I would say you’re looking for Texmex cuisine, which is the Americanized version of Mexican food that’s heavy with the cheeses and sauces, and Sino-American cuisine, which is the Americanized Chinese food and also includes things like fortune cookies which are most definitely not Chinese in origin.

Though I might just say “American” cuisine as that would include those things, and also very American foods like pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs.

To me, Fahrenheit is a lot like inches and feet for carpentry. As in it’s fine for things like describing the weather and setting my house’s thermostat. It mostly falls apart for must other things, though it’s still okay for cooking and baking. From a scientific perspective, any temperature scale that isn’t zero at absolute zero is nonsense, so it’s pretty much Kelvin or bust.

I’d assume that if we are ever communicating with aliens and trying to figure out each other’s way of expressing numbers and doing math, dimensionless constants like pi, Euler’s number (e), the fine structure constant, etc. will be important first steps. As you say, our units of measure are purely human inventions. But the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is the same no matter what units you use to make the measurement.

We easily produce enough food to feed everyone with our current technology level. Making it free and available to everyone is mostly a logistics and economic problem.

Along somewhat similar lines, I wouldn’t mind a fan that monitored my temperature while sleeping and adjusts its speed accordingly.

Not really. The pieces are already in place with UEFI and Secure Boot. All that would need to happen would be to force Secure Boot to be enabled, and only preload keys for an approved list of operating systems. With that, your fancy new motherboard may not be able to boot and run the OS of your choice.

Electricity would be tempting. If you have access to water, you can boil it to make it safe. Run a refrigerator to store food. A convenient source of heat for cooking. Stay warm in the winter, stay cool in the summer. Lights for when it’s dark. Use power tools to build things. Listen to music, watch movies, play those old Nintendo games.

Even after some time when your electronics break down and scavenging working ones gets tough, it’s not difficult to build things like simple resistive heaters. Making crude incandescent light bulbs wouldn’t be impossible either.

While they were not sold in America, you could theoretically import a first gen model under the older than 25 years rule without too much trouble. Thanks to the internet getting parts wouldn’t be too hard, though you’d want some form of backup transportation as you may have to wait a bit for them to arrive.

And from Diablo II…

“Guess what! I’ve named a boil on my ass after you. It, too, bothers me every time I sit down.” - Gheed

“He who controls the past, commands the future. He who commands the future, conquers the past.” - Kane, Command & Conquer

Kane of course was just paraphrasing 1984.

Leaving your house without your papers and government issued ID.

I bought a mechanical keyboard back when this whole mechanical keyboard fad was in its infancy back in the mid-2000’s. Honestly, the main reason I bought it was because I thought the key backlighting was cool. It’s a nice keyboard, but I find a decent membrane keyboard (such as what I have at work) to work just as well for a fraction of the cost.

I suppose I can’t complain about the durability though, as it’s lasted nearly 20 years now.

Not too long ago I checked out the current state of what is out there, and it’s just nuts with all the choices. Not to mention all the fanatics that seem to like to build dozens of keyboards.

Interestingly, despite all the heavy customization of things like switches and keycaps, there seems to be very little ability to customize the layout. Many of the various compact keyboards out there make some interesting design choices (IMHO) about what keys they leave off, and where they distribute the keys that they decide to still include. I wouldn’t mind taking a short at creating my own compact layout, but that doesn’t seem to be what the hobby is about.

I don’t think there were SSDs that large when they first came out in the late 2000’s. I saved up for an 80GB one back around 2009, and it was an absolute piece of trash. It was fast when it wanted to be, but most of the time it would randomly stutter and just go unresponsive for several seconds causing the rest of the PC to hang up until it decided to start responding again. After fighting with it for too long, I replaced it with a traditional harddrive which at least behaved as it was supposed to.

It was several years later before I tried another SSD, buying a relatively inexpensive 120GB drive that actually did live up to the hype.

Well, actually thinking about you would have to split the 1995 internet into the internet and the world wide web. I actually spent a considerable amount of time on usenet - this of course being back when it was more than alt.binaries. Probably around then I also discovered MP3s, and the main way I had of getting a hold of those long before the days of Napster was public FTP sites. With any luck, when I found a good one there would be others mentioned in the greeting and/or some sort of readme that I could then go check out. I could also try snagging them on usenet, but the server my ISP ran didn’t really put much effort into making sure the binaries groups had any sort of decent retention, but every once and a while I could snag something. I also still had access to AOL, but I don’t recall doing much in their client other than checking email.

In any case, that was all outside of the WWW. As for the WWW I remember using to do things like look up guides to video games I was playing, and other fun stuff like looking up Star Wars and Star Trek fan sites. It was more of a toy for me - for things like getting news, looking at the weather, or researching things I tended to go to “traditional” sources. Honestly, the whole every website had had animated gifs, blink tags, MIDI music, and horrible background images is more a meme than anything else. Sure, that’s not to say there weren’t sites like that, but even so that was more of a late 1990’s-mid 2000’s thing (coughMySpacecough). In 1995 most things still pretty simple. In 1995 trying to get too fancy would result in your site taking a while to load at 14.4k (a single MP3 took forever), and would grind the average PC (something like a 486 with 4-8MB of RAM) to a halt.

As for cars, I agree with the OP is the 1990’s is when the typical new car took a big leap in terms of quality. What they lack is the cool factor that cars from the 60’s have. Things have gotten better since then in general, though I’d argue that some things like usability and ergonomics have taken a hit.

Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn’t enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn’t had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices.

I’m sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn’t available in 95, so yeah, it might have become “enshittified” but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book.

Do you remember the internet back then? Sure, there were some truly terrible websites around back then, but most of the internet wasn’t like what MySpace looked like a decade later.

Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn’t worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don’t even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn’t all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap.

As someone who was around back then, the quality of 90’s cars were far better than the 70-80’s cars that preceded them (in general). By the 1990’s a lot of issues that plagued the early electronics in cars (late 70’s-80’s) had been sorted out, things like fuel injection became standard, the quality of paints improved drastically - 1990’s cars didn’t rust out nearly as bad as cars from previous decades. Of course most of these cars are gone now - the newest 1990’s cars are over 25 years old at this point, but it’s still not uncommon to see them driving around. Much more so than seeing cars from the 60’s-70’s driving around in the 1990’s.

It surprises me how little stick-built houses have changed in the last 50 years or so, at least in the USA.

Some rope lights would be a nice touch.

You’re thinking of a swamp cooler. In some places they work great, in other places they’re next to useless.

Air conditioners are called that because they “condition” the air by not just cooling but also by reducing the humidity.

That 1990’s McDonald’s picture is the specific restaurant that was across the entrance from the Dallas Zoo, hence the animal theme. While it’s now remodeled and much more dull, it still looked like the picture up until just a few years ago. In any case, it’s not typical of what a McDonald’s has ever looked like.

As someone born around the same time as you, I do remember when the typical McDonald’s had a bright red roof with the yellow lights, which the 2000’s pic is a toned-down version of.

It works out for Dvorak.