Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

I read all the Narnia books and never picked up that they were supposed to be Christian allegories until adulthood. To me they were just stories about kids in an imaginary world. And my mom dragged my brother and me to (Catholic) church every Sunday. I guess I just wasn't a particularly close reader...

Sid and Marty Krofft to thread.

I imagine that was a common experience with CS Lewis, although my parents were pretty vociferously lapsed at the time. Not even sure if I was baptised come to think of it.

That reminds me when I read The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail I thought they seemed to have taken the whole thing from the Foundation series.

Erik Davis has made a good point about how Gen Xers grew up surrounded by culture created by heads.

Heh, I met the dude a few times back in the late 90s -- he struck me as the kind of guy that tends just to focus on things that support his ideas -- more of an advocate than an analyst (Culturally we need both, so not a dig on the dude)

as in, I don't think his point is a good generalization for the entire generation though I'm sure it's true for a number of ppl

I think it's practically a truism tbh. Whether you personally picked up on overt freak culture stuff as young child (more likely as teens) or not. How can you not say that stuff wasn't around or influencing culture in the 70s unless you lived in some renunciate commune. Those youth cultures were simply (a major part of) the ones that immediately preceded our own.

He might have been a bit more (or less) to what he said, it seems an interesting bit of context to think about anyway.

* There might have been

I read all the Narnia books and never picked up that they were supposed to be Christian allegories until adulthood. To me they were just stories about kids in an imaginary world. And my mom dragged my brother and me to (Catholic) church every Sunday. I guess I just wasn't a particularly close reader...

― but also fuck you (unperson)

no, i think lewis was just bad at writing children's books. "hey, kids! allegory! subtext!"

if you'd told me aslan was supposed to be jesus when i was reading those books i would have told you that was stupid and that jesus wasn't a lion.

and that's what makes c.s. lewis tolerable for me, i try to read his stuff now and there's all this bloody awful subtext to everything and it's shit.

"That reminds me when I read The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail I thought they seemed to have taken the whole thing from the Foundation series.

― Stanley Halfbrick (Noel Emits)"

i read a lot of asimov too, he really wasn't a very good writer, "foundation" in particular is so much "whig history IN SPACE" bullshit

the main thing that gets me about holy blood, holy grail is that the guy who wrote it co-wrote the original yeti serials for doctor who (the second one was also a knockoff, this one of the film "zulu"), and then tanked his career with the show by doing an awful piece of anti-hippie tripe called "the dominators"

We are gonna be the meanest and the crankiest.

Not saying the millennials don't have potential though.

https://i.imgur.com/24lxeho.jpg

Yes Asimov was a pretty bad writer I eventually had to admit. I haven't gone back to any of that stuff but some of the short story ideas stick with me.

Didn't know about the Dr. Who connection with HBHG (THB&THG in the UK). Dr. Who always felt literally close to home because I was at school with the children of one of the main 70s through early 80s writer / producers and later an actual Doctor (perhaps not one of the more feted ones) was also a parent.

Kevin Fallon @kpfallon
I asked Dylan Gage, the 14-yr-old actor who plays Gabe on #PEN15, what he felt is the biggest difference between kids in 2000 and kids today.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EioUA8CWkAAlQH6?format=png&name=900x900

That feeling on late Sunday afternoons when there is nothing good on TV and you have nothing to do, lost forever.

30 years ago a child would kick a ball on the street.

at the risk of being "ok millennial" there is a huge-ass citation needed on "casual derogatory phrases"

Gage, btw, is spectacular on that show; really a great acting job.

The nature of boredom changed permanently at some point during the past 20 years. In the 20 years prior, the technology of personal distraction had changed very little. In the '80s, people already had cable TV, the Walkman, video games, VCRs. By 2000, little had really changed: more channels on TV, Discman instead of Walkman, better video games, DVDs instead of VCRs - but basically the same set of options. Who'd have thought nostalgia for boredom would be a thing.

I was very bored as a teen 20 years ago

you want real straight-from-the-bottle boredom let’s get into the 1880s

Krakatoa tho.

you see the lengths they had to go

Man, I don't remember ever being bored as an early-to-mid-'90s teenager. And I lived in two different assholes of the world in high school, where there was quite literally nothing for people my age to do.

'Dicking around in the woods' was a popular option, as was 'trespassing in various buildings that should by all rights have been condemned'.

some things are still the same

https://azure.wgp-cdn.co.uk/app-table-top-gaming/posts/battletech-82204.jpg

it was raining heavily most of the time, I didn't always have good books to read, I would be finished with all my computer games, tv sucked.

just got drunk and high, but was still bored

if only you'd had memes to share

And a 200+ game backlog on Steam that only exists to beget guilt.

Sounds to me like you should've gone fishing, jiv. You're still bored, but you're recreationally bored.

I'm reading "We Pointed Them North", recollections of a guy who has on cattle drives in the 1870s and he talks about the supreme boredom of winters, after the drive was done but he and a few other cowboys would stay a couple of dozen or so miles from the nearest small town in a tiny cabin. Entertainment: A deck of cards, perhaps someone could play harmonica or guitar, maybe you had a good storyteller there. After a week you'd have already told and heard every story and asked every possible question of your companions. Even the meals were monotonous. Trying to imagine what that'd be like gives me the creeps that is only surpassed by imagining being in "The Hole" in a prison for months at a time.

some things are still the same

Nah, new Battletech minis are one-piece plastic instead of metal you have to glue together (also kind of crap looking).

also people just play on steam

Smoking dirt weed and playing GoldenEye ate up a lot of time.

The nature of boredom changed permanently at some point during the past 20 years. In the 20 years prior, the technology of personal distraction had changed very little. In the '80s, people already had cable TV, the Walkman, video games, VCRs. By 2000, little had really changed: more channels on TV, Discman instead of Walkman, better video games, DVDs instead of VCRs - but basically the same set of options. Who'd have thought nostalgia for boredom would be a thing.

Did the nature change? Netflix instead of DVDs or Channel 342 on cable, different videogames, Spotify.

The big difference is the sending each other memes, but I carried a paperback everywhere because I couldn't handle being bored in line for two minutes without something to do - the nature of filling those gaps is the biggest change but the gaps still existed.

now we have podcasts to fill every moment that our eyes can't be occupied with screens

well, and even those moments too tbf

I was a very late adopter... I think I started using a computer in '97, a cellphone in 2004 or 2005....

Had my first phone in 2000? Was the last girl in my year to get one as well. Not properly online until 03.

Cable TV since 1977 (we lived in a very remote area that had had it since the early Sixties), computer since 1979, microwave since 1980, online since 1989 and Internet since 1995. Cell phone since 2000 or so because of work, PDA around the same time so I could have books to read at work.

I think I got mine in 2002. I almost always called and never texted anyone until I moved to France in 2008, which is when I realized there was a massive divide in terms of cell phone use between Europe and North America (no idea how the UK fits into this tho). The intervening years have all but it erased it, of course.

Literally bought my first cell phone because my wife had been unable to get in touch with me on 9/11.

xp 2008 is proof of boomerism being not just an age but a mentality

Touché.

Never texted anyone until the iPhone came out, unless paging someone with 80085 in the '90s counts.

first celly in 2005, until then I borrowed my mother's. Cingular, a shitty flip phone that the internet stopped working on in one month and never again worked.

the plan was something like 2 minutes per night, 3 on weekends, $300 for every minute you went over

I was often bored but that was when I daydreamed, read, and smoked weed as a teenager. And watched weird movies in my parents' basement.

All I did in my teenage years was study in my room, read novels and have unrealized sexual fantasies. I was so determined to achieve something. I had friends but didn’t do that much socializing. It wasn’t bad though, I was never bored

I was was also on the wrestling team in my high school and the matches in my weight class against opponents from other local schools were exciting and terrifying

First Nokia mobile phone c2000 I think. About a year or so before, a friend got one for her birthday and I thought "why on earth would you need that? you going into stocks and shares?". But by the time I got mine, most people I knew had one. It happened very quickly, so that by end of 2001 it was weird if you didn't

When did you get a smartphone? I had a cell briefly for work in the late 90s and then got a flip phone in the mid-2000s. First iPhone in maybe 2011. Been trying to escape the Apple ecosystem ever since. Unsuccessfully.

all i did in my teenage years was Master the Blade

I had a mobile phone in the late 90s that was a huge brick-like thing that I used for work, my friends laughed about it but were also amazed, it's hard to believe in retrospect that mobile technology started that long ago