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[Getting older] on the internet
Aldo
Hippo HoorayRegistered User regular
Hippo HoorayRegistered User regular
I think it's the favorite/most hated observation we've all been having on this forum and on the wider internet: We're getting *old*. And everyone around us is getting *old*. This wouldn't be so bad, if it didn't come with both physical and mental issues that were just abstract notions before.
In this thread I want to discuss some of the shit we're struggling with now. Because the subject has so many aspects (with overlap with the parenting-, home-owners and jobs-threads spread out over D&D and SE++) I figured I'd start with being a nostalgic old on the internet.
Dealing with nostalgia without hating on the new
We're a forum around a webcomic that often makes jokes about new games and shit on Twitch. Sometimes the context needs to be explained to people who are very vocal about "not keeping up" with all that stuff. There's often a bit of a prideful undertone: "of course I wouldn't know about that." The same sentiment can be felt when a new remake is announced and it gets a lot of attention from folks from the generation that remembers playing the original. I think these are indications that we're just getting old. We get so excited about stuff from our youth and we feel this urge to tell everyone that this "new stuff" is never going to live up to the original.
I think some of us got this way after an onslaught of nostalgia-cash grabs from big studios, but there's also an element of our changing psyche as we get older. It's guaranteed that the older we get, the fonder we look back to our past. Back when I started on this forum I would never even bother with old games, in my mind new games would be better by default. Now I find myself unironically playing Homeworld Remastered going "I bet Homeworld 3 is never going to capture the magic of this game from 1999.". It's absolutely mental and I think it's a silly take that just has me throwing up barriers to talk with anyone younger than me.
I'm curious if more people recognize this and consider it an issue? I'm trying to be less grouchy, but it's so hard? Do you have the same issue, or not at all?
There's plenty of other subjects related to "getting old(er)", I had a much longer OP at first, but it's kinda shitty to have my half-formed opinions on a bunch of stuff as the OP when I just want to read more takes from you fine forumers I've grown older with over the past ~15 years.
In this thread I want to discuss some of the shit we're struggling with now. Because the subject has so many aspects (with overlap with the parenting-, home-owners and jobs-threads spread out over D&D and SE++) I figured I'd start with being a nostalgic old on the internet.
Dealing with nostalgia without hating on the new
We're a forum around a webcomic that often makes jokes about new games and shit on Twitch. Sometimes the context needs to be explained to people who are very vocal about "not keeping up" with all that stuff. There's often a bit of a prideful undertone: "of course I wouldn't know about that." The same sentiment can be felt when a new remake is announced and it gets a lot of attention from folks from the generation that remembers playing the original. I think these are indications that we're just getting old. We get so excited about stuff from our youth and we feel this urge to tell everyone that this "new stuff" is never going to live up to the original.
I think some of us got this way after an onslaught of nostalgia-cash grabs from big studios, but there's also an element of our changing psyche as we get older. It's guaranteed that the older we get, the fonder we look back to our past. Back when I started on this forum I would never even bother with old games, in my mind new games would be better by default. Now I find myself unironically playing Homeworld Remastered going "I bet Homeworld 3 is never going to capture the magic of this game from 1999.". It's absolutely mental and I think it's a silly take that just has me throwing up barriers to talk with anyone younger than me.
I'm curious if more people recognize this and consider it an issue? I'm trying to be less grouchy, but it's so hard? Do you have the same issue, or not at all?
There's plenty of other subjects related to "getting old(er)", I had a much longer OP at first, but it's kinda shitty to have my half-formed opinions on a bunch of stuff as the OP when I just want to read more takes from you fine forumers I've grown older with over the past ~15 years.
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I'm currently replaying and greatly enjoying Mass Effect Legendary and Baldur's Gate 1 but I'm sure this is irrelevant.
As for talking with DA KIDZ about stuff, I dunno. I have quite a few years on most people here and have come to the conclusion that people younger than you respond well to genuine enthusiasm about a thing, old or not. Reflexive cynicism or dismissal about new stuff is tedious, but having well-put reasons for disliking a remake or an old movie or a game isn't going to alienate anyone. The remake of The Magnificent Seven is inferior in just about every way to the John Sturges movie.
I dunno. I don't expect to know what the kids are talking about all the time, nor should I care. Having their own music, books, TV shows and so forth that can feel like theirs is an important part of growing up. It's common cultural currency among their peer group. Your currency is different, and can often only be exchanged with those who already have it.
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I hear the new Ninja Turtles movie is good, but I’d bury that in a shallow grave if it meant kids these days got more new stuff that was just for them. I’d say 60% of the stuff my younger family members like is a continuation of something I played with, read or watched as a kid.
Anyways I can still do a kick flip, so I’m not old until I fail, and when I do my fragile body will turn to dust as I hit the curb.
There were a LOT of female-identifying gamers at the time, and there was much less gatekeeping because if you had enough knowledge to connect a telnet client to an online roleplaying game you had already earned your credentials. Because it was entirely text the were fewer accusations of using sexuality to... whatever the Gamergoobers get riled up about... and all we really had was our chosen pronouns on character creation. If the text said "Player COMPLETELY DEMOLISHES the Creature with her slash" you treated the player as female and that was that.
I find a lot of the online gender conflicts these days just exhausting...
I think that's big studios trying to grab more money by making all their entertainment appeal to the full 6-60 age bracket. Tickle the parents with nostalgia, have it be cool stuff for younger audiences, and absolutely never take a risk with developing a new IP. I feel bad about that as well, and I'm glad every time I read about a new IP being successful.
But you are male? I feel like a lot of the shit that happened to women in the past just wasn't reported on or women would prefer to stay quiet out of fear of repercussions. It's still incredibly dangerous to go public when someone has assaulted, blackmailed or harassed you. I'm not sure even half the people currently on this forum realize how many forumers just decided to not come here anymore after identifying as female and being outspoken about their opinions. I like to think we're doing better now, but it's pretty much impossible for me, as a male, to really be sure about that.
And then the 2000s and the ability to send pictures enabled "tits or GTFO", and suddenly "There Are No Girls on the Internet" became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The early internet was very male STEM populated, and IRC/Usenet were absolutely rife with the worst kinds of misogynistic bullshit.
The big change has been awareness of it happening vs it somehow just happening in the 00s. The internet wasn’t exactly mainstream for the majority of the 90s/early 00s.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
There's all this nostalgia about hacking, frequently referencing movies like Hackers (1995) and Sneakers (1992). This person said that all these references have actually been pretty off-putting to new blood in the hacking community -- they have no point of reference whatsoever to all that old stuff.
Anyway that’s not really about getting old so much as it is a statement about how much more content younger folks have access to than we did
I was never all that hip or with it amongst the yutes when I was a kid, so I never really expected it to happen now. It is interesting to hear about things from my cousins, but in a mostly anthropology kind of way.
As for fear of developing new IP rather than utilizing existing, that's an ancient phenomenon. Take a look at how many references are in old Looney Tunes that only make sense if you are aware of old pop culture, but at the time would have been drawing from a well worn well that everyone watching was aware of.
I see so much love for new games without attachments to the past, and no real yearning in general for games of the past as strictly better (though plenty of retro games are popular options) by anyone who actually plays substantial numbers of new titles. It seems correct and normal to engage with sequels and remakes on whether they deliver on the characteristics that led the studio to make a remake or sequel though. It feels like trading in effort for psychic trickery. Deceptive, lazy, whateber.
If a franchise had notably high quality and you drop it, youre gonna make people feel lied to. If you were known for tense, horror gameplay and you just increment a number and now you're an action shooter, people feel lied to.
I just think that as IP become increasingly deep and expansive and places for people to explore, it's quite normal to be frustrated that the latest entrant isnt more of what you enjoyed so much before. Or that the gameplay isnt what you enjoyed before.
I think we've had the realization about once a week over in the [job] thread that younger colleagues just aren't Good With Computers. All the intuitive UX was developed way later than that the functions we use every day exist. Like your focus on file names or how often we hit the save button even when something auto-saves... Just things we picked up before the tech got to the point we could rely on it for more than 50% of the time.
Yeah, my first computer was in 1983. It came with PC-DOS 2, a 20MB HDD and a 5.25" floppy. I copied the fuck out of some floppies in my early years.
So many of the skills developed during that time, honestly up until Windows XP, are just... not really needed to function in society. We abstracted it all away, or made them irrelevant. I was a certified novell netware administrator (CNA).
Even programming has gotten much simpler. Garbage collection and memory management is mostly system-managed now, and if something IS done wrong the tools tell you what and where. And then you have automations and workflow engines on phones that require zero code... just wild stuff that is easily accessible to non-technical folks.
People are doing WAY MORE with computers than any of the hacky fun stuff I was doing in the 80s and 90s... things that would have seemed like witchcraft when I was running a multi-node Renegade BBS... but they don't know how any of it works and they don't care... and I get frustrated at the either ignorance or lack of curiosity. The magic box does magic shit, the end.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Which is kind of like dropping formal.English education because well isnt there English all around you?
You dont need bio, you use a body every day.
Yeah I ran into an issue yesterday with a colleague who was having issues uploading a file and didn't recognize or understand the distinction between a single file and a folder full of files and a zip of that folder full of files. So much functionality is obfuscated for people who only use devices or never get into the nuts and bolts of their PC that is just intuitive. Granted, this is a community that very much self-selects for people of an age and background that is predisposed to have learned those things and find them intuitive, so I'm sure there is a component of that in addition to generational differences.
Considering a good chunk of my broader cultural knowledge comes from Simpsons referencing it and I can communicate with members of my generation almost entirely by quoting Simpsons, what's old is new again.
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The problem with basic computer classes is that for roughly twenty years by the time the curriculum and accompanying hardware/software package got approved, purchased, and installed they were outdated, and insufferable precocious dorks (hi!) were correcting the teachers.
Something like the iPad UI getting created and eating Microsoft's lunch on the consumer market was unthinkable even as late as like 2012. They were neat toys but the assumption was still that everyone would have an actual-ass computer running Windows at home with all the attendant cruft that encompassed.
While I haven't sat down and read through the classic 1897 novel Dracula, I have seen 1995's Dracula: Dead and Loving It so I think I've got the basics down.
Watching "A Clockwork Orange" was instructive in how many references to it I had seen but not quite understood.
I can't imagine it's any less tedious to be on the dispensing side, so I have aspired to never let my capacity for appreciating new things atrophy to that point.
Thankfully, it turns out things are still good now! What a delight.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age [Switch] - Sit down and watch our game play itself
I mean that was true for me and the Simpsons
A lot of people forget that the stuff they "just know" was taught to them at some point. Maybe not in a formal educational setting, but very few things are that obvious where you don't need someone to guide you along the way. Kids are kids, not tiny adults.
I think it's more rewarding, for whatever reason(s), to complain than it is to be enthusiastic about things.
These days (and frankly for years now) it feels like there's far more risk of getting what comes across as serious pushback when you express enthusiasm for something rather than shitting on it because people are more than happy to pile on with their best attempt at a backspin hot take double dunk but rarely does the opposite happen.
Which isn't to say it's universal and that's what all shitting upon things is now. There are things that deserve a certain level of vitriolic disdain.
But it definitely feels like vitriolic disdain has become a much more common pastime for people and speaking personally I often don't even want to discuss things I like/enjoy anymore because of it.
Well, at least when it comes to online interactions.
In person people largely still seem to have enough self awareness to ask themselves "Wait, am I being an asshole for no reason?" before they respond that way.
One thread (or series of threads) on the forums I loved was Thom's occasional Instant Watch thread. Just a bunch of people talking about a movie they loved and recommending it.
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I think I can only speak for videogame nerds here, everything else is too far removed from my day-to-day. My partner has recently made friends with a bunch of younger people on the internet through online games. They've hung out IRL twice now, despite them living ~500 miles away from us.
I think it's fracturing between what you do with a large audience and what you do to make actual friends. There's a lot of yelling into the void hoping to be heard: trying to get noticed by a popular influencer/streamer/YouTuber or trying to write the wittiest response to a news article.
I think for a lot of people they find kinship and smaller groups on Discord servers or chat rooms of smaller Twitch streamers. My partner found those friends through a guild event in SWTOR, one of 'em had a small Discord for friends and he sometimes livestreams what he does in videogames, so my partner joined them on there and started playing some of the same games they played. She has a great personality and that works super well with this guy both on stream and personally. I think there's maybe 5 or 8 people who are active in that group, but they easily pick up other people when they're playing something online.
I think for a fucking webforum around a webcomic that's being made by two 40-somethings it only makes sense that their fans are also growing older. I think that between the Acq Inc Kickstarter Discord, the Club PA Discord, their chatrooms of their Twitch streams, their followers on social media and us on the forum we're representing the oldest age group that's the furthest removed from whatever the folks at Penny Arcade are doing. I have some opinions about how it would be healthier if the forum had some more overlap with the larger Penny Arcade ecosystem, especially if social media is getting shittier by the day. That way there might be more people joining in the community of this forum after they had to come here to get information of other PA stuff.
So sometimes if someone is saying something that seems particularly stupid, I have to pause and wonder if they're just really that dumb - or if I'm arguing with a literal 13-year-old.
Plenty of things are going to just turn to dust and we'll be sitting around eating tapioca making references to long dead memes in the nursing home. However, nature abhors a vacuum and things seem to fill a void created by the collapse of enshitification with something else. No way to predict what that will be, but the yearning for community (and cat videos) is a part of the human condition.
Yeah, I've had to really work to remember that everyone online is no longer approximately my age or older.
Only sort of related, I was trapped in a car with some nephews recently and they mentioned how Lil Peeps untimely death was their cultural equivalent of Kurt Cobain. Im still recovering.
Expressing enthusiasm opens you up to someone telling you the thing you like is actually bad because <reasons>. Which is a lot of the internets favourite passtime these days.
But that itself is more a function of social media then age. Though I guess that kinda gets back to that because of the "kids spend a lot of time on algorithm-driven social media these days" thing.
As far as entertainment goes, shit we're in a golden age for music and video games.
Honestly, the last few years have honestly been an improvement on that regard. Wheldonian, CinemaSins-style writing and critique has faced a lot of pushback on the last few years, because people realized that is just joyless losers taking potshots at people for enjoying things because they are too cowardly to leave their safe wall of cynism. "The kids" are doing a lot better these days.
Also, to get this out of the way, the ever classic reference that talks about getting older even though the people that get said reference are older and fewer these days:
Do the PA forums regularly attract new active users? I always kinda got the vibe that they were slowly shedding users over time or at best maintaining a population. I have no idea, though, never seen any numbers. These are the only forums I use, so probably not fair but they're pretty much the basis of my knowledge of the health of forums in general.