and we wondered why everything was a GameBoy or a Nintendo for our parents
No no! THIS is different ! 😀 it’s because it’s funny to mess with kids.
My routine when I walk into the room where my daughter is playing a game:
- Identify the game she is playing.
- Ask her how <activity in game she isn’t currently playing> is going. Like if she’s caught all the Pokémon when she’s playing Minecraft.
I’m not even trying to be subtle about it, but am still not sure she realizes I’m doing it deliberately. Either way, she corrects me with exasperation each time.
Well and here we are! I don’t even know if peeble and doop are real places online or she just made it up to make a point 😆
Made it up. Please. Dear god. Please.
When I hear “20 yrs ago” I still think 90s. 😭
I remember in 2010 when someone posted a meme on ragecomics that showed how sad they are that some people still use ‘years ago’ to refer to the early 90s…
I still think 90s when I hear 8-9 years ago.
I used to work at a hikers’ hostel on the Appalachian Trail. A group of hikers needed a ride into town but were short on cash. One of them suggested they offer the hostel owner some weed in exchange for a ride. Another one said, “He doesn’t smoke weed. He’s old, like in his 40s.” He actually was in his 50s and bought his weed from me lol
“We are the first to do this.” -every young cohort going back through time
“The young ones are lacking conservative quality that we had” - Every old cohort going back through time
Ah the duality of humans :p
Also “the fucking old people caused this mess and are standing in the way of fixing it. We need them to die off so we can turn it around”
There has never been a young generation not saying this. Many of them have been correct too, but few have turned anything around when it’s their turn.
Yeah. But if we’re talking about Baby Boomers, they really leaned into the “caused a mess and standing in the way of fixing it.”
For over 50 years they had every advantage that’s now denied young people, and as a cohort, Boomers are the shining example of failing upwards. They now roost at the top of whatever ladder they bumbled up and exist primarily to punch downwards.
So, I don’t know that your pattern holds true for the specific epoch of the last 50-60 years, as, for the first time in modern history younger generations are worse off than their parents or grandparents. And that blame can readily be heaped at the feet of “Generation Me,” who have broadly, and uniformly worked to maximize their personal wants at the cost of any economic, social, emotional, environmental, or financial impediment that got in their way. Even now, Baby Boomers suck the air out of politics and C-suites across the country, adamant that they are still relevant and that their opinions are as good as facts.
It’s hard for me to feel sympathy for them, when instance after instance of what brought us to this point can be directly tied to their behavior.
I feel like GenX said, “The fucking old people caused this mess and are standing in the way of fixing it. We need them to die off so someone else can turn it around, but there aren’t enough of us so it’s probably up to the younger generations.”
We never had a lot of collective ambition, which I guess is good because our parents still won’t let go of power.
You keep joking about Doop and it’s going to come true.
I often need to remind myself that Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings are not recent movies.
It’s the same as being a kid in the 80s, which I was, and thinking The Seven Year Itch was a recent movie. Now, I had seen that movie on TV, because my parents liked it, and I thought it was funny, but never did I think of it as “recent”.
Still, you can’t tell me that Harry Potter movies didn’t happen in the last ten years.
Holy hell, the last movie was released in 2011.
I remember how much anticipation and agony people were complaining about waiting for it, that it couldn’t come soon enough.
I recently picked up a new game: RoboCop: rogue city… It hits all of the nostalgia about the original movie so far. Marching through an office building blowing off people’s hands and ripping machine guns off turrets and mowing down rooms full of enemies in all the gory, bloody detail… It gives me all the warm and fuzzy feelings.
The sound track is on point too.
Hard to believe it’s source material is from 1987. The game almost looks as good as the movie did. It’s not as polished as big name titles. People will talk and their mouth won’t move, some of the idle animations for NPCs is very repetitive and robotic… But the visuals… MMM. If you liked the original, and want to partake in some thug killing mayhem as Murphey himself, I’d recommend it.
It’s actually only $9.99 right now with the Steam spring sale, normally $49.99…fuck. I might have to play it.
I refuse to ever call Harry Potter a classic.
But it is a classic
I have never (not asking for info, I can look it up) seen it, just heard it mentioned by name. Couldn’t tell you the actors or even the genre off hand.
But I can tell you that every time I hear the movie my brain (for juuuust a second) always thinks it’s a Star Trek movie that’s specifically about pon farr.
For those not in the know, Vulcans (aka the race of aliens that Spock belongs to), while very disciplined, will get super horny every 7 years. So horny that they will just up and die if they don’t bust a nut and for whatever reason they can’t just take care of it themselves.
Now I’m no kid from the 60s, but I did hear of it first with Tuvok in the Voyager series. And now that reference is just as dated now as the original show was when I watched Voyager. And I just had a whole existential moment between those 2 sentences in this paragraph. I’m so old now.
I don’t regret any of this one bit, you look them up and it’s always someone shilling products extremely hard while doing extremely low effort content like reaction videos or streaming Minecraft.
The fact that ‘influencer’ is a legitimate job title is proof that humanity is doomed.
They aren’t some symbol of the end times or anything, they’re just a symptom of the sort of attention based economy we’ve built up here in America. They exist precisely because you can get paid to shill products while playing Minecraft.
If we reign in the marketing and advertising industries then influencers will fall alongside them.
Or, if we regulate “proper” ads and fail to do the same to influencers, whether on purpose or not, then they will become a primary source of advertising. Depending how this is handled could be a good or bad thing.
To me, reaction videos are truly astonishing. Like, the number of videos reacting to some thing typically outnumber the thing itself by the hundreds. People prefer watching somebody else watching something so they know how they should feel about it. It’s the modern version of the laugh track.
This.
The TV stations around me are desperate to attract the young viewers, so they always have influencers as guests on their shows and what not, and I simply do not get it.Today’s guest: Billy Bobberson.
What’s he famous for? Oh he posts some selfies on Instagram daily and every other post is a sponsored brand promo.
Why the fuck do people even follow influencers like this???Because most people are stupid. It is easier for stupid people to follow fake celebrities aka influencers, than to read a book or think for themselves.
I was talking to my primary-school age kids about their teachers, and one of them says their next teacher will be Mr Smith.
“He’s old,” they said, “he must be at least fifty”.
I said “nah man. Mr Smith is probably only a few years older than me, early forties I reckon”.
They had me with “no he’s like really old. He reads a newspaper”
Yeah, the other day I was consulting with another therapist, and I was telling her how in EMDR therapy I often say “don’t give me the whole article, just the headline” when I want to explain to the client to avoid talking too much during EMDR. she works with teens, and she went “yeah, that will not fly with my clients.”
We came up with “don’t give me the long-form video, just give me the TikTok” as we both felt we were inching closer to the grave, lol.
We came up with “don’t give me the long-form video, just give me the TikTok” as we both felt we were inching closer to the grave, lol.
“Give me the Reader’s Digest condensed version.”
“How does what a reader eats have anything to do with this? and why would we need a condensed version of that diet description?”
oh god, I’m old.
Hey kids! Anything interesting in the latest TV Guide?
Oh really? I’ll have to set up my DVR to tape it, I’ll be at a doctor appointment when the first episode airs…
Bro im not that old and i remember this, all the good English shows used to air new episodes at night.
Brother, if you remember that, you are old by young people standards.
I remember being … around 10 and poking fun at my not even 40 yet dad for using a dot matrix printer and fax machine… in the late 90s or early 00’s.
That’s not too far from the same age gap as the TV Guide / DVR thing.
A 10 year old now would probably make fun of a person having a digital document scanner at home. What’s the point? Just take a picture of the document with your 8384 megapixel smartphone.
On that note: Polaroids, film cameras, low grade digital cameras or camcorders as fairly common household items, fucking landline home phones.
Most kids born in the last 10 or 15 years would laugh at these, or the idea of them, just like I laughed at a dot matrix printer and home fax machine in the late 90s, or grandma still having a rotary phone instead of a cordless home phone.
Jesus, I don’t think I’ve actually even thought about the last time I made a home phone call on a phone with a cord… in about a decade.
As an aside, the Target store near me carries Polaroid film and vinyl records. With everything virtual and touchscreen these days, some kids value the kinesthetic experience.
Heck, I’ve been cell phone-only since 2003, but I’ve been thinking about setting up a landline phone from my childhood with a VoIP adapter just because it has such a satisfying heft in the hand, and tactile buttons.
All Targets have them and Walmarts do too. They’re not as rare as you seem to think.
Damn…
I’m Gen Z and I feel like I’d still understand the article analogy, but when I think about my gen-alpha cousins maybe they would need the TikTok analogy…
“no he’s like really old. He reads a newspaper”
I think this is a fair dig haha
As somebody who was born in 2007, I have no clue who modern celebrities are either. People consider me out of touch but I have no idea what half of what people around me are saying. The acronyms don’t help and I am too scared to search them up.
Woah, 2007ers are 18 now. 👴
Well 17 still. I still got like 6 months.
I watch NBA basketball and back in the day (1990s) there was exactly one player that was referred to by his initials: Michael Jordan. Nowadays fans use initials (with their jersey number occasionally tacked on as if that’s the cleverest thing to do in the world) for almost every player and it’s almost impossible to know who they’re talking about. For some players this is legitimate (e.g. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is a mouthful so SGA is a good replacement) but for most it is not.
In baseball now, they like to make nicknames by taking the first initial and the first syllable of the last name. Like J-Hey. It’s annoying and unoriginal. Baseball used to have the best nicknames too.
Um, A-Rod has been a thing for a while now.
Um, nobody said he hasn’t. Um, what’s your point
Just that it’s not a new thing like you made it sound.
Honey, baseball has been around a lot longer than the mid 90s. It’s new. Learn about context.
In the distant future, when we look back on scattered social media caps, we will regret that the date of posting is not shown. Like scattered pages from books unknown, page numbers elided.
The fun thing is that none of this stuff is going to survive long-term at all. Databases are backed up onto forms of media that have a very short lifespan. Only material that is endlessly copied forward (like DNA) will still be around, and nobody is going to pay for that kind of archiving, at least not for the generally trivial bullshit that comprises social media. FWIW this fact make me happy.
As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?
If you want reliable media to last on a timeline relevant to our lives and even several generations, look into M disc blurays. Though, similar to dual layer dvds back in the day, it’s much easier to find a writer than the media itself. But it claims lifespans of centuries to millennia rather than decades usually associated with other disc media. They are actually etched instead of just using some fancy ink. Readable by normal drives, too. It’s just on the writing side that you need one that can specifically handle M discs. It also supports multi-layers, but those are even harder to find and get pretty pricey.
Still not likely a way to pass information ahead to civilizations even tens of thousands of years away, and even before they break down, a new civilization would need to figure out how to read and interpret them (when we had trouble reading hieroglyphs from known civilizations that we could read directly with our eyes).
But at least they should be relatively safe to write, verify, then forget about for a few decades until you find them and want to take a walk down memory lane. Assuming you can still get a bluray reader at that point, or held on to one. Pack them together and future you or your heirs might be grateful.
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there’s now money in buying failing platforms.
But yeah, I’m also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
Things like tape drives and optical storage etc. Even if they have lifespans measured in decades (and these things typically don’t) that still means they have short life spans in terms of being recoverable in the future. A hundred years from now these things won’t be restorable.
I found this report from NIST that estimates tape to last 20 years, CD-R and DVD-R 30 years, and M-DISC 100 years 🤷 (I didn’t even know optical was used professionally, and found the term “optical jukebox” to be hilarious :)
https://www.nist.gov/publications/digital-evidence-preservation-considerations-evidence-handlers
But more importantly, an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained). And for example AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just $0.00099 / GB / month*, so you can store terabytes for the price of a cup of coffee.
*Plus extra fees for access and stuff, but the point is managed storage isn’t particularly expensive unless you have very large amounts of data or heavy usage.
an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained)
I mean, this is really my point. This stuff isn’t going to be maintained forever and will eventually be lost - even if it takes 100 years or more. This idea of future archaeologists troweling their way through Facebook posts isn’t going to happen.
Even much of what we know about the first civilizations in Mesopotamia is only because their clay tablets - which were never intended to be permanent records of anything - were accidentally fired and buried when their storage facilities caught fire. It’s possible that some modern forms of media might be accidentally preserved and restored somehow thousands of years in the future, but it’s a bit hard to imagine such a scenario. Especially when we’re going to cook ourselves off the planet before then.
Most of the Chinese internet from the mid-90s to ~2010 has already disappeared.
I’m 29 so maybe I’m too young for this statement but if you ask me it’s because younger celebrities tend to be the result of nepotism and don’t have any actual talents.
which has always been true
The nepotism part has always been true, and talentless celebrities have been around as long as the concept of “celebrity” has, but the category of celebrities “being famous for no reason” did not truly exist until Paris Hilton. Princesses and Kings aren’t “celebrities”.
There’s a whole lot of people who are basically famous with being famous…
And most of them have the surname “Kardashian”.
If you mean the literal Kardashians, they’re only a dozen, but figuratively it’s like a genericised trademark and there are thousands of people like that.
“CURTAINS FOR ZOOSHA? K-SMOG AND BATBOY CAUGHT FLIPPING A GRUNT.”
Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King, or is he just getting rizzed up by Livvy?
I love that yours is entirely real but it feels just as fake as the entirely fake one you are replying too 🤣
entirely real
I will press (Gen) X to doubt…
Reminds me of “Shrimp cereal Topanga husband is a MeToo milkshake duck.” You have to be aware of five different pieces of pop culture and meme culture knowledge for it to make sense.
How come the only part of that sentence that doesn’t sound like complete gibberish is “milkshake duck”?
CATCH IT TONIGHT ON GREEB AND DONT FORGET TO FLIM FLAM THE POPCHUDZZ GIBGUBBLERRR
These posts feel like Interdimensional Cable from Rick and Morty.
I’m a school bus driver and my elementary school kids go on about somebody named “Queso” (sp?) on Youtube and I find myself constantly fighting the urge to see what he’s all about. It can’t possibly be good.
He’s a streamer whose chat makes fun of him for being fat. Caseoh.
I guess he won streamer of the year in 2024 - that was the first I’d heard of him
People born in 2007 shouldn’t be old enough to be online yet…
When I wrote this I was thinking, “12 is a little young to be online but I guess they could be”. No, turns out someone born in 2007 would be 18 right now. Yikes
I was online at 11 or so, but back then we pretty much just had AOL teen chat and rudimentary web sites.
I was online when I was 11 also, back in 94. No google. No yahoo. No youtube. Just non-stop unregulated pornography as far as thee eye could see. Then yahoo showed up and had yahoo chat WITH NO BOTS. They even had a Webcam feature on dialup. I was 14 by then and I remember going into a Webcam room with a woman in Australia in her 40s and she made me watch her use a huge black dildo. The original rickroll was goatse, or this website that infinitely loaded popup windows until it crashed your pc.
Truly a golden age.
Ooo yah my young ass found AOHELL TOOLZ and would scroll the chat or send logoff bombs to peeps.
Golden age indeed.
At the time I had no pc in my house, I could only use it at my grandparents house. They got AOL, and like a week after getting it he checked his email and it was a porn spam with a big image of 2 lesbians using a double sided dildo and he called that day and canceled AOL and he switched to a smaller local isp(back when those existed). I still cackle at that, with how ubiquitous emails like that are.
Hahaha that’s excellent. When I hit like 13, I was fed up with AOL’s walled garden (funny, because now I love my iPhone, but at least I get the whole internet) so I installed something like freeinternet.com or whatever and the Opera browser came out, so I used that. My mind was blown when suddenly I didn’t have parental restrictions. The free internet was a crunchy place back then!
Then, as a later teen, I discovered suuuper early TOR. THAT was a wild place. I stumbled upon things I did NOT want to see.
I vividly remember as a young teen watching a completely free Webcam feed from Amsterdam of unpaid amateur people who liked to be watched have sex(on dialup) with a little watching counter in the corner. It was literally front page, didn’t even have to goto a page and click a hotlink. Or how Whitehouse.com was a porn site and kids would regularly go there by accident in the school computer lab doing projects.
I never used TOR until like 2004 and by then I was in my 20s. In 2007 I came this close to buying $40 in bitcoin to use on silk road when they were less than a penny. I could be a millionaire right now if my ex hadn’t talked me out of it.
