This is my actual Macintosh Classic that I dithered with my own implementation of Atkinson dithering (which seems fitting).
My journey with nostalgia is a complicated one. At its worst, it makes me acutely aware of lost time and can bring on something like a panic attack. In smaller ways, it serves as a distraction from the current world for me. Through therapy and self-examination I've learned to become more comfortable with nostalgia and to realise why I might seek refuge in it. And I've learned not to feel shame for "wasting" my time submerging myself in the past.
This strong negative reaction to nostalgia delayed me learning that what actually brings me joy is the feeling of the past; not the past itself.
This is why I enjoy things set in my past (like Stranger Things, Halt and Catch Fire), or the imagined future of my past (most William Gibson novels) but I don't really like most 80's films (which rarely hold up to how I remember them). I enjoy pixel art games but not actually booting an Amiga or DOS emulator to play unfriendly and not-all-that-fun old games. I enjoy the look and feel of Macintosh System 7, but I do not want to (and did not) restore my Macintosh to running condition.
This, I am belatedly learning, is one of the key things that attracted me to tilde.town. It's alive. It's here today. It's not something from the past trapped in amber. I'm not reading transcripts of IRC from twenty years ago; I'm on IRC today. But, tilde.town is of the past. It represents an aesthetic that is in decline (but also maybe a resurgence, in a small way).