I, like many of you, spend too much time scrolling through Facebook, being subjected to dumb memes and posts, and witnessing society’s gradual slide into total dystopia in realtime, as the feelings of dread mount and each day brings us closer to human extinction. This is known as doomscrolling. Last year was a great year for doing that, but the idiocy continues this year. Rather than blow up people’s feeds by reacting to them all, I had the idea of doing a monthly blog series where I discuss or criticize some of what I see on Facebook, and occasionally Reddit. Just a fun idea, which conveniently also helps me express my opinions while avoiding getting into pointless internet arguments with people in the comments of these posts. Some of these will be humorous while others serious. These will get political at times, so if I say something you disagree with, I do apologize and hope you’ll still like my nonpolitical stuff. If not, meh, oh well.
Post number one:
Sad Proof That Millennials Are Getting Old
Posted by The Ultimate ‘80s Page
Oh dear Gods, I feel like I need dentures after reading this. I was born in 1986, so this is supposed to include me. People my age are finally starting to make these stupid posts. Can’t I just follow a page on Facebook about an era I enjoy without these sort of curmudgeonly “we were the best generation because we drank water from a hose” posts? Where to begin with what’s wrong with this post? Let’s just go down the list:
- Kids still play in the street today, believe it or not. Us kids born in the 80s still grew up staring at screens like the current generation, and in fact so did the two generations before us too who had TV, and surprise surprise, playgrounds still had kids then and do now.
- Video games first came out in the 1970s, so that’s wrong.
- First generation to watch cartoons in color? Color TV started in the 1960s, and before that theatrical cartoons had been in color since the 1930s. The early silent short Little Nemo from 1911 was hand-painted in color, if you want to get technical about it. That’s just flat out wrong.
- And amusement parks have been around for decades, what are they talking about, 80s kids being the first to go to amusement parks? Didn’t Disneyland open in the 1950s? And that wasn’t even the first amusement park ever. At least read Wikipedia for Gods’ sakes before you make such moronic claims.
- The cassette part is true (maybe the only thing that is true in this whole post), although Gen X probably deserves more credit for pioneering the Walkman because I wasn’t even born yet when it first came out.
- More than half of the cartoons listed came out decades before the 1980s.
- Seat belts definitely existed when I was a kid and you were an idiot if you didn’t wear them, plus it was illegal. And cars had air bags.
- A bike without brakes?! What?! When did bikes ever not have brakes? “Back in my day, kids just got concussions and died of brain hemorrhage, by jiminy, and we liked it!” Again, Wikipedia. Bikes have pretty much always had some kind of brake.
- The first Playstation came out in 1995, when I was nine years old, and someone born in 1980 would have been 15, so we definitely had them. Although I went from Sega Genesis to Nintendo 64.
- Everything else listed came out in the 1990s and early 2000s, before I was 20 years old. Why are they acting like people born in the 80s were actually born in the 60s? Are they under the impression that the internet and cell phones didn’t exist until 2010?
I guess old people shaking their fists at the kids on their lawn has always existed and will always continue to exist. Sure, we had a “GREAT Time”, until we were all tricked into getting worthless college degrees and had to spend the rest of our lives in debt in a crappy job market as the economy crashes every ten years. But yeah, let’s be salty at all these kids with their smartphones. Even though we had Game Boys.
Anyway, next post:
“My Sexual Orientation is: the cast of ‘The Mummy’ (1999)”
So for a long time last year, the following image was circulated in meme groups focused on the 1999 film The Mummy. To the point where I was tired of seeing it. Here’s that image:
Ha! How dare the original image leave out Beni! So, the cast of The Mummy, you say? You’re attracted to the WHOLE cast? Really? What they actually meant was “The Conventionally Attractive Cast Members of The Mummy”. Of course they didn’t mean that overweight hairy guy in the fez who spits all the time, tries to illicit sexual favors from Evie in exchange for Rick’s life, and gets eaten alive by scarabs. Maybe someone should make one for the cast of “The Mummy” (1932). That movie never gets enough love. “The Mummy” (2017) is rightfully ignored, though. In fact, forget I mentioned it.
This all went down in Imhotep Mummyposting.
A Political Wizard of Oz Meme by Someone who hasn’t Read the Books, or Probably even seen the Movie in Years
Another interesting point; in the movie, whether or not they play a hero or a villain, they’re all actors who are friends off-camera and get their paychecks from the same corporation. Just like politicians. Maybe this meme DOES make sense. But I’m obviously putting way more thought into this than whoever made this meme.
I would like to introduce non-Armenians to the Armenian side of Facebook, a microcosm in and of itself, and an awful, emotionally-taxing place to spend one’s time since November. A great place to doomscroll. Between Azeri trolls leaving laugh reactions on news stories about tortured POWs and grieving mothers who lost their sons in war, you also have inane stuff like this picture above. I could do this entire blog post with stuff like that. Here’s a small sample. On the left we have war hero Monte Melkonian, who helped Armenia win the war against Azerbaijan in the 1990s, and on the right, current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who of course, signed a surrender which gave Azerbaijan control of most of Artsakh last November.
When Music Wasn’t “In the Cloud”
Hey, remember when, like, things were different before the internet? Yeah, back when you had to blindly drop $15 on a CD you’d never heard before and hope the music was as good as the cover art? Or buy a CD from a band you’ve heard one song you liked from, only for that to be the only good song on the whole album? Can’t say I miss that. Musicians and record labels probably do though. Well, that’s why I support the artists I like on Bandcamp. It’s a double-edged sword for musicians, because now it’s a lot easier for bands to be discovered, but at the expense of actually making money off one’s music. But record stores still exist. The big chain ones are mostly gone, except for FYE which had to diversify to stay in business, but you still have indy stores. Stop acting like they’re Blockbuster Video or something.
On the other hand, there was a certain thrill you could only get at a record store, when you dug through the alphabetized shelves and discovered they actually had CDs of an obscure band you like. Can’t get that through online shopping. I still occasionally buy CDs at concerts, but if you’re already at the band’s concert you already know you’re going to like the CD you’re buying. It’s not the same.
Shared in What if phones, but too much. Which is a hilarious group by the way for stuff like this.
Nikol the Traitor
Sigghhh....okay. He didn’t have a smile when he did it. In fact he looks like he’s aged ten years since September if you see him now. And Artsakh wasn’t so much given as it was taken. He was forced to sign the surrender. Maybe he could have handled the war better, but he’s not the only one to blame. If I actually lived in Armenia I’d have a more educated opinion on the matter, no doubt. But my opinion, for what little it may be worth coming from the diaspora, is that he doesn’t deserve most of the blame. Maybe just some. But I would direct my anger at Aliyev, Erdogan and Putin (the leaders of Azerbaijan, Turkey, and of course Russia) before Pashinyan. It’s kind of strange to me to be angrier at him than at Armenia’s actual enemies, and passive “allies” who did nothing. Armenia has been a vassal state to Russia for a long time now, but with delusions of grandeur. It is very painful to admit this. Tigran the Great’s Armenian Empire, which was Armenia at its greatest power, was more than two thousand years ago. While taking on Azerbaijan one-on-one militarily wouldn’t have been an issue, once Turkey, Israel and the Syrian mercenaries got involved, there was just no way Armenia was going to win. Sucks not having any real allies, and living between two much larger and richer countries that want to erase yours off the map. Then you had thirty years of corrupt oligarchs sucking the country dry. That didn’t help matters. Point is, you can’t reduce the defeat to one politician being a traitor.
Anyway, stupid posts like these are not helpful. Pashinyan is at worst a naive and incompetent leader, but I wouldn’t call him a traitor. He didn’t sign that surrender with a smile on his face. But, when a country loses a war, the country’s leader becomes the scapegoat. That’s just how it is. If he couldn’t handle that he shouldn’t have become the leader. I don’t envy his position. Still...maybe my cousin would still be alive if he’d found a way to end the war sooner. Maybe we’d still have Shushi. Maybe it’s because he pissed off Russia by being pro-west so they didn’t bother to get involved sooner. Or maybe it would have happened anyway. I can’t put all the blame on him, though. Perhaps there are sides to the story that we will never know.
Quite a month to be talking about this, with Armenia’s own military calling for Pashinyan’s resignation on February 25th. Almost a coup but it fizzled out before anything actually happened. You might have heard about it on the news. Funny how the mainstream media was nowhere to be found when Azerbaijan was beheading Armenians and burning Armenians alive with illegal white phosphorus, but suddenly now they’re interested in Armenia. No one has put forth a better option than Pashinyan though. I would think holding snap elections and letting people decide if they still want him as a leader would solve the problem and shut the opposition up if he wins, but what do I know?
Anyway, onto more pleasant topics. For you see just like my Facebook feed, these Doom Scroll posts are going to give you mood whiplash.
Social Media Addiction
“Help me, I’m addicted to Photoshop, LinkedIn and Uber and it’s tearing my life apart!” What are you trying to do, SadietheJedi, spread Covid around even worse? And didn’t you post this on Twitter? Curious.
I avoid Twitter due to the horror stories I’ve heard, this screenshot is from Facebook, which along with Reddit are my drugs of choice. Does she have a point? Hm. Well, let me stop making fun of this post for a moment and really think about it. I’ll apply it to my life. Before Facebook I was on MySpace, where I got involved with the roleplay community, making fake profiles for fictional characters and having them interact with other role players with fake profiles, like a co-authored fan fiction written in realtime. It’s a time I miss now. I really honed my writing skills there. But I think my addiction was even worse back then. I had to be on all the time or I would miss something in the roleplay or keep people waiting for replies. Facebook isn’t nearly as fun as MySpace was. More often than not it’s kind of depressing. But I can tear myself away from it whenever I need to. I’m not going to miss anything. Before MySpace (prehistoric times) I would spend most of my free time listening to music, playing video games, watching TV or reading books. I still do all those things when I am able. I didn’t go on the internet much back then, but it’s not as if my life was free from electronics and screens. I hung out with friends in-person too, but moreso in college. Before I graduated High School I was even more isolated, only hanging out with friends when I was at school, mostly. The only reason I hang out with friends less often now is because I moved to Florida, making social media the only way I stay in contact with family and friends. I’m with my wife and son most of the time, but beyond that I’m kind of a hermit, and really always have been a bit of a hermit to varying degrees.
The question then is does social media actually make me socialize with people in-person less often, as this post claims? In my case, no, not really. But maybe it’s because I’ve always been this antisocial. It was more the move to Florida that did it. It’s a lot harder to make friends when you’re an adult. My newest friendships are all through social media. I may not be the best example then.
1984
Ha! This one got a chuckle out of me. Obviously aimed at conservatives who compare not being allowed to be openly racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic on social media to George Orwell’s dystopia, without ever having actually read the book. All our electronic devices are listening to us; our social media is selling our information to advertisers, insurance companies and the government; the majority of us have to submit to low paying jobs and be exploited by greedy tyrannical employers who treat people like expendable numbers with the only alternative being homelessness, starvation and death; our planet is dying thanks to human greed and we’re in the middle of the biggest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs; our phones track our every move, and yet not being allowed to be a dick in public is what makes them scream about 1984. What a strange hill to die on in the grand scheme of things.
Shared on i’m begging you please read another book, which is normally a hilarious anti-Harry Potter group, but they also talk about any overrated book. Although in this case maybe we should be begging people to actually read the book they’re talking about. Reading books takes too much brain power for some people.
Classic Rock
Anyway, thank you for taking a break from your own doom scrolling to witness a bit of mine. I’m sure this month I will come across more terrible things to talk about.
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