenience we once had, or screwing up something else. Flash storage is one of those things. I plug a USB thing in my computer that is the size of my finger and hey look at this, 8 gigs to do whatever the hell I want. Thank god this standard is universal, so I can keep a thumbdrive to my keychain and never had to burn a CD or look at a floppy disc again. Good times. Also, I wanna give a shoutout to Sandisk, which seems to be the only hardware company who advanced technology without causing some monkey’s paw side effects, introducing brand new problems to the world, or trying to freeze prices when hardware manufacturing costs reduce.
(honorable mention: Terabyte Hard Drives)

Affordable Personal 5.1+ Surround Sound
“There’s sound coming out of the back of the room!! OMG OMG OMG! It’s like the movie is flying right past me! Fuck yes!” Ah yes, and in FPSs, I can use my surround sound to identify where my surrounding enemies are. I can put in a 5.1 Flaming Lips album and crank the volume up to 80. My movie theater staff won’t do that. They’re a bunch of pussies.
(honorable mention: Bluetooth)

Arrogant Bastard Ale
A giant picture of a drinking gargoyle satan proudly displays on a bottle explaining in great detail why you won’t like it and you’re not worthy of it. 7-11% of 22oz groinkick. I am honored to drink your beer, Mr. Stone Brewing Company.
(honorable mention: $1 Double Cheeseburgers)

Xbox Live Dashboard
Despite this mess being a clusterfuck of avatars, ads, shitty hardware, and a $50 pay per year service, this firmware craziness changed the way I view and play games. Achievements (not gamerscore) give me motive to finish every title I touch. Services like last.fm and Netflix integrate multimedia like I’ve never dreamed. Friends lists let me observe gaming trends in real time, figure out what multiplayer games I could actually put to use, and organize actual play sessions with other people; or I can just bullshit and chat with friends while I do my own thing. All of this functioning with custom soundtracks. It’s all marvelous contraption, and despite 360 having the most horrible hardware and controllers on the planet, I can appreciate what they’ve done for gaming.
(honorable mention: PS’s XMB)

PSPgo
Yeah I’m sick of writing about this thing too, but I’m the only one with anything positive to say, so run with it. This neat little machine has caused a shitstom because very few people (including Sony itself) know how to perceive the device. Gamers still don’t know that storage costs money, so they hate it. Music hipsters love apple shit, so they won’t touch it. Video people still like laptops apparently, so that’s out. Nobody really sees PSPgo as a 14gig MP3 player with a PS2 duct taped to it that can play high quality videos. But hey, for the first time we have a PS2 that finally fits in your goddamn pocket that doesn’t need cartridges and works with Bluetooth controllers, headphones, and internet. It’s about damn time. It’s about damn time.
(honorable mention: Lagless online fighters)

Left 4 Dead/My Friends List
The December of 2008 was a good one. No, fuck Christmas, that didn’t have anything to do with it. I got to spend my days playing a zombie game with three to seven other people. And it was excellent. The forced Co-op experience means I could play as good as I want and not be ostracized, and then we got strange and wonderful ongoings like Phneri teamkilling, LeftyBrown rabblerousing, Tiggermango’s one-liners, and TeeTocks’s radio silence yet constant winning. Fighting a TeeTocks team is the most enjoyable FPS experience I know about.
(honorable mention: Rez HD)

House
Hey look at that, they finally put a huge dick who sorta means well on center stage. Huge Laurie is becoming one of my favorite actors even though it’s still shocking when he uses his real voice. Two things are cool about House: the cases, and the overarching character developments. No other show has two cool things about it. Most shows have nothing cool about them. So I don’t really watch TV, like, ever.
(honorable mention: Adult Swim)

Saw series
Whoever these guys are, they’ve made six movies with pretty cool twist endings. A new movie comes out every year and I haven’t been disappointed with a single one. That’s a good track record. Gore is pretty cool sometimes.
(honorable mention: Pixar’s Streak)

HDTV
When anything good happens on the screen, it must be the HD. The picture turns any sporting event into eye candy. Back when HD was done well on other channels, the picture quality was pretty and made the content of whatever I was viewing just that much more appealing. Cable providers intentionally gimped the signals so the quality is back to SD rubbish on almost everything. Then ya got the thing where HDTVs have so much lag, most gaming is unplayable on them. Ah well, we’re off to a great start. I’m waiting for television to make a comeback.
(honorable mention: Satellite Radio)

Wi-Fi
You’re saying I can pick up internet…over the air? Cool story bro! Like a bug jumping from bubble to bubble in a foam party, coffee shop enthusists with laptops and iPhone peddlers continued their wasting time in any way outside home they could. I didn’t need to think about how to rewire my house with ethernet jacks. Life was good until the neighbors figured out how password protection worked. Fucking Dateline scare tactics.
(honorable mention: Wireless Broadband)

XNA Indie Games
Not that I’ve used it to make a game or anything, but it’s been a good cause to dream. All I wanted to do is make a game and play it on a not PC. Now I can. I have notebooks filled with notes and some ghetto flash testing files lost somewhere. The point is, I have an ongoing dream, and great dreams are awesome. You’ll play my Doppelganger Internet game one day…when we’re old. Very old. As for now, I gotta give a positive word to games like Jump!, I Made a Game With Zombies, Miner Dig Deep, Echoes+, Yes Squid! Not So Octopus!, and fuck Rumble Massage…-unless you’re a chick-…-I guess…
(honorable mention: Wii split controller)

The Wachowski Brothers
Anything these crazy people come out with, it turns my head. From Speed Racer, to Ninja Assassin, to V for Vendetta, to Matrix. These guys know what I’m into and know what to do with these IPs. Sequels by them are a different story. Let’s not talk about that.
(honorable mention: Judd Apatow)

Windows XP
Remember when shit was Y2K compliant? That rush of lunacy was pretty funny. Windows XP stumbled out of the ashes of that clusterfuck and became the silent protagonist of the 00s decade. Nobody really fell in love with it when XP came out, but we all learned it sucked the least for a PC later on. Despite no single praise to give this operating system, it wears the theme song of the software that got us by. And by-golly we got by. Barely. Now we have a black president.
(honorable mention: Mac comeback)

Google
It’s not like Google came out this decade or anything, but I know that I have pretty much zero brand loyalty to whatever. I’ve never stuck with the same company on any service or product for ten straight years; not even Microsoft Windows. Google seems to be some anomaly. They’re not the best at anything and their search systems have been gamed to hell, yet I still keep coming back when I need to find something. Count it.
(honorable mention: Reddit)

Drunken Gamers Radio
‘Cause this isn’t awkward. Naw fuck it, I can defend this. After learning about these guys sometime mid decade, how I dicked around with forums changed, how I researched games changed, how I met people changed, and what I bought changed. It’s not like these guys were directly responsible for revolutions, journalistic integrity, makeovers, and all kinds of wacky shit that Lag would gush about, but the Aarons ‘n John got a small ball rolling; unintentionally of course. It’s not like their impact is about introducing me to new things to try, they more like saved me a ton of money by accidentally talking me out of tons of triple-A titles without going for a Geico joke. Last gen I had one console and like, 150 games. This gen I have 3 consoles and probably 50 games combined. The big thing that keeps me coming back is that these guys don’t make gaming seem embarrassing. They make me laugh, out loud. They work at street level, they’re dedicated to their own opinions, and they’re out to put on a good time. I can get behind that enough to wanna contribute to the cause once in awhile. Even my woman hangs out for the occasional episode when they don’t talk about zombies. I dunno how these guys do it every week, but god bless them for pulling it off. When gaming journalism took a massive desolate shit, I see why these three fuckin’ heroes rose to the top. “♫I’m the fucking♫ captaaaaain♪♪♫” SCIENCE!!!!!!! Taglines friend. Taglines.
(honorable mentions: Shawn Andrich, M.C. Wilson, & Icarus)

Tweet

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Tags: 2000, 2010, stuff of the decade

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Lists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.