memes

Seen it all happen from a "safe" distance. Damn you're unlucky in a way.

That's unlucky as heck. I always think about how I decided last minute to go to get an associates instead of going to the typical four year. I ended up graduating and getting a job right before the financial crash. A pretty significant amount of my friends were still in college and couldn't get jobs for years if ever (at least related to their degree)

We had a lot of things pretty good. Since we don't have TV, I've spent the last year every weekend creating a 2.5 hour block of tailored programming to recreate the experience of Saturday morning cartoons for my kid, with selections from ~60 of the best (and some bad) cartoons from the last several decades, animated music videos, unearthed funny old clips, and modern indie animations, often with seasonal themes. Halloween is the most fun.

My toons are objectively better than the Saturday morning block ever was, and it takes hours every week to gather clips, edit, and manage where we're at with every show. I sometimes wish I could share it with a larger crowd but it's really not worth the expense, legal exposure, or effort - not to mention it's more special since it's just for my kiddo. I get to share the culture with him, with the crusts cut off. They don't have to put up with commercials, bad reception, or the constant ear-splitting blare of homophobia that was the nineties.

All that to say, that's the big picture too. Every generation we try to make things a little better for the young ones. Sometimes we're pretty envious of them, but we'd be failures if things were completely better when we were kids - and they'll have to work hard too, because in some ways we have been failing.

There's a few genocides in there too. Also I sleep in an abandoned house for like 6mo after the housing bubble burst. Whole neighborhoods where a light never turned on. All speculation market.

I thought it was the dotcom crash and great recession, in addition to the ones you mentioned war on "terror" and pandemic.

Accelerationists and bigots make up a large chunk of that bloc, and “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” make up the rest.

(The oligarchs that bought him don’t count in the same group as the plebeians.)

I remember people following Harold Camping's doomsday predictions. They sold their houses, bought RVs, preached that The End is Nigh, etc. The day came and went like any other. He revised the date a couple of times, but of course world didn't end. I just can't believe people are that gullible.

What if this happens every Thursday?

I also appreciate the restoration of our ozone layer. I remember there was a time (when above a certain latitude at least) my skin would fucking burn in less than 5 minutes under direct sun, it's a lot better now but it seems weird we all just kind of collectively forgot about that time when we all nearly ended the world to such a degree that we could feel it outside, then we all reversed course and fixed it mostly.

I wonder if we would be more motivated to fix our current issues if they caused skin burns.

Except it’s not interesting anymore. It’s been a cycle of the same bullshit over and over again.

"Shouldn't have wished to live in more interesting times" -Tav, Baldur's Gate 3

Millions of man-hours were put in to keep Y2K from happening. In their coverage of New Year's Eve 1999, ABC cut to the Y2K control room where people were amazed nothing was happening.

The only recognition all of those folks got for all of their work to keep the lights on and the planes in the air was the movie Office Space, and people who were disappointed they didn't fail.

The idea that people before us lived worse lives is one often used to obscure the clinical nature of standards we attribute to quality of life such as lifespan, infant mortality, food security, and housing. This is because it allows corporations to trivialize the impact of doubling the workload by normalizing the 40 hour work week and housework and child care, what used to be two people's worth of work, into one.

Are we living 'better' lives? On paper, sure. Are we living happier lives? That's hard to say.

And squandered the shit out of it.

economic collapse, hyperinflation, dictatorship, economic collapse, war, revolution, y2k, global economic crisis, end of the mayan calendar, semi-dictatorship, (self-imposed) exile, brexit, covid, war v3, climate crisis getting real, revolution again?

We didn't start the fire.

I vote for "the screaming twenties" to be the official name for this decade. Brilliant.