My Generation (split from Election 2024)

[amadeus]

GenZ has the worst music [names 2 millennials]

Doesn’t it make sense that musicians would be generally older than the teenage customer base?

 

[Samez]

I think the borders of the millennials are a bit difficult as the big difference between someone growing up born 1980 and someone born in 1990 is, that one of them had a high chance of growing up completely without PCs and Internet and the other one might already be used to PCs and mobile phones from childhood.

 

[Arakhor]

That's what rapid technological growth does for you.

 

[EvaDK]

Most of my favorite artists are bands; Gen Z seem much more into solo artists.

I feel like an old soul in a young hull

 

[Arakhor]

That'll soon change, just by virtue of the inevitable march of time. Literally just yesterday I was watching an episode of Only Connect and one of the quiz topics was "famous people born in the 21st Century". It's 2024 already!

 

[Cutlass]

Have you ever looked into a guy named Lincoln? If you want to count up illegalities by a president there would be a start. Those Republicans!

Which is to say, Lincoln did mostly the right thing, and the Republican party has been downhill ever since. With all of the 46 presidents ranked, 4 of the bottom 10 would be Republicans in my lifetime. With Trump and Shrub in the bottom 3. Reagan and Nixon in the bottom 10.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yeah. I paid people to do things for me. But I had a typewriter in high school, but maybe that's because I worked.

I do applaud your initiative. And would hire you based on that story, if I was still in business, which I am not. Sometimes, I admit, I go over the top a bit. If I could earn more money working than doing something else, yeah, I paid someone to do whatever. I even had a few vacations. There is another difference between my generation and later ones. It became standard thinking that it was a bad thing to work all the time. Many, not all by any means, but many of us were a lot like I read the Japanese are. Work till you drop. Fairly common, though I had secret reasons to do it.

Well, thank you for the applause. I deserve it. It was infuriating when a friend asked me, "When are you going to get a REAL job?" He figured that if you work at home, it's not a real job. I told him that during the busiest times of year (October-December and February-April) a short working day for me was about 12 hours. Around the time when the major term papers were due, it wasn't unusual to put in 30 hours (with breaks for meals, bathroom, and an hour for my soap opera) and then crash for 12 hours. Then get up and do it all over again. In the winter months, I'd go outside and clear the snow off the porch and sidewalk for a few minutes at a time to help myself keep awake (-25C at 2 am will wake you up).

In addition to typing, I taught music lessons and was a crafter (sold at various stores around town, plus craft fairs and commissions). So I was doing my 8-hour days. I just didn't do them from 9-5. I usually took January off (between the term papers and Christmas craft sales, I was pretty well fried at that point and needed a break). In January I read books, and there usually weren't that many people who wanted typing done beyond a few essays or resumes, which might take an hour or two all told. Things would get busy again in February, so I needed that time off.

I also took July and August off from typing, and July off from crafting unless I was making something science fiction convention-related. Again, there might be the occasional client who called, for a resume or some other thing. I did legal papers for a couple of retired high school teachers (my former French teacher and I ran into each other at the grocery store one day, he asked what I was doing now, I told him, and he asked for my number; I did legal papers for him for the next few years, in both English and French - I charged a hell of a lot less than he'd have had to pay in a lawyer's office, and he recommended me to a friend).

I did well enough that some clients who did their 2 years in Red Deer and transferred to the university in Calgary came back to me. One guy whose sociology papers I did put it this way: "This paper is worth 50% of my final grade. I'm not trusting it to anybody but you." And he drove all the way from Calgary to bring it to me. One guy ended up in university in the U.S. and mailed stuff to me to type for him; I'd done his history and anthropology papers when he was here.

So it paid to do a good job and treat the clients like people, not ambulatory wallets. The guy who brought his paper from Calgary sometimes told me updates on his custody issues (there was a kid; the mother got custody and shut him out) and one day he said, "Talking to you is like talking to my bartender." My dad told me that was a compliment (I don't drink, so I've never had reason to talk to a bartender).

It's unfair of you to look down on the nursing students for not typing their own papers. They don't have it easy, since practicum is a large part of their education, and they're doing actual nursing in hospitals - supervised, of course; during my 2-week hospital stay 5 years ago, a nursing student asked if she could 'practice' on me and I told her sure, no problem. She was grateful for that because so many other patients had said no, they wanted a 'real' nurse, and I said how do they expect you to become that if you're not allowed to practice and learn?.

There's a program where nursing students are matched with expectant mothers, and they have to attend the birth. They had pagers to let them know when it was time to get to the hospital, and one day I was going over an assignment with one of them. Her pager beeped, and she said, "I have to get to the hospital now" and off she went. Immediately, no excuses of being busy with something else. The patient came first.

I knew some of them were working at jobs elsewhere, as I'd see them around town. As I said, some were mothers with kids, and you have to prioritize kids' needs over typing much of the time. As far as I'm concerned, they did the hard part of attending the classes, researching, and writing the papers. All I did was type what they wrote, and made sure the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting were as perfect as I could make them. I never forgot the lesson I learned in one of my English classes - I lost an entire letter grade because I misplaced two punctuation marks in the bibliography. I decided that was not going to happen to the clients if I could help it.

Oh, and vacations? Two weekends/year, in either Calgary or Edmonton. Science fiction conventions, where I met authors, artists, and editors.

Pop music is what's terrible.

I have no idea what pop music even is.

Of course I've likely heard it, I just don't know which songs that label applies to.

I think the borders of the millennials are a bit difficult as the big difference between someone growing up born 1980 and someone born in 1990 is, that one of them had a high chance of growing up completely without PCs and Internet and the other one might already be used to PCs and mobile phones from childhood.

That's one of the cultural disconnects I've noticed. Culture nowadays can be divided into pre-internet and internet era. If I were handed an electric typewriter now, I'd still know what to do with it. It would be a bit frustrating, having to concentrate more on not making mistakes (turns out I'm allergic to corrector fluid and handling the tape isn't much better) and typewriters are a lot noisier than computer keyboards. But I still remember how everything works. And I had a rotary dial phone as recently as 2009.

There's another disconnect I've noticed among science fiction fans. In the era of streaming, when whole entire series are available at the push of a key or swipe of the finger, people don't have to wait for anything. The younger people can't identify with the idea that you had to wait for reruns (if the show had those), and wait for the new seasons.

There's such a thing as too much. People here talk about TV shows I've never heard of because it's on some streaming platform I either don't have because of expense, or because it's geoblocked in Canada. That's one reason why, if a show does end up somewhere I can access, it's 10 years later and I have to catch up.

That'll soon change, just by virtue of the inevitable march of time. Literally just yesterday I was watching an episode of Only Connect and one of the quiz topics was "famous people born in the 21st Century". It's 2024 already!

I just tried to think of somebody famous born in the 21st century, and all I could come up with is Greta Thunberg.

 

[Ajidica]

Talking about Nixon, are we?

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
...
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

****. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
...
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also **** in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

http://professorverspoor.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/62908749/hewasacrook.pdf

 

[Takhisis]

Which is to say, Lincoln did mostly the right thing, and the Republican party has been downhill ever since. With all of the 46 presidents ranked, 4 of the bottom 10 would be Republicans in my lifetime. With Trump and Shrub in the bottom 3. Reagan and Nixon in the bottom 10.

You have two Shrubs, y'know.

 

[Cutlass]

You have two Shrubs, y'know.

eh?

 

[Takhisis]

Shrub Senior and Shrub Jr. They both invaded Iraq so they are kindof exchangeable.

 

[JollyRoger]

There is another difference between my generation and the more recent. My generation is more likely to defend unpopular opinions. This probably because in the days past we took the freedom of speech as a right to be defended in all spaces. And we will not compromise on that defense just to be accepted.

Because the opinions you hold that were once popular are now unpopular.

 

[Takhisis]

Basically what I get from MisterCooper (rebranded as Core Imposter for some reason) is that the state didn't give him a handout during the Republican presidencies and later Carter did offer handouts but to his sister and so he's jealous and all Carter need have done to not incur his wrath was not help his sister. If I got the chronology right.

 

[Samez]

...
I have no idea what pop music even is.
...
I just tried to think of somebody famous born in the 21st century, and all I could come up with is Greta Thunberg.

The older we get the more we are disconnected from the youth. For some years now it was hard for me to identify what "scenes" are popular with young people - in the olden days we had rocker, popper, punks, skater, Emos....
Often connected by style of clothing and music as common identifier. IMHO the individualization of music and fun time activities prevented the forming of a identifiable group. Skibidy Toilet might be the closest I can identify as youth culture today, but tbh I might also just not recognize it, as I am too much out of touch.
Perhaps someone like Mr Beast is someone famous from this century...

 

[Cutlass]

Shrub Senior and Shrub Jr. They both invaded Iraq so they are kindof exchangeable.

Only the younger was called shrub, because he was the baby bush.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The older we get the more we are disconnected from the youth. For some years now it was hard for me to identify what "scenes" are popular with young people - in the olden days we had rocker, popper, punks, skater, Emos....
Often connected by style of clothing and music as common identifier. IMHO the individualization of music and fun time activities prevented the forming of a identifiable group. Skibidy Toilet might be the closest I can identify as youth culture today, but tbh I might also just not recognize it, as I am too much out of touch.
Perhaps someone like Mr Beast is someone famous from this century...

I don't understand about 99% of what you just said.

"Skater"? The only reference I have for that is the Avril Lavigne song. That song was on the radio constantly.

 

[Zardnaar]

I don't understand about 99% of what you just said.

"Skater"? The only reference I have for that is the Avril Lavigne song. That song was on the radio constantly.

Means you're old and out of touch.

I can follow a lot of it but not tik tok trends.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I was out of touch even as a teenager. It happens when you live with your grandparents and grow up with their musical tastes and only figure out your own by being exposed to some other stuff in music classes in school or listening to whatever else might be available - my dad had an Irish Rovers 8-track, which accounts for my becoming a fan of that group. I was 8 at the time. About the only really popular stuff I remember being interested in at the time it was first public was the Partridge Family and Shaun Cassidy. Both of those are hopelessly tame by today's standards.

I first heard of Gordon Lightfoot in my Grade 7 music class, learned a couple of songs, played them later on the organ (handy to be able to play by ear), and my grandmother became a Gordon Lightfoot fan as a result. Her favorite was "Early Morning Rain".

An odd place to first learn about Three Dog Night was in my Grade 7 literature class. The teacher had us read and listen to "Black and White" as a poem, and I learned and played that at home, too. The family wasn't into it - no idea what it was about, and didn't find the melody appealing.

And I remember the first time I played a Fame cassette (music from the TV show). My grandfather wasn't happy.

Mind you, he wasn't happy about the soundtrack to Oliver! either. You either like "Consider Yourself" or you don't.

So... my family approved of waltzes, polkas, older country/western stuff (ie. Johnny Cash; I learned "Ring of Fire", which my grandmother liked), folk music, and some of the songs I learned in the theatre. Fast-forward a couple of decades and I got into Enya and Yanni. Somewhere along the line about 20 years ago, ABBA snuck in there... probably the night I listened to a show about them on TV, as I played Speedy Eggbert and Moraff's Mahjongg on the computer. That's quite the combination.

So is it any wonder that I find modern music to be mostly noise?

 

[Core Imposter]

My hearing is impaired, had a brain injury, but I loved all the music up to disco, which come to think of it, would have ruined my hearing and injured my brain in any case. The last song I remember listening to on purpose was something about letting the dogs out.

 

[Narz]

I was out of touch even as a teenager.

Likewise. I didn't even listen to the radio til 13 when I went away to school.