MudMan

Right. That’s my point, though. Depending on where you are in the world and how joined at the hip with the US you are culturally this particular set will start making sense at a different point. In some cases not at all.

Where I am millenials are the first that definitely sync up. Up until GenX we are in a completely different set. I bet in other parts of the world even with how fully online we all are even then it doesn’t click.

See, I kinda see it the other way. Generational demarcations used to be cultural and thus geographically determined back when different places had different media. Now we all have the same garbage social media, so since the 2000s it makes sense that we’re all on the same boat made of crap and hate.

For example, my parents had a moon landing, but it looked, sounded different and meant very different things. Also for example, I had no idea what Oregon Trail was or what it was about until the Internet told me it was a staple of US computer classes. If you think about it for a few seconds it may be no surprise that my equivalent was some combination of drawing dicks in LOGO, Defender of the Crown and Saboteur II.

We have local names for people born in the late 70s to mid 90s, too. After that we just use the US-designed universal names, though.

Did you just… figure out thinking?

Yeah, as people insist on new names for “the youths” that they can use to write derisive articles it becomes almost impossible to match any of these arbitrary things.

By most metrics “Gen Z” is coming up on their thirties, but people still want to flag them as “the kids”, where the Gen A batch that’s still in school still aren’t the target, so you end up with this weird ongoing reclassification. It’s all kinda dumb. At the end of the day if you think about it anything since just pre-Millenials is all the same bundle of anxiety-ridden online natives that can’t afford a house. They’re all just at different stages of that process. The big cutoffs happened in the 00s with the one-two punch of the post 9/11 US imperialist nonsense and the big mortgage crisis. Everything after is just fallout.

That’s one of the places where it landed. And certainly the stupidest sounding one.

I didn’t make up “Gen Y”, it was a thing you’d hear at the time, it just didn’t stick. Iliza Shlesinger has a comedy special called Elder Millennial, which is also a thing I’ve heard elsewhere. She was born in 83.

It’s all a dumb mess, I guess is my point.

You are telling me Germans consider people born in the first 20 years of the 20th century to be “the greatest generation”?

Holy crap, you may hang out with the wrong Germans. Did they seem particularly excited about the recent NRW elections?

Why the hell do you feel the need to slippery slope this? Isn’t the actual thing that we’re actually dealing with bad enough? Do you really need the disproportionate Facebook meme or you just don’t care?

I’m annoyed by this on principle and across the board, but I do want to point out that “Greatest Generation” all the way to “Baby Boomers” makes zero sense in most of the planet. You can sooooort of get away with Millenials to Alpha because the Internet is a bad idea, and Gen X at least applies to probably most of Europe as well as the US and Canada, although it’s still weird across the board.

But everything before that? Super specifically US-only.

You’re getting super stuck on that part, which comes after “never been in a fight in my life”. Feeling insecure about your masculinity when mouthing off to parents in public or something?

For the record, nope. Turned around to face the guy, who immediately stopped shouting at the lady. I don’t think anybody noticed. Never done something like that before, I expect to never have to do it again.

He was being a dick about it, though. So… there’s that.

Whether you perceive a difference or not doesn’t change that it’s not happening to you. It’s happening to the kid, first of all. If anything it’s happening to whatever parents or relatives are with the kid.

You’re just there, being a dick about it.

I get that it’s an edgy shitty joke, but man, do I get a rise of messing with people who act all uppity when kids and dogs refuse to behave like 50 year old middle managers.

I’m talking James Gunn levels of “this thing will do damage to your eyeballs and I’ll cheer for it”. I’m talking Gremlins “we’ll shoot an old lady out of a mobility aid like it’s a rocket launcher and I’ll cheer for it”. I’ve never been in a fight in my life but the one time I squared up with a guy it was for aggressively talking shit to a mom about a loud child in public transportation and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

It bothers me how Generation X has been stretched out over time. It should be more people in their 60s. Coupland is 63. If you’re 55 now you were barely in high school when his book about late 20s-early 30s people came out.

Intellectually I understand why we gave up on the “Gen Y” stuff once the idea of Millenials surfaced, but I’m in that gradient where during my lifetime I went through waves of being post-Gen X, then a millenial, then all the way back to Gen X, then sorta millenial again once it became OK for millenials to have kids and jobs and be old and stuff.

Generational designators are bullshit anyway, but if you’re in that gap between X and millenials, or between millenials and Gen Z, now going through that exact process, they become annoying bullshit.

Wakes up and immediately spends an hour with a screen right up to their eyeballs looking at stuff on the Internet with a 90 degree bend on their spine.

“Why am I always so tired right after getting out of bed?”

This isn’t an accusation, it’s a confession.

“Keeps”?

Someone is making a lot of assumptions about how the last decade of being terminally online has gone that reality isn’t willing to sustain.

Well, I’m still waiting for Twitter to “need a replacement”. It seems to be doing just about fine on its new normal. Ditto for any of the other Meta places, which have only consistently grown over time. Yes, Facebook, too.

To be clear, I don’t particularly mean too little to late for me. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook or any of those platforms, Bluesky and Fedi aside. And again, I was not on board with the Masto quote tweet thing. I did stop using it frequently, but not for that reason.

I mean too little to late to make an impact of any kind. Masto has been stuck where it is for a while, and so has Bluesky. I don’t think either are going back to growing anytime soon, but if either does it probably won’t be because Masto added quotes. I’m fairly comfy talking to the same dozen people out here like I’m in a 90s IRC channel, but ultimately it’d be nice if the gross places didn’t keep driving the global conversation forever. And on that front… yeah, too little, too late.

I used to be inverted until controller FPSs started to be a thing. I don’t think people realize how long PC FPSs were mostly a keyboard-only thing. By the time WASD+Mouse standardized, quite late into the Quake 1 era I had hundreds of hours on Tie Fighter/X-Wing and a bunch of other first person flight games.

Hell, Descent predates Quake, and I’d argue it figured out full 3D controls way before Quake did.

Now that I’m on board this train of thought, do kids these days think Doom played with full mouseview and just distorted all over the place? Is it well known for people not born at the time that Doom was mechanically closer to a twin stick shooter than an FPS or have all the source ports erased that from history?

That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I’ve come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.

Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we’re at it, while I don’t particularly like the implementation of Bluesky’s custom subject feeds I’m fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.

Yeah. You’re basically buying a laptop crammed into a small box. May as well get a laptop if you need the small footprint and portability or a desktop if you need the price-to-performance.

Also, the Steam Deck thing people keep repeating is terrible advice. Even these can power their components somewhat robustly. A docked Steam Deck is still a 10W APU for no good reason. It depends on use case, in that you also get a handheld out of the deal, but if you’re looking for a primary device even a laptop would be a better choice.

Right, so when you said “forced it on everyone” you meant “the feature existing at all even if it’s optional or disabled”.

See, I don’t have a problem with the latter, that’s legitimate. But you implied the former, and the former is false.

Now, I don’t like the feature and I absolutely turned it off the moment it (finally) got patched into my supported PCs. But it’s worth noting that similar features are present on Android phones (from all the way back on Google Assistant to the upcoming Magic Cue), Apple phones (via Visual Intelligence and Siri) and other PC and phone manufacturers. I recommend turning them all off, but with the caveats you original omitted this isn’t a Windows-specific thing, it’s a pretty widespread fad.

Of course the reason people are latching on to the MS version is their initial implementation was hot garbage and entirely unaware of its own context, so now it’s a meme, particularly in tech-savvy, Linux-friendly circles. The biggest lesson we’ve all learned is that Microsoft is bad at PR and marketing, which I feel we already knew.

I’m so exhausted of social media nonsense latching onto meme crap to push preconceived narratives and flipping over to ignoring reality altogether the moment any facts at all don’t fit their dumb little package of memes.

You know what, I hope it’s not actually off and anybody with the trivial means to check what their Windows PC is sending to the mothership notices so we can get the EU to GDPR the crap out of them and build some nice hospital somewhere with the fine money.

In the meantime, go do conspiracy theories over on Twitter. There’s plenty of real stuff to be mad about at Microsoft without having to make shit up.