My 1999:

• Waitresses had been calling me “sir” for at least a few years at that point.
• My first gray hairs were sprouting.
• I was building a blogging engine for the BDSM community I operated. And migrating the whole community platform from a custom —and horrifically inefficient— flat-file XML database to a slightly faster Access backend. (It was several more years before I moved to MySQL.)
• Shakespeare In Love won the Oscar, which wasn’t the most egregious winner ever, but certainly in the top —bottom?— 15.
• Columbine happpened… I remember being pissed that those two dweebs made Doom look bad.
• Napster materialized. I remember being pissed that Lars and James made Metallica look bad.
• Putin took over. I remember thinking I was going to miss having a Russian president named “Boris”.
• I saw this video with a hot cheerleader asking to be hit one more time.
• “My Name Is” and “Guilty Conscience” were in heavy rotation on my CD-based MP3 player.
• Cher made us all familiar with AutoTune. And then Buffy’s freshman roommate tried to kill us with it.
• “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things” amused me.
• “Nookie”, “Break Stuff”, and —dear God, just typing this hurts my fingers— “9 Teen 90 Nine” did not amuse me. Listening to Durst moan “touch my balls and my ass” on his leaked sex-tape, OTOH…
• I did not go to Woodstock ‘99. In retrospect, I’m happy with this decision.
• I will never get over the night I played Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West” on the stream and everyone collectively blinked and said as one, “Will Smith had a music career?” Yes, children. He did.
• Someone tried to murder George Harrison; presumably his wounds gently weeped.
• Susan Lucci finally won an embarrassingly beta Daytime Emmy, thus shutting her up forever. And the world rejoiced.
• “I see dead people.” And two very different career trajectories.
• Lessee… says here The Prisoner of Azkaban was released. Which I guess made me The Jailer of Didntgiveafuckington.
• Keanu Reeves starred in My Big Fat Trans Allegory. I thought it was gorgeous, but it didn’t really make me go “woah.” It made an awesome DVD demo, though!
• My personal Best Picture was Magnolia, hands down. Nothing else was even in the ballpark.
• Meanwhile, I know many of my Tumblr followers have spent countless hours mastursobbing to Girl, Interrupted.
• “What would Brian Boitano do, if he were here right now? He’d make a plan and follow through, that’s what Brian Boitano’d do!”
• Craig Kilborn walked away from The Daily Show, and the total concentration of smug in American skies instantly decreased by 7.8%
• Family Guy showed up and made lots of noise. Took me years to get into it at all… my initial distaste tracked with Trey Parker’s.
• I forgot Hank Azaria married Helen Hunt. Given the brevity of their marriage, they probably wish they could join me in blissful forgetfulness.
• Cold Case Files was —in terms of sustained excellence— one of my all-time favorite shows. Listening to Bill Kurtis’ endearingly weird delivery of the words “the body” every episode was an experience to be savored.
• Of all the early Food Network personalities, Alton Brown is the only one I still care about.
• Jay Mohr is kind of an asshole today, but in ‘99 he was the lead in the best one-and-done sitcom of the year, Action. And wasn’t Go released in ‘99, too? Jay had a busy year.
• Freaks ‘n Geeks, Popular, and Roswell began their (respectively) shockingly brief, absurdly truncated, and bizarrely lengthy runs.
• NewsRadio, Homicide: Life on the Streets, and MST3K all ended their consistently delightful and impressive runs.

Your 1999:

• Goo goo.
• Giggled at a sparkly thing.
• Cried.
• Pissed self.
• Fell asleep attempting to roll over.

Which —let’s face it— is just your 2024, minus:

• Scrolled Instagram and furiously masturbated