ITT Post Your Random Thoughts

[Mechanical Ape]

We can call them “QuaranTeens”

[Perpetual Motion]

There are absolutely cultural trends that come with being born in a certain time period, and categorizing that is useful for sociology and related humanities. But trends are just trends and are not absolute, and people have tendencies to apply generalizations as absolutes, doubly so when tribalism is involved.

Basically, leave the categories to the scientists working on the big picture, and treat individuals as individuals.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

indeed

[Skipper]

I'm having a hard time picturing the usefulness of grouping people together based on the timeframe in which they were born, but that is probably due to me being a dumb Millenial.

[RIP Syndrome]

i wanna take this moment to express my utter dislike for all the names assigned to generations and the entire concept of naming generations and assinging characteristics/sterotypes to them

I wanna take this moment to say I personally find it hilarious as I sip on my energy drink and wish I wasn't a dirty scum millennial

[RIP Syndrome]

I'm not even the good kind, I'm the barely a millennial, but not a zoomer either generational reject type

[Fizzbuzz]

I'm having a hard time picturing the usefulness of grouping people together based on the timeframe in which they were born, but that is probably due to me being a dumb Millenial.

I've heard that we (as in all of humanity, not just any given generation) tend to be more strongly influenced by things that happen to us when we're young than when we get older. For example, Millennials all have the shared experience of being old enough to remember 9/11 (being 5-20 years old when it happened) and subsequently watching the rest of the country lose its mind over things we perhaps didn't quite understand, as well as getting hurt badly by the 2008 recession and its fallout of lost jobs that didn't recover for a few years, putting a serious damper on our careers early on. Those of Generation X and older grew up in more prosperous times and formed their expectations for society that way, whereas we've had to make do with the scraps left over from the tumult we grew up into.

As the world becomes more globalized, generational boundaries like this might also apply more worldwide, but I do feel like the generations you hear so much about are specific to Americans for the most part.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i mean, the thing you just described about gen x is only applicable to the US and that's kind of the problem i've always had with these groupings, they're always viewed through an american lens first and foremost.

A gen x-er in eastern europe didn't grow up in a more prosperous time and was, quite contrary to the popular view of gen x, not an apathetic and apolitical person. A millenial, depending on which eastern european country we're talking about might've been better off than a gen-x-er or worse off. Hell, baby boomers weren't better off either a lot of them lost their jobs in economic transitions of the 90s.

I know in Japan the 1990s were characterized by an economic crisis after the boom of the 1980s. Coming to it being refered to as the lost decade and still affecting Japan's economy and politics.

Despite these things being the kind of things that influence generations, they're left out, because the popular "baby boomers are like this, gen x is like this and millenials are like this" view is more appealing, because it's simple and easy to tweet about.

[RIP Syndrome]

i mean, the thing you just described about gen x is only applicable to the US and that's kind of the problem i've always had with these groupings, they're always viewed through an american lens first and foremost.

A gen x-er in eastern europe didn't grow up in a more prosperous time and was, quite contrary to the popular view of gen x, not an apathetic and apolicitcal person. A millenial, depending on which eastern european country we're talking about might've been better off than a gen-x-er or worse off. Hell, baby boomers weren't better off either a lot of them lost their jobs in economic transitions of the 90s.

I know in Japan the 1990s were characterized by an economic crisis after the boom of the 1980s. Coming to it being refered to as the lost decade and still affecting Japan's economy and politics.

Despite these things being the kind of things that influence generations, they're left out, because the popular "baby boomers are like this, gen x is like this and millenials are like this" view is more appealing, because it's simple and easy to tweet about.

Finland went through a terrible economic crisis in the early-to-mid 90s stretching towards the end of the decade too so yeah this is pretty relatable. Can't really call it a wondrous, prosperous time of continued growth from the 80s onward when shit was fucked for most of the 90s.

but I still think generational naming and definitions are funny.

[Mr. Big]

I never read Mark Millar's stuff before but I've been hearing about some of his past works.

...is something wrong with Millar?

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

he seems to be still alive

[Gloomy Rube]

i thought mobile games are just microtransaction laden skinner boxes

There's those, and then there's Layton Brothers: Mystery Room



the music is so good

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

wow, that is good

[Mechanical Ape]

Bringing smooth jazz to your workday, it’s 104.3 FM, The Shy. Gonna slow it down for you with some Layton Brothers.

[Mr. Big]

I got a book "When Magoo Flew" today. It's all about the history of the UPA animation history and its rise and fall.

I only skimmed through it, but the gist I got is that, despite its ambition and successes with the likes of "Mr. Magoo" and its award winning cartoons, it was really badly managed due to Steve Bosustow (the founder) being rather bad at managing business, something he himself and numerous UPA people alluded to. The fact that the studio had to push out a lot of its top talents due to the Red Scare and the HUAC nosing in didn't help either.

Yet in spite of all that, it made a huge impact, for better or worse, on the industry. A lot of former UPA crew went on to start their own studios, some of which outlasted UPA itself, including Format Films (the makers of the first Alvin and the Chipmunks cartoon), Pantomime Pictures (which lasted well into the late 1980s, I believe), John Hubley's own studio, Bill Melendez Production (the "Peanuts" specials) and Murakami-Wolf (went on to make the first "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" cartoon). The book said that they may have been inspired to start their own studio because the artists felt they could run a studio better than Bosustow, or at least, no worse than him.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

trucks are cool

[RIP Syndrome]

indeed

[Skipper]

Indubitably

[Adiwan]

Random thought of today:
We are all disguised as bank robbers when walking into the bank with a mask, and nobody calls the cops....
until a real bank robber appears.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

[Princess Flufflebutt]

Wow, I haven't played Payday 2 in a million years

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i hear people hate drills

[SlateSlabrock]

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

hahah

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

it's interesting how quake's development was kind of a mess

the game itself is good, that much is clear, but how it was developed was apparently more a "throw shit against the wall and see what sticks" situation

[Skipper]

So a bit like the infinite monkey theorem, but instead of on typewriters they were behind computers

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

kinda yeah

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

the game has four episodes and they all have a different theme and i remember that pretty much depends on who on the team designed the levels

[Madeline]

i mean, the thing you just described about gen x is only applicable to the US and that's kind of the problem i've always had with these groupings, they're always viewed through an american lens first and foremost.

A gen x-er in eastern europe didn't grow up in a more prosperous time and was, quite contrary to the popular view of gen x, not an apathetic and apolitical person. A millenial, depending on which eastern european country we're talking about might've been better off than a gen-x-er or worse off. Hell, baby boomers weren't better off either a lot of them lost their jobs in economic transitions of the 90s.

I know in Japan the 1990s were characterized by an economic crisis after the boom of the 1980s. Coming to it being refered to as the lost decade and still affecting Japan's economy and politics.

Despite these things being the kind of things that influence generations, they're left out, because the popular "baby boomers are like this, gen x is like this and millenials are like this" view is more appealing, because it's simple and easy to tweet about.

I still had a lot of privilege from growing up white in the US, but the area I grew up in had been economically devastated by the oil crisis in the 1970s and by Reaganomics setting off a recession in the 1980s. There weren’t any jobs unless you worked at one of the universities in the area or in a government job. Everything had been dairy farming or manufacturing, and the farms couldn’t compete with corporate factory farms, and manufacturing jobs went overseas so workers could be exploited and underpaid even harder. All those toy commercial branded things from the early 1980s like MLP only exist because of a Reagan-era tax trade loophole that made it dirt cheap for US companies to make deals to manufacture shit in China and Taiwan, and dirt cheap to animate shows in Japan, which is partly why so many of them are based in part on Japanese toy brands. Takara has all these Diaclone toys and manufacturing lines set up in East Asia? Okay, Hasbro can come in and call it “Transformers” and get Denny O’Neil (RIP) and Bob Budiansky to slap together some fiction so it can be pitched to the cheapest overseas animation studio and broadcast under the “Sunbow” name so Hasbro can sell all those licensed Diaclone toys at a profit. When those deals ended, a lot of cartoon studios who were getting toy company money to have shows animated in Japan had to either close down or moved to using Korean studios. The manufacturing jobs never came back to the US. You can also spot when it happens with the toys: the designs became simpler, even blockier, and stuff like die cast metal and chrome was phased out to make sure profit margins would stay the same even as manufacturing costs went up during late 1986 and early 1987. Also I doubt those workers were treated well, because capitalism.

So we skated by on food stamps, family handouts, and clothes from the Rescue Mission. At one point, my mom would spend entire days sewing doll clothes and plushies so she could sell them because then we could get some spaghetti or enough flour and shit to make pancakes, and then that’s what we’d eat every night for a while. I used to get so fucking pissed off at how apathetic most of the people I knew in school were. Shit like “Reality Bites” made and still makes me so fucking angry, like, boo hoo, I’m selling out by taking this upper middle class job with benefits and making bank instead of writing poetry or whatever that movie was about and LARPing as a poor person while still falling back on mommy and daddy’s cash. Being poor is so ~romantic~. /s You could still write your damn poetry before or after you got home from work, like many working writers do. That’s not a hard life. A hard life is when a cop is likely to shoot or arrest you for something you didn’t do because of the color of your skin. A hard life is dying from shitting out your own intestines because of starvation and malnutrition. When I was in high school, I realized how fucking nauseating USA to Africa and “We Are The World” was: here’s a bunch of wealthy pop stars who could have paid for starving Ethiopians to have enough food for decades by themselves, shilling a charity to ordinary people so they can pay for it instead, and then singing “we’re saving our own lives” and patting themselves on the back for caring about starving children. When caring about starving children should be a bare minimum standard of human decency.

Anyway, tl;dr, I got radicalized at a pretty young age because I couldn’t stand how unjust the status quo was and is. I fucking hated anyone who was apathetic and didn’t think you could change the status quo, because not trying to change the status quo is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, no shit things don’t change when you don’t do anything. But because upbringing, diet, and environment matter in a person’s development, somebody who grew up in, say, Silicon Valley could have had a radically different life experience and beliefs than mine, even if we would have otherwise been exactly the same.

Outside of useless pop culture flotsam that could be entirely thrown away and destroyed for how much it will matter to anyone in 100 years, I don’t know what a shared generational experience would be, other than remembering where I was when Kurt Cobain, Tupac, and Biggie died, or when 9/11 happened, or the great recession in 2008, or when I heard about Brexit and got bad feelings about the upcoming 2016 elections that turned out to be right. For American Boomers? I don’t know, probably Kennedy and the moon landing. I would say the same for other generations, too. Intersectionality alone kinda makes nonsense out of all the generational stereotypes. There is no way a young BPOC growing up in Compton in LA in the 1980s had an easier life than I did, the same way there is no way that an average non-wealthy child growing up in Syria right now would have an easier life than a roughly equivalent American child, even in 2020’s Hellworld. Things are bad in the US, but not yet “civil war and colonialist foreign military interference to keep the oil flowing in the region” bad.

The human brain just likes to make sweeping generalizations because they’re easier to deal with, and easy jokes give you a quick dopamine rush when people laugh, I guess

[Madeline]

also holy crap wall of text, also also seriousposting in a shitpost zone

poo fart butts

hopefully that fixes stuff

[Princess Flufflebutt]

Yeah, apathy kinda sucks.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

yeah

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i desire twitter's demise

[!saak]

for a long time I was like "eh twitter is okay" cuz I followed artists n shit

then I looked at Dutch political twitter

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

pretty much

[Princess Flufflebutt]

twitter more like shitter

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

twitter more like shitter

[Perpetual Motion]

Twitter makes you bitter

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

Twitter makes you bitter

[Octavia]

I only use Twitter to upload screenshots from my Switch