It’s been months now since the series finale of Stranger Things, and fans are forgetting… they’re forgetting quickly.
Not just the friendships we made with each other, or the rekindled family moments watching the show and talking about theories together… but the friends we had on the show too. They were ours. We cried for Max Mayfield when she faced Vecna. We cheered for Murray Bauman. We stood against the Soviets. We were wrapped in nostalgia.
And now… we just have nostalgia for the nostalgia.
There’s a dullness to it now, like a blunted edge. The new animated series is coming, and no one really seems to care. The fading light of the The Duffer Brothers has cast a shadow over their newest project, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. And maybe that title says more than it should about what happened when we saw the show!
Because something very bad did happen. The fading star of Stranger Things.
It was with us for nearly a decade… and then it was gone in an instant. So fast. Quietly slipping away with that closing credit scene, carried out by the haunting echo of a David Bowie song. It didn’t leave with a thud… it left with a whimper.
Remember the days leading up to the finale? When we were all hoping like hell that Conformity Gate was real… that there was a secret episode coming. One more piece. One more answer. One more night in Hawkins. It never came.
It was never going to. But even now, months later, sitting with it… I still feel like Vecna won.
I know it was just fiction. I know that. But in this world that felt so real… it didn’t feel like a victory. We saw conformity through Mike’s eyes, and the ending felt bleak in a way that lingers longer than it should.
Maybe one day we’ll get that reunion. Maybe the cast comes back, set in the 90s. Maybe we see who stayed friends… and who didn’t. Just like life.
Because that’s the part that hits the hardest… they move on. And so do we. But every now and then, I catch myself. I have to snap out of it… out of that nostalgic fog where I’m thinking about a show that was never real, about people who never existed.
The eulogy-like sendoff… it just lingers there as a reminder. Time moves on and things that feel massive today become memories tomorrow. And eventually they become something we almost forget.
A lot of people dabbled in early internet by using places like Angelfire to express themselves. And until just a few weeks ago, those early internet sites were still there for everyone to enjoy..
They are now gone.
People who didn’t live through it won’t get it. ICQ numbers and AOL names as a contact? People saying “welcome to my page” At the top like you were entering some type of business meeting.. Awkward family photos.. Guestbooks you are being asked to sign!? My ICQ was ICQ NUMBER: 29085260..
This was a great time to be alive during the old internet era. We were like pioneers in the wild west. Sure, by comparison to the wild west and the Oregon Trail game, it’s a much safer environment, and the biggest danger we had was not cholera or smallpox, but instead dial-up connections. However, we were charting new ground. Back then, people didn’t quite know what to make of it. Were things real? Were people real? You couldn’t really tell but chances are in the early net, people exploring online were actually the real thing.
A lot of people were on various pages like Angelfire and GeoCities. And when these pages go away, it creates some sort of a strange void.
It’s almost like thinking your local mall is still open, and then you show up just to see it got knocked down.
There is no Angelfire anymore. And if you had, from the late 1990s to the very early 2000s, anything with family-related events or photographs or stories or blogs, it’s gone. It may still exist on Archive.org, thankfully for that, but for the most part, the real pages of what existed are all gone. Depending on how you felt about yourself 26 years ago, you may or may not like that an archive still exists …
It’s interesting because a lot of people most likely had family websites on Angelfire, and they don’t even know that those pages are gone now. By the time Angelfire told its users that the pages were shutting down, most people had already tuned out. Many didn’t even assume their pages were still working. I, for one, knew mine were still up all these 27 years later. I would go back to them now and then, maybe three or four times per year, just for the fun of it. It was when I went back recently that I discovered it was gone. Then I did some more research and realized they are all gone.
It is like corporate fast food chains. Everyone decries how now they all look the same.. same color, same design, modern. All the colors from the past are gone. The same thing happened with Angelfire and GeoCities. Think about those moving GIF backgrounds. They were horrible to read. You couldn’t tell what the font looked like. The horror sites had blood dripping down. Other sites had sports GIFs all over the place. It was chaotic and even at times ridiculous.
But they were the days.
Let me just picture it. You go to some Angelfire website, and the first thing you see is a GIF of a dancing Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. It has nothing to do with the page. But that’s because the person who made the page loved Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. That’s what Angelfire was like, just a big, giant collection of junk and gunk with words in between. Like AI slop now, but just edited and created by real humans to express their own personal slop.. emblematic of the person who created it.
Angelfire is actually what led me to learn HTML coding. Now listen, my coding is not really as necessary these days as it once was because of AI or structured websites that are already created for people in a box, but back then, you had to learn the old-fashioned way. Not only were you on Angelfire and your mom was telling you to get off the internet so she could make a phone call, but you were in the middle of saving your index with HTML coding, which might have broken the entire thing, and you just couldn’t find out until mom was done with that call.
No calls cut us off now, but internet outages still happen, and when they happen, now they’re bigger.
I think in a way people will look back and romanticize things like Angelfire a lot more than what they deserve. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the easiest time, and the websites were clearly not the nicest. But it was something. It was almost like your little space on the internet—somewhat like what MySpace was. Literally the term “MySpace.” Then Facebook came around and changed the game. Things always come around and change the game. That’s okay, it’s the natural progression of how these things work.
But what seems to be painful is that with all the changes, we’re running out of space for the old stuff. The old internet was extremely important, and people who didn’t live through it will never quite understand or appreciate the daily happenings online. There was no social media and had to learn how to find things yourself instead of things being sent to you because of an algorithm. You sought out websites and found your favorite writers or bloggers and communicated with people in a personal way.
Social media is constant now. So much so that it’s overwhelming. This is not natural for our minds, folks.
But back then, you were slower about this. You were more methodical and could carve your path on the internet the way you wanted to, not the way a corporation would feed it to you.
There are people out there who have done their best at preserving the internet. Some have preserved GeoCities. I don’t know if Angelfire was ever really preserved the same way. GeoCities felt like one of the first real blog-style platforms where people kept updating things, and eventually that morphed into Blogger and everything else that followed. Angelfire felt different because it was more static. More like a personal statement. A website before websites became what they are now.
Angelfire didn’t collapse because of some dramatic scandal. It just… faded. Lycos, its parent company, quietly shut down the free hosting after years of decline. The internet moved on. People moved on. The infrastructure got old and the demand disappeared. And one day, something that existed for decades just didn’t anymore.
On Friday, August 21, 2026, I’ll be screening “H4” right next to the former Vincent Drug building featured in the film – at The Bambino restaurant on their outdoor patio, located directly beside Vincent Drug. The restaurant will be serving pizza and desserts all evening and as the sun goes down over Midvale, Halloween music will echo through the night… and The Shape returns!
This is the hottest nostalgic Halloween ticket of thr summer!
If it was 1971 and you really liked clowns, chances are you could have filled every room in your house with these amazingly frightening lamps straight from the JCPenney catalog.
Don’t be too scared .. it’s just a little taste of John Wayne Gacy in every room… or Pennywise the Dancing Clown… or even that infamous clown from Poltergeist, though that one hadn’t yet terrorized anyone because this was 1971.
Maybe clowns were more simple and less sinister back then. Maybe all the clown-related events that have unfolded in the decades since have slowly morphed our collective clown repertoire into something darker. Because when I look at this picture, I don’t just see playful décor. I get a little heebie-jeebie feeling. There’s something about that blank, wide-eyed stare that hints at carnage rather than comfort.
I can’t help but wonder how many kids had one of these glowing in the corner of their bedroom. And I wonder if any are still around today.. tucked away in the back of an antique shop, or sitting quietly on some auction block.
Not that we’d buy one.
But we’d definitely like to see it… preferably displayed in someone else’s house.
This morning when I woke up, I noticed that Netflix added a new category to its main page called Let’s Pretend It’s 2016. It features movies and television shows like the Ghostbusters remake, The OA, and of course Stranger Things, since Season 1 appeared ten years ago.
Seeing that listing was a reminder of just how many things have come and gone on Netflix… and, honestly, how much better things used to feel. Over the last decade, everything seems to have gone downhill. So much of what’s released now feels rushed, made without much care or concern, with lackluster scripts and very few fresh ideas. But go back just ten years, to 2016, and we kind of had it made. We just didn’t know it.
Back then we were probably complaining that Netflix had already dumbed things down, that there wasn’t much to watch, and that the best entertainment was from ten or twenty years earlier. Little did we realize that here in 2026 we’d be decrying the bad writing of Stranger Things Season 5 and missing shows that were genuinely binge-worthy, not ones you casually glance at on a boring snowy weekend.
It’s nice to see this category, but it’s also bittersweet. Nostalgia can be one of the most dangerous things… it has a way of creating unrealistic memories of the past. Things weren’t always that great, and tomorrow isn’t always as bad as it seems. But when it comes to entertainment, movies, and television shows on Netflix, things really might be as bad as they feel right now.
So I guess this weekend, as the snow falls outside, I’ll watch what I watched ten years ago… and maybe it’ll feel new again.
In a desperate attempt to change the narrative away from Stranger Things posts for the last week, or maybe just as a brief respite from entertainment and movies altogether, we’re going to focus on dreams. That’s fun. Or, in my case, last night’s nightmare.
Every now and then I have a dream this memorable .. a nightmare that sticks with you .. and last night was one of those sleepless nights. It was the 3:00 a.m. witching hour when I woke up. That seems to be the most popular time for a nightmare to abruptly pull you out of your nocturnal decommission.
In this situation, the abrupt nature was a giant inflatable lumberjack.
Let me explain.
In the dream, there was a bluish tint to the atmosphere and fresh-fallen snow covering a giant yard .. presumably my yard. I noticed something underneath the snow, struggling to move. When I went down to investigate, it turned out to be an inflatable lumberjack. How cute. Have fun.
It started innocently, with the lumberjack now freed from the heavy snow on top of it and able to inflate freely. But as dreams tend to go, it didn’t stop there. Literally. It just kept inflating, to the point where it was potentially 30 to 40 feet high, and that’s when it started to frighten me.
So, in the dream, I ran back to the house for safety. When I looked out the window, the lumberjack decided to grab a giant inflatable axe, detach himself from the strings holding him down, and run at the house at full speed.
What a strange concept — a lumberjack, let alone a 40-foot inflatable lumberjack, charging at you at full speed.
It’s weird because it was just a dream, but it’s the kind of dream that stayed with me all day. There could be plenty of reasons why it happened. Maybe it’s stress. Maybe there’s something in my own life coming at me full speed that I need to grasp or grapple with.
Or maybe it was just too much vino at the hotel bar. Either way, I asked AI to make a gritty four-panel comic based on my very detailed description. It didn’t quite capture the full inflatable rendering, the size and ferocity of the lumberjack, but it’s good enough for me.
So I present it for your approval, with the help of our ever-increasing spy device known as AI. Enjoy: The Inflatable Lumberjack Dream, comic-style.
Picture it: Christmas 1990. You’re sitting there playing Zelda, and you just can’t figure out what to do next. You’re stuck, it’s ruining Christmas, your family’s angry, you’re angry, and you don’t want to throw the controller at the TV. What do you do? Well, this is 1990. We didn’t have Google, we didn’t have AI, we only had the word of mouth of others. And in this case, your friend circle has no idea what you should do next.
Who are you going to call? You’re going to call the Nintendo phone number helpline.
Yes, there was a Nintendo helpline where you, as a gamer, could call up and not speak to a computer, but actually talk to a real person. You’d describe the scene you were in, the level you were stuck on, and that person.. who might literally be playing Nintendo games while on the line.. would give you the advice you needed.
Talk about an amazing snapshot in time, right? I think back to it and realize that as a kid, I learned to find secrets or figure out glitches in games through pure perseverance or maybe a tip from another kid at school. There was no internet walkthrough; you either figured it out yourself or called someone who could walk you through it like a gaming therapist. And that was part of the challenge and the fun.
You know, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if I ever end up with Alzheimer’s and find myself in a nursing home, I want someone to bring me a Nintendo. Because no matter what happens to my brain, I guarantee I can still beat Mario 3.
Christmas time is here again. The annual ritual of spending cash you really don’t have. Society expects it!! Get that card out!
Like you, I’m out there right now wandering the stores, scrolling the apps, perusing the malls that still exist and matching the prices up with the Amazon option. I get panicky this time of year because I haven’t purchased much yet. I check my bank account (you do it too), and I realize there just isn’t much time left until the big day … food, medicine? Or Christmas gifts. What do you spend on in December?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9TByT3QlWc
Every year I try to be one of those organized people who gets things done early.. knock a few gifts out in November, finish up the first week of December. Because we all know what happens if you don’t: the Panic Purchases begin.
We’ve all been there. You see nervous husbands frozen in the appliance aisle. You see kids staring at some sad-looking afghan blanket, trying to convince themselves, “Yeah, Mom would probably like that.”
Let’s be honest: most of us already have enough stuff. We don’t really need much of anything on Christmas. But we’ve been programmed for decades to think we have to buy, buy, buy.
So go buy. Be a part of something.. 🙂
As you get older, it actually becomes more fulfilling to buy something for someone else that genuinely makes them smile. The only problem is that we still wait too long to start looking for that “special” thing. So we end up right back in that blender aisle, trying to justify why someone in life might really want to circular-saw their fruits and vegetables into mush all year long.
That’s a different story for a different post. We have digressed too long.
Toy Ad Nostalgia: The Real Christmas Catalog
One of my favorite things about this time of year isn’t the new stuff… it’s the old stuff. Specifically: old Christmas ads. Especially toy ads.
We all feel those toy ads, right?
For me and many, the sweet spot is the late ’80s and early ’90s. That’s when my childhood was starting to age out of toys, but not quite yet. Right before everything shifted into “I just want money” mode. You may be prompted into the inebriation of nostalgia from the 70s, maybe the 50s.. Maybe even the 2010s! Any way you slice it, the same effects on the mind and body occur.
Those were the years when the toy spreads in the Sunday paper or the department store flyers looked absolutely magical:
He-Man figures lined up like plastic warriors
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in all their neon glory
The Nintendo Entertainment System taking over living rooms one cartridge at a time
I remember one of the greatest Christmases of my entire life like it was yesterday. I got:
A Super Mario game for Nintendo
A Batman game for Nintendo
A red bean bag
A blue bean bag
The colors matched Mario. That was it. That was the list. And somehow, that simple combination still stands out in my mind as the Best Christmas Ever™.
Before that, when I was younger, I remember getting Tonka toys—real metal, heavy, practically indestructible. That was also the year Christmas collided with a stomach bug. I spent part of that magical morning sick, but here’s the thing: even with that, the memories still come back warm. A little queasy, but warm.
Old Ads, Old Prices, New Reality
So here’s what I want to do with this post:
I’ve got a couple of old Christmas toy ads I want to share with you. Take a good look at the prices in those ads. The toys, the games, the “big” items.
Below each ad, we’ll break down a few of those prices and talk about what they’d roughly translate to in today’s money. How much would that Nintendo, that action figure set, or that Tonka truck actually cost now if you adjusted it for inflation?
Because back then, a toy that cost $19.99 felt like a big deal. Now we blink at $49.99 like, “Eh, that’s just what stuff costs.”
We used a typical inflation calculator to see what the Nintendo was.. $237 in today’s money. and even in today’s dollars that would be VERY affordable compared to the high priced almost $1000 dollar gaming consoles of today’s gaming market. And you ca n OWN a game then, BATMAN, for 40 bucks.. That would be $96 today. So yes.. we are being taken advantage of in today’s gaming market, right?
But just stop and appreciate that 1990s. That was the year I got the bean bags, BATMAN, and MARIO 3.. life changing childhood moment.
A year before the greatest Christmas ever I most likely before the $3.99 BATMAN action figures.. My parents got me BATMAN and the JOKER and BOB THE GOON. They spent $15 bucks on those, and in today’s money about $11 each. But yet in 2025, action figures in stores are 20 bucks or more… Again, are we being used by corporations?
Kids drooled over the SEGA by 89 as Nintendo faced competition.. It was pricer at $189
So now we are talking bigger money.. that is almost $500 in today’s cash. We are getting closer to the Playstation or xBox..
Ad for the heck of it in 1986 when you may have craved a Wuzzle at the Schuylkill Mall.
$1.99 then! Not even $6 bucks now .. Great deal. I am sure if they were existent today they would be $20 on sale. And if you kept it in a box, you could sell in on eBay TODAY for $99 bucks (according to sell prices), which by the way was $33 bucks in 1986. Reverse.. deflation.. See how that worked?
So money talked.. Money was spent. Bills long paid, or ignored.. We have moved on.
What make it all so special in the past?
Maybe it wasn’t the price. Maybe it was the bean bags. They meant more than anything else..
Revisiting the 1990 It miniseries is like stepping back into a time when horror on TV had to dance carefully around the censors and when a clown named Pennywise became an icon dancing on the little screen.
I remember it well: I was ten years old, my homework half-finished, and the only way I could get to watch that eagerly anticipated TV event was by promising I’d get my work done. It was absolutely life-changing for a young movie fan like me.
ABC took a pretty bold leap adapting Stephen King’s It for prime-time television. Sure, they had to cut out the more graphic and adult themes from the novel. The blood and gore was minimized to nearly nothing. The unsettling moments got toned down so they wouldn’t scare the living daylights out of a wide audience watching that night. But even with all those network limitations, they created something truly special.
A big portion of the magic was Tim Curry.
His portrayal of Pennywise wasn’t buried in monster makeup. It was a deceptively simple clown design—almost friendly on the surface, which somehow made it even more terrifying. Curry didn’t rely on special effects or gore but instead was able to subtlety have presence, voice, and a simple smile. That haunting, unforgettable smile. In a time when horror icons like Freddy and Jason dominated with blades and blood, Pennywise chilled you with charm and menace and a little paper boat for Georgie.
The production itself had challenges. There were delays, rewrites, and debate within ABC about just how far they could go. But the cast, both kids and adults, brought heart to the screen. The chemistry was real, and despite the limitations of the format, they managed to breathe life into King’s story. Curry’s performance was so commanding that he overshadowed everything else and become the most anticipated part of the made for TV series.
Yes, even that ending with the not-so-great giant spider was lousy.. but being honest, that part’s a bit of a punchline now when you watch it again.. but somehow Curry held the whole thing together and ages like a fine wine.
There are no reports of any dramatic on-set accidents or major injuries. It wasn’t a famously chaotic set. Most of the struggles came from trying to condense King’s dark, emotional, and layered story into something suitable for 1990s television.
At the time, the reviews were generally solid, especially considering the restraints of the medium.
Stephen King himself was pleased with it. And now, all these years later, it’s still fondly remembered—not just for the scares, but for what it represented: a moment when horror tried something different. When it became a prime-time event. When kids like me rushed to finish their homework just to be scared by a clown.
The 1990 It wasn’t just horror—it was appointment television. And for a lot of us, it still lingers in the back of our minds, floating there like a red balloon in the storm drain of memory.
Tim Curry…
He made us all really scared of clowns. And that was more than enough for TV…
Imagine one day you go to the mailbox and there’s an envelope in there with no return address. Just your name. No explanation. Inside is an old VHS tape. No label. No handwriting. Nothing. Just a blank tape. So you dig out that old VCR from the closet or the basement, because of course you kept it, right? You pop the tape in, press play, and what comes on the screen is a dimly lit room with a group of people sitting around a table. Regular people. Nobody looks dramatic or haunted. They’re just… there. Talking to someone who isn’t visible. And then the table begins to move.
That idea sticks with me. Because the thing we’re talking about here is the Philip Experiment, and most of us only ever see fragments of it. Little clips that show up on YouTube or TikTok every so often. Grainy, eerie, just long enough to make you wonder if you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to see. The full uncut video isn’t floating around. It’s not archived publicly. Parts of it exist — but never the whole. Which adds to the legend, if you ask me.
Back in the early 1970s in Toronto, a group of people got together to see if they could create a ghost purely through imagination. They didn’t believe Philip was real historically. He wasn’t. They made him up. They gave him a life story, motivations, a tragic arc. They shaped him the way writers shape a character — except instead of writing a book, they sat around a table and tried to call him into existence.
This is where belief becomes interesting. Because these people weren’t actors, they weren’t psychics, and they weren’t trying to deceive anyone — including themselves. They knew Philip was fictional, and yet they set out to see whether their collective attention could make something happen.
And eventually, something did.
Knocking sounds. Rhythmic responses. The table moving. Slight at first, then more confidently. If you’ve ever sat around a Ouija board and felt that moment when the room shifts from joking to dead silent — you’ll understand the sensation. It’s not just about the movement. It’s the way the air changes. The moment your body reacts before your brain does.
I imagine that’s what happened in that Toronto room. Everyone knew Philip wasn’t real — until they felt something that made them question that certainty. And once one person believes, the belief becomes contagious. Group energy is real. Human minds sync. A spark in the room becomes a fire in the room, and suddenly everyone feels like something is there, whether they can define it or not.
Now, depending on what you believe, there are two paths this story can take.
Some say this was purely psychological. The human brain moving the table subconsciously. The ideomotor effect. A shared feedback loop of expectation and excitement.
Others say that when you call out to the void — something answers. But not always the thing you think you’re calling. And that it might have worn Philip’s face for the fun of it.
Either version is unsettling in its own way.
What stands out to me personally are those video clips. Watching the table move with no visible hands lifting it. Not proof — because the paranormal never seems to allow itself proof — but enough to make you sit still for a second. Enough to make you inhale differently. Enough to make you wonder if reality is a thinner membrane than we pretend it is.
Some of the people involved in the experiment did speak about it years later. None of them claimed it was hoaxed. None of them said they summoned an actual spirit either. What most of them said was something closer to this:
“We knew Philip wasn’t real. But the things that happened felt real.”
And that is the part that lingers.
Not the ghost. Not the séance. Not the story they invented.
But the moment where imagination and experience touch. Where the room feels different. Where the mind opens a door it didn’t know it could open.
And once a door is opened — even for a moment — who’s to say it ever really closes?
So here’s my question.
If you tried to recreate the Philip Experiment today — would you be daring enough to go through with it? And if you did, what would you name the entity you were trying to call into existence? Would you choose a new name? Or would you try Philip again?
And what if — just what if — when they created Philip all those years ago, they didn’t create something pretend… but they connected to something that has been drifting ever since. Not gone. Not dead. Just waiting in the quiet spaces between worlds to be acknowledged again.
